Wilfred Jarring builds bridges, both physically and metaphysically.

Wilfred Jarring in His Own Words:
(Translated from the original Swedish.)
The whole thing started in 1976. I was 17, and attending secondary school in Stockholm when the Guatamalen earthquake occurred. Feeling bored with my life, and wanting to do something to help the people effected by the quake, I flew to Guatamala with a few thousand kronor (donated by my parents) and a dozen bottles of Penicillin in a backpack.
The devastation was terrible. Thousands of people had died, and thousands more had lost everything. The money and medicine I had brought were used up depressingly quickly. It was weeks before the situation stabilized, months before a semblance of normal life could have been said to have returned.
In the quake, a number of local rivers had flooded, washing away the bridges connecting the two sides. As an affluent Westerner, one of the things that most shocked me was seeing how hard it was for people to survive without bridges. People literally died because they could not get across a river-because supplies could not get across, because they could not reach medical help, because they drowned trying to swim across.
I spent over a year helping to rebuild after the quake, and during that time I spent a great deal of thought musing over this problem of bridges and the lack thereof. In the months after the quake most of the major bridges had been rebuilt, but the footbridges the rural farmers depended on were almost entirely neglected. I decided to do something about this. I found some engineers working for local mining companies willing to sketch plans in exchange for beer. I persuaded the managers at those companies to allow us to appropriate discarded cables and other materials. I got the locals onboard as labor-needless to say, they were the easiest to convince. And so we built a bridge.
When word of the project spread, other communities started asking me to help rebuild their lost bridges. I talked to some NGOs and the local government, got some grant money-not a lot, but enough to pay for parts we could not scavenge. And so I spent my 19th year building bridges throughout Guatamala. Eventually I started building bridges in places that had had no bridges before, but which needed them. I started building them outside of Guatamala, expanding to other countries, wherever my help was needed. People came together to help build the bridges, even people who had every reason to hate each other. One of my finest moments was when I got the Columbian Army and the FARC guerilla group to collaborate on building a bridge. On another occasion I built a bridge linking Honduras and El Salvador across a valley that had been the scene of a war between the two only a decade previously.
A bridge is a wonderful symbol, you see. It brings people together. It links two communities that had previously been separated. And they are so useful, so necessary, that even feuding communities will collaborate on their construction. And, working together, maybe find that they had fewer reasons to feud than they thought.

Personality: Pleasant, cheerful, and focused. When he talks about bridge-building he can be surprisingly persuasive-his passion for the subject is self-evident. He has a Swedish accent thick enough to stop bullets.
Appearance: Tall, bulky, and rugged, with weathered skin, prematurely gray hair, and a broken nose that never healed properly (the legacy of a construction accident in 1984). He wears glasses.
Obsession: Building bridges, both physical and metaphorical, between different peoples.
Fear Passion: (Helplessness) Drowning. He first came to the idea of bridge-building when he watched six people drown trying to cross a raging river after 1976 Guatemala earthquake, helpless to save them as they were swept away by the furious waters.
Rage Passion: Apathy. People are hurting out there, and 90% of the Western world stands by and does nothing.
Noble Passion: Getting people to work together.

Wound Points: 60

BODY: 60 Rugged
General Athletics 30%, Keep Going 40%, Struggle 20%
SPEED: 50 Steady
Dodge 20%, Driving 35%, Firearms 20%, Initiative 30%
MIND: 60 Professional-Quality Amateur
Bridge Construction 50%, Conceal 20%, High School Education 15%, Notice 20%, Pick Up Language 25%
SOUL: 70 Dedicated
Avatar (Peacemaker) 60%, Charm 25%, Lying 20%, Oddly Persuasive 40%

Pick Up Language: Wilfred has a facility with languages that he has never fully or formally developed. He can pick up minimal facility in a local language in a few days of total culture immersion; with a weak success on a significant Pick Up Language roll, he is considered to have 15% proficiency in Speak Local Tongue. On a strong success, he is considered to have a skill rating equal to the roll or 15%, whichever is higher, in Speak Local Tongue.
Rituals: Bridging the Gap (see below).

