Howard Drummond

Professor Drummond is your stereotypical academic: very smart, very focused on his own interests, and not particularly interested in much outside of them. In this case, his interests begin and end with the ancient Romans.
However, the Professor is a little worried about modern life, and the way it seems to ignore the past and its lessons. Especially troubling to him is that nobody seems to have any continuity anymore: for example, for a culture that has such a definite interest in death, Western society seems bound and determined to discard everybody that actually has experienced that state permanently. The ancient Romans were wiser: they would have holidays where the dead were honored, respected, and most importantly, remembered. If modern man spent less time obsessing over the mechanisms of death and more time trying to get a perspective on its meaning, people would probably be happier. They'd certainly be able to handle their own eventual demises better.
All of this wouldn't be important, of course, if it weren't for the fact that Professor Drummond happens to be a good public speaker and a better writer. His book on the subject hit the nonfiction best seller lists immediately, not to mention solid critical and academic acclaim (something not seen every day), and his suggestion of a National Day of Contemplation seems to have stricken a chord with the public. Being a Roman scholar, naturally he picked the Festival of Faunus as a suitable date ~ and that's where the trouble started.
Celestials are suspicious entities. Professor Drummond practically screams "secret Pagan Soldier" to even the mildly paranoid. He's not (actually, Howard is a practicing Lutheran): the man has never heard about the War, doesn't really believe in angels or demons, and has no potential for a sixth Force. He is firmly and simply just a normal academic with no aptitude and less interest in the supernatural.
Try telling that, though, to the ethereals, pagan Soldiers, sorcerers and various servitors who have begun to go over his life with a fine tooth comb. The more they vainly look for hidden affiliations, the more they persist in their delusion that the professor is a secret agent for someone. At the moment, the general consensus is that he's personally working for either a Superior or a major ethereal god: that, and the fact that everybody has a different agenda, has kept him fairly safe. Of course, that's no guarantee that such a standoff is going to be permanent.
Meanwhile, his classes have begun to get the most interesting transfer students . . .
Category:Humans