Uncle Rob

Character reference art generated with AI.

Aliases: Robert Powell Status: Recurring

Uncle Rob’s house is where Chino and Homeboy land whenever they’re out of better ideas: “there isn’t a problem in the world you can’t find the solution to at the bottom of a bottle, that’s what Uncle Rob says,” and his living room “was where bad ideas thrived.” The habit runs past just drinking, he’s also the person they call in a genuine crisis, whether that’s phoning him mid-interdimensional-emergency (“We’re gonna have to call Uncle Rob”) or waking him at midnight to weigh in on a possibly-magic sword (“Let’s take it to Uncle Rob. Maybe he can tell us if it’s magical”). He’s foul-mouthed and short-tempered, though he later tells a room of night-school students he has Tourette’s and medication for it. Handed almost any raw material, his instinct is to build something he shouldn’t: a Flux Capacitor turns up on his porch as an unattributed UPS package with no instructions, and rather than read a manual he and his crew of day laborers (“the Mexicans,” as he calls them) cobble a working time portal around it out of beer cans, cardboard, and duct tape. He is called Uncle Rob by Chino and Homeboy. The text never states that he is actually related to either of them: nobody in the volume calls him “my uncle” or the boys his nephews, and “Uncle Rob” functions as a title people use for him, not a stated family tie. His past stays blank: his real name surfaces as Robert Powell only when a federal agent, Agent Darren, hauls him in for interrogation, and when Darren’s people dig into that name they come up empty: “it’s as if you were born five years ago.”

The Adventures: Volume 01

Across Volume 01, Uncle Rob supplies the crew’s turning points more often than he drives the plot himself. The mail-order Flux Capacitor from Uncle Rob’s Time Portal sends Chino and Homeboy a day into the past and pulls Homeboy Alpha back through the resulting portal. In Uncle Rob and the Aliens he’s revealed to have a working relationship with an alien crew: he stages the boys’ abduction as a prank (“Didn’t I tell you that shit would be funny?!”), walks them through the ship door by door (cloning experiments behind one, captured aliens being watched for “scientific research, like National Geographic” behind another), and holds court in a research room where his Mexicans and the aliens huddle over beer coasters that Homeboy recognizes as the time machine. He hasn’t earned his own ship yet. He still owes the aliens discoveries, “and it’s getting harder and harder” since humans keep fucking the planet, but he’s their fixer on the ground. When invisible, weed-empowered Homeboy turns the bridge into a burning alarm-scape, Rob’s crisis response is to grab him by the balls, then pivot straight to looting, handing out plastic bags: “get as much bud as you can,” seeds and stems especially, stuffed up their asses so the alien tech can’t find them. He talks the Alien Captain down from spacing them (“the most fucktarded humans they’ve ever abducted”), endures the airlock fake-out, and closes the night promising to recover the Flux Capacitor from the Time Vortex, then back home announces his new career plan: smoke the alien weed, get superpowers, become a super villain, with the boys as his henchmen. (“You mean flunkies?” “Yep.“) In There Can Be Only One, he first tries to throw a stray sword in the trash, then gets pulled in deeper when Chino and Homeboy drag a man they believe they’ve killed to his door; on his instructions they wrap the body in trash bags in his garage, only for it to start breathing again. Uncle Rob is the one who tears the bag open to let the man get air, and interrogates him directly once he can talk. The man gives his name as Killian and claims to be immortal, from Wales, and a wartime spy. None of it changes Uncle Rob’s answer: bury him alive in the Ominous Forest anyway, since decapitation is the only thing that actually kills him. By Night School, he’s revealed to be the pair’s Astrophysics and Cosmology instructor, introducing himself to the class by writing UNCLE ROB on the whiteboard rather than any legal name. That story’s field trip to Vandenberg Air Force Base turns out to be cover for something else entirely: using a heads-up display built into his glasses, he secretly deploys self-guiding tracking pills into classified satellites and astronaut helmets, gets pulled aside and interrogated over it, and walks out warning Agent Darren that “before I walk out of this building, you’re going to be ordered to forget I ever existed.” Moments later, every monitor in Mission Control scrambles into static and goes dark. The text places the two events back to back without spelling out that he caused it.

The Adventures: Volume 02

• El Duende: Loki snaps his fingers and turns him into a dog after Rob mocks the Duende. Spends the rest of the story as Dog-Rob, napping at Killian’s feet while everyone fails to un-curse him.
• Uncle Rob and the Edibles Factory: Seizes the edibles factory while the Dealers vacation, ties Greg to a chair, and rallies the Kush people with a doubling-production speech. Loses control when the Kush Monsters and Kush Fairies revolt; gets dragged out and tossed into the street, banned for life. Promises “real magic” next time.
• Uncle Hank and the Naked Pod People: Lends the boys his Mexicans for the Emporium op, prepares for war at the mansion, and demands in on the plan.
• The Joint of Azathoth: Refuses to regrow the Azathoth OG plant (“Can’t help you… I have a world to balance”), leaving the boys to wait out the body swap.
• Of Rednecks and Vampires: Crashes the vampire-hunt briefing, runs the assault via a dog-sized tank drone, and rolls the drone home when the negotiation turns boring (“Fuck this. I’m going home.“)
• The Return of Dos Santos: Refuses to help Lucy (“there’s only room enough on this planet for one devil”), then patches up the concussed Chino through Jesus and his Mexicans.
• The Emperor of the Universe: Coordinates the Emperor search from the mansion, befriends the self-titled Emperor (“Scourge of the Galaxy”), canes Mr. Bitches in the face, and flies off with the Emperor for drinks at the restaurant at the edge of the Universe.

Military Chronicles

Record not yet declassified.

Space Adventures

Record not yet declassified.