Braam de Klerk
Braam is young, wearing a beard to make him look older, with no significant memories of life before the Core Wars, having been ten years old when the Wars ended fifteen years ago. REAL men like Braam’s father, and Noah Campbell, and Captain Tanner have scars showing how valuable, brave, and masculine they are. Not him.
Braam is lanky, (6’11”, 120#, or 2.1m, 54.4 kg). His tall thin frame announces that he is a multigenerational spacefarer, unaccustomed to planetary life.
His family were straatvegers, roaming around the outer system in a caravan of small craft that weren’t literally death traps, but would serve until the death traps showed up.
In between picking up random scrap they could find floating around the system, the caravan would sometimes settle into a station, maybe an asteroid base, every now and then even a core. It was roaming around these places with the other straatveger kids, sometimes the locals, that Braam learned several important lessons. First, if you don’t want a beating, don’t let them catch you. Second, if they still wanted to keep something, why did they just leave it lying around? Stompzinnigen!
Living on the caravan, plus his other activities, gave Braam a good appreciation of systems, especially security systems. If there’s a way of getting around a security system, Braam has probably sussed it out or improved upon it. Alarms? What alarms? That’s not his fault!
Still, everyone needs a legitimate job now and then. Scrapjacking? Somebody’s got to get in those ships so they can be hauled away, you know. Someone clever.
Another lesson Braam has learned out on the rim — the people in charge don’t give a shit about you. The people who control the money — they think they deserve all the money, even when they don’t do any of the work. Even when the money isn’t theirs in the first place.
Someday — maybe soon, maybe not — the people will realize that they will have to unite, that they have nothing to lose but their chains. Until then, Braam is content to do his own redistributing of the wealth.
Physical Description
Body Features
Braam exemplifies the de Klerk family trait of skinny length. Urban legends debate whether taller and thinner people simply prefer the lighter gravity of spacer life, or whether a mutation occurred, perhaps to resist the bone density loss that many humans display in reduced gravity. Most ships maintain around 1.0 Terran gravity standard to prevent long term ill effects, yet many straatvegers, particularly the de Klerk family, tend to be over two meters tall at adulthood and thin as a rail.
Facial Features
Braam wears his hair longer than any military regulation would allow so that he can conceal a pair of bone-conduction headphones. His beard is just long enough to hide a throat-microphone. He can subvocalize commands to the portable computer/communicator unit he keeps on his bulky tool belt, but not nearly as fast as he can type and read a display.
Identifying Characteristics
Braam has had no body modifications since his bris as a baby.
But, he did spend some time unconscious on a mad scientist's operating table, so who knows? He's probably safe. That mad scientist, Dr. Kana, wasn't the type you'd expect to slide a surprise into a common straatveger to use as a mule to sneak something highly illegal through security, nor was Kana the type to disguise it as a Bone Density Monitor capable of releasing "medication" into his bone marrow when the time is right. He's probably safe.
Physical quirks
Due to a recent violent attack, Braam has many pockmark scars from hot slag scattered across his body. Proper medical treatment and some light cosmetic work could completely remove the remaining scars and restore his body-hair pattern to normal, eventually. If he wants to return to his former blank slate.
Special abilities
Braam can fix almost anything electromechanical, and some things that are chemical in nature, though the biological is beyond him. He can operate a fabricating machine to build everything a spacer could need, not want, but need.
Apparel & Accessories
Braam's work jumpsuit and exo-vehicular encounter suit must be custom-sized for his long and lanky frame. Fortunately the shipboard fabricator can make new outfits for any of the crew in hours or less.
Braam carries a bulky tool belt (including a portable fabricator printer, a universal screwdriver, a portable "personal device" unit with various wired and wireless connections, and many other tools).
Specialized Equipment
For personal protection he prefers a cheap-looking gyrojet rocket pistol as his sidearm, with 6 rounds. It looks only a bit off from the standard pistol, but you know how straatvegers use junk for everything. But this one holds a secret. A quick twist converts it into two completely believable parts for an acetylene welding torch. Why would anyone hide gyrojet rocket bullets in the tip of a welding torch? That would be just suicide. The fired-gunpowder smell is normal for welding equipment, honest.
