App Scratch
Jan. 24th, 2015 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
abyss_also_gazedName: The alias she most commonly uses is Annelise Kaufmann (the name her second doctoral dissertation was published under), but to her colleagues she's just Dr. K., because that's not her birth name and legally she doesn't exist.
PB: Jaime Murray
Age: 41
Appearance: Dr. K is a rail-thin, extremely pale woman. She stands about 5'7" and her left arm is missing just above the elbow, replaced with a polymer prosthetic that ends in a stainless steel split hook. She has shoulder-length black hair that she generally wears down when she isn't working, and dark eyes that are usually surrounded by almost equally dark circles. She has a number of small shrapnel scars on the remaining portion of her left arm, a large chemical burn scar on her right ribcage, with a few smaller splash marks on her stomach and hip, and two tiny, faded scars on her abdomen from a tubal ligation. Needless to say, she doesn't do swimwear a lot.
World: Dr. K comes from an alternate version of Earth (specifically, the year 1978) where the fabric of reality has become increasingly permeable, allowing objects and entities from other universes to cross over into it - some relatively benign, some more dangerous, and even a few that could prove to be a threat to all life on the planet. Organizations have sprung up worldwide to study, contain, or destroy these things - mostly the last one, but the group Dr. K works for, the Habakkuk Foundation, is focused primarily on the other two, as they believe that the nature of these objects might provide some clues as to how to stabilize the fabric of reality before the damage spreads further. Already, though, there are entire areas that are uninhabitable due to said damage, and at least one major city that has had to be evacuated and quarantined by the Foundation.
For the most part, all of this has been kept secret from the public - in the U.S., their quarantine operations are performed with support from the CDC, which includes the loan of equipment, uniform patches, and falsified credentials.
History: Dr. K was born in 1937 in the town of Roswell, Georgia. Her youth was largely uneventful - well, as uneventful as anyone's was, growing up during World War II and some of the tensest years of the Cold War. She was fascinated with science from a young age, and had some slight brush with the CIA's attention when, as a senior in high school, she wrote an extremely detailed report for a county science fair about the potential for biological and chemical weapons to render nuclear weapons obsolete. Though it seemed insignificant at the time, this ultimately facilitated her transition into her chosen career after graduate school.
She majored in biology and minored in mathematics at the University of Georgia, then went out west to UC Berkeley for grad school. It was there that she first learned - albeit not directly, not until after she had completed her first Ph.D. - of the Habakkuk Foundation's existence. Her dissertation was on the mathematical modeling of swarm intelligence, and her advisor was one of two professors also doing work for the Foundation on the side. After the other one committed suicide (not "suicide" - he genuinely could not handle what he'd seen), she ended up assisting him in working with things that she "couldn't talk about, had no knowledge of, and which definitely did not exist."
The glowing letter of recommendation her advisor wrote for her that got her recruited by the Foundation might have been considered using her as a blood sacrifice - throwing her to the wolves so that they'd get back out of his life - if she hadn't already developed a taste for the work, and if he'd known about the incredibly high mortality rate of the job he was effectively signing her up for.
The Foundation was very upfront about that last part, however, and about the fact that the mortality rate didn't go down significantly once you completed your training and were given a more permanent post at the laboratories of one of its quarantine or storage sites. Interns might be more expendable, after all, but they also weren't trusted to help with handling the more dangerous specimens - the ones that, if there was a containment failure, could do more than kill whatever dumb asshole didn't adequately follow security procedures. Thus, things tended to even out between the internship and the residency (the Foundation uses the terms for its laboratory positions as well as its medical ones) - though, the latter was where shit started getting real.
Like many of the female residents, after she heard what some of the Foundation's specimens were capable of, she elected to undergo a tubal ligation. There was also a full hysterectomy offered, and she was seriously considering it, but during the internship she'd distinguished herself as one of the smart ones, who understood the value of following protocol, and she had some interesting projects awaiting her that she didn't want to have to pass up in order to recover from major surgery.
As it turned out, she managed to dodge any necessity for undergoing any other form of surgery until her final year of residency. Still, there are times in Foundation work when even doing everything by the book and taking all the right precautions with the specimens under your supervision isn't enough, because sometimes you don't know nearly as much about them as you think, or someone else will forget something at exactly the wrong moment - or both.
Which was how Habakkuk Kardec-class Specimen 39 (HKK-39), then on loan to another group in the same lab, wound up breaching containment and killing seven people, with Dr. K nearly becoming one of them.
Kardec classification indicates the most dangerous specimens in Foundation care, those that have particularly complex containment procedures and an especially high lethality when they escape. HKK-39 was a humanoid entity that could phase through most materials at will, with a mouth that was apparently a portal to another dimension; it escaped containment through a single weld in its containment vessel that wasn't made to specifications, and had eaten half a dozen people before it tried to consume Dr. K.
She lost her left arm jamming an anti-ecto grenade down its throat. See, one of the most important things to know about Dr. K is that something trying to kill her only makes her furious.
The entity's unusual properties prevented her from suffering shrapnel injuries to the rest of her body, but HKK-39 was destroyed in the process - one of the few times she's lost a specimen that still had scientific value. Her arm was never recovered, for obvious reasons, but she adjusted quickly to using a prosthetic; a split hook, she found particularly useful for lab work. However, the psychological fallout was worse than the physical. She had always been a psychopath, which was why she was so well suited to working for the Foundation, but this is where her mild solipsism syndrome began, as well as her cocaine addiction - the latter both to combat some of the former, and to improve her alertness so that hopefully she'd catch any problems before another incident like the one with HKK-39 occurred.
