Alois Richter

Alois Richter was a Technocratic mage and a member of the Thule Cabal, a group of mages in service of Nazi Germany.

History

Richter was already working for the Nazi regime when he Awoke in 1940, as they let him indulge in his radical genetics research. He quickly joined the Progenitors, but became frustrated by the slow past of the Technocracy's program. Eventually he deigned to join the Thule Society, a group of Nazi occultists that included a few Awakened members (mostly Nephandi). He learned occult summoning rituals, rationalizing them within his Paradigm as some sort of psychic focus technique.^[1]

Richter and his Awakened colleagues studied a tainted Node near Dachau, trying to perfect the occult weapons of the Third Reich. They discovered that a mage exposed to this "torture fountain" had their Avatar shattered. The resulting Avatar shards, like the Avatar Storm sixty-some years later, flayed the souls of most mages who entered the Umbra in these areas. Richter hoped to manipulate the Avatar shards into a weapon to be deployed against Awakened Allies, and engaged in horrific experiments on the "Fetch-marked," mages with a unique resistance to the Avatar shards.

In 1946, after the Wewelsberg Tribunal, Richter and a few colleagues escaped execution or Gilgul thanks to the Technocracy's Operation Sparkmaker. Richter was secretly allowed to continue his research as best he could without access to the Dachau nodes (which were by then in the custody of the Consanguinity of Eternal Joy).^[2] Even most other Technocrats, however, despised Richter for his crimes, and he was eventually relegated to a small, under-funded lab — until the Avatar Storm suddenly made his work at Dachau relevant again.^[3]

Richter used Enochian ritual magic to force Psychopomps to manifest, however briefly, in consensual reality, and collected tissue samples from them. He used these samples in an attempt to turn mages into hybrid Anakim with the power to manipulate the Avatar Storm. Most of his test subjects died horrifically, babbling visions while their flesh mutated. One hybrid, Peter Wu, survived the procedure and took Richter hostage when a Traditions cabal attacked Richter's lab.^[4]

References