Amaltheo 🐁

A kind yet reserved professor who is beloved throughout the student body for his kindness and understanding!  Amaltheo is as sweet as can be, although he’s more than a little awkward and tends to get very alarmed by compliments to the point of blushing from his neck to the tips of his ears and stammering out something that almost resembles words.  Amaltheo seems to be much more at home amongst his studies and pet rats rather than anything that can actually respond back to him, especially as time goes on and suddenly he becomes a lot more jittery and afraid than usual, receding back into his work, not attending his lectures, and leaving office hours in a hurry 

This is because Amaltheo is secretly in the business of atrophy and entropy

Or more specifically, he’s in the business of studying the everlasting atrophy of the body of old gods whose corpses have fueled the magic of his world for generations.  Amaltheo conducted secret research for the university under the suffocatingly watchful eye of his higher ups, one of the only handlers of extremely rare samples of old god blood and bits and pieces.  This was until the day that he stumbled across something that was forgotten for a reason, tapping into a realm of forbidden magic that fused him to one of his rats, and now is in a race against time to destroy his research and any hopes of ever recreating it before his new shortened lifespan is up.  Or worse, before one of his eager students get concerned enough about his rapidly declining health to go poking about his office or happen to run into him when he’s transformed 

For now Amaltheo is trying his absolute best to keep up appearances, although his own gets more sickly by the day.  He still attends his lectures as frequently as possible, and his students are very understanding when he happens to run out of them early to be sick, and he pretends to keep up his research so the very few faculty in the know don’t get suspicious.  He’s not sure what’ll crumble first, his lies or his body 

Some fun facts!!

-Is called ‘Amy’ by some of the more unpleasant faculty members.  It’s an unfortunate undergrad nickname that happened to stick with him far into adulthood and it’s something he’s just come to accept at this point in his life.  Some of the students now call him the same, only because there’s a little rumor that goes around every so often that he prefers being called that.  He has reluctantly accepted this as an every-semester occurrence

-Hated by a lot of the other faculty members for always getting grants for his research while they all struggle to do the same.  If only they knew the real reason he always got those grants, and just how much he’d rather be doing anything else

-Studied at the same university as a student and was groomed throughout his young adulthood by another professor to take up the mantle of secret god corpse research, which Amaltheo accepted after being manipulated by promises of getting to do what he loves

-After being fused with one of his beloved rats he can now transform into a gigantic, bellowing rat he’s come to call ‘The Were-Rat’.  He still retains all of his memories and sense in his rat form, and can speak with some difficulty.  What causes him to transform is often random but tends to be triggered by strong emotions of any kind.  More research will have to be done