Evelyn S. Retherford

### Affiliation

Associate of the Abigail Institute, Specialist and Consultant for Albion Esoteric, citizen of Albion

## Biographical information

### Date of death

27th of April 2020 8:45am27th of April 2020 3:34pm

28th of April 2020 (at least 87 deaths between 7:11 and 8:23am in numerous aborted timelines)

### Place of death

Trawsfynydd, Wales[World/User], Eidolon-23

Bristol, Ireland

## Physical description

### Eye color

Gold

**Evelyn Sophia Retherford** (born 23 September 1997) is a female metahuman of Albionite nationality. She is an extremely obscure and low-earning individual whose work primarily consists of neutralising persons and phenomena considered to be out of the ordinary. These include metahumans, anomalies and groups in possession of advanced technology. She is in a constant state of financial destitution in spite of taking on up to five times as many commissions per year as her contemporaries. This is in large part due to her inability to negotiate fair prices with her clients, usually charging between a tenth and a hundredth of the expected price of her services.

Retherford is notable for being one of the least powerful and least influential members of the cast. She has no outstanding heritage, relatives or connections to any of the extant dynasties.

## Appearance

Retherford is an English woman of average height and athletic physique. She has golden eyes and orange hair which she usually styles into a loose bun. Her voice is quiet and low, and is often described as having an exhausted timbre. She has numerous scars on her hands and arms, owing to her being unable to afford extensive medical treatment which would remove such marks, in addition to such treatment being too disruptive to her work.

## Personality

Retherford is generally tired, unmotivated and closed off. She experiences next to no aversion to stimuli that would be considered by most to be unpleasant, being unperturbed by darkness, morbid scenes and extreme pain. However, she is extremely anxious and is easily startled or intimidated by minor or even nonexistent threats to her safety. Fear is a motivating force for her rather than a paralysing one.

Retherford has a very low estimation of herself and is consumed by feelings of dissatisfaction and boredom. These depressive symptoms abate when she feels that she is at genuine risk and when she encounters obstacles which are markedly different from those that she has faced in the past. She expresses a subconscious drive to overcome difficulties and will willingly take on apparently impossible or obviously suicidal tasks in order to challenge herself. This is motivated in equal parts by a desire for hegemony and a carnal enjoyment of combat and the sensation of fear.

## Abilities

### Supernatural Abilities

Retherford possesses an ability which her peers colloquially refer to as "piggybacking", although she prefers the term "habitation". It allows her to instantaneously enter any object or medium which is in motion and to emerge from it downstream. She may inhabit bullets, beams of light, shockwaves, electrical currents and other physical mechanisms which may be thought of as having a constant velocity. If the object which she enters changes its direction or speed while she is inhabiting it, she suffers severe nausea and hemorrhaging of the orbits. Damaging an object which she is inhabiting causes said damage to reflect on her body as well. These limitations do not apply to light, sound or electricity. Entering an object does not affect its mass or speed; for the duration of her residence, she effectively does not exist.

Retherford may not travel against the current of whatever medium she is inhabiting. For example, she cannot move through a wire in the opposite direction to the current flowing through it, nor can she enter a beam of light and reappear at its source. Furthermore, repeated use of her ability causes temporary blindness, vertigo and symptoms of radiation poisoning.

This ability allows her to effectively teleport from place to place, as long as there is some flow of energy or matter from her original location to her destination. Using laser pointers or projectile weapons, she can reposition in order to gain vantage points or flee from unfavourable situations. Reappearing inside another object causes her body to violently displace it, at the risk of being maimed by shrapnel.

