A traumatic Awakening in the summer of 1997 was just the beginning of Thad’s emotional problems. The disappearance of most of his Pittsburgh friends a few weeks later compounded his issues and, while he zombied his way through art school and into the workforce, he never quite regained the paranoid zeal he once shared with his best friend Ornix. He spent the next five years pummelling his higher self into oblivion with drugs and alcohol – a method of “self medication” that ultimately failed spectacularly.

Thad has always had some measure of psionic ability, even prior to being “noticed” by the River Guardian. In the mid 1990s he and Ornix were the focus of Templar interest, as they fit many of the recruitment conditions stipulated in the Waking God Protocols.

Thad’s issues form the major thread of The Dualist. As of Transitional Voices his mind is “dislocated” into the body of Annathena Val.