App for TLR

[usfuzzies]

Player Information
Name: Meredith Callahan
Age: 29
App Contact: shiplizard @ gmail dot com

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Character Information
Name: Bennett 'Ben' Rainsford
Canon: The Fuzzy Trilogy - H. Beam Piper
Age: 42
Appearance: A short, perpetually rumpled man, usually in a bush jacket and hiking clothing; he sports a red beard that bristles irascibly when upset. He exudes constant curiosity and energy.
Canon Point: PRE-CANON - Before the events of Little Fuzzy and his arrival on the planet Zarathustra

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History: A (very) short canonical history is here. Expanding on that, however-- as a young man, Rainsford graduated with a degree in xenobiology and a minor in xenobotany back on old Terra, and happily took a job with the Terran institute of Xeno-sciences that would send him out to newly colonized worlds where there was still something to learn.

He generally lives on worlds without a wide social infrastructure, like an interplanetary park ranger-- he's long learned to hunt game, sleep rough, and survive hostile environments despite his natural tendency to investigate absolutely everything even if it bites him. His job description is 'naturalist', meaning that his specialty is more in the broad interconnection of ecological systems instead of being a focused biologist or botanist.

Personality: Enthusiastic and easily immersed in problems, Ben seems younger than his forty-some-odd hard-to-calculate-at-relativistic-travel-speeds years; he approaches new assignments with an energy that only starts to peter out once he's learned enough to satiate his first wave of curiosity. Then he can settle down to thorough study-- until he starts to get bored, at which point he'll seek out a new challenge within the purview of his job.

He approaches everyone with the expectation that they're reasonable people; if someone betrays him or behaves particularly unreasonably, he turns a significant portion of his excellent memory and high-level energy to keeping a grudge against them. This is one of the reasons why he's kept (to his satisfaction) on so many remote jobs. He plays office politics very badly and has an outright contempt for any corporation or organization that treats nature like nothing more than a resource. He sees very few shades of gray where people are concerned; white hats are the enemies of black hats and it frustrates him when anyone he perceives as villainous is rewarded for it.

This is no picnic for his friends, either-- he gets sulky, aggressive, and snappish when he's in a white hat mood. During canon, this manifests in outright paranoid outbursts in which he accuses his friends of 'bucking for jobs with the Zarathustra Corporation', which he (and they) consider the enemy, mostly because they're insufficiently angry at said corporation. His friend Jack Holloway notes that those are the kind of fighting words that lead to back country duels, and probably would have if he didn't genuinely like Ben.

But Ben is genuinely likeable. Difficult, yes, but the kind of introvert who bonds well with a small group of people. He tends to get overtired and retreat from big parties-- prefers the company of animals (or Fuzzies, come canon-time; Fuzzies aren't animals, but they mentate on the level of children and are significantly saner than human beings.) In a small group, though, he can be outgoing without exhausting his reserves of politeness, enthusiastic without overwhelming his conversational partners.

He can handle large groups if he must-- he can handle civilization, if he must. While he comes to the game precanon, the fact that he'll someday be-- and succeed at being-- the governor general of the planet Zarathustra says that little as he likes it, he can put his nose to the grindstone and cooperate with strangers. He's wise enough to use the advice of the experts he surrounds himself with, too, once he gets past his initial sulk.

That isn't to say he's not proud of his own expertise-- he is very, very protective of his scientific credentials and justifiably sure of himself in the field. Another swift and sure way to make him your enemy is to question his capacity to do his job-- or worse, to patronize him in his own damn field. He'll shut down a conversation in half a second and take drastic action if you try-- a report to your superiors, say.

He'll often give his opinion without considering the whole political side of what he's saying-- his beef with the aforementioned Zarathustra Corporation started when he noted that the Corporation's big Blackwater Swamp drainage project had changed the local climate significantly-- a Zarathustra Corp scientist named Kellog immediately tried to discredit him, nervous that he'd make the company look bad. Kellog wasn't even a particularly big wheel at the Corporation, but that didn't stop Ben from taking the conglomeration as a whole as his personal enemy.

Even in social situations he's prone to the occasional similarly-misjudedged outburst of feeling-- he's generally the first person in the room to blurt out whatever uncomfortable thought others may be thinking, and he will blurt it out without much diplomacy to boot. This makes him bad general company but a staunch ally in difficult situations where the world seems to be against you.

Dangerous and stressful situations make him bite deeper into the problem rather than backing away from it; he is tenacious when he finds a mystery, and he's likely to put roots down the second he sees Quadratus as mysterious. If there's a discovery to be made he badly wants to make it; he wants to learn, to discover, to understand, and don't tell him he shouldn't or can't.

Abilities:
Strengths: A good all-round survalist, with enough common sense to survive his curiosity; experienced hunter, trapper, fisher, forager, and homesteader
Weaknesses: Mercurial temper, a tendency to paranoia after even a mild slight, poor social skills

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RP Samples:

Sample 1 - prose Civilization came with drawbacks, in Ben's mind; mostly that you had to rely on other people, and other people could be pretty damn slow about getting around to whatever it was you needed from them. He'd dropped the soil samples off, one carefully labeled specimen tub with the geologists, one with the botanists, and he was waiting for a report on the chemical complexities of mycology here. He'd do it himself if he'd kept up on his botany, but he hadn't, not to the level he needed, and he hadn't got a lab.

He set out into the resort ill at ease, looking for someone to start up a conversation with, or something to learn. Civilization! He'd rather be out in the bush, but every so often you had to come in and submit reports. If it was all fun, they wouldn't call it work.

Sample 2 - first person
[Ben's been dealing with the boredom of a luxury resort, as compared to the interestingly rough life he left on Gimli, by researching and writing. The lost civilization here is interesting; he's not an anthropologist, but if he bones up he'll be able to include observations that might actually be helpful to experts who come after him. He's picked up some threads that have got him in a chatty mood, though, from old books.]

Native civilizations can be funny things. The contemporary stuff is all fresh-- the wrong foot we got off to with the Khoogra on Yggdrasil, for example. They aren't at the same stage of development we are, but they were higher than anyone wanted them to be, and the courts proved that when they gave their planet back to them. The story is that we learned from our mistakes-- but history shows it didn't stick. I never got this one in school. Did you know, back on Terra, when the first really massive colonization movement from Europe went over to the Americas, they completely wrote off the locals as backwards tribespeople while marvelling at how 'naturally tame' the forests were? And these were fellow Terrans, mind you, who they ought to have known were at exactly the same level of mentation. Of course the forests weren't naturally tame, the locals had tamed them, had an infrastructure set up--but the local population had dropped in numbers, pretty badly, because of some bacterium or virus or another ranging around, and left some of their old stomping grounds uninhabited.

But it was taken as a convenient natural feature of the 'new world', put that in quotes, the continental masses were the same age, because the colonists didn't recognize it as civilization. For them, it was easier to believe that the undergrowth managed itself--somehow that fit better in their worldview.

I wonder what we're taking for granted here, that seems convenient and might be traces of what the natives left behind.