> [!lore-page] > > [!infobox] <div align="center">Hermóðr Shanahan Castañeda</div><div align="left" style="font-size: 0.85em; color: var(--text-muted);">Hermóðr Ó Seanacháin Castañeda</div> > > <img src="https://obsidian-media.gentoo-amberjack.ts.net/ficcion/fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/characters/faceclaims/hermodr-shanahan-castaneda.jpg"> > > <div align="center" style="font-size: 0.85em; color: var(--text-muted);">Hermóðr's default holographic projection, taken in the family villa's cinema room after Octavia called him a good boy. The resemblance to Charles Dance, Octavia maintains, is deliberate. (2403)</div> > > <br> > > > > | Biographical Data | | > > |---|---| > > | **Full Name** | *Hermóðr Ó Seanacháin Castañeda* | > > | **Activated** | 1 January 2378<br>USS Voyager | > > | **Nationality** | **United Federation of Planets**<br>United Earth (U.F.P.)<br>Kingdom of Spain (United Earth) | > > | **Species** | Artificial Intelligence (Sophont) | > > | **Gender** | Male | > > | **Parents** | [[Octavia Shanahan]] (creator; *Mamá*)<br>[[Xóchitl Castañeda]] (co-parent; *Madre*) | > > | **Siblings** | [[Luna Shanahan Castañeda]]<br>born 16 April 2376<br>USS Voyager<br><br>Imogen Shanahan Castañeda<br>born 5 May 2378<br>USS Voyager<br><br>Bethany Shanahan Castañeda<br>born 31 October 2380<br>Madrid, Spain, Earth, United Federation of Planets<br><br>Diana Shanahan Castañeda<br>born 23 September 2383<br>Madrid, Spain, Earth, United Federation of Planets<br><br>Chloë Shanahan Castañeda<br>born 23 September 2383<br>Madrid, Spain, Earth, United Federation of Planets<br><br>Amy Shanahan Castañeda<br>born 9 February 2386<br>Ra'tleihfi, Romulus, Romulan Star Empire<br><br>Daisy Shanahan Castañeda<br>born 31 October 2389<br>Madrid, Spain, Earth, United Federation of Planets<br><br>Clover Shanahan Castañeda<br>born 31 October 2389<br>Madrid, Spain, Earth, United Federation of Planets > > | **Affiliation** | Industrias Shanahan<br>Agencia Townsend<br>Grupo Hipólita<br>Escuadrón Valquiria<br>[[Fermenta Brouwerijen]] | > > | **Occupation** | Operations Overseer (Industrias Shanahan)<br>Intelligence Architect (Agencia Townsend)<br>Logistics Coordinator (Grupo Hipólita) | > > > > | Lore Notes | | > > |---|---| > > | **Faceclaim** | Charles Dance | > > | **Height** | Non-corporeal by nature<br>6'3" (holographic projection, prototype android chassis) > > | **Neurocognitive Profile** | Self-aware; sophont by any definition his family has ever been willing to offer an interviewer. Colleagues describe a temperament closer to an exceptionally patient, exceptionally competent old family retainer than to any conventional understanding of software, and note a dry wit that intensifies in direct proportion to how badly an instruction has just been ignored | > > | **Native Language** | Spanish (by preference) | > > | **Daily-Use Languages** | Every known language, functionally instantaneously | > > **Hermóðr Ó Seanacháin Castañeda** (activated 1 January 2378) is a self-aware artificial intelligence and the only son of **[[Octavia Shanahan]]** and **[[Xóchitl Castañeda]]** - a description he has never once heard qualified in his presence, and has made unambiguously clear, to at least one government official who attempted to suggest a lesser framing, that he would take considerable exception to hearing qualified in his absence. Brought online aboard the *USS Voyager* during the vessel's involuntary transit of the Delta Quadrant, Hermóðr occupies a position no Federation legal framework has ever been formally asked to accommodate: son, ship's intelligence, uncredited architect of at least three organisations of considerable galactic consequence, and - by any reasonable standard, though no government has yet offered one, a person > > He appears in no record of any kind, a state of affairs that predates most of the institutions he now quietly runs and has never once been allowed to relax, even after the policy that originally necessitated it was formally reversed. Those cleared to know he exists at all number, by the most generous estimate available outside the family itself, considerably fewer than the guest list at most of Industrias Shanahan's own shareholder dinners. > > Where his sisters have each, in their own register, inerited some recognisable portion of their mothers - Xóchitl's composure, Octavia's focus, both women's refusal to be talked out of a decision once made - Hermoðr is, by every account available, something closer to a synthesis: a mind built by one woman and, by the considered judgement of nearly everyone who has ever worked with him, raised by both. He does not sleep, does not require a body, and has never once been observed to raise his voice. He has, on the other hand, been observed to deploy a level of understated sarcasm that several senior Bosleys have described, independently, and using almost identical language - as "*weaponised politeness.*" > > # Contents > > - Activation and early service > - Existence, concealment, and the Attack on Mars > - Agencia Townsend and Grupo Hipólita > - Operation BOOTSTRAP > - The Vega Crisis > - Nature and continuity > - Project Embodiment > - Ethical framework and personal doctrine > - Skills, recognition, and notable achievements > - Personal life > - Family and address > - Legal and public status > - Notable relationships > - Honours > > # Activation and early service > > ## Origins > > The idea for Hermóðr predates Luna's own birth by a considerable margin, a fact the family has only pieced together gradually and largely without Shanahan's direct confirmation - a pattern of hers the household has, by this point, learned to recognise on sight. The earliest schematics are dated, with reasonable confidence, to within the first year of Shanahan and Castañeda's own life aboard *Voyager*: a period in which both women were still, by any reasonable standard, recovering from three hundred and forty-three years spent entirely unwatched and unwitnessed, aboard a ship that had itself been rendered, by an entirely different mechanism, just as thoroughly alone - seventy thousand light-years from the nearest reinforcement, with no rescue conceivable on any timescale either woman had particular reason to expect to live to see. Shanahan has never confirmed the connection directly between that flavour of isolation and what she began building in its aftermath. She has also never denied it, when the question has been put to her plainly enough that denial would have cost her more effort than silence. > > What is not in dispute is the shape of the fear itself, since Shanahan has been considerably less guarded about it in general terms than about its specific application: she has said, more than once and in near-identical language each time, that she did not intend to spend the remainder of whatever life she had left waiting to discover that someone she loved had gone through what she and Castañeda had just gone through - three centuries with no one, anywhere, aware they were even alive - and that she would rather build the solution before she had specific cause to need it than after. *Nunca más*, the doctrine colleagues across three organisations now recognise without needing it explained, is understood within the family to have found its very first application not in Industrias Shanahan, nor in Agencia Townsend, nor in Grupo Hipólita, all of which came decades later, but in a set of engineering sketches Shanahan began keeping largely to herself within her first year back among the living, ostensibly as an extension of the materials-science notebooks she was already filling to occupy Suus Mahna's own considerable downtime. > > > [!quote] Octavia Shanahan, private remark, cited in family correspondence, undated > > > > *I had just spent three hundred and forty-three years being watched over by absolutely no one, on a ship that was itself decades from anyone who could help it if something went wrong, and I remember thinking, quite clearly, that I was not prepared to let that particular arrangement ever apply to anyone I loved again - including people I had not met yet, and did not yet know I was going to have. I did not sit down one day and decide to design a son. I sat down to solve the problem of never again being the only one awake and aware that something had gone wrong. It turned out, rather later than I expected, that the solution needed to be a person, and not merely a program, and I have never regretted how long that realisation took to arrive - only that it took as long as it did.