Jayce Clauster

The main character of the story In The Water. Jayce was a child during the early days of Hope City. His parents had owned land within the city before the Blast, and so had been guaranteed a place to live under a scheme known as the Hope Land Grant. However, Jayce discovered as a child that he was ineligible for the grant, and became isolated from his peers (all of whom were the children of academics and futurists who wanted to move to a completely new country and start afresh).

He attended a school where the water was dosed with microscopic fragments of powdered crystal. It isn't clear who was responsible for this. He drank only water, avoiding soft drinks in order to save his lunch money, and so was the first to be affected. He gained strange crystalline structures throughout his body, which allowed him to sense and manipulate other crystals around him using the phenomenon of crystal resonance. He was monitored by some kind of quasimilitary agency (ancestors of City Special Forces, maybe) until his powers fully manifested.

He interrupted a school shooting by Silas Buxton; and became the first supernormal killer. He used the crystals within Silas's own body to shred his brain stem; a secret autopsy revealing damage as if from a million microscopic scalpels. There was some sign that Clauster would become dangerous to himself or others; and he was taken away by the military.

However, he went on to be an expert in the properties of the mysterious material he named Claustronium; eventually coming to believe it was formed in the city water supply as a byproduct of the decontamination following the Blast. He developed a method to extract the material from the water supply, rendering people 'safe', and also provided samples to Hope One and Two, although these were insufficient and both agencies ended up obtaining larger crystals either from Professor Normal or from Antique Angel. Although he never knew the true origin of the crystals, Clauster was instrumental in giving many scientists an explanation for where they might have come from. It is likely that he worked with Professor Normal for most of his adult life, although we don't yet know how much of the truth he discovered during that time.