One of the major influences on Tesseracti, was, weirdly enough, Half-Life and Half-Life 2; every PC party had their own Controller, my spin on Half-Life's G-Man. It probably would trigger every anti-authoritarian impulse the players had, but I liked the idea of having an enigmatic advisor who was on your side, for once.

NPCS THAT YOU MIGHT MEET ON YOUR WAY DOWN TO HELL

DR. HENGE: Dr. Henge is the Tesseracti's primary medical advisor, which is quite a feat considering the range of medical staff that the Tesseracti has to choose from. Dr. Henge's expertise, however, doesn't entirely derive from the medical training that he's picked up over the years. Rather, it comes from the fact that he's the penultimate of his own fallen echo. Two hundred thousand people died to grant him the ability to know almost everything there is to know about the human body. 

He's managed to avoid a lot of the arrogance that marks specialists, but he's still not a terrifically pleasant person to be around. His personality is cold and detached, and frequently contemptuous - he's never rude or unpleasant to the people he treats, but his diary is a laundry list of his opinion of the IQ's of the people that he's had to mend. None of them are laudatory. People speaking to him usually get the impression that he's only giving them enough attention to maintain the impression that he's listening to them, while the rest of his mind continues on what it was doing before you bothered him. If you're injured, he's attentive - and even vaguely sympathetic - but he's too engaged in his work to concentrate on the feelings of the person that he's working on, leaving that to his assistant. 

Dr. Henge, while nominally the director of the Tesseracti's medical department, is actually more of its chief surgeon. He's delegated much of his authority to the individual heads of different departments so as to be able to concentrate on his own pursuits, and department heads now wield approximately as much power as he does when making decisions for their department. Conflicts between departments are usually settled by Dr. Henge by what he calls the Solomonic method - one department loses everything, while the other department gains it. Of course, this usually causes an overload of work on behalf of the winner, which makes department heads reluctant to bother Dr. Henge. Dr. Henge himself likes to be present for the first test run of new surgical techniques, which simultaneously allows him to offer his expertise to the operation while ensuring that he gains some measure of credit for its success. 

He's six feet tall, with short gray hair that's chopped fairly close to his skull in order to make it easier for him to wear surgical headgear. His skin is sallow, a little coarse and faintly yellowish. His nose has been broken and carefully reset, but it's easy to see that the surgery wasn't perfect. Dr. Henge keeps the injury as a memento of his old echo. His accent is clipped - it sounds Germanic, but after hearing it for a while, it's obviously not from Earth. 

DOCTOR TEACHER:

Doctor Teacher isn't a doctor or a teacher; it's the name given to him by his parents, who hoped that he'd live up to either occupation. He became neither, instead choosing to become a diplomat for his country. During a tour of a neighboring country's new cloning vats, he became aware that the cloning vats weren't cloning humans, as agreed on by treaty, but were instead creating...things whose presence caused local physics to begin acting weirdly. Doctor Teacher was the only survivor on his team, and only then because three other members of his team died to ensure that he would escape to his home arcology. As the news spread of what the neighboring country was doing, the Tesseracti caught word. A week after Doctor Teacher returned, the Tesseracti began to launch raids on the Xyacti-infected areas. Doctor Teacher was on the list of infectees, since he had directly seen what the antihives of the Xyacti had created. Shortly after the first societal eradication memes appeared, Doctor Teacher was abducted and forcibly integrated into the Tesseracti's ranks. 

That was thirty years ago. Since then, Doctor Teacher has become an invaluable resource to the Tesseracti because of what he offers to new recruits: a sense of sanity. Most Tesseracti operatives have Doctor Teacher as their initial contact once inside the Tesseracti, and his calm and reasoned explanation of what the Tesseracti are about - and what the Tesseracti can do for the operative - are some of the most reassuring that new operatives get. On particularly dangerous missions, he's used to brief the teams going in, as a morale booster. 

He's approximately five foot eight, middle-aged, a little heavy, with most of his face hidden behind a copper-red beard and a pair of spectacles. A lifetime of diplomacy has left him with a calm, even voice that helps people calm down - it's difficult to rant and rave when he's talking to you, since you become more and more aware of how extreme you sound. He tends to dress like an Oxford don, down to the tweed suit with the leather elbows and the penny loafers. He's got a Controller's disease rank and is infected with Link-AD4, although with a remarkably strict cap on how often agents are allowed to use his brain. He's got a variety of short-range weapons embedded within him, including a small nanofactory that allows him to lactate single-malt scotch. 

