A Retrospective, Part 1
Posted on Friday, June 8th, 2012
I spent a year and a half writing Building Character. That’s not the longest I’ve spent on a writing project, nor is it the most words I’ve produced under a single banner. But for that year and a half, these columns were always on my mind, always driving me to do research or seek out inspiration.
This is the last month Building Character will be produced, at least in a weekly format. I thought that this might be a good opportunity to look back at some of the characters introduced in these columns, in a “where are they now” sort of way. I hope these tidbits spark a few story ideas for you, and I hope that you’ve found one or two things to enjoy while you’ve been reading Building Character. Thanks for sticking with me.
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The Boss is currently trying to dispel rumors that Delgado and Company has not one, but two Placers on their payroll. Whether it’s true or not, Carmina’s pergressor powerbase on Denuo and Sanctuary is rapidly becoming something the Janus Syndicate cannot ignore. The very idea that a single woman could build a company of pergressors capable of competing with the syndicate on its home turf in barely thirty years is an insult to the Janusite leadership. Even though Carmina isn’t looking for a fight, she believes in being prepared, and whether this’ll be decided in a boardroom or one of Sanctuary’s back alleys she’s started hiring the best help her considerable assets can buy.
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Owitiaun continues to wander through the ruins of an advanced civilization completely alien to the modern Ingressa. He believes the builders were human or near-human, but he spends more time fighting or dodging the troglodyte-like creatures squatting in the crumbling cities than he does learning about the planet’s past. Once, he got complacent and was captured. While he escaped within a matter of days, he still wears a manacle on his left wrist that trails fifteen links of a heavy chain. So far, nothing he’s done to it has even marked the strange, greenish metal, including beating four of his captors to death with the chain during his escape.
Owitiaun holds out hope that he will discover what happened to his daughter Subira someday; what he doesn’t know is that Subira made it off the nameless planet, and plans to return to rescue her father as soon as she can hire a team that doesn’t care about the massive TDA bounty on their heads or her fugitive status. Currently, she only has two bargaining chips: the location of a dead world just waiting to be scavenged, and the TDA research and development files stored in her Janusite chronometer… which she hopes Owitiaun still has.
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Musheera Ghannam really did become the first woman in the world with wrist-mounted bioelectric tasers, the most impressive of several proof of concept enhancements she’s made to herself. Mana-enhanced symbiotics as a replacement for cybernetics still have not been welcomed with open arms, so to speak, but Doctor Ghannam remains convinced a few successful missions by an “improved” Fixer team is all she needs to get Denuo’s (or perhaps the Derinam’s) attention. Of course, Musheera would insist on coming along on a such missions to observe her creations in the field.
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