Bestiary

Frédéri Pochard

Subdivision Director without Portfolio

Elected in a landslide despite not campaigning, Frédéri Pochard is an enigma. He looks different at each Board meeting. Initially he would show up with a different hair color or a sudden change in muscle mass. Once, he arrived in a woman’s body. Nobody knows if he’s going through some radical body-alteration before each meeting, if he is a psychic taking over the bodies of random people to preserve his true identity, or if “he” is actually a group of people who work together to manipulate the Board to their own ends.

Whatever the case, Frédéri has many of the same mannerisms when he appears, as well as an accent that is mostly French, with some English and German mixed in. He naturally sounds cultured and worldly, but not foreign enough to spook investors in the American heartlands.

Before the election campaign, Frédéri was a troubleshooter — employed by Pentex, and deployed to subsidiaries and flashpoints around the globe. He took on covert operations against rival companies and werewolf packs alike, and worked damage control operations to minimize the loss of company assets. He used a wide range of personal assets on these jobs — assets that Pentex would desperately like to get their hands on. As with his meetings with the Board, no two groups he’s worked with ever report him looking the same.

He rose to prominence by claiming responsibility for various useful coincidences that nobody in Pentex had ordered — a rival company’s factory burning down, the key lawyer obstructing an oil pipeline dying in a car crash. Whether he was actually responsible or just taking the credit for things he had no hand in remains to be seen, but it was enough to get his name recognized. Nobody knows who sponsored his nomination for the election — each Board member thinks it was someone else, and they distrust one another enough that they can’t be certain. Certainly plenty of shareholders had heard of Frédéri Pochard, even if they only knew of him by reputation. They thought they knew what he had done, and that was enough to elect him.

Without a formal position in the Pentex hierarchy, the other members of the Board of Directors agreed that Frédéri should take the position of Subdivision Director without Portfolio. That way, he can focus on his work and on the Board without having to worry about formal structures. They also hope that the less formal position will give them a chance to evaluate Frédéri’s abilities. Some believe that he has powerful psychic talents, while Kathryn Mollett and Franklin Rubin are certain that he is a powerful vampire. Harold Zettler suspects — and Ian Robertson knows — that Frédéri is a mage of some sort, but they don’t know much more than that. Each Director is certain of Frédéri’s devotion to the Wyrm in soul and in deed, but he worries them. Meanwhile, he hasn’t stopped yet. He’s already planning to oust Adrian Newberry as Director of Operations, and become the next power behind the throne.