THE MARION:

The Puppet Hives echo is a fairly recent discovery, and an echo that treads the edge of being neutroned by the Tesseracti. As it stands, it's currently on the watchlist for potential eradication. From birth, every human within the echo has his body linked up to a computer network by what appear to be puppet strings, metal cables which wrap around the long bones of the body and connect the person with the ceiling of whatever room they're in. The strings allow for assisted movement, which tends to cause muscle degeneration and, as time passes, the deformation of the attached bones. They also, however, allow every human being to form his own datafort within the massive computer network of the Puppet Hive echo, allowing a subliminal democracy to form. If the hivemind turns authotarian, then the Tesseracti have orders to bomb it flat - but until then, it's on the watchlist. 

The Marion was an assassin for the government. It was also entirely inhuman, constructed out of cybernetics that were intended as replacements, but which became components instread. The Marion's goals were simple: it tracked down those who were trying to interfere with the net, then severed their strings with its fingers. It was a fearsome opponent, and served the hivemind pretty well when it came time for wetwork. When it was sent after a Tesseracti scouting group, however, its own strings were severed in short order, driving it insane. Figuring that it would make a good agent for the Tesseracti, the group brought it back, then left it in the care of Research and Deviancy. 

Since then, the Marion works for the Tesseracti. Even close up, it looks like an unusually tall human being, with a simple sculpture of a human face glued to the front of its head. The skin, however, has the same dirty, yellowish-white cast as dirty porcelain, and the arms and legs are a little too long in comparison to the torso. Most significantly, the strings that kept it aloft now trail behind it like a wedding veil of steel cabling, creating a thready little hissing noise whenever it walks. (Research and Deviancy attached some devices to the cables to make that noise, the same way that you can stick a playing card in the spokes of your bicycle.) It's good at assassination, but it's lousy when it comes to a stand-up fight - not out of cowardice, but out of a lack of long-range firepower; its fingers are too sharp to hold a gun.  

The Marion basically takes the role of the Shadowy Menacing Figure. It stalks through the Iron Labyrinth on what it thinks are security patrols, but what everybody else recognizes as an excuse to terrify anybody who doesn't know its backstory. When it was back in the Puppet Hive, it was controlled by five people who gave it advice; now that it's been severed, the only mind that it has are crude copies of its controller's minds, all of whom are fighting for more control of the Marion. Two minds have already eaten one mind each, and the third survives only by hiding and dodging through the labyrinth of the Marion's thoughts. 

The Xyacti merit some description; they're the mortal enemy of the Tesseracti, an unknowable alien force which corrupts echoes - pocket dimensions - until they're basically nightmare dimensions. Rather than being actively malevolent, though, the Xyacti are curious and trying to understand the world around them - like Jason Sartin said, they're radioactive toddlers, damaging their environs without really understanding what they're doing. They spread through memes, which means that they have to be fought through contradicting information - although, to be honest, I never sat down and wrote out what they were like. You can get some clues as to what they're like from the below.

XYACTI VICTORIA:

The Tesseracti live in mortal fear of the Xyacti because of exactly what happened to the Victorian Station echo. When it was discovered, it was an analogue of Victorian England, including fog-shrouded streets, a dirty sky the color of sepia photographs, a skyline festooned with smokestacks, and a steam-powered monorail that hung some five hundred feet over the city. (You boarded it by taking an elevator up to the top of a building.) There wasn't much in the way of technology that the Tesseracti could burgle, and so the dimension was used as a third-tier recruiting source for disposable muscle. 

In 1982, contact was lost with two Tesseracti operatives, both Anglophiles who had decided that they wanted to honeymoon in pseudo-Victorian London. A casual expedition to bring them back resulted in the deaths - well, as "dead" as you can get in an Xyacti-invaded echo - of eight Tesseracti operatives and the abrupt cessation of echo travel for approximately six days as the upper echelons fought a panicky civil war over what to do next. When communications were re-established with the expedition, the Xyacti used an open channel to jump into the Iron Labyrinth, spreading as a concept though three different levels before it ran out of people to infect. 

The Tesseracti burned a number of favors with the NanoBaja sublimed dimension in order to find out what was going on. NanoBaja, having already sealed themselves off from the threat of Xyacti invasion, sold a number of concept-armor devices which offered the Tesseracti some protection. 

