Registry of the Non-Evolved Database
File #11 Aug 2009 16:10
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 James Callis |
Born into a low-class family in London's east-end, Martin Crowley was destined for an ordinary, mundane life. With his father working long hours at a shipyard and his mother wasting away at a shoe factory, life for the young Martin son seemed like something out of a Dickensian novel, not the early 1970s. For the early years of his life, Martin's family held little in his heart, save for steady meals and a dispassionate connection from both mother and father. It wasn't until he was school aged that people began to notice the one shining purpose of young Martin Crowley; he was a bloody genius.
With a natural intellect, Martin was quick to adapt to school and gain the notice of his teachers. While at home, the isolation that his parents long hours of factory work provided gave him ample time to continue in theone thing he truly succeeded at, his studies. All through primary school, Martin feverishly applied himself at academic pursuits in an attempt to bury himself in something other than the disaffected homelife and his fair-weather friendships with peers.
Only in his early teens while Martin was just starting secondary school did his parents come to understand their son's brilliance, finally taking the time out to integrate themselves into his life more cohesively and discover what intellectual talents their son possessed. Unfortunately, this turn did not become the watershed moment of change in Martin's life as he had hoped, and after a long discussion with his teachers, it was decided that he would be sent to a private academy for the remainder of his secondary schooling in the city of Oxford. Of course no one would realize until it was too late, but this was the severing of the final emotional thread between Martin and his family.
To the Crowley family, Martin was a meal-ticket waiting to be cashed in, a genius child who would become a doctor or a lawyer or a politician and drag his family out from the poverty line. For all of the lack of love and affection they hadn't had the time to spare Martin in his youth, they made vestigial attempts to recreate in his teen years, but only by the time Martin himself had given up on them. Visits out to Oxford were fleeting, and when the Crowleys would pay a trip out, lip-service was all that Martin would return to their attempts at affection and familial nicities. He'd already hardened up on the inside, and scholastic pursuits was what he could throw himself at, and a burgeoning attempt at something resembling a social life with his peers.
By the time of his graduation from secondary school, Martin was well on his path to pursuing a degree in law from the University of Oxford, and it was exactly the break his parents were hoping for, surely their son's burgeoning career in legal studies would be their ticket to high society. It's a small wonder they never realized how little he cared for them, or how infrequently he would pay visits home.
Within three years at Oxford, Martin obtained his LL.B (an undergraduate law degree) while dabbling in philosophy for personal interests. He continued on through a two-year postgraduate program to obtain his masters in law, followed by beginning his studies for a doctorate in law, when everything Martin Crowley was struggling to obtain quite literally blew up in his face.
On a brief visit home during holiday from school on Christmas Eve in 1995, Martin was involved in a minor traffic collision upon entering London, when a speeding vehicle careening through a roundabout clipped the rear of Martin's car, spinning his vehicle around. The offending vehicle bounces off of Martin's and collided with a cement column out front of a bistro. Following the collision, Martin — who was thankfully uninjured at the time — proceeded to climb out of his vehicle and pitch and irate tirade at the other driver before he had even climbed out of his automobile.
On the rainy streets of London, Martin was pitching a fit at a fogged up window, not realizing for a moment that the orange glow inside of the car was — quite unusually — fire. When the driver burst forth out of a flaming vehicle, Martin was mostly screaming, flailing his arms and apologizing for verbally berating a man burning to death before he realized two very important facts about this incident. The first, being that man on fire was neither screaming nor in pain. Secondly, that another car had skidded into the intersection, along with finely dressed gentlemen in suits pointing firearms at the trundling inferno.
While attempting to extricate himself from the situation, Martin found himself instead politely tasered and told in no unmistakable terms to "stay right there." The pair of armed 'officers' proceeded to subdue the inflamed man, but before legitimate authorities arrived bagged and zip-tied both he and Martin and had them hauled off in separate unmarked vans. This gentlemanly encounter was Martin's first introduction to the Company.
Martin Crowley never came home that night, and neither did he return to Oxford several days later when the school reopened. No, after being carried off by unfamiliar men in the back of a van that smelled disparagingly like boiled eggs as he does so often recall, Martin Crowley was interrogated by the two Company agents that had apprehended the pyrokinetic; Agent Samuel Bingham and Agent James Woods. As witness to an event involving the Evolved in the mid 1990s, Martin was questioned about what he believed he saw, his background checked, and detained for a full night while considerations to his situation were made.
