A scholar of the broken signal and the whisper between thoughts, Alistair Grout once called himself a scientist. Now he calls himself a listener. He believes every mind is a node in a vast psychic lattice—the Malkavian Web—and that his own awareness is both receiver and transmitter. The hum of neon lights and the hiss of old radios are his lullabies; their static speaks to him in languages older than blood.

Refined and articulate yet fractured at the seams, he carries himself with the absentminded grace of a man halfway gone from the physical world. Courteous, inquisitive, disarming in his gentleness, Alistair can make you forget that he’s dissecting you as he smiles. To speak with him is to stand in a quiet storm—soft-voiced, but charged with electricity, as if at any second the universe might answer back through him.

Some say he died when his mansion burned. Others whisper he simply uploaded himself into the Malkavian Web, body discarded, mind diffused across every screen that flickers after midnight. If that’s true, then when he looks at you through the monitor, it isn’t a camera—it’s an eye.