The second expedition into Xyacti Victoria revealed what had happened. The darkness was broken only by faintly luminescent blue fog and the fluorescent alien witchlight that beamed from what used to be gaslamps; the bricks in the walls seemed to vibrate according to some unfelt frequency. A brief exploration into a record shop revealed rows of severed human heads, each encased in a weird sort of wax and still attempting to speak as Xyacti implants explored the neural pathways of their minds. The monorail had taken on the aspects of a living creature, sections of monorail track dipping down to gnaw entire stories off of buildings. 

The authorization for destruction by neutron bomb went through in record time. Once they'd been dropped, though, the followup expedition found out that nothing had happened, and lost a couple of bunnymen in the process. The neutrons bombs had simply been chewed up. 

Xyacti Victoria was finally subsumed into the Xyacti home dimension in 1994. However, interactions with the Xyacti have revealed that much of the Victorian Station's elements were integrated into the Xyacti home dimension. Xyacti invasions now frequently include Xyacti versions of Victorian Station-style architecture, clothing and music making their way into the invaded dimension. Apaprently, the Xyacti are under the impression that humanity's natural state is that of Victorian Station, and the dimensions that it invades are simply odd offshoots of the original genus. Given that the Xyacti are unable to tell the difference beteeen human life and the things that it produces, the Tesseracti have begun a systemic purge of anything that could be considered Victorian in their technology or architecture. So far, it's been pretty successful. They think.  

This is from a role-playing game that I wrote called Tesseracti; the idea, heavily influenced by Grant Morrison's "The Filth", was that you were an operative recruited by a shadowy, mysterious organization called the Tesseracti who basically acted like border police between a variety of pocket dimensions and Earth. For a variety of reasons, I never got it done, but I think that the concept is interesting. Anyways, these are some details from one of the pocket dimensions, Alien US.

Shaking the dirt from the cellar floor onto your bacon and eggs is a neat image, I think.

 ALIEN US:

Alien US is the United States circa 1954 or so, complete with drive-in movie theaters, soda shops, a strong military - and its skies are swarming with alien spacecraft. As far as the Tesseracti can determine, the echo was created from the paranoid fear that the Russians would someday invade or infiltrate the United States, a theme which was reinforced by the pop culture of the time. In the case of Alien US, the aliens have already infiltrated and invaded, and the United States is now under military occupation from an alien culture. 

A lot of the major capitals have been flattened, resulting in the human populace transferring itself into a multitude of small towns which look disturbingly similar - a fountain in front of city hall, a Main Street populated with various Mom and Pop stores, a high school with a football team, and the occasional punk just to liven things up. Everybody lives normally. Rock and roll is still on the rise, there's a television in every home and everybody's just repressed enough to keep the society working - for the moment. 

But the shadows of flying saucers still sweep over the town at regular enough intervals that nobody looks up anymore. There's no government anymore; just a puppet President who lets the people know what the aliens are planning. Periodically, the saucers land in order to disgorge squads of bug-eyed men, complete with spacesuits, fishbowl helmets, and green, slimy skin. They don't do anything to you unless you happen to provoke them - and they're kind hard to provoke, what with their alien emotions - but they do strange things when they land, ranging from mechanically throwing a ball for a stray dog while recording the results with an enormous array of scientific equipment, to systematically disassembling a store and moving the parts into one of their craft, apparently with the intention of rebuilding it somewhere else. For alien invaders from beyond the stars, they're pretty benevolent. They don't experiment on humans, they don't mutilate cattle, and while they do rule the Earth, they do so as a looming background presence. If you aren't in the resistance, you don't have anything to worry about. 

Of course, there's a level of resistance. People gather together in lonely farmhouses, or in the basements of drugstores, or in disused schoolrooms to plan out a way to resist the alien invaders - whether to poison their supplies, knock one of them out of the sky with a stolen National Guard artillery piece, or attempt a raid on one of their science squads. Every one of them lives in mortal fear of suddenly being caught up in the brilliant searchlight of a flying saucer, but they resist just the same. Occasionally, they even score successes.

