062: Gailteach

ENTRY 062: Gailteach

In every war, there are casualties, the disruption of social systems, and people who fall between the cracks and out of the human networks they knew. Gailteach was an operative, though for what agency, hypercorp, or government she does not recall. Doctors who have examined her believe that at some point Gailteach was exposed to multiple basilisk hacks, either at once or in close succession, and the damaging information is still cascading through the menton’s nervous system, causing rolling neural damage that continually rewrites the neural connections between individual sequences in her long-term memory. So while her recall remains perfect, the result is an asynchronous fugue, Gailteach’s recollection of past events continually shifted out of order.

Despite the damage, Gailteach maintains her significant linguistics skills, though in her personal speech is prone to rambling in multiple languages, not all of them natural. She maintains an existence as a researcher and translator, publishing original papers and articles on linguistics, and serves as a tireless on-call community literacy teacher, translator, and interpreter for her habitat. This selfless service has given Gailteach an excellent reputation, and the community provides more of her material and medical needs. For other matters, Gailteach relies on the assistance of her muse Egon, who is programmed to only communicate in certain synthetic languages.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
28	15	20	15	15	10	20	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
7	1	40	8	80	35	7	50

Morph: Menton

Skills: Academics: Linguistics 85, Academics: Neurolinguistics 80, Art: Logograms 50, Interests: Accents 60, Interests: Dialects 75, Interests: Synthetic Languages 80, Interests: Xenolinguistics 80, Interfacing 50, Investigation 50, Language: Native Gaelic 95, Language: Any*, Networking: Firewall 25, Networking: Scientists 25, Profession: Interpreter 75 Profession: Linguist: 80, Profession: Teacher 60, Profession: Translator 65, Research 77

Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Eidetic Memory, Hyper-Linguist, Math Boost, Multi-tasking, Oracles

Traits: Fast Learner, Mental Disorder (Severe phobia of psychosurgery), Neural Damage (Amnesia, Blackouts)

* Gailteach knows hundreds of human languages and dialects; common languages (Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, etc.) have a typical rating of 75; uncommon languages 60, and synthetic & obscure languages (Esperanto, Klingon, Sumerian, &c.) 50.

Using Gailteach

While she doesn’t advertise it, Gailteach is an occasional resource for Firewall, and the PCs are most likely to encounter her in that respect. Gailteach is aware of her memory issues and so will remember the PCs (and any NPCs) in different contexts on subsequent encounter, so that at any given time her general reaction to such characters may be positive, neutral, or negative; however Egon’s memory functions perfectly, and anyone who takes advantage of Gailteach’s faulty recollection (for example, she may mistake the character for a relative, wife, or old lover) will find themselves cut off from contact with Gailteach by all the means at Egon’s disposal. Playing Gailteach may be difficult for the gamemaster; keep a list of random foreign words and phrases around to pepper into her speech can help, and if the nature of her neural damage is difficult to grasp, treat it as early on-set senility.