Doll

Flasks must be washed until they look new. A bench scorched in an experiment must be sanded until it shines. The balance is recalibrated every third day. Her zeal and reverence for science, for the secrets of the world, make her expect as much from everyone and everything around her.

Herself included, of course, after all, not everyone can embrace death calmly and ask to be made an Awakener.

Unlocks at: Awakener Level 1

Doll is indispensable to Mythag University, and to the field at large.

Of all the Awakeners in the school's care, she has neither the steadiest Gnosis Index nor the greatest strength in a fight, but she is without question the calmest and most rational of them.

For Awakeners who were once human, the first stretch after "coming back" usually brings confusion, panic, and mania. Doll seems to have skipped that adjustment entirely.

On her second day awake she was back in the laboratory, and within a year she had compiled a technical manual that brought together outer-realm knowledge and human learning.

These days Doll spends half her time advancing Silvercore Technology and the other half "cleaning up after idiot students."

Incidentally, under the influence of a higher-dimensional presence, Doll wrote that Technical Manual in some unknown language. The translation is proceeding in an orderly fashion, in whatever spare time she has.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 3

"Comments with no mercy in them." "Failing papers." "Research reports that don't pass."

In decades of teaching, Doll has signed off on graduation certificates for a handful of students at most. Most give up in the face of her impossible standards and transfer to another professor, and over the years Professor Doll's reputation has spread accordingly.

Still, some students believe the standard is how she picks her disciples: only the most iron-willed deserve to hold the key to the door of truth and walk beside her as she lifts the veil off the world.

So even though the odds of graduating under her are almost nothing, applications to study with Doll keep flying into her office.

Sometimes, when Ramona is pulled in to help read through them, she can't help thinking it isn't such a bad thing that the students believe that.

As far as Ramona can tell, Doll simply holds human students to the standards of an Awakener. Nothing more.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 5

Doll's arrival was the one moment of glory Mythag University ever had in the eyes of the outside world.

Scholars everywhere lamented that even a talent sent from heaven could not escape worldly chains, that she had let some nobody university buy her for money, and taken on the stink of coin.

While the world tore into her for supposedly selling herself, Doll was getting something at Mythag worth more than gold.

She was allowed past the border of material science, close enough to touch the veil over reality, and beneath that veil lay what she would give her life to reach.

Researching Silvercore Technology is no safer than dancing on a knife's edge, and Doll became its most serious, most tireless, most gifted dancer.

When the D-Mark appeared, the dancer did not stop. She used what time she had left to keep turning, letting her own steps settle and crystallize.

Until the Dissolution Phenomenon wrecked her body, reached her mind, and ate into her reason.

Even then, she was still far too distant from the center of the truth.

And so that star, its flame of life gone dim and its hunger for knowledge still blinding, left these words behind: "Awaken me, before the world forgets me."

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 7

A new star of science and knowledge rose out of an ordinary working-class family.

Most of Doll's childhood was filled with the pulse of cylinders and the turning of gears.

But a love of machines was never going to carry a girl up the harsh slopes of science.

What set her on the path of knowledge was a plague.

An unknown madness tore through the city. Hospitals overflowed, morgues buckled, and no one felt safe.

"There isn't enough ground in the whole city. Dig up Grandma or burn Mother, you have to pick one."

And so Doll watched her mother disappear into the fire.

Unlike the others burned that day, the handful of bone fragments and ash she had once called "mother" held something more: a shimmering silver mass, still flowing.

"I want to know whether I can ever see her again."

"I want to know whether her kind soul is somewhere inside that."

"I want to know whether that silver is the origin of life, the essence of the soul."

"I want to know whether everything in this world begins from the same point."

Until she has her answers, Doll will not bow to the Dissolution Phenomenon.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 9