Dr. Elizabeth "Lizzy" Catcher

Alchemist of the Stargazer Exploration Company • Electrum Theorist • Reclusive Scholar

Dr. Elizabeth Catcher—known to the few who dare familiarity as Lizzy—was born in 1842 in the soot-stained industrial quarter of Leaden Ward, a place where steam, gears, and ambition mixed in the air like fog. Now, in 1870, she is twenty-eight years old and already one of the most quietly influential researchers in the Stargazer Exploration Company (SEC)—though few outside the Cove know her name.

Early Years & The Mercurial Society

Lizzy was born in 1842 in Leadenward, a place where the reek of machine oil clung to the air and the clang of forges never ceased. Her childhood was defined by a restless fascination with mechanism and material. While other children played in alleyways, Lizzy took apart broken regulators from the shipyards and reassembled them better than before. She could identify alloys by scent, predict the tensile failure of metal plates by tapping them with her knuckles, and memorise dense technical treatises long before she understood what it meant to be “gifted.”

Her talent drew notice early. A recruiter from the Mercurial Society, that prestigious and notoriously hierarchical alchemical guild, visited Leadenward and immediately recognised the potential in the wiry, sharp-eyed girl. Lizzy began her apprenticeship at sixteen and excelled with startling speed. She absorbed the Society’s metallic theory faster than her instructors could test her, mastering controlled reactions that other students refused to attempt.

And yet, the more she learned, the more she realised the truth the Society carefully hid behind silvered rhetoric. Their research was dictated by sponsors with deep pockets, their discoveries guarded behind vault doors, and every formula was valued not for its usefulness, but for its profitability. What they called “Alchemy in service of civilisation” was nothing more than Alchemy in service of the elite.

Lizzy stayed long enough to earn her credentials. Then she walked out without a backward glance, determined never again to bow her head to those who measured knowledge in Gold.

The Day She Met the Stargazer

Five years ago, fate—or perhaps the ocean’s own mischief—brought the Stargazer limping into Leadenward after a violent encounter at sea. One of the ship’s Electrum engines had suffered a catastrophic destabilisation, and the SEC engineers, were at their wits’ end.

Lizzy encountered the repair crew by accident. She had simply wandered down to the docks to clear her mind, only to overhear a frustrated argument about an Electrum resonance cycle that made no sense whatsoever. Her annoyance overcame her caution. She stepped forward, pointed out that the calibration had been reversed, and offered a correction so simple and elegant that the entire crew fell silent.

Captain Maximus "Max" Orion Hawkes watched her work—a few deft adjustments, a muttered calculation, and then a smooth, stable whirr of Electrum that had eluded his engineers for hours. Her hands moved with confidence, her eyes with the intensity of someone who understood things at a fundamental, instinctive level.

Hawkes didn’t ask for credentials.

He simply asked if she wanted a job.

And Lizzy, for reasons she still doesn’t fully understand, said yes.

Within a month, she had relocated to Streamrise Cove, taking up residence in the company’s deepest, most secretive laboratories.

Her Work Within the Stargazer Exploration Company

Lizzy’s official title—Electrum Research Specialist—barely scratches the surface of what she actually does. Within the Cove, among the echoing metal ramps and humming conduits, she is the leading authority on the behaviour of Electrum in both natural and engineered states.

Her days are filled with the study of ancient pre history era artifacts, pieces of technology whose true purpose remains a mystery. Lizzy handles them with the caution of a bomb-disposal expert and the reverence of a Scholar, cataloguing every glyph-etched disc, every resonance rod, and every fragment that seems to hum with trapped energy.

Her research extends into reverse-engineering pre history energy systems, tracing the logic of long-dead engineers who carved impossible circuitry into stone and metal. She works endlessly to stabilise Electrum reactions for modern use, refining the delicate hybrid engines that allow the Stargazer to fly, submerge, and shift seamlessly between operations.

She has devised protocols now used throughout the Company for safely extracting artifacts from their housing and locations —procedures that have already saved several engineers from painful, glowing mishaps. Her notes on anomalous field samples are legendary in their precision, and more than one expedition has returned with a “curiosity” specifically because they knew Lizzy would want to see it.