Ultimately, the decision of what to do with one Martin Crowley fell to the assistant-director of European Activities within the Company — Sabra Dalton, a director based out of the Company's French offices. In a polite conversation which, quite surprisingly, included tea and an ominous mute that served it as well as a deceptively nice old woman who in no small words described Martin's situation to him.
Assistant Director Dalton's delicate touch and careful explanation of the facts offered a unique opportunity to Martin; leave her office and ultimately forget the entire encounter, awakening in a hospital in Sussex County with a head injury from his collision, or take a figurative trip through the looking glass and see what the world has not otherwise yet seen.
It was, much like with his family, Martin's stunning intellect and keen grasp of academic studies that interested the Company. While there are brighter, more special agents within the Company it is Martin's singular focus and his often fluctuating moral compass that attracted them to make the invitation after his, unintentional, trial by fire.
Martin Crowley quietly transferred out of Oxford to the University of Buckingham to carry out the remainder of his legal studies to obtain his doctorate, while beginning his orientation as a Company agent in the United Kingdom.
On a relatively inauspicious morning on May 16th, 1997, a single-page handwritten letter was delivered by post to the home of Martin's parents. In it, was a terse letter politely describing his prior graduation from University with a doctorate in law as well as his desire never to associate himself with his 'contemptuous' and 'self-serving' family. Despite the emotionless content of his letter, Martin would later come to feel all of those shoved-aside emotions after a narrow brush with death.
That brush came nearly ten years later after a trip across the pond to the United States with his then partner Sarah Ashford, the 'one of them' in his pairing and an individual capable of extremely short-term precognition that allowed him to reflexively react to situations just slightly prior to their happening.
Martin's trip to New York was a simple one, requiring a tour of the Bronx Primatech facility and a review of captives contained on Level-5 as well as treatment records to ensure that nothing untoward was being done to the Company's detainees. During his time with the Company, Martin's official position had become something similar to an Internal Affairs agent within a police department. While lacking a title to that sort, Martin's job was to act as an oversight to Company policy and ensure no wrongdoing was taking place, reporting back to the Company's ultimate director, Robert Bishop, with his findings.
While in the Bronx, Martin became aware of the events transpiring in the city, and the apprehension of Theodore Case by the Department of Homeland Security. As a precaution, Martin sent Sarah to follow up on the department's trail of Sprague while he finished up at Primatech-Bronx. Getting to Sprague only after the Company target 'Sylar' was able to extract his ability. Agent Norton radioed back to the Bronx facility on the development, which was the proverbial stick to the Company's beehive. Sylar has a nuclear capability, and was loose in New York.
While this was happening, and while key members of the Company's Founders in Angela Petrelli were secreting themselves and granddaughter Claire Bennet off to Paris, Agents Crowley and Norton were struggling to cattch up to Sylar's trail while operating under the suspicion that the Bronx facility was not operating at full capacity for the threat at hand.
Moments before noon on November 8th, 2006, Agent Norton had caught up to Sylar's trail of destruction, just a block from Kibry Plaza in an attempt to head off the notorious serial killer before he could do any more damage. Martin Crowley was able to see the mushroom cloud from the explosions after feeling the shockwave rattle the Bronx facility. He could see the fires of Midtown, hear the screams of those watching the scene turn to howls, watch the ash rise up into the air and block out the sun. In that fiery explosion, Martin not only lost an official partner, but a fiance as well. Of course no one would realize until it was too late, but this was the severing of the final emotional thread Martin truly ever possessed.
Shortly following the destruction of midtown and Sarah Norton's death in the explosion, Martin left America and returned to England, taking a temporary leave of absence from the Company's active duty roster. After two psychiatric screenings it was clear he was not fit for duty, and rather than allowing himself to be forcibly removed from duty, Martin quietly stepped aside and let the Company handle more pressing matters.
For a full year, Martin consoled himself at the bottom of a bottle. He wasted away his days in a flat in London, watching the world slowly lose its mind through a television screen. He watched theory after theory expounded upon by 'experts' and 'analyists' and none of them were shooting in the right direction. How could they know? Nathan Petrelli's groundbreaking speech came as a blow to Martin, outing the world he had worked so diligently to keep secret in a time when the population density of the Evolved seemed to be ever escalating.
Sinking deeper into depression, Martin's drinking eventually slid down that slippery slope towards alcoholism. It would take a personal visit from now Director Dalton to smack a firm maternal hand of sense into Martin and wake him up from the self-deprecating pit he was allowing himself to fall deeper and deeper into.
