The Order of Jotelin

Name: The Order of Jotelin

Type of Faction: Slaver Organization

Faction Leader: Joseph Tellinger

Other Names: Pre-war: Joe; Post-war: Jotelin, The First Holder, the Alpha Holder, He Who Communes With the Higher One, The Walker of the Way of Three Paths, Jotelin Himself

Active Characters: Silas; S1-65

Other Notable Figures: Jotelin, the Commander, Ross

Goals: At the core, the goal which is kept hidden from the charons under the main leadership is to attain true immortality. The “Ways” are three methods of inducing extended lifespands. There is the first way of forced ghoulification by immersing charons in the “Pool”, a heavily irradiated body of water right in the submerged radioactive generator rooms. These rooms also serve to hide the the sealed doors of the underground bunker. The second way is through the cybernetic experiments of fusing charons to power armored suits, while the third way, the way that Jotelin and the rest of the High Holders have obtained immortality, is through the use of cloning and brain transplants from a deceased host to another.

The charons are tools meant to keep these Holders alive so they can continue to “enjoy” their immortality.

Beliefs: For the High Holders their only real belief is in the power of science to unlock the mysteries of the human body to obtain eternal life.

For the indoctrination of the charons their induced belief system can be found in more detail in their contracts. However, a summarization would be that all charons have a source of Nothingness, the god of Evil and Death, Charon, inside them, and that this god has created every evil in the world since the dawn of time, culminating in the Great War. Thus, the contract is actually a way to counteract that evil – so long as a charon is under the contract to its Holder its own inner Nothingness will not leak out and cause pain. Thus the best thing a charon can do for the world is obey their Holder without question.

Allegiances: The Order has deep connections with various slaver organizations through the wastes. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship – any children that they come across are sold to the Order and the Order occasionally sells contracts (and therefore charons) to the slavers as well, which allows a few straggler charons to crop up in odd places. For the main headquarters in D.C., they primarily deal with Paradise Falls and the Pitt.

Enemies: The Regulators, the Temple of the Union and other do-gooder and anti-slavery groups. Also, both Brotherhood of Steel branches have bones to pick with them. The Eastern because of their close proximity and evil nature, the Western because of their use of power armor and laser weaponry for the Enforcement Program.



Headquarters: The headquarters of the Order is in an old pre-war tower in downtown D.C., a few blocks away from the National Guard Depot. A bulky monolith that rivals the size of the Tenpenny Tower to the southwest. It once housed a pharmaceutical and biochemical research company called Tellinger Technologies, but the old sign above the main doorway has been taken down. The tower contains thirteen stories and each of the lower floors house the Holders and the charons, with the twelve High Holders in charge of the first twelve floors. The top three floors are the quarters for the three Programs, while the very top is Jotelin’s penthouse – identical in appearance as it was before the bombs dropped.

Locations: The Order also has minor locations scattered throughout the Wastes – the majority of them can be found on the East coast clustered around the main headquarters but there are couple in hidden locations on the west coast, to stay out of the eyes of the NCR. These other locations function much like the main headquarters, though with more limited resources. The Programs are enacted only in locations secure enough to seek higher level troops.

Also, in the Jotelin Tower there is a subterranean private vault that Josepth Tellinger had constructed pre-war. It is there that the cloning facilities and the Chip manufacturing plant exist.

Armaments: The armaments of the various charons vary greatly depending on their proficiency developed in training. In general, however, they are given one long ranged weapon, one close combat weapon and a melee weapon to serve in any given situation. A standard array would be a hunting rifle, a shotgun and a combat knife. The highest grade weapons available to the charons are those who are in the Powered Amror Infantry Brigade who wield laser weaponry – rifles and pistols. The Circle, made up of thirteen High Holders – the top three being Jotelin, the Commander of the Brigade, and Ross Tellinger the High Holder in charge of the Advancement Program, all wield plasma weapons – the same weaponry they’ve possessed since before the bombs dropped.

The Tower itself also has its defense mechanisms, which includes ceiling and floor mounted turrets.