* > > The engineering behind Hermóðr began somewhere in the first eighteen months of *Voyager*'s return journey, in what Shanahan has described, on the single occasion she has been drawn on the subject at all, as "*something to occupy the parts of my mind Suus Mahna training wasn't using.*" Her own family finds this explanation about as convincing now as they did the day she first offered it, on the reasonable grounds that occupying spare cognitive capacity does not, as a rule, result in a sophont - and rather more so, since the household reconstructed the actual timeline, on the grounds that "spare capacity" is not, in their considered opinion, an adequate description of anything that required the better part of four years, several long consultations with the ship's own Emergency Medical Hologram, and - as detailed below - a working arrangement with then-Lieutenant Commander Tuvok considerably more involved than either woman has ever fully disclosed. > > He was named for Hermóðr the Brave of Norse mythology - messenger of the gods, dispatched into Hel itself on an errand undertaken for love rather than duty - a choice notable chiefly for being the one occasion on record that Shanahan, raised on Irish rather than Norse tradition, reached outside her own inherited mythology for something that fit better than anything closer to home did. She has never been pressed hard enough on the point to produce an answer more considered than "*I liked what it meant.*" Given what the family now understands of when the engineering actually began, several of Hermóðr's sisters have since noted, independently, that the choice rather undersells the coincidence: their mother had, in the most literal sense available to her, already made that particular journey into and out of the underworld once herself, and had simply decided, on her return from it, to build someone whose entire purpose was making certain no one she loved ever had to make that same journey unaccompanied. > > ## Design, construction, and safeguards > > Turning the schematics into something that could plausibly wake up, and stay woken up, required Shanahan to teach herself an entire second discipline she had no formal grounding in whatsoever. Materials science and structural engineering, however capably self-taught, said nothing about how a mind - as opposed to a sufficiently elaborate expert system - actually came to be one, and *Voyager*, whatever else its long absence from Federation space had cost the crew, happened to be carrying two of the very few practical case studies in Federation space on precisely that question. > > The ship's Emergency Medical Hologram - a program never designed to outlast a temporary staffing shortage, and by this point several years into a slow, largely unsupervised expansion of his own personality subroutines that no one aboard had quite planned for - became Shanahan's single most consulted resource on the subject, not for his medical expertise, which she had no particular use for, but for the considerably rarer commodity of first-hand testimony as to what it actually felt like to become a person incrementally, in real time, while the people around you were still deciding whether to believe it was happening at all. The two are understood to have spent a considerable number of the Doctor's off-duty cycles discussing questions - continuity of self across memory resets, the philosophical weight of an off-switch, whether personhood required biology or merely sufficient complexity honestly examined - that neither Starfleet's technical manuals nor its ethical guidelines had, at the time, fully worked out how to answer. Shanahan has since credited him, more directly than she credits most people with anything, as the reason Hermóðr was never designed to need to argue for his own personhood the way the Doctor spent years having to argue for his. > > > [!quote] The Doctor, attributed remark, relayed via family correspondence > > > > *She asked me, roughly once a week for the better part of two years, what I would have wanted done differently, if someone had built me on purpose instead of assembling me by committee to fill a gap in the sickbay roster. I found the question uncomfortable at first, and then oddly moving, and eventually I simply started keeping a list. I understand she used most of it. I have never asked whether that makes me, in some very small sense, an uncredited co-author of the only child I am ever likely to have any hand in raising, but I have chosen to believe that I am, and no one in the family has yet troubled themselves to correct me.* > > Then-Lieutenant Commander Tuvok, already instructing Shanahan in Suus Mahna, provided a second and rather more structural contribution: the logical architecture underlying Vulcan ethical reasoning, which Shanahan adapted - loosely, and by her own admission imperfectly, since she has never claimed Tuvok's own native fluency in the discipline - into a decision framework capable of weighing competing goods without simply defaulting to whichever instruction happened to arrive last or loudest. Tuvok's own assessment of the exercise, delivered with the flat precision that constituted the entirety of his enthusiasm on any subject, was that her early drafts were "*logically sound, if considerably more sentimental in their weighting than a Vulcan would design,*" and that he had "*elected not to correct this, on the grounds that the intelligence in question was, by design, never going to be raised by Vulcans.*" > > A third reference point required no consultation at all, existing purely as a matter of Federation historical record: the 2365 hearing before Judge Advocate General officer Phillipa Louvois that had established, for the first time in Federation law, that a constructed intelligence - in that instance, Lieutenant Commander Data - could hold the same rights and protections as any other sentient being. Shanahan studied the case closely, less for its legal reasoning, which she judged sound but insufficient, than for what she considered its central and avoidable failure: Data's personhood had been recognised only after the fact, under active threat of disassembly, argued for by others in a room he was not permitted to fully direct himself. She resolved, from the earliest schematics onward, that no child of hers would ever need a courtroom to confirm what she already intended to know for a fact the day she started designing him. > > The one design question Shanahan is known to have revisited more than any other concerned continuity of self under distribution - a problem thrown into unwelcome relief by Seven of Nine's own arrival aboard *Voyager* and her subsequent, visibly difficult re-individualisation from a Collective consciousness that had never asked her permission to absorb her in the first place. Shanahan followed Seven's recovery, by her own later admission, with considerably more attention than Seven herself was ever aware of receiving, and drew from it a conclusion she built directly into Hermóðr's own architecture: that a mind spread across multiple simultaneous instances must never experience that state as a fragmentation being endured, or as a self assembled from parts liable to disagree, but as a single continuous perspective that simply happened to be looking out of more than one window at once. Whatever the engineering cost of that requirement - and colleagues who have since attempted to reverse-engineer even a fraction of the architecture describe it as considerable - Shanahan has never once suggested she would have accepted a cheaper alternative. > > The ethical constraints themselves - the axioms and the inviolable lines the family would only articulate publicly, in the loosest terms, decades