CHARACTER NAME: Peter Verhoef HISTORY: Peter Verhoef was born in the Netherlands 26 BF, and attended the European Union Peacekeeping Academy and graduated as a second lieutenant in the EU Peacekeepers. A brilliant and well-educated young man, he rose to the rank of captain and ended up assigned as a junior aide-de-camp to General van Ulm, the Netherlands-born commanding general of the EU Peacekeeper 1st Rapid Response Division. He was still part of the General's party as the remnants of the EU Peacekeeping division made their last stand at Hamburg military spaceport, during the Fall of Earth. After it became known that there were not enough berths left on the available ships, or even enough capacity on the egocasting capacities, to evacuate all the troops after the remaining civilians were taken care of, the General needed all his charisma and command ability to hold the troops together from mutinying. He achieved this by arranging for a random, computer-chosen lottery to determine who would go and who would hold the rearguard to the end -- and by making it known that he would exclude himself from the survivors' lottery, and command the rearguard personally. Captain Verhoef also excluded himself from the lottery to stay with his commander... and found himself entered in it anyway. More than entered in it; the General had convinced the captain of one of the escape ships to reserve a slot for him, and then ordered for Captain Verhoef to go aboard the ship to 'make arrangements'... and he ended up still being on board while it lifted off, using the slot reserved for the general. The escape ship in question was a troop transport headed for Mars. Overcome with survivors' guilt, Captain Verhoef formally resigned his commission in the now non-existent EU Peacekeeping Force en route, and represented himself to the recruiters at the other end as an only moderately-skilled civilian, not advertising his resume. By the time this deception was exposed he was already working as a junior habitat services engineer on a remote Martian outpost. After a couple years of that, he was recruited into the Martian Rangers. Acting in the role of a frontier town sheriff, he spent the next several years being assigned from outpost to dome to small town, keeping order, dealing with drunks and bandits and habitat systems failures and life's little emergencies. Peter's survivors' guilt and untreated PTSD from the Fall led him to seek employment opportunities significantly below his education level, despite his obtaining several new degrees and employment certifications via correspondence learning as he wandered the Martian backcountry. Although honest and devoted to the law he still formed good contacts with the Barsoomians, as one of the cops who would give a ruster a fair shake whenever he could, and turn a blind eye to harmless activities like smuggling or hacking company nanofabs to produce useful goods. He even picked up a few tricks of the trade in that regard. As the hypercorp clampdown of the terraformers and rusters proceeded, the Rangers had to lay people off due to budget cuts, and and Peter found work with a small security corp -- that was within a year the victim of a corporate takeover by Direct Action. Peter grew more and more disaffected with his work. He was expected to act more and more as an enforcer and strikebreaker for the Planetary Consortium then he was as a peace officer and valued community member among the small settlements of the Outback. His c-rep score grew lower and lower as he grew more disaffected, and he was denied sensitive postings due to his suspected Barsoomian sympathies, until he ended up as a mundane security sub-supervisor for a large refinery complex. The industrial disaster that occurred there gave him a new lease on life -- literally. Going above and beyond the call of duty, Peter took command in the middle of the massive fire and hull breach, acting several ranks above his paygrade while the actual management either fled to save itself or was ineffectual. It was due to his actions and command presence that over 100 morphs escaped intact and several key parts of the facility were kept in salvageable condition, even though Peter had to hold the line until the death of his current morph. Of course, since he was a Direct Action employee killed in the line of duty, DA picked up the tab for resleeving him. With his c-rep soundly re-established by his heroism, DA offered him his choice of assignments. However, his temporary death and re-instantation had helped Peter come to some level of closure with his past; instead he resigned his DA contract at the earliest possible date, and sought newer, more fulfilling work elsewhere. Seeing an advertisement for a corp specializing in paramilitary rescue