Derek Hawthorne's Ascent

## Casualties

*“Focus, Derek. That’s not the worst part, though.”*
*“There’s a worse part? What could be worse than this?”*
*“The Committee wants you to come before them to give a full accounting of your actions.”*— Penny Hawthorne and Derek Hawthorne, *Esoterrorism*
**Derek Hawthorne's Ascent to the Committee** was the result of a series of events in the Wazir's war against the House that culminated in the Confrontation at Strickland's Safe House. In this confrontation, the Wazir gave Derek Hawthorne a flash drive of incriminating evidence against The Committee with the intent for him to use this information to join the Committee himself, ensuring that the House and Cassandra Cassidy would go to war and he could wipe out the survivors. After careful consideration, Derek decided to go along with this plan and, with the help of his sister Penny and father Nathan, Derek murdered Yuri and took his place on the Committee.

## Background

After determining that Dr. Edward Strickland and Cassandra Cassidy were working against the House, Derek and Shannon O'Reily attempted to investigate them. However, before they could concretely prove what had been happening, Cassandra cut a deal with the Committee, forcing Derek and Shannon to retreat. This gave Cassandra the opening she needed to ambush them at their hotel, with both of them only barely escaping alive. At this point, the Committee told Derek to attend a meeting with them the next day to discuss his failure. Cassandra and the Wazir began an assault on the House, while Derek, Shannon, and Penny tracked Dr. Strickland's location.

After tracking Strickland to a safe house, Derek and the Wazir had a conversation, beginning with the latter murdering Strickland at Derek's request. During this conversation, the Wazir presented Derek with a flash drive containing every immoral and illegal thing the Committee had ever ordered and explained that he wanted Derek to join the Committee. If he did so, he would unite the House against Cassandra, allowing the two of them to attack each other until one was weak enough for him to swoop in and wipe them out. However, before they could discuss further, Shannon killed his homunculus.

After Derek and Shannon briefly turned against each other, they were reunited with Penny and began to discuss their options; Penny wanted to immediately get to work avenging the agents Cassandra and the Wazir had killed, while Derek, who had confirmed less than 1% of the Wazir's allegations and thus believed all of them were accurate, was willing to entertain the plan. After a brief discussion with his soul manifesting as a janitor in the hallway, he officially decided to follow the Wazir's plan and join the Committee.

## Ascent

### Before the Meeting

As part of the plan, Derek did research into every Committee member, not just cataloging their various crimes but also trying to predict which one would likely put up the most fuss to his attempt to stand up to them. With this research, Derek decided to focus on Yuri, a Russian member of the Committee responsible for various crimes like the assassination of Angela Strickland and murder of his own daughter. Yuri had postponed his life by putting his soul inside an egg, so Derek had Penny track down the egg.

The next day, Derek, Shannon, and Penny traveled to Nathan's residence, the Hawthorne family home. Once there, Derek said his potential goodbyes to Shannon and Penny in case his plan failed, then confronted Nathan himself. Derek began the conversation by handing Nathan a letter detailing his plan, which Nathan read before burning it all to a crisp. They began to discuss the situation, including Derek's continued hang-up over the disappearance of Ashley Morgan and Nathan's awareness of her survival.

Once it became clear that Derek had thought the plan through and would execute it whether or not Nathan assisted him, Nathan took some of the documents the Wazir had provided Derek and, after revealing that it would be obvious where Derek got the files from, agreed to play his part in the plan: presenting incriminating documents on certain Committee members to *other* Committee members, giving them ammunition over their supposed comrades. After promising to give the files to the members he believed would be most willing to go along with Derek's plan, Nathan went inside. After spending about an hour inside, Nathan returned and summoned Derek to the meeting room.

### During the Meeting

After entering an empty meeting room with Nathan, Derek was soon greeted by the Committee using astral projection to appear despite being all over the world. After all eleven Committee members appeared, Derek briefly derailed the meeting by asking them how they were able to so effectively control the world, with the Chairman saying that it's easy to do so when they can see the future. This unintentionally confirmed one of the Wazir's major allegations - that the House knew the Wazir planned to destroy Wheatfield, Kansas with the Matheson-22 virus before he did so and let it happen anyway.

When Nathan attempted to get the meeting down to business, Derek flipped it, demanding total access to all of their secret information and resources across the entire organization. The Chairman amusedly noted that the meeting was supposed to be regarding Derek's failures in the Cassidy investigation, only for Derek to continue to defy him. In response, Yuri finally stood up and yelled at the blatant lack of respect, saying Derek should be killed for it; at this point, Derek pulled out Yuri's egg with his soul in it.

By now, the Chairman realized what would be coming next, recognizing that Nathan himself had done something similar when he ascended to the Committee, but made no effort to interfere. Derek revealed to the room that he knew Yuri's greatest crime: killing his own daughter because of a prophecy that said daughter would eventually cause his death. Yuri attempted to order the Chairman to arrest Derek, only for him to say Derek was already under arrest and Yuri should have protected his soul better. With nothing else to add, Derek crushed the egg, killing Yuri instantly.

### The New Committee Member

With his membership confirmed, Derek took Yuri's seat; however, his candor began to rub the Chairman the wrong way, causing him to detail how, if Derek did anything stupid, the Committee would kill everyone and everything he ever loved and destroy any power base he may have for retribution. Once Derek was actually sitting down, he announced his intent to make a deal with them. Though it was clear that the Committee still intended to punish or even kill him despite him technically joining their ranks, Derek bluffed that Karl had given him more information than he really had, giving him the ability to take down the House if his demands weren't met.

After additional prompting from the Chairman, Derek began to explain his ideology regarding the House's purpose; though the House did serve a valuable purpose suppressing the supernatural, it would be obsolete very soon because of modern science and technology, which both the Wazir and Cassandra were taking advantage of. Instead, Derek wanted to completely rearrange how the House worked; not only did he want to shift their main goal from suppressing the supernatural to balancing civilization (even including possibly revealing the supernatural to the world over several years themselves), but he wanted to unite all of the Divisions under one division head, encourage them to pool and share resources, and recruit supernatural agents like lilin and rakshasa.

With Derek's goals laid out, the other Committee members began to communicate telepathically, excluding Derek from the conversation despite his promotion. However, the Committee eventually decided to agree with Derek's proposal with a caveat: Derek would have the full resources of the entire House and all of its Divisions at his disposal, but he had two weeks to track down and eliminate both Cassandra and the Emerald Eye to prove that his plan had merit. Additionally, they agreed that while Yuri's death was fair game, Derek still did not demonstrate the proper respect to them, so they ended the meeting by blowing up his left eye and knocking him unconscious.

## Aftermath

The effect of Derek's ascent to the Committee was instantaneous. With the House working together instead of being at its own throat, Cassandra's lair was located in only a matter of hours, rather than the weeks it would have taken before. Though Division One was still forced to scrape by on minimal resources due to Cassandra's attacks on their assets, they were able to verify the lair's location, allowing Derek to gather a team to attack the lair and kill both Cassandra and the Wazir once and for all.

Derek's status as a Committee member, however, left him an easy scapegoat for Protocol Zero, a plan the other Committee members put in place to fully put the supernatural world under their heel no matter what ethics needed to be broken. His attempts to continue acting as a Red Room agent despite his newfound power and influence also made him a tempting target for Dracula, which eventually led to the Protocol Zero War.

It was also later discovered that Derek's ascension to the Committee was a vital part of Nathan's plan to destroy the House, a plan which included the slaughtering of the entire Committee by Stephen Hawthorne. By the end of the House's destruction, Nathan was the only survivor of the Committee.