### Skills & Expertise

* **Physical Conditioning:** While Retherford's physique lies above the human average, her strengths lie in her agility, speed and coordination. She is extremely dextrous and double jointed in both arms.
* **Mental Conditioning:** Through some quirk of genetics, luck or latent metahuman ability, Retherford's reaction times are short to the point of nearly being a superpower in their own right. Her reaction times approach 150ms while at rest and are approximately 120ms in duration when alert. She is also extremely resilient against confusion, pain, extremes of emotion, motion sickness, visual and somatosensory overload and other forms of psychological or sensory harm, allowing her to push her body until the point of true mechanical failure and to apparently ignore injuries that would cause others to flinch, fall down or pass into shock. Most people are involuntarily stunned or at least temporarily lose focus due to the infliction of grievous harm; Retherford's ability to circumvent this effect makes her more able to react to and make assessments in light of sustaining wounds.
* **Military Training:** Retherford has received training from both the military of Albion and specialised trainers employed by Albion Esoteric. She has been tutored in fieldwork, hand to hand combat, medicine, tracking and marksmanship. Her preexisting skillset and metahuman ability lend themselves to the development of the latter skill especially, allowing her to fire immediately and accurately even in confused environments or when taken by surprise.
* **Combat Intelligence:** Retherford's choice of career often places her in situations where she has next to no information about her opponent or is unable to beat her enemy in a direct confrontation. This has fostered a savant-esque ability to discern the weaknesses of individuals and to exploit them. She is proficient in laying traps, manipulating her enemies' psychologies and discovering vulnerabilities. She has experience in terminating all manner of metahumans and therefore possesses a catalogue of counter-strategies for use against archetypical powers such as regeneration and invisibility. Her ability to discern individuals' weaknesses does not exist in a vague form - she is able to identify injuries, handedness, fatigue, a person's blind spot, gaps in a hostile party's armour and psychological weakpoints with minimal observation.
* **Loop Training:** Following her confrontation with Cesarino, Retherford's CQC skills have improved markedly. Once she observes a person's preferred fighting style, she can effectively counter them in subsequent confrontations, even if said person is substantially larger and stronger than her. She applied this technique to great effect against the much more skilled and physically robust Violet Addaway, and believed that she would be able to beat Catherine Amy Vidicer with it as well.
* **Other Skills:** Retherford is a practised photorealistic sketch artist. She is also skilful with the violin and piano.

## Possessions

### Equipment

* Caracal 816 assault rifle. FAB Defense GL-SHOCK AR15/M16 Shock Absorbing Butt-Stock, select-fire specifications, Vortex Razor HD LHT 3-15×42 mounted optical scope (3-15x magnification), Griffin Armament Recce 5 Mod 4 suppressor, underslung Laserex GLS-520 Green Laser Gun Sight with remote activation pad, side mounted M600U Scout Light Weaponlight, model #10817 Limbsaver AirTech Precision Fit Recoil Pad, Magpul Vertical Fore Grip RVG for Picatinny Rails MAG412, Atlas V8 BT10 Bipod Standard Two Screw 1913 Rail Clamp, and Heckler and Koch Product 207059 “Carrying sling with quick release. 38 mm wide“ with belt clip.
* 6x 30-round STANAG box cartridges (HK AR-15 .223/5.56 30-Round Sand-Resistant Steel Magazine); three chambered with 5.56×45mm NATO M995 armour piercing cartridges, and another three chambered with Mk318 Mod 0 "Cartridge, Caliber 5.56mm Ball, Carbine, Barrier" cartridges.
* Vepr-12 semi-automatic magazine fed combat shotgun. MOLLE-compatible Condor Tactical 18” shotgun holster, shortened barrel, Trijicon ACOG 1.5x16S BAC Riflescope TA44-C-400242, MOE SL-K Magpul Carbine Replacement Stock, "VECTOR OPTICS VIPERWOLF IR LASER COMBO 5MW/5MW IR LASER TOP AND SIDE RAILS".
* 4x SGM Vepr-12 12 Gauge Polymer Tactical 12 Round Magazine. Federal Power-Shok Ammunition 12 Gauge 2-3/4" 1 oz, hollow point rifled slug.
* LT-08890LGF 3000mw 450nm Pure Blue Beam Light Multi-functional Rechargeable Laser.
* Gerber Strongarm fixed-blade survival knife.

### Property

* 1,222,000 sovereigns in obscure civil credit.
	+ 764,000 from various tasks undertaken throughout her early career
	+ 264,000 from Trench-59
	+ 83,000 from Eidolon-23.1
	+ 292,000 from Eidolon-23.2
	+ 193,000 from Vidicer
	+ -374,000 to Addaway, Ivers, Reagan, and the Abigail Institute
* 4,870 sovereigns earned between the 22nd of March and 29th of May
	+ 375,000 from Jim Saethris
	+ -372,000 to Ryugo Saeki and Ryuju Saeki
	+ 1,200 from Camp Cologne
	+ 954,670 from Cesarino
	+ -954,000 to Ryuju Saeki, Ryugo Saeki, and Kelli Ivananko

## Biography

Evelyn was born in London in 1997. Her parents were killed during Alexandria Ashwood's takeover of the country and founding of Albion; she was subsequently passed into the foster care system. The United Kingdom’s government was successful in resisting the metahuman takeover for a number of years, retaining control over much of England and some of its holdings in Scotland. During that period, most necessities were strictly rationed and martial law was imposed. Evelyn’s upbringing was one of hardship, and when she became aware of her powers she consciously repressed them due to the government’s policy of eliminating metahumans or conscripting them into the military. She repeatedly came into conflict with other children and her caretakers, breeding an instinctive vigilance and scrupulous demeanour.

