Joseph Dippel
Doctor Joseph Dippel is a spare man of aristocratic German stock with an aquilline nose, and wavy, dark grey hair. Other than the gleam of brilliance that rests in his eyes, his features are relatively bland. In his early 50's, Dippel comes from a family of old German stock. Before the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy and the establishment of democracy in Austria in 1920 the Dippel family held the rank of Freiherr ("Baron"), as they had ever since they moved to Austria from Germany in the 1730's, when their first castle burned down to its foundations under mysterious circumstances. Dippel claims his doctorate from the University of Berlin, where he studied botany under Georg Schweinfurth.
That's the surface of Dippel's tale, but the truth may be far stranger. According to his diary, he's been alive since earlier than 1831, having drunk the fabled elixir of life, and only periodically slips into somnolent torpor whereupon an alchemically created homunculus takes his place. At the moment, all most can say about Dippel for certain is that he is allied with The Thule Society and was the creator of a monstrous man/plant hybrid that seems to have perished with the burning of his castle.
Dippel claims to have nothing but pity and disdain for the warring, petty masses and believes, based on what he's seen, that only the noble are fit to survive, but a recent conversation with Rabbit revealed that he may have a softer heart than he cares to admit; he fled before things to could too heated, for parts unknown.
Doctor Dippel's Diary[edit]
24 July, 1923
Awake again, with only fifteen years gone. My slumber grows shorter every time I lapse into Lethe; Paracelsus’ elixir is working. In one, two more lifetimes at most, I won’t need to slumber again.
But the world in my absence hasn’t been a happy place. A conflict so terrible held Europe in its glove that they still call it the “War to End All Wars.” God willing, that’s true. The thing’s I’ve seen in the doppelganger’s brain; single guns worth a regiment that cut men down like chaff, the terrible yellow gas that blisters a man’s skin until he tears it open and boils the inside of his lungs until they fill with blood. Sad, barbarous humanity. The sulfurous fumes you left over the fields of Europe should serve as a premonition for your future fate.
And in the wake of the war… The New World is on the rise to becoming a great power, but the Tsars are gone. And the Mad Monk along with them, if my double’s observations are to be believed. A pity.
The thing knew nothing of the old castle, though. Damnable homunculus. Was it harmed in the war? The secrets I lost when I fled there…
But my work goes on. This most recent doppelganger has tested the Nutriwheat under all conditions I laid out for him and every test met with success. One final season, under my own observations, and I’ll be ready to begin raising the crop in earnest.
7 August, 1923
Fuchs has been and gone. It disturbs me still how he knows, always, when I’ve awakened. Is it a trick of his own, some power he possesses? Or is it a property of the elixir that will soon seep into my veins? To know when others like me walk the world?
Has Fuchs even taken the elixir? He is a chemist of no mean skill, but I am unsure if he knows Albertus Magnus’ art. Certainly he has never spoken as if he knows first-hand the fire of life that courses through my veins.
He has told me of new players who walk the world, and some old friends who have not yet passed on as he or I had hoped. It seems I was right about Tunguska. That should prove interesting. Vaneko still lives, which is no surprise. I’ll renew that old friendship soon.
And then there’s the Lazarines… Harper’s alive. But then, he always has been. Fuchs saw him skulking around Vienna. I don’t think he’s connected my name with any of the old madness, though. We’ll see…
Fuchs has also repeated the tale of the Mad Monk’s death. If he believes the story, then it might just be true after all. He doesn’t seem to know about the daughter, though, nor does he need to. If she’s but half-followed in her father’s footsteps, she might become a valuable aid to me in my work.
13 September, 1923
Beaumont writes from Boston with tales of a man name of West who’s trying after some of my old experiments. It seems that he served his country in the War and came to the conclusion that no one would miss a handful of corpses out of thousands. Wretched, degenerate ghoul.
Still, it’s the folly of youth to walk the same paths their elders have followed to no avail. I have written him a letter wishing him luck and offering him a tour of my laboratories, should he so desire, but I don’t hold out much hope for his success. Despite the elixir and the homunculi I distill, I gave up trying to engender life in the fully dead in, what, 1831? It’s a fool’s errand, but his sins and blunders are worth watching out for.
27 October, 1923
Three months and I’ve grown out the first of the new floronic men. Another failure. I’m still convinced that Darwin’s study of the carnivorous plants are still providing the structure I need to get the thing to move. It responds to outside stimuli, but never with directed force. I need to grow a more developed system of nerves, but that’s a system that no plant has.
