Pawn Alan

Pawn Alan is a young Pawn in the Checquy whose material-weakening ability helps Myfanwy and the staff trapped in a steel-armored trailer escape during the Reading crisis. His quick contribution does more than open a hole in a wall: it makes an unexpected operative visible, then places him in a communications role as Myfanwy tries to coordinate the response without leaving a record.

Identity and Ability

Alan is referred to as Li’l Pawn Alan, and the account identifies him as an adolescent Pawn working in communications. His ability acts on inorganic material. When he places both palms against the armored trailer wall, he leaves a mottled gray streak in the metal; a large bodyguard can then punch the weakened area and break through. The power is thus not simply brute force: Alan changes what the material can withstand, while his companion supplies the force that finishes the breach.

Ingrid later explains the limits of the ability. While Alan is touching a material, he can affect an area about the size of Myfanwy’s torso; without contact, he can affect only a much smaller portion. Even that smaller effect is useful: it can weaken a trigger enough to make it shatter. The account presents his power as precise and conditional, with its practical scale depending on proximity rather than on strength alone.

Escape from the Trailer

The trailer has been dragged toward the police station, but Myfanwy realizes that the bodyguards have taken her down a hallway that does not lead to an exit. Instead of following the expected route, the large bodyguard calls Alan forward. Nervous and licking his lips, Alan presses his hands to the steel, and the gray flaw he leaves behind gives the bodyguard a point to strike. The guards tear away the remaining metal until the rough opening is large enough to use.

The breach changes the immediate situation for everyone inside. Myfanwy is lifted through it, and the bodyguards begin passing staff members down from the raised trailer, with one guard tossing each person to a partner who sets them on the pavement. Alan and Ingrid are among the first passed down and are ushered away by Pawns in camouflage. The escape makes Alan's ability part of a coordinated rescue: he creates the weakness, the guards widen it, and the trapped staff can get out.

Communications and Operational Judgment

Later, while Myfanwy is responding to the wider crisis, she asks Alan to contact the watch office in the Rookery for the status of the Barghests who are not in Reading. Alan answers that Mrs. Woodhouse has his phone. Emily quickly lends him hers, and Myfanwy approves the workaround. This brief exchange shows Alan being used not just as a field asset but as a communications operative whose access and equipment matter to the response.

Myfanwy is also concerned that calls about the situation could leave a discoverable record. Alan recommends the secure command suite in the basement: its phones are encrypted, disconnected from the regular switchboard, and guarded at the door. When the others look at him, he explains that he works in communications and received the orientation lecture that morning. Myfanwy accepts his suggestion and asks him and another Pawn to go there and make the calls, while also arranging a car. His knowledge of the system gives the group a practical way to protect the operation's secrecy.

Relationships and Significance

Alan's actions place him in a working relationship with Myfanwy built on responsiveness and trust. She directs him to obtain information, accepts his solution when he lacks his own phone, and then follows his advice about secure communications. The sequence moves him from a nervous young Pawn at the trailer wall to a trusted participant in the effort to manage a sensitive emergency.

His contribution also complicates the impression of him as merely a junior or physically slight member of the organization. Myfanwy later asks in surprise whether he can fight a soldier with a gun. Ingrid clarifies that his demonstrated value lies in altering inorganic material, not in conventional combat: the same capacity that compromises a steel wall can make a trigger brittle. The distinction matters. Alan is effective because his particular ability and technical knowledge fit the problem at hand, while the rescue itself depends on cooperation with the bodyguards and the wider Checquy response.

The account also recounts how the confrontation in the command suite became visible to a Rookery graphic designer working overtime. The designer saw an adolescent Pawn fighting a security guard while the Rook's executive assistant lay unconscious and bleeding, then used her electricity-casting ability to render both combatants unconscious before calling security. Alan's presence in that confrontation underscores how quickly his role can shift from communications work to direct physical danger, even as the episode's later emphasis falls on his material ability and his operational advice.