Nigel "The Voice" Griffin

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IamLEAM1983
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Nigel "The Voice" Griffin

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Name: Nigel Griffin
Age: 200 years old
Gender: male
Species: superhuman

Strengths: simply put, Nigel is the first and currently only known example of an intangible being; the one and only Invisible Man on record. As his name suggests, he has some kinship with H.G. Wells' and Universal Studios' Jack Griffin, owing to the fact that in Hope's universe, the mad scientist's formula didn't so much come from plants, but from a mutation he co-opted from a lesser-known relative.

As such, Nigel is entirely undetectable to the naked eye, or to any object which mimics the properties of your average human eye, such as cameras, the light refraction mechanisms used by Clanks and the optic sensors designed for use by cyborgs. Only external effects could disturb his intangibility to a certain degree, such as rain sluicing down his frame, flames licking his limbs or viscous substances sharply outlining his features. More on that in his Weaknesses.

Thankfully, he seems to be able to carry moderate loads into intangibility, which enables him to carry a professional thief and cat burglar's arsenal. This includes smoke grenades, flash-bangs, lock-picking or electromagnetic countermeasure tools, along with a pair of nightsticks. Pair this with his perfect command of Judo and Karate, and you earn yourself a man who's exceedingly proficient at knocking guards out for anything from twenty minutes to a few hours.

Considering the prevalence of laser beams or path-activated wards in those security systems he's usually interested in, his advanced age doesn't seem to take a great deal of flexibility out of him. In fact, it'd be fair to say he's more supple and nimble than most of today's twenty-somethings – making him an accomplished escapologist. There's very little he can't slip out of – especially if his company designed those contentions that are holding him...

Chief among his advantages are his acquired reputation with various other company heads, as well as a fair share of American, Canadian and English households. Being the head of Griffin Securities, he has access to a cherry-picked panel of security experts coming as much from your average letter agencies or former war theatres as from their own histories as former enhanced burglars. His systems are solid because he designs them so he, and all those that are even remotely close to his skill set, would be unable to fool them or circumvent them. Of course, there's a catch.

The catch is that while he designs his own mouse traps, so to speak, he really knows all the latches and holds all the keys. Anything designed by GrifSec is essentially perfect to house and contain virtually any serious cutpurse or snoop – except Nigel Griffin himself. In the same way Bruce Wayne knows his way around everything WayneTech, Nigel can hack, brute-force, shimmy into or slither around anything his top men produce. That obviously doesn't mean that no security grid whatsoever can stump him – all that means is that one of the Western world's most trusted and widespread home defense system providers has no secrets for him. Whatever office or household that isn't protected by GrifSec, he can still more than likely take the time to study and plan for. If he can't – well he still is pretty good at thinking on his feet.

Pair all that together and you earn yourself a modern-day living ghost, a guy who'll knock you out cold and steal what he'll consider to be ill-gotten without so much as a twitch of remorse.
Weaknesses: as said above, anything that functions close to or emulates the human eye will not detect him unless something external outlines him. Fog banks, water, strong electric arcs, fire, high-viscosity fluids or plain and simple mud – anything that sticks to the skin or presses against the average body thanks to gravity will suffice if you're trying to turn the Voice into what you'd more adequately call the Featureless Human Male Body. Several of these above-mentioned things would also carry several degrees of unpleasantness, too. Being intangible doesn't protect you from drowning, burning alive or being corroded by acidic substances – and it certainly doesn't protect you from temperature extremes.

Before going into the aspect of what his body can tolerate, however, it should be mentioned that his conveniently invisible bag of tricks frequently contains tools that emit electro-magnetic pulses. If your nature as a cyborg or a techie enables you to map his gewgaw or gadgets' frequency to a visually perceptible level thanks to a bit of computer work; then you've earned yourself a “ping” of sorts, which you can then follow using standard GPS hardware. If that fails, switching to thermal vision won't. Your naked eyes might deceive you, but his body still subsists at the human average of 38.6 degrees Celsius. This is more than enough to light up any thermal display like a Christmas tree. The only way he could hope to defeat this is by heating or cooling his body accordingly, which carries a gaggle of associated risks. Hypothermia and heat prostration might be old bedfellows for him, but that doesn't change the fact that they're still liable to kill him.

