Profile

Name: Danny (Daniel) Whitmore
Date of Birth: May 24, 1976
Physical Description: 6’0”, dark brown hair, friendly but unremarkable features
Personality: Danny used to be an affable, kindhearted man, but following financial disappointments and personal tragedy, he turned inward and became colder to the point of seeming cruel. Traces of the man he used to be occasionally show up, but they are few and far between, hidden behind the cold mask that allows him escape his own grief.
Hometown: Philadelphia, PA

Danny Whitmore was an unremarkable man who led a mostly unremarkable life -- was being the key word in that sentence. He made decent grades in high school and married his college sweetheart, welcoming a daughter into the world in his mid-twenties and moving the family to take a lucrative position with a web startup company in the early days of the new century. All in all, life was good, but his world began to collapse as the dot-com bubble burst. ParkMyCar.com held out a little longer than most, but by 2004 the company, which had provided parking garage and lot location services in major metropolital cities around the US, was going under. Danny lost his job in the third round of layoffs. There was little severance pay provided, and his accumulated stock was worthless.

Danny and his family tried to roll with the punches. His wife, Annie, held a full time job as a bank teller while Danny looked for work, but there was little available for the many left unemployed following the market crash. He worked part time as a substitute teacher -- thankful that his degrees could afford him that much -- and the family just barely managed to make ends meet, though they had to let go of their home in the Back Bay and move into an apartment in Roslindale.

On November 17, 2007, Danny was interviewing for a freelance bid to build software for Ingress Tech, a company created and helmed by a retired physicist with deep interest in the afterlife, when tragedy struck. One distracted driver later, Annie was dead; Zoe lasted four days in the hospital before succumbing to internal injuries. Danny got the job, but lost everything else.

Dr. Koenig wasted no time in putting Danny to work and, in desperate need of something to focus on outside of his personal tragedy, Danny dove in headfirst, not truly understanding the odd doctor’s research. It soon became apparent that Ingress Tech was a company that had only two employees: the doctor, and Danny. Dr. Koenig’s research was bent on finding a way to not only communicate with spirits in the afterlife, but to bind them to physical objects. Danny went along with it, thinking it all sorts of foolishness, but fell to pieces when the doctor triumphantly displayed his first real success: the bound spirits of Annie and Zoe Whitmore, attached to the little girl’s hairbow that Danny had kept on his desk as a memento, stolen away by the mad doctor, and held in a triangular force-field created by a device that Danny himself had helped build. In a rage, he shoved the doctor and stole the control mechanism from his hands, not noticing that he had pushed the doctor through the electrified bonds of the force-field, stopping his heart.

Paramedics ruled it a heart attack; Danny, without thinking, stole the device the doctor had built and left Ingress Tech behind. In a measure to protect his own psyche, Danny convinced himself that the doctor hadn’t bound a conscious spirit, but rather an impression or memory recorded in time. Some practice with the device led to his mastering the technology - he’d always had a knack for such things - and, with little else to do with his time, Danny began experimenting and capturing spirits (still certain they weren’t conscious beings) and, in a surprising situational twist, found himself ransoming a captive spirit back to its family. Seeing a lucrative opportunity with such an endeavor, he began attending funerals and memorials, seeing if he could catch a new opportunity for a payoff. He still doesn’t believe in ghosts, and prefers to think of himself as an opportunist, rather than a con artist.

PB: Misha Collins