Laiden Brinsop

This page will provide private details of Jason’s character, for Jason and the GMs only.

Half-Dragon Template

Level 1 (subtle changes):

Level 2 (physical manifestations and larger changes):

Miller 2 powers

Normal ship operations consume 1 power/day, and 1 cpu. Creat 1 refills 1 power.

The Perseverance has 5000 power and 100 cpu/round.

Continuous effects:

Instantaneous effects:

1 AU (Astronomical Unit) = 1.49598e11 m 1 LY (light year) = 9.4605284e15 m 1 LY ~= 63,240 AU

|Distance|Time required| |<1 LY|1 hr + 1/2 s/AU| |1-10 LY|10 hrs + 1 hr/LY| |10-100 LY|20 hrs + 1/10 hr/LY beyond 10| |100-1000 LY|30 hrs + 1/100 hr/LY beyond 100| |1,000-10,000 LY|40 hrs + 1/1,000 hr/LY beyond 1,000| |10,000-100,000 LY|50 hrs + 1/10,000 hr/LY beyond 10,000| |etc.|etc.| E.g., 0.2 LY = 12,648 AU ~= 9,924 s ~= 165 min ~= 2.8 hrs E.g., 7 LY = 10 + 7 = 17 hrs E.g., 400 LY = 20 + 1/100300 ~= 23 hrs E.g., 70,000 LY = 50 + 1/10,00060,000 = 56 hrs

