Here, I'll kick things off with my own "character sheet":

[i]It’s a story everyone's heard before. A cruel dictator finds himself opposed by a jealous mayor who didn’t so much detest his evil as much as he envied his ability to commit it. The two raised their armies, and they fought, and thousands upon thousands were crushed in the unfeeling machinery of war. By its end, the dictator had won himself a foot of land. 

In the eyes of history, the One-Foot War was just another calamity that would be obscured by the rising murk of the Steam Age. But for one man, it proved to be more: it was the start of his legend. For those who returned spoke of a mysterious figure who walked the fields of battle soon after the final shots were fired and the boiling clouds floated away. A man whose imposing figure was wrapped in doctor’s robes, and a thick leather mask to protect his face from the disease and identity. These survivors claimed that he treated all, no matter their side, but he did not treat them equally. Some soldiers were given serums from strange vials that renewed their spirit and injected them with life. Others were poisoned and had their suffering end prematurely. Both were lucky: for there were others who were treated with something else, something that had kept their bodies moving but could barely be called alive. Some half-state of endless pain and power, and the figure would watch unflinchingly as his “patients” tore across the fields of dead, rushing with madness in their eyes to wherever their fevered feet and minds would take them. 

To the Recruiter, it seemed like a tall tale from warped minds battered by the war. But the more he heard the story in his travels, the more convinced he became there may be some truth to it. So he went to these battlefields, where the ground was now cold and the bones, bleached by rain and crow, and he looked for any truth to these claims. Too long had passed to find evidence among the dead, but he did investigate nearby towns, asking if they had any encounters with these “living ghouls” created by his serums. 

And surprisingly, the sober villagers spoke of such things. By the time these men and women had reached their village borders, whatever this “doctor” had done to them had faded, and they were hollow and half-dead, barely able to move yet inhumanly compelled to do so. Most were unable to speak, and approaching them provoked a feral snapping like a starved dog. So most were mercifully put down by the farmers and their rifles. 

One, however, had survived, as fortune had dictated he stumble into the yard of someone who knew him from long ago. The recruiter found this survivor roped up in some old woman’s barn. To call him “alive” was a discredit: his body, between the infected wounds, the exhaustion, and months without food and water, should have died ten times over. But “it” was still alive in the most technical of sense: with no energy to move, all it could do was release shallow breaths and, occasionally, blink the flies from its dry, milky eyes. 

Whoever had created this… ‘thing’ had a sick brilliance the Recruiter admired, and knew he would need for his expedition. He went to the larger centers in the region, the walled-off city states and the company-owned villages where intelligent, morally compromised people tended to congregate. He investigated at the doctor’s guilds, the underground surgery rings, the body-cults, the academies and private institutions, and while he didn’t find the mysterious doctor, he did discover a ill-tempered, witless surgeon who was praised for somehow creating medicine that could ‘miraculously’ heal even the most gravely injured. After some… persuasion, the Recruiter was able to uncover the surgeon had received his miracle medicine not from a peer in his practiced field, but rather, a chemist living in the outskirts of town, who typically made his living mass-produced steroid cocktails to fatten livestock to absurd sizes.

The Recruiter politely asked for an audience. 

The moment the Recruiter saw the chemist, a huge man with broad shoulders, he knew he had found the figure the soldiers had whispered about in the bottom of their ale-tankers. But whereas he had expected some twisted madman, he was surprised to find this Chemist was a fairly well-mannered, social, and civil figure, offering him a cup of tea and a polite smile from under his slightly-grayed whiskers. The recruiter even doubted, for a moment, this could be the same genius who had somehow forced a body to stay alive through countless deaths.

But the chemist admitted to everything. Walking the battlefield to test his concoctions on the dying. Making on-the-to alterations with a portable laboratory to improve and alter his formulas. Experimenting on these near-dead humans, because, in his own words, “I can’t experiment on my cows. I need to sell them.” It was a grim confession, but one made fearlessly, almost joyfully.

It was this offhand dismissal of his misdeeds that had convinced the Recruiter, and it’s what made him offer the job. At first, the Chemist didn’t like the idea: after all, he was being hired to keep people alive, and he knew how to do that well enough. But when the Recruiter mentioned the Juun, the Chemist reconsidered: after all, what kind of wondrously strange concoctions could he make with just a pinch of Juun in every vial?

And so the Recruiter had found his first “partner”: [b]Wolfgang, the Chemist.[/b] 
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