This is, honestly, his largest drawback. It's hard for him to do his job while wearing clothes, unless he happens to operate in a pitch-black space. To be fully intangible, he has to be as naked as possible, with his abilities including the very limited possibility of bringing outside objects into his state. From his bag or knapsack to his cotton gloves, which he uses to avoid leaving hand-prints, he quickly reaches his personal limit. He's tried slipping into the kind of gear that would make stealthy Spec Ops types drool with envy, but he unfortunately couldn't drag it into his state of flux.

For better or for worse, Nigel has to be largely naked in order for his skill set to work. That means zero protection against the elements, zero protection against bullets and any other hazards, and largely zero protection against anyone who's learned to not be so conveniently sight-dependent. He has a tough time waylaying certain vampire and anthro breeds, while certain Clanks like Archie have learned to de-prioritize their sensory stimuli in order to better process whatever strikes them as being important. The muted sounds of an exhausted and aging invisible superhuman, for instance...

Finally, to injure him is to track him. Manage simple cuts across his invisible self and you'll find your disembodied red slash bobbing a few inches above the floor, leaving little drops of blood behind. Whatever leaves his body quickly becomes visible again. This applies to blood and spit as much as it does to urine or, well, virtually anything else. Give him a good punch and manage to knock out a few teeth? You'll find them on the floor a few moments later, quite visible and quite tangible.

To all that have to be added the daily little annoyances. Having invisible eyelids is murder, to be perfectly honest – try sleeping when your eyelids don't do shit when it comes to blocking outside light, or try getting rid of one half of a flashbang's problem when you can't expect your most seriously squinted eyes to avail you from that little tin can's magnesium-gunpowder blast. Nigel needs eye covering to sleep, and he needs to more or less bury his face into the pavement (or someone's shoulder) to try and prevent common pacification systems from dazing him.

Appearance: in everyday circumstances, Nigel appears as a suit. Literally, as a walking suit with no discernible wearer. At about five feet six and some hundred and twenty pounds, there's a fair bit of lasting athleticism to his frame, and his suit cuts tend to be designed to favour casual movement ranges and to at least allow unplanned physical feats. Single-breasted jackets, ties held in place with a pin, white shirts and moderately shined shoes tend to make up most of what he wears. Both in order to put some strain off of his eyes and accommodate others, who might prefer to have some sort of eye contact aid, he consistently wears a pair of black sunglasses. Otherwise, you'll sometimes see a fastened wristwatch hover just past his left cuff, and a single pinky ring that'll be floating in its intended spot, on the opposite hand. Very rarely, you'll find him wearing gloves of the cotton, latex or leather variety, depending on what his outing of the moment requires.

Past that, very few people tend to have any idea of what he exactly looks like. Very careful scrutiny through thermal goggles shows a thin-faced gentleman of advancing years, with every single hair across his body having been depilated. Seeing as his nature makes it hard for him to get haircuts that don't end up being absolute fiascos, he's long since gone ahead of androgenic alopecia and chosen to present a smooth and hairless dome to the outside world. Even his eyebrows are gone, as he's obviously concerned about leaving DNA behind after an errant rubbing of a tired eye or two. In a world where Chimeras are commonplace and cloning feels more like a question of when rather than how, and with the history his family name carries, he'd much rather make it as hard as possible for any bio-tech firm to scrape together dead skin cells belonging to him or even the occasional errant eyebrow hair.

With that in mind, most people know him by what his former superheroic moniker suggested. He essentially exists in the public eye as a voice, more than a person. As this is the one thing that makes his existence irrefutable, he's taken great care to cultivate it and make it as expressive and wide-ranged as possible. He's a slightly less nasal Malcolm McDowell, if you believe certain people in town, with maybe a smidgen of childhood Scots burr picked up from growing up on the coast of England. His long decades of American life have more or less smoothed this over to a certain extent, to the point where others say he sounds only vaguely European. Your typical Eurotrash accent, in a sense...
Behaviour: as the CEO of his own company, Nigel is well-known for his polite, honest and well-researched interventions in the corporate sphere. He combines a shrewd competitive drive with an uncharacteristic amount of empathy for a top-tier executive. If the common saying suggests that most top-tier company honchos are mild sociopaths, it's be fair to say the former thief is the exact opposite. He doesn't quite bring Cordatus' grandfatherly charm to the table, feeling a tad too much youthful to contribute something like this – but he does contribute his extended life experiences and seems especially receptive of his employees' wants and needs. Certain business-related publications haven't been shy in their attempts to paint him as one of the best corporate-circle bosses you could ever hope to have. Whatever growth-fostering gutsiness he tends to display doesn't so much stem from the need to make GrifSec expand its reach, but rather out of the fact that he honestly loves what he does.

