Character Creation Chain

[CupofJoe]

Doc Kincaid
Doc Kincaid eased back on the chair rocking it on to its two rear legs until she was perfectly balanced. Her spurs caught in the wooden rail of the veranda like they had done for years keeping her steady. She pushed her hat up and looked straight at the young hot-head with her cold blue eyed stare. The young gun knew how to stand, one hand resting lightly on a hip, near his gun but not too near. He wore his gun low too, ready for a quick draw. It was nice, tooled leather rig, but too new. There was no signs of age or use.The leather would be too stiff and unforgiving for a really fast draw. It told no stories because the boy had none. Doc’s rig was almost black with sweat and stains from decades of use, and she could draw from it like a hot knife through butter. Unfortunately, it was hanging on the veranda rail beside her boots. This kid didn’t need to be fast. He just needed not to miss.

Roger the Baseless

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

Roger the Baseless:

Those were the days when people first took to adding their base-name after their surname: my great-grandmother was Amy Lee Tycho, for example, and Dimitrios Korzenyakos Plato later became Prime Minister. The different domes had each developed their own dialects during the Dark Ages, so if you met a stranger, it was easy to tell where on the Moon they came from. Not so Roger the Baseless. He would appear in the central bazaar in one dome or another, a shabby, grey-overalled figure with mutton-chop whiskers, a receeding hairline and an ingratiating wheedle to his voice. His bungo-sled was packed tight with odd and useless parts, most of them obsolete by several decades. His customers were the poor or the relentlessly thrifty: people still nursing along Model J dynogyres or living in Thermex modules. My grandfather described his voice as "like something out of an old Earth sitcom." Other roving peddlers muttered about him. They said that his comings and goings never lined up with the intercity roller schedules, and they never saw him go through customs and decontamination. It was as though he lived alone somewhere out in the dark, stealing in though cracks in the dome like a rat in the walls.

Columbine Harvestar.

 

[AnRoinnUltra]

• Columbine Harvester wasn’t always jittery.
• He didn’t always dart about the place.
• Or fight with every second person he encountered.

He once had the biggest rocket hire yard in the solar system. And it was not the biggest for nothing. His rockets were cheaper, faster and more reliable than anything the outer planets could create.

Everyone knew that if you wanted to go interstellar, you headed for Columbine Harvesters rocket yard.

• The problem back then was that Columbine Harvester hated red tape.
• He doesn’t have that problem anymore.
• Because he’s stone mad.

The madness is an indirect result of the actions of an irresponsible Jupitarian. Who backed one of Columbine’s rockets into an Ongobulan orbital station. And knocked out the Hobobble converter they kept there. The Jupitarian knew that if she hung around after the accident the Ongobulans would have her on the hook for a new converter. So she left on foot. And was last seen sidling into a Hydrosulfide storm. With a guilty look and bruised right shin.

The rocket was traced back to Columbine. Who had forgotten to post the Hobobble protection form. He had got as far as the fourteenth naughts and crosses game, so as to prove he was not a robot, but had given up.

Columbine Harvester had to pony up for a new Hobobble converter. Which cost him all his worldly and outer spacely goods. And his reputation. And the thing he did every day. And, ultimately, his sanity.

If you ever see Columbine Harvester, look away.

You’ll know you’ve seen Columbine because he’ll either be shouting abuse at you, or the person next to you. Don’t worry, he’ll have moved on to the next victim before anything involving pain happens.
Still, best just leave him be -life is short, and it can change at the smallest of things.

Bruscar Obelgottle

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

Bruscar Obelgottle
Polite society mistrusts Bruscar Obelgottle on several counts. Firstly, she is a Quink, and few Quinks are ever permitted to leave their reservation on Benggami Mountain. Secondly, she is a witch, and not just any witch. The honorific "Bruscar" means she is an elder among witches, and not to be trifled with. The third and most damning point against her is that she looks her social betters dead in the eye and will use the familiar "thou" even to men of the exalted Skaldmirk caste.

