Ferric Holmberg

IRAF (Formerly)

> *"He's not a doctor. He's a madman with a degree." -*Muraco "Wolf" Rose
>
>

Ferric Holmberg is a current employee of Temporal Offices, specifically hired by Wolf to work for Rose Radiation Research and Advancements. While living within the Boundary, he uses the fake name of "Anders Ferrum" to dodge the government.

## Personality

While he tends to present as amicable and friendly at first, it has been commented by multiple colleagues from the Foundation as well as Pinnacle Electronics that he has a disturbing presence. Over time, his friendly facade slowly fades and is replaced with a reclusive researcher, before fully descending into a sadistic and cruel madman. He is obsessed with discovering anomalies that can be abused for his own gain.

Ferric usually keeps a disturbingly calm demeanor, regardless of the situation. This facade only falls in times of extreme emotion, in which he falls into fits of intense hysterics. He returns to calmness quickly once the emotions pass, but if the cause of the fit is not dealt with, he can cycle between calm and hysterical with only seconds in between each shift in mood. Cycling is most common when working with subjects who have not been sedated and are unable to mask their own pain; Ferric derives joy from their terror.

## Relationships

#### Caradoc

A tapir he stole during his escape from the Foundation. The tapir can "talk", but for some reason, only Ferric is able to hear it.

While Ferric is typically not averted to collateral damage and chaos, for some reason, he consistently protects Caradoc even when doing so would be inconvenient for him. It can be assumed that Caradoc is the only entity that Ferric considers to actually be a friend, though for reasons that are currently unknown.

#### Jensen

Before the destruction of the Sector 3 East Wing, Ferric and Jensen were colleagues working in the genetics department of the Foundation, and consequently often worked as a team to analyze genetic material of biological anomalies. Jensen considered Ferric to be a close friend, though he did not realize that Ferric did not feel the same and only saw him as a tool to meet his own ends.

He was one of the first people wounded during Ferric's rampage, but he survived albeit with severe physical scarring from the attack. He is the only known victim to have survived Ferric's time at the Foundation; three were killed during his escape, many others in his department were found dead and believed to have been killed by Ferric (though there is currently not enough evidence to legally confirm this), and dozens of others have gone missing between Ferric's arrival and departure.

Some of Ferric's notes imply that he would drug Jensen into unconsciousness for various reasons, whether that's to access his documents without his knowledge, or even to perform entire experiments on Jensen himself. Much of Jensen's work was used to create the serum Ferric used to transform himself and slaughter several of his colleagues and destroy the lab.

## Ability Overview

#### Teratocat Mutation

He carries with him, at all times, multiple syringes containing dubious and unstable substances that will turn him into a catlike monster.

This is typically his primary response to direct confrontation; he's weak otherwise, and relies on deception to avoid being pinned as a target.

The ability is shift is slowly fusing with Ferric's DNA with each usage of the serum, but as of current, he still relies on it and cannot transform without it.

## General Bio

Ferric Holmberg was originally hired as a researcher for the Irregularity Detection and Removal Foundation (IDRF). He was initially hired as an intern, but quickly worked his way up to senior researcher due to sudden unexplained disappearances in higher staff.

Ferric is directly responsible for the destruction of the entire Sector 3 East Wing of the largest known Foundation site, due to a freak accident that resulted in a transformation into a mutant creature that rampaged for several minutes, killing three members Foundation staff and injuring Jensen before escaping.

There is now a large bounty placed on the head of Dr. Ferric Holmberg by the Foundation, the information of which is spread through government agencies to prevent the discovery of the Foundation by the general public.

Dr. Holmberg himself is considered a Tier 3 Infohazard (the highest degree currently described by the Foundation Archives), as he managed to escape without being administered amnestics; he has retained all knowledge of the Foundation, and its experiments. This only adds to the bounty on his head, calling for him to be delivered to the Foundation dead or alive. If captured alive, he will be swiftly terminated by the Foundation execution unit.

After his escape from the facility and evasion of the Mobile Task Force, he was taken in by Pinnacle Electronics as a scientist. Though not trusted by his new coworkers (especially among suspicions that Dr. Holmberg himself killed his higher-ups, in addition to those confirmed killed by him during his escape), he was still covered by the corporation with a fake identity to protect him from the Foundation. He is officially filed under Quad Co. paperwork with the name "Mr. Anders Ferrum" on his resume.

## Trivia

* Ferric was hired by Temporal Offices through a Craigslist ad posted by Wolf, and no background checks were performed on him. Had he done so, he would have found that nobody with the legal name "Anders Ferrum", the fake name that Ferric used as of his employment with Pinnacle Electronics, exists in the first place.
* Due to severe physical trauma received during his escape from the Foundation, Ferric has palilalia, and will often repeat words or phrases in repetitions of three.
	+ This trauma also caused anisocoria --- his right pupil is permanently dilated larger than his left.
* Ferric is of direct Swedish descent and speaks with a Swedish accent as a result.
	+ Some of his more dubious notes and documents are written in Swedish to make it more difficult for others to figure out.