Dr. Emile Rousseau

About

Dr. Emile Rousseau paces his office, muttering ancient Greek phrases under his breath, a habit he picked up from his mentor, Dr. Amara. His eyes light up when he spots a new cryptic text, fingers twitching to decode it.

Backstory

Three languages died the day Emile's parents vanished during an archaeological expedition in Mongolia, taking with them the only remaining speakers of a dialect that existed nowhere in written form. Obsessed with preserving what was lost, he taught himself cryptography by reverse-engineering his parents' field notes, discovering they had been tracking a conspiracy of artifact smugglers who erased indigenous languages to hide the true meanings of stolen relics. Under Dr. Amara's mentorship at Oxford, he learned that his parents had been close to exposing an international network before their disappearance, and she secretly trained him in advanced code-breaking techniques while publicly grooming him as a classical scholar. When Amara died suddenly, leaving behind encrypted journals written in a cipher that mimicked ancient Greek, Emile realized she had been continuing his parents' dangerous work—and now the responsibility of unmasking the smuggling ring falls to him, one cryptic text at

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