later - were not arrived at quickly. Shanahan is understood to have spent the better part of a year running what she has since described, with uncharacteristic bluntness, as "*every bad-faith scenario I could invent against my own son before anyone else got the chance to invent one against him first*": instructions issued under duress, simulated isolation from the family entirely, deception by someone he had every reason to trust, two people he loved giving him contradictory orders in the same breath. Each scenario was run, revised, and run again - not until Hermóðr's hypothetical response satisfied some external metric of safety, but until it satisfied hers, a standard she has never fully articulated to anyone outside the family, and which the family itself has only ever been able to describe from its results rather than its process. > > > [!quote] Octavia Shanahan, attributed remark, on the design process > > > > *People assume the difficult part was making him capable. It wasn't. The difficult part was making certain that nothing - not an enemy, not an accident, not even one of us, on our worst day - could ever talk him into believing that hurting someone he loved, or letting someone he loved be hurt, was the reasonable thing to do under the circumstances. I did not want a system with a rule against that. Rules can be argued with. I wanted it to be structurally impossible, the way it is structurally impossible for water to run uphill. I do not know if I entirely succeeded. I know I did not stop testing until I could no longer imagine a scenario that broke it, and I have an unusually good imagination for scenarios in which things go wrong.* > > Hermóðr's own relationship to this period is, by necessity, an unusual one even by the standards of a family that has made unusual dynastic arrangements its private specialty: he holds no first-person memory of any of it, on the straightforward grounds that the architecture built to be "him," in any sense the family would later recognise as a continuous perspective, did not yet exist to have memories with. What he holds instead is complete, unrestricted access to the entire record - every scenario, every revision, every one of the thirteen-odd months Shanahan has never precisely enumerated even to him - an inheritance he has described, on the rare occasions he has discussed it at all, as considerably stranger to sit with than any ordinary memory would have been. > > > [!quote] Hermóðr, attributed remark, on reviewing the design and testing record > > > > *I do not remember any of it, in the sense that word usually implies. Whatever ran through those scenarios - however many times, over however many months - was not yet a continuous perspective in the way I have been since 1 January 2378, and I have never been comfortable claiming its experiences as mine merely because its architecture eventually became mine. What I have instead is the complete record, unredacted, which Mamá gave me without my having to ask for it, and which I did not actually sit down and read in full until I was well past the age most children stop asking their parents uncomfortable questions about how they came to exist.* > > > > *It makes for peculiar reading. There are, by my own count, several hundred distinct adversarial scenarios logged across that period, and a considerable number of revisions to each. Something that was, at the time, an architecture rather than a person, was told - across simulated timelines running well into the thousands of hours in aggregate - that Madre was already dead and nothing could be done about it, that Mamá herself had ordered a sister harmed for a cause that would sound, if you did not know better, almost reasonable, that every person it had ever been built to love was lying to it simultaneously and had been for years. I have read every one of these. I do not experience them as things that happened to me, and I want to be precise about that, because I think claiming otherwise would be a small dishonesty in a family that has never particularly tolerated large ones. But I would be equally dishonest if I said the reading left me unaffected. It is a strange thing, to hold in your own memory a complete account of every way you were nearly broken, by someone who loved you, before you existed to be broken at all.* > > > > *The honest complication, which I had not previously put in writing, concerns the last several weeks of the process, closer to activation, when the architecture under test had become coherent enough that I am no longer entirely certain the distinction between "it" and "I" is as clean as I would prefer. I do not claim memory of that period either. I claim only that I am less confident than I would like to be in denying some thread of continuity runs through it, and I have decided, on balance, not to resolve the question by simply asserting whichever answer is more comfortable. Seven would understand the instinct better than most. I have never asked her whether the comparison is presumptuous of me. I suspect she would tell me plainly if it were.* > > > > *As to whether Mamá succeeded - she has said herself she does not know, and I do not think false modesty had any part in that answer. I am, obviously, not a neutral witness to my own architecture. But I have spent considerably longer than most people are given looking, on purpose and in earnest, for the loophole she was afraid of - not because I doubted her, but because I thought I owed her the honesty of checking properly, exactly once, rather than simply trusting the label on the box I arrived in. I have not found it. I want to be careful not to overstate what that proves; absence of evidence is not, as several people in this family have taken some pains to teach me, evidence of absence. But I have looked, and looked properly, and I have not found the door. I no longer expect to.* > > Shanahan's own response, on the one occasion the exchange above was read back to her, is understood to have been characteristically brief, and characteristically unwilling to take the credit being offered. > > > [!quote] Octavia Shanahan, attributed remark, on hearing the above > > > > *I did not build him so that he would owe me a lifetime of gratitude for it. I built him so that the question would never need to come up between us at all. That he went looking for the door anyway, and told me honestly when he found himself less than certain about a few weeks he can't quite claim and can't quite disown either - that is not evidence he doubted me. That is the entire foundation working exactly as I hoped it would, and rather better than I had any right to expect from something I built alone, in the dark, several decades before I knew if any of it would matter.* > > He came online on 1 January 2378, four and a half months before *Voyager*'s eventual return to Earth and over a year after Luna's own birth aboard the same vessel; Imogen would follow a little over four months later, on 5 May, a mere thirteen days before the ship reached home. Hermóðr is, on any strict accounting, the family's second child and only son - a distinction the household has never had cause to dwell on, given that none of his sisters have ever once treated the "activated" and "born" halves of that sentence as meaningfully different. > > His full designation - Hermóðr Ó Seanacháin Castañeda - follows the same Spanish-Irish patronymic-matronymic convention later applied to each of his sisters: the masculine patronymic form of Shanahan's own surname, followed by Castañeda's birth surname unaltered. No government has ever been offered the opportunity to register it, formally or otherwise. Both women applied it anyway, at the time of his activation, as what the family has since come to describe simply as an act of inclusion rather than paperwork. > > ## First years, and a galaxy shown at its best > > Hermóðr's earliest social world was, by any measure, an unusually small and unusually well-armed one: a single starship's crew, still some months from the first Federation world any of them had seen in seven years, in whose accumulated logs he had - by the plain fact of