Armor and Uniform: All charons wear leather armor – not only does it serve as light and flexible armor, but it also acts as a uniform of sorts conforming all charons into one set image. The charons are not allowed to put any personal touches of individualism on their apparel. Of course, holders outside the Order may decide otherwise. The charons in the Enforcement Program are melded into T-45 power armor, though the Circle is seeking higher grade models. Lastly, the Holders of the Tower all wear personalized apparel, whether it be the shaggy white t-shirt of a merc grunt, combat armor (if they feel the need for added protection), or even dirty pre-war casualwear. Speaking of pre-war clothing, the High Holders in the Circle all wear pre-war business suits – they go to great lengths to make sure their clothing is ironed, crisp and stark clean.

Vehicles: The Order possesses one Vertibird that they commandeered from an Enclave squad during their active phase a few years ago. It was a squad of the Powered Armor Infantry Brigade, led by Charles Furguson, otherwise known as the Commander, which overtook the vehicle. Since then the Order has been using it to expand their reach across the continent and for supply drops. The Veritibird is kept to the far north – out of the range of the Brotherhood’s radar scanners.

Technology: The Chip, or the Bioenhancer Strengthening Module, is one of the few wonders that the Tellinger Technologies unlocked in their pre-war years. The chip is implanted into the brain stem, right above the spine and central nervous system. Its positioning allows it to distrupt signals from the central nervous system to the brain, making those who are implanted with it completely numb to pain, which increases their endurance tremendously. But it also acts as a final failsafe should the other means of indoctrination fail, it can also completely shut down a charon’s central nervous system, paralyzing them and creating the induced-addition like symptoms of withdraw. It is both a charon’s greatest strength and weakness.

The second technology that Tellinger Technologies discovered, and the one they kept secret from the public, is the use of their cloning facilities. They were the chief researchers in charge of the cloning technology used in the nearby Vault 108. Once their research reached the threshold of being repeatable on a large scale the research was bought from them by the Vault-Tech Corporation, however the scientists of Tellinger Technologies continued their experimentation. Where Vault 108 failed, with each clone growing increasingly mad, TT succeeding – being able to transplant brains, and therefore pre-war minds, throughout the centuries.

Other: They have three sets of advanced power armor mk II, otherwise known as Enclave Power Armor, in storage. As it is a post war model, the Circle needs to study the armor more before they can replicate it and merge it to future charons in a renewed Enforcement Program.

Numbers: The Order has a strict hierarchy. There is the Circle of Thirteen, each with five Holders under them, who also has one subordinate. These Holders all have one or two charons they command, with the exception be the Commander of the Powered Armor Brigade, who is the Holder for seven charons who have been grafted into power armor and Ross Tellinger, Joseph Tellinger’s son who – due to cloning – is actually currently older than Jotelin who died thirty years ago, who is in charge of the Advancement Program, and thus has seven ghoulified charons under his command.

Thus, adding both charons and Holders together and including the few charons that have been sold to holders from the Wasteland, the Order’s total numbers would be – 250, with half of that number being charons.



Joseph Tellinger was born into wealth. It was a fairly common story among America’s elite. As the Thirteen Commonwealths formed from the consolidation of the previous fifty states, those who had power before obtained even more power. Tellinger Technologies absorbed and merged with countless medical firms over the decades preceding the Great War, and had enough political networking in place that they could dabble in a wide variety of fields.

Given this background, it would have been fairly easy for Joseph to just sit back on the lapels of his forefathers and just party in his young years. His father was notorious for being a playboy after all. But Joe Tellinger was different – a different breed entirely. He spoke his first words before he was even a year old, and started scribbling out letters as a toddler. He was a wunderkind. A child prodigy. Where other children his age were still learning their a,b,cs, he was going over medical texts and trying to pierce out their meaning.

It came as no surprise that he started coming out with new discoveries. Perhaps the only surprise was the field those discoveries were in: memory erasure.

While Joe Tellinger was different from many boys his age, there was one similarity: A love for Hubric Comics.

But Joe Tellinger didn’t have any interest in popular comics like Grognak the Barbarian or Captain Cosmos – no he had an interest in MechanistMan. A superhero comic about a RobCo employee who takes up arms against the evil mad scientist named Doppelganger, who hops from body to body … hogwash, all of it, but, still, the powers of the antagonist intrigued him. Is it actually possible to obtain superhuman powers by unlocking the limits of the brain? To the point of extending your lifespan through body-snatching?

Genius met childhood fascination, and, from that moment on, Joe Tellinger’s course was set.

He had heard it said that humans never use more than 10% of the brain, and, after a quick search debunked that urban myth thoroughly. Humans do use a hundred percent of their brain. So, turning from that, he then focused on another aspect of the brain that interested him: memories.

