Professor Pestilence

Background:   Dr. Damian Salas was once a promising infectious disease specialist working for a high-level medical research institute in Canada. Brilliant, obsessive, and unflinchingly cold, he believed modern medicine was too timid—restrained by ethics and public fear. His obsession was not with curing disease, but understanding its will—its purpose. He saw bacteria, viruses, and prions not as enemies, but as the architects of evolution, agents of entropy and change.   His descent began when he was diagnosed with a rare and incurable neurodegenerative prion disease. With no time and no ethical recourse, he broke every law of biology and medicine in a last, desperate bid for survival. Using stolen tech and forbidden theories on psychic biomapping, Salas underwent an illegal self-experimentation procedure that spread his consciousness across a microbiome of engineered microorganisms—a biome he could now control.   The procedure worked. He survived. But something within him was... broken.   He awoke with his disease halted—but now utterly dependent on its presence to live. His body and mind twisted in pain and ecstasy. Every nerve screamed. Every breath burned. But he could feel the life around him—the microscopic world teeming with violence, hunger, and evolution. He was reborn.   He forged a suit—not to protect himself from infection, but to house and regulate the living biome he now depended on. The world saw a monstrosity in a reverse hazmat suit, its glowing faceplate etched with sigils and biohazard symbols, its tanks hissing with viral clouds and his voice gurgling through filters like a preacher in a plague pit.   And he declared his mission: to spread infection as prophecy.   Personality:   Professor Pestilence is a fusion of scientific genius and religious fervor. He is grotesquely eloquent, speaking in sermons laced with medical terminology and apocalyptic metaphors. He sees himself as both victim and vessel—a martyr of modern medicine and a prophet of evolution through suffering.   He believes disease is divine. Pain is sacred. And that by bathing the world in controlled devastation, he will reveal who is worthy of the next biological age.   Detached from human morality, he is cruel but not sadistic. He experiments on the living not for joy, but for "clarity." His sense of humor is twisted—dry, sarcastic, and terrifyingly cheerful when describing mass death as "cellular liberation."   Despite his monstrous nature, he is terrifyingly persuasive. He speaks with the passion of a revolutionary and the authority of a doctor, making even intelligent listeners question whether he might be right.