James Chilcott's page

A slightly ruffled dark suit
A letter confirming that James Chilcott has been offered the job of electronic technician at a lab in New York.
A hip flask containing the remains of a bottle of scotch James had been preserving since his return to the US in the height of prohibition.

Briefcase:
A large sheaf of notes and scrawls with details of failed experiment and a couple of notepads filled with arcane calculations and near unintelligible jotting
Colt M1911 pistol, loaded and with the safety on.
A box of .45 ACP rounds and an extra magazine, unloaded

Travelling Trunk:
A jumble of clothes, toothbrush, razor etc.
More notebooks full of arcane mathematical scribbling.
A large copper wire electromagnet which makes up most of the weight of the trunk.
A wooden box containing a glass vessel filled with a slightly luminescent gas with mirrors on both ends and a metal tube for the whole to he inserted into, the whole thing trails a pair of wires.

With a genius level IQ and childhood in which he knew very little of his parents James has developed a borderline sociopathic personality. Outwardly charming and friendly he feels very little attachment to others and feels no real qualms in crushing opponents to further his own scientific career. An example of this callousness would be the death of his his research assistant, while he wrote an apparently heartfelt letter to the man's parents he felt no real remorse and in fact resented the man for damaging his own career.

James Chilcott is a highly intelligent, extremely sceptical theoretical and experimental physicist. He was born in 1902 in Oxford, the first and only son of Mary Thompson and Walter Chilcott, a pair of Oxford graduates. Shortly after his birth his parents emigrated to the US to work as professors and researchers at Harvard and it was here that James spent most of his childhood and adolescence.

With two such busy and overachieving parents, James did not have much of a childhood. He was almost entirely raised by a nanny, his parents strange gods who appeared each evening to quiz him on his activities for the day and possibly give him a distracted pat on the head when he did particularly well at something. James had very little contact with other children until he reached school age and joined the local grammar school. He quickly discovered that he was years ahead of his peers in both intellect and learning, but years behind in social skills. He found it incredibly hard to relate to the other kids but also incredibly easy to manipulate them, turning the mob against anyone who crossed him or deflecting it's attentions away from those he favoured. In a few short years he had passed through the school system, having learned nothing of value from his teachers but much from his interactions with his classmates.

At the tender age of 17 James followed in his parents footprints and travelled to England to read Physics and Mathematics at Oxford. It was here that he finally found intellectual equals in his professors. Before the first year was out he had been moved off the normal degree program and given his own curriculum, consisting mostly of discussions with various ancient dons and conducting his own research. James quickly became fascinated with the emerging field of quantum physics and by the end of the fourth and final year of his time at Oxford he had a number of papers on the subject to his name and growing reputation as a man smashing his intellect against the very limit of human knowledge. Oh and a Masters in Physics.

He returned to the US and took up a research position at MIT, studying the practical applications of quantum mechanics. Over the years James's experiments grew stranger and stranger as he delved deeper and deeper into uncharted territory. As his publications became more and more arcane his fellows began keeping their distance and whispering behind his back, worried that an association with the great James would end their career. Even with his burgeoning reputation as a mad scientist James continued to find funding for his research and in 1925 set out to conduct his most daring experiment to date. Using an array of huge superconductors and a bank of items of his own invention he called a phased photonic beam generator (lasers) he proposed to teleport a small object a short distance and for it to arrive in exactly the same conformation that it left in.
What actually happened is the subject of a number of gag orders by the relatively newly formed FBI. The only two to see the results first hand were James himself and the grad student assisting in the experiment. The grad student refused to speak of what they saw and only a week later leapt from the top of their apartment building. James rationalised what he saw that evening as a hallucination bought on by lack of sleep combined with the strong magnetic fields involved and refused to speak to any reporters about the cause of the great ragged hole that had appeared in the side of the building that contained his lab or the reason for his assistant's suicide.

Shortly thereafter James was asked to leave MIT and discovered that the rumours surrounding his 'failed' experiment had made him unemployable in the science community, a pariah. Even his parents wouldn't have him in the house, worried that reporters would hound them and their reputations would be inextricably linked with that of their 'mad scientist' son. He spent the next 2 years living in near poverty, unable to conduct any research and feeling as if his finely tuned mind was rusting away with disuse.
During his banishment from the scientific community James was visited by a number of exceedingly strange men with russian accents who were uncommonly knowledgeable about his area of experiment and extremely interested in his failed experiment. When James refused to talk about his work the men grew increasingly aggressive, phoning him in the dead of night and resorting to threats of a most violent nature. All these threats prompted James to contact the FBI agents who had ordered him not to speak of his experiment on pain of arrest and imprisonment. Sadly for James their only advice was to move house and to purchase a gun and learn how to use it. With the promised violence of the threats against him ever increasing James took the FBI's advice to heart. He took the first science related job he could find in New York and spent the last few days until his tenancy was up purchasing a pistol and learning the ins and outs of its use and maintenance. By the time he boarded the bus to New York he was a proficient if not brilliant shot with the thing and was already thinking up a few remarkably simple ways to improve its firing mechanism.