Warrior Cecrops Tangaroa

played by: David Turover

In 1997, Warrior Cecrops Tangaroa was just a high school senior in Petaluma, California when he attracted the attention of the Brothers of Grimace, who noticed in him the potential to become a powerful mage. Faced with increasing Lyran activity in the region, the Brothers decided to push Tangaroa into the Jihad before the Lyrans -- with their mind-control powers and advanced magic skills -- could get ahold of him. They did this the soft way, leaving propaganda lying around where he would see it and holding conversations where he could overhear them. To this day, Tangaroa thinks he discovered the Jihad and not the other way around.

The newly recruited Dobermensch had been in the Jihad for a total of two days before running into a small Spongin battle group. Looking to serve his new Cause, he singlehandedly wiped them out with their own weapons after disarming one with a punch. In the official Empire records, this victory secured his entry into the Empire as an officer, Trooper Cecrops, rather than as an enlisted man; but due to his powers and the Brothers' desire to keep him close enough to be controlled, he had already been inducted with this rank and name.

Cecrops nearly met his end that day. After the battle, he was set upon by a juvenile Saethrian that had been a Lyran gift to the the Spongins' Wyrm Minion leader for past successes. When Cecrops faced death, his previously unknown-to-him powers emerged to halt the creature's attack and lead him to victory.

After serving in a few Operations where Cecrops's powers and weaknesses were tested, and the finding that one of his weaknesses was an inability to control any more than a fragment of his power, Cecrops was directed towards more behind-the-scenes work: managing Jihad-Mundane relations, clearing up evidence behind Operations, and searching the Mundane media for signs of new Spongin activity in the days before VRDET's SpongeScope network rendered this activity obsolete.

Cecrops was quickly promoted to Warrior, granted the new name Tangaroa, and assigned to coordinate DobIntell activities in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Northeast Asia, areas which had been relatively quiet and where his handlers assumed he should not be discovered by the Lyrans. To his watchers' distress, Tangaroa often kept these regions quiet by personally stamping out any hotspots of Spongin activity.

Tangaroa also pioneered increased coordination with Mundane contacts, sometimes hiring mercenaries to back him up in assaults and seeking compensation from Mundane establishments for eliminating Spongin threats to them. His innovative methods drew the attention of Dobintell director Windigo, who unexpectedly dropped in one day to personally review his procedures and just as suddenly left after Tangaroa demonstrated how he kept a strict separation between Jihad and Mundane activities, always keeping his contacts in the dark on everything and never using Jihad resources (including himself) for purely Mundane purposes.

For being a spy, Tangaroa is unusually honest, preferring to phrase his words to avoid telling a lie than to tell a falsehood. Although having such honor in that one aspect of his life, Tangaroa has little honor on the battlefield, using any kind of trickery to avoid a fair fight. His personality is that of a quiet ruminator, thinking over situations and evelopments
and usually having a decent plan for anything that comes up.

 

GURPS character stats

(not as yet available)