Being somewhat of an outcaste myself, I naturally made Obelgottle's acquaintance more than twenty years ago. She has not aged visibly in that time. A small, olive-skinned woman, her face is deeply lined but her posture bolt upright. Ratty, greyish hair straggles out from under a kind of lace fez; she favours long, dark skirts and tunics embroidered with Quink patterns in red and blue. Her nose is hawklike, her brown eyes piercing, her thin lips mobile and expressive. She is usually chewing tobacco. She holds her peace until she has something to say, at which point Gihaxis Himself would fail to get a word in edgeways.

Bruscar Obelgottle specialises in fixing the kind of problem that falls outside the law, but inside a strict moral code of her own that we, her clients, can only guess at. She sets her prices by the client's purse, or sometimes by that same moral code. When you approach her with a job, you never quite know how she's going to respond.

Parry Houlihan.

 

[Sphinctus Bogstrider]

Parry Houlihan

Parry works as a school teacher in Droghada, just north of Dublin. He is an alcoholic who lives on his own is a bedsit. He can hardly pay the rent on his flat, and lives off of a diet of bread, margarine, salted peanuts and cheap lager (that he drinks at room temperature).

He likes to read second-hand comics in his spare time, that he gets at car boot sales. Recently, he has convinced himelf he is a super hero really and that his tedious life is just a nightmare that he will wake up from eventually. He goes on long country walks at the weekend, and when no one is looking, he likes to jump off of boulders and other relatively large objects to see if he can fly. He has not broken anything yet, and if he flaps his arms enough, he knows that he will be able to one day. Then he can get an old cheap super hero suit and start doing the stuff he was meant to do. The reality is he does fly in his dreams, and he looks forward to going to bed every night for this reason.

Parry is fifty three years old. He has never had a serious partner. He doesn't know how to talk to people really. He doesn't understand why no one thinks like him. He doesn't care anymore either. He just looks forward to the day he can fly all the time.

Vixen Blondhair

 

[ColGray]

Vixen Blondhair

Detective Grade 3 Vixen Blondhair works in the LAPD's elite Fungible Crime Division. She spends her days busting crooks who use copied components and fake avatar motifs, preserving the sanctity of chain tokens. She had a TV show once -- or a show about her. Studio execs said she wasn't believable as a real person--that she looked like a perfect doll, and no one would believe she was real. The show only lasted a year--not because it wasn't good, but because it drew too much attention. Pretty soon, she couldn't go anywhere without seeing skins of D3 Vixen Blondhair's on every street corner and cafe.

And she pulled the plug.

The studio execs lost their minds. They had a hit! They wanted the pinup! Think of the money!

They never got it. The irony was that the execs were right: Vixen wasn't the real her. The fulfilled her. That her only exists at night and his name is Raymond Holbrook: a mild mannered father of three and an accountant.

Remedia Candalaria

 

[AnRoinnUltra]

Remedia Candalaria

Was a very fine spaceship inspector. There was no fare dodging when she was onboard. And she was always onboard.

Which was the problem.

If you took the Meteor Line express to Ganymede you'd be sure to see her eighteen flonged clombertudes scraggling their way down the aisle.

'Tickets', she'd say.

No more, no less.

And if you were not in possession of a cardboard stub then woe betide you. For it would be the last thing you were not in possession of. And she always cleared up the mess after.

Now. The truth of Remedia is that she was not one thing. She was many.

189736 in total.

And each and every Remedia was one and the same. A piece of intergalactic bio engineering craftmanship. They say that when the gene splicers made her they broke the mould (not strictly true, logic dictates that they could only have broken the mould after a minimum of 189736 incubations).

In any case, Remedia was a creature of her time.

Interplanetary, and for that matter intergalactic, travel went paperless.

And very fine spaceship inspectors were surplus to requirements. And the universe no longer had a want or place for one Remedia Candalaria, let alone 189735 multi flonged clones. So they were fed to the Taingeoughan.

Over a period of three weeks.

And gave it mild indigestion.

Or so the story goes.

Flux Bontempi

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

Flux Bontempi

She was a toy saxophone, to begin with.

