Elijah Griffin
Age: 20
Height: 5’10”
Appearance:
• Lean, wiry build; more endurance than strength.
• Short black hair, usually not styled and falling slightly over his forehead.
• Near black eyes that hold a steady, observant focus.
• Tends toward quiet, practical clothing: navy jumpers, dark jeans, wool coats; the kind of neatness that looks unintentional.
• Always carries a small notebook and pencil in his coat pocket.
Personality:
• Thinks before he speaks; tends to test his own thoughts before voicing them.
• Seeks rightness rather than recognition; deeply believes in proportion, fairness, and truth as moral balance.
• Introverted, yet capable of decisive action when it matters, especially in defence of others.
• Feels deeply but hides it under composure; his care shows in vigilance rather than words.
• The kind of student who can’t leave a question half-answered, which makes him both gifted and vulnerable to manipulation.
Motivations:
• To uncover the truth behind Adrian Baynes’s death and the meaning of his unfinished thesis.
• To reconcile intellectual honesty with moral responsibility and the line between curiosity and complicity.
• To prove to himself that knowledge can still be kind, even after being weaponized by someone he admired.
Year: 2nd Year Undergraduate
• Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Humanities – Department of English Language and Literature
Academic Standing: High First in coursework; nominated for the Phronesis Essay Prize.
Clara Goldstein
Age: 20
Height: 5’6”
Appearance:
• Long auburn hair, usually braided loosely over her shoulders, with strands always escaping in soft curls.
• Green-grey eyes, sharp and bright, the kind that miss nothing.
• Light freckles across her nose and cheeks.
• Prefers practical clothes layered with care: cardigans, rolled sleeves, boots that can handle rain.
• Carries a fountain pen and a battered notebook whose margins are full of equations, reminders, and the occasional doodle.
Personality:
• The realist in the room; questions before assuming, measures before moving.
• Her care is pragmatic, never sentimental; she makes lists instead of promises.
• Naturally systematic, often the one who translates Elijah’s intuition into method.
• Uses irony to defuse fear or tension but rarely mocks.
• Where Elijah hesitates on moral weight, she steadies him, though she hides her own fear behind precision.
Motivations:
• To protect what Adrian’s work stood for: truth without spectacle, integrity without worship.
• To keep Elijah safe, not just from Marlowe, but from his own self-endangering sense of duty.
• To see justice done in a way that leaves meaning intact, not mangled by institution.
Year: 2nd Year Undergraduate
• Faculty: Faculty of Philosophy and Theology – Department of Philosophy
Academic Standing: Consistent First; served as undergraduate research assistant to Professor Errington in Philosophy and Praxis.
Adrian Baynes
Age: 21 (at death)
Height: 5’11”
Appearance:
• Dirty-blond hair, short and usually untidy, like he always ran a hand through it mid-thought.
• Storm-grey eyes, intense and unguarded, the kind that seem to argue even when silent.
• Wiry frame; long fingers always ink-smudged from annotation or graphite.
• Favoured dark jumpers and worn blazers, pockets full of folded notes and loose paper scraps.
• The sort of student who looked perpetually half-exhausted, half-inspired.
Personality:
• Brilliant, impatient, and idealistic. Thought faster than he spoke, and rarely slowed down enough for caution.
• Charismatic but volatile. Could pull people into his orbit with conviction, then push them away with the same force.
• Believed ideas should wound before they healed; sought truth even when it burned.
• Refused easy answers, the kind of moral absolutist who saw compromise as decay.
• Yet, beneath confidence, carried a persistent sense that no one really understood what he meant.
Motivations:
• To expose the double standards within academic ethics: how silence becomes moral theatre rather than virtue.
• To prove that moral courage and intellectual rigour shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.
• To challenge Marlowe’s authority by finishing a thesis that dismantled his very philosophy of “guardianship.”
Year: Final Year Undergraduate (deceased before degree completion)
• Faculty: Faculty of Classics – Department of Classics & Ancient History
Academic Standing: Projected First-Class Honours before his death. Posthumously awarded for research contribution.
Magnus Errington
Age: 65
Height: 5’9”
Appearance:
• Compact build, the quiet sturdiness of a man used to walking the same halls for decades.
• Silver-white hair, always neatly combed.
• Hazel eyes behind thin, rectangular spectacles — observant, unreadable, quick to sharpen when students miss a point.
• Often seen in worn suits and a long wool coat that smells faintly of chalk and rain.
• Carries a fountain pen clipped inside his jacket; lectures with a folded handkerchief instead of slides.
Personality:
• Speaks in complete thoughts, rarely repeats himself, expects precision in others.
• Cares deeply but shows it obliquely through correction, not comfort.
• Believes that ethics begins in what can be practiced, not performed.
• His sarcasm has the polish of philosophy, never cruelty.
• Knows institutions fail but insists individuals can still choose integrity.
Motivations:
• To preserve practice over performance, to remind his students that thinking well means living well.
• To protect inquiry from turning into vanity; believes scholarship is service, not theatre.
• To teach what he calls “the quiet mean”: the balance between truth and gentleness, courage and care.
Title: Associate Professor of Philosophy, St. Orion’s College
Education:
• B.A. (Hons) in Classics and Philosophy
• Doctor of Philosophy in Ethics
Academic Distinctions:
• Former Fellow of the British Academy for Ethics in Education.
• Published “Rooms, Not Corridors: The Practice of Measured Speech” in 2018.
Julius Marlowe
Age: 51
Height: 6’1”
Appearance:
• Tall, composed, with an economy of movement that reads as authority.
• Dark brown hair, beginning to silver at the temples; always neatly combed.
• Grey-blue eyes, sharp and steady, the gaze of a man who studies before he speaks.
• Dresses with understated precision: pressed tweed, polished shoes, gloves in winter.
• Voice low, deliberate, and calm: a tutor’s cadence that can sound like care even when it conceals control.
Personality:
• Charismatic and exacting: Knows how to make intellect feel like intimacy; the kind of mentor who flatters through discipline.
• Speaks of order and restraint as virtues but uses them to justify possession of others’ choices.
• Rarely angry, rarely kind; every response measured for effect.
• Convinces himself that control is stewardship, that pruning excess preserves truth.
• A man who never raises his voice, because silence achieves more.
Motivations:
• To curate minds and institutions into “purity of purpose,” purging what he deems decay or excess.
• To prove that moral equilibrium must be enforced.
• To shape successors (like Elijah) in his own intellectual image, believing it a mercy rather than manipulation.
Title: Senior Lecturer in Ethics and Modern Moral Theory, St. Orion’s College
Education:
• B.A. (Hons) in Moral Philosophy
• Doctor of Philosophy in Moral Guardianship and Institutional Virtue
Note:
• Prefers to be called ‘Doctor’.