History:
This is it!Personality: The most obvious aspect of Herbert is that his primary interest is with his area of study—death and reanimation—and with science itself for the most part. Almost everything he does is in pursuit of furthering his research goals. The reason he has become a medical student appears to be for the access to resources, scientific supplies and dead bodies alike. His initial choice of Dan Cain (star pupil of Miskatonic University’s medical college) as a roommate appears to be Dan’s better access to resources than himself. He even injects himself with his reanimation formula regularly in order to avoid needing to sleep or eat so that he can spend literally all of his time working on his research. He only interacts with people as much as he has to. When the Dean of the medical school he’s joining attempts to introduce him to Dan, he only barely acknowledges him, and pushes past his outstretched hand. He has to engage with the Dean, of course, because the Dean controls his access to supplies and further research and education.
There really isn’t much, in fact, that he won’t do for his research. Herbert appears to have very minimal moral standards in relation to it. He’ll sneak into morgues and mess around with the dead. He’ll steal from the university—Dr. Hill indicates as such when he notes that the microscope Herbert is using in his lab at home comes from the school. He’ll even kill: when it looks like Dr. Hill will steal his research from him Herbert struggles out of his mind control (it’s a weird movie) and beheads him with a shovel. This also means that his judgement is fairly poor, though, when something might possibly aid his experiments. There isn’t a single viable dead body that Herbert won’t reanimate, no matter what a terrible idea it might be to anyone with a shred of common sense. He reanimates a huge, strong man without any restraints, after his previous reanimated body, a cat, became incredibly violent post-reanimation. He reanimates the Dean of the school after he’d indirectly killed him with the previous reanimated corpse, and also had gotten on his bad side pre-death. He even reanimates Dr. Hill (no restraints this time either) literally right after he’s just beheaded him for trying to steal his work.
His empathy initially seems to be completely lacking as he only seems to find the Dean’s death vaguely regrettable, and he especially shows no sympathy towards Dan’s girlfriend Megan (and the Dean’s daughter) who has just lost her father. However, his empathy isn’t so much lacking, as it is incredibly pinpointed. We have evidence of two people that Herbert has fixated onto and empathises with as much as he can: his mentor Dr. Hans Gruber (it came out before Die Hard), and Dan. The people that Herbert chooses to fix onto, insofar as a connection can be made when there are only two real examples, are intelligent people who are also obsessed with defeating death. Dan is a medical student who wants desperately to prevent all his patients from dying while Dr. Gruber was, it seems, as interested in reanimation as Herbert, and was responsible for formulating the reanimation reagent with him. Herbert goes all the way to Massachusetts from Switzerland in order to try and get some sort of comeuppance for Dr. Hill, Dr. Gruber’s old coworker who plagiarised a great deal of his work. He was already situated at the Zurich school, if all he wanted was to complete his research and access supplies. What he wanted was revenge for his mentor by showing up Dr. Hill with the brilliant reanimation science he’d worked on with Gruber.
Dan starts out as a convenient guy with a useful basement and the position to potentially validate Herbert’s research with the greater scientific community but he very quickly becomes one of the few people Herbert is actually able to empathise with. He hides Dan’s dead cat in the fridge when he finds it because he wants to just get it reanimated before Dan notices, knowing he was fond of it. He desperately wants Dan to continue to agree to help him, even when Dan loses his position to help Herbert’s work get validated after he gets his scholarship rescinded. He even helps Dan cause a distraction to rescue Megan even though rescuing Megan won’t get his work back that Dr. Hill stole and he actively despises her. Of course, everything Herbert does basically contributes towards ruining Dan’s life, but he is trying! With other people, he only tries as long as is necessary to remove him from the immediate situation, and sometimes not even then.
Positive: Motivated and driven in his work
Negative: Low morality in regards to science, bad at empathising, poor impulse control.
Powers and Abilities: He has a certain amount of superhuman abilities but only if he’s injecting his reagent. His reagent (diluted) helps him go without sleep, and evidently without much food either. It makes his mind run a bit faster than it would otherwise. It’s probably also responsible for the multiple near-death experiences he’s escaped from. In the final movie in the trilogy (Beyond Re-Animator, takes place in a prison, really awful) a drug seeking prisoner injects a full syringe of full-strength reagent, and he not only vibrates until he explodes, but every part of his body retains some form of animation. His eye still has sight somehow, even though it’s become unattached. All this is a really convoluted way of saying that I don’t know exactly but he can probably keep going through stuff that would incapacitate him if he wasn’t on the reagent. He doesn’t regenerate, or heal faster than normal, but he’s bounced back almost immediately from what should have been a concussion on several occasions so I assume he’d probably keep going until abruptly passing out from blood loss after receiving any sort of traumatic injury.
As far as other abilities, he has a good deal of medical knowledge, being as he’s a third year medical student and something of a genius into the bargain. His specialties are in surgery, neurology/neurosurgery in his specific focus of reanimation, enough chemistry to design and formulate his reagent, and the science of death. He also seems to be fairly quick at learning about anything that seems related to his pet project. Additionally he’s a pretty decent thief…
Inventory: Notebook of reagent notes, penlight, small black bag with vial of reagent and syringe with a few hypodermic needles
Samples:
Weird Renfield convo TDM 
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scientificist) wrote2018-01-21 09:46 pm