Toddler and aspiring mad scientist Wolfgang von Trapp made some upgrades to the cheap plastic instrument, then got bored and threw it away as he did with most of his toys. For years, she lived in the junk heap, endlessly twiddling her brightly-coloured keys. She enhanced herself with parts taken from other abandoned projects. In those days, there was no malice in Flux Bontempi, just a singular, absolute drive: to discover the God Lick, the greatest possible jazz lick in the Universe.

Centuries later, she stood before the assembled Jazz Adepts of the Twelve Galaxies. In her tinny, reedy toy-saxophone voice, she sang the God Lick. And everyone laughed.

Thus the Bebop Wars began.

Ethyl Mercaptan

 

[Mgellis]

Ethyl Mercaptan is an artificial intelligence created by the designers of the Magfire City virtual world. Snooty, a perfectionist about her appearance, and overly proud of her wealthy family and their meager accomplishments, she is one of many artificial residents of Magfire City. She was created to add to the overall atmosphere of the virtual world and to provide people with information--she is a terrible gossip; you just have to get on her good side. Naturally, she is not self-aware; she is simply a very sophisticated chatbot with a very lifelike avatar. She looks good in purple.

Artibonite Rowdon

 

[CupofJoe]

Artibonite Rowdon was a Yorkshire Gnome. And proud of it.
They had work down one mine or another for nigh on forty year. Their family went back sixteen generations in mines and pits all over what the humans called "God's own country". All the time they had been Master, and Mistress, Prop Creakers. There hadn’t been a major cave-in or face collapse for over three hundred year that a Rowdon hadn’t taken a proud hand in, with a last minute warning to save a few, if all could not be saved.
That was at an end now that the Company had invested in new hydraulic jacks. They were supposed to be safer and more reliable. It was the end of a way of life for the Rowdons.
Arbonite was no longer a Mistress Prop Creaker.
But Arbonite the Valve Taper and Pipe Burster was looking forward to the future as they picked up their small hammer and a long thin steel pin. The future was going to get messy!

Farleigh Wallop

 

[Mgellis]

Farleigh Wallop was a gentleman and he never let anyone forget it. His family owned the biggest chemical refineries in Dalton-Westburgh and their family compound sat on some of the most beautiful land in Westburgh Cylinder. It was only proper that his parents wanted him to marry someone from one of the city's other plutocrat families. The only problem was that he had fallen in love with one of his childhood friends, Leda Tadanao, and although she there was nothing wrong with her family, most of them very respectable physicians and biologists, she was very middle class. How was he going to explain this to the family elders?

Leda Tadanao

 

[AnRoinnUltra]

Leda Tadanao was the second child of Mogobod and Frog Tadanao. Her brother was thirteen years her senior, and was someone she knew little about. She was five planetary cycles old when he left for the Galactic Core.

Leda’s father Frog Tadanao was a tax collector for the galactic collective. He was also very protective of Leda, and insisted she go everywhere with him as he worked. This meant that a large part of Leda’s formative years involved watching her father getting punched, kicked, spat at and insulted.

The days, weeks and years spent traipsing behind Frog had a lasting impact on Leda. It can do things to your worldview to see a grown up abused in that way. In fact, it can poison your view of existence.
‘
Which is what happened to Leda.

She now works at the weighstation on Stromlacháin junction. Her job is to act as a secondary observer to the officials as they measure and log the cargo passing through to Section AZG4183 the Nonganglask Star System. To date she has recorded details for 18,934 starships, which has taken three decades. Leda has otherwise retreated from life. She spends her evenings in a nondescript apartment on the upper levels of an orbiting habitation satellite that sits in geostationary orbit next to Stromlacháin junction weighstation. Her sole source of pleasure are the Core approved holo-videos she watches.

To date she has viewed 453, 896 of them.