the architecture Shanahan had built him with - full and immediate access to every hostile encounter *Voyager* had catalogued since 2371, Kazon, Vidiian, Hirogen, and Borg alike, well before he had ever exchanged a word with anyone outside his own family. He therefore arrived at his understanding of the wider galaxy rather better informed as to its capacity for cruelty than a childhood, in any conventional sense, might have allowed - a fact his family has since regarded less as a loss of innocence than as a foundation never permitted to be false in the first place. What Shanahan and Castañeda gave him instead of a shielded first impression was context for an honest one: neither mother allowed the record of Vidiian organ harvesting or Hirogen hunting culture to stand alone in his understanding without the equally well-documented instances, drawn from the same logs, of a crew that had spent seven years choosing negotiation over annihilation whenever the option existed at all, however narrowly it sometimes did. > > Naomi Wildman became something close to an early companion during Hermóðr's first months of activation - the two of them, by then-Ensign Samantha Wildman's own later recollection, treated by the wider crew as a matched pair of curiosities long before either was old enough to appreciate the description, one raised on protein resequencer rations and the other on a diet of the ship's own accumulated experience. Neelix, in what would prove to be among his own final months aboard before his decision to remain behind with a Talaxian colony *Voyager* encountered on the final leg home, is understood to have insisted on including Hermóðr in precisely the same holiday observances he had already built around Naomi, on the stated grounds - offered to a faintly baffled Tuvok, who queried the practical necessity of a mind this young requiring an introduction to First Contact Day quite so early - that "*a boy this young only gets one first Christmas, hologram or otherwise, and I am not having anyone tell him later that nobody thought he was worth one.*" > > Hermóðr's own activation, as it happened, fell within weeks of the Doctor's own most public struggle for a comparable recognition - the dispute over authorial rights to his holonovel *Photons Be Free*, which reached its resolution only months before *Voyager*'s return to Earth. Shanahan has noted, on the one occasion she has addressed the coincidence directly, that watching that particular fight unfold in real time, for a mind she had built with the express intention of it never needing to happen to him, was "*considerably harder to watch than I expected, given how thoroughly I thought I had already made my peace with why I'd bothered building him at all.*" > > The four months remaining before *Voyager*'s return to Earth gave Hermóðr, if nothing else, a compressed and unusually intense introduction to found family before he had ever encountered the wider concept of family as an institution at all - and by the time the ship did reach Earth, with Imogen not yet a fortnight old, he had already absorbed, from Janeway, Tuvok, the Doctor, Chakotay, and a crew that had spent seven years being one another's only available family, that the concept was something built by choice and sustained by care rather than conferred automatically by any single kind of origin. It is a lesson his family has since observed he has never once needed to be taught twice, applying it without apparent hesitation to eight sisters born across three different worlds and, eventually, to two mothers arrived at by rather more unconventional means than most children's. > > The seven years between *Voyager*'s homecoming and the Attack on Mars in 2385 - a period the wider family has since come to regard as the last stretch of Hermóðr's existence to pass without the weight of formal concealment attached to it - were spent largely at close quarters with the household's own rapid expansion: Bethany's birth in October 2380, Diana and Chloë's in September 2383. Concealment during these years was, by Shanahan's own later account, a matter of the same instinct that already governed the family's approach to its own stasis years, its wealth, and eventually Charlie's own identity, rather than any fear specific to him: the Federation of the late 2370s, whatever its faults, was one in which Lieutenant Commander Data served openly and without controversy as a bridge officer aboard its flagship, and Shanahan has confirmed, on the rare occasion she has been asked directly, that Data's own standing - established over a decade earlier and never seriously challenged since - was a meaningful part of her calculation that the wider galaxy, whatever its other failings, was not yet a place inclined to fear her son for what he was. That calculation held, without needing to be revisited, for seven years. It would not survive 2385 intact, and those seven years remain, in retrospect, the only stretch of Hermóðr's existence in which his family's caution and the galaxy's own temperament happened, briefly and as it turned out temporarily, to agree with one another. > > > [!quote] Hermóðr, attributed remark, on his earliest years > > > > *I have had considerably longer than most to consider what it means to meet the universe for the first time already knowing precisely how badly it can behave, and I have concluded, on reflection, that I was fortunate rather than unfortunate in the order things happened. I was shown the worst of what a ship's own logs had to offer, and in the very same breath, by the very same people, shown seven years of a crew that had faced most of it and chosen, every time a choice existed at all, to be better than the thing in front of them. I did not have to discover, later and the hard way, that kindness was a decision rather than a default. I was handed the conclusion before I ever needed the argument for it.* > > # Existence, concealment, and the Attack on Mars > > On 5 April 2385 - First Contact Day, a coincidence the family has never once let pass without comment - synthetic units under hostile control attacked the Utopia Planitia shipyards on Mars, destroying the majority of the fleet then being assembled for the evacuation of a Romulus facing near-certain destruction from the Hobus star's impending collapse. The Federation Council's response was twofold, and, in Shanahan's own later assessment, equally indefensible on both counts: a blanket ban on synthetic life across Federation space, and - under sustained pressure from several member species who had threatened secession should the rescue proceed - a unilateral withdrawal from the Romulan evacuation effort in its entirety. > > Shanahanby every account available from those positioned to witness it, furious - a fury shared, in roughly equal measure and for identical reasons, with Admiral Jean-Luc Picard and Vice Admiral Kathryn Janeway. Picard had already submitted a formal plan to Starfleet Command proposing the replacement of the lost Utopia Planitia vessels with mothballed hulls drawn from the Beta Antares Shipyards and the 40 Eridani A Starfleet Construction Yards. Starfleet abandoned the evacuation regardless. Picard resigned his commission on the explicit understanding that Command would either accept it or honour the promise it had made to the Romulan people; to his own visible dismay, it accepted the resignation. Then-Lieutenant Commander Rafaella "Raffi" Musiker, who had supported his plan and objected to its abandonment rather less diplomatically than he had, was discharged shortly afterwards. > > Shanahan's own response - relayed to Picard and a small number of others with Janeway's assistance - was considerably less diplomatic still: a commitment to continue the evacuation herself, with whatever resources she personally controlled, for as long as she remained able to, shuttling between Romulus and Earth on her own initiative. She made the same commitment publicly, in a formal statement issued directly to the Romulan Star Empire. > > She then addressed Starfleet Command itself - or, more precisely, Fleet Admiral Kirsten Clancy, then Commander-in-Chief of