More market shares means greater challenges, and greater challenges mean more fun with the R&D sectors of his company. Whatever stock-market aggressiveness the company might display doesn't come from him or from his own board, but rather from the few lawyers and economists he's hired to take care of the boring stuff : acquisitions, dissolutions, budget re-balances, et cetera.

As he's also uncommonly known to slip on a lab coat himself, he can sometimes lose sight of those company matters that pertain to filthy lucre. Money is never an object until it becomes one, at which point he tends to be caught with his pants down. Once again, this is why he's handed the coinpurse to people who think that developing foolproof locks is fairly boring and who get more of a rise out of numbers and dollar signs. He's not quite Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne, but it isn't uncommon to find some of his personal blueprints in with those of his best researchers, largely made available to use by any company engineer who'd care to percolate over designs that haven't reached prototype phase.

So there's a healthy dose of humility, a dash of passion – but also the kind of damning curiosity that gets you poking your nose where you aren't supposed to, or that gets you to swipe something you shouldn't touch...

Being a former thief, Nigel tends to agree with the Paradise notion that ownership is a fleeting and mutable concept. The catch is he tends not to covet anything for himself, having long since passed the “cat burglar” phase where lining his own pockets was his primary concern. Ever since he's reached Hope, he's been far more interested in spotting those goods he suspects of being ill-gotten or grossly unnecessary, and redistributing them to those who would make better use of them. The bulk of his superhero career preceding his corporate projects, he doesn't really go out on his illegal sorties as often as he used to. Still, there's still a unique rush in the process of stealing something rich ignoramuses merely store away and giving it back to those who'll put it on display. As the Voice, he's fleeced several families and individuals who'd managed to line their pockets in the pre- and post-Battle eras, and contributed to soup kitchens and disaster relief efforts on an anonymous basis. Unlike most of the city's classic good guys, however, this meant he oftentimes had the cops on his tail.

Being something of a smiling scoundrel in a suit, he'd still confess to feeling he's most engaged and stimulated when forced to go about streaking, hoping that his tools won't jangle too much, or that the guards he'll have to square off with won't be too skilled at ignoring what their eyes is telling them. As much of a nice guy as he is, there's a kind of troll-worthy glee behind his heists, as he can't resist giving vaguely Vaudevillian leanings to his messing around with armed goons reduced to wild and terrified panic-firing. In turn, this indicates that he has absolutely no shame or regrets considering his condition, as he couldn't be able to laugh or jeer in such a relaxed fashion if he carried some shade of self-loathing.

The only thing you could conceivably do to bring a more sombre tint to his illegal proceedings would involve threatening someone he cares for, injuring them – or killing them. As a rule, and considering his history with his cousin Jack, he's vowed not to kill another soul. Attacking his heart, in a sense, is a good way to try and test his personal morals. He's never snapped or killed someone in all of his time in Hope, but Alderan and Amazo could speak of those rare times where someone the Voice had cared for had been put in traction, which seemed to drive the thief into leaving more than a few dislodged teeth or bruised limbs behind...

If he has no cause to joke around, Nigel makes it painfully clear that his nature makes an apex predator out of him. He's taken down and severely crippled walking mountains who would've been able to crush him into a fine powder in normal circumstances – if only they'd been able to see him. This, in turn, suggests how much of his time before Hope he's actively buried, if not fled from as fast as possible.

Goals: with vampires, mages and supernaturals tending to be perfect museum rats or churchmice, someone had to pick up the slack and design systems that could keep those especially gifted individuals out of anything from personal residences to places deemed of high cultural or political importance. He's gone from a 1979 Maker Fair booth to a skyscraper in Hope in 2025, but no amount of corporate presence across the country can change the fact that some people will buy his products he'd really rather wouldn't put at their disposition, out of personal convictions.

These people, he has no problems causing grief to. Robber barons from the past eras, modern-day suit-and-tie thieves, art or artifact hoarders; dragons who binge on wealth for no other reason than because they can, vampires with similar leanings or a gross tendency to showcase their affluence... Everyone that fits in the above categories, right down to the asshole with an Audi who picks the handicapped space in his tower's parking garage while being fit as a fiddle – these people, he intends to drag kicking and screaming into a living Hell of seeing their most cherished possessions wilt away, one after the other. If possible, he'll do it while leaving his own mocking laughter to die out somewhere in the distance.

