Richard Swansea

Richard Swansea was the Checquy operative who founded and sustained the Croatoan, its American counterpart, turning a fragile foothold in the colonies into a resilient network for confronting supernatural threats. His career links two sharply different worlds: the pleasure and social fluidity of London, where he grew up and learned to move between classes, and the austere colonial settlements where he had to build an organization with few resources and little governmental authority. His loyalty to the Checquy kept him at that difficult post; his diaries, written across a life that ended violently, also preserved a theory about why the continental United States experienced fewer paranormal manifestations than Britain.

Identity and Background

Swansea was the son of a successful madam and grew up moving between the streets of London and the company of his mother’s upper-class customers. He was acquainted early with both the underworld and polite society, an unusual double education that would later make him valuable as an operative. At twelve, his powers manifested: chameleonic skin, the ability to regenerate body parts, and hypercontortionism. A high-ranking Checquy member among his mother’s customers recognized his potential, and the organization took him in.

During training, Swansea impressed his teachers and won the affection of his fellow pupils. After graduating, he became the Checquy’s most prominent operative. His knowledge of elite circles and criminal life allowed him to carry out remarkable operations, making him the natural choice when the organization sought to establish a major outpost in America. The post required more than his unusual physical abilities: it drew on the social adaptability he had acquired before his recruitment.

The American Assignment

The Checquy was present from the English arrival in the New World. One early operative returned to England convinced that the continent required a better-funded effort to assess its supernatural potential, and the Court dispatched agents in response. Swansea became the leading figure among them, serving as a secret paranormal agent in the colony of Plymouth. His letters to England recorded the strain of the assignment, including the fact that he did not share the religion of his neighbors.

To survive in Plymouth, Swansea performed public piety with extraordinary care. He was known for good works, sober dress, and readiness to condemn lax behavior, becoming a local hero held in greater reverence than the community elders. Yet his private duties required him to preserve concealed records that could have brought a death sentence if discovered. The outward role of the exemplary Puritan and the covert work of a Checquy agent were not merely different jobs; they demanded opposite versions of the same man.

The contrast with his earlier life was stark. The former London dandy, accustomed to moving through society’s dining rooms and sewers alike, now carried a blunderbuss in a colonial settlement whose religious culture he found oppressive. He remained in place because of his loyalty to the Checquy. In the wilderness, he formed friendships with Native Americans, warned them of dangers posed by his countrymen, and urged them to move away. They showed him the land’s secrets but did not follow his warnings; he watched the consequences with sadness and little surprise.

Building the Croatoan

For the next 107 years, Swansea worked to make the American operation resilient while maintaining close ties to its parent organization. The Croatoan spread across the colonies, with an office in each. Its mission was to record supernatural beings and events, suppress threats where necessary, and, if possible, send dangerous entities alive to England for examination. In practice, the thinly scattered outposts often lacked the resources to capture a menace, and some threats had to be killed. The network’s reach stretched across a vast wilderness, but its individual stations remained small.

Unlike the Checquy, the Croatoan could not draw on a large population base. Its forces were assembled from whatever powered people its members could recruit. Swansea approached Native American tribes about joining, having observed that powered births were more common among them. They declined, reasoning that generations of experience had equipped them to handle dangers arising in their homeland, and wished him luck. Their refusal left the Croatoan to build its strength through other means.

The colonies’ religious independence made child recruitment especially difficult. Swansea could not rely on government authority to claim children, and revealing supernatural abilities to Puritan communities risked suspicion and violence. The Croatoan therefore recruited children whose families agreed to apprentice them to local tradespeople, while seizing others from streets or beds and sending them to another colony. There, they received new identities, education, and trades, and were taught the Checquy mission as carried out by the Croatoan. The process built the force the organization needed, but it did so through both consent and coercion.

Swansea also had to find adults. Checquy reinforcements sent across the Atlantic were welcomed, but they arrived periodically rather than providing a dependable supply. The Croatoan press-ganged sailors and rescued people with powers who might otherwise have been executed as witches. Swansea helped reeducate and recruit them through his charisma and commitment. He also screened and purchased enslaved people, freeing them when they entered the organization. Some Croatoan operatives objected to accepting formerly enslaved people as equals; their protests faded when African members proved, on average, more capable than many other operatives. The Croatoan’s mixed ranks were thus shaped by necessity, recruitment, and a direct challenge to the prejudices some of its own members carried.

Institutional Loyalties and Later Legacy

Supernatural threats arose repeatedly across the colonies, and the Croatoan responded by sending reinforcements from one threatened settlement to another. This intercolonial cooperation helped the organization endure the American Revolution. The Croatoan was loyal to the throne, but its work also meant protecting the people among whom it operated. Its members were pragmatists: their commitment was not reducible to political allegiance alone.

As the United States expanded, the Croatoan expanded too, though more slowly. It had fewer powered children than the Checquy in Britain and faced fewer supernatural threats overall. The relative calm did not mean that America was free of danger: the country saw the mathematically created Irregularities, which warped time and space while manipulating the silent-film industry, as well as the Cult of the Estrangement, the Horseman of Famine, and the Rattling God.

Before his death, Swansea noticed the disparity between the continents and proposed an explanation in his diaries. His friendship with Native Americans had given him access to their rites and practices, and he theorized that they had laid protections into the fabric of the land. The tribes diminished, but, in his account, their work endured, leaving the continental United States relatively protected from paranormal manifestations. The theory made his earlier relationship with them part of the Croatoan’s institutional history: the people whose warnings he had failed to persuade them to heed had also shared knowledge that, he believed, helped protect the continent.

Swansea died after being repeatedly decapitated by a civilian lover he had spurned, who became increasingly bewildered as the violence continued. The grotesque circumstances contrast with the long institutional legacy he left behind. The Croatoan remained a distinct organization, but it maintained close relations with the Checquy, communicating regularly and exchanging visits between their Courts. Their friendship was formally codified in the 1850 Sororitas Pact, which established the List of serious threats, provided for extradition of transgressors, and bound neither organization to participate in a war against the other’s country. Later cooperative operations continued that relationship, including the Croatoan’s call for Checquy reinforcements against giant mollusks during the American Civil War. Swansea’s foundational work therefore outlasted both his colonial assignment and his life: it created an American organization capable of acting on its own while remaining connected to the Checquy.