Robin Pearson, D.Asc

Robin Pearson is a character in QUIETUS.

Description:
Bobby (as she prefers to be called) is a calm, chipper scientist in her mid-thirties, who could pass for about five years younger if you had a keen eye for that sort of thing. Her black hair's swept off her face, and tidily trimmed to a nape-length bob. At the time of abduction, she had her nice green excursionary peacoat with pepper spray, keys, a cell phone, and a few sticks of gum in the pockets; office-acceptable black trousers and white blouse underneath; and modestly heeled dark green shoes. In her suitcase is a netbook, charger, several pen drives and empty museli bar packets, a journal submission or two she still needs to get round to reading, a labcoat that really should be stored in a separate plastic bag, and poorly-defined assorted necrologist paraphernalia. Robin herself is intelligent, pretty much married to her research, exasperated with society's mass stupidity but too optimistic to become a true misanthrope, and quite happy to tell you about the work she does. She understands full well that her line of study has a powerful "gross" factor for most, but still espouses how much use it can be to people. Having technically killed herself under controlled lab conditions and coming back a few hours apparently-unscathed, the prospect of imminent death may not completely faze her. Which, in itself, is kind of creepy for most.

Items/Abilities:
Necromancy! (Even though the "old name" for it is considered unscientific and bad for PR.) Robin tackled the nebulous magical energies relating to the dead with her can-do scientific approach, while completing her self-constructed thesis and Ph.D - all after graduating with honours on her Bachelor of Arcane Sciences. She's been told she has a real knack for the field (much to the chagrin of her Magibiology lecturer), and can navigate the spirit realm for your average homicide victim's soul in the space of three hours. Robin likes to be able to keep ahead of whole-human genome sequencings, so hones this skill as often as her other advocacy work and research allows. Also amongst her skills she's never had ethical clearance to perform outside the lab are restoring souls to vessels, raising the dead (with the permission of a body's prior owners, obviously), and generally communing with assorted entities on the non-mortal planes of existence.

Biography:
It bears mentioning, just to get some sort of perspective, that the Arcane Sciences were studied from whence Robin harked since their inception - an Event occurring roughly twenty years ago (in the late eighties) in an otherwise similarly-progressing universe and Earth to our own. Like any new change on their modern planet, humans approached it with wild speculation and rumour-mongering, before the scientific community rolled their sleeves up and tried to get some reputable information about the way people could suddenly control the elements. Much like astrophysics, some of the finer details about how all this exactly worked weren't agreed upon, but where facts could be found papers could be published. Robin grew up aspiring to work in some kind of practical capacity with the newly-discovered sciences, but didn't decide on necromancy until the scarcity of information intrigued her.

Suffice to say, it's been an uphill battle for her since. While the physics, biochemistry, and all the other "classical" disciplines have gone full steam ahead in finding out how the less unsavoury schools of magic play out in their reality, necromancy in all its forms suffered from severe negative public backlash. Robin's quick to exclaim the myriad useful applications were society to decriminalise necrology; of being able to clear cold cases, or use consenting bodies as a low-cost workforce, as examples; but faces criticism at every turn. Having said that, she's a poster child for necrologists worldwide, and does a lot of advocacy work explaining to schoolkids and community groups what her work entails so her colleagues can work with fewer protestors trying to torch their offices.