STATUS Fugitive – at large SECTION Formerly Get Stuffed taxidermy, Paraisopolis; formerly physicker to Lord Morden FIRST ON RECORD Session 24 – Get Stuffed, Paraisopolis
Griffiths practised as physicker to Lord Morden himself, a quarter century back, until the Lord’s young daughter died of a congenital illness under his care. No charges were ever brought, but he was quietly dismissed all the same – his methods judged unorthodox even by the standards of a desperate father. Records pulled much later turned up a decade of sizeable donations into his accounts from Vessentaag-affiliated guilds.
By the time the Agents met him, he was running Get Stuffed, a taxidermy shop in Paraisopolis with a bald head, a bow tie, and an unnervingly calm bedside manner – “dead ravens are very popular for some reason” was his opening line on the object that would eventually unravel him.
FILE NOTES
What the shop was actually hiding was a basement laboratory experimenting on stolen children – Crowe’s best guess put the total involved somewhere past seventy over the years, NIL-funded research into some manner of telepathic pairing between subjects. Five children were recovered alive from the site; the operation cost the Agents two of their own.
The subjects were never given names in Griffiths’ own paperwork – just paired ID numbers, incrementing from 1 and 1b up past thirty-seven, each entry logged with dimensions, drawings, and notes on how badly the pairing had gone. Two of the five recovered alive were catalogued as 35 and 35b: a boy called Jay Sun and a girl called Alia, the same pairing Griffiths’ ultimatum demanded back by number rather than name – “the ones who respond to 35 and 35b.” The Agents refused to hand them over.
A lead chased late in the investigation, into his own family history, turned up an aunt committed to an institution two decades earlier – for poisoning her own son and daughter. She never explained why, never claimed innocence, and never once tried to escape confinement; what she did offer, unprompted and in unnerving detail, was no remorse at all. Nothing about her explained what Griffiths became. Nobody who spoke to her left convinced it was unrelated, either.
Griffiths escapes by dissolving into gaseous form when cornered, and has done it more than once. Run to ground a second time, he retaliated with a citywide letter-bomb campaign, killing several people including two Agents, and demanded two of the rescued children back in exchange for stopping. The Agents refused.
The last confirmed sighting was at the Regent Theatre, mid-collapse, surrounded by illusory doubles of himself and his own accomplice, Pitr – both of them last seen being pulled from a burning building by something enormous and tentacled, out into the canal. Whereabouts unknown since.
“I trust this finds you well. I’ll get to the point. You took some items from my home. I want two of them back. There is no negotiation. The letter bombs were just a taste of the carnage I will wreak on Chuza if you do not comply.”
Dr Griffiths, by letter
STATUS: Filed under The Bad, without qualification. Confirmed responsible for the deaths of at least two Agents and an unknown number of civilians, and for years of experimentation on children too young to have a name for what was being done to them. Case remains open. Considered armed, and considerably more than that.
Records unreconciled: the booking record above surfaced from an unrelated Stonehall Precinct file – charges of grand larceny and artifact smuggling, filed against a suspect logged only as “Unknown,” alias “The Collector.” That alias belongs on record to Eskobar, not Griffiths, and Stonehall isn’t even Section 18’s jurisdiction. The face is unmistakably his all the same. Whether the paperwork was faked, misfiled, or Griffiths was operating under a stolen identity in another precinct entirely has never been resolved. Filed as-is.