Dr. Hieronymus Maurer

FULL NAME: Dr. H. Hieronymus Maurer (don't ask what the H stands for)
NICKNAME: Hiero, in the closest circles. Dr. Maurer has been known to respond to "Doc", but only the first time.
GENDER: Male
AGE: 42
SEXUALITY: ???, presumed widower


Dr. Maurer is a man of few words and fewer facial expressions: his default is a vague frown, which is turned mildly communicative by the occasional quirk or lowering of his heavy eyebrows. He has a grim manner and a strong presence, and a very fine hand at doctoring--and so far as the average citizen is concerned, that is all that anyone needs to know. For the most part, they are correct.

However, if one were to bypass the stern countenance, to probe the brain behind it with an intelligent question or a thoughtful comment, one would discover an incredible mind and a surprising capacity for deep discussion and stimulating conversation; further still, and one might find the distinguishing tastes of an aficionado and connoisseur, the lofty contemplation of a philosopher, and the sterile logic of a mathematician.

Dr. Maurer is, of course, not without his faults. He is an arrogant perfectionist and the very blunt sort of pessimist, inclined towards obsession and socially aloof to the point of appearing cold or even cruel. However, he is also incredibly attentive, careful and discerning, and what he lacks in social grace he makes up for in his extensive patience and a selfless inclination to generously teach and instruct anyone that sincerely desires to learn from him.

Perhaps Dr. Hieronymus Maurer is not the man whose hand you want to hold as you breathe your last, but he is absolutely the one you want to be wielding the scalpel when it's a matter of life or death.


At least, that is how it used to be.




RANK: N/A
GROUP: Civilian
JOB: Physician & surgeon
HEIGHT: 6'6"
WEIGHT: 225 lbs
HAIR: Light blond, going gray at the temples; a little wavy. Dr. Maurer wears it short around the ears and combed back against his skull, where it never sits flat.
EYES: A cold grey-blue; hooded.


PHYSICAL APPEARANCE:
Dr. Maurer is a stern-looking man, with sharp eyes and a grim set to his bushy brows. Quite tall and respectably broad-shouldered, with a terse manner and a clipped way of speaking, he is an intimidating presence beside many of his civilian patients, but his build is the slim one of a scholar. He maintains himself with a fastidious dedication to short nails, a clean-shaven face and straight white teeth. The only thing about him that is remotely out of place is a poorly-healed break in his already aquiline nose, and even that serves as the perch for the brassy bridge of his thin-framed spectacles.

Dr. Maurer's attire reflects the precision of his personal upkeep, all crisp fabrics and straight lines in shades of red, black and gray, often patterned in order to keep the combination from growing too stale. His typical working attire is dominated by a double-breasted leather coat that acts as a full-body apron, with the collar turned up around his square jaw, and the sleeves up or down depending on the task at hand. In his off-time, he might don a vest over the ubiquitous high collared dress shirt and slacks.








Solitude: Maurer is a man who values silence and personal space. Having spent so many of his years at work alongside the ill and wounded, who may appear at any time and with any number of inconveniences, he has come to particularly treasure moments that are void of screams, sobs, moans and snifflings. A natural introvert, he also requires periods where he is allowed nothing but his own company, or he will begin to suffer some degree of social fatigue, which tends to make him unusually snippy and gruff.

Working: On the other hand, Maurer also deeply loves what he does, and has a strong need to be constantly productive. He is very dedicated to his duties, whatever they may be, and acquires satisfaction from the sight of any sort of progress. Maurer is the doctor that will work tirelessly through the night on a patient he intends to save. Indeed, he would sooner work himself to death on a gripping project that is nearing completion than consider taking a break. Since his separation from Dr. Geist, this particular habit has taken a noticeable toll on his health.

Perfection: Maurer values little as much as he values a job well done--whether it is his own or someone else's. Possessed of a particularly critical eye, he is always keenly aware of flaws, which tend to irritate him. Of course, this has also readily equipped him for fixing them. Maurer has never been known to do a bad job at anything, and while he is a highly proficient doctor because of it, his frustrations with anything short of sheer flawlessness make it rather difficult for him to willingly pick up anything aside from what he has already mastered without scoffing, including hobbies.

