Of course, everyone has secrets: things we did or had happen to us that we don't tell another living soul if we're smart about it. Secrets are wonderful currency to the men who spend the world away. But then there are those who take their bright, lovely secret and throw it out to anyone who would listen - and usually, no one will.

That is the sort of secret that Simon DuChance has. He's been shouting it out loud for almost nineteen years now. You can see it in pseudo-academic journals, strange magazines that cater to the "fortean" side of things, odd conventions and other, weirder formats. And that is because the news he has to tell is very weird indeed.

His secret is this: ghosts are real, and they're tears in the fabric of time and space.

But that's not the sort of thing that "serious" scientists want to hear. They scoff at his claims. They wonder how on earth someone could have graduated from Cornell with a Masters in Physics and still believe in such nonsense. They're really puzzled how he could have traveled the whole world over, looking for proof that just doesn't seem to be there, and yet continue on. And they suppose it's a good thing that his parents died young and wealthy and left it all to him, or he'd be knocking on their doors trying to get a grant.

Simon has incredible luck preaching to his "choir," of course, but, though he finds their encouragement helpful, he doesn't want that choir at all. He's tired of shaking the hands of middle-aged men who think JFK was an alien clone, or wide-eyed conspiracy theorists who ramble on about the microchips in our smallpox vaccination scars. He's desperate to get published in a journal that won't have an article on bigfoot's sex life following his own.

But he continues on, knowing that one day he will be proven right. He has a dream that keeps him going: in the dream, he's sitting down and talking with Dr. Stephen Hawking, and everything he's saying to the man is being agreed with, and added to, and compounded upon. It's every physicist's dream, one supposes, but moreso for him.

Name: Simon DuChance, Temporal Investigator
Age: 39
Nature: Visionary
Demeanor: Scientist
Motivation: to be proven right
Group: none

STR: 2 DEX: 2 STA: 2

CHA: 1 MAN: 4 APP: 2 (Manipulation Specialty: Annoying)

PER: 3 INT: 3 WIT: 3

Talents: Alertness: 3, Brawl: 1, Expression: 1, Intuition: 1, Streetwise: 1

Skills: Research: 3, Technology: 1

Knowledges: Culture: 2, Enigmas: 2, Investigation: 4 (Paranormal), Linguistics: 3 (ENGLISH: French, Latin, German, Swahili), Occult: 1, Science: 4 (temporal physics)

Backgrounds: Contacts 2, Influence 2, Resources 3, Personal Library 3, Artifact 2

Willpower: 5

Specialties:
MANIPULATION: Annoying - gets what he wants by being persistently persistent, until the other person coughs up the goods just to be rid of hourly phone calls, daily visits and emails and weekly letters.

INVESTIGATION: Paranormal - anything out of the bounds of normal science is his specialty, though he spends most of his time trying to explain what he's found out via normal science, anyway.

SCIENCE: Temporal Physics - theories and formulae regarding the passage of time, and its ability to be relative. As he spends his time chasing 'temporal anomalies' that most would call ghosts, this comes in rather handy

CONTACTS: Paranormal Scientist Circles - "paging Fox Mulder?" He knows two people to call if he needs a question answered or a quid pro quo favor done. Dr Bob Snobbertz of MIT is a fellow Temporal Researcher that he met four years ago at Disinfocon (don't laugh - it's real) and Jackie Gleer is researching the 'temporal seams' at Bangu in the Central African Republic.

INFLUENCE: Independent Researchers - Basically, if he needs to he can get certain favors done without having to ask something in return, but not too terribly much.

ARTIFACT: Fetish Skull

While in Africa, Simon found this skull in a hut at the site of a major "seam" in the CAR. After he was finished investigating the site, he took the skull as a souvenir, not realizing its' true power.

An Abambo (African Wraith) was necromantically bound to the skull through a long, gruesome ritual. While it is trapped in the skull, it emits a palpable resonance of earth-shattering fear that affects any ghosts in the immediate area: any who cross into that area are gripped with horrible, terrible fear and are most likely to flee, unable to get the hideous, nail-ridden grin of the skull out of their minds. If left in the open, the effect will resonate for thirty square feet - if in a room of 30 sq. feet or less, the effect will go to the walls and go no further.

If the Wraith thusly affected realizes in-character that there's nothing to fear, she can try again and, if she makes make a successful Willpower roll (diff of her permanent Willpower - 10), the effect is dispelled for her. From there on out she can enter the field and the skull's effect will have no further power over her.

The Abambo within the skull is caught in a terrible dreaming state, unable to break free from the horrors it is witnessing and unaware of its surroundings. If the skull were ever destroyed, the wraith would be freed, and there would be some real bad hell to pay...