That's only half the equation, however. He lives for the challenge of a tough heist despite his years, but he especially comes alive when in the process of switching his own sedan for an unmarked little car and his fittingly expensive clothes for nonspecific hoodies and turtlenecks – all the for purpose of leaving fat envelopes of unmarked and untraceable cash in the mailboxes of former soup kitchen beneficiaries, or to entry-level accountants at the bottom of his tower who have two kids, as many college funds to prepare and not enough revenue to take care of both.

He lives to take five minutes during a coffee break to wire cash anonymously to free clinics around the country, or to make sure that a significant sculpture has made it out of an illegal purchaser's hands and back onto a museum stand. Every little thing he does buffs his English years out of his mind just a little more. Every smile he earns scrapes some of the blood from his past and from his association with his cousin Jack.

Considering, it's not too surprising for him to dote over a few employees he works with on a daily basis, as well as their families. Gavin Drake has been his Chief of Security for just over fifteen years, and the invisible man's very quickly become more than just his boss. Not having sired an heir, Nigel is extremely fond of the Drake children. There's a bit of an unofficial Omertà in the family about certain vacation pictures, as some people could take the sight of a Hawaiian shirt and straw hat-wearing CEO enjoying some fun in the sun along Pickman's Sound with an employee's family a little out of context.

History: born in 1825 in Hayling Island, Hampshire; Nigel's birth almost spelled his death. With his family showing no signs of prior arcane or superhuman leanings, and with the Vienna Accords being less than a whisper in Matthias d'Aubignier's mind, his mother was initially diagnosed with an oddly late and malformed miscarriage – as she seemingly expelled nothing but blood and amniotic fluid. It took the infant's screams and the sight of floating puddles of blood for the physicians to understand what they were dealing with. It was a little boy, he seemed perfectly normal – but he vanished as soon as the waste produced by birthing him was washed away. He was almost disembowled when his umbilical cord was cut far too shortly – it also being intangible – and caring for him seemed like an impossible task. For a fisherman and a stay-at-home wife who weren't terribly educated, this was all too much for them to deal with.

Marjorie Griffin, also known as Margie, was Rupert Griffin's mother. She was also blind from birth, the family very quickly realizing that the infant had a chance with a woman who wouldn't be as dependent on her seeing him to take care of him. What began as an extended babysitting session quickly turned into Margie expressing deep disappointment in her son's refusal to accept his responsibility towards his son. Rupert's revulsion soon won out, the young parents soon stepping out of Nigel's life entirely by moving back to the mainland.

Raised by a blind woman in Victorian times, it took some time for him to realize that his condition wasn't exactly blindness. She couldn't see herself, he assumed, and he also couldn't see himself in the mirror. This initial confusion would bring far more good than harm in the end, as Margie made him approach his nature as being as close to entirely natural, as opposed to something extraordinary to be exploited.

It took 1842 and his awakening to the opposite sex for him to truly realize he was different. He'd spent most of his life as a sheltered boy, his nature preventing him from standing as an appealing target for bullying – at least at the onset. A trip to the beach and a simple case of confused changing cabins, however, made him understand that he was blessed – or cursed – to see things nobody else ever would. As long as he didn't make a peep, as long as he kept quiet, he could fool those people who saw. He'd never be able to fool his grandmother, of course; but everyone else became fair game. It went to the point where clothes began to feel restrictive to the youth, as he could only carry so much without betraying himself. What he did carry consisted of those home-made tools he concocted to see all the corners of Hayling nobody wanted teenagers to gawp at.

From B&E, there was only a small step to take towards petty theft. From there, more elaborate heists were carried out. Before long, his personal joyrides caught the eyes and ears of the local hooligans, who promised bigger challenges and something approaching a regular pay if he'd only disregard his prior compunctions about doing certain things...

By 1855, he was living down by London's docks, having gradutated from being the best available man out of a cadre of island thugs and thiefs to an expert cutpurse, spy and murderer. Working for those who held the controlling interests in the city's import-export scene, he was routinely called upon to frighten, coerce, steal from or downright assassinate rival gang leaders. If it hadn't been for his flaky botanist of a cousin, odds were he'd have followed down that path up until today, emerging as a kind of superhuman Guy Ritchie extra.

