nigel

“Sometimes a bullet is the best medicine”

healer-warrior

Nigel is an odd duck, an older man, and a British healer/warrior with Indian roots and a history of using electrical currents to cure wounds rapidly. His grandfather served in India with the British Army, and although Nigel carries this heritage proudly, since adulthood he has become much more liberal politically than his conservative grandparents.  Although he is a social progressive, Nigel appreciates the old-world, conservative ethos of the Rimfire weapons manufacturing process and usually buys his weapons from them, although he is warming up to Zhang as well. In combat Nigel prefers Machine guns and Tazers, and is modest in victory and shows a stiff upper lip in times of trouble.
Nigel is known as much for his provocative experiments at the edges of accepted science as he is for his surprising agility in combat.  When Nigel was 40, he went back to school for a while and got a medical degree, but has never practiced. For many decades he has been using electrical currents to cure battle wounds rapidly, but now he is convinced that a much improved technology using Erythrium is eminently possible in the near future.
In the past ten years Nigel has embarked on a secret program whereby once or twice a year he will do some research and find a socially poisonous individual that he believes merits elimination. He then self-assigns himself as the assassin who will accomplish the task. Nigel enjoys using different methods for each of his secret assassinations, and his targets have ranged from political figures to organized crime figures and religious zealots.

colonial nostalgic

Nigel remembers fondly his childhood years of living with his grandparents in India. He says he learned a sense of his own responsibility from his grandfather, a sense of his own humanity from his grandmother, and acquired his love and fascination with science and engineering from his grandmother’s brother Uncle Harry.  This love for his family did not die when in early adulthood he moved away from their conservative political opinions and became a die-hard liberal.
When by himself Nigel often cooks traditional Indian dishes like Tandoori Chicken, which he shares with his pet snake and several of the small lizards that live in the jungle next to the New Dawn gang hangout. Nigel loves reptiles and snakes in general and communicates with them affectionately in a way similar to the way many people treat dogs and cats. But Nigel hates insects and feels that they bite him more than most other people.  He has a battery of sprays and herbs to ward off insects, and an even larger collection of unquents and creams to treat itchy bites.

Nigel cherishes his customized combat boots that he made from a pair he inherited from his grandfather. Sonny jokes that there is not much of the original boot left, only the bad smell.  Nigel often enjoys the conviviality of informal groups, but he avoids political conversations as he dislikes those he considers “idiot right wing loudmouths”.  In general he  doesn’t really enjoy conversations that are not discussions of some scientific or mechanical project, and this may be part of the reason Nigel’s romantic life has not always gone according to plan.

callsign: nigel

ability: caretaker

name: Nigel Henry Winterbottom

origin: English, born in India

affiliation: new dawn

  • This picture shows my grandmother Lila, my grandfather Colonel Liam Winterbottom in his Loyal North Lancashire Regiment uniform, and my father Hartley, who is dressed in Indian clothing, as they stood in the garden of their home in Bangalore, where I was born twenty years later.

    When I was six years old my own parents died on a voyage back to England when the steamer they were traveling on sank during a typhoon off the coast of Africa, so I grew up living with my grandparents in that home in Bangalore.

    Learning the high value of being useful was a big part of my childhood.  When I was very young, my grandfather was still in active service with his regiment.  As soon as I was old enough to hold a brush I was given the job of cleaning his boots when he came home from his daily work.  I remember being proud of how brightly I could get that black leather to shine. When my grandfather later retired from the army he gave me those old campaign boots, and told me to take care of them because one day they could be useful to me.

    Before marrying, my grandmother was Lila Henry, from the Henry cotton fabric manufacturing family in Manchester.  She and my grandfather moved to Bangalore a few years later when grandfather’s regiment was stationed in India.  Lila was an amateur healer, and an enthusiastic student of Indian herbal medicines, which she used to treat the wounds of many of grandfather’s companions in arms.

    I did not mix much with the local population, and I learned most of my life lessons from my grandparents.  They were my teachers, my playmates, my emotional support, and my inspiration.  Again, learning how to be useful was a big part of what I learned.  Early on I learned how to help my grandmother in her healing activities, accompanying her on both her collecting trips and her missions of mercy. I got my interest in non-conventional healing techniques from my grandmother.

