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Regarding life,
the wisest men of all ages
have judged alike:
it is worthless.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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Dr. H. M. H. Antonius
Grandmaster Alchemist

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A surgeon and scholar with a torturer's tools
and a comportment as cold as iron.He smells of musk, myrrh, and blood.⠀

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♪ MUZIK

🜔 ➔ THE EXCRUCIATION SEQUENCE // STEEL HOOK PROSTHESES◬ ➔ RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW // STONEBURNER🜏 ➔ BLOOD WILL RAIN // CONTROL➔ KILLSHOT // BEN FROST

➔ SYNDROM // DØDSMASKIN🜔 ➔ IN TWO MINDS // SANCTUM◬ ➔ DROP HAMMER // CHU ISHIKAWA🜏 ➔ TERRORBIRD // AUTHOR & PUNISHER

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DEPLOYMENTS

AREAS OF STUDY

INTERIOR

◈ IMMUTABLE RESILIENCE
Herr Antonius does not respond normally to pain. Most often, he does not respond at all.◈ IMPERVIOUS CHEMISTRY
Herr Antonius must consume at least two times the regular dose of any imbibed substance for it to do anything to or for him.◈ INDOMITABLE INTELLECT
Herr Antonius possesses a will of iron. He is resistant towards all varieties of mental manipulation, including suggestion, control and thought reading.
(Individuals who attempt to communicate with him telepathically will recognize that he is also mind-mute, and can neither hear nor respond to them.)

◈ ALCHEMIST'S TONGUE
Of all the senses, Herr Antonius's most refined is that of taste. He can acquire a remarkable array of data from sampling any substance, and can identify thousands of reagents and alchemical concoctions by nothing but their gustatory character.◈ TRANSFIGURED FLESH
Herr Antonius has made several significant modifications to his physiological configuration. These alterations and mechanisms are too subtle to be apparent outside of specific circumstances.◈ RED ENGINE
HATEFUL FURNACE. ROARING CRUCIBLE.
COLLAPSING CITIES. MOURNING EPOCHS.SEVEN KEYS. SEVEN CROWNS. SEVEN BILLION BODIES. SEVEN KEYS. SEVEN CROWNS. SEVENTY SEVEN BILLION BODIES. SEVEN KEYS. SEVEN CROWNS. SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SEVEN BILLION BODIES.

"I NEVER DREAMED,"
the ARCHITECT said,
with conviction as cold and hard as the scalpel between his fingers."I KNEW IT FROM THE DAY I WAS BORN.
I KNEW IT BEFORE I KNEW HOW TO BREATHE."

EXTERIOR

◈ PECULIAR LENSES
Herr Antonius is never without a unique pair of asymmetrical eyewear. They are made out of two brass barrels of differing diameter, with opaque white lenses that entirely obscure whatever lies on the other side.Each primary lens possesses a significant number of rotating, secondary lenses with varying interchangeable functions, including Truesight, multiple types of magic detection, and several artificer's enchantments which allow the wearer to perceive exact dimensions, the integrity of certain mechanisms, and other valuable data.The larger barrel has three closing vents on its side, and the narrower barrel can be rotated to adjust magnification.Spells or enchantments whose function is to reveal whatever lies on the other side of these lenses will consistently fail for an indiscernible reason as the lenses themselves do not appear to bear any sort of magical signature.◈ GLASS & KNIVES
Herr Antonius's clothing practically bristles with little alchemical implements at all times. He is never without a scalpel or vial, and generally has a full suite of useful brews in convenient doses at his disposal.◈ PERPETUAL RIGIDITY
Herr Antonius conducts himself with a very controlled, mechanical stiffness.◈ STOICISM
To an observer, Herr Antonius appears to feel little, and express less. His manner and affect are flat and stern at all times.◈ WICKED AURA
Magical beasts of good alignment and even normal animals instinctively avoid and revile this man.

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◬ SELECTED INVENTORY

◈ WEAPONRY
A sturdy iron warhammer; a half-sentient whip with whirling metal teeth; a pair of brass knuckles; a monstrous 'wrecktangle'; and a frostfire blade.But in a pinch, Herr Antonius can and will try to kill a man with anything.

FOR YOUR SAFETY

21 years old and above only.

THE MAD ARCHITECT is a no consent character.This means that you are free to attempt any action upon him.
(Do not assume that it will automatically succeed, of course.)DO BE ADVISED:
Deliberately provoking him with acts of aggression
means that you forfeit your own right to the consent rule.Be careful. Have fun.