Even after the fall of the British government in 2005, she remained impoverished and generally underprivileged. London had been destroyed over the course of the war by The Morrigan and she was forced to inhabit its slums alongside other survivors for the duration of the rebuilding efforts. She subsisted on a diet of vermin and scavenged food waste during this time. During this period of her life, she was acquainted with a dog which would often accompany her during the day. Eventually, it was killed by a member of the military of Albion. She witnessed the incident and retaliated by mauling the man with a shard of glass. She was shot in retaliation but managed to escape. Hours later, bleeding out in an alleyway, she was found by elements of a criminal group operating out of the area, taking advantage of the lack of regulations in the destabilised climate of the UK to traffick illegal goods and recruit members to serve their North American interests. She was sworn in as a runner, relaying messages and delivering packages. She earned a decent living. After some time, her superiors began tasking her with minor errands: handling negotiations, organising dead-drops, et cetera.

After Albion stabilised, her organisation allowed her to begin taking on personal commissions. Her old network of criminal contacts essentially evaporated as the newly formed government of the Thaumatarchy of Albion began suppressing organised crime. Therefore, she gravitated toward work posed by legitimate sources. This ultimately led to her being employed as an “Abigail”, a term for a person who neutralises metahumans and various unintelligent phenomena which threaten public safety. She was capable at her job and though she maintained that she was a freelancer, she worked full-time hours, even being employed to supplement the police force by tracking down and apprehending superhuman criminals. She later became an affiliate of the Abigail Institute, for which her vocation was named. It was during this time that she received her training from the Albionite military. As part of her employment by the Abigail Institute, she received additional funding for the procurement of equipment as well as legal immunity within Albion, so long as any crimes she committed were in the service of fulfilling a contract.

On the 14th of July, 2015, Retherford received a communique from an individual she had known during her time spent in the foster care system: Rain Casey Florette. Florette requested that Retherford allow her to share a flat with her in the city of Albion, to which Retherford agreed. After moving in, Florette naturally began to fulfil the role of a domestic worker due to Retherford's own neglect of her living space. Florette would cook, clean, buy groceries and generally maintain the orderliness of the household while Retherford was away at odd hours due to work. Eventually, Retherford decided to officially hire Florette as her secretary, and then her attache. Florette presently serves as Retherford's liaison with Albion Esoteric and the Abigail Institute, performing clerical duties and making the necessary arrangements for Retherford to conduct her business.

On the 22nd of March, 2020, Retherford and Florette sedated a metahuman foetus - Trench-59 - and remanded the object into Albion Esoteric's custody. Retherford mutilated herself as part of this process, using a bladed weapon to perform a Caesarian section upon herself. She was paid in $109,000 worth of civil credit. However, due to her not knowing about the existence of the account, she assumed that she simply hadn't been wired the money; she did not investigate further. On the 25th of April, she assisted Ryugo and Ryuju Saeki in killing Jim Saethris in Melbourne, earning $3000 out of the initial offer of $375,000. On the 26th of April, she participated in a raid upon the West Cologne Processing Centre, arranged by Teris Renner for the purposes of evacuating minority prisoners of the Villeneuve regime. She was paid $1,200 for this venture.

On the 27th of April she was assigned to guarding Elizabeth Ashwood during a week-long vacation to the town of Trawsfynydd, Wales, alongside Ashwood's regular security detail. During this visit, Eidolon-23 manifested on a nearby hill. Subsequently, Elizabeth's security team was killed. Retherford was killed twice: once by Eidolon-23 during its initial manifestation, and once again at the hands of Ryugo Saeki. She was ultimately revived by an alternate version of herself who had come into possession of Eidolon-23's abilities and whose intentions were to toy with the inhabitants of Albion in violent and sadistic ways. Retherford killed the doppelganger after a protracted conflict. Over the course of this battle, the inhabitants of Cardiff, Trawsfynydd and many other Welsh towns were killed or transformed into sub entities under Eidolon-23's control, resulting in the effective loss of around ~40,000 civilians.

