Derek Hawthorne

**Derek Hawthorne** was a senior agent in the Red Room of the House, having served the organization for his entire adult life. Raised by Nathan Hawthorne to be the best agent he could be, Derek was notorious in the organization both for being a terrible spy and for his incessant pop culture quips, which made him very difficult to work with. Over the years, Derek faced every threat imaginable, both from esoterrorists and from intra-office politics, including zombies, wendigos, warlocks, and being ordered to murder the love of his life, Ashley Morgan.

After spending years in the spy game, Derek encountered the Wazir during a routine mission, throwing him into a series of events unlike anything he had ever faced before. Before long, he was juggling a succubus partner, betrayals from moles within the house, his ex-wife beginning a murderous rampage against the house, and, eventually, being forced to join the Committee and force the changes on the House that he wanted. Under his leadership, the Divisions of the House began to cooperate as a previously unseen level, finally putting the House's resources to use in their mission rather than line the Committee's pockets.

During the Protocol Zero War, Derek encountered a spirit of Hell named Bloody Mary, who helped unlock his latent magical powers. Using these powers, Derek became even stronger, eventually putting him up against Dracula.

After spending several years on the Committee, Derek would ultimately lose his life during the Fall of the House at the hands of Balor. With Bloody Mary's help, Derek became a demon after his death, allowing him to observe the mortal plane so he could monitor the former members of his team after their retirements and aid Bloody Mary in her mission.

He is the main protagonist of the *Red Room* trilogy.

## Biography

### Background

#### Early life

Derek's early life was marred by his parents. His mother, Song Hawthorne, walked out on him and his twin sister Penny at a very young age, at which point his father Nathan dedicated the rest of his upbringing to becoming the best Red Room agent that he possibly could to follow in his father's footsteps. Derek took to the training easily, and by the time of his adulthood was ready to become an incredible agent. However, with that training came a mountain of psychological issues. Derek took to pop culture, cartoons and comics in particular, to ease the void that his parents never filled.

#### Marriage to Cassandra

While Derek was still a junior agent, his father arranged for him to be married to Cassandra Cassidy, the CEO of Pantheon Corp and the son of Jonathon Cassidy. Derek accepted the arrangement and agreed to marry Cassandra, knowing that he might not ever genuinely love her; however, over time, Derek grew to genuinely love her and eventually viewed his wedding as one of the happiest days of his life.

However, while their marriage began strong, especially for an arranged marriage, as time went on, cracks began to appear. Cassandra would go from sweet and loving to literally trying to kill Derek within literal minutes, and despite their best efforts, they were never able to produce an heir like Cassandra wanted. In truth, and unknown to Derek, Jonathon had brainwashed Cassandra into loving Derek so as to give himself more power and sway with the Committee, and those moments of anger were Cassandra's will breaking through. She would later be freed by the Wazir, at which point Cassandra demanded a divorce; still having no idea what was wrong and still being in love with her, Derek assumed it was because of his inability to produce a child and sadly accepted.

### Early Career

After rising through the ranks and becoming a Senior Agent, Derek was sent to recruit Ashley Morgan, the most powerful psychic the Red Room had ever seen. Following his orders, Derek gave her the choice of either joining and serving the Red Room or having her psychic powers removed with an invasive surgery; she chose the former. Despite all of his training and emotional hangups, Derek began to fall in love with her and she with him. The duo would go on countless missions together, including attempting to hunt a wendigo in the Pacific Northwest and hunting a telekinetic teenager that Ashley managed to talk down with empathy.

#### Provost Zombie Incident

On one of his first missions with Ashley, Derek was called to Provost, Texas to put down a zombie outbreak that had been contained to a local mall. As the two entered, Derek gave her a crash course on revenants, particularly the fact that most will be harmless if you leave them alone. Ashley put down a few of them anyway before both of them reflected on the mission parameters, specifically the fact that they would likely have to kill the perpetrator; Ashley immediately objected, noting that they might be a dumb teenager, not a malicious witch.