There is a three step process for the creation of memories: first, there is encoding, which means to receive information from the senses, second, there is storage, which is the creation of a permanent record of the memory, and third retrieval, the ability to recall or access that record of memories. The parts involved with the neuroanatomy of memory are the hippocampus, a long, thin lobe in the middle of the brain, the amygdala, two almond shape lumps of nuclei, the stratium, which dealt primarily with body movements of motivation, and mammillary bodies, which resides in the undersurface of the brain and acts as a relay for the amygaldae and hippocampi.

Just researching this basic information, the information necessary to even begin to think of how to tamper with the natural course of memory, took time. While there was the Tellinger Technology mainframe database, the computer was nearly five times as tall as he was, and Joe couldn’t even tap the keypad even if he managed to sneak inside. So, instead, he went the long way about it – gathering books from the local library, where other kids his age played a game of soccer right outside.

In was in these hours of page turning and pulling books from shelves that Joe Tellinger struck across the question that he’d pursue for the rest of his life: Was it possible to force amnesia onto another’s mind and then replicate one’s own memories into the brain to create a duplicate copy of yourself? A doppelganger, if you will.

It just so happens that his father was currently undergoing experiments in regards to memory wiping. They were trying to develop a drug that would erase a specific fearful memory in the target, while leaving the others intact. The goal of the experiment was to interfere with the memory transfer, known otherwise as reconsolidation, between short-term memory and long-term memory. The experiment took a group of rats and shocked them whenever a specific song was played, therefore creating a fear for that music. They then injected half the rats with the prototype drug - U0126. A day later they played the song again. However, still all the rats reacted with fear.

At night, Joe Tellinger broke into the lab.

The next morning, Joe’s father, Edward Tellinger, was called in to work. When he arrived at the lab he found the vials of drug U0126 scattered across a table, with samples of it poured into several beakers in their chemistry set by the back wall. Other scientists were already crowding around the lab, all of them staring at Joe Tellinger as he sat in front of the rat cages. There was now a third group. The boy smiled as Edward approached. “Dad!” He said, “Watch!” With that he played the music.

Both the control group and the group that had been injected with U0126 in the lab still showed signs of fear, but the third group did not react to the music.

Joe Tellinger had taken the control group, split it in half, and injected this new third group with his altered U0126.

When it dawned on Edward what had just happened, the scientists of Tellinger Technologies quickly called the press.

Joseph Tellinger made the news. He was on the cover every major science magazine, including the ever-popular Programmer’s Digest. The boy genius who developed a drug that could wipe out one traumatic memory (granted, it was actually the scientists of Tellinger Technologies who did most of the work, but the news was more sensational that way). From that day forward, Joseph Tellinger (because he went by that name when on “official” business) shadowed his father in the workplace. It was through this method that he learned about the scientific method, which only bolstered his natural curiosity.

And formed his new callousness.

Joseph’s primary duties was in the caretaking of the rats or “specimens” as he learned they were called. He was given a rough autonomy lesion of the animal’s bodies, he learned about their nervous system and which veins he needed to inject. On one hand he was feeding them, giving them water and cleaning their cages, and, on the other hand, he was injecting them, watching as their bodies twitched with each new conducted compound.

He skipped several grades in school, joining the high school students as a junior higher. This, naturally, did not sit well with the other kids. He formed a new routine. One where he went to school from morning to evening, got bullied afterschool, covered his bruises as best he could before dinner, and then joined his father in the labs at night. Though he managed his schoolwork with ease, believing the readings and homework to be exceptionally easy, stress began to build due to his busy schedule.

Then, the means for revenge struck him.

The year was 2004. And the newly founded West Tek Research Facility released its first ever AEP1 prototype laser pistol. It was a civilian model, though there were rumors that a military model, with a photonic focusing chamber and a crystal array instead of a laser focusing diode, had been disturbed throughout the army. A manual, which hold schematics, came included with the AEP pistol. He bought the gun from the gun store by the side of the shooting range at the edge of town. He brought it back, went upstairs to his room and then dismantled it on his bed, keeping the instructions and schematics spread out beside the pieces.