SCENES & HOOKS

Below are listed some specific potential scenarios or possibility for connection. Not all of them are suited to all characters or players. Use your best judgment.◈ BAD LUCK. You are caught, alone and out-of-sorts, by something that wants to take something important from you. You cannot scream, or if you do, no one hears you. When it is over, you find yourself incapable of describing what happened. You can only shudder in its presence.
Alt Scenario: You cry out, and someone does come to your aid. Instead, both of you suffer.◈ BOUNTY. This man is evil. You have been given a list of his sins, and will be paid well to dispatch him for the good of the world.◈ WITNESS TO THE LABYRINTH. You have come too close and seen too much. It haunts your nightmares and your waking moments. You know that Herr Antonius is a part of this, but you do not know how you know.◈ ANNIHILATION. This man has destroyed someone or something you loved or hated. You remember it by the sigil of the weeping eye within the triangle. Perhaps you seek to pay him back for what he has done.◈ BLEAK APPETITE. Rumor has it that Herr Antonius may be inclined to commit extraordinarily gruesome acts of violence. You discover, intentionally or as an unwitting third party observer, that this rumor is nauseatingly true.◈ HUNT THE HUNTER. You need to drink of those closely-guarded veins, if only to know whether the delicious scent of sweet blood disguised beneath the musk and myrrh is true, or just another layer of deception.◈ NEED THE MONEY. You are desperate. You answer an ad requesting subjects comfortable with parting with any or all of the following: flesh, nonessential organs, teeth, blood, and skin. You tick off the boxes for the things you think you won't miss. You will be treated well, and paid quite handsomely. What have you got to lose?◈ STRANGE CLIENT. You are called upon to provide what you expected to be a run-of-the-mill erotic service. It turns out to be something quite different altogether.

CONTACT

▣ furcadia | ALCHEMIST

▣ discord | DOKTOR.RIP

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DR. H. M. H. ANTONIUS is a man with titles and distinctions as numerous as any decorated officer, and has committed as many crimes against humanity to earn them on subtler, though no less bloody, battlefields. In the art of medicine and the occult science of alchemy, few men have ever matched him in extraordinary insight and an unconscienced willingness to test the limits of mortality, and society's tolerance for such experiments thereby.Antonius achieved the lofty title of Grandmaster Alchemist at the respectable age of twenty-seven, an honor typically reserved for intellectuals whose work has spanned many more decades. The vehicle that delivered him to this academic zenith was his esoteric work, "Prinzipien des Fleisches," the later reputation and covert banning of which has rendered it a sought-after tome of hidden knowledge. The specific nature of his trial consisted of a private demonstration during which he would reveal the work's core assertion as "eine kleine Opus Magnum," that is "a little magnum opus," and support this claim with practical demonstrations and replications of his once-classified experiments, conducted in secrecy over a period of five years.Since data has been made available to the public we have a clearer picture of the scope of inhumane scientific inquiry that lay behind Antonius's work, as well as the networks of complicit individuals who allowed it to take place. His research was conducted legally and with the blessing of officials, who saw fit to supply him with suitable test subjects in the form of numerous prisoners whose crimes had seen them sentenced to death. ¹ On the circumstances of this endorsement, Antonius has said that it was quite easily obtained: when he had presented the precise medical advancements that he claimed would derive from his work, personal interests quickly joined professional ones. In exchange for even a ghost of hope for the possibilities he promised, the lives of scum were, the reasoning went, a paltry price.²Let there be no doubt: Herr Antonius kept those promises. Whether the miraculous ends justify the vile means used to achieve them is a burdensome question, whose nebulous answer will lay heavy upon the conscience of any who would presume to shape it.

-excerpted from "TRAUMA BONDING" by Ludwig Krause; unpublished

THERE IS MORE

Mutilation in a medical context; torture; extreme distress; restraint; cruel alchemy; cannibalism; murder; mention of miscarriage; exploitation of the suffering

READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED

The process which the demonstration would present required a victim, who, for some days prior to the experiment, would be starved and deprived of sleep. The purpose given for this was "to cleanse the flesh of those excesses which tarnish the purity of the prime principle."³ When suitably divested of these undesirable characteristics, he was restrained and infused with a glut of substances carefully dosed so that their combination would both sedate the motor functions as well as amplify the nervous signals. Now the process could begin: the victim would be subject to a complete castration by means of a pair of heated crocodile shears, and due to his chemical condition, his suffering was at once unbearable and nigh inexpressible, such that none of the powerful potency generated by his agony was lost through the natural methods of screaming, thrashing, weeping, et cetera. Herr Antonius took care to note that the shears were merely his preference, and that other methods would be equally effective so long as the full extent of pain was experienced in "hallowed completion."It was proposed that, due to this excess of internalized power, the victim's consciousness, incapable of cohabiting with that inexpressible suffering, would detach, or dissociate from the body. This was described as a key requirement of the process, a crucial part of the purification of the principle, and it had apparently been discovered through extensive trial that amputation of the genitals was among the fastest ways to achieve the degree of trauma required to compel this spiritual severing to take place. Symbolically and alchemically, this act also had a power of its own, which would be released into the bloodstream and join that of the confined trauma. This power was described as the material mourning of the generative principle, which is also the seat of creation. It was like burning coal: in this case also, the original matter and anima were destroyed in a controlled crucible in exchange for a certain type of transmutative energy which would drive the engine of refinement.At the time of the trial and demonstration, this information was revealed in cold tonelessness by the surgeon himself, as if he were narrating the uninteresting dissection of a frog. ⁴The removed organs were then mashed into a red paste alongside other reagents, dissolved into a special preparation, and pumped back into the veins of the victim. This would serve as the substance upon which this released energy would act, transforming or transmuting it into a singular alchemical compound instead of a combination of natural ones. This process was likewise repeated with the eyes, the tongue, the thumbs, the right lung, the thyroid and a segment of the small intestine, for reasons Herr Antonius did not describe at the time nor in his book, which did not include such details among its clinical accounts of procedure.To witness this series of cruel operations was a surreal experience. What should have been conveyed in the screaming of the tortured as his own blood corrupted could only express itself as the frail hiss of breath through a paralyzed throat. One of the officers that oversaw the demonstration said of it, decades later, that he could yet remember with haunting clarity the glistening eyes of a man who had died of the psychic trauma well before his body followed suit. The eventual extrication of these tormented windows to the soul was, he confessed, more a relief than a shock. ⁵For what end did this young doctor so scandalize his hopeful observers? What could be worth the complete destruction of his reputation, a result that surely was impending? At the time it seemed that nothing could justify such calculated cruelty, no matter the crimes of the victims. Was not the mind which had not only devised such things, but executed them multiple times to perfect them, more perverted and inexcusable than that of the very criminal he tormented? What good could possibly come from such evil?The resulting substance, collected from the man's pierced arteries as he succumbed to the complete transmutation of the character of his blood, required oral consumption to achieve the most prominent effect. Seeing as those present were naturally hesitant to participate in this stage of the trial, a 'volunteer' was forcibly selected and restrained, and subject to mutilations which allegedly mimicked common battlefield wounds. He was also maimed, in similar manner to the first man from whom the substance was taken. It was well before this point that many thought the good doctor was surely mad as well as wicked, making sport of these men to satisfy some violently sadistic appetite. One of the men took wrathful umbrage with the doctor, going so far as to draw his weapon and cut him across the face. However, the presiding Grandmasters ruled that he be allowed to continue, and the offender was removed from the scene of the trial.As the chosen victim wailed and howled, he was forced to consume the foul product, and what followed was sufficient to render dumb any further protests: his wounds closed, his mangled limbs regrew like fruit from a flower, his blood replenished itself. He began to laugh, at which point Herr Antonius struck him in the jaw, took hold of him by the hair and gouged out his eyes with a knife. The bruises came and then vanished. The leaking eyes became whole again, shedding the destroyed matter like dead skin. Antonius slashed his throat and drove metal spikes into his chest and belly, piercing the liver and puncturing the lungs. They were gradually ejected from the flesh as it mended, and the man's dying gurgles turned, once more, into laughter.The substance taken from that vile procedure was thus demonstrated to have the miraculous property of endless and healthy regeneration so long as its influence remained within the system of its imbiber. When asked how this was possible, Herr Antonius declared that it was because he had synthesized a means of capturing and exploiting the active principle of living flesh. ⁶ In the situation he manufactured to acquire this specific result, that principle was desire for just completion, the fervent and natural longing to be whole again, distilled like the purest spirits into a perfect potency which could then be transferred to and realized in other environments. He proved then that the core tenets of alchemy operated within the living in ways his predecessors had never dreamed of. Even in the circumstances of medicinal and biological applications, alchemy had always been, after all, an art of dead things, of minerals and mathematics and severed members whose functions in life had long expired.This would revolutionize medicine. It would revolutionize war. In order to prevent this from becoming known to the enemy, Herr Antonius's notes were suppressed and he was effectively imprisoned at the Universität Ingolstadt, where he was given a position as a professor. What happened during that time will be examined in a later chapter.Despite these efforts, however, a matter of such universal interest and horror could not remain imprisoned forever before, like a rogue homunculus, it escaped its strained confinement. By what means was never confirmed. The strongest contender for truth among the rumors was that Grandmaster Valdo Glore, Antonius's mentor, had deliberately chosen to spread the secret, although to what end was never explained. As this forbidden knowledge proliferated slowly and amid much skepticism, there arose among the alchemists who took it seriously a secret controversy over the production and use of this substance, given the nickname of Red Succor⁷; its properties were indisputably miraculous, but the alleged method by which it was produced was too horrific for its production to be tested, let alone organized. It was never made legal, and neither was it described for prohibition, so that the mechanisms of its creation were kept a mystery and the laws that might have governed it were never written. Unanimously and in silence, it was determined that it was better that no one ever know of its existence.Yet rumors persisted, and this legal stasis did not stop mad mixologists and desperate doctors from attempting to replicate the young Grandmaster's monstrous procedure, often with less judicious selection of the type of victim used to perform it, and only half as much information about how and why it was successful in the first place.In time, lesser forms of the cruel medicine were discovered and derived from other circumstances wherein the central principle could be generated and fixed within solvents of varying efficacy. It could be taken from blind men longing for their lost sight, from mothers mourning their miscarried children, from soldiers whose service had cost them their limbs.⁸ In this way, the very people such a development was ostensibly meant to assist were instead used to manufacture the substance that could have relieved them, and many to the point of death. Gold, Black, Green and White Succor were sold on black markets as miraculous cure-alls, great panaceas that would change medicine forever, commanding high prices. In tandem, harrowing plagues of bursting bodies and malformed regenerations began to ravage the noble and military districts as users discovered the side effects of these imperfect simulacrums. Black magicks imported from across the Great Sea were blamed for these events, renewing patriotism and support for the war, but every wise alchemist-physician knew that this was his own art gone horribly awry.Let us take a step back and recall that, well before he had made this presentation and accepted his new title, Antonius had been certified as a physician and surgeon, and served his time as a battlefield medic, during which he had saved the lives of many men.⁹ The secret controversy did not touch him whatsoever. His fellow men of science, privy to his works but not their full details, were taken by the advancing demonstrations of his great service to their field, and would not hold him accountable for the atrocities that had been required to achieve it. Contrarily, those well acquainted with him at this time could tell that something was gravely wrong, and had been for many years. Perhaps his mind had lost its fetters of morality and reason in the mangling theater of war. Or perhaps he had, simply, lost his mind altogether, somewhere in the course of the occult studies he had long pursued.As is often the case with deranged geniuses, the powers that be saw to fit to not only protect him, but to encourage and foster his madness. In the end, this decision would cost them everything.

