Doctor Gertrude Grunfeld
Age: 55
Born: Strasburg, Carolingian Union
Gertrude Grunfeld has always been a serious individual. As a child she had no use for playing pretend or other frivolous activities that children engaged in. She was, and is, just plain mean. She has the ability to identify pain points in others and use it against them mercilessly to get what she needs—sometimes just because she’s bored. She is eloquent, logical, a contrarian, a stickler, brilliant, and insufferable.
Grunfeld excelled in school and graduated as valedictorian from the Sorbonne. Her speech to her class is one of the longest in school history, a treatise on everything she saw wrong in education,the school, and her fellow students. She went on to receive her medical degree and almost immediately became a renowned practitioner. She had no bedside manner, but wealthy individuals flew to Juan-les-Pins in the south of France from all over the world to be treated by her.
Eventually, Grunfeld’s already limited patience completely evaporated. She despised the daily interactions and moronic conversations of everyday people, and everyday people hated working with her. She couldn’t stand the rules of the university hospital that prevented more exciting—and dangerous—research. She looked to move to a place where nobody would bother her.
Grunfeld relocated to Sri Lanka to practice. The main draws were a lack of governmental oversight and the fact that the people she would work with spoke Sinhala, which was not one of the eight languages Grunfeld spoke. With freedom to work how she saw fit and a lack of smalltalk, Grunfeld was in heaven for years. That changed when a rare hemorrhagic fever afflicted her village outside of Uhana. Eighty-percent of the town’s 500 person population was infected and Grunfeld was unable to cure the disease. Grunfeld was quarantining the infected at the town’s school, but the infected population continued to grow.
Dr Grunfeld realized that the virus was becoming airborne and soon there would be nothing to stop it. Fortunately for the rest of the world, one night, with the town asleep a fire broke out in the gym and spread with shocking and suspicious speed, destroying all traces of the disease...along with all those inside.
Grunfeld was never formally accused of starting the fire, but to her colleagues there was no doubt. She was effectively prohibited from practicing medicine and found herself ostracized from the community.