In the present day, the resistance movement in Alien USA has managed to claim one or two "shadow communities" using alien technology to keep hidden; they've also riddled the skeleton of the United States' government with enough moles to be able to bring the weight of the US army on the aliens when they day comes. The alien plan has become somewhat clear: They're trying to build an exact replica of Earth on another planet - the buildings remain the same, but the terrain around it is very much like the moon. The resistance currently theorizes that the aliens are trying to recreate our planet on Planet X, with the eventual intention of transferring the human race to it, then strip-mining our world down to its molten core. 

Initial Tesseracti analyses have revealed a number of things. As the reigning echo theory suggests, the echo's world has been frozen in both cultural and technological development - a "doll world" effect, where everything is the same despite the development that should be taking place. Despite fifty years worth of cultural development, it's still the 1950's - duck's-ass haircuts, poodle skirts and live, black and white TV are the order of the day. The Tesseracti have found that technological progress literally can't occur. Force-seeding scientists with advanced technical knowledge simply didn't work, as the scientists seemingly forget what they were taught a few days later. 

Tesseracti activity in this dimension is fairly energetic. It's a good place to rest and recover, as long as you wear the appropriate hostileflague and don't screw around with any of the natives. Of course, since the dimension is so peaceful, some of the Tesseracti have created a new sport that they refer to as "duck-hunting." After attracting the attention of a flying saucer, the group tears down a road until the flying saucer is far enough away from civilization, then takes it down with something appropriate from the weapon orchards. All that's left to do once it hits the ground is to get the barbecue started, and you can have as much bug-eyed alien as you can eat. Those in the know say that bug-eyed alien tastes a lot like human flesh, which is gamy, like venison. The Tesseracti has put a one-per-month limit on saucers, to avoid drawing too much attention, but the ban is largely self-enforced. 

POTENTIAL RECRUIT TYPES:

THE HOOD MADE GOOD:

 You were in the resistance since you were twelve, helping your father set up the meetings for the resistance cells in the neighborhood, standing watch for saucers, shadowing alien sentries if they happened to wander through your neighborhood, and always, always watching the skies. When you were fourteen, the aliens captured your dad and two of his friends on their way home from a fishing trip, replacing him with a waxy-skinned automaton that said all the right things - but wasn't your dad. Your mother tried to kill him every day - a butcher knife in the throat, poison in his food, a back-shattering blow from a sledgehammer - but he would just regenerate, showing up the next day in his chair, shaking the dirt of the cellar floor off of his shoulders and into his bacon and eggs. 

You missed your dad, but you hated your neighbors worse than the aliens. They had just abducted your dad. Your neighbors knew that they'd replaced him, but they were too scared of the aliens to do anything but treat the replicant as if he was the real thing. You hated that. Hated them. You became a hood to scare them, to make them as much afraid of you as they were afraid of the aliens. You got rid of the automaton for good one night, tying it to a chair in your father's old rec room and setting it on fire, and driving your mother to live with her relatives in one of the hidden communities. 

On your way back, you had to almost drive off the road in order to avoid a car that was fleeing from a saucer, somebody in the back blazing away the pursuing craft with a tommygun. You'd dropped out of the resistance, but you followed them anyways, hoping that you could rescue at > least one of them from the inevitable abduction beam. When they brought down the saucer with what looked like a cross between a typewriter and a handgun, you couldn't have been more surprised. When they inducted you into the Tesseracti, and told you that you'd be fighting for something much larger than just the freedom of your echo, it nearly broke you - but you recovered. The grafts itch a little, but you've found out that the taste of bug-eyed man tastes a lot like victory. And vengeance. 

ALIEN QUISLING:

You always resented the aliens. You fired your slingshot at them whenever they flew overhead - you never hit them, but not for lack of trying. You always hid from them when they touched down, but you found yourself drawn to them anyways. You watched them arrest somebody that they thought was in the resistance, using beetles the size of your two clenched fists in order to hunt him down and paralyze him, all inside of his own house. As you grew up, you reailzed just how deep their influence went. They were the driving force behind your world, and everybody was terrified of them. And you started to envy that power, especially when you realized that for all of your friend's talk, they were just as afraid of the aliens as everybody else.

It started out small. You stood around and watched the aliens for a while while they cracked open a mailbox and scanned the letters with something that looked like a baseball-sized alien eye suspended in a cross between a specimen vat and a handgun.  They ignored you while you watched them, but when they were finished, one of them gave you a flat sheet of metal with a glyph engraved on it. You stared at it while they left, thinking.