As they moved toward the potential perpetrators, they reflected on what might happen should the Great Lie ever come out, with Derek saying that it would lead to the collapse of civilization while Ashley thought it was inevitable. They moved on to the second floor, where they encountered several ghasts, meaning that demons were starting to come through the rift instead of just the walking corpses, and managed to put them all down. After they tracked the casters down to a comic store guarded by about forty revenants, both of them opened fire before Ashley defeated the rest with a telekinetic scream.

As they entered the store, they found the two spell casters, Thomas and Steve Spencer, dead in the middle of the casting circle, with their girlfriend, Sonja Perrin, standing over them. Sonja revealed what Derek had already realized - that they had wanted to raise her from the dead after her car accident, but the spell wasn't strong enough, so the two men added their own lives to it. As Sonja lamented that the entire point was for all three of them to be together, Derek apologized to her before putting her down again.

#### Ashley's "Death"

After years of working for the House, Ashley finally had enough and contacted a reporter, intending to expose the House for everything it had done. All that accomplished was getting the personal attention of the Chairman, who ordered Ashley's immediate execution. He did so through Nathan, and Nathan decided instead to pass the buck to Derek during a Halloween party at the family mansion. Over a game of pool, Nathan gave Derek the order, and the two began to argue.

As Derek made it clear that he loved Ashley and would do anything he could to protect her, Nathan coldly revealed her attempt to contact a reporter and summoned her psychological profile that revealed she had always been insubordinate and questioning the House's mission. Derek tried to argue that she had done excellent work and deserved the benefit of the doubt, but Nathan doubled down, arguing that she was a threat to every single person on Earth with her dedication to exposing the Truth. Derek's final attempt to appeal to him by asking what Nathan would do if he was asked to kill Derek's mother failed when Nathan made it clear he would do it, so Derek disowned Nathan on the spot and went to find Ashley in the house, already planning to fake her death and willing to kill anyone in the Red Room he needed to keep her alive.

At that moment, he briefly saw a glimpse into the future due to his latent magic, seeing, among other things, himself paired up with Shannon O'Reily and Ben Talbot, his ex-wife Cassandra shooting him in the arm, and a confrontation with someone who looked exactly like him; however, because he had not yet mastered his magic potential, he dismissed the images.

After he arrived in Ashley's room, the two were briefly distracted by a talk of previous missions, but Ashley soon glimpsed from his mind that he intended to fake her death. With no other choice, Derek used a pressure point to knock her out immediately, then snuck her out of the mansion to his car outside. As he frantically debated whether to fake Ashley's death or commit full-on treason by trying to ally with one of the House's enemies, Penny snuck up on him and entered the car. Derek explained the situation to her, which gave Penny the idea to smuggle both himself and Ashley out of the House through The Cuckoo.

After a three hour drive to a village on the coast, the trio discussed where they might end up hiding, with India looking like the most logical suggestion before the Cuckoo arrived with a magical thunderstorm cloaking his movements. Derek tried to convince Penny to come with them too, but Penny refused, pointing out that no one would believe all three of them died in the same night, so Derek went to speak to the Cuckoo and size him up. He learned that it was actually Blue Room agent Christopher Hang, an agent he had crossed paths with before.

Christopher immediately spelled out that while he could get Ashley away from the House that night, there was simply no way he could hide the son of a Committee member like Derek, meaning she would have to go alone; most importantly, Derek would never be able to see her again without risking her life. In return for making sure she was completely impossible to find, Christopher asked Derek to call in favors and get him back into field work, which Derek realized would likely make them partners. Despite all of his hesitations, Derek agreed to the plan.

After another brief talk about how to survive such a tragic separation, Derek finally exited the car and returned to Ashley, who was already aware of what they had discussed. The two had their final conversation about the lives they wanted for each other, with Derek reaffirming that he would always rather be miserable than have Ashley die. As the two had their last kiss, Ashley used her powers to lock the memories of that night away, ensuring they could never be read or made to be forgotten, and then got into Christopher's car. Penny drove Derek home that night, and Nathan would spend years pretending that he thought Derek had gone through with killing Ashley.