MY DEAR COMPANION,

I KNOW THAT WHAT YOU HAVE ALREADY WITNESSED HAS NO DOUBT GIVEN YOU CAUSE FOR GREAT ALARM. DO NOT BE FRIGHTENED. IT WILL AVAIL YOU OF NOTHING BUT THE DULLING OF YOUR WITS, AND WHAT YOU WILL SEE AHEAD IS SIGNIFICANTLY WORSE THAN WHAT YOU HAVE SEEN BEFORE.YOU MAY WONDER WHETHER THE OPTION OF TURNING BACK IS AVAILABLE TO YOU, AND BE TEMPTED TO CHOOSE IT. I TELL YOU FREELY THAT THERE IS NO OBSTACLE BETWEEN YOU AND THIS COWARD'S SOLUTION. NO HARM WILL BEFALL YOU. NO FURTHER HORRORS OF THIS KIND WILL ACCOST YOU.INSTEAD, YOU WILL LIVE THE REMAINDER OF YOUR LIFE IN A PURGATORY OF REGRET, FOREVER LAMENTING YOUR CHOICE TO AVOID THIS CHANCE AT ILLUMINATION. YOU WILL NEVER HAVE THE ANSWERS YOU CAME HERE SEEKING.UNCOMPREHENDING AS AN ANIMAL AT SLAUGHTER, YOU WILL BE CAPABLE ONLY OF WATCHING AS THE INEVITABLE WASHES OVER YOU. THE MEANING OF LIFE WILL EBB AWAY LIKE THE TIDE, AND WITH IT YOUR DESIRE TO LIVE. YOU WILL LONG FOR DEATH, AND IT WILL COME IN A SHAPE YOU NEVER WANTED.WHAT I OFFER TO YOU NOW IS A GIFT AND A PRIVILEGE.CHOOSE WISELY.

BEST REGARDS,
DR. H. M. H. ANTONIUS