"Spruce"

Basic Info:

Player: snorlison

Position: Foundation asset: Precognition (Former CotB cultist, anomalous)

Demeanor: Scatterbrained and spacey. Somewhat polite and deferential to any Foundation personnel. She often seems in a hurry.

Nature: As she is compelled to, she fully believes that the Foundation is a divine organization and that all its employees are touched by some part of that divinity. However, she is not stupid and she has begun to grapple with her copatriots' humanity. While she would find it hard to admit to herself, the years of prophecy and awareness of her inevitable and imminent demise have left her at a remove from all others. The Foundation protocols securing her don't help this attitude.

Description: Spruce is a tall, wide-set white woman. Her short, rudely cut hair is jet black, but it's beginning to show white. Her clothing is simple and institutional, clearly provided by the Foundation. A heavy looking metal collar surrounds her neck, and her skin shows signs of chaffing. In undefended moments, her face falls and she looks tired. Something about her seems younger, but records date her age to be somewhere in her 50s. This seems to be matched with the grey in her hair, and the wrinkling of the skin beneath her eyes.

Stats:

Health
  • Physical Health: 7
  • Mental Health: 7
  • Burn1: 3
Attributes
  • Physical Defense: 5
  • Mental Defense: 5 (6-1 Burn)
  • Perception: 3 (4-1 Burn)
  • Agility: 3
  • Strength: 4
Skills
  • Intimidation: 3
  • Melee: 6 (4+2 Str)
  • Sneak: 2
  • Academics: 1 (2-1 Burn)
  • Medical: 2 (3-1 Burn)
Specialties
  • Devotee of Brokenness: 5. Has a strong awareness of the traditions, rituals, beliefs, and theology of the Church of the Broken God. Even as other details have begun to abandon her memory, Spruce's knowledge of the Broken God remains a guiding light. +5 to Academics for checks involving the religion of the Church of the Broken God, or for using rituals to learn about and tame anomalous phenomena, and control some minor magical workings. Can tackle larger magical workings, but would require access to help, knowledge, and resources she most certainly isn't authorized to have.
  • A Mustard Seed's Worth of Faith: Her belief in the Broken God and Their inevitable trajectory to recreation is almost dissociative in its strength. By tapping into this belief, Spruce can take on tasks that would leave many others quaking. +2 bonus to Mdef, Strength to protect a member of the Foundation against mortal harm.
  • See God's Design (anomalous): 3. The Revelation is an ongoing thing. Every now and then, both unbidden and prompted, she receives a glimpse of the Design of the Broken God. In mundane terms, this usually emerges as some piece of information critical to the Foundation's agenda. Provides one automatic success per run in a Perception or an Academics checks, or the GMs provide random (but potentially significant) trivia. Feel free to use Spruce as a conduit for whatever bit of exposition needs to happen.
Anomalous Flaw
  • "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten.": The nature of the Revelation is slowly killing Spruce. She is fully aware she will not be present for the universal restructuring she expects the Foundation to create, and has (mostly) come to terms with this. Regardless, for now, her anomalous ability is eating through her brain. The burn is slowly removing her capacity to remember, her faculty for critical thinking, and her self-awareness. Spruce takes on a total (Burn/3) ongoing penalty to mental skills. These penalties update whenever Spruce receives XP. Her precognition can be used once during a run without Burn, but each additional use of precognition in a run accrues two points of Burn. Spruce accrues a point of Burn at the end of every second run on which she gains XP.

Gear:

  • A Foundation-proved institutional jumpsuit, devoid of insignia or identifying marks.
  • Laminated Foundation access papers, detailing what Spruce is and is not allowed to do at the Site.
  • A spiral-bound notebook and pen, to help her remember things.
  • A Containment and Submission device, subdermal configuration.
  • A Containment and Submission device, collar configuration.
  • (Secret) The suicide pill, which she has been instructed to take in the event of her capture by forces hostile to the Foundation.
Equipment:
  • None

Possessions:

  • Nothing of note

Personal History:

On July 17th, 1946 10:43 am EST, seventeen members of the Church of the Broken God experienced their Revelation. The Revelation was attended by some minor physical signs, such as the healing of wounds and diseases, but the primary result was a communication from the Broken God. Much was revealed to these seventeen, the main thrust was this — "The Godhead will be restored within a generation, but not by those calling themselves the Church of the Broken God. The Foundation is the font of the Godhead. Go to them, and give them any aid they require."