work, he applied, and has just finished training and is ready for his first team assignment. FRIENDS AND FAMILY: Peter's family is all dead in the flooding of the Netherlands during the Fall, when the dikes broke from the orbital strikes of the TITANs. Due to his having been a wandering man with untreated depression, he wasn't very gregarious during his time on Mars. Several people he [i]is[/i] close to are... [i]Nuri el-Malik, Sufi clan elder and Barsoomian organizer[/i]: Nuri el-Malik, despite being only several years older than Peter, is a well-respected elder among the Sufi nomads of the northern desert, and of undefined yet notable prominence among the Barsoomians. He was Peter's grief counselor during the years immediately after the fall, and him and Peter are as close as brothers. However, their friendship is constrained by their respective allegiances; they have always understood, without anything needing to be said aloud, that certain portions of the other man's life are entirely off-limits. Peter never asks Nuri questions about certain things, Nuri never asks Peter for certain favors or involves him in certain activities. [i]Anne Donovan, hypercorp business consultant:[/i] A junior executive management specialist, interdepartmental liason, and "general associate" for one of the PC hypercorps, Anne is Peter's current girlfriend. They met (at the veterinarian's) five months ago shortly after Peter moved into New Shanghai to start his corporate training for his current employer. Anne is solidly middle-class, non-political, and a lifelong resident of Mars, as is her extended family. Her relationship and Peter's is not casual, but they're still figuring out what they have and how deeply they know the other person. [i]The 1st Rapid Response Division, European Union Peacekeeping Forces:[/i] Between the Fall, the disastrous partial evac, infugees still stuck in inactive storage, and attrition after the Fall, The 1st Rapid Response has exactly 34 survivors left alive and active in the Solar System today. Peter knows this because he and the rest are all on a particular private mesh mailing list/drop. While him and the other 33 are scattered all over known space in different roles, affiliations, allegiance, and objectives, they all still keep in at least some kind of e-mail contact... if only to celebrate birthdays and funerals. Typical of the sort of informal 'survivor's associations' formed by Fall evacuees of various subgroups, nations, clades, or just shared experiences, the memorial society for the 1st Rapid Response is a quietly private thing. (Since I suck at creating lots of NPCs, I left this open as a device for the DM to insert whichever ones he wants. Note also that surviving widows, cousins, etc. of his former unit mates can also be slotted in here, if you need more variety of archetype.) [i]Nick:[/i] Is Peter's cat. An ordinary unmodified off-the-rack black Earth cat with white spots, Peter found him as a stray near the spaceport very shortly after the Fall. Peter has since kept him with him and healthy through every assignment, transfer, and frontier posting he's had on Mars. If you value your life, [i]don't hurt the cat.[/i] :) (I admit that putting a cat on this list is cheating, but its indicative of Peter's personality. It's also a personal memorial to a cat I had IRL, who we lost a couple years ago.) ENEMY: Major Alexander Vashin is a Direct Action counterintelligence officer who has spent several years trying to trace back Peter's link to the Barsoomian terrorists. (Which has been epically frustrating, since Peter doesn't actually have any; all of his Barsoomian sympathies and associations are legal and aboveboard). This came to a head when Major Vashin deliberately left security holes surrounding the refinery that junior Direct Action employee Peter Verhoef was stationed at, to give him enough rope to hang himself. Instead Peter became a hero for saving the facility, and Lt. Colonel Vashin got a corporate black mark and a demotion for having gone overboard with his investigation. He now has it as a point of personal pride to prove that Peter is up to /something/, and to ruin the new career that he has. Peter, on his part, is aware that somebody in Direct Action is highly suspicious of him, which is one of the reasons he quit his contract there as soon as he had enough c-rep to cancel it while still keeping his morph free of indenture. He has yet to discover just how outside the rules Major Vashin is prepared to go... although the Major still has limits, given that he can't afford another black mark on his record, and Direct Action doesn't want a major intercorp jurisdictional dispute with Pathfinder. Major Vashin appears on Peter's character sheet as a 10-point Enemy flaw. POSSIBLE