If his plan to have revenge on Tommy, otherwise known as “Tiny” Tommy, his high school bully, was to work then he needed to do two things. First, lower the power frequency so the gun stunned not harmed, second, he had to reshape it so it didn’t look like a laser pistol anymore. To do this he needed a third focusing mechanism, one that would have an even lower output then the civilian models. He found the solution through the internal capacitor that was fueled by three separate small energy cells, if he reduced the number down to one that would suffice in weakening the charge.

The next step was reformatting. He needed to change the structure so the weapon would look normal on his person. He settled on making it look like a pen (besides, he had seen one of those spy movies recently). He even wore a pocket protector to school, so another pen peeking out from his front pocket wouldn’t be inconspicuous at all. It took hours, night had snuck in as he worked, but Joe finally leaned up from his the finished product, wiping some sweat from his brow. On the bed lay scattered parts of the laser pistol, and, in the middle of it all, a single pen-looking device, as if being highlighted by the pieces.

It was time to do a trial run.

Like he had a couple years ago, Joe once again slipped into the labs at night, but using a key this time. He walked pass the rat cages – using the pen on them wouldn’t prove its effectiveness against Timmy. He needed a test subject that was more … humanoid. Joe found the answer he was looking for in the back. Monkey cages lay in the back corner. The animals were asleep, tails clinging to bars as they slept upside down. One of them popped its eyes open as he approached.

Tommy’s basically an oversized ape, anyway.

Joe fired.

In the morning, the scientists would think the monkey just fell from the bar in its sleep.

In the morning, the students of Roosevelt High would be stunned to see how ‘tiny’ Tommy really was, considering he had been stripped naked, had his ankles tied and hung upside down from the WKML Broadcast Station.

Joe grinned all throughout the day, a self-satisfied smirksmile which gave Tommy all the grounds to suspect him. He didn’t know how the nerd got into his home, knocked him out and dragged him to school, but the bully was sure of Joe’s guilt. That day Joe began to feel an increasing dread as he felt Tommy’s glare intensifying throughout the classes. Afterschool, despite Joe’s best attempts to escape unnoticed, Tommy cornered him and gave Joe had never experienced before. Despite his lackies, who normally joined Tommy in his bullying, attempts to restrain the older boy, Joe was still left on the ground in a pool of his own blood – unconscious.

Tommy only realized the severity of the situation when Joe stopped breathing. An ambulance came in minutes.

It turned out that Joe never told his father about the bullying. Whether it was the boy’s pride or his sense of independence, either way he tried to solve the problem on his own – like it was a complex math problem. Of course, his parents, like all parents, knew. They saw the bruises, saw the soaked jeans from where he tried to wash off dirt, saw how he put sunglasses despite being indoors, but they downplayed it – thinking it was not too serious if Joe didn’t approach them about it.

After all, boys will be boys.

But when Edward Tellinger did find out, when he saw his son wrapped in bandages on the hospital bed, he swore his own revenge. Using the economic power of the Tellinger Technologies, he hired a team of lawyers and brought out a law suit. The end result was devastating for Tommy Tortuga and his family. The boy was sent off to juvie, and the family went into deep debt from the monetary reparations given to the Tellingers. The strain pushed the parents to their breaking point and they divorced. They lost their family, their car, their home, and their American Dream.

When Joe Tellinger recovered and left the hospital, he discovered all his father did. It was, at that moment, that Joe Tellinger received an epiphany of sorts. The revelation was this: It didn’t matter how smart or clever you were, what you need is power – either brute strength like Tommy’s or political, economic power like his father’s.

He would get both in the years to come.

He skipped more years and entered into college when he was fourteen. From there, it was an escalated rise to power. He absorbed knowledge like a sponge and spent hours at his university library. He worked for his father, learning both science and business acumen. He stayed current on all the latest technological advances – and there were many. Through this progression of time, a plan of sorts began to form, especially once it became clear that the world was creeping ever close to nuclear armageddon.

The first idea sprung from his earliest experiments in memory erasure and his earliest imaginings in childhood. Further study convinced him that he couldn’t just take over another’s mind, but that did not mean the discovery could not be put to use. His revelation about power in the aftermath of the bullying instance had stuck around in the back of his mind in the years to come. Simply put, if he did not have the power to protect himself he needed someone who could – someone who has had their whole memory erased and has been indoctrinated into steadfast loyalty. That was how he would protect himself once the end of the world came.

But the second matter was the one that he was most concerned about, the one that kept him up late at night – how would he extend his life? The answer he came up with was ingenious in its simplicity.

Cloning and brain transplants.

