MBTI Type: ENTP

Jeronicus starts out as an ambitious and motivated entrepreneur, who has the most popular toy shop in the city. Though energized by the many people passing through his store marveling over his inventions, he is also working on a dozen more and filling his notebook with detailed blueprints about how to make these magical toys work. He is tremendously excited to create a doll with the spark of life, since it is the accumulation of his life’s work… and then… everything goes wrong. His assistant steals his notebook, he struggles to keep the store open, his wife dies, and he loses all passion and ambition for living and creating and falls into a depressive state. Left without praise, recognition, or any of the good ideas he worked so hard to cultivate, Jeronicus falls into a Si grip. He loses all his enthusiasm for life and has no more new ideas and all he does is run a pawn shop and tinker with fixing clocks and other broken items for passersby. He thinks nothing will ever change or improve and often reminiscences on how it ‘used to be.’ It’s not until his granddaughter arrives that he begins to think creatively again, and realizes he does not have to live this way. Toward the end of the story, we see that he has once again built a large toy empire that has prospered beneath his new ideas. His cannot even throw a snowball without first calculating how to make it ricochet off a nearby building and hit its target! Jeronicus’ analytical mind allows him to understand how things work and fix almost anything, from broken clocks and sprockets to Bobby the Robot. He enjoys testing his granddaughter’s ability to understand complicated mathematical equations, and does not easily grasp at first that ‘belief’ is an essential component in making the robot come to life. It just isn’t logical. Jeronicus makes his living in his depressive slump fixing things that break in his pawn shop. He can be oblivious to other people’s feelings and doubtful of their intentions, such as when he skeptically hears his granddaughter out and then almost decides to leave her in the street, until she points out that she has nowhere to go if he doesn’t let her come inside. Before his great losses, he was an enthusiastic showman full of charisma, an easy ability to connect to his wife and daughter, and showed some interest and concern for his hired help. After, he uses his emotional skills mostly to avoid insulting his creditors and the woman who persists in chasing him romantically, but he has grown out of practice and must learn to once again crack open his heart.

Enneagram: 3w2 so/sp

The creative, imaginative and inventive Jeronicus at the start of the story is a far cry from the man experiences a devastating loss (that of his most important invention, and his book of plans for more) and falls into 9 disintegration. At the start of the story, he is bold, ambitious, and proud of himself—he considers himself a ‘great’ toy maker, and is full of enthusiasm for his life and the absolute belief that he can do anything (and that his daughter and wife are equally talented). But after he loses everything, including the love of his wife and his status, Jeronicus falls into apathy. He merges into his boring life so well, he develops inertia. He can be a bit too settled in his ways, has lost in his past, and managed to numb himself to everything and be ‘okay’ with his lot in life. But as time passes, he also shows flits of his old self in his desire to be not just any old grandpa, but ‘the best.’ He loved to bring happiness to people’s lives through his inventions, hated losing his ability to provide for his family, and begins to care about this again once his granddaughter arrives.