Come August of '56, James Thomas Griffin – commonly known as Jack – had brewed a plan out of his years of frustrated adoration of his relative as well as his proficiency in the domain of botanical phylogeny. Back then, gene sequencing was a technical impossibility, even for the most gifted of all Victorian Technomancers or old-fashioned Steampunk “hackers”. Still, changes could be affected in plant life by crossing strains and observing the differences in the offsprings' morphology. Jack Griffin was one of such scientists who had a grasp on the crude properties of racial parentage behind an organism's appearance and abilities, and he'd studied enough arcane theory to understand how he might go about capturing the essence of his cousin Nigel, the core of his abilities. He sought to do what he believed Nigel had always been stupid for refusing, which was offer his skills to the highest bidder. Better yet, if invisibility could be applied in the form of a serum, and injection or a treatment, then absolutely anyone would have the fabled ability of King Gyges of Lydia, whose legend involved the possession of a magic ring which could render him undetectable to the naked eye...

Jack's efforts involved a complex process by which unbloomed offshoots from the local dryads would be boiled and reduced to a fine powder, after which he'd have to scour his cousin the assassin's lodgings in the hopes of finding enough pieces of him – fingernail clippings, hair or beard shavings, dead skin – to amalgamate into a reagent. With the right formulae, the chemist was convinced he'd have himself the first invisibility potion to have ever been made since the end of the Inquisition.

The problem is that between being a chemist and an alchemist, there are subtle and important differences. All of your base ingredients have to have carefully measured amounts of via, and your own quickening process – typically supplied by a heated beaker's warmth – has to be processed. If one can't be reliably operated without the other, alchemy absolutely cannot do without a decent chemist's exactitude. If anything, Jack was far too eager for his own good.

Nigel never noticed anything. Who would honestly worry about missing dandruff on a pillow or errant nose hairs carefully plucked from the bathroom's sink? As for the other Griffin, he was missing the elder's currently denied, but still sharply present sense of morality. Grandma Margie hadn't raised a hooligan, nevermind how her grandson behaved exactly like one. Underneath his hired killer's frost, there was a growing mountain of guilt.

By 1868, Londoners began to notice. Maniacal laughter could be heard through the streets and the countryside, without any traceable origin. Objects were knocked aside or thrown at people's heads for no apparent reason. A string of deaths began to spread, the similar nature of Nigel and Jack's fingerprints landing the mobster and assassin in particularly hot water.

What pushed him to try and track his imposter down initially happened to be professional pride; but the more he looked, the more he began to understand that this other Invisible Man had sick, even downright perverted projects in mind. He wasn't sure where he'd come from, but that denied morality of his made it hard for him to keep up with his act of tough carelessness in the matter. The bookies and kingpins he'd previously frequented as friends began asking questions – until the last few murders he failed to investigate were classified as poisonings. That made him recall little James and his wide-eyed, even downright worrying worship of him.

Nigel tracked Jack down, their first confrontation forcing the thief to realize he didn't intend to kill his relative. As he'd hired an armed posse to help him, he also came to understand that any failure to deal with his own target would be perceived as a mark of weakness. All the while, his conscience had grown far too troubled for him to consider keeping the stone-cold killer act going. It was lucrative, but he'd long-since stopped assaulting other hoodlums and petty criminals. The middle class was paying his bills, and they were paying it in blood. How long until he was dispatched to take care of a target he actually wouldn't mind tormenting?

What started out as invisible fisticuffs between a seasoned grappler and an overexcited scientist ended with Jack being taken out of commission and dragged off to the nearest precinct; with an old overcoat draped over him to signal his presence to the bobbies outside. He told quick and easy lies to his backup guys about how invisible people would simply disappear if killed, and hurried back home to pack his bags.

The more he packed, the more he came to realize he was headed for a new start in life. His conscience responded to that realization like a drowning man gasping for air, relief washing over him in waves strong enough to force him to sit down and recompose himself. Unfortunately, it'd be a while before he'd understand that the only truly safe place he'd be able to count on wasn't on his side of the Atlantic.

Spending decades travelling across Britain and trying his hardest to establish his new career as a gentleman thief, he'd routinely come to blows with people who emerged out of his London life, gun or knife in hand. He'd split with undivided assets and without his boss' consent, he'd left five or six contracts hanging in the wind and he'd especially disappointed those who'd put their trust in him. His only choice was to keep moving.

