At the higher end of the hierarchy within the Deadmen Pirates sits the Four Quartermasters; The four enforcers handpicked by Davy Jones, the Right Hand, and the Left Hand. However, only four may exist at once, and they tend to specialize in one specific thing. Today, we will be looking at the quartermaster who uses Spirit.
“I once stitched three guys together for fun. Anyways, that’s how I lost my medical license.” -James Richter, AKA Mad Doc Richter.
James Richter, AKA Mad Doc Richter, or just simply Richter, is the quartermaster of the Deadmen Pirates who uses Spirit Energy. He carries with him a winged staff made of gold that had been blessed by Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. Richter is a younger man with crazy, always disheveled rose-colored hair, and he’s always seen wearing his white and red medical robes. Unfortunately for his patience, Richter is a blind man, having gouged his own eyes out when he had first seen a dead body. From that day on, he’s been disturbed and eccentric. He is also highly fixated on the concept of death and spends most of his time conducting horrific ‘experiments’ to try and resurrect the dead. With his twisted, morbid mind, Richter has turned the gift of unmatched healing his staff gives him into a dark, disturbing power that stains the life it touches.
As the Deadmen Pirates’ resident doctor, he is responsible for patching everyone up after battles. Despite his madness, he is an incredible doctor who has saved hundreds of his crewmates’ lives. Initially, he would let some crewmembers die on purpose so he could ‘experiment’ on their bodies, implanting wicked artificial pieces fueled by black shards from the Dark Sea to create cyborg zombies. Davy Jones eventually put him in his place and now Richter fixes anyone up who is still breathing, only working on bodies that have already expired.
While he does experiment on whatever corpses he can get his hands on, he prefers the corpses of magic users, and he takes considerably more care of the corpses of particularly powerful magic users. In his eyes, his most ‘spectacular’ creations are his two hulking assistants he made from the dead bodies of two Grand Navy Admirals he killed; Frank and Stein, both being grafted with extra muscle and flesh to make them titans around normal men and augmented with special equipment that lets these lumbering corpses use their magic, even in death. Frank has special magic and arcanium augments that allow him to conduct his Sun magic, while Stein has special magic and arcanium augments that allow him to conduct his Lunar magic.
As implied by his list of crimes containing two killed admirals, Richter is a very powerful adversary. He uses his spirit energy powers in creative and sadistic ways, with his main method of attack being siphoning energy from others by creating a giant ‘Spirit Sun’ to shoot lasers at those nearby. He also uses his powers of medicine and healing via spirit energy to make himself virtually unkillable by having himself passively infused with his own power. This, however, prevents him from attacking at full power and also causes him to expend more energy when he does attack. During battles, he will also infuse debris with his spirit energy to produce mindless constructs. The only way to get rid of these constructs is to destroy their ‘core,’ a glowing ball of light that’ll appear somewhere on the construct. His zombies also have a ‘core,’ but it is usually hidden under clothes or armor. Sustaining constructs requires next to no spirit energy, but the initial creation requires incredible amounts and often leaves Richter temporarily weakened. Bigger constructs or zombies will also take exponentially larger amounts of spirit energy to initially create.
As you can see, Richter is a complete madman with a morbid curiosity about death. This, however, stemmed from his first exposure to a dead body at a young age. He was only a little boy when he had witnessed a criminal get executed at Palo Town, and the sight had horrified him so much that he took a kitchen knife and carved his own eyes out. After witnessing such a disturbing scene, he developed an overwhelming fear of death and the deceased. He became set on wanting to conquer death, to become truly immortal. Not immortal like Curse Users, but immortal against everything. He wanted to be unkillable. However, he came to a major roadblock; He was blind and needed assistance with everything now. He had to constantly be accompanied by his mother or his father, both very wealthy bankers for the Paramount Bank, when they were not busy doing their work. Each day, either of his parents would assist him in almost every aspect of his life, but he eventually began to notice something, and his parents began to notice it as well; He was slowly gaining his vision back.
It shouldn’t have been possible, but he was able to see again. He knew where buildings were and where people were standing. At an incredibly young age, he had developed the ability to use sensing, but his sensing was born not out of necessity, but out of fear. His sensing eventually allowed him to sense even the tiniest details around him, but it also gave him a terrifying power since it had been born mostly out of fear; He could detect the natural lifespan of those around him. This power was so precise, it let him tell how long someone had to live down to the very second and even sense harmful foreign contaminants inside others, such as illness or poison. This power was not future sight, he simply was able to tell how long someone would be able to live before dying of natural causes, and this number could change based on if you get sick or do something harmful to your vital organs. Otherwise, things such as accidents, murders, and so on were things he could not predict.
