Ekundayo Temitope

Game: Trinity (White Wolf, 1998)

My Experience: I was an intern at the Wolf while Trinity – then titled Aeon – was in early development. I wasn’t in that compartment, but I knew it was coming, and I was hungry for it. Halloween weekend of ’98, I was in Dayton at a Halloween gathering with some friends I’d made on a chat server. We went out to hit a local game store and I saw the book sitting there. That was pretty much the end of the weekend for me. I feel in love instantly. Almost three decades of gaming later, Trinity remains the setting in which I’d most want to be a PC. My only opportunity to play it was a short-lived play-by-email game in which the developer, Andrew Bates, was also playing incognito. I’ve run it a few times, including one complete playthrough of the original published adventure trilogy. I was lucky enough to provide input on several supplements and freelance (not my best work, sadly) on the Player’s Guide right as the line’s first incarnation was wrapping up. When Onyx Path rebooted the line a few years ago, I scored several chunks of the core book and a couple of supplements (which I think are among my best work).


Inspector Ekundayo “Kunda” Temitope, Forensic Engineer

Ekundayo was born in 2091 in Olympus, so many sublevels beneath the lunar surface that his neighborhood was in one of the original burrows, dug before grav crystals and modern radiation shielding made surface life practical. Always good with his hands, he found himself put to work at a young age, crawling through mechanical spaces too tight or technologically sedimented for an adult to access. When the next sector down the burrow suffered a blowout and poorly-maintained seals and hatches failed, Kunda was on the first rescue team through the airlock. He got a good look at the consequences of not keeping up with maintenance.

That experience stayed with Kunda. What started as child labor (not to put too fine a point on it) became a calling. Kunda worked himself up through Olympus’ sublevels and eventually earned a scholarship to Kenyatta University’s space systems engineering program. When he graduated, he returned to Olympus and started working in the habitat’s atmospheric engineering department.

Keeping the air in and the sieverts out was mostly fulfilling, but routine – until Olympus’ security agency came calling. They had a locked room murder on their hands and needed an expert to tell them if the life support had been tampered with. The detective work, the chance to figure out something more important than another fraction of a percentage of system efficiency, was fascinating. Kunda was hooked. He applied for the next academy class. Two years later, the day he met the minimum required time in a uniformed patrol assignment, the agency’s forensic engineering unit had transfer paperwork ready for him.

Early last year, Kunda was assigned to a joint task force investigating possible Aberrant infiltration of Luna. Although Kunda had kept up with the briefings his whole career, he’d never before had to directly face the possibility of encountering an Aberrant, one of the superpowered once-human monsters who’d appeared a century ago and turned the world into their plaything and battleground before united human military forces drove them into interstellar exile. His unease was certainly not tempered by the task force’s inclusion of several psions, the new and ostensibly sane and stable breed of exceptional humans who’d emerged when he was a teenager. But as the weeks went on, Kunda found himself accepting that the psions were people – people with exceptional gifts, yes, but still people.

Still, he wasn’t ready when two of the psions he’d come to call friends sat him down for a serious talk and told him he very likely had the potential to become one of them.

The decision to accept the offer wasn’t easy. But as Kunda spent night after sleepless night pacing through his cramped quarters, he realized that this was an opportunity to become better at everything he was. Engineer. Protector. Discoverer. How could he not rise to this challenge?

Now Kunda is a newly-fledged clairsentient, possessed of radically expanded perception and a crystalline attunement to the universe around him. He’s also on the precipice of a decision. With his leave of absence from his job expiring in a few weeks, it’s time for him to decide whether he wants to use his newly-gifted powers in service to Olympus, or throw in his lot with the Interplanetary School for Research and Advancement, the psi order of cryptic adventurer-scholars that awakened these powers for him.


Traits

Psi Aptitude: Clairsentience
Nature: Analyst (Kunda regains Willpower when a rational, scientific approach helps solve a problem)
Allegiance: ISRA

Attributes and Abilities

Strength •
Dexterity •••: Athletics •, Firearms ••, Martial Arts ••, Pilot •
Stamina •••

Perception ••••: Awareness ••, Investigation ••••
Intelligence ••••: Bureaucracy •, Engineering ••••, Linguistics ••• (Chinese, Swahili, Yoruba), Science •
Wits •••: Meditation •, Rapport •

Appearance •
Manipulation ••: Command •
Charisma ••: Savvy ••

Advantages

Backgrounds: Citizenship •• (Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria), Resources ••, Status ••• (Olympus security)

Willpower •••••

Psi ••••

Clairsentience Modes

Psychometry • (Psionic Echo): Kunda can touch an object or person and receive an impression of who or what has recently interacted with it.

Telesthesia • (Sense Mastery): Kunda halves all difficulty penalties for sensory extremes.

Telesthesia •• (Danger Sense): Kunda can attune himself to an area to become hyperaware of imminent physical danger there.

Telesthesia ••• (Sensory Projection): Kunda can project his senses several dozen meters away, even through solid matter.


Equipment

decent wardrobe, business casual and engineering jumpsuits
Olympus security badge
toolkit, patch kit, and biowelder
vocoder chipped with most languages commonly spoken in Olympus
Wazukana DX70 ruggedized personal computer
field suit (bashing resistance 1, lethal resistance 3)
Orgotek Wasp II pulse laser pistol (bioware, formatted)


Notes and Afterthoughts

I knew what I wanted to do with this character – the 22nd-century equivalent of an arson investigator – but making the narrative come together in a satisfying manner was surprisingly challenging. I’m happy with the result, though. While ISRA has always been hard for me to wrap my head around as an organization, clairsentience was my favorite psi aptitude from the book and has always remained so.