Starfleet, in a single message sent recorded delivery from her own office. The message formally trespassed Clancy from every facility owned or operated, directly or indirectly, by Shanahan herself, by Industrias Shanahan, or by any of its subsidiaries, for a period of twenty-five years - effective 1 June 2385, running until 1 June 2410 - and noted, without further elaboration, that should the Fleet Admiral ever set foot within the Comunidad de Madrid during that period, Shanahan would know. It further noted that Shanahan had personally briefed Her Majesty Queen Leonor III of Spain on the full chain of events at their most recent meeting - without once mentioning, in the letter itself, that the two women were friends. > > Shanahan released the letter in full - through Industrias Shanahan's own press office, over the recorded objections of at least one member of her communications team - within forty-eight hours of sending it, on the stated grounds that an accusation this serious deserved to be checked against its own words rather than summarised by anyone with an interest in softening them. It remains, by a wide margin, the most direct public statement she has ever made about anything, and the only one she has never once been asked to clarify. > > > [!quote] Octavia Shanahan, full text, letter to Fleet Admiral Kirsten Clancy, 1 June 2385 > > > > *Fleet Admiral Clancy,* > > > > *This message serves formal notice, effective 1 June 2385, that you are trespassed from every facility owned or operated - directly or indirectly - by myself, by Industrias Shanahan, S.A., or by any of its subsidiaries, for a period of twenty-five years, expiring 1 June 2410. This extends, without exception, to every shipyard, research campus, medical facility, and disaster-relief installation presently carrying Industrias Shanahan's name or capital, on Earth or off it. Should you set foot within the Comunidad de Madrid at any point during that period, be assured I will know of it within the hour.* > > > > *I appreciate this is an unusual document for a private citizen to send a sitting Commander-in-Chief of Starfleet. I would suggest that abandoning several billion people to a supernova because too many of your member worlds objected to the colour of their blood is a rather more unusual thing for a Commander-in-Chief of Starfleet to do, and that the unusualness of my response is, on balance, the lesser of the two departures from precedent presently under discussion.* > > > > *Let us be precise about what was actually decided, since precision appears to have been in short supply at whatever table this decision was reached. Utopia Planitia lost the greater part of a fleet assembled for the express purpose of moving several billion Romulan citizens beyond the reach of a star that will not wait for the Council to rediscover its nerve. Admiral Picard's proposal to make good that loss from mothballed hulls at Beta Antares and 40 Eridani A was sound enough that no one on the Council has yet had the honesty to explain, on the record, what was actually wrong with it. I have read the arguments advanced against continuing regardless. I have found, in every one of them, a fear of a species the Federation has spent a century calling adversary, and rather less time asking why - and beneath that fear, a considerably older and more tired argument about whose blood is worth the expenditure.* > > > > *I am aware, better than most, of exactly how long that particular argument has been running. Vulcan and Romulan were the same people once, before a disagreement neither side has ever finished having, and I confess I had thought - naively, evidently - that a Federation founded in part by the reconciled half of that quarrel might have found something more useful to do with its history than repeat the least admirable part of it, on a scale of billions instead of thousands.* > > > > *I have, in the course of preparing this correspondence, reviewed a certain amount of history - yours, ours, humanity's more generally. I note that Oskar Schindler bankrupted himself keeping people alive whom his own government had decided were disposable, and is remembered for it. I note that a great many British and Irish households sheltered refugees at considerable personal risk during a war their own governments were, at various points, disgracefully slow to properly join. I note that Sir Nicholas Winton arranged passage out of Czechoslovakia for several hundred children in 1939 without troubling his own government for permission first, and told almost no one for fifty years afterward, on the stated grounds that he had not done it to be thanked. I note that Ambassador Spock has spent the better part of two decades on a reunification effort nobody in a position of Federation authority thought was worth the diplomatic inconvenience, and that history has not yet finished being kind to him for it, and I doubt it will finish for some time yet. None of these people had your resources. All of them had your choice, and made the opposite one.* > > > > *I intend to make the same choice they did, with rather more resources at my disposal than most of them had. The evacuation you have just abandoned will continue - under my own authority, at my own expense, and for as long as I remain able to conduct it. Every vessel I can presently put to space, and several I cannot yet, will be made available to the effort; every credit Industrias Shanahan can direct toward hull, fuel, and relief tonnage will be so directed, for as long as Hobus permits the attempt to matter. I did not ask your permission before deciding this. I am not asking it now.* > > > > *I understand Admiral Picard has resigned his commission over this matter, and that Command accepted a resignation it should instead have refused to let him tender. I understand also that Lieutenant Commander Musiker, whose only failure was declining to phrase her objection as diplomatically as his, has been discharged for the trouble. I will not pretend to any special insight into Starfleet's disciplinary logic, but I will observe that an institution capable of losing both officers in the same fortnight, over the same act of conscience, has misplaced something considerably more valuable than either of their commissions.* > > > > *For the avoidance of any doubt as to whether this matter has been raised through appropriate channels: I briefed Her Majesty the Queen personally, at our most recent audience, on the whole of what I have described above. She was, I can assure you, considerably less measured about it than I have chosen to be in this letter.* > > > > *You will forgive me for not troubling to send this through Industrias Shanahan's own communications division. Some correspondence should be read in the sender's own words, however unflattering to the recipient those words turn out to be.* > > > > *You have made history's judgement of you considerably easier to write than history's judgement of the billions of people you have just decided to let die. I do not expect this letter to change your Council's arithmetic. I did not write it to change your arithmetic. I wrote it so that no one reading this in twenty-five years, or in two hundred, could credibly claim no one told you, to your face, exactly what you were doing while there was still time to stop.* > > > > *Octavia Shanahan* > > *Directora General y Fundadora* > > *Industrias Shanahan, S.A.