This power drove him even more mad, and thus his obsession to prevent death had begun. Using his sensing, he would feel out the outlines of writing on a page and begin learning medicine, but this would not satisfy his growing hunger. He stole a sailboat from the docks and fled Palo Town as he began his search for the knowledge he desired. He would travel all over the Bronze Sea, engaging in less-than-ethical means of obtaining information, such as coercing people or bartering with criminals. In order to survive, he would steal and rob others either in broad daylight or under the cover of darkness. Eventually, his ambitions to conquer death would lead him to learning about magic, but also dark and sinister practices from all manner of evil individuals. This darkness would eventually lead to his first experiment, which would also be his first murder. After nearly seven years away from home, he would return to Palo Town at the age of 25 and kidnap his first victim; A young man by the name of Leon, who would be found days later after his corpse was smelled in an alley, where it had sat in the sun and rotted since his disappearance.
Shortly after this murder, more people would go missing. Five individuals would be found dead before Navy forces would corner Richter, but the five marines who had cornered him would be found dead in a similar manner to the prior victims. After this encounter, Richter would flee Palo Town and begin conducting his experiments all over the Bronze Sea, and later the other seas as well. Eventually, he would have a breakthrough after acquiring black shards from a group of criminals, where he would make an apparatus that reanimated a dead rat. Quickly, Richter began to experiment with this apparatus, making it bigger and better with each iteration. He’d move up from rats to rabbits, then to foxes, but he would hit a major roadblock; He was unable to make a proper device that could sustain prolonged animation in anything bigger than a fox. So he set out again, continuing his morbid experiments, killing people to use as subjects.
He would eventually find himself within the Aegean Sea when his ship would be caught in a storm, and it would eventually be capsized and he’d be swept away by the violent waves. Richter would then awaken on an uninhabited island somewhere within the same sea, unsure of how much time had passed. When he came to, he found himself stranded on a temperate, uninhabited island full of big basalt columns. However, he did not feel alone, he felt a presence calling him, trying to get his attention. It called from deep within the island, and so he decided to follow it. The presence beckoning him led him to a deep lake in the island’s center, and it called to him from the bottom. He didn’t know why, but he jumped in and began vigorously swimming down until he found it, he could sense its outline in the mud; A staff. He quickly unburied it and swam to the shore, where he’d gasp for breath after nearly drowning. This is when Richter would come into possession of his golden staff, the staff he’d use to conduct his spirit energy.
Once he found the staff, he quickly found out he could use it, he found he could release spirit energy. Every day, he’d practice with it, and he’d practice from the time he got up to the time he went to bed. He practiced using his new abilities in isolation for three years before a group of pirates would find him, these pirates led by none other than Davy Jones. While the others wanted to kill him, Davy Jones said he saw something inside Richter, something twisted and malicious, and so he offered Richter a place on his crew. This is the point where Richter was no longer a rogue madman, using the dead for his sick experiments, but the resident healer of the Deadmen Pirates.
During his early days on the crew, he would be taken in as the assistant to the previous quartermaster who used spirit energy, the previous medic named Hans, who wielded the Tidestone Band. Richter would grow incredibly fond of his new teacher and master, who would supply him with corpses to experiment on after every conflict. Eventually, Richter would learn that he could perpetually animate the dead with his spirit energy, a discovery he made on accident when he released a small burst to heal a wounded crewmember, but the burst would also travel into a nearby corpse, and Richter would sense it come back to life and sit up slowly before slumping forward and going lifeless once more. From then on, Richter would experiment with creating zombies, augmenting them with his experimental enhancements or grafting more decaying matter together to create abominations, seeing how far he could push his resurrection powers. His work would not only earn him acclaim from Hans, but from Davy Jones, the Right Hand, and the Left Hand as well. However, everyone else was deeply unsettled by his disturbing work.
Richter would become one of the Four Quartermasters only a few months after his greatest breakthrough, when Hans would be killed at sea by two admirals. Hans’ body was never recovered. Blinded by fury and the kitchen knife he cut his eyes out with, he ruthlessly hunted the two admirals; Admiral Igor Frank and Admiral Victor Stein, whom he would kill and drag back to the Deadmen Pirates’ hideout to convert into his two hulking assistants. After his return, Richter was given the news by the Right Hand that he had been elected to take Hans’ place, a wish he had made to Davy Jones only a month before his death. Now, Richter is the Mad Doc, the spirit user of the Four Quartermasters, and he is more ravenous than ever to take his powers from mere mindless reanimation to complete immortal resurrection.
