Aberrant: 200X - William R., or Operative Gerad Donighal

[Odysseus]

Public Profile for 'William R.'

From Novapedia, your nova encyclopedia

Name: William R.

Occupation: EMT/Paramedic

Legal Status: American citizen with no criminal record.

Location: Manhattan, NY, USA

Identity: Public

Nova Name: None

Place of Birth: Redmond, WA, USA

Age: 32

Eruption: Result of workplace stress.

Height: 5'10"

Weight: 145lbs.

Eyes: brown

Hair: brown

Distinguishing Marks: none known

Approximate Power Level: William is a very recent eruptee who claims to use his powers conservatively and infrequently, for reasons he seems shy to discuss. His estimated power level is among the bottom 50% of new eruptees.

Known Quantum Powers: Enhanced perception and cognitive abilities, greatly increased motor skills, minor resistance to several forms of physical and mental assault, minor influence over probability.

Abilities/Special Skills: William is a trained and experienced EMT and Paramedic. He knows sign language, as well as Spanish, and has the skill and knowledge (if not the accreditation) of an emergency diagnostician and surgeon. He collects baseball cards and claims to have an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball trivia.

Weapons Used: While outside of work, William keeps a small caliber pistol on his person for self-defense. The firearm is registered and licensed in NYC.

Appearance and Personality: William is a kind-faced, soft-spoken, broad-shouldered fellow of average appearance, the sort of fellow who could have played the best friend to the female lead in a 1980's teen film. He is known to friends, co-workers, and to some of the patients he works on for having large, extremely powerful hands that are surprisingly gentle. He is a rather large man for his height, but his mannerisms are such that he tends to put other people at ease. In expressing himself, he is firm, tough-minded, and professional, and seems to be at least tolerant of anyone who doesn't seem to actively cause harm.

William claims to be a sort of devil's advocate in discussions pertaining to novas and nova activities. While hardly an ally of Utopia, he maintains his own connection to his humanity strongly and professes the belief that anyone can chase away their humanity if that's what their goal is, making novas who embrace their so-called inhumanity functionally no different from people who choose to embrace sociopathy. Despite this, he is careful and diplomatic in his speech and seems to strive to remain on friendly terms with everyone. He recognizes that he is a small fish in a very big pond, and as such, makes no attempt to paint a target on himself.

This nova biography is a stub. You can help Novapedia by expanding it.

=====================================================

AOR: Directive, Nova Personnel

DIRECTIVE FILE: DR 012

REL: C3I (File for release)

IPSP: Standard (FOUO)

Encryption: Delta

Full Name: Gerad Nicholas Donighal

Alias(es): William Reed (see appendix 13B), 'Odysseus'

Title(s): HK Operative Cell Lieutenant (Bravo), Intelligence Cell Special Tasks (see appendix 13B)

DOB: 12 Oct 1972, 0344 EST

Induction: 13 February 2006, New York City

Eruption: On assignment 21 September 2006, (see DIRECTIVE FILE SD 049)

Summary:

Alright, Lucas, here it is. I know how you like to keep tabs on all your fellow novas in the department, so here's what I could gather. Our boy Gerry was born in Troy, NY (hometown of Uncle Sam, if you didn't know; no bullshit, he's buried there) to Thom and Doris Donighal, a retired USN short Colonel and a housewife, respectively. Gerad's old man retired about a decade after the end of the Korean War and moved the family upstate, where he took on work for the capital armory as a foreman. Gerad's accounts and attending psychological evaluation seem to indicate that his attitude toward his parents one of mostly healthy love and respect. His father was an authoritarian type and taught his boy not to take or give any shit, and it seems to have stuck.

Notable childhood events include his beginning smoking at fourteen, his first job at fifteen (for the now-defunct Ginny's Giant Burger), and dropping out of school to leave home at seventeen. Gerad remained an only child, though medical records indicate his mother underwent a suction-aspiration abortion in 1982, and corresponding interviews seem to suggest he never knew.