Wine: Maurer dabbles in collecting and appreciating all sorts of things, but one of his favorites is wine. Guests that join him for dinner or company can always count on being treated to something fine and unusual. For all of the breadth of his experience and taste, however, Maurer retains a particular soft spot for Riesling.

Creative Pursuits: The rigid and repetitive nature of the field of medicine does not leave a brilliant mind much room for dramatic innovation. Dr. Maurer takes pleasure in exploring the right side of his brain as much as the left, though the moments available to him for it are often short. He keeps a small sketchbook alongside his notes, to record drawings or ideas that might be considered too novel to implement anywhere else. He has a particular talent for technical drawings, and a fondness for designing structures that range from utilitarian to fantastic. That said, this is still a skill-in-progress so far as Maurer is concerned, and he does not take kindly to any prying eyes.



Rigid Morality: Dr. Maurer views morality not as a starkly separate pair of perspectives but instead as a spectrum of them, a veritable gradient of gray running from the blackest heart to the purest intentions. Individuals that oppose this theory tend to grate upon his nerves, and Dr. Maurer is fond of instigating subtly argumentative discussions with people that assert ethical absolutes, usually by suggesting scenarios when things that are widely considered evil, such as murder, might be excusable in the face of some greater good.

Religion: Besides finding the Cult ridiculous, even appalling, for the way it takes advantage of hapless civilians, Dr. Maurer thinks it is especially repulsive for being so intellectually bankrupt in every possible way. He does not particularly pity the gullible minds that subscribe to the idea, supposing that anyone that stupid deserves what they get.

Laziness and Willful Ignorance: So far as Dr. Maurer is concerned, these two deficiencies are practically the same thing. His legendary patience dwindles rather quickly when spent on individuals that openly display no interest in putting forth any kind of effort, be it to enact a change or educate themselves.

Disorder: While unlikely to go into an aneurysm at the sight of a messy room, Dr. Maurer prefers to keep his things as tidy as possible. Mind, his concept of tidy does not particularly entail neat--he considers his things to be in order so long as he can easily recall where they are, even if they are collected in a nondescript pile on his desk. It bothers him immensely when things are moved around, including supplies in his clinic.


Discovery: Not the perfect discovery of scientific exploration, of course, so much as the external discovery of his own more dubious pursuits. Dr. Maurer has done several questionable things in his search of a Greater Good, and would rather that nobody learn about them until his efforts have borne their fruit, lest his progress be frustrated--even terminated--at the hand of blind justice.

Failure: Dr. Maurer holds perfection and precision in such high regard because the one thing that he refuses to even so much as consider is the possibility of failure. Years in his field have taught him that a patient cannot always be saved, that a procedure cannot be calculated beyond surprises, and that sometimes his best is not enough--but Dr. Maurer does not mind those things. What he minds, indeed, dreads, is one day meeting a challenge with much at stake, and failing to surmount it because of something as petty and avoidable as an entirely foreseeable error. Maurer sees giving up as a form of failure, and so is very unlikely to ever cease doing something he has decided he will succeed at.

Being Proven Wrong: On the Big Things, that is. Dr. Maurer conducts his life according to a series of structured premises that he has calculated himself and built all else upon; the dismantling of even one of these Big Things could lead to an internal collapse and a forced re-evaluation of things he might rather not change. Most of these Big Things are philosophical and ethical in nature.



The Betterment of Humanity: Dr. Maurer holds the deep conviction that humanity deserves something better than the hand that fate has dealt it. It is this conviction that drove him into the medical field, and it is the very same conviction that has taken him forward into the darker recesses of scientific inquiry. Maurer believes that it is humanity's right and destiny to raise itself from its helplessness; however, he has also witnessed and tended to the hopeless suffering and loss of the Scouting Legion. Ever pragmatic, he has decided to pursue the elevation of the human race in a different way--one that is not afraid to sacrifice the few for the benefit of the many.

The Furthering of Science: Ordered beneath his drive to perfect humanity is Dr. Maurer's own desire to extend the reach of scientific knowledge. The Titans present a veritable gray area in the field of biology, and their strange connection to humans themselves is of immense fascination to Maurer. The esoteric nature of the Titan Shifters and the arcane powers the creatures possess have additionally inspired him to look beyond science, into the realms of occultism and even magic.



Even in the days before the attack of the Titans, Hieronymus Maurer had been a man with a mission.