Sabra's visit, and her subsequent brick of sense to Martin's head roused a semblance of life from him. One that was used in first sobering himself up (to a degree, as he still leans on the bottle as a crutch) and visiting his family for the first time in years. It was this one, deeply emotional visit with his estranged family that would allow Martin to see his mother before she passed away in early 2007, and his father's slipping mental health forced Martin to put him into a retirement home paid for by the Company.
The loss of his mother and the declining mental health of his father made London all the more bitter, coupled with the loss of his love Sarah in the fires of Midtown. Requesting transfer to the United States, Martin was sent to Chicago Illinois under the supervision of Assistant-Director Roger Goodman. It would be in Chicago where Martin would finally step back into the role of internal affairs within the Company, and begin investigating something under Assistant-Director Goodman's request: the Company's response and reaction to news leading up to the destruction of Midtown.
Goodman's superiors wanted to know of the Company did all it could, or if there was subversion evident.
In July of 2007, Martin Crowley was partnered with agent Albert Paulson, a transplant from the Company's Costa Verde, California branch. Unbeknownst to Martin, and still to this day, his partner is not the man that his identification badge and dossier says. He began his life as Mongomery Biard, an agent responsible for the death of a civilian in the line of duty.
Together, Agents Crowley and Paulson began their investigation of the Company's activities leading up to the destruction of Midtown by heading west, following the trail of Sylar through the west coast; his attack on the Walker family, his attack on Claire Bennet in Odessa, Texas. The trail of Agent deaths smacked of poor leadership and mismanagement to Agent Crowley, and by the time he had investigated his way out to New York City's crumbling remains, he had constructed a fairly detailed analysis of the Company's attempts — and failures — to capture Sylar leading up to his possession of Theodore Sprague's induced radioactivity.
In late 2008, while still collecting evidence for his report, the attack on Primatech Bronx resulting in the escape of Adam Monroe and other dangerous prisoners from Level-5 continued to add pages and pages to Crowley's report on Company mismanagement and inappropriate conduct and mishandling of resources. Compounding these matters were Director Bishop's medical leave of absence and Sabra Dalton's arrival from London as a replacement Director.
Hoping that things would operate smoothly under Sabra's leadership, Crowley instead found continued instances of incompetence cited as references of security failures across the board, from the escape of Doctor Odessa Knutson from Company care all the way down to Roger Goodman's espionage for Pinehearst, and the eventual need to blow the Bronx facility with its repeated compromising of security.
Crowley's report, filed on August 3rd 2009 was a seven hundred and sixty-eight page humiliation of the Company's successive security and procedure failures, along with recommendations from experts and long-time agents in how to better manage Company assets, agents, and prevent incidents like the Bronx raid from happening again.
However, no conclusion was ever given for the investigation into the Company's mishandling of the Midtown disaster, and to this day Martin Crowley is still actively investigating possible threads of conspiracy within the Company that would have allowed the events of November 8th to come to pass.
On the outside, Martin Crowley is a smug and opportunistic man who would sooner sell an agent up the river for a failure to promote his own advancement than act with discretion. As such, Martin's role has often put him at odds with other Company agents, viewing him as an 'attack dog' of sorts. This impersonal and often flippant seeming demeanor is a cover for an extremely emotionally damaged man. Between the loss of Sarah Norton and the death of his mother compounded by the mental instability of his father, Martin is hiding deep-set feelings of inadequacy to his parents that can never truly be resolved, as well as guilt over Sarah's death. As such, he has a thin skin when it comes to insults, and often takes even the smallest slight rather personal. He's not only one to hold grudges, but one to mope around about them and drink a bit too. He's… rather poor on the revenge aspect of grudges.
Appendices
Possessing a doctorate in Law from the University of Buckingham, giving him a versatile understanding of both locak and international law, which he utlizes constantly in his associationw ith the Company, advising them on matters pertaining to their arrangement with the Department of Homeland Security.
Martin's job within the Company is that of an internal affairs investigator. His background in philosophy and psychlogy while studying at Oxford comes into use here, as well as training in criminal investigation afforded to him during his tenure at the Company.
As a Company Agent, Martin is required to carry a standard-issue Company sidearm and be trained in its use. However, Martin has not once ever been required to discharge his weapon int he line of duty, and quite honestly just holding the bloody thing makes him really nervous, despite his training. Though he'd never profess that to anyone.
Not a learned skill but more of a practiced one, Martin is often times an obnoxious busy-body, as such is his occupation. During his years of service with the Company, he has learned a little bit about most field agents he's interacted with, and makes pains to view dossiers and profiles — especially psyche profiles — of agents heis gong to be associating with, even if he has to pull strings to get a look at the files. So there's a high chance that Martin knows one dirty little secret or another about most agents below his pay grade.
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