#### Christopher's "Death"

Being separated from Ashley completely changed Derek. From that moment onward, Derek held no more illusions about the villainy of the group he was working for, going from considering them the lesser of two evils to just as bad as all of the organizations he had spent his career fighting. He took out his rage on the monsters and supernatural world, with he and Christopher spending months destroying every operation they could get their hands on. This included being the pair to bring in Derek's insane brother Stephen when he went on a murderous rampage. However, all of this would change during a routine mission against the Network in New York City.

Derek and Christopher were sent to New York to meet a contact with information; this contact was a man named Evan, though Derek's memories would later be tampered with so that he remembered him as a woman. Evan revealed that the Network had created an "Underground Railroad" designed to co-opt psychics and sorcerers away from the House into new identities, and they even had collaborators in the House itself; however, the Network itself was not going to be an issue any longer, as the Vampire Nation had kidnapped the members of the branch. Though his orders did not mandate he do so, Derek made the decision that they would rescue the hostages from the vampires, and to do this, he needed backup in the form of mercenaries.

Half an hour later, the mercenaries arrived, including his half-brother Alec and, unknown to him, his future partner Shannon. After promising to compensate him with a black card for the operation Derek interrupted, Derek filled him in on the mission parameters; though Alec hesitated to get involved with Vampire Nation politics, he agreed to the plan. After a conversation with his half-brother about everything from their mental fortitude to his mercenaries using magical steroids, they decided that they would steal a vampire transport, use it to evacuate the hostages, and then leave them somewhere the Red Room could find them.

However, the mission turned out to be a trap, and Derek walked right into it. In reality, the vampires had already turned the hostages into draugr, and the resulting battle was a massacre. Though Derek repressed the memories, he was still able to recall flashes of the event, most notably Christopher being pulled into darkness by an obscuromancer. To survive the battle, Derek drank the blood of a vampire, giving him a temporary strength boost to kill his opponents; he became such a threat that Dracula chose to spare his life out of respect for the horror he wrought.

After losing a second partner, Derek's rage was astronomical and he began a killing spree on the vampire population of New York. By the time his killing spree was done, he had killed upwards of 400 humans and monsters and became known to the Vampire Nation as "the Cleaver", the human with the single most vampire kills in the world. Not even receiving another partner closed the gap, as Solomon was a racist homophobe who was unceremoniously gored by a unicorn, at which point the Committee stopped assigning him any partners.

For years, Derek operated this way, uncaring if he lived or died and hating almost every aspect of his life. He soon gained a reputation for acting as a cowboy, often charging in and using more force than necessary even when a mission should have been completed quietly. As a result, despite his high standing within the agency, he was often relegated to menial tasks; it was during one of these menial tasks that Derek first encountered the Wazir.

### War with the Wazir

#### Ohio Bio-Attack

Derek, alongside his twin sister Penny, were tasked with intercepting members of the Emerald Eye terrorist organization to see if they were carrying noteworthy. Derek became so bored with the mission that he began narrating it, only for Penny to shoot him down. This prompted Derek to go on a rant about the nature of spy work and how technology, particularly that produced by White Room scientist Lucy Danvers - Penny's girlfriend - was making most of it obsolete. However, this conversation was brought to a screeching halt when Derek realized that the supposedly routine handoff had been accompanied by none other than Karl Bjornson himself.

The two briefly argued over what to do before Derek made the executive decision to have Penny evacuate the building while he approached Karl to bring him in peacefully. With a plan formed, Derek walked towards Karl and held a gun to his back, instigating a conversation with the mad wizard. Karl immediately put Derek on the back foot by revealing that he knew everything about Derek, including his father, his ex-wife, and his half-dragon heritage, and he began playing on Derek's insecurities regarding the House. This didn't work, and as Penny pulled the fire alarm, Derek ordered the Wazir to walk towards the exit, but Karl instead ordered his rakshasa to begin killing everyone.

As the rakshasa began killing everyone they could reach, Derek immediately killed the Wazir, then turned his attention to the two rakshasa. However, a brief collision with a fleeing family meant a rakshasa got the drop on him and moved to rip him in half. Before he could, Penny intervened and froze the attacker, leaving one more rakshasa charging at her. Derek shot him instantly while Penny killed the other, leaving only the Wazir, who survived Derek's lethal shots. The Wazir attempted to run, but Derek incapacitated him again, leaving him attempting to drop an unknown vial on the ground; before he could do so, Derek killed him again, and the vial remained intact when it landed.