6 November, 1923
Glauer wants to be called him Rudolf von Sebottendorf now. Lunacy. Although, to be kind, there were times when I signed my name Christianus Democritus or Konrad Frankensteina. I think he feels the new name is more German. As if names mattered. Happily, he’s finally turned the Thule Society into more than a handful of Frankfurt intellectuals in a beer hall. There are soldiers now, men of will. With the resources at our disposal, we may yet reach the perfect society.
I only mistrust the ritual Glauer’s added to the affair. I don’t mind the mysticism itself – I’ve seen first-hand how quickly magic becomes science – but the origin of his designs is something else altogether. India is Fuchs’ old home, and I don’t trust the influence the wily old thing might have brought to bear on Glauer and what that might mean for our successes and failures.
12 November, 1923
Package arrived from Beaumont today, from the Caribbean. The blasphemous witch doctors may be closer to my goals than I had ever realized. Two powders make their zombies; Beaumont’s sent samples. The first is a mix of bufotoxin and tetrodotoxin; extremely anesthetic. Simple stuff, harvested from mushrooms. The second powder’s a powerful hallucinogen; the man I tested it on may never recover; the ergot is growing into his brain. An interesting possibility for the floronic men; fungus-based brains. If the ergot maintains the nerve properties, as it does with trees when it grows in the forest, and given a plant’s racial memory and natural molecular organizational traits…
21 December, 1923
Stalin is a fool, and I will not help him with this line of research. No matter what he offers, no matter his friendship with Vaneko, breeding apes and men together is a fool’s errand. And in want of my services Stalin has chosen a fool to run it for him. Ivanov is an able breeder of horses, but he is no scientist. No matter how many rubbles the steel man dumps into Ivanov’s pockets, no matter the number of women he tries to impregnate in that laboratory in Georgia, no matter how many trips he makes to Guinea, chasing after his stories of ape-men, a breeding project of this sort simply will not work.
30 January, 1924
Success! With the fungus grown first around the dendritic frame as nerve tissue, the creature is capable of perfect response. Phenomenal strength, tireless limbs, insensitive to pain, obeying every command… The perfect soldier, the perfect laborer. Another step closer to Thule.
Now if only I could speed up the process…
8 February, 1924
Dietrich is proving the most useful of Glauer’s men. A capable soldier, an excellent spy and the best pilot I’ve ever seen. If he returns from Stalin’s without Vaneko or Fuchs being aware of the trip, I’ll send him to the Caribbean to set up a secondary nursery. The man’s amazingly competent; it’s no wonder that Glauer wanted him for Thule.
27 February, 1924
My hideous progeny has more intellect than I had credited to it. I caught it in the library today, trying to read. The thing could not make out the letters, of course, but it knew that there was meaning to them.
There was only minimal tear in the vines that held it, as if their grip was weakening. Invasive and chemical tests suggest that they’re as strong as ever, though. Can’t imagine what the problem might be.
6 March, 1924
Strangest thing; the creature spoke today. Definable words. “Stark and stormy, grey and grizzly.” Must’ve heard the words from some of Glauer’s men. I sedated the thing and cut it open as soon as I heard, of course. Don’t know what prompted the thing to grow vocal chords. The human brain tissue perhaps? If there was anything identifiable as human in the rest of its cell structure, maybe, but as it stands everything I put under the microscope is pure plant life.
10 March, 1924
The creature escaped! Damnable thing. None of the vines were torn at all. Do they respond to the creature in some fashion; are they unwilling, or unable, to hold onto one of their own? A frightening thought. I’ll have to find another means of keeping the seedlings in place before too much more time has passed. Not chains; if it didn’t tear them apart, it could tear its own hand off in the attempt and free itself anyway. Probably a chemical solution…
Meanwhile, I’ve sent the men Glauer’s given me out to look for the thing and I await word from the village or, worse, Vienna with nervous impatience. I’ll not have a repeat of the old castle to deal with.
13 March, 1924
A hiker spotted the thing yesterday, I’m sure of it. The papers reported that he left the woods nearby, gibbering about their movement and life. I cannot imagine what else he might have meant except the creature. Three days and the Thule idiots can’t find the thing, but a hiker stumbles across it. At least no one’s connected me with it yet.
The others are responding well to the enolpyruvylshikimate 3-phosphate synthase enzyme inhibitors – with a daily spray of that, they can’t properly photosynthesize and so remain weak.
20 March, 1924
It seems the thing cannot survive long without its special food. The evening edition today reported that two farmers found its skeleton this morning, crawling towards their barn. The creature decays quickly, then, which is a relief – no more worry of exposure, unless the Lazarines pick up the trail.
But why the barn? There was only wheat there, not animal flesh. Bears further investigation, when the next seedling grows to fruition.
