Cyrus Veil

Deep wrinkles mark Veil as an older man, the lines paired with eyebrows that are thick and a chin left clean of any stubble. Both his hair and his eyes carry a light, washed-out shade. For dress, he favors the kind of tailored suit that suits a federal official's standing.

Ambition defines Veil, and he handles his duties at the energy office with stern gravity. His thinking runs nationalist: above everything he wants America to lead the field on the energy shortage, and what frightens him most is the prospect of his country trailing the worldwide scramble toward self-sufficient power. Stopping that outcome is reason enough for him to ally with Kenjaku.

The way Veil sees it, Kenjaku's offer opens a path to examine cursed energy and shape it into an ideal, spotless fuel. No method is off the table in chasing that, not even snatching citizens of other countries by force and running tests on them. After the President voiced doubts about the ethics of supporting Kenjaku, Veil recast the kidnappings as protection instead of seizure, a framing he may genuinely accept, since he kept pressing for swift action to guard Japanese civilians from rival nations and grab the cursed energy ahead of them.

During September of 2018, Veil joined a gathering of high-ranking American officials who were meeting with Kenjaku. Kenjaku explained what cursed energy was and the phenomena it spawns, distributed cursed-tool spectacles that made curses visible, and then put his technique on display. The other attendees panicked, taking the spirits for tricks of virtual reality, yet Veil alone declared the curses genuine and sensed a chance in them. Once a recording capturing the Shibuya tragedy, taken by Kokichi Muta, had finished, Veil argued that cursed energy could end the shortage altogether, its purity letting it displace every fuel then in use.

Once the Culling Game was outlined to the assembled bureaucrats, Veil pushed the President toward grabbing the chance to take sorcerers as test material, his reasoning being that rival powers would hunt down everyday Japanese people after discovering curses, so America had to move first under the banner of shielding them. Later still, Lieutenant General Garry K. Johnson wondered aloud whether sixty sorcerers would be enough to run the experiments, and Veil cheerfully signed off on the count.