Unfortunately for him, the police arrived immediately after, forcing Derek to put down his gun and surrender. He was arrested by the police and kept in captivity for five days before being freed by the Professor, his direct superior in the Red Room. After being lectured on his failures, the Professor filled Derek in on what he did not know about the confrontation with the Wazir: not only was the Wazir truthfully using homunculi during the confrontation, meaning that he was still alive and active, the substance in the vial was Matheson-22, a virus that turned people into draugr, and said virus had been recently responsible for the destruction of Wheatfield, Kansas. He also revealed that there was a mole in Division One - in fact, until that night, the Blue Room thought it was him - and that the primary suspect for the creation of Matheson-22 was Derek's ex-wife, Cassandra Cassidy.

#### New Partner

The Professor revealed that they were giving Derek this information so that he could take advantage of he and Cassandra's former relationship to get into her building and investigate her involvement, but Derek disagreed, arguing that the last time he had tried to go inside, Cassandra had thrown him out. Regardless, the Professor stuck with his plan and revealed that he was also being assigned a new partner, despite the Committee generally leaving him alone after Solomon's death. Despite appearances, Derek immediately deduced that the true motive behind the assignment was to have someone monitoring his investigation due to his emotional investment.

That night, Derek returned to his apartment building and was warned by his doorman, Steve Wilson, that his new partner was in his apartment. After ascending to his floor and seeing his door ajar, Derek was introduced to Shannon O'Reily, his new partner, and learned that the Emerald Eye had placed a bounty on his head for half a million dollars. Shannon immediately tried to seduce him, but Derek resisted her charm until he provoked her into a physical attack, at which point she laid him out to make clear that she was still a capable agent. As she held a knife to his throat, he put a gun to her chest, forcing them into a stalemate until they both backed down.

At this point, Derek deduced her status as a lilin, though Shannon corrected him that she was *half*-lilin. They briefly discussed how to handle the current situation and decided on two things: to take advantage of the bounty on his head to try to lure out someone who could lead them back to the Wazir, and to investigate Pantheon Corp even though he didn't think Cassandra was personally involved. After confirming with sources that everything Shannon said was true, the two headed straight to Division One headquarters to debrief on the Matheson-22 sample Derek acquired in Ohio.

As Shannon was shocked by how nonsensical Division One's spending habits were, the two were confronted by Tommy Moretti (whose wife Derek had slept with), though the "confrontation" was quickly revealed to be a bluff. Tommy boasted that he had been the one to point the Blue Room towards Derek after they had originally suspected him. After briefly discussing and rejecting the idea that he could be the mole, they briefly ran into his personal assistant Ishikawa Sakura, where he asked her to arrange a cyber-attack on Pantheon Corp's servers. Though they wouldn't be able to get through their firewalls, it would give Derek the excuse he needed to get into her building under the guise of investigating the mole in the Red Room who launched the attack.

Continuing his investigation, Derek went to the White Room to meet with Lucy Danvers, the top scientist that the Matheson vial had gone to as well as Penny's long-term girlfriend. He and Shannon walked in as she and her boss, Edward Strickland, were having an argument regarding the morality of experimenting on the Matheson virus, with Lucy managing to convince him to leave her with the virus and no experiments being conducted. After Strickland left, Lucy confirmed the worst possible news to Derek: she was certain that Pantheon Corp was responsible for the creation of Matheson-22. With Derek planning to go straight to Pantheon Corp to continue investigating, Lucy armed him and Shannon with many gadgets, including a quantum knife and a bottled minute. However, before they could leave, the alarms sounded.

#### Defending the White Room

As Lucy gave Derek a gas mask, she revealed that the alarm was specifically the bio-hazard alarm. As operatives in the building began turning into draugr, Derek immediately deduced that the mole within the Division must have made their move by distributing Matheson-22 in the air, but when he went to turn on the White Room's holy water sprinkler system, he discovered the line had been cut. He thus concluded that the next step would be him and Shannon fighting their way through the draugr-filled halls to the pumping room and turn on the sprinkler manually.