The Shinganshina District had once been home to him and the surgical practice that he ran alongside his wife, the esteemed Dr. Chalice Geist. Both of them took pride in doing good work and providing a valuable service to their little corner of the last bastion of humanity--but Maurer was hungry for something more satisfying than that. Their location meant regular exposure to the failed operations of the Survey Corps, and each utter defeat, each cold corpse, fed a flame in the surgeon's heavy heart. Humanity should not be so helpless, certainly not before an enemy so crude and revolting as the Titans.

The fact that no feat of science or medicine had emerged within the past century to defeat that terrible enemy did not dismay Dr. Maurer or incline him away from the impossible solution he had become resolute to find. When he was away from the clinic, he forged connections, and made arrangements to obtain samples from recently killed Titans. His objective was simple: discover and isolate the power that permeated every inch of their tissue and gave them the capacity to regenerate any loss of flesh or blood. With such a strength on their side, humanity would truly stand a chance.

Maurer soon began to dedicate almost as much of his time to this project as he did to his practice, and it had only been a matter of time before the two of them mingled. Desperate for progress and starved for test subjects, he began to feed some of his concoctions to his dying patients, and had injected his own veins with later tonics on more than one occasion. Dr. Geist, while quite privy to her husband's pursuits, did not learn of these particularly questionable actions until one day when an iteration of the tonic succeeded--horribly. Maurer had been forced to put down the screaming amputee with a bullet to the head while a nightmarish regeneration ravaged his body.

Maurer's eyes were never quite the same after that.

Disturbed and disheartened by this unexpected and grotesque turn, the surgeon ceased all of his experimentation at once, but was not so resolute that he destroyed his research. He instead hid it beneath the floorboards, with some intention to one day return to it when he had enough information to avoid such tragedies in the future. Despite the horror he had caused, Maurer knew that the tonic did something, and that a perfected version therefore could not have been out of reach. His obsession drove him to continue purchasing and distilling Titan tissue, though he operated now as covertly as possible so as not to inspire Dr. Geist's objection.

On the day that the Titans came, Maurer had been out on just such an excursion, intending to come home long before his wife's return from her own journey to collect supplies. This was made impossible, of course, by the breaching of Wall Maria. Maurer never saw the wreckage of the clinic, and never learned the whereabouts of his wife; his frantic course was herded away from it by the infestation of the Titans, and he was forced to withdraw behind Wall Rose, distraught but not hopeless. He searched the refugees for her, and he asked them questions--but all of them were stricken with grief or made cruel by loss and powerlessness, and in the end, he never found her.

Maurer assumed the worst. Embittered by the cost of his own neglect, suffocating under an unfamiliar and terrible feeling of helplessness, the doctor slowly rebuilt his life with a conviction solidifying like iron around his heart: he would find a way to save humanity from this cruel tyranny at any cost.

Needless to say, he did not anticipate the depths of the mire he had stepped into. Maurer dealt with his own grief by throwing himself headlong into his project, the one that had cost him a final few moments with his love, convinced that he no longer had anything to lose. He would find a way to imbue humanity with the powers of the Titans, who suffered no pain and feared no wound save the one that split the nape of their neck.

The pursuit of this outrageous solution quickly became a point of obsession. Maurer opened a new clinic outside the edge of the Chlorba District by his lonesome, and there began to truly experiment in earnest--and in secret. The money he earned from his ethical daytime practice was directed towards black market dealings of the darkest sort: he began to buy low quality slaves, whom he kept in the cellar of his home and visited every night in order to test new substances upon them in the endless search for the miracle tonic that would grant perfect Titan regeneration to human beings. His frustration sometimes surfaced in those bleak, hopeless hours, and the injuries he inflicted as measured tests began to lose some of the control he so valued in himself.

Shaken by his first dedicated dive into the world of harm rather than healing, Dr. Maurer has since taken a short break from the experimentation in favor of expanding his practice, and has handily disposed of all of the remnants of the dead that did not pass his tests.

The shadows in his eyes and the blood on his hands, alas, will not be done away with quite so easily.

Thank you very much! You are, of course, entirely correct--that was an oversight on my part. It's been a few weeks since I binge-watched the anime. I've amended that detail.

I appreciate your getting back to me so quickly!

wewww thank you for the changes <33