Tuesday Character: Perfect Elliot Refuel

Times have been tough for the Cathartic Church. Granted, not as tough as they've been in other timelines, in which the church was wiped out back when it was still the Albigensian Heresy, but there's a reason the phrase "better than being massacred by a Papal army and tortured by the Inquisition" never really caught on. The actions of a cadre of nobles who had converted, found the new faith a fascinating curio, or just wanted to tweak the Pope's nose convinced the King of France to intervene on behalf of Catharism, but the sect remains a tiny oddity one step up from a cult. While the church's doctrine of a world created by a spiteful divinity (Rex Mundi) that wants humanity to suffer rings true for many, and the Cathars' much more liberal stance on sexuality has kept them at the vanguard of religious reform, their doctrinal opposition to bringing children into this vale of tears has come perilously close to wiping them out. Only an extremely active recruitment program (bolstered by how evidence of Rex Mundi's dominance is always close to hand) keeps them from disappearing completely.

Perfect Elliot Refuel. the head of Cathars in the Edge (where the Demiurge's malevolence is most clearly visible) has kept the faith since he became a Credente at the age of 28 almost forty years ago. In that time, Refuel has found that the Cathartic goal of complete separation from the material is simply untenable. The endless fundraising needed to maintain the proselytization campaigns has ensnared him in the political machinations of the island, and he often finds himself at some monstrously tacky gala, haplessly nodding along as one or the other of the island's Kings of Wickedness explains how much respect they have for the Cathartic vision. The Cathars even occasionally participate in the Temple of the Divine Experience's broadly Christian Sunday service, rubbing elbows with other churches that would have  wiped their ancestors out (and, multichronically speaking, did).

The lines between divine and vulgar have grown blurry for Refuel, and his prayers to the True Godhead seem to be cast into a gulf even wider than the seven emanated universes of doctrine. He worries constantly about the state of his own soul and that of the church, and ruminates that perhaps it would have been better to let the church be annihilated than to let it become the bloated thing it was today. He mechanically accepts filthy lucre from the material world, justifying it as the only legitimate use for money but still terrified of the implications. Refuel worries so much about his interactions with the material that his shunning of material temptation has caused him to pass out from malnutrition at three separate social functions. He knows he will soon be replaced by one of his underling Perfects*, and it's fair enough - the promotion of Catharism is a young man's game, one for enthusiasm and ideology rather than acclimatization and exhaustion. But before he goes on to whatever awaits him (he fears it is simply another rebirth, despite (or because of) his rank and service), he wants to do something to awaken the faith of a new generation of Cathars and to save his own.

* Although the Cathar name "Perfect" is used to refer to all clerical members of the church as a nod to the church's egalitarian origins, it disguises a highly complex and stratified organization. Refuel worries about that as well.