Day 6: Hobbes

30 meters

Dry from the summer heat the tall grasses rustle in the hot wind. He snuffles, the wind is coming off his prey, he can smell the stink of it. He moves forward carefully, timing his movements with the gusts and eddies of wind, the rustle of movement lost in the breezes.

20 meters

He crouches for long moments, his prey takes shade under a strangely twisted tree, safe from the midday suns. The tip of his tail flicks expectantly, with will he calms it. His prey hears nothing.

10 meters

He is up to the edge of the clearing, in it the grass is matted down from use, his prey is not the only one to use the tree as shelter. He changes stance from stalking to prepared to spring. Two bounds and the prey will be his. He forces his tail to calm itself. He waits for his prey to look away. His butt wiggles in defiance.

The moment comes.

Taut muscles and sinews launch him forward. one jump, the prey hears but turns too late, two jumps, the powerful legs launch him in a graceful and terrible arc. He strikes his victim in the chest, knocking the wind from it, eliminating any chance of escape.
The prey fights back but its struggles are futile. Hobbes stifles a giggle as Calvin tries to crawl away.
“I thought I told you to stay with the ship”
” You did, and I did” replies Hobbes, “but you didn’t say how looong I was to stay” {{giggle}}

Well, he’s Hobbes, fuzzy bellied pouncer who loves the belly rubs and smooches. He gets dragged along by Calvin into just about every misadventure the spaceman has. He’s not so secretly in love with Suzie. and his favorite tactic is the sneak up and pounce.

Hobbes

Day 4: Patricia “Hush” Welker

Patricia Welker collects memories. Every morning she takes out her notebook and works through the littany of the places she’s been, the people she’s met. From the smell of Georgina’s bake shop on 429 Smith street, to the last light of a day sparkling on the spire of the Voight Corp building on the first day of spring – she has a host of memories from the last 3 months and cherishes each one as she takes careful notes about each thing she discovers. The light of dawn, the overheard snippets of conversation in the main square, the look on young lovers faces as they get lost in each other on a monorail platform. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. Everything gets noted and everything gets remembered. Memories are not to be taken for granted, especially after you’ve been mind wiped.

Patricia suffered a headwound somewhere, sometime, and she was found wandering the backstreets of Mar Sara City. A kindly citizen took her to the emergency room where they stitched her up. They extracted a computer chip from her head wound and attributed her memory loss to feedback from the damaged chip. At her insistence a friendly doctor arranged for her to not be turned over to the authorities. As far as she can piece together she’s a ghost, an assassin for the Terran Dominion. She has all the equipment, and as one traveller who wouldn’t take “back off” as an answer found out, she has the skills. She’s only vaguely interested in finding out about her past life, all she can discover about the ghost program gives her doubts about returning to that life. Even her name is a new creation, the only thing she knows from her past life is that her call sign was “Hush”.

She travelled to Backwater Station to see the sunrise and sunsets over the badlands. When the protoss “glassed” the planet, unique crystalline structures were formed and resulted in glorious views among the canyons.

Build notes: Sold back Knowledge – area knowledge, since the mindwipe took that away
When she advances in level I would probably give her the photographic memory perk and possibly Creativity – artist skill

Patricia Welker

Day 3: Alphonse “Reaper” Grimm

Alphonse Grimm’s dreams are of liquid and pain.  On good nights they are green and muffled, the color of the liquid he awoke to in his cloning tube, the voices of the technicians muted through the bubbling fluid.  On bad nights they are claws and jaws, blood and his own screams adding to those of his squad.  On good nights he wakes when the dream reaches the decanting, the bracing feel of air on his skin, in his lungs.  On bad nights he has to rip himself awake with his own screaming. 

On most mornings he wakes up in the cargo bed of his modified Hellion 4×4, climbs out of his sleeping bag and checks his armor before rummaging through his box of MilRats for breakfast.  Special days find him rolling out of an actual bed at Maeve’s Inn in Backwater Station.  The original Backwater Station was overrun by zerg the first time he “visited”.  Following the protoss bombarding the planet and the terraforming that followed waves of colonists made it back to their world. Rebuilding this far into the badlands takes a special kind of crazy, hunting zerg in the badlands takes a special kind of desperate.  Alphonse “Reaper” Grimm isn’t crazy or desperate, he’s mad.  All the time.   His squad was the only family he had, all decanted at the same time.  His batch was MarSara-K8-73.  He was number 32.  He didn’t become Alphonse until a sweet young lady in JoeyRay’s gave him the moniker and it stuck.  “Reaper” came later.  When Mar Sara was overrun, he fought until the last moments, but as the drop ship lifted off he could see the last of his brothers cut off from salvation.  Raynor offered to let him join the Raiders, and it seemed like a good idea, but then the Protoss killed every living thing left on Mar Sara and nothing seemed to make sense any more. He tried the mercenary gig for a bit, that’s where he picked up the call sign Reaper but he was saddled with the notion that Big Things were happening around them and sank further into depression.

Once all the wars died down he found himself back on Mar Sara hunting feral zerg.  Killing the damned monsters gave him the feeling that he was doing something, though initially is was all out of revenge for what had been done to his people, his world. 

But now the bounties are not so profitable, the zerg are getting few and far between, and the rage is dying out little by little.  There’s a pretty little bureaucrat who has taken it upon herself to teach him geology in exchange for some of the crystals he brings in.  When the protoss bastards glassed the planet something happened to the crystals and the gov will pay big bucks for the new form of crystal and more for the coordinates where the crystals are found. 

Alphonse Grimm