Hidden in the Cove’s restricted archives lies a mountain of her unpublished work: full treatises on glyph-matrix resonance, theoretical reconstructions of "circuitry", and extrapolations about a civilisation that seemed to understand energy in ways modern alchemists can only dream of. The Company’s leadership encourages her to publish. Lizzy demurs every time, insisting that the theories are still incomplete—still imperfect. The truth is simpler: she is terrified of being misunderstood.

Daily Life

Lizzy lives in a narrow room carved into the stone wall of the Cove’s inner ring. From her bed she can hear the soft, steady thrum of generators and the distant rush of ocean water where the cavern opens to the sea. Her quarters are sparse: a single shelf with her notebooks, a small brazier for heating tea, and a battered trunk full of clothing that she never remembers to mend.

Her days follow a rigid and almost monastic rhythm.

She rises early, often before dawn, brewing a pot of bitter chicory coffee that she drinks without sugar. The quiet, empty gantries of the Cove are her favourite place to think. She walks them slowly, cataloguing the scent of salt spray, the shifting hum of machinery, and the restless movement of the ocean beyond.

From morning until late evening, she works in the laboratories—sometimes alone, sometimes with a pair of terrified junior engineers who have learned never to interrupt her mid-calculation. She forgets meals unless someone physically drags her to the cookhouse, and her breaks consist almost entirely of her solitary Oshi games. She plays with intense concentration, using the slow, deliberate movements of the game to unravel problems that elude her in the lab.

Her reading habits are similarly solitary. She devours alchemical journals, Engineering papers, and obscure treatises on metallurgy. Fiction, poetry, or anything resembling social literature might as well not exist to her.

Her lab space is organised to the point of obsession—every beaker exactly aligned, every instrument meticulously cleaned—until inspiration strikes, at which point the room becomes a landscape of open tomes, glowing Vessels, and muttered theories. She moves through this chaos with total confidence, recalling the placement of every object even when the floor is covered in chalk diagrams.

She rarely attends crew events. She finds small talk exhausting, laughter confusing, and the warmth of company uncomfortable in ways she cannot explain. The crew has learned to accept this, though she occasionally appears at gatherings with a distracted expression, stays for ten minutes, then flees back to the labs claiming she has “a thought” she must chase.

A Solitary Nature

Lizzy’s career, brilliant though it is, has come at the cost of companionship. She has no close friends outside the Cove, and even within the Stargazer Exploration Company, her relationships are more professional than personal. People simply exhaust her. Their emotions move too quickly, their questions too inefficient, their expectations too strange.

Yet despite her isolation, she feels a deep loyalty to the Company. She respects Commander Felix for his clarity of thought, admires Maxwell Hawkes for his unshakeable integrity, and even tolerates the tendency of certain engineers to create explosions “for learning purposes.” She listens when the crew brings her problems, even if she answers with blunt honesty instead of comforting words.

Strangely, people trust her.They know she will not lie.

And in a world shaped by storms, politics, and secrets, that is a rare thing indeed.

Quirks and Habits

Lizzy hums subconsciously when performing delicate experiments—always the same three bars of an old Leadenward lullaby, the only fragment of her childhood she kept. She labels every sample she collects, even the ones that appear useless, convinced that one day the pattern will matter. She never throws anything away; she reuses every shard of metal, every scrap of paper, every failed reaction.

She plays Oshi not for leisure, but as a kind of meditation. The shifting stones help her untangle the pattern-logic of Electrum matrices, and she often reaches solutions mid-game that have eluded her for days.

Her desk holds a small collection of smooth river stones she claims improve “mental grounding,” though even she cannot articulate how. She works for such long stretches that the engineers have established an informal rule:

if Lizzy has not moved in ten hours, someone must check if she has forgotten to eat.

She is perpetually cold, wearing layers even in the warmest parts of the Cove. No one knows why—not even Lizzy—but she suspects some alchemical exposure in her youth left lingering effects.

Philosophy

To Lizzy, Alchemy is not merely the transmutation of materials, but the unraveling of potential hidden within the world itself. It is the study of what might be, not only what is. She sees The Burn not as a catastrophe but as a puzzle, a scar that speaks, and Electrum as its most intimate whisper.

Where The Mercurial Society chased prestige and wealth, Lizzy chases understanding. She wants to know how Titan engineers shaped energy, how they carved impossible circuits into stone, how they harnessed a power that modern scholars barely comprehend.