Nick Severance is an agent with the Crimson Dragon Society (CDS).
He will be, at least, and that will present him with several immensely exciting and dangerous assignments around the world. That is what will earn him a position in this compendium.
When we first meet Severance, however, he is a detective with the City of London police. Detective Chief Inspector, to be precise which shows he has been a copper for a while already by the time we encounter him in his first recorded adventure. In that line of work Severance had "seen quite a few dead people" but his job was investigating their deaths and if called for, bringing their assailants to justice. No one sought to make him one of these victims. That will change when he changes jobs.
The oddly named organization that Severance will come to work for, the CDS, is an "unofficial Japanese intelligence agency" started by a man named Mashida. That man had been a military intelligence officer starting a few years before WWII, working largely to collect intelligence on Russia. After the War and the dismantling of Japan's official spy and counterspy organizations, Mashida believed that "in time Japan would need its own secret service", Mashida created his own, "with covert American blessing", though "as far as Japan and her allies were officially concerned, it didn't exist."
Severance is 40 years old when we first meet him, born in 1975 and that first encounter taking place in 2015. He has no plans or desires to leave the police force but he will find his employment brought to a most definite end during the course of that first adventure. That is when the offer to work for the CDS will be made.
Severance will meet halfway in the second adventure the extremely capable Mariko Mashida, granddaughter of the CDS founder. She is in her "mid to late twenties", tall for a Japanese woman, with "shoulder length jet-black hair framing a long and attractive oval face with very pale, unblemished skin". Mariko will become an intimate part of Severance's life, first professionally and then personally.