Violence 0H 1F
Unnatural 3H 1F
Helplessness 0H 1F
Isolation 0H 0F
Self 0H 0F

Inventory: In the field, wears glasses, faded and quite old jeans, T-shirt, and backpack. He carries several ballpoints and a wallet with $20 in local currency in his pockets. His backpack contains a canteen, compass, an unloaded M1911A1 .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol (for intimidation only), other engineering and wilderness survival supplies as needed, and a map tube containing rolled-up plans for his current bridge projects. Finally, there is a concealed pouch in the bottom of the backpack containing around $200 in American currency, his passport, a backup pair of glasses, a plastic bag containing half a dozen dove feathers, and any permits he has obtained for his current project.
Possessions: Essentially nothing. He lives off of the generosity of locals in exchange for his services as an engineer. His construction techniques rely heavily on locally-available material: native timbers, cast-off metal wiring and supports from mines, and other scroungeable supplies. What cannot be got for free he pays for with a mix of NGO grants, local government subsidies, and donations from locals.

Bridging the Gap:
Wilfred learned this ritual from a shaman he met in the Amazon rain forest, which was his first encounter with the occult.

Cost: This ritual ordinarily costs two significant charges, but it can be performed at the cost of seven minor charges by an avatar of the Peacemaker.
Ritual Action: This ritual must be performed on a bridge linking two communities that the ritualist wants to reconcile. The communities cannot actually be engaged in open war when the ritual is performed, but intermittent border clashes are fine. The ritualist must find two local leaders, each representing one of the communities the ritualist wants to reconcile. The leaders need to be acknowledged as having authority by the majority of their respective communities; they do not need to be liked or acknowledged as a political leader, simply seen as being some sort of leader. The leaders will need to be willing participants in the ritual, and they need to honestly want peace between their respective communities; otherwise, the ritual fails.
Place at least seven drops of blood from each of the leaders in a cup along with seven drops of the caster’s sweat. Add some kind of liquor-any amount or kind will do, though Wilfred prefers to use whiskey so as to mask the taste of the other additives. Mix the results thoroughly with the wing feather of a dove.
Finally, the two leaders must drink the mix while promising to seek peace and cooperation with each other. Each needs to drink roughly equal amounts, and the entire amount must be consumed. As the wine is drunk, the leaders must pledge themselves to preserving the peace and creating cooperation and harmony between their communities. At this point, expend the charges or roll the skill check.
Ritual Effect: On a success, no accidents will occur threatening the peace between the two sides. Deliberate intention can still destroy the truce, but soldiers will not get lost and accidently cross the demilitarized zone, and misplaced training tapes will not make RADAR operators think the enemy is about to start bombing. So long as everyone involved wants the peace to hold, it will hold. Moreover, anyone who witnessed the casting of the ritual who attempts to renew the conflict must make a rank-4 Self check. If either of the participating leaders tries to renew the conflict, they need to make a rank-7 Self check.

Using Wilfred Jarring:
There are plenty of feuds in the Occult Underground. Wilfred sees it as his life mission to build bridges to end feuds-and those bridges don’t necessarily have to be in a remote rain forest. Wilfred is only peripherally involved in the American Underground, but he has a few contacts, and he would only be too happy to try to get negotiations started. That said, while he means well and does have a certain charm, he lacks extensive experience in getting people to negotiate their differences-his approach in South America has basically been to just start building a bridge and get the parties involved to help out. Without that sort of physical cooperation, he’s going to find the going rather rougher than he’s used to.
Incidently, Wilfred is based on a real person who I heard interviewed on the BBC. I don’t remember the real-life guy’s name, unfortunately, and I made up the occult bits, but I just thought it was too cool not to use.