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.