Backstory

t61 days. 2 hours. 23 minutes. Two months in a grey hole will do strange things to a person. I mean, here I am, writing to no one. Or to myself, although I think that might be worse. Sitting here, wondering about my fate, wondering how long this ship will hold out in this… well, this whatever this is, I’ve started to reminisce. Not a good habit I really, but I’ve been thinking about all of the things that have led me here and I can’t help but wonder about some of the decisions I’ve made. I never knew my mother. For that matter, I never knew my father. I can’t tell a sad tale about the circumstances of my birth because frankly, I haven’t got a clue. I grew up with a foster family in Germany until I was 17. Not that I knew that it was a foster family at the time, they pretty much raised me as their own. Pleasant little family living in Frankfurt (am Mein) in a small apartment. I went to school, thought about going to college. tMaybe sometimes it’s a good idea to wait until later in someone’s life to tell them they are adopted. Probably in my case it would have been better if they hadn’t told me at all. Would I still be here? Would I be here if they had told me from the start? I don’t hate them for it, they cared for me and raised me. I can understand the awkwardness in trying to explain something like that to a child. tAt least, I don’t think I would have ended up here. Of course, pondering the nature of fate and what I could have done to change mine isn’t really going to do anything but drive me crazy. Well, faster anyway. tI left home, ran I away I suppose you could say. I guess I was leaving anyway; the only difference is my original plan didn’t include never speaking to my family again. I tried for a while to find my original family. I was pretty good with computers and not bad with people either. All I found were dead ends. As near as I could tell I had been found abandoned in Germany and there were no records of my birth parents. It was a hell of a thing to learn as a teenager? tWell, I saved up some cash, working odd jobs and stealing a bit here and there and went in for genetic testing. The lab I went to couldn’t seem to figure a damn thing out. They seemed to think I had some sort of mutation, something they had never seen. I tried a couple of other places but naively told them about my previous results. No one would help me and after I while I considered giving up and going home. I might have gone if I hadn’t wanted so badly to never speak to my parents again. I wandered for a few years, taking odd jobs or just taking odds and ends that I needed. tThen I met Baelom. Dr. Baelom. He never did give me his last name. He came looking for me. He was intrigued by my story. There was something a little bit strange about him but then again there was something a little bit strange about me so we got a long well. He told me that there were people on the other side of the world that could help me to figure out what I was, maybe even who I was. He was intelligent, charming, and persistent. tI went with him to America. I went with him to that crazy city they built in the middle of the desert. On the way we talked. He wanted to know what I was doing, where I was going, what my plans, if any, were. I had none. tAfter some exhaustive, and exhausting, testing they final came back to me with an answer. The same answer that I had heard a dozen times, except that it wasn’t. “We don’t know,” they said. Then they said something different. “If you stay with us we will keep looking and we will keep trying until we find the answer.” tBaelom offered me a job. He said that I had skills and talents that they could use and if I stuck around not only would I be improving those skills I would be earning a steady paycheck and giving them more of a chance to solve my little mystery. tSo that’s how I came to work for Magitech. That was 2057. To this day I do not know why they were so interested in me or why they took me in. I guess if I knew the truth about myself I might know that as well. tWorking for them was probably the best time in my life. Baelom and I became very close friends. I became a trusted outlet for him, someone he could talk to about problems that he wasn’t allowed to talk about without any worry of anyone finding out. tI was good at lying to people. tI really thought at the time that I was doing good work for them. Looking back on it now I think that it is more likely whatever peaked their interest initially was the real reason they kept me around. I can’t say that I really had a lot of ambition. The only strong drive that I have ever had in my life was learning about my origins and that seemed like it was being taken care of better here than it could be anywhere else so the best thing that I could do was wait. tIt’s funny how sketchy my knowledge of history is. You would think having lived through all of this that I would know a lot about it. I guess I just never really took much of an interest in current events. I loved technology though, computers and electronics and, well, toys. I was pretty good with it too although what I really excelled at and loved even more were two things that allowed me to gain more knowledge and toys than anything else that I’ve done for two hundred years, stealing and lying. tMy job consisted primarily of working with gadgets and with software. I’m afraid my real talents remained merely a hobby for the majority of my employment. tIf there were some sort of award for slacking I think I easily deserve the grand prize. Not many even have the opportunity to goof off hundreds of years away let alone actually take it. Sure I worked and learned bits here and there but I found that, my real passion lying not in my work that I put most of my energy into playing, playing with toys, playing with people, that I learned a fraction of what an averagely ambitious person would have in my situation. tNow, at some point I realized that even with all the things that Baelom did tell me that he probably shouldn’t have there were a lot of things that he didn’t, which I understood given his position and I figured, if he ever learned of it, that he would understand me doing my best to learn every little secret of his that I could because of mine. tThis produced decades of amusement for me, trying to glean little pieces here and there. Looking back now I figure he probably knew from the start what I was doing but I thought myself pretty clever at the time. Actually, the only piece of information of any real value that I ever learned ended the little game for me. tThe geneticists who were working on my case had told me that, while they couldn’t actually identify what I was, it was quite clear that I would be able to wield mystic magic. I spent a lot of time in space however, partially because there was work to do there and partially because I just really liked the feel of being out in the void. The idea of having that kind of ability but constantly losing it terrified me. The longing stuck with me though like a longing for a lover whom you know you could have but with whom you know it would never work out. tAbout five years ago I stumbled across one thing that I don’t think that they never would have thought that I would have. A lot of things changed that day, some for the better, some for the worse. Maybe if they had learned what I was really good at earlier a lot of things would be different now, maybe not. One thing is certain, my job got a lot more interesting. tThrough some clever social engineering and a little creative hacking I managed to get access to some of Baelom’s personal files. I had always wanted to know what he really did there. I knew he was a teacher but he had always been very vague about what exactly he taught. That day I knew. I also knew for the first time that there was a way that I could have that thing that I had longed for for so long. tI never held it against him that he never told me, it was clear that this was one of those secrets, the kind that you never tell anyone, not your best friend, not your wife, not your parents, not even your doctor.

-convincing Baelom to teach me psionics -changing jobs to covert sorts of operations -subtle hints that magitech knows more about me and my past than they are letting on -unexplained total dissappearance of Baelom -deciding to betray and leave magitech -stealing crystal -stealing ship -months on the ship, interaction with the AI