On the 28th of April, Retherford infiltrated the compound of Vergil Cesarino while posing as a security guard. With the assistance of a number of other private contractors whom she had hired, she managed to trap him and torture him for 47 years in an unsuccessful attempt to kill him. He managed to escape the trap, having suffered a severe loss of faculties and having developed a sexual obsession with Retherford. He attacked her, overwhelming her allies, until she managed to inject a quantity of his CSF into her skull, giving her the ability to retain memories across the time-loops that his metahuman ability produced, allowing her to fend him off for seven years, during which time she conditioned him to obey her commands. Ultimately, Cesarino was domesticated and rendered harmless, whereupon she remanded him into Albion Esoteric's custody and collected 670 USD (out of 945,670, the remainder of which went to her co-conspirators) from the numerous open contracts that had been levied against Cesarino in prior years. She received anti-aging therapy in order to undo the physical damage that she had suffered during the seven year ordeal.

On the 28th of May, Retherford returned to Albion alongside Ryugo and Ryuju Saeki, Rain Casey Florette, and Sophia Ashworth. Ashworth had no prior arrangements within the city and thus chose to live with Retherford for the duration of her stay - an arrangement that Retherford acquiesced to due to her social anxiety, and which was hastened by the fact that Florette was moving into her own apartment in order to be closer to her place of employment at a hospital. While Retherford went shopping, a representative of the Abigail Institute opened the door and mistook Ashworth for the apartment's usual resident, causing Ashworth to be pulled into the investigation of the Fames Murders, a series of violent killings perpetrated against the members of Magister Bartrich's cabinet. Ashworth misrepresented the truth to Retherford, claiming that Ashworth herself had been invited to become an associate of the Abigail Institute, allowing her to both continue to moonlight as an Abigail vis a vis her mistaken identity, and to employ Retherford to assist her in solving the case. Later that night, Retherford went to find Ashworth in order to reclaim her room keys, only to find that Ashworth was being attacked by Avery Fames, the self-admitted perpetrator of the Fames Murders. She chased Fames off and severely damaged the assassin's eyes with a violet burning laser.

Suspecting that the Fames Murders had been committed by an individual known as Avery Fames, and that they had been committed to the benefit of Magister Bartrich's successor, Retherford and Ashworth decided to investigate the residence of said successor, a man called Magister-Designate Nicolas Fabian. While in Fabian's house, Ashworth discovered that a figure with the last name "Alsworth" was to replace Huw Terfel, Magister of the Arbitration Sequence. She relayed this information to Retherford, who proceeded to kidnap, torture, mutilate, and then finally kill Connor and Benedict Alsworth, the former of whom was the intended replacement. She learned about the existence of Kimolia through these two men, a shadowy organisation within Albion whose intentions were to replace the highest echelons of power with their own members, and to achieve some unknown ideological goal.

Later, Retherford was cornered in Fabian's gallery by Avery Fames. Although Retherford believed that Fames was there to kill her, the assassin instead let her go after a short conversation, not wanting to cause a scene in Fabian's mansion. Retherford, out of extreme boredom and a desire for a fight, attacked Fames in spite of her disadvantageous position. In the subsequent hand-to-hand fight, Retherford was severely beaten all over her body and had much of the flesh on her forearms removed. Both she and Fames remained confident that they could win the confrontation. However, Kelli Ivananko, who had been hired by Fabian to guard his home, intervened by attempting to break up the fight. Retherford took advantage of the commotion to steal Ivananko's sidearm and to shoot Fames in the right hand, after which Fames escaped by melting through the floor of the gallery. Ivananko then attacked Retherford with her bare fists, culminating in a mutual incapacitation, whereupon Ivananko revealed that the fight had been a test of whether Retherford was fit to join Ivananko's mercenary organisation or not.

Retherford pursued Fames into the basement of Fabian's home, where she reunited with Sophia Ashworth. They attempted to kill Fames, with Retherford knowing that if they didn't defeat her within a few hours that her physical condition would deteriorate to a point where she would not be able to fight any longer. However, Fames managed to lure them into an abandoned concert hall and ambush them there, turning out the lights and then overclocking them to blind her opponents before maiming both hand-to-hand. She gave Ashworth and Retherford twenty four hours to live before her ability killed them, and decided to leave out of a sense of mercy.