Donighal dropped out of high school in May 1988 and hitchhiked to Manhattan where, according to some of our taped interviews and Gerad's account, he became a part of the underground music subculture and alternated between homelessness and living at the Chelsea Hotel. Police reports from that year give accountings of a handful of misdemeanor petty larceny charges and a half dozen charges for assault & battery. All available information indicates that our boy Gerry was a cocky little punk-rocker asshole who got drunk, got into fights, and went home with girls who looked like Cyndi Lauper. In short, the son of a bitch had the teen years most of us would have killed for. Anyway, nothing about this period of his life seems to indicate that he was mixed up in any terrorist or antipatriotic organizations or that he was doing any hard drugs. We're sure he did, but it doesn't seem to have had any lasting effects into adulthood and his spinal tap came up clean.

On 12 August 1989, Gerad returned to his family home in Troy. His father put him down with two punches, shoved him into the family station wagon, and drove him to an Armed Forces recruiting center. Given the option between being turned out by his father the same day he returned or signing up for the service, he opted for the Army. Smart boy. Interviews and psycheval indicate that Gerad saw this decree as a positive even at the time: he claims to have been considering the service already, and it sounds like he even expected his old man to do something along these lines.

It probably won't surprise you to know that Gerad flew through basic: for all his tough guy bullshit, he knows how to fall in line when it's advantageous to do so and he respects the chain of command (the supplementary post-eruption psycheavals, appended, seem to say he still does, so that's good news, unless he's gotten so smart he can outwit them, which would be bad news). He was tapped early on for Ranger school and aced that as well. Three months later he was deployed to Iraq with the Bravo Company of the 55th Ranger regiment. His expanded file on his activities during Operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield are in appendix 04C: suffice it to say that Gerad's career as a Ranger was memorable, but not epic: he was the recipient of the Purple Heart, the Meritorious Service Medal, the Valorous Unit Award, and the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal.

(cont.)

[Odysseus]

After the Gulf War engagement ended, Gerad spent the last couple years of his hitch on loan with Medeciense Sans Frontierse and took part in relief with the genocide in Rwanda. Afterward, he left the service and used the GI bill to get into RPI, back in his home town. He left with a Master's in Engineering. On 02 Jan 1996, while Gerad was working on his degree, his father died of a pulmonary embolism (I appended the Coroner's report on the off chance you were interested). His mother had a complete mental break and was subsequently admitted to the Shady Pines Care Facility in Poughkeepsie, NY (yeah, got that one, too), where she resided until Gerad signed on with the company.

pictured: Gerad Donighal, May 2004, Baghdad, Iraq

It's here that the trail gets a litte murky. You did the interviews about this part of Gerad's life yourself, so I won't belabor them. HUMINT and PHOTINT corroborate Gerad's account that he spent Mar 1997- Jul 2004 participating in a series of equitorial wars as a professional mercenary. You and I both know we generally tend to look down on that attitude in this organization, but Gerry picked his battles pretty well: always fought for the right team, minimized baseline civilian casualties, and destabilized just the right assholes. A short list of his old haunts include Iran, Georgia, Syria, Iraq, Chad, Eritrea, Mozambique, Chechnya, Somalia, Rwanda, and Turkey. It's also during this time, specifically during the latter part of July 2004, that while pulling protection for Medeciense Sans Frontierse he lead a squad of Iranian Kurds through hostile territory and past a military blockade into Turkey. It was during this episode that Gerad and two of the civilians in the caravan fought and killed the Janissaries elite Mamud ‘Wazir’ Samad (see DIRECTIVE FILE BR034).

He attacked Gerad first with a kinetic discharge that fractured four ribs and his clavicle. Thinking he’d put him down, Wazir turned his attention onto the caravan. While two of the men in the truck drew Wazir’s attention by peppering him with a hail of ineffectual AK rounds, Gerad climbed the ladder of the nearby guard post with his good arm, jumped 5.8 meters across from the 9 meter high tower, landed on Wazir’s back, dragged him to the ground, and used a field knife to tracheate the now-prone Samad and stuff a frag grenade into his throat. Samad apparently panicked and reflexively regenerated the damaged skin tissue, sealing the grenade inside his throat where it exploded. After this, Gerad burned the carcass, scattered the remains, and continued the trek into Gaziantep. Of the sixteen civilians in the truck, all lived. The story was picked up by papers in Gaziantep and quickly spread as far west as Istanbul and even Athens. Barely a blip on the worldwide radar, especially in the two days after the Newsman Incident becoming public, but it attracted one of our recruitment officers who had been vacationing in Troy (Turkey, not New York: oh, how I love life's little synchronicities) at the time. In fact, it was for this incident that Gerad eventually earned his operative handle, given first by the Kurdish refugees he saved and then established by the other recruits at the Forgotten City: “Odysseus”, the seafaring warrior-adventurer, “the one who is wrathful”. Through our contacts with MSF, Gerad was persuaded to return to the states to recover from his injuries and for therapy related to PTSD. It was during this time that we decided to put him under background surveillance, and the rest, as I’m sure you know, can be found in our case files.