Both technologies currently existed by the time the idea struck him. In fact, cloning had existed for years. The first successful cloned organism was a tadpole cloned in 1952, and though it was “officially” illegal to clone humans (Joe thought of it as “officially” because who knew what governments were doing behind closed doors) cloning technology has been progressing for years. As for brain transplants, while it has been done once or twice in labs worldwide, General Atomics International has mastered the skill in their mass-produced Robobrains (which he would study the programming for organic brains at a later date). The process (or what he would later term – “the Third Way”) was this – he would create several hundred clones, choose the one he would be “reincarnated” into, remove its brain and then transfer his own brain into it. Preferably he would do this when the clone’s skull has reached its full growth which would be between the ages nine and fourteen.

But the obvious flaw in the plan was that it would be very simple for someone to kill him in the process. All it would take is for someone to dump the bio med gel and brain to the floor and then stomp on the organ – just like that he would not obtain immortality but just give someone easy access to murder him. No, he needed absolute obedience from the surgeon who operated on him, which meant that he needed to enact the brainwashing program first. And, just like that, Joe Tellinger outlined the plan that would transform him into Jotelin centuries later.

A plan he called Project Psyche – after both the woman in Greek mythology who became divine and the contemporary usage of the term “the human psyche” – showing both sides of his plan.

It was just a question of who would be his first servant. He had the process down. He knew the steps. He just needed to implement it. And he knew the perfect target.

His father, Edward Tellinger.

By making him into the first servant (Joseph hadn’t termed the phrase ‘charon’ yet) he could create a vacancy at the head of Tellinger Technologies. A vacancy he would fill as the new CEO of the company.

It was a simple matter after that. With the help of a small team of scientists, his own men in the company, he knocked his father out with chloroform while he was still in bed and then dragged the man to an underground bunker beneath the Tower. However, Joseph Tellinger failed. Edward was too old, his personality too entrenched, and the horror of the fact that it was his son doing this to him shut down all other thought processes. After one dosage too many of the U0126, Edward Tellinger overdosed.

And like that Joseph Tellinger was a murderer.

He had to revise his plan. He needed someone young, young enough that their personalities could be molded, than unnecessary memories or emotions could be erased. He told his ideas to his colleagues, those who were as guilty of murder as he was, and, so, were unwilling or unable to turn back. They turned their attention to a nearby orphanage. They knew that there was a local tradition for unwanted children to just be left on the orphanage’s doorstep. They waited for one such moment and then stole the child away before the staff of the facility even realized the baby was there.

The first charon was created. Joseph named the boy Ross. Ross was very different than the ones to come after. The child did not learn combat skills, not with a federal government and federal legislation over weapons still in place. No, instead the child was taught the skills Joseph knew, the skills he inherited from his father. The charon was taught the medical trade, he was taught the skills of a surgeon. Joseph had him try test runs to make sure the child learned the skill of the brain transplant – over the course of the next few years the number of monkey test subjects that Tellinger Technologies bought increased.

At the same time that Joseph Tellinger was training his “son” in the art of medicine, he was also experimenting and mastering the art of massproducing clones. A perfect situation presented itself in the years before 2061. In the aftermath of Project Safehouse, bunkers known as Vaults cropped up throughout the country. Tellinger had kept his eye on the project and personally knew many Vault Tec scientists (science is a rather interdisciplinary field, after all). And so when Vault 108 began construction and hired Tellinger Technologies to install cloning facilities in the Vault, Joseph jumped at the chance. He was told the cloning facilities were necessary in the depopulation following the end (though why none of the other Vaults requested it, he did not know). But honestly Joseph Tellinger did not care about their reasons – the funding from Vault Tech helped speed up his research to incredible lengths.

All the steps were in place.

When the cloning facilities had been fully installed in Vault 108, Tellinger continued his own experiments with cloning in his underground bunker beneath the Tower. He had to make sure the clones and he, himself, was safe from irradiation. In September of 2076, a month before the Great War, and when Joseph Tellinger was at the limits of his human lifespan, all those who were involved in Project Psyche descended into the bunker, and Tellinger Technologies officially collapsed. While the D.C. police immediately took up investigations into the mass disappearance, they could not get very far until it ended – until everything ended.

And then, as all turned into ash, Joseph Tellinger was reborn into a ten year old body, and Project Psyche went underway.

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Additional Info:

The Contract

U0126