Jeremiah Tarquin is the black sheep, which at a clinic staffed by psychics is a meaningful designation. He has a mean-eyed cat for a totem. His color is green. He would like it noted that neither of these things is his fault.
He reads cities. Not metaphorically — the way other people read rooms, Jeremiah reads the accumulated emotional history of a location. Every place carries what has happened there. Most people can't feel it. Jeremiah cannot turn it off.
He is the black sheep for reasons that Book III will make clear, and that are not simple. He and Claire have a history. They have, in fact, several histories, and the question of what they did to the other Urges in the past — the manipulation, the management, the things done with the best intentions that weren't asked for — is the central darkness of inVocation.
Jeremiah is not a villain. He is someone who used his abilities in service of outcomes he believed in, without full consent, and who is now living in the long aftermath of that. He finds this genuinely difficult. He also still thinks he was right. This is the problem.
Reads the emotional and psychic history of a space. Every room has a record; Jeremiah reads it the way other people read a page. Old grief, old violence, old love — he feels all of it on entry. In active cases this is invaluable. In daily life it requires management.
Clears psychic residue from a location. The technical work of the haunting — what's stuck, why it's stuck, how to unstick it without making things worse. He has developed methodologies over years of practice.
The city as a living system, with its own memory and its own intentions. Jeremiah can navigate this system, influence it in limited ways, use its channels to move information and intention. He is one of the better practitioners currently working.
His primary clinical specialty. The resolution of attached entities, residual intelligences, and psychic knots in the fabric of a location. Not glamorous. Often unpleasant. Genuinely necessary. He is one of maybe a dozen people in the country who can do this well.
His co-lead in Book III. Their history is long and not simple. What they did to the others, why they did it, what it cost — all of that is inVocation's business. They are working it out. Slowly.
View file → Nadine BlumenthalShe likes him more than she admits. His knowledge of places, her knowledge of people. Neither has fully said so yet.
View file → Benjamin AlmondineClaire's husband, who Jeremiah trained alongside. Currently missing in Eastern Europe. The mission to find him is part of inVocation's present-day action. Jeremiah has feelings about this. They are complicated by everything else.
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