Curie Tina Maria Polschend
Powering the Under Sea requires more than engineering. It requires a particular kind of faith, and Curie Tina Maria Polschend has built her authority on the intersection of both.
A Nation of Accensor and priest of the Church of Darwin, the Curie leads the Holy Engineers Union, the organization responsible for keeping the wind and water turbines producing electricity for the settlement. She pushes her followers to evolve themselves and their community through advancement of the mind, treating scientific progress and engineering excellence as inseparable from devotion.
The Curie's most controversial position is her stance on Psions. She is rumored to actively protect and adopt psionically inclined individuals into the faith, treating their abilities as an evolutionary step that should be encouraged rather than feared or destroyed. This stance has made enemies within the Under Sea and drawn attention from the Fallow Hopes at North Gate, neither of which is a trivial threat.
What keeps her alive is leverage. The Curie has made the settlement dependent on what her followers provide. The turbines run because the Holy Engineers Union maintains them. The lights stay on because the Union's faithful work until their fingers bleed, and some have died laboring rather than allow their equipment to fail on their watch. If control of those power sources ever shifted out of the Curie's hands, there is little doubt that the wholesale slaughter of psions and Holy Engineers Union members would begin immediately.
When the opportunity arose to strike against the Iron Works' life-extension programs, the Curie handpicked Project Manager Phillips Tournian Freckling Smithe-Wessin to coordinate with the Doctors of the Final Plague. The operation required placing Holy Engineers Union resources and personnel in the field alongside the antagonistic Fallow Hopes, a situation that demanded someone brilliant enough to deliver results and practical enough to keep two opposing faiths from tearing each other apart.
A Nation of Accensor and priest of the Church of Darwin, the Curie leads the Holy Engineers Union, the organization responsible for keeping the wind and water turbines producing electricity for the settlement. She pushes her followers to evolve themselves and their community through advancement of the mind, treating scientific progress and engineering excellence as inseparable from devotion.
The Curie's most controversial position is her stance on Psions. She is rumored to actively protect and adopt psionically inclined individuals into the faith, treating their abilities as an evolutionary step that should be encouraged rather than feared or destroyed. This stance has made enemies within the Under Sea and drawn attention from the Fallow Hopes at North Gate, neither of which is a trivial threat.
What keeps her alive is leverage. The Curie has made the settlement dependent on what her followers provide. The turbines run because the Holy Engineers Union maintains them. The lights stay on because the Union's faithful work until their fingers bleed, and some have died laboring rather than allow their equipment to fail on their watch. If control of those power sources ever shifted out of the Curie's hands, there is little doubt that the wholesale slaughter of psions and Holy Engineers Union members would begin immediately.
When the opportunity arose to strike against the Iron Works' life-extension programs, the Curie handpicked Project Manager Phillips Tournian Freckling Smithe-Wessin to coordinate with the Doctors of the Final Plague. The operation required placing Holy Engineers Union resources and personnel in the field alongside the antagonistic Fallow Hopes, a situation that demanded someone brilliant enough to deliver results and practical enough to keep two opposing faiths from tearing each other apart.
Nation of Accensor priest of the Church of Darwin; leader of the Holy Engineers Union and controller of the Under Sea's power infrastructure
Children