Retherford was taken to the Devana Medical Facility where the autochthonic, chimerical Elizabeth Ashwood came to visit her. While there, she learned about Retherford's plight and used Alexandria Ashwood's personal line of credit to hire several of Albion's most esteemed medical professionals and corporations to repair Retherford's body, in spite of the Abigail's protests. They were able to restore her limbs, but could not remove Fames' decay from her brain without lobotomising her. Afterwards, Retherford and Ashworth, who had recovered through other means, set off in pursuit of Fames, whose identity was disclosed to them by Rain Casey Florette in collaboration with Magister Clower and Secretary Hearse of the Oversight Sequence and Abigail Institute respectively. Fames' real name was Catherine Amy Vidicer, and she was a former NAU special forces operative who had later emigrated to Albion to become a member of the Abigail Institute, before leaving the Institute to become a contract killer.

Vidicer had booked a seat aboard the A.C.F. Viola, a luxury cruise liner set to depart from Albion later that day, having learned that the blackmail material which Fabian had been using to force her to work for him had been stolen by Ryuju Saeki and Christopher Morgan. Retherford, Ashworth, Ryuju Saeki, a number of police officers, and three of Vidicer's former compatriots in the Abigail Institute - Reagan Ivers, Ishikawa, and Violet Addaway - boarded the ship and located Vidicer, whom Police Captain Epley Ledeshire immediately shot, before revealing that he had been sent by Fabian to kill her in order to cover up his involvement in the Fames Murders. Ledeshire and his forces were defeated through the combined efforts of all those present, but Vidicer was knocked unconscious and severely wounded, lapsing into a coma.

Vidicer's former peers - who referred to themselves by their old squad name, the Avigilons - argued with Retherford's party over the eventual fate of Vidicer, with the former believing that she should be taken to the NAU or Reich to keep her out of the hands of Albion and Kimolia, while the latter wanted to execute her immediately in order to cure their afflictions. They fought, and Retherford's party emerged victorious, with Retherford and Saeki participating in a short but extremely intense fight against Addaway, who repeatedly passed over opportunities to instantly kill both of them in favour of toying with them and trying to subdue them nonlethally. Once Addaway had surrendered, Ishikawa had been subdued, and Ivers had been shot by Retherford after noticing that he was going to shoot at the group, Retherford's party killed Vidicer where she lay, removing her decay from their bodies.

Retherford, having been hired by Ashworth and thus the Abigail Institute by proxy in order to assist in the investigation, technically fulfilled the conditions of her contract. However, for instigating the fight against the Avigilons and killing Vidicer when their stated goal was to capture her, payment was withheld and no replacement equipment was issued, forcing her to consider purchasing a new pistol, as the last one had been destroyed in the fight against Vidicer in Fabian's home. Further, for employing lethal force without justification against her peers, she was fined 181,000 sovereigns, suspended for 21 days, and placed on 18 months' probation.

Retherford later met Addaway in a park, where they both unwound after their fight and spoke to each other about their personal lives. There, Retherford tried one of Addaway's cigarettes and found it to be unpalatable due to it being too luxurious. She also lamented that she hadn't had an opportunity to have a rematch with Vidicer.

## Trivia

* Evelyn earns ~24,000 USD annually. She takes on about 40 contracts a year and receives $300-2,000 per assignment that she resolves, skewing low. The minimum full-time wage in the real United Kingdom in 2020 was around 22,000 USD.
	+ An average associate Abigail earns 72,000 USD per year and takes on 6 cases in that time, earning $7,000-21,000 per commission. Generally, multiple Abigails are hired at the same time to resolve a situation; those who operate without others' assistance can earn up to 12x as much money per assignment.
* Most of Evelyn's rifle attachments wouldn't be compatible with her choice of weapon, as they were manufactured for the HK416 or AR-15 rather than the CAR-816. While the Caracal shares some similarities with the HK and AR, their attachments are not guaranteed to be mutually compatible.
	+ The inordinate amount of effort put into describing Evelyn's equipment was a subtle jab at other RPers who tend to put unnecessary detail into their characters' abilities, armaments and appearance.
* Evelyn experiences neither sexual nor romantic attraction. According to Eidolon-23, she would be intensely unhappy in any intimate relationship. Her aversions to sexuality and procreation are so intense that they allowed her to overcome Trench-59's effect upon her psychology, something that virtually no other person on the planet could've done.
* Evelyn's appearance was based off of a piece of art depicting the character Makima from the manga Chainsaw Man. Retherford's creator was not aware of the fact that the image they were using was from said work when they were writing her character application.
* Evelyn's blood type is O-, making her a universal donor.
* Evelyn has never received the government stipend that all Abigails are allotted, nor has she received any of the Civic Reward Points that Albion owes her. This is due to a clerical error which has not been resolved for the last 23 years. She is unaware of this fact and personally believes that she simply hasn't done anything to earn government funds.