Bolump Fomlacháin

 

[Mans]

Bolump Fomlacháin got off the spaceship and after descending the stairs, stood motionless on the ground of Mars and looked around happily. It was his first time traveling to Mars. Although the spaceship was old and arrived on Mars late, it was still cheaper than the new, faster spaceships with ample facilities and furniture.One of its engines also stopped working halfway, and the captain had to go into the engine to try and repair it. Throughout this period, the spaceship was floating in space, and Bolump heard the captain hammering something in the engine. Eventually, the captain was able to repair it and emerged from the engine with a sledgehammer, though his helmet and half of his spacesuit turned black due to soot and oil.

Harry Colman

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

Harry Colman was born in the aggressively Human enclave of Townville on the X'huithi Ring. He has lived there all his life: a solid, normal Human man doing a solid, normal Human job. At the age of 35, he has been made a foreman at the bread-roll factory. A steady worker, a sensible family man, not the kind to get distracted by the fact that his tiny world is just a dust mote within a vast, glittering, multidimensional alien civilisation and Humans are extinct everywhere else. Nobody knows about his secret second savings account, though. Once little John and Stacy Colman have fled the nest, and once Sophie Colman is thoroughly sick of her boring husband, he's getting out of here. There's a Multiverse to see.

Gendangra Liaulu

 

[CupofJoe]

Gendangra Liaulu was not the best dancer he would freely admit. He couldn’t jump as far, or as high, or as gracefully as those born and bred for their Hives to be dancers. But Liaulu had a dream! Long before he had been in a pupa, he had only thought of dancing on silken wings. When he hatched and his outer shell had hardened and wing extended, he clicked his rear legs together in trepidation. He was amazed at the sound. He had a deep sonorous chirp. Deeper and longer than any of those flighty dancers that got all the lead rolls. In every performance, but it was EVERY performance, he was the villain. He could fill any stage with rounded but sinister sounds as his character tired to seduce or kill or steal. He loved every moment.

Joe Smoke

 

[AnRoinnUltra]

Everyone in Glonfallach Orbital Mining Station has a story about Joe Smoke. I know that because I'm stationed there and I've had to listen to each one over a hundred times. For some reason, the staff there never get bored of telling those stories.
The stories are an inane collection of insignificant events that follow a depressingly predictable arc. Joe Smoke is faced with a difficulty, and overcomes the difficulty in a clever or dramatic way. The narrator, however, never seems to be present. And the stories are always second hand.
An example would be the time there was a revolt by three guards at Transit Point Nine. Joe apparently hid behind some equipment on the pressurised cargo belt and knocked two of the out cold with a Stillson wrench. Which, according to the teller, was an impressive and clever thing to do. The thing is, I've never seen any evidence of there ever having been guards at Transit Point Nine.
Which brings me to Joe Smoke himself. He is omnipresent at Glonfallach Orbital Mining Station. You can't piss without him appearing to dispense advice, usually followed by a story about how he cunningly gained the knowledge.
If you ever find yourself stationed at Glonfallagh make sure not to mock any stories you hear about Joe. There is, for sure, a good chance that what you are listening to is pure muck -but Joe is very popular. And for the vast majority of miners, Joe Smoke is all they think about.

Habbonigle Anpont Bulant-Durocknel III

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

Habbonigle Anpont Bulant-Durocknel III ("Habby-cat" to her friends) is the "spare" of the Bulant-Durocknel dynasty that rules the Plutonian moon Hydra. She's in no danger of inheriting: her older sister, Gonsandicles, is both heavily cyborgised and redundantly backed-up. So, anyway, Habbonigle: a fresh-faced young party-animal of 60 (Earth) years who is currently deep into a grip-hop phase. Think green hair, violet skin, big clonky shoes and those jewelled tentacle-implants - you know the type. She's a common sight in the zaft-houses of neighbouring Pluto, sniffing on a tube of the latest neo-emotion whilst holding forth on the merits of Juno Singh's haptic smokescapes. A bit superficial perhaps, but she's warm, friendly and not in the least bit "catty" - the nickname is more to do with her habit of curling into the biggest chair in the club and holding court there all night. She thinks the best of everyone, and thanks to her bodyguards she gets away with that.

Mantique Fletcher