“Technician”

An ugallu discovered by Jocasta, Mitch, Marshall, and Hilary at a subduction zone south of Wyman, West Virginia, during Operation ALLOCHTHON.

Its clothes are an odd motley of Cold War scientist-technocrat and Sumerian priestly finery: its plain white shirt (complete with pocket protector and slide rule) is bedecked with a breastplate of jewels—carnelian and lapis lazuli—its long priestly tunic oddly modern in its styling, its clawed toes bursting through a pair of black shoes. The ugallu's copper knife is strapped to its wrist with a rough leather strap; the strap also appears to have a watch face attached to it.

Combat ensued. With an assist from Mitch, Jocasta managed to kill him using a good ol’ fashioned, made-in-the-USA grenade.

According to Jocasta’s psychometry, “the Technician,” as Marshall later dubbed him in his AAR, was originally baseline human who irrupted during the ALLOCHTHON crisis. He had, or believed he had:

an exceedingly important role to play here, and no one — irruptor or human — is helping him. The precise calibrations, the minute changes it needs to monitor in order to increase the irruptions along the ley line from Ohio to Missouri... all for naught as soon as these cattle entered the valley.

But faintly … the ugallu had another parallel existence and set of memories, that involved sitting here in this distant installation, working for SANDMAN with three other technicians. He'd been forced to spend the past week or so sending out a series of radio transmissions meant to aid in a continent-wide test of some theories put together at Granite Peak at many levels of clearance higher than the chief technician ever had access to. And then there was this moment yesterday when the feedback came back through the dish, a returned transmission when none was expected, and no matter what they did — redirecting the dish, cutting the power — the transmission persisted. It vibrated through the receivers, the whirling computer memory banks, the video terminals. The walls of station GOLDPAN burst into flame, electrical surges blasting through the radio and computer banks … and the Technician suddenly found himself here, the transmission having worked and put him and his three girtablullû companions here, safe in a bubble of the True History amidst the False.