Dorromee Ado, Grand Scholar, the Central Guilds, Tarnath
Sula 33, SP~5,022
Dorromee Ado, Grand Scholar, the Central Guilds, Tarnath
The Guild Energetic Research Coalition, commonly known as GERC (that’s GURK, not JERK), is the largest research organization on the Tamarra Continent, as we discussed in an earlier blog. In this blog, and following blogs, we will discuss some of the various parts of this vast organization.
Resource Dispersal and Governance
While this division might have the most boring name of any GERC division, it is in fact the main governing authority for the Coalition. Overall, the main mission of the RDG is to temper the individual passions of division heads in favor of a more balanced, “big picture” view of the research the GERC should be doing.
To be clear, the power in the GERC is decentralized; each division has its own directors who can make many decisions without ever consulting the RDG, and who can even overturn some of the latter groups’ decisions for their own division (see Division Head Council below; there are checks and balances in place to prevent particularly egregious corruption). The RDG does, however, set policy for the GERC as a whole, and they control the allocation of funds within the Coalition; while division heads can overturn many decisions, this tends to boil down to politics. Each division has a minimum funding requirement that depends upon their size, average materials costs, and so on, and is quite hard to change; it takes a 3/4 majority vote of the RDG to change established funding minimums. Even so, the minimums usually come out to around 60% of a given division’s necessary costs in actual terms – so it is in most divisions’ best interest to find a halfway point between the RDG’s requests and their own planned projects if they want enough funding to keep all their members happy.
The RDG is composed of fourteen members: two members of each Guild (who cannot be full GERC members, but have usually been with the GERC in some capacity before election), plus two non-Channels. These last two places were controversial when they were first added in SP~4,864, but the RDG at the time had just recovered from a period of bureaucratically crippling internal division. The DHC convened an emergency council and cast a rare unanimous ballot to add two members of Governance who were completely unaffiliated not just with the Guilds, but with any solidarity at all around Energetic channeling. In the century and a half since they were added, the two non-channels have grown to be valued additions to the RDG – even if there are still some members who grumble about them behind closed doors.
The current president of the RDG is Amovar Kagu, a human Charismatic who was raised by an ishiri family in Naldrin City. Kagu is generally respected as a skilled administrator and mediator, able to piece together the various requests and demands of each division to make everyone, if not ecstatic, at least content. She is a veteran politician, having served time on several of Naldrin’s many legal councils, and it shows; while she has not crossed the line into outright corruption, she does not hesitate to roll up her sleeves and get her hands dirty when necessary. Given that she tends to use her maneuvering for results that are beneficial overall, most GERC members turn a blind eye to it.
Wyrd (WEErd) Division
Most GERC members agree that the Wyrd Division is a little… off. Almost every member of the Division has transcended at least one Barrier in Shadow. They study Wyrd energy, a corrupted version of one or more of the fundamental Six Energies that make up the world. They also examine more practical, applied areas like automaton development.
The current head of the Division is Kemmfaut Lap-Kep, a wellyn who has achieved the remarkable feat of transcending two Barriers in each of the six Energies. One of her eyes has a bright purple iris, while the other is completely white, with no iris or pupil at all. She has no tongue – she speaks in Quen sign language – and scars cover her face and body. Stories abound throughout the GERC of how she came to be this way: was she born with those eyes, or were they the result of some strange ritual? Did she remove her own tongue, or was it taken from her?