Still, the Victorian Era's supernatural craze and most of pre-World War II Britain offered him plenty of opportunities to work as a less morally objectionable mercenary. Across both wars, he'd steal from defectors to the Germans or redistribute wealth as he deemed appropriate, keeping ten percent of all earnings he was authorized or ordered to liquidate. This seems small at the onset, but the more his new-found fame grew, so did the complexity and threat level of his jobs. Before long, he was raking in several million dollars a heist – something which became a small fortune by 1950.

Unfortunately, his past caught up with him. His quaint little Surrey manor house was the subject of a gangland-style drive-by, which injured some of his neighbours and killed their daughter. He pooled assets to stabilize those who could be saved, and then packed his bags – finally fleeing to America.

He arrived in Hope in 1951, a little over ten years before the Battle and smack-dab in the middle of the city's Golden Era. Archie and Bucky had only recently gone to sleep, and the city's safety was assured by the then-exotic concept of the Superhero. Keeping his ear to the ground, he quickly came to understand that there were problems that no active do-gooder could reliably fix. He wasn't really fit to duke it out against the Society of the Black Lotus or Doctor Cerebro, but he could still even the scales by pitching his rather unique contributions into the fray...

It wasn't long before the moniker of “the Voice” made its way around newspapers and tabloids, simultaneously described as a walking plague for all bourgeois or entrepreneurial types and as a godsend for all struggling middle and low-class families. Cops were divided between those who tailed him actively and those who pretended to try and catch up with him – in order to let him go. Local politicians operated in much the same way, and tabloids and newspapers alike flip-flopped between angelic portrayals of the invisible rogue, and needlessly alarmist editorials.

For ten years, he dispensed his rather ironic and bitingly Karmic take on justice, one heist and one joke at a time. His disembodied laughter became as much a signature as the fact that you couldn't see him, until the inevitable tag team between he and Amazo, or reported research evenings between himself and Sophia, began to be described to the press. He might not have been American by birth, but this thief was quickly becoming a household name all the same.

Then, Elysium happened. He stole from those Drifter and Karthian drop-ships the invaders had used, fleeced technology or bits and pieces of weaponry whenever and however he could. Essentially turning into the resistance's best man on the inside, his efforts might not have amounted to a lot of dead Chimeras, but they certainly levelled the playing field. Aspasia herself might remember seeing one of her carriers' cargo chutes activating on its own, with a playful taunt and a laugh Dopplering out into the void along with the stolen weapons.

When Gregory Rendell was finally defeated and that reconstruction became the first order of business, Nigel was like many other wealthy men of his time in that he became convinced he had to give something back. Pooling his large funds into his own skyscraper and penthouse project, he inaugurated Griffin Securities in 1972. Digging back into his old bag of tricks as a perpetrator of larcenies diverse, he began rounding up what he believed to be the world's best available panel of experts on home defense and general security – fellow international thieves. Prototypes were put into production by the end of the year, and his first sale was recorded at the Maker Fair in 1975.

Things more or less snowballed from then on. A few dozen orders for hand-crafted and personally installed systems became several thousand needing a small crew of trained installers and service techs, which itself blossomed into several service points across America, Canada and Europe. Before long, Nigel wasn't so much a Fortune 500 contender as someone whom private military contractors and various other domotics and robotics firms needed to keep an eye on. All the same, he didn't allow the legacy of the Voice to entirely die out, as there'd always be an illegal collector who'd suddenly find himself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Report the theft and risk being hauled in for being a thief yourself, or sit on it and chew on your evaporated several million dollars' worth of investment? That's a question several people have had to ask themselves over the last few decades...

Shortly after GrifSec's creation, his cousin Jack managed to escape Parkhurst, the very same facility where Anastasius Romanov had been detained. Flying to the United States for the express purpose of avenging his previous loss, he almost managed to carry his plan to fruition, managing to take Nigel off guard and to claim his place and identity for several days. In the end, two bodiless suits had themselves a knife fight in broad daylight in the middle of Centennial Park – Jack's admittedly increased combat proficiency ultimately losing to Nigel's comfort with using dirty tricks. Throwing some soil into his cousin's face convinced those who'd seen the CEO with his occasional latex mask – that wasn't Hope's cat burglar.

Today, Nigel's only remaining worry is the fact that Jack is detained in Chimera Row. He's double-checked to ensure that the former botanist wouldn't be able to get some honey poured into his ears by the saurian terrorist, but it doesn't change the fact that he's concerned that Rendell might have earned himself a particularly guiltless chemist, to potentially replace or complement Rupert Isaacs.
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