Mad scientist

Of the many forms of passion pursued in the Manor, the mad scientist 's debauched quest for knowledge is exemplary. Three noteworthy cases exist: a monk and a shaman-psychiatrist, each secluded in caverns deep underground, and a medical doctor sequestered in the North Tower.

The Franciscan monk Brother Piet took a vow of solitude to better engage with the divine mysteries. His spiritual researches uncovered the antediluvian language of Adam, which facilitated communication with hosts of angels. The notes he transcribed during his trances have not been recovered.

The disturbed shaman, psychiatrist and blacksmith Dr. Talgat Baltabek fled underground to continue his work after a perceived harassment campaign made him feel unsafe and unwelcome in his former laboratory in the North Tower. His projects include diverse alchemical transmutations. These have further eroded his fragile health and sanity, while bearing out numerous psychoactive potions and subtle artifacts. These include the psychogenic resonator bell and the looking glass, the latter of which allowed him to detect the presence of his neighbor the hermit.

The sadistic medical experimenter Aloïse Metzger was isolated in a soundproofed operating theater in the North Tower when his consuming need to torture became a liability to his colleagues. Formally he remains the Chief of Surgery in his dotage and his madness, but all day-to-day operations are handled for him and thus patients protected from him. Yet a perverse loyalty to their master and the enduring political necessity for interrogation and extralegal punishment has kept a steady supply of victims available to him.