Tom Andrews

Tom Andrews is an agent in the Department of Floaters. He is written by Thoth.

Appearance
Tom is a more-or-less ordinary human from the Laundryverse. He’s male, taller than most, and has the unnaturally pale look of someone who probably has trouble remembering what the sun looks like. In terms of facial features, he has short brown hair, brown eyes, and bears a near-permanent easy smile. He is rarely seen around HQ without a bottle of Coke and a laptop.

Personality
He’s loud, cheerful, excitable, and somewhat clueless socially. This may be in part because he spent a lot of time at his previous job in the Laundry desperately trying to distract himself from the horrors of reality, and still does. He’s poorly organized, and enjoys a good joke. And he has a lasting minor fear of demons—once in a while, he’ll run OFCUT (the Laundry’s utility application) scans on random objects, just in case, although this may be for a laugh.

In his spare time, he is a heavy gamer, and a known adherent of Quake 3/Live. He's gotten his face pounded in at that game by DoSAT personnel on multiple occasions.

He is a fairly decent programmer, and can summon up various sinister entities as needed given enough time to code—he prefers to avoid doing so, however, for obvious reasons. His preferred weapon is his digital camera, which is actually a basilisk gun—when it takes your picture, 10% of the carbon nuclei in your body get turned into silicon nuclei. The results aren’t pretty. He doesn’t get to use it very often.

While DoSAT managed to loosen the Laundry's Oath of Office a bit, they couldn’t get rid of it entirely: if he told anyone his former place of employment—or, as it would be obvious if he did, his home continuum—his brain would probably have fried. Or at least, until his Oath collapsed entirely in 2018 HST, for reasons concerning his home continuum. Why it took so long to fall in on itself is unknown, but there were some mutterings about "dimensional barriers," "metaspatial transversal," and "Thoth, how did it take you that long to read the latest Laundry novel? You've got an agent from there, right?"

Agent History
Tom was born and raised in America, though his family moved to the UK just at the start of high school. After that, he took his undergrad in Computer Science at university, and discovered a fun shortcut on his work while highly over-caffeinated. Said “fun shortcut” almost destroyed his town if not the world, and he was recruited into the Laundry. He served for a few years as a Computational Demonologist—desk work, with an odd bit of field contact here and there—before finding his way into the PPC entirely by accident just a bit before CASE NIGHTMARE RED (alien invasion) tripped. As to how, some cultists wound up shoving him through a hole in reality to feed him to a dark, sinister god. Fortunately for him, said hole didn’t go where they thought it did, unless they really thought that the SO was a dark, sinister god. He chose to become an agent because 1) it seemed like he’d be a lot more use there than at a desk, and 2) what with CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN (magic becomes easy and the fabric of the universe falls apart) approaching, it seemed to beat front row seats to the apocalypse.

Timeline

 * 2017
 * Meets his new partner for the first time.


 * October 13: Has a bad day.


 * October 31: Convinces Thoth to go to a Halloween costume party dressed as a Space Wolf and referees a drinking contest between him and Derik.


 * November: Mission to "the company of thorin oakenshield with future giants."

Partnered with Thoth

 * "The Company of Thorin Oakenshield with Future Giants" (Warhammer 40,000 x The Hobbit), with Agent Derik (DMS)
 * In which brothers are found in unlikely places.