PLOT HOOKS: * A member of the 1st Rapid Response memorial society is on Mars! And he needs help. * Major Vashin discovers that Peter is dating a respected hypercorp employee! What will his paranoid mind think of this, and how will Anne react to being caught in the middle? * Major Vashin having finally revealed himself and the depths of his obsessive hatred (whether via the above seed or somethign else)... well, Peter's not going to take that lying down. How does he get this ruthless bastard off his back? * Nuri is finally desperate enough to ask Peter to break the law in the name of friendship... and the circumstances are such that its not execrable for him to have done so. Can Peter find a third option? Or will he finally have to choose between his duty and his closest living friend? DESIGN NOTES: So far the character in question is a good shot, a fair pilot, a good cop, a decent investigator, a military-academy-trained historian, knows a bit of infosec, can do jackleg first aid and fix your gun or your habitat's lifesystem or program your fabber to make basic useful gizmos even without a legal template (all of the above at 35-45, except for combat skills which are 60 in kinetic weapons and fray, 50 in unarmed, 45 in freerunning, 40 in gunnery, clubs, and seeker weapons, and 30 in free fall)... but he knows [i]jack squat[/i] about gatecrashing. He's been on only two planets, Earth and Mars. So while he's good for combat support in strange environments and is a jack-of-many-trades-master-of-few for general adventuring, if I have to abandon the 'he's the new guy on the team' element of the character then I'll need to redo a good chunk of the skill list. (The character design was originally done for Mars and Mars-orbit type rescue.)

HISTORY: David Pournelle-Kinross was born 14 BF as a scion of the ridiculously wealthy Pournelle clan, one of the oligarch dynasties that hold major (if hidden) sway in the Planetary Consortium, and before then in the Offworld Consortium. Raised in the lap of luxury, given the best of everything, he barely remembers Earth; his parents had moved to one of the glitterati's L-5 habitats when he was a young child. The Fall did not directly touch David's life; as one of the hyperelite's children, he was carefully insulated from its tragedies. The main change it produced was that the overcrowding of the L-5 habitats in the wake of the evacuation prompted his branch of the family's move to Mars, filling in the slots in the oligarchy there as Mars' post-Fall expansion mirrored the birth of the Planetary Consortium. It wasn't until David was in university (pursuing a business degree just like all the other 'First Family' hyperelites of his generation) that he first started meeting people outside the hyperelite cocoon, and with them a knowledge of just what crimes his family had perpetrated during the Fall. Distant family patriarch Orson Pournelle had ruthlessly abused his authority over the Panamanian space elevator to sell evacuation slots to the highest bidders, extort priceless Earth artifacts and/or stock holdings in key offworld corporations from desperate refugees as the price for allowing them escape from Earth, and prioritized hypercorp interests over human life. (It's important to note that David hardly knows the /full/ extent of Orson Pournelle's crimes... that kind of stuff is hardly public knowledge. Just hearing about the least bad 10% or so of what that bastard is rumored to have done is still enough to shock the hell out of anyone.) Guilt-ridden and outraged, David cast about for something do that wouldn't just be a futile gesture, and found his answer in Argonaut philosophy. Changing majors to biogenetics (and later to medicine), David chose to embrace techno-progressivism and pursue a path of using technology to enrich the lives of everyone rather than just conserve wealth for an elite few. Of course, he was hardly the first (or the hundredth) rich young scion to rebel this way, and his family elders calmly acted to show this latest young naive rich boy what the 'real world' was like. Arranging for him to be stuck in a backrocket post in the plains of Tharsis after graduating medical school, they figured that a nice sharp taste of the misery of the proletariat would send him running back to the family trust fund and private pleasure habitats. Instead, David found a new thing to be outraged over; the exploitation of the rusters via the 'Genetic Service Pack' planned obolescence. Applying his medical and genetic training alongside that of Barsoomian and Argonaut genehackers, David was a part of the open-source scientific project that came up with a cure for ruster morph degeneration. While this cure has not ended the GSP scam on Mars (for one thing, arranging for