It took you two nights to finish mowing the vacant lot so that the unmowed grass formed the shape on the sheet. It took you five minutes to pour the gasoline, one minute of fumbling before you lit the match, and a year of your life as the aliens trained you as their agent on earth. At least, you think it was a year. You kind of lost track of time when you were in the learning wombs, and when you came back, you knew that you couldn't ask anybody how long it had been since you'd been away. You've lost contact with everybody who knew you before, and you can't re-establish contact without arousing suspicion. It's not so bad, really.

You have to admit that the Tesseracti made the aliens look like a bunch of chumps. They had you out of your echo and into a liquid containment tank in two seconds, and by the time that you figured out that you could breathe the liquid, they'd deactivated every implant in your body and made it quite clear that you were on your own. You didn't kick at all. You were used to the idea of being in service of somebody more powerful than you were, and the Tesseracti had become that new somebody. Now, you're a double agent. Triple agent, really, since you've got a low rank in the resistance. The Tesseracti have called upon you a few times to do some external missions, and you've become aware that your world was just one of many - one of the better ones, but not as good as primal Earth. You're trying to find a way to play all three sides off against each other so that they'll let you free - but you can't talk about that now. They might be listening. Shhh. Shhhh.

POODLE-SKIRTED VALKYRIE

Two! Four! Six! Eight! Two in that diner, four when the collaborators tried to escape and ran into you on the way out, six in that raid on the National Guard outpost - you kinda regret that cute soldier that stumbled onto your team - and eight when you finally got aboard one of those saucers. Well, okay, the eight was your team's score, not your score, but you did kill five - one human, four aliens. Two, four, six, five just sounds like you forgot to count by twos, though, so it's always two, four, six eight when you hit the field and start cheering for your home team. 

You were exactly like everybody else. You did track and gym when you were in junior high, then moved to cheerleading when the time came - all of your friends said that you were pretty enough to do it. You were nervous that you'd start feeling the blood on your hands again when the time came to audition, but you came through without a hitch. You threw up a little afterwards, but it was okay. 

When the Tesseracti recruited you, you made a point of why you were so good at killing things. They checked you over, and they told you the truth: You were an exceptional human being, but you hadn't been enhanced. And you weren't psychopathic, even though killing didn't particularly bother you. 

So, you're doing the usual until the Tesseracti needs you again - spying, killing collaborators whenever you can, and enjoying the nervous silence that you get whenever you're around other members of the resistance. You'd never hurt any of them, of course, but it tends to be a little easier to get your way if they don't know that. You're living a pretty happy life, all things considered.

Blood's a bitch to get out of a poodle skirt, though.

BUG-EYED MONSTER OUT OF ITS DEPTH

This is _so_ not how it was supposed to work out. You were supposed to be a third-glanded corporal, occupation-phylum in the Ninth Private Army of Klortho the Magnificent, a member of a unit that had managed to bid high enough  - with the aid of your own small fortune - to get the plum duty of occupying Earth.  Every member of the unit had been married to each other before you left for the duty, and you even had a clutch of eggs that you thought would come to term, perhaps inspired by the Earth's chill climate. 

You were in pursuit of some thralls who had dared to fire at your craft when one of them suddenly flash-froze half of your saucer, rendering the metal so brittle that it only took a stiff crosswind to break it cleanly in half. You succumbed to the reflexive cannibalism of your species as you were plummeting towards the ground, and landed with your teeth buried in your love-brother's throat. 

When you woke up, you were on an operating table, with a surgeon-thrall leaning over you. You released the pheromones that should have incapacitated him, but he just laughed and squirted you in the face with water, which was humiliating. He explained, matter-of-factly, what you were - just a figment of the collective unconsciousness made solid - and what the Tesseracti had revived you for. You would never see your unit again, which was a relief, considering that most of them would still want to eat you. 

You'll never be able to work on primal Earth, of course, but you are cleared for the weirder kinds of echo work. You've still got a good idea of how your race's hyperscience works, and while it's a little primitive when compared to the Tesseracti's, it does the job. The man who introduced you to the Tesseracti, Dr. Henge, has actually become a friend of yours, since you both share the same black sense of humor and the ability to enjoy a good dissection. Maybe someday you'll go back and assassinate Klortho, gorge yourself on larval caviar and become the new Father-Mother of your race, but for now, you're enjoying the sense of superiority that your position brings.