    One of the few frequent visitors we had was Uncle Harry, my grandmother’s brother.  He was an engineer, and came to Bangalore frequently to oversee the installation of various equipment his company built.  In his free time he often built new water pumping stations for the locals, as well as designing new sanitation systems that did not dump the materials into the river as was traditional. I was quite pleased that he always gave me tasks related to his activities, such as keeping his drawing table clean, sharpening his pencils, and making sure his toolbox was filled with the appropriate instruments for the job at hand.  Uncle Harry also worked on small projects with me, helping me design and build a very fine tree fort in the garden as well as a pulley system with which we could have food sent up to us from the kitchen in the house.  I got my love of science and engineering from Uncle Harry.

    Grandfather Liam took up golf in his retirement, and I was assigned the duty of keeping his clubs and other equipment cleaned and ready to use. As I grew I learned how to replace the leather grips on the clubs, and I even learned a bit of machining from Uncle Harry so that I could repair grandfather’s pitching wedge after the head broke off when he hit it against a tree.

    When I began my own military career I was determined to use my grandfather’s old boots, but they were not in any condition to be suitable.  Time and the humidity in Bangalore had eaten away at the lacing holes, so I fashioned a pair of straps for each boot that would hold my feet firmly.  I replaced the squeaky old leather heels with composite rubber foam pieces that were much more comfortable as well as being silent.  The boots were also far too large for me, as my grandfather had unusually enormous feet, so I modified the toes and tipped them up to make the boots fit my smaller feet and be much better for running and jumping.  Today they fit me perfectly, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything, except perhaps a chance to see my old friends again and thank them properly for all they taught me.

  • Nigel loves science to the point that involving himself in scientific research projects is his favorite pastime.

    A few months ago, he launched an experiment testing pollution migration with his new equipment that he had developed with the help of his Paradox gang team members.  The project was actually a paid experiment in Northern Scotland for a company called Eco-Ore who labeled themselves a social activist organization acting as a watchdog of the polluting effects of tube extensive offshore drilling and mining in the area.

    For the project Nigel was documenting how microplastics make their way through the food chain, going from the sediments that have settled on the ocean floor, back into the surface layers of seawater and onto the shore, where they are ingested by land animals, resulting in a bioaccumulation that can cause liver toxicity.

    The experiment hoped to show how deep sea mining puts sedimented microplastics back in circulation and the negative effects on land animals, specifically reptiles.

    Nigel’s new equipment was able to mark individual microplastic particles in seabed sediment, then track their progression to the venomous adders (*Vipera berus*) who are the only indigenous snakes in Northern Scotland.

    Several months later during his last mandatory R&R cycle at UltraHorse Towers, he returned to Scotland to test several of the subject snakes, and measure the occurrence of any tagged microplastics in their livers.  He did find numerous instances of high levels of tagged microplastics, and in his final report he theorized that this was the result of the high levels of deep sea mining in the area by the company Petrolith.

    Back at UltraHorse Towers several weeks later, Nigel was astounded to receive a communication from Abel McTavish, the lead scientist at Eco-Ore, asking him to modify his data downward before re-submitting his report.  Suspicious, and a bit outraged, Nigel asked the researchers in the UltraHorse office to do some investigating.

    What he found out was that his client Eco-Ore was actually an agent of  Petrolith itself, operating under a pseudonym.  He immediately sets up a private meeting with Dr. McTavish on an encrypted online call.  Dr. McvTavish quickly confessed that he was being pressured by Boss Cunningham, the leader of a private army in Northern Scotland, who had been sent a warning to cooperate with Eco-Ore, along with pictures of his wife shopping, and his daughter in her schoolyard.

    Dr. Mctavish also told Nigel that Boss Cunningham, who controls the northern areas of Scotland, was being paid by Petrolith to issue permits for their deep sea mining operations in previously prohibited areas of the north Scottish coastline.

    Immediately after the call Nigel contacted a friend of his at Scotland Yard and arranged for Dr. McvTavish and his family to be secretly relocated under a new name to Australia, where he had grown up.

    He next sent his real unchanged report to the Scottish government in Edinburgh and gave the whole story to the reporter Oliver in UltraHorse Towers, who published it online on various truth news sites.  The result of these actions was that Petrolith was banned from all future activities in not only Scotland, but also Ireland and England.  Nigel was satisfied with this result.

    Unfortunately, a week later though he received a message telling him that some of Boss Cunningham’s thugs had located Nigel’s cousin in Manchester and roughed him up and threatened him with further abuse.

    Nigel’s reaction to this was that he now knew where he would be going on his next mandatory R&R leave from the Towers.  He would be going back to Scotland for a personal visit to Boss Cunningham.  While he was there he planned also to test a new iodine based nano active spray that might allow reptiles in their winter dens to be inoculated against the problems caused by ingesting prey that contained large quantities of microplastics.