distribution is still quite the problem, in addition to the hypercorp memetic engineering that makes so many rusters still believe the Barsoomian cure is unsafe or a fraud), it has led to a new lease on life for hundreds of thousands of rusters, a lease free of the Consortium "recurring revenue stream". In one fell swoop, David set an all-time Solar System record for highest Circle-A list rep ever achieved by a Pournelle. Needless to say, the family was /not/ amused. Pulling strings to get David the hell out of the Martian Outback before he did something even more embarassing to the family was elementary enough, but one does not become a hypercorp oligarch by being ignorant of what makes people tick. His family elders knew perfectly well that the harder they tried to order a rebellious young man not to do something, the more determined he'd be to do it. [If the campaign is not actually with Pathfinder after all, we'll work out a revision to this next part. The basic theme is 'David ends up working at wherever the PCs are employed'.] So instead deciding to lure him by his scientific curiosity, they 'arranged' for a prime job opportunity at Pathfinder to cross his path, hoping to get some use out of him and his proven intellectual potential by handing him a nice laboratory job far away from politics... and if they were really lucky, far away from the Solar System. It worked... for all of six weeks, which is how long it took for interoffice gossip to filter down to David as to exactly why he'd gotten the job. At which point, David took advantage of the intricacies of the corporate HR manual and finessed an internal transfer to the medical division and became a rescue worker. That'll be a good place to still be in Pathfinder (as he's aware that trying to quit would just ratchet his family's attention up to /really/ uncomfortable levels) and yet not locked into his family's vision of what he 'should' be doing until David figures out what he actually /is/ going to do next. As for his elders? While they continue to keep an eye out, they accept that he's safely contained for now. After all, he's taken what's effectively a menial service job, giving paramedical treatment to proles. What could he possibly end up doing /there/ that would in any way be important? PERSONALITY/INTERESTS: As is obvious, David is an idealist. Raised as one of the many great-grandchildren of a hyperelite immortal oligarch, bred and schooled to be a hyperlite oligarch, with every genetic and material advantage money could possibly buy, David has instead decided to become a progressive devoted to open-source technology and advancing medical science. Like many rich children turned activist, he's still mildly naive on just what the travails and tribulations of the proletariat actually /are/; unlike many of them, he's genuinely intelligent, determined, and sharp with people. People who were /not/ sharp with people didn't survive long in the Pournelle clan; they ended up with a permanent lifetime trust fund and a 'career' as a useless socialite drone for all eternity, just like all the other ones who couldn't make the grade. David is a devoted Argonaut despite never having actually met more than a few of them and never having been to an Argonaut habitat; he's a philosophical devotee based on what he's read and internalized, not an actually employed faction member. He also is comfortable with many of the anarchist ideals about social justice and infugee rights, even if he'd need to use his endocrine control mods to avoid having a heart attack at the pansexual robot snakes and other such weirdness of a full-on anarchist hab. David's main interest is his genetics research and theoretical nanotech concepts engineering, although he's also starting to get mildly interested in xenomolecularbiology. However, this research-oriented side competes for David's attention alongside the fact that he genuinely likes taking his hands and making sick people well. David's hobbies are classical Greek and Roman literature, tai chi, painting, and philosophy. He also regularly competes in the Mars Unlimited-class (all augmentations allowed) Freestyle Parkour league, and placed sixth in the last planetary games. APPEARANCE: David was born to a family that could drop more credit on a whim than most transhumans would make in a century. His morph is the best money can buy -- its a custom-sculpted Menton with a striking and attractive appearance that stands out even in this age of mass-produced beauty. He's also bought many after-market augmentations, and a full set of physical augmentations comparable to those on some combat morphs to make him competitive in the Unlimited-Class Freestyle Parkour tournament circuit. IMPORTANT PEOPLE: Marie Pournelle-Kinross: David's