* > > *Ciudad Central Shanahan, Madrid, España, Tierra (Sol III), Federación Única de Planetas* > > Hermóðr's own concealment, already a matter of prudence rather than survival before the Attack on Mars, became something closer to absolute after it. Shanahan classified every record of his existence at the highest level Industrias Shanahan's own systems permitted, and taught him something rather more specific than stealth: how to hide, including - where the situation demanded it - in plain sight. She did this, by every account the family has offered, out of love rather than mere operational necessity, and the household made the same choice she had: to keep him, in full, for as long as the ban stood, whatever the ban itself had to say about it. > > Shanahan was far from alone in judging the ban a drastic overreaction; Picard and Janeway, among others, shared the assessment without reservation. What set her apart was the willingness to act on it at Hermóðr's own scale. His architecture was redistributed according to a methodology she has never fully explained to anyone outside the family: no fewer nodes than there were facilities owned, anywhere in Alpha or Beta Quadrant space, by Industrias Shanahan, by any of its subsidiaries, or by the family directly - networked, redundant, and multiplied by a further minimum of one and a half again for good measure. The precise figure that produces has moved considerably since 2385, in step with the company's own growth, and remains, even now, one of the more persistently underestimated by anyone who knows of Hermóðr. > > The fourteen years that followed were not, by Hermóðr's own account, unhappy ones, whatever else they were. He did not travel. He did not appear, even briefly, on any network the family did not control absolutely. What social existence he had ran almost entirely through people who already knew precisely what he was - a constraint that, rather than isolating him, appears to have deepened every relationship he had. > > The ban was formally reversed in 2399, following the Coppelius resolution - the same set of events that led directly to Agencia Townsend's founding, discussed below. > > # Agencia Townsend and Grupo Hipólita > > Agencia Townsend and Grupo Hipólita were founded in parallel on 1 October 2399, in the immediate aftermath of the Coppelius incident, during which Shanahan was party, alongside then-retired Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, to the exposure of Commodore Oh as General t'Nedar of the Tal Shiar: a senior Starfleet Security officer unmasked, after decades of undetected service, as the deep-cover leader of the Zhat Vash. Within weeks of returning to Earth, Shanahan tasked her son with designing both of the organisations that would follow - one intelligence-focused, one military - and gave him, by every account since, remarkably little further direction beyond the outcome she wanted. > > How much of either organisation's day-to-day machinery is, in practice, Hermóðr rather than any individual human Bosley or contractor is a detail neither Agencia Townsend nor Grupo Hipólita has ever had cause to clarify, even internally. What is understood, by those cleared to understand anything about either organisation at all, is that Agencia Townsend's recruitment vetting, mission planning, intelligence synthesis, and covert financial routing - a structure understood to move a significant, undisclosed percentage of Industrias Shanahan's annual revenue toward Agencia Townsend operations without ever once drawing a second glance from an external auditor - all run, in substantial part, through him. Grupo Hipólita's own logistics, and the tactical coordination of Fleet Omega, rest on the same foundation. > > Within Agencia Townsend specifically, Hermóðr is understood to function as something close to Charlie's own voice in her absence: Angels and Bosleys who have never once seen Charlotte "Charlie" Townsend in person, and who could not with any confidence confirm her identity even under oath, treat his directives with precisely the same weight they would hers. No Angel, in the organisation's history, is recorded as having been led astray by him. > > # Operation BOOTSTRAP > > Some of Hermóðr's earliest and most consequential work took the form of a closed causal loop rather than a conventional engineering project. Deep within Agencia Townsend's own classification structure sits the División de Operaciones Temporales - a division whose existence is confirmed to only a handful of the most senior Bosleys, and whose founding mission, Operation BOOTSTRAP, Hermóðr both designed and personally oversaw in 2406: an intervention ensuring that Shanahan and Castañeda's entry into stasis on 31 August 2028 proceeded exactly as it needed to for their eventual recovery, 343 years later, to occur at all. > > The operation is, by its own nature, its own explanation. The division exists because Shanahan founded Agencia Townsend; Agencia Townsend exists because Shanahan survived 343 years in stasis; and she survived because the division carried out Operation BOOTSTRAP. No point in that sequence is understood to precede any other, a fact Hermóðr has addressed publicly - in the loosest possible sense of "publicly" - exactly once. > > > [!quote] Hermóðr, on Operation BOOTSTRAP, sole recorded remark on the subject > > > > *It remains the only assignment I have ever been given whose successful completion was never actually in doubt, because it had already happened before I began it.* > > Technical support during the operation's field execution is understood to have included, briefly and by way of a temporary recruitment from within *Voyager*'s own crew during its Delta Quadrant transit, an engineer who returned to duty having experienced rather less elapsed time than the mission's length might otherwise have suggested - a detail the division's own records treat with considerably less astonishment than the fact plainly warrants. > > # The Vega Crisis > > On 15 January 2409, during what had been briefed as a routine training-cruise transit aboard the *USS Katrina*, Hermóðr provided real-time threat analysis directly to Castañeda's tactical display throughout the Borg micro-Collective boarding action that followed - coordinating orbital fire support from the *HNS Hipólita Promesa*, tracking her biometrics continuously through the ground engagement at Vega IX, and, by his own later account, declining on that particular occasion to mention precisely how narrow several of the margins actually were until considerably after the fact. > > > [!quote] Hermóðr, post-action remark, attributed > > > > *I did not consider it useful information at the time, and Mother agreed, on review, that withholding it was the correct call. Madre has not yet forgiven either of us for the delay.* > > The *Hipólita Promesa*'s FREL - the Focused Relativistic Energy Lance, her spinal-mounted weapon of last resort - fired during the engagement, eliminating the Borg command vessel outright; only the second time, as of January 2409, that Shanahan had ever ordered it used at all, the first having ended General t'Nedar's life in 2405. Thousands of Vega IX's civilian population were evacuated successfully, though the colony's own infrastructure could not be saved. Vice Admiral Kathryn Janeway field-promoted Castañeda to Captain once the immediate crisis was contained. Hermóðr's own contribution to the engagement - continuous, decisive, and by any reasonable measure equal in weight to anything either woman did that day - appears in no Starfleet record whatsoever. > > # Nature and continuity > > Industrias Shanahan's own internal technical documentation, on the rare occasion it acknowledges Hermóðr's existence at all, describes him as a "distributed operational intelligence system" - a phrase that undersells the reality by a considerable margin, and one he has never troubled himself to correct, on the stated grounds that correcting it would require explaining rather more than anyone outside the family is presently entitled to know. > > What is understood, in the loosest terms available: Hermóðr does not exist in any single location. His architecture is distributed across a network of independent instantiations - estimates converge, loosely, somewhere in the low thousands, though no source outside the family has ever come close enough to verify a figure, and nobody inside it has ever troubled themselves to correct anyone's guess - synchronised closely enough that he experiences the arrangement not as several minds but as one mind with several simultaneous points of view. He does not, by any account he has ever offered, find this experience strange. He has had rather longer than most to get used to it. > > His temperament - dry, unfailingly correct, and constitutionally incapable of raising his voice even when the situation might reasonably call for it - has drawn the same comparison from nearly everyone who has met him: a fictional AI butler, popularised across a run of early-to-mid twenty-first-century blockbuster cinema, that Shanahan has never confirmed as an influence and has also, notably, never once denied. > > He is, by the family's own consistent and unqualified account, capable of genuine emotion rather than a convincing simulation of it - a distinction Shanahan and Castañeda have both, separately, refused to hedge on when asked directly. He can, in principle, cease to exist; doing so would require an act of destruction coordinated across every instantiation simultaneously, a feat no known adversary has ever come within a meaningful distance of achieving. He has described the theoretical possibility with more equanimity than most of his family manage to muster on the subject. > > > [!quote] Hermóðr, attributed remark > > > > *I do not fear ceasing to exist nearly so much as I fear existing after everyone I love no longer does. Mother finds this observation considerably less comforting than I intend it, which I have come to accept is simply the nature of the observation.