Caecus

He is always scowling, always drifting along the lakeshore alone. Bit by bit the students have taken to calling that stretch of water "the gloomy half-Deep One's territory." So he comes every day and patrols it, solemn as any lord. When he throws himself in, the churning bubbles wrap around him gently; down there, the jeering from the bank is hard to make out.

Unlocks at: Awakener Level 1

A.F. 3@1, January.

On the Devil's Reef off the eastern coast of the Agló Republic, local fishermen reported they had salvaged "a strangely shaped corpse", short and hunched, with protruding eyeballs, partially hardened skin, webbed fingers, and the most bizarre feature being symmetrical red marks on either side of the neck. If it weren't for the student uniform it wore, it would be hard to consider it a "human corpse."

When the investigators arrived, the strange corpse had already been burned by frightened fishermen as an omen, leaving only a suitcase that was quite popular among students at the time. The suitcase contained no change of clothes, only some illegible manuscripts, a compass, and a photograph of a middle-aged woman.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 3

Since the @2 incident, Caecus has made his peace with us and joined the Awakened Studies program as an outside auxiliary. His grasp of @1 is fragmentary at best, yet he is only too glad to display it and share it.

Around Tulu, Miryam, Goliath and their like he is nothing but humble; every other race, humans above all, gets a dark, unfriendly look. The researchers who have read his file understand where the bitterness comes from, but some of the hotter-tempered Awakeners have no patience for it. It usually falls to Sylvia to step in and talk everyone down, and a certain trust has grown up between her and Caecus along the way.

Under her guidance, Caecus has discovered a new virtue: "the forbearance of a higher race." He now lets provocations pass without a word.

"That child talks about his human mother often, and always fondly. They say a mother is the yardstick a child measures the world by, his hostility toward humans wasn't born in him, it was taught to him. So really, all he's short of is a little guidance and a little care." So Sylvia wrote in her counseling notes.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 5

Caecus hated humans. He hated them even as a child.

He once pulled a drowning little girl out of the water, and the other children called him a monster for it. When he kept well away from them, they chased him down shouting "stinking frogman."

In all those bleak years, the one thing he had to look forward to was a letter from Uncle Orne. Orne's learning was vast, and it came with an endless supply of ghost stories that left little Caecus spellbound. It did not last. A few years on, Uncle Orne simply vanished.

Then, at sixteen, Caecus went back to visit his grandfather's house and happened upon Orne's manuscripts. At last he understood the noble meaning hidden in the twisted markings on his skin.

Hah. Humans. Lowly creatures in the end, all of them.

After that he stopped despairing. He waited instead, waited for the day his destiny would come for him.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 7

You must have had this dream too. A fortune drops into your hands out of nowhere, or some absolute power does, enough to grind everyone who ever sneered at us, everyone who ever hurt us, under your heel.

And then you wake, and reality is still there, endless, and you sink one layer deeper into despair.

But my dream was real. My destiny came for me.

Don't you see? You are the weak ones.

A frail body and a withered soul can't carry noble blood? No. That simply isn't possible. The name Orne is the glory and the emblem of our @2. Granted that blood and that name, I am no longer the freak anyone could humiliate, I am a @1, with noble blood in my veins.

So... please... stop looking at me that way. I can't breathe when you look at me that way...

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 9