Abraham Hellsing was one of the ranking members of ParaSol, and he was the head of Ashcroft's wing of Neurological Enhancement and Application Research, what most people called The Cradle.
First, to understand things better, it's necessary to know more about the Cradle. The project had it's roots in the late Sixties, after the end of the MK-ULTRA trials. NEAR was designed to "create and cultivate psychic and parapsychic potential in the individual", and to achieve this goal they created the Espers. Young children, often either clones or orphans, that had their neurological abilities enhanced, made stronger, brought out.
NEAR's espers were designed with a variety of applications, from simple remote viewing to more direct operations. Though the Cradle's projects still failed in most cases to live up to the military expectations, they still made great strides. Unfortunately, there were side effects. While MK-ULTRA's trails involved LSD and hypnosis, NEAR worked with genetic manipulation and neurological engineering. The children of the Cradle became quiet, reserved, and completely obedient to their handlers without a second thought. All qualities that any parent would want, but in a way that no child would normally be. The children were often described as 'creepy', 'ethereal', and in at least five cases 'evil'. Studies revealed that the Cradle's espers emitted a low level psychic field that caused unease in those around them, specifically their handlers.
The children themselves often had problems. The were often plagued by nightmares, and the espers labeled Watchers, the ones involved in remote viewing, would have visions, seeing things that weren't there. The children called them Faeries, and more often than not they took forms that were disturbing and wrong, much like the feelings that the children themselves emmitted. They would look perfectly normal, but at the same time they would appear off, as if everything about them was shifted one micrometer in the wrong direction, or their shadows twisted and changed while they stayed the same, or they had smiles that were too wide. They saw things that weren't there, things that couldn't be explained even by the tests that revealed the low level psychic disturbances caused by the children.
But every single one of the children described the same creatures.
Either way, the Cradle suffered from a number of psychological problems, and had a high rate of suicide. In at least two cases there were murders, but both cases were considered to be unrelated to NEAR.
Bram oversaw the Cradle of the Sariel Project, one of the most promising subjects. She had relatively few of the problems that the other handful of current Cradle children did; she didn't see dark creatures between the seams of reality, she didn't unnerve her handlers, her nightmares were easily manageable. She was the most talented esper of the lot of them, and people would stand to make a lot of money if things had gone well.
Now, with all of this it would be easy to paint Bram as a monster, a cruel man who only wanted to make money. This isn't true, though. Yes, he was motivated by his own greed, and it was that greed that he was punished for when Sariel snapped. He also treated her like a daughter. While his primary goal was for wealth and power that would come from the success of NEAR, he was still a decent enough human being if not for his insatiable avarice. He cared for Sariel, treated her kindly. He was still strict, but he would treat her as gently as possible. He had a grandfatherly demeanor, though he was capable of outbursts of anger. He managed to restrain that temper around Sariel, and not only because she was important and expensive. He truly cared for the child so long as it didn't interfere with any money or power that he would gain.
It was Ashleigh Harker, Sariel's handler, who was the one who stopped that. She grew too close to Sariel, and as she got older, and the tests got harder, she couldn't deal with what she had to do to the girl to force her potential. She went to the head of ParaSol, and she lobbyed to cut back on the project. With results not being what they wanted, they scaled back the Sariel Project. Or at least, that's what the official unofficial statement was. Bram made it so that the project would be going into a new phase, to watch and wait. Sarah was given surgery that would hamper her abilities, her memory was erased, and she was placed in adoption to be adopted by Micheal Carpenter.
After Sarah was raped and Michael killed Andrew Cunningham and himself, Bram was there to pick up the pieces. Ashleigh, shaken deeply by the incident, ran away, fleeing to Boston, Maryland to start a new life. Hellsing continued the project without her, and Sarah once again became Sariel. Things quickly spiraled out of control, though, and Sariel slipped deeper into the same problems that the other Cradle children had. Her demeanor became the same hollow shell that the other espers had, and she began seeing the Faeries--and the other things that either couldn't be seen or didn't exist--more and more. Her nightmares increased, and her new handler was unable to help her cope. He hanged himself less than a week after starting, despite maintaining his composure through three of the Cradle's other espers. This was three days after Paul Krueger was found murdered in the California Hotel, and by the end of the month, Ashcroft stopped existing as it had and became part of the Otherworld.
Hellsing, for his part in it, sits in the Operating Room of the Ashcroft Medical Research Hospital, between the main hospital and the branch used in the Cradle. His new form represents the Greed that drove him to make and break a little girl, and is punishment for his part in Sarah's death, and Sariel's rebirth.
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