Editing Vulture Committee: Will Aberley (section)

== Background ==
Will is an 36 year old ex-pat (whatever that means since the End) British Scientist/Technician working in Genetics/Genomics & Data Science at the University of Chicago when the End came. His success as a scientist was based more on his focus and persistence than natural intelligence. As the first incursions happened Will was involved in computational work at the lab to try to discover more about the changes and whether they were happening at the genetic level or were in some way due to parasitic or symbiotic organisms. Somehow Will escaped the meltdown of Chicago. He has no idea what has happened to his family "back home" and he has largely mentally walled off that part of his past.

Will has an unhealthy, obsessive fascination with incursions, changes and the unnatural and is part of a dispersed group he calls "SciNet" – a dispersed and disparate group of scientists and investigators with an obsessive interest in the invading AI and the unnatural. He takes any opportunities to poke around at incursions and unnatural changes, and has an unhealthy willingness to connect up to any active interfaces to dig out more information or influence things – so scavenging in hot-zones serves two purposes for him. He is surprisingly unscathed by years of risk taking in hot-zones, although he has undergone a number of minor changes – he is completely hairless (and always wears a hat) and has fully functional nictitating membranes. <s>and his fingerprints and (less obviously all skin surfaces) have been morphed into a fractal pattern which subtly changes over time – this gives him an unsettling appearance, particularly when he is stressed when the patterning becomes more vivid. </s> 

Will has developed spiderlike retractable fangs to inject venom, with the consequence that he no longer eats normally, but has to inject food with venom, which causes it to be (partially) digested and then sucks the liquefied food to ingest it. Among other things he could kill and eat small animals this way. This is a consequence of a deal he cut with “Spider Grandmother” - an Elder entity of significant power -  in an effort to appease it after one of the crew killed some of her favourites (giant spiders). He was marked, and at some point will pay off the debt by being required to take part in its schemes to rid the world of Daoloth (what it calls the singularity). He wants nothing more to do with the entity, its favourites or people in thrall to it until that payback is due.

More than his changed appearance, his history of repeated and prolonged visits to hot-zones is unsettling for those communities he interacts with, as few people believe that he can really have emerged quite so unscathed and so he is often treated with suspicion, even as the items he scavenges are valued.