Phillips Tournian Freckling Smithe-Wessin

The Smithe-Wessin family is wealthy, connected, and accustomed to a certain standard of Pure Blood privilege. When their son began showing onset signs of psionic ability, they disowned him. He had not yet reached his teenage years.
  The Holy Engineers Union took the child in and treated him as an equal. The adjustment was difficult: the gap between a life of luxury and the grinding labor beneath the Under Sea is not one a child crosses without cost. What closed that gap was talent. The young Pure Blood possessed an innate aptitude for complex medical machinery, and the Engineers recognized it before he did. Within years, he had become a vital resource to the Union, studying everything available regarding Strain anatomy and the co-existence between the fungal entity and the living body known as the Infection/Mortis Amaranthine relation. His peers and mentors sought him out as a prodigy for the creation of tools, equipment, and mechanical resources that served doctors and Grave Robbers across the fractured coast.
  Multiple attempts have been made by prominent Pure Blood families to extract Smithe-Wessin from what they perceive as imprisonment. The notion that a strong, able, brilliant Pure Blood could choose to live as a laborer among Darwinists is incomprehensible to them. Smithe-Wessin's own position on the matter is concise: "Your lofty families control the finances and resources of the wasteland; my mind and efforts control life and death. Besides, as a child all I ever wanted was for people to shut up during dinner and stop blathering about things that didn't matter. Down here, I can't hear the prattle."
  As Project Manager for the Holy Engineers Union, Smithe-Wessin oversees medical needs, health, and all organic engagement technologies in the mechanical pits beneath the Under Sea. His research centers on extending the lives of Union members. A good engineer takes decades to train; having them die a decade after reaching their stride is, by the Union's calculus, less than optimal. This practical urgency drove Smithe-Wessin deep into the study of infectious materials, means of preventing infection loss at death, and methods for reinforcing biological agents so that members of the faith stand a higher probability of passing through death with cognitive function intact.
  When the Curie needed someone brilliant, practical, and capable of working with the antagonistic Fallow Hopes, she handpicked Smithe-Wessin. He coordinated the tactical strike against the Flinty Farms infection facility, managed the subsequent research program, and oversaw the development of the Iron Lazarus injection, a modified Lazarus Draught with properties that could reshape the balance of power in the coming conflict with the Iron Works.