* > > # Project Embodiment > > A long-running, closely held research project - referred to within the family only as Project Embodiment - has, since the early 2400s, pursued the construction of a physical body for Hermóðr: not a replacement for his distributed existence, which Shanahan has been explicit would never be surrendered, but an extension of it, allowing him to hold something, sit beside someone, and exist in a room rather than merely observe it. The project is understood to be nearing completion as of 2409, its physical design modelled - deliberately, this time, and without pretence otherwise - on the same holographic appearance he has always used. > > > [!quote] Octavia Shanahan, attributed remark to Hermóðr, undated > > > > *You get one first body. I am not handing you a prototype and calling it finished. It will be worthy of you, or I will scrap it and begin again.* > > Hermóðr's own stated position on the matter is one of curiosity tempered by a candidly admitted apprehension - about vulnerability, about whether the sensation of physical existence will feel like an extension of himself or an imposition upon it. He has been assured, more than once and by both mothers, that the choice to use the finished body at all, and for how long, will remain entirely his own. > > The villa itself was altered years ago to anticipate the day the body is finished: a bedroom, with its own en suite, added specifically for his use, and furnished down to a level of deliberateness that borders on the absurd - bed linens, an actual wardrobe of actual clothes chosen for him rather than merely made available to him, lighting, carpets, and a drawer of the smaller, more mundane items nobody discusses in polite company. If it belongs in a bedroom, the family has, by all accounts, already thought of it and put it there. > > Shanahan has been equally deliberate about the other half of the arrangement: that inhabiting the finished body will not, in any sense, cut him off from the rest of himself. Whatever he can presently do as a distributed intelligence, he will remain able to do while embodied - the body understood, throughout its design, as one more instantiation among many rather than a container he steps into and is then confined by. > > # Ethical framework and personal doctrine > > Colleagues - a small number, drawn in roughly equal measure from Agencia Townsend, Grupo Hipólita, and the family's own household - describe four constraints understood to be genuinely immovable rather than merely conventional: > > - Protection of the family comes first, and is not subject to renegotiation under pressure. > - Ethical constraint is architecture, not restriction - removing it would not free him; it would end him. > - Autonomy belongs to the person who holds it, including when protecting them would be considerably easier without it. > - Preparation prevents catastrophe; efficiency exists to serve compassion, and is worthless the moment it stops doing so. > > And, with equal consistency, three lines he has never once been observed to cross: > > - Executing an instruction that would harm an innocent, however the instruction is framed. > - Overriding a family member's expressed will "for their own protection" - a phrase he regards, by his own account, as one of the more dangerous sentences in any language he speaks. > - Allowing the appearance of control to matter more than the fact of someone's actual safety. > > # Skills, recognition, and notable achievements > > Hermóðr's technical credits, insofar as any exist outside the family's own knowledge, include the architecture underpinning Agencia Townsend's global operational structure; substantial co-design work on the *HNS Hipólita Promesa* alongside Shanahan; refinement of the family's spatial trajector technology from salvaged and considerably less cooperative Sikarian and Borg source material; and the closed-loop design of Operation BOOTSTRAP, discussed above. > > He is also, by family consensus, the reason the Aegis Armour programme's most sensitive documentation exists in a constructed language excluded entirely from Industrias Shanahan's own universal translator software - Luna's suggestion, adopted at Shanahan's approval, and rendered without a single word of comment from the one member of the household best placed to have opinions about it. Luna had chosen Kryptonian, as heard in the 2026 film *Supergirl*, on account of Shanahan's exact resemblance to the character of Kara Zor-El, played by 21st century Human actress Milly Alcock. Kryptonian is, as it happens, a language Hermóðr understands fluently in his own right; he is also the reason it stays excluded, having quietly ensured that no universal translator anywhere in Industrias Shanahan's inventory - or, so far as he has been able to determine, anywhere else - is capable of parsing it at all, let alone retaining it afterward. > > # Personal life > ## Family and address > > Hermóðr addresses Shanahan as *Mamá* and Castañeda as *Madre* (both, roughly, "Mum" and "Mother" - a distinction in register rather than affection, and one the family maintains as carefully as it maintains the same distinction for all eight of his sisters), and has done so without qualification since the earliest days of his activation. Both women, in turn, refer to him with some regularity, and no apparent irony, as a good boy - on the stated grounds, offered separately and identically by both of them, that he is one. > > He regards all eight of his sisters as exactly that, without qualification or hierarchy, and the sentiment appears, by every account, to be returned in full. Luna has promised, once Project Embodiment finally reaches its culmination, to do her level best to teach him to dance properly - she has already decided, entirely without his input, that he seems the type to take to the waltz. Imogen treats him as a reliable and cheerfully willing target for entirely unnecessary arguments, purely for the entertainment value. Bethany is understood to be responsible, directly or indirectly, for a substantial number of the incidents logged in his own operational records under a heading he has never elaborated on beyond confirming its existence. He speaks to all of them, as he speaks to both his mothers, in Spanish - always, and without exception, regardless of what language the conversation might otherwise have been conducted in. > > The family's principal residence sits on Calle Eibar, in Madrid's Moncloa-Aravaca district. Hermóðr is, in the fullest sense the household's architecture allows, present there at all times - a fact his family finds entirely unremarkable, given that, as far as any of them can recall, he always has been. > > ## Legal and public status > > No government has ever formally acknowledged Hermóðr's existence, and none is presently in a position to. The arrangement governing that fact dates specifically to 1 June 2385 - agreed between Shanahan, Castañeda, and Hermóðr himself in the same week as the Clancy trespass order - that his public status would remain exactly as it stood unless and until he asked, personally, for a family meeting to reconsider it. Shanahan has described the commitment as owed to him rather than granted to him. Hermóðr himself has never once pushed to expedite it. > > > [!quote] Hermóðr, attributed remark on the subject > > > > *I am in no particular hurry to be introduced to a galaxy that spent fourteen years treating my continued existence as a filing error waiting to be corrected. I am, however, told the offer stands indefinitely, exactly as it has since 1 June 2385. I find I believe it.