Volta

Adrian Ezekiel Volta was born on the 17th of October 1870 (55 y.o.) in Saniego, in the West of the Alliance, to demon emigrants from the Left-Behind World. His father, a field surgeon, moved the family to the still-half-built town of Famas in 1878, drawn by rumours of strange poisonings around the newly-opened ethereum mines. Volta was eight years old when he saw the first Hill go up.

He read his father's anatomy textbooks before he could properly read anything else, and by sixteen was assisting at amputations in the original timber-and-tin clinic that stood where the Central Hospital stands now. At twenty he travelled back to Saniego to complete a formal medical degree, with an unusual second concentration in toxic mineralogy. He returned to Famas in 1896 and quickly built a reputation for being far more competent than pleasant. Even among demons, who in Famas had drifted overwhelmingly into the mines or the trades, doctors were rare; among demon doctors, his name became the only one most of the city could remember.

Volta's reputation reached Samon during the civil war of 1905 - 1908. Through three years that strained every hospital in the city, he ran the emergency floor of Famas Central without rest and without favour, attending the wounded who came through his doors regardless of name or rank. By the end of the war his stubbornness had earned him a debt he had not asked for. In 1908 the Major personally appointed him head physician of the hospital, the largest in Famas. Samon's gift of ethereum came with the appointment, but Volta has never used it. He can recognise the seat of an illness in a patient almost on sight, and is rumoured never to have missed a critical diagnosis.

Volta is curt, sleepless, impatient with anyone who is not actively dying, and famously protective of his patients above all else. He has been married for over twenty years and has one daughter, sixteen years of age. Of the civilians who still see the Major face to face, Volta is one of the very few who speaks to him as an equal. He has earned both his reputation and his ulcer honestly.