You’ll find all the gory details in the case files I’ve appended and the Directive archives. The only piece you wanted that I couldn’t provide was his sealed records of training from the Forgotten City. You know how Mifune is, so I can’t imagine it comes as a surprise to you. His precise wording was, I believe, “If that cocksucker Barrows wants to waste his time poring over training regiments, PT reports, and Quartermaster’s logs for one of my men, he can requisition them through the proper fucking channels like anyone else.” Having said that, nothing about Gerad’s interviews or debriefings since becoming an operative indicates that he underwent anything but the same training anyone in Operations would receive.

Lucas, I realize that you asked for an expository vocational profile on Gerad and not a psycheval, but I’ve worked with him on a few occasions both before and after his eruption, I was also one of his fellow recruits at the Forgotten City, and I wanted to throw in a few words of my own. I don’t want to in any way undercut the contribution he makes to our organization, because it’s sizeable. And I know that aside from you, he’s one of only a handful of novas they’ve permitted to (stay in) the ranks. And furthermore, I can tell you honestly that I’ve never seen a hair or a bead of sweat on the guy that wasn’t loyal to what we’re doing here. He has spoken with candor on the subject of his eruption to me, and as I’m sure you no doubt have read elsewhere, he is as aggrieved by his transformation as he is taking advantage of the perks it provides. This is a man who eats, sleeps, and breathes what he does and adopts the goals of whatever organization he works for as his own. In spite of his bravado, he is a patriot, and without question the finest soldier I have ever met in my life.

I offer you only this caveat: it would be wise to take all possible means to retain Gerad as an asset to this organization. The kind of risk he would pose to us if ever turned against us would be to Jesse Hooks what the shelling of Berlin would be stacked up against toppling a child’s sandcastle. He’d probably have to be taken back to the Forgotten City - or worse - and it would be downright fucking tragic to see that kind of end come to such a man.

-Dmitri Roskolnikov

[Odysseus]

Character Sheet for Gerad 'Odysseus' Donighal

Attributes:

STR: ●●●● (brawler) DEX: ●●●● (crackshot) STA: ●●●● (indomitable)

CHA: ●● MAN: ●● APP: ●●●● (rugged)

INT: ●●●●● (rational) PER: ●●●● (body language) WIT: ●●●● (grace under fire)

Abilities:

Brawl: ●●●●

Firearms: ●●●●● Drive: ● Stealth: ●● Athletics: ●●

Endurance: ●●● Resistance: ●●●

Diplomacy: ● Command: ●●

Streetwise: ●● Subterfuge: ●●

Engineering: ●●●●● Tradecraft: ●●●● Science: ●●● Linguistics: ●● (Japanese, Russian) Computer: ●●

Medicine: ●● Intrusion: ●● Survival: ●●●

Awareness: ●●● Investigation: ●●●

Analysis: ●●●●

Thought Discipline: ●●●●●

Backgrounds:

Backing: ●● (Directive)

Cipher: ●●●

Rank: ●●

Favor: ●

Equipment: ●●●●

Resources: ●●●

Contacts: ●●

Willpower: ●●●●●●●

Quantum: ●●●●

Taint: ●●●

Mega-Attributes:

M-DEX: ● (Perfect Balance)

M-STA: ● (Adaptability)

M-INT: ●●●● (Discerning Mind, Prodigy; Engineering)

Quantum Powers:

Quantum Forgery: ●●

Quantum Imprint: ●●●

Ledger:

Bonus Points - 15

Quantum x4 - 8

Willpower x7 - 0

Nova Points - 50

Attributes x9 - 47

Backgrounds x10 - 45

Abilities x36 - 39

M-DEX x1 - 36

M-STA x1 - 33

M-INT x4 - 21

Enhancement (INT) - 18

Q-Forgery x2 - 12

Q-Imprint x3 (tainted) - 3

Remaining: 3NP