I'd forgotten how much I love being in a different timezone and missing all the activity while I'm asleep...

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Malcolm Gerhart, bookseller and failed scholar. 

29 

Appearance: Severely underweight, with pale blonde hair. Typically wears plain shirts without a tie under an ill-fitting tweed jacket. Not an attractive man, he has a thin neck and a weak chin- in combination with his clothes this gives him a peculiarly notable appearance. 

Inherited ability: Shadow

Brief History 

Mal's drive was not from any idealism, but because of a simple question. Why are there no records? Every other event, no matter how atrocious, has received some historical treatment. The Holocaust was the subject of countless books, biopics and narrative illustrations; even long after it had passed far out of living memory, it was still taught in school as an example of man's cruelty and responsibility for his own actions. Even the better obscured slaughters in human history- the Cultural Revolution, whose deaths were never tallied, or America's wars against the drug farmers of the Middle East, received foreign criticism, even if there were no official records. Why then had the cataclysm 100 years ago escaped the oversight of history? 

Mal started this journey as a doctorate student, fresh and eager to impress by tackling something different from the usual questions of Post-Industrialism and the economic impact of globalisation on past geopolitics. He needed no discouragement from his mentors; his findings were discouragment enough. In the absence of any formal record, he started his search with secondary material, rumours or allusions of what had happened in old newspapers; he found nothing. It was not as though there were any lack of material from the time-period; far from it. Simply, there was nothing, nothing whatsoever discussing the cause of the cataclysm; merely lists of the cities burned and of the names of the dead. 

Eventually, Mal was turned out of his position. His snail's progress on his personal 'quackery' was excuse enough for the department to refuse further funding for his doctorate. He was sure this was a cover, that he had gotten too close to some uncomfortable truth and that he was being targetted. He did not end his search. 

Soon (his new job procuring and auctioning rare books and editions for an antiques company only reducing the time for his research, not preventing it), he stumbled on his first piece of real progress. He found a small group of people who had had the truth passed to them directly, and as the price for learning it for himself, he swore that he would repay their answers with his loyalty. 

Mal is still searching for answers. All that's changed is how he asks the questions.

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