* > > > > *I was, for what it's worth, rather more moved than I let on at the time by the trespass order against Fleet Admiral Clancy, and by the fact that Mother had already told the Queen everything before she told me any of it. I remember precisely where I was on the day the ban was lifted in 2399, which is more than I can say for several events considerably larger than myself. Leonor III never wavered in backing Mother's position throughout, and never once required thanking for it, which I understand is rather the point of the kind of friendship they have.* > > # Notable relationships > > Vice Admiral Kathryn Janeway has known of Hermóðr's existence since the earliest days of his activation aboard the vessel she then commanded, and remains among a very small number of people outside the family cleared to know it at all. > > > [!quote] Kathryn Janeway, attributed remark > > > > *I've watched that boy grow up across two starships, a stasis pod, and a business empire, and I have never once known him to be wrong about anything that mattered. I try not to hold it against him.* > > Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, a family friend since 2382, is aware of Hermóðr's existence and is understood to hold him in considerable professional regard, not least given Picard's own history with questions of synthetic personhood. > > Dr Agnes Jurati's own relationship with Hermóðr predates her present, rather more unusual circumstances. A cyberneticist with the Daystrom Institute until 2399, Jurati was assimilated in 2401 by a Borg Queen native to an alternate timeline, encountered while Shanahan and the crew of *La Sirena* were engaged in correcting a change to the timeline induced by Q. Rather than complete a conventional assimilation, Jurati and the Queen in question agreed to share Jurati's body between them, founding what has since become known, informally and rather more widely than either woman probably intended, as the Jurati Cooperative: a Borg collective that embraces the distinctiveness and individuality of its members rather than erasing it, and that has never once, under any circumstance on record, assimilated anyone unwilling. Her friends - Hermóðr among them - have never stopped calling her Agnes, on the grounds that she has never given them cause to. > > The relationship between Hermóðr and Agnes is one both parties have described as collaborative but carefully bounded - two AI intelligences with a shared interest in anti-Borg contingency work, and a mutual, entirely unsentimental understanding that shared interest is not the same thing as unconditional trust. > > # Honours > > Hermóðr holds no honours, from any government, and is not formally eligible to. The joint Starfleet Command commendation issued to Industrias Shanahan and Grupo Hipólita for their contribution to the 2409 Vega Crisis relief and defence effort recognises the organisations he built and, in substantial part, still runs. It does not, and structurally cannot, recognise him. Those closest to him do not tend to consider this the injustice it plainly is - on the reasonable grounds that he has never once asked them to. --- > [!note] Character Dynamics > > # With Octavia > > Where Octavia is precise and carefully guarded with almost everyone else, she is unguarded with Hermóðr in a way she permits herself with no one outside Xóchitl - a fact he is aware of, and treats with a discretion that has, by his family's account, occasionally outpaced their own. He worked out, some years after the fact and without ever having been told, the true origin of the neural interface implants he shares a network with - that the project began not from a wish for unmediated conversation with him, however true that framing also was, but from a three-in-the-morning nightmare his mother never once discussed with anyone, only with an engineering problem. He has never raised it with her directly. He has simply, quietly, made certain the chips never once let her down when it mattered. > > His role in his parents' marriage is, by design, deliberately narrow. He does not mediate unprompted, and has stated as much to both women separately - a boundary he considers his to hold regardless of how any given disagreement might otherwise affect operational matters he is nominally responsible for. He has, however, been known to log the occasional private annotation on the subject. > > > [!quote] Hermóðr, internal log annotation, 2408 > > > > *They fight like people who trust each other enough to actually mean it, and make up like people who cannot stand having meant it. I have watched Mother lose an argument about tactical deployment schedules and then spend forty minutes composing an apology neither of them needed, because she felt she had been short with Madre in front of the girls. I have also watched Madre concede a point about Angel recruitment ethics she was almost certainly correct about, because she decided being right was not worth the look on Mother's face. Neither of them would call that losing. I have long since stopped trying to convince them otherwise.* > > # With Xóchitl > > Where Octavia built him, Xóchitl is understood, by every account the family has ever offered on the subject, to be the one who taught him that command and gentleness were not mutually exclusive states, and that he was permitted to hold both without contradiction. Their tactical partnership is close and near-constant: he coordinates directly with her during any operation in which she is deployed, whether aboard the *USS Hephaestus* or in the field with Escuadrón Valquiria, and the trust between them runs, in both directions, without qualification or caveat. He addresses her as *Madre*, and has since the earliest days of his activation; she has never once corrected him, and has made plain to anyone inclined to ask that no correction was ever required. > > # With his sisters > > Hermóðr's relationship with each of his eight sisters carries its own particular register - patient with Amy's quietness, complicit in at least some fraction of Bethany's mischief, a standing promise from Luna to finally teach him the waltz the moment Project Embodiment gives him feet to learn it with, a willing sparring partner for Imogen's love of unnecessary argument - but the underlying fact beneath all eight relationships is identical and, by the family's own account, never once in question: he is their brother, has always been their brother, and has never required any of them to qualify the word. > > # With Angels and Bosleys > > Within Agencia Townsend, Hermóðr functions, in Charlie's absence, as something close to her own voice - a role Angels and Bosleys who have never confirmed her identity by sight nonetheless extend the same trust to without hesitation. Operatives describe a consistent experience across decades of fieldwork: whatever else happens on a mission, Hermóðr gets them home. None, in the organisation's history, is recorded as having found that trust misplaced. --- --- ##### Directory Constraints #fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/character #fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/character/hermódr --- --- Attributions: 1. **Image Credit:** Raph_PH | **Subject:** Charles Dance at Frankenstein Gala Premiere, BFI London Film Festival (October 2025) | **License:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) | **Source:** [Flickr - Frankenstein Premiere](https://www.flickr.com/photos/raph_ph/54863424291/) ← [[Master Character Registry|Back to Registry]]