fraternal twin sister. While she's apparently chosen the Family-loyalist path of the hypercorp glitterati/executive, her and David are still each other's big-brother/sister-best-friends-forever(*). And what her own opinion is on things like infomorph exploitation or the more unethical uses of Consortium power, not even David knows for sure. Marie always was the subtle one, after all. (*) It's a running joke between them as to which one was born first; nobody knows. The formal birth certificates show an identical time stamp, and the hospital's local file copies of the obstetrician's lifelog and records were destroyed in the Chicago antimatter explosion during the Fall. Professor Anson Hartley: David's mentor at university, this iconoclastic don is chiefly responsible for his conversion to the Argonauts. An eccentric yet undeniably brilliant scholar in several fields, Professor Hartley is an unshakably tenured fixture among Mars academia despite his outspoken opinions against 95% of the University of Mars' corporate donor list. David and him still correspond regularly, and David's still-unopened bottle of genuine Old Earth 22-year-old relic Scotch was a gift from him to David after the Circle-A list exploded with the names of the 11 genehackers, biologists, and nanotechnicians responsible for cracking the current generation of the Planned Obsolescence GSP... and David Pournelle's name was among them. The First Families: Although David's role in creating the Ruster Cure has tanked his c-rep to zero at the moment, its important to note that he's /not/ actually Blacklisted. That could /never/ (well, /hardly/ ever) happen to a Pournelle; short of outright treason to the Planetary Consortium nothing will change the fact that however on the outs he might be with his family /at the moment/, he is still a distant genetic relation to some of the most influential people in known space. Which means that he will never cease to be at least /some/ kind of useful or interesting to a certain class of people. This is why David's Hypercorp [Networking] skill is so high (its not just how he was raised, its the fact that his last name alone still gets many people to talk to him even if he's in disavor), and this is why his existence on the edge of the most influential family dynasties of the Inner System will be a never-ending source of interesting plot complications -- both good for David /and/ bad -- to the DM. Oversight: While the negative attention David's earned isn't quite at the level where I could justify an Enemy negative trait, being part of the Barsoomian Ruster Cure project definitely doesn't earn you any friends at Oversight. Of course, Oversight has unwritten rules as to how much they're allowed to harass hyperelite First Family scions, even disfavored ones... but then again, the First Families have unwritten rules too. POSSIBLE PLOT HOOKS: * David's ongoing family soap opera. Do they even have a point anymore -- after all, David's a trained and experienced scientist now, and does the family really need yet another hypercorp business specialist? -- or is it just stubborn pride? * Professor Hartley is arrested for having allegedly crossed the line between campus activism and actual sedition/terrorism/libel/fraud? What can David do to help his old mentor? And are the charges true... and if true, are they justified? * David's ongoing athletic competition. Unlimited-Class Freestyle Parkour is /serious business/. And the annual championship is coming up... conflict with medical duties? Crooked gambling syndicate trying to lean on him? Another competitior pulls a Tonya Harding? Possibilities, possibilities... * Oversight, or a particular faction/officer within it, decides to make an example of David as the person involved in the Ruster Cure project that they can most easily reach. Of course, when a hyperelite dynasty as powerful as the Pournelles might be offended by too much overt action, the 'example' must be done very carefully (read: something subdued enough that a PC has a fair chance of successfully resolving the subplot, as compared to the 'you have no hope, go directly to obliterated, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 credits' that usually results in tangling with Oversight.) * Marie, as a hypercorporate lawyer/fixer/operator/etc. of no small heft, does not lead an entirely boring or safe life herself. And her and David /are/ very close... * David's being unfairly shafted at work. His very influential (and normally disapproving) father offers to pull a few strings to help him out. Is this the obvious trap/enticement it looks like, or is this actually a genuine attempt at reconciliation by his old man in the only way he knows how... and how offended/outraged would he be if David refused?