And now...........the Mad Inventor.

I have alluded to the Mad Inventor previously. His biography is below.

Here he is with his fiendish Mechanical Progeny, each powered by a portable steam-powered Arc Generator. These Automata are his ultimate warriors, controlled via electro-mechanical waves transmitted by his ingenious control device. Clever though this device is, he must stay within transmitting range of  his creations, otherwise they will simply halt until he is close enough to regain control of them. Although these mechanical warriors are slow-moving and without the power of independent thoughts or actions, they are heavily-armoured and resistant to damage from many conventional weapons. Their only independent action is their ability to fire at anything that comes within range of their "eyes", which are actually complex lenses that serve as a targeting mechanism for their weapons. Of course, the Mad Inventor has the ability to direct their fire when they are under his control.

These figures are all, once again from Ironclad Miniatures.

The Mad Inventor's name is Professor Erasmus Van Hulst, and he was born in Amsterdam. Always physically small and weak, he was inquisitive and interested in mechanical devices as a child. He was often bullied by his schoolmates, which led him to find ingenious ways of inflicting his revenge upon them. As he grew up, Erasmus nursed many grievances against the men who, as boys had made his life a misery. He studied at a number of universities and institutes across Europe, eventually ending up as a professor at the University of Strelsau in the Kingdom of Ruritania. There, he was able to test certain hypotheses about the creation of Automata and soon began to construct models in his laboratories in his home in a secluded manor outside the city.

He supplied a number of Automata to a local impresario and they quickly became a huge attraction in the main theatre of Strelsau. After the mysterious death of the impresario, Van Hulst quit the university and founded a touring show featuring his ingenious creations. Styling himself as Count Cagliostro, Master of Mysteries, Professor Van Hulst began to develop his control system and embarked on the construction of more and more complex Automata. As his experiments progressed, he began to plot and then wreak his revenge on his childhood tormentors. 

Finally, he perfected his most powerful Automaton, the Steam Jäger. With this step forward, Van Hulst turned his attentions to thoughts of crime, chaos and domination. His psychopathic tendencies, always there under the surface began to take him over, causing him to withdraw from society, using the vast fortune he had accumulated as Count Cagliostro to turn his Ruritanian Manor into a fortified headquarters where he could build an army of Steam Jäger Automata. 

Professor Van Hulst frequently visits the capital cities of Europe, keeping homes in Paris, London, Berlin and Vienna. He uses his mechanical skills in many ways, not least in experiments in the area of electro-mechanical prosthetics and the creation of bio-mechanical human beings.