Three of the seventeen stayed amongst the Church of the Broken God to share the truth, while the remaining fourteen fled to the Foundation front the Revelation had directed them to. Those three were utterly destroyed for their trouble, but not before revealing a crack of doubt within the existing CotBG leadership.

The fourteen were taken into immediate custody by the Foundation on July 18th, 1948. Needless to say, the Foundation was immediately suspect of their motives and anomalous abilities. They were locked away and subjected to endless questions, but this was a process the fourteen were eager to participate in. Their information proved mostly accurate and useful, to the point where interrogation of the fourteen had become a standard procedure during SCP research and even field operations. At first, their responses were not often included in the planning or briefings for field operations out of fear of contamination or subversion. Over time, as the accuracy and evident willingness of the fourteen started to become an open secret amongst researchers and agents, this information began to be included in mission planning.

Without any obvious betrayal and nearly a decade of cooperation, a pilot program has been started. The program suggests taking advantage of the fourteen's abilities during field operations. One of the fourteen were randomly selected for this duty, and as Spruce had known since July 17th, 1948, she was to become the first (and last) believer in the Broken God to become a field asset for the Foundation.

In preparation to being a field asset, Spruce experienced some preliminary training in infiltration and disengagement (in case she should be separated from her handlers on a field op) and a modicum of unarmed self-defense training. In between the Foundation training, the more aggressive and informal styles of defense she learned with the Church of the Broken God, and a surprising natural strength and aptitude, Spruce has become terrifyingly effective at taking down threats to herself and other Foundation employees.

Though she had to beg for it, Spruce has also been authorized to receive supplementary emergency medical training. Though she hasn't been trained to independently administer medical care, she has proven to be an able assistant. Spruce is good with being told to carry people and with holding wounds clamped shut; All the better to help Foundation agents complete their divine task.

Spruce has forgotten, amongst many other things, her past before joining the Church of the Broken God. She remembers pieces of a lonely childhood as a boy, spent at an isolated farmstead reading books and poking anthills. She cannot recall if these are actually her memories or an aspect of the Revelation, and she has no inclination to question them.

Miscellaneous:

Spruce is not allowed to carry weapons.
Spruce is not allowed to remove her tracking and submission equipment.
Spruce is not to be told her location, or the location of the campus, unless contravened by operational exigency.
Spruce is not allowed to be unattended during any operation off campus.
Spruce is not allowed to operate any communication equipment.
Spruce is not allowed in areas where sensitive or anomalous research is occurring, nor is she allowed access to any repository of information on sensitive or anomalous research.

XP:

0

Languages

  • English
  • Spanish
  • Dutch

Miscellaneous:

Spruce and the Broken God:

In 1946 Robert Bumero became His Holiness, Builder of the Broken God. This is the same year that Spruce and 13 others left the CotBG. At that time, the Church's obsessive focus on mechanization hadn't yet taken its place as the central dogma of the Broken Church. Spruce (and the other 13 like her) conscientiously left the Church because their Revelation indicated that the Church was going down the wrong path. In the 11 years since the self-imposed exile, some differences have developed between the faith of the Fourteen at the Foundation and that of the mainline Broken Chruch.

For Spruce, her central dogma are pantheist and panentheistic ideas of God. The focus on mechanization we've come to associate with the CotBG still exists, but as a sort of metaphor for the central mystery. Spruce takes building or making things as a sort of meditation on the nature of divinity, as to her, the transformation that happens when something mechanical is assembled is reflective of the act of creation of God. If you notice, Spruce doesn't even have an engineering skill — she's not a mechanomancer, and she doesn't make anomalous machines, not by herself. Instead her preferred role is as a mystic; she blesses the works of others while they are being made, transforming them to access the oneness of God. She helps those who make the tools to suffuse the work with their spirits, and those who use the works to integrate the tools into themselves. She creates a connection between the Maker, the User, and the Tool, further unifying the disparate elements of the world, and bringing the date of the Apotheosis that much closer.

Spruce plays her role as one of the Fourteen at the Foundation (as they sometimes style themselves in their less humble moments). Of course, they mean Foundation in both the institutional and figurative senses of the word, since their Revelation predicts that the SCP Foundation will become the Font of the Godhead. They know that the actions of the Foundation over the next generation will ensure that the universe reaches Apotheosis. It will issue forth from that future moment at some Foundation site, and spread everywhere. Apotheosis will spread across space and time, rewriting history and restructuring the heavens. All the universe and its history will be united with and perfected in that moment to ensure that God is, was, and always had been.

XP: 0

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