Powers/Talents:
Personality: Dr. K has the personality of a bag of snakes, and this is not something she goes to great lengths to conceal. Initially, she doesn't come across as unusually awful, but she tends to be highly dismissive of people she doesn't feel are on her intellectual level.
PB: Jaime Murray
Age: 41
Appearance: Dr. K is a rail-thin, extremely pale woman. She stands about 5'7" and her left arm is missing just above the elbow, replaced with a polymer prosthetic that ends in a stainless steel split hook. She has shoulder-length black hair that she generally wears down when she isn't working, and dark eyes that are usually surrounded by almost equally dark circles. She has a number of small shrapnel scars on the remaining portion of her left arm, a large chemical burn scar on her right ribcage, with a few smaller splash marks on her stomach and hip, and two tiny, faded scars on her abdomen from a tubal ligation. Needless to say, she doesn't do swimwear a lot.
World: Dr. K comes from an alternate version of Earth (specifically, the year 1978) where the fabric of reality has become increasingly permeable, allowing objects and entities from other universes to cross over into it - some relatively benign, some more dangerous, and even a few that could prove to be a threat to all life on the planet. Organizations have sprung up worldwide to study, contain, or destroy these things - mostly the last one, but the group Dr. K works for, the Habakkuk Foundation, is focused primarily on the other two, as they believe that the nature of these objects might provide some clues as to how to stabilize the fabric of reality before the damage spreads further. Already, though, there are entire areas that are uninhabitable due to said damage, and at least one major city that has had to be evacuated and quarantined by the Foundation.
For the most part, all of this has been kept secret from the public - in the U.S., their quarantine operations are performed with support from the CDC, which includes the loan of equipment, uniform patches, and falsified credentials.
History: Dr. K was born in 1937 in the town of Roswell, Georgia. Her youth was largely uneventful - well, as uneventful as anyone's was, growing up during World War II and some of the tensest years of the Cold War. She was fascinated with science from a young age, and had some slight brush with the CIA's attention when, as a senior in high school, she wrote an extremely detailed report for a county science fair about the potential for biological and chemical weapons to render nuclear weapons obsolete. Though it seemed insignificant at the time, this ultimately facilitated her transition into her chosen career after graduate school.
She majored in biology and minored in mathematics at the University of Georgia, then went out west to UC Berkeley for grad school. It was there that she first learned - albeit not directly, not until after she had completed her first Ph.D. - of the Habakkuk Foundation's existence. Her dissertation was on the mathematical modeling of swarm intelligence, and her advisor was one of two professors also doing work for the Foundation on the side. After the other one committed suicide (not "suicide" - he genuinely could not handle what he'd seen), she ended up assisting him in working with things that she "couldn't talk about, had no knowledge of, and which definitely did not exist."
The glowing letter of recommendation her advisor wrote for her that got her recruited by the Foundation might have been considered using her as a blood sacrifice - throwing her to the wolves so that they'd get back out of his life - if she hadn't already developed a taste for the work, and if he'd known about the incredibly high mortality rate of the job he was effectively signing her up for.
The Foundation was very upfront about that last part, however, and about the fact that the mortality rate didn't go down significantly once you completed your training and were given a more permanent post at the laboratories of one of its quarantine or storage sites. Interns might be more expendable, after all, but they also weren't trusted to help with handling the more dangerous specimens - the ones that, if there was a containment failure, could do more than kill whatever dumb asshole didn't adequately follow security procedures. Thus, things tended to even out between the internship and the residency (the Foundation uses the terms for its laboratory positions as well as its medical ones) - though, the latter was where shit started getting real.
Like many of the female residents, after she heard what some of the Foundation's specimens were capable of, she elected to undergo a tubal ligation. There was also a full hysterectomy offered, and she was seriously considering it, but during the internship she'd distinguished herself as one of the smart ones, who understood the value of following protocol, and she had some interesting projects awaiting her that she didn't want to have to pass up in order to recover from major surgery.
As it turned out, she managed to dodge any necessity for undergoing any other form of surgery until her final year of residency. Still, there are times in Foundation work when even doing everything by the book and taking all the right precautions with the specimens under your supervision isn't enough, because sometimes you don't know nearly as much about them as you think, or someone else will forget something at exactly the wrong moment - or both.
Which was how Habakkuk Kardec-class Specimen 39 (HKK-39), then on loan to another group in the same lab, wound up breaching containment and killing seven people, with Dr. K nearly becoming one of them.
Kardec classification indicates the most dangerous specimens in Foundation care, those that have particularly complex containment procedures and an especially high lethality when they escape. HKK-39 was a humanoid entity that could phase through most materials at will, with a mouth that was apparently a portal to another dimension; it escaped containment through a single weld in its containment vessel that wasn't made to specifications, and had eaten half a dozen people before it tried to consume Dr. K.
She lost her left arm jamming an anti-ecto grenade down its throat. See, one of the most important things to know about Dr. K is that something trying to kill her only makes her furious.
The entity's unusual properties prevented her from suffering shrapnel injuries to the rest of her body, but HKK-39 was destroyed in the process - one of the few times she's lost a specimen that still had scientific value. Her arm was never recovered, for obvious reasons, but she adjusted quickly to using a prosthetic; a split hook, she found particularly useful for lab work. However, the psychological fallout was worse than the physical. She had always been a psychopath, which was why she was so well suited to working for the Foundation, but this is where her mild solipsism syndrome began, as well as her cocaine addiction - the latter both to combat some of the former, and to improve her alertness so that hopefully she'd catch any problems before another incident like the one with HKK-39 occurred.
Powers/Talents:
Personality: Dr. K has the personality of a bag of snakes, and this is not something she goes to great lengths to conceal. Initially, she doesn't come across as unusually awful, but she tends to be highly dismissive of people she doesn't feel are on her intellectual level.
