Coil

Thomas Calvert, aka Coil is a supervillain based in Brockton Bay. He is formerly a ranking officer of PRT and personally penned a significant number of their policies and regulations. Officially, he had retired and is pursuing private business ventures, which is technically true. He is one of the two survivors of Ellisberg, other being Emily Piggot. He is rumored to have had shot a commanding officer in the back to become a survivor. Director Piggot is known to heartily detest him.

General consensus on Calvert is that he is an unpleasant person to be around, but highly competent officer regardless. He is completely amoral and has no compunctions about sacrificing people for his ambitions. His ambition is to become a director of Protectorate in Brockton Bay and take over the city in it`s entirety covertly. His power allows him to split the timeline and experience both alternatives for a while, eventually picking the one he prefers as the one that would be integrated into casuality. He usually exploits this to explore the consequences of binary decisions, picking the outcome that he deems favorable. Unlike everyone else, Coil retains the memories of both timelines and have had made ample use of this, using a timeline to torture information out of people and then dropping it, leaving the person in question entirely clueless about the fact they have had already divulged the information in question to Coil. It is heavily implied that he used this trick on Tattletale multiple times by the start of the story already.

Coil`s organisation employs mercenaries as his primary force. He arms them with advanced weaponry supplemented by tinkertech (as an example, P90 PDWs with underslung laser emitters). Although Coil does employ other parahumans, he prefers to keep them at a distance or otherwise render them pliable. He is the person who put Undersiders together as a team and had plans to abduct Dinah Ascott and forcibly addict her to tinker drugs to use as his personal precog. While he is known to offer decent payment to his employees for their services, he also uses coercion to press them into service - for example, he had procured the services of Tattletale by ambushing her in civilian identity and threatening to kill her. Coil is known to be greatly interested in Thinkers.

During his tenure at PRT Calvert had put a lot of effort and resources towards subverting the local branch in varied ways. He has numerous backdoors into their computer systems and has a number of moles in the organisation in question.

Coil`s powers come from Cauldron and his actions are tacitly supported by that organisation as an experiment on feudal society among parahumans. As many other thinker powers, his is incapable of properly processing the concept of demon and as he interprets any split timelines in which he comes in contact with Varga as "void". Needless to say, the experience is unpleasant to him, as he is incapable of figuring it out, and going against the unknowable is terrifying for a schemer like him.

At the beginning of the story, Coil sends Undersiders on a nigh-suicidal mission against Lung, thus setting them on a collision course with Saurial. That later proves to be his undoing, as Tattletale joins Family as Metis. In order to put an end to his depredations and to secure their own standing to PRT, Tattletale informs Emily Piggot about his actions and with the aid of Saurial reveals his civilian identity to them, as well as the location of his secret base and backup caches.

Although Coil does attempt to sit things out in his underground base, he is eventually captured by Family and turned over to PRT in a clandestine operation.