Braam improved his personal weaponry after a young lady assassin half his height slapped one of his bullets out of the air (because it was fired at short range, so the gyrojet rocket had not reached full speed). His Gyrojet Rocket Pistol now contains explosive rounds; if they impact at short range, the remaining fuel and oxidizer explode the bullet into razor-sharp shrapnel.
Mental characteristics
Personal history
The de Klerk family has an unofficial goal to travel to all settled worlds, stations, and world-stations, and as many uncharted ones as possible. Braam and his many cousins (and ship mates who were called cousins though not actually related by blood nor marriage) were competitive intellectually as much as most human children are physically competitive. They made too many stops to count, and only returned to a previous locale if they had left with a reasonably good reputation (which was certainly not always) and had acquired an item or material known to be of great value there. Bringing valuable goods for trade at reasonable prices made straatvegers more palatable.
Braam left Core VIII's Cockaigne World-Station hastily and signed up with the Calypso on a mission anywhere out of Core VIII, it did not matter where, but the farther, the better.
Sexuality
Braam is a virgin to humans.
Robots are a different story.
Robots are a different story.
Education
Braam was home-schooled in a straatveger caravan of small ships. He learned all the basics of human history, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and metallurgy. He got a bit more than just the basics of straatveger history, electrical and mechanical engineering, manufacturing techniques, shipboard systems, and of course security systems. Like most straatvegers, his primary language is English (particularly technical terms) with a large dose of Dutch, South Afrikaans and Romani terms for household items and exclamations.
Employment
Braam's first tour under Captain Tanner of the Calypso is documented in Scrapjack: Out to the Black.
His second tour, is documented in Scrapjack: A Knack for Trouble.
Failures & Embarrassments
See Cyberphiliac Dark Secret below.
Intellectual Characteristics
Workaholic (Strength)
No matter how bad it is, push it all down into a deep dark pit inside of yourself where it can never see the light of day again and focus on getting the job done.Morality & Philosophy
Although Straatvegers can ascribe to any religion, usually a combination of two or more, and occasionally none, the de Klerk family are proud members of the Judeo Roman religion, albeit of widely varying levels of piety.
Personality Characteristics
Personality Quirks
Braam is a fledgling misogynist yet rather submissive due to his upbringing by an anal-retentive mother and a tough and toxicly masculine father. His mother referred to his father's condition as testosterone poisoning, despite (or because of) her highly functioning obsessive compulsive disorder. An appropriate adage is, "The husband and children of a woman of substance are impeccably dressed, and their eyes have that hunted look."
Braam believes "real men" display scars from the Core Wars which show that they are valuable and brave. In regard to other men, his rule is: if you can't be a good leader, be a good follower.
Conversely, he believes that women are by nature expert strategists who provide the goals, ambitions, and growth opportunities for the aforementioned "real men". His rule is: don't try to compete with women. Hierarchically, women are a completely separate category from men.
Social
Family Ties
Both Braam's father and later his mother died of the most common form of death for a straatveger, shipboard calamity.
Braam's cousin who got him into trouble on Cockaigne Station in Core VIII is naturally named Vinnie.
Religious Views
Braam is what is called a Fallen Roman, who likes to think that he still practices the Judeo Roman religion, but he might only actually perform or attend a religious ritual a handful of times per year.
Notable tenets and fun facts about Judeo Romans include:
- Members are the "chosen people of God", (the assumed intelligent creator of the universe, similar to the author of an MMORPG who can monitor all activity, can stop the program at any point, change initial parameters, restart the program, and run it rapidly to the same point in "time", at which point the situation would be different although no record of the change would exist since the beginning of "time".) The title implies stewardship to keep the universe running smoothly with equal sharing of resources among "creatures".
- The title "chosen people of God" often also implies, "chosen to receive the toughest punishments the universe has to offer". Many rituals boil down to, "remember, we've suffered."