At this point, they heard gunfire, making the team realize that there were hostile forces in the building as well. After getting a briefing from Lucy on how Matheson-created draugr differed from typical draugr, including the fact that they could spread their affliction through bites like a zombie, Derek and Shannon left the room, while Lucy barricaded it behind them. After they encountered and killed several former comrades turned draugr, they continued to the pumping room as the massacre continued around them. Just before they made it to the pumping room, they were ambushed by militants shouting generic anti-House slogans, but Shannon was able to use her quantum knife to kill or incapacitate everyone attacking them.

After Derek and Shannon turned the pumping system back on, thus destroying the draugr in the facility, Shannon interrogated a dying soldier, revealing that there were others in the building accomplishing three goals: the first was to extract an unknown individual, the second was to massacre anyone in sight, and the third was to destroy the White Room's information hub. With the choice between saving the people of the White Room versus saving the House's information, Derek chose to save the people and followed the gunshots to the location of the mercenaries. Before they could kill another scientist they had at their mercy, Derek and Shannon opened fire and killed the squad.

After getting the scientist to flee the scene and barricade herself in a safe place, the duo attempted to hunt down the rest of the attacking mercenaries, only to find the squad dead with one of them undressed. Derek quickly realized that the mole must have betrayed and killed the squad to cover all his loose ends, alongside dressing like them to escape in the chaos unseen, and the mercenaries' armor made him speculate that they may be Sons of Mars. Knowing the mole's plan, Derek and Shannon headed to the security room, only to discover that the mole had sabotaged the sprinklers in the security room as well.

At this point, draugr poured out of the room, forcing the battle into the soaked hallway. To turn the tide, Shannon exposed her half-lilin form and defeated the draugr, but in the heat of battle, she turned her attention to Derek and attacked him. He managed to fight her off, but during the brief conversation that followed, the lockdown was disabled and Division One forces began to enter the area, allowing the mole to slip out undetected.

#### Investigating Cassandra

With the destruction of the information hub, Derek was desperate for any lead to the Wazir and finally asked Shannon how she got through the Red Room's mystical barriers, prompting her to answer that God let her in. Though he didn't understand how her story could be true, but he took it at face value for the moment and moved to go speak with the Professor. After interrupting his "debrief" with Lucy, Derek explained what happened during the attack, to which the Professor commended him for choosing to save the agents instead of the information hub, though he made the choice not to report her species to him.

The Professor informed them that he was issuing execution orders for both Cassandra and Tommy Moretti due to the evidence against both of them, but when he demonstrated his compromised thinking due to Strickland's death, he agreed to let Derek and Shannon lead the investigation into the traitor so as to not waste more resources, though he also admitted that if Cassandra escaped, he would place a kill order on Derek and Shannon's heads. As he and Shannon got out of their blood-soaked clothes, Derek revealed that his endgame was to keep operating publicly, hoping that the half-million dollar bounty on his head would encourage people to try to attack him, and eventually one of them would lead them to the Wazir.

## Powers and Abilities

### Abilities

* **Mental Fortitude**: Derek's mental conditioning was some of the strongest seen by the House, ranking at a level 10 (whereas his brother Alec was an 8 and his partner Christopher was a 6). As a result, Derek was capable of resisting Shannon's natural seductive abilities for several hours even after seeing her pure lilin form and was even able to hold back against mesmerization.

### Weaknesses

* **Long-term Strategy**: While Derek was an expert tactician, his track record with longer term strategy was inconsistent at best. He often fell into traps his enemies set and, while he would end up defeating his enemies, they were always able to set off most of their plans before Derek could cotton on to what they were. Cassandra and the Wazir in particular took advantage of his short-sightedness to make sure he was out of the way when their plans began, leaving him unable to combat them directly until he ascended to the Committee.
* **Politics**: Derek was an expert agent, but he had no experience in the political game. While this was not a problem while he was an agent, it became his greatest failing upon becoming a Committee member; the other members of the Committee took advantage of his green status to scapegoat him for Protocol Zero, only failing because of Nathan's interference, and Roland targeted him in part because he knew no one on the Committee would be willing to support him.