Genius: The Transgression/Characters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Characters from Genius: The Transgression include:

Catalysts

Grimm

I am nanometers from perfection and no longer answer to any mortal authority. They weren't there for me and I won't waste time helping them as I rise asymptotically toward the ultimate virtue. Every corpse I leave should be one less investigation to make, instead of one more open case. But I'm not here for human justice any more. When you see the Paolenti penthouse burn with white fire and the dreams of serpents, you'll know that, and so will every other man-mask-wearing machine-demon in this city. They'll never love me for the things I've done, but I never asked for love. Only for perfection.

Hoffnung

You've seen it on the billboards and the trash-strewn alleys, amidst the halls of the powerful and in the tenements of the desperate: the Change. It's coming, and soon everything will be different. Our world will transform itself―in fire, if necessary, in blood, certainly―and be reborn, fresh and new, to gaze out on the universe with innocent and wondering eyes. And I am the herald of that Change. So forgive me if I cannot hear your words or your screams. They are too small. Do you hear the mayflies screaming tonight? Neither do I.

Klagen

When I was in high school my teacher told me that there are more people alive today than have ever lived. Don't worry: she lied, then got cancer. (Not my fault.) We live atop a mountain of corpses. The Earth is swimming in humans, above and below the ground, so when I see you trying to raise the dead, I'm torn. On the one hand, I recognize your despair. On the other hand, do you really want to spend the rest of the week fending off a Zombie Apocalypse as the Earth vomits up her dead? AGAIN? Come on, man, think this through: every time you try this, we end up fighting zombies. I hate zombies. Just put the syringe down.

Neid

First let me tell you that human beings without mathematical souls are transparent to God and thus mean nothing to Him. So you ask, why does God (who is the Equation) care about window-souls? He doesn't, but the Devil, whom I define as our negative thoughts, does, and directs window-soul humans at us to destroy us. These humans think they think and feel, but they are without the highest Number and their feelings are only our self-doubt. Destroy your self-doubt, be free of their hatred. Or destroy them, and be free of your self-doubt. Vengeance is time- and space-symmetrical, like any good equation.

Staunen

I'm afraid I don't see things like you do. I mean it: I'm afraid. What if the things I find beautiful drive you mad? What if they hollow you out like clever little squirrels getting nuts for the winter, except the nuts are your eyes, and winter is, I don't know, maybe the Rapture or something? And I'm just smiling while your face gets ripped apart because I think it's beautiful? These things worry me sometimes, when I'm not looking at the night sky. So I spend a lot of time looking at the night sky, and not looking at your face and thinking about squirrels.

Foundations, Baramins and Programms

Peerage

The International Union of Artifice

Good, fast, and cheap: you get all three. And if you talk like that to my people again, you're going to wake up as a collection of spare parts.

Fellowship for Manifest Direction

Like even the strongest iron bar, every man has a weak point, and it can be found.

Center for Circumferential Navigation

I've seen things you wouldn't believe. Hell, I've seen things I don't believe.

Reformed Society of Progenitors (formerly Children of Demiurge)

It'll work this time, I promise. It won't hurt anyone.

College of Scholastic Theory

If it's true, someone wrote it down, even if just to refute it.

Lemuria

Atomists

There was so much potential. So much promise. So much that failed us, all those years ago. But not this time.

  • I Want My Jetpack: Or Hovercar/Invisible Zepplin/Robotic Spider/Horde of Gorilla Cyborgs
  • Determinators: They are the best at warding off Havoc- it happens sooner or later, but maybe next time...
  • Straw Man Has a Point: Despite their elitism, real world ideologies like the 1990s "New Economy" and singularitarianism show that they're much more in touch with mundane humans than unmada normally are.
  • Utopia Justifies the Means: All they ever wanted was to bring us into the future- not that they ever cared about the people who would have to live in it.
  • Zeerust: Not a defining trope, but certainly not uncommon, being formally founded in the 50s at the dawn of the Nuclear age means many of their elders have a pre-apocalypse Fallout style of Mad Science.
Etherites

Now if you look here, you'll see that this is how things really work. Actually, really, positively work. But ignore that, that part is still being corrected.

Mechanists

We're all just cogs in the Great Machine. Whatever we think we choose was actually predestined, part of the process. Part of the Plan.

  • Clock Punk: Sometimes.
  • Face Heel Turn: Sorta. Geniuses espousing what is now modern Mechanist philosophy have always been around, but the Baramin itself officially formed after a schism in the International Union of Artifice.
  • The Fatalist: They reject the idea of free-will and consequentially the idea of responsibility.
  • Steampunk: Other times.
Oracles

No. No. This is absolutely wrong. Look, just let me fix it. All of it.

Phenomenologists

Hmm. That's an interesting point, but is there really any kind of absolute truth out there? Anything that is immutable?

  • Consummate Liar: And how! They can spend a point of Mania to gain a exceptional success on a subterfuge roll. This is because they aren't actually lying, they genuinely believe anything they say.
  • I Reject Your Reality: Even more so than other Unmada. Phenomenologists will reject their own reality when it suits them.
    • Not all of them do, though. For example, Belinda Czdenk (who is not highly regarded by other Phenomenologists) doesn't so much disbelieve in objective truth as believe that it's irrelevant and/or unknowable. So, while she may reject common reality, she can't substitute it with her own, much to her frustration. Yes, that logic is shot, but remember who we're dealing with.
      • Because of this the other Phenomenologists consider Belinda to e a phony.
  • Surveillance as the Plot Demands: They're in charge of Lemuria's intelligence operations.
Dharmists (destroyed)
Numericals (ascendant)

Programs of Note

Formalists (Ten Thousand Fans)
Thule Society (Revanchists)

Fellowships

Elders of the Third Law

Hermetic Order of the 28 Spheres

Phantom Foundation

Perfected Vision Institute

Iridium Sentinels

Malcolm T. Washington Fellowship

Nine Vertex Devil Club

Ressurection Consortium

Geniuses of Note

Historical

Leonardo di ser Piero
Nikola Tesla
Robert Hook

Seattle of Tomorrow

Dr. Vienna/Yancy Wolfgang Borcowitz
Gracie Calabash
Screaming Sam Paluxy
Captain Joe Calazzi
Devon Ogura
Melantha C. Dranias
Erin Out-Of-Time
Detective Alice Gotti
  • Hollywood Atheist: Subverted; she didn't lose her faith because of her many hardships, she just can't sustain religious convictions as a Beholden.
  • Hot Mom
  • The Igor
  • Iron Woobie: Let's see... through bad luck, she lost her shot at the Ivy League, and her parents want nothing to do with her. She recovered from that and became a police officer. Then she got pregnant and her husband abandoned her. Then she discovered that her superiors were on the Pacific Gauntlet's payroll. Then she was made into a Beholden by Dr. Vienna. Life has not been kind to Detective Gotti, but she's taken everything it's thrown at her.
Hook-Man/David Islington Whittlesworth
Megiddo
Argentine St. Croix

St. Croix is a bitter, tired woman, touched by sadness at the disappointments in her life. While insane and, when the mood takes her, tremendously cruel, hers is the small, weak kind of human cruelty that encourages as much pity as loathing.

Belinda Czdenk
Erwin Tycho

Other

Rapata/"Mr. Shark"
Prof. Partridge Crown
Arturo Banger
Dr. Keiko Takamori
Dr. Ilsa Hauser
Walking-Man, Peripatetic Dreamkiller

  1. They were originally a zoroastrian philosophy cult. Truth was to Ancient Persia like democracy is to Eagle Land