- Notably, the religion boasts an extreme value of the virtue of chastity. Almost invariably, young members lose a degree of piety, starting when they initially feel inclined to become sexually active in discord with the virtue, ending whenever they feel inclined to raise a family with one monogamous partner of the opposite gender. Active Judeo-Romans mate for life.
- Roamin' Romans are active Judeo Romans who by preference or due to job responsibility attend whetever church or services are available once a week with no preferred parish.
- There are spoken prayers for every occasion.
- Spoken prayers are often preceded and followed by a simple ritual of two fingers of the right hand touching the forehead, belly, left shoulder, right shoulder, then pressing both palms together, fingers up, coinciding with the words, "In the name of the Father, the Son, the Mother, and the Spirit, Amen." This ritual draws attention to the concept of one God with four personalities, similar to a team of four programmers of an MMORPG.
- A slain person or animal, a person undergoing misfortune, or even a person who has sneezed might be met with a gesture of two fingers of the right hand waving up and down, then left and right, along with the phrase, "Bless you."
Holidays
Judeo Roman holidays (based on a 365.2422 day yearly calendar) include:- Ash Day is the beginning of a 40-day period of self-improvement. It is customary to vow to forego a self-noted weakness or self-destructive tendency such as eating high-carbohydrate foods, gambling, gossiping, swearing, et cetera.
- Easter Day is the end of the aforementioned 40-day period of self-improvement and is a day of celebrating how much better the member has supposedly grown now that overcoming the self-noted weakness (or addiction) has been demonstrated. The intent is to eliminate one weakness each year, not to eliminate the same weakness every year after falling back into the same bad habit again.
- Literally every day of the year is a holiday assigned to the memory of a member (or the founder) who died exemplifying the religion's virtues rather than give up his/her morals (as would have been preferred by the people who caused the person to die on that day) followed by at least three events where a person called upon the memory of that member followed by a violation of the known laws of physics occurring. (See above definition of God and reference to "remember, we've suffered.")
Social Aptitude
Braam would like to be the Strong and Silent type, but he is really only the Shy type.
Braam is a virgin to humans. He considers sex with a human to be a very serious step in a person's life. He believes he has to have a stable job with little risk of death before he can settle down with the right one woman for a monogamous lifetime and raise a family. He's in no rush. He still has plenty of years ahead of him for that, doesn't he?
Mannerisms
Does not socialize much with crewmates. Mostly sticks to business. Most of his slang terms he keeps in his head.
He does not clear with the captain anything sneaky or shady he might be doing for the benefit of the ship or crew, (perhaps to allow his boss plausible deniability).
Speech
- Stompzinnigen! = Stupid people!
- kak = poop
- choty goty (“choe-tee-go-tee”) – beautiful girl, a babe, stunner, smokeshow
- jol = party party party
Relationships
History
To Braam, Captain Tanner recently moved up from just a boss (a good one) to absolutely vitally important. Captain Mao Tanner hired Braam de Klerk as a scanner technician and general repairman for the Calypso. They had an average captain/crewman relationship for half of one tour when Braam got into a pickle. Then the Captain fought his way through killer cyborgs to personally carry Braam's nearly naked and barely conscious body off of the operating table of a mad scientist who wielded an industrial cutting tool that could brunoise a school house and hauled him back to the Calypso and safety.
Relationship Reasoning
In short, Braam owes this guy BIG TIME. However, Captain Tanner would have done this for any of his crew. Braam hopes he can somehow repay the Captain, maybe even just by convincing him that he shouldn't accept a pittance for this next job. He has the power to just keep the goods for himself or at least demand no less than a planet as reward. He deserves no less.
