Matt Browning

Matt Browning is a very clever teenager with a high IQ, and Lieutenant of Department 19. He also works as a scientist for the Lazarus Project.

Physical description
Matt is small and has a petite built. He has pale skin and an almost feminine face with soft, not really striking facial features. His hair is brown and falls down his forehead. Furthermore, Matt wears glasses.

Plot
The following passages need revision.

Attacked by a Vampire
His throat is torn out by Larissa Kinley after she's thrown away by Anderson, on Alexandru Rusmanov's orders. She was critically injured and her vampire instincts meant she attacked him without thinking. Matt was sent into Blacklight intensive care and put into a coma. Whilst there, Jamie Carpenter visits Matt in the infirmary because he feels a sense of companionship with Matt - both of them have just had their lives turned entirely upside-down by this world which only a few people even know about. When Matt wakes up, he fakes amnesia because he knows that this organization - Blacklight, as he'll discover later - is classified beyond Top Secret, and he figured that if they knew he still remembered everything that happened, they probably wouldn't let him go home. Jamie finds him when he wakes up, and knows that Matt's amnesia is fake but his desire to help is real. Jamie tells him to try and get back to the Loop. Matt recovers and goes home at the end of the first book.

Becoming a Member of Blacklight
Matt has been at home for two months but researching vampires all the while. Any kind of website could be useful. After a while, he gets access to Echelon, the monitoring system used by Intelligence divisions of the security services, which scans all digital communication for certain buzzwords. On the list of scanned words are ones which would seem odd to anyone who didn't know about Blacklight - vampire, black, visor, purple, fangs. He uses the knowledge that things like phone calls are scanned for these words, and makes a hoax phone call saying that he's seen vampires and Blacklight officers. He's soon attacked by two vampires (proving that they have access to Echelon) but they're quickly destroyed by Operators and he's taken back to the Loop. This, after a word is put in for him by Jamie and Professor Talbot (after discovering Matt's extraordinary IQ of 196), results in Matt joining Blacklight. He works the Lazarus Project, oblivious to the horrors it really contains, and is nearly killed by Prof. Talbot (aka Christopher Reynolds), but is saved by Jamie. At the end of the book he receives a medal, which he thinks he doesn't deserve, and is put in temporary charge of the entire Lazarus project and extracting useful data from the hard-drive which Reynolds was going to take with him before he was killed.

This data proves to be extremely useful; even though Reynolds was torturing vampires in all kinds of horrific ways, and trying to eliminate their weaknesses instead of find a total cure, there's no doubt the information he gathered was useful and gave the Lazarus team a head start of a few years. In Battle Lines, we see Matt in a fully revitalized Lazarus Project, using fully humane methods, with a Professor Karlsson heading the project and with certified geniuses from all over the world working on it. They include a pretty, young Russian girl named Natalia Lenski who Matt develops a crush on. (Natalia is the one hurt by the bomb planted in Kate's room; she had been given the override code to the door to let herself in, as Kate had arranged to meet with her to talk about Matt.)

Matt is the one who figures out that there's a direct correlation between how old the vampire is and how quickly the people they turn develop as vampires, from the fact that the Broadmoor escapees were probably just injected with the plasma from a very old vampire (possibly even Dracula himself) instead of being bitten, and that Larissa was bitten by the oldest vampire in Britain and developed very quickly.

Towards the end of the book, Matt finds out what his dad has done (assist Pete Randall, Kevin McKenna and Albert Harker in uncovering Blacklight to the public) and goes with Kate and Frankenstein to try and stop them.

The Browning Theory
This theory suggests that Matt said that the older a vampire is, the more powerful the vampires will be when turned by them.

GARDEN OF EDEN
This mission was searching for Adam (known properly as John Bell) and on it, Danny Lawrence (an NS9 operator) dies.

Skills and abilities
Matt possesses an IQ of 196 and therefore is one of the most intelligent people on the planet. Due to that he was allowed to work for Blacklight's Lazarus Project as a scientist.

Matt is also a very good runner, due to the fact that he was chased by bullies all the time prior to his time in Blacklight.

Jamie Carpenter
Jamie and Matt are very close friends. Jamie was the person that met up with Matt and told him about Blacklight and its operations during his hospitalization, which had resulted in Jamie being severely punished. They grew close together as the series progressed and eventually wounded up as best friends since Matt was the closest person to his age group.

Larissa Kinley
Matt and Larissa had a very "sharp" relationship at first as the latter slashed his throat out and nearly killed him. He was very wary of his contact with Larissa at first but eventually as the series progressed, they started to talk and Larissa apologized for nearly killing him. It simply couldn't be helped since Larissa was after all a vampire. Currently, they are very good friends.

Natalia Lenski
"He wanted to explain that he wasn't doing it for her, but rather because of her; that when he was with her, he felt as though he could do anything."

- Department 19: Zero Hour (chapter 18)

Natalia was Matt's crush. They both developed feelings for each other while working for the Lazarus Project during which they observed each other's brilliance.

Appearances

 * Department 19
 * Department 19: The Rising
 * Department 19: Battle Lines
 * Department 19: Zero Hour
 * Department 19: Darkest Night

Trivia

 * Matt lives in the Loop on Level B, Room 173, right next to Jamie.