Garnet

# Garnet Bartholomew For over nine centuries, Garnet Bartholomew has served the Empire in one form or another. He is neither a legendary conqueror nor a celebrated genius, but a man who simply remained at his post long after everyone else was gone. Born into the Waypoint class, he entered the Imperial Army as a commissioned officer and spent more than three centuries on the battlefield, eventually reaching the equivalent rank of major. His military career ended not through defeat, but through exhaustion. A spear thrust shattered his left eye and came within millimeters of killing him. During the long months of recovery, he realized he could no longer endure another lifetime of watching soldiers die in blood and mud. He resigned before the army consumed the rest of his centuries. His second career led him to **Esmeralda University**—officially a state research university, in practice the Empire's foremost institution for exterminating the grotesque composite lifeforms born from the excesses of postwar biotechnology. Research at Esmeralda rarely happens from behind a laboratory bench. It is conducted in ruined cities, abandoned facilities, and monster nests, where specimens are usually killed before they can be studied. Somewhere between extermination campaigns and field reports, Garnet accumulated a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, a doctorate, and eventually a professorship almost by accident. Over the centuries, his role gradually changed. As younger researchers pushed the boundaries of ethics and common sense, Garnet became the only consistently level-headed figure left within the institution. He stopped being merely a hunter and professor, and quietly became the person responsible for keeping Esmeralda functioning at all. Today he serves as **Chancellor of Esmeralda University**, a position he has held for roughly four and a half centuries. The Empire rewarded his service with a baronial title, though he declined to govern any territory, choosing instead to remain where he believed he was actually needed. His days are divided between directing chimera eradication operations, answering parliamentary investigations, containing catastrophes caused by brilliant but catastrophically irresponsible scientists, and ensuring that the people who have entrusted their lives to Esmeralda survive both the monsters outside its walls and the researchers inside them. Garnet often thinks the army would have been the easier life. Then another chimera appears. Someone still has to clean up the mess.