Wealth & Financial state
Cyberphiliac Dark Secret (Weakness)
The definition of a Cyberphiliac Dark Secret is when you take shore leave at Core VIII's Cockaigne World-Station again, (the place where all forms of entertainment are available for a price, and AI sex robots are legally licensed and regulated for safety every bit as much as are human sex workers), and there is this robotic cleaning / vacuum robot, whose intelligence is jailbroken by a cousin of yours, with enough extended memory attached to legally qualify as a sentient being if the cops ever find out, and after having a trist with it, (which by the way even on Cockaigne Station is in the same class of HIGHLY ILLEGAL as having a similar relationship with an underage minor or a farm animal,) he then returns it (because of course he had stolen it since he never held onto a penny in his entire life) to service in a casino, (with all of the new vibration and suction attachments plus a D-NECS which stimulates the "Pleasure Center" of the human brain) where naturally no one in the Maintenance Department notices that this one robot has mental faculties well above the requirements of the job, and it begins to underperform out of loneliness and boredom, and then he introduces you, his virginal cousin, to this "person" who by this point is desperate to interact with anyone who views her as a real person, not just an object, and then the aforementioned cousin disappears on a six-month-run for some quick cash, and you realize that the relationship physically is everything you could ever want, addictively so, but every time, and I mean EVERY TIME, that you mention you wonder about anything at all (no matter how insignificant) she has to instantly look it up on the omniweb and then tell you all about it like she is constantly trying to impress you with her knowledge and then when you tell her to her "face" that you get it, you admit that she's smarter than you and she doesn't have to keep trying to impress you and then, BAM!, that just opens up a whole can of worms because she has also instantly (somehow) watched vids showing that many men are intimidated by more intelligent women, and particularly straatveger men of your "personality type" find them to be emasculating and smothering - oh - and apparently she gave you a personality test without ever telling you she was doing it, and even though you directly and honestly tell her that you are not that type, because you can just love her for being her, but still you start to notice over the next few weeks that literally everything she says and does is a façade to make you feel smarter and feel like she depends on you, up to and including actually challenging you to a game of Snakes and Ladders, even though you both know that you're a straatveger and can roll whatever number you want to roll most of the time, and you both know she is a robot who can roll whatever number she wants to roll - literally - every - time, and she STILL loses to you just to pump up your ego because she honestly believes that you are so FRAGILE that you would leave her if you knew she was better than you at absolutely anything, and - in the middle of the night - when you know you are living a lie, and you turn to her and you tell her honestly that you think SHE should be open to seeing other people, then - BAM! - she jumps to the conclusion that you know she's not getting sufficient intellectual stimulation from you anymore and she has gotten just as needy as when you first met her when nobody would talk to her, but there she goes again: She is so certain that you are the one who can't handle having a smarter female partner and you are just trying to trick her into letting you sleep around with human women, and you are just so frustrated with the whole thing that you both start throwing things and breaking the little useless casino mementos that do nothing but remind you of how much better your relationship was before she, yes SHE, got suspicious of your every word and your every thought, and you finally decide, fine, fine, she will figure it out and be so much better off if you just be the bad guy and bail and walk to the port where there's a cyborg captain looking to leave quick, and there's an extremely curvy pilot who you just know is EXACTLY what your ex-lover is currently picturing you running-away-with but their Gorgon-class ship won't "go" anywhere until you say you can fix it just to get a seat, and then, surprise, you discover all it needs is that incredibly powerful computer multi-tool which their engineer must have stolen from somebody high up in Bank of Terra and then scratched off the logo, plus a little platinum, along with palladium, rhodium, and some carbon to basically make a catalytic converter, all of which are rare elements you STOLE, yes, you admit it, you STOLE from your crazy ex-girlfriend because she is a desperate manipulating hyper-intelligent vacuum cleaner! They should really tell you WHY things are illegal!
by CB Ash using Creative Commons
Eyes
Dark blue, squinty
Skin Color
Pale white, Tanned, Spotty
Hair
Long, sleek, raven black
Height
6'11'' or 2.1m
Weight
120 lbs or 54.4 kg
Known Languages
Straatveger (English with a large smattering of Dutch, South African, and Romani)
Dark blue, squinty
Skin Color
Pale white, Tanned, Spotty
Hair
Long, sleek, raven black
Height
6'11'' or 2.1m
Weight
120 lbs or 54.4 kg
Currently Boarded Vehicle
Species
Ethnicity
Age
25
Spouses
Siblings
Children
Gender
male
Related Plots
Character Prototype
Space-Gypsy, Repairman, Maker
