TORQUEL HANE 'torquel' - a virtue name. Meaning similar to the English phrase 'renaissance man', suggesting somebody with talents or knowledge in many areas. It is in some ways an equivalent of John in being the 'typical' masculine name for the planet. 'hane' - an occupation name. Means 'pilot' - Torquel's family, though currently farmers by trade, reached the New Continent by airship (balloons were the first form of flight discovered on the planet). The man from whom they are descended was the ship's navigator. APPEARANCE: AGE: 57 HEIGHT: 6'2" HAIR: Ash brown, straight EYES: Gray-brown Torquel is of average height for people on his own planet, a bit tall when measured against the average for the galaxy in general, and a giant by the standards of fourteenth-century Earth. His early life of constant physical activity - first on his family's farm and then in the navy - shows in his powerful build and hearty appetite. He certainly looks the part of ex-military, with a square jaw, intense gaze, and severe haircut. His clothing tends to be conservative but comfortable, after the styles of his homeworld. HOME PLANET: Ness Despite it's reasonably well-advanced technological sciences and place in the Human-Inhabited Alliance, Ness remains a largely agricultural world, with a total population of just under two billion. The Nessings are a tall, fair-skinned people with straight, silky hair and long arms and legs that give them a somewhat gangly appearance. The males are capable of growing beards but doing so is currently out of fashion. Their hair tends to bleach slowly in the sun, so individuals with longer hair often have dark roots that fade out to nearly white over about the first three inches. As a culture, they are basically conservative, valuting humility, privacy, family (the Nessing word for 'family' is quite broad, encompassing what we would call the extended family, including cousins sometimes many, many times removed), and hard work. They prefer to keep out of others' business, and expect the same in return, and are considered notable for their resilient and optimistic approach to disasters: whatever befalls them, the reaction is likely to be that they must simply pick up, dust off, and start again, wasting as little time as possible in the process. They give their children practical names related mainly to virtues, occupations, and ambitions. They like and use technology, but do not like the idea of autonomous machines. Even very dangerous jobs are not entrusted to robots, even remote-controlled ones. Tasks like mining or heavy construction work are usually done by human-piloted mechs (the preferred word in the Nessing language is probably best translated as 'exoskeleton'). BIOGRAPHY: The first half of Torquel's life was quite typical: he was the fifth child in a large farming family and grew up working on the farm and attending public school. At eighteen he joined the navy and served a four-year term before returning home and enrolling in university (post-secondary education is often postponed in this fashion). He earned a business degree and went to work for a shipping firm. He caused a bit of an upset in his family by marrying an outsider (Nessing families being extended but close, cousin marriages of various descriptions are common and encouraged - it is generally believed that marrying outside one's family results in unhappy matches), but everybody seemed to get used to it and he and his wife settled down and had three children; two girls and a boy. Unfortunately, his happily-ever-after was spoiled - as many were - by the pandemic; the planet was hit by a flu strain with a variable incubation period that made it all but impossible to track. The basic attitude of the Nessings, preferring to be self-sufficient (and to just sit tight and see if things blow over) rather than ask for help, contributed to many unecessary deaths. The pandemic claimed over five million lives, and many, many more people left the planet in terror that the disease would return. Torquel and his infant son, Asher, were among those who took part in this exodus - his wife and two daughters having died of the disease. He spent the next twenty years or so mainly in space - finding work planetside in the alliance can be difficult for offworlders (partly due to innate prejudices and partly because different planets have different educational standards), but space stations and colony worlds tend to be more open and multicultural. Asher grew up mainly in this 'anything goes' environment and thus absorbed a more liberal (and cynical) outlook than his father. The small family moved around quite a bit as jobs came and went - at one point Torquel remarried, to a woman older than himself and from a differen planet, but it only lasted a couple of years before they divorced and he moved on again. During a particularly difficult part of this period, Torquel came back into contact with some friends he'd met while in the navy, who offered him a job. The job in question turned out to be with a firm that existed as a front for a money-laundering operation, thus beginning Torquel's association with the mafia. He was a good enough businessman to attract attention from higher-up the totem pole and within a few years found himself with some powerful people for both friends and enemies. His eventual takeover bid, when the previous Boss died, was motivated less by desire for power than by the urge for self-preservation - if he did NOT sieze power before they did, his enemies would likely have had him killed. As it was, he found himself in a very unstable position, and one which lasted only about six months before he was ousted and forced to flee, taking his son, his new wife, and by a quirk of fate, his accountant, with him. PERSONALITY: Torquel lives up to his name in being a very capable person; he gives the immediate impression that he is somebody able to get things done, and believes firmly that if something is worth doing it is worth doing well - he applied this philosophy to farming, military service, business, and eventually crime, and it never failed him yet. He is good at managing people on a professional level, but not at relating to them on a personal one; his first marriage was cut short and the two that followed were both unhappy, and he feels as if he barely knows his son but has no idea how to go about remedying this. On the whole, he prefers to deal with work than with other human beings. He often seems distant, and can be rude in situations that ought to require empathy. Introspection and insecurity are things he keeps very much to himself. --- ASHER HANE 'asher' - a season name. It means 'summer' and has connotations of good luck and plenty. Like 'Beverly' or 'Shirley' it was originally male but has since come to be used primarily as a girl's name, subjecting male bearers of it to quite a bit of grade-school abuse. PPEARANCE: AGE: 22 HEIGHT: 6' HAIR: Ash brown, straight EYES: Gray-brown The first word most would use to describe Asher is 'nerd', and while not nice, it's accurate. He resembles his mother more than his father, being short (for a Nessing - he's still considered extremely tall on Earth) and skinny, with a big-eyed 'pretty boy' face, and wears wire-rimmed glasses for reading. He has none of his father's 'presence', and his habit of dressing like a slob and going several days between shaves do not make him any more imposing. BIOGRAPHY: Although Asher was born on Ness, he and his father left the planet before Asher was two years old, and have never been back. Asher tends to think of himself as being a citizen of the galaxy in general rather than of any one planet. He was brought up by a succession of babysitters and his father's girlfriends, on space stations, city-ships, and colonies all over the inhabited arm. As a result he was exposed to a wide variety of humanity in every shape, size, colour, and culture imagineable, and is much more tolerant of all these differences than are people raised on one particular world. This exposure to differen cultures fuled a fascination with the ways in which societies work and the things all people have in common, that led him to enroll in an anthropology program - his father would have liked him to serve a few years in the military first, as is customary on Ness, but Asher refused. The impression Asher always got of his father was of a man obsessed with work to the exclusion of anything else; this turned out to be only half-true. Torquel IS a workaholic, but he also wanted to shelter Asher, as much as possible, from exactly what kind of work it was that had made him so wealthy. He always meant to explain it someday, but wasn't sure what, exactly, he ought to say, and then Asher went off to university still not knowing, and Torquel began to think he could get away with just never telling him. This, of course, was not at all true - the truth came out when Torquel arrived to literally pull Asher out of bed the night before his exam and take him away so that his enemies in the mob could not make a target or hostage of him. Needless to say, the affair did nothing to narrow the emotional gulf between father and son. PERSONALITY: In personality as in appearance and general outlook, Asher is as little as possible like his father. He's quieter, more empathic, and more philosophical, preferring books to people. His penchant for anthropology makes him more likely to sit back and analyze what the other people are doing rather than getting involved himself. In fact, Asher doesn't get involved in much - he's somewhat neurotic about anything involving a risk, and is constantly thinking about how physically, financially, or otherwise dangerous a given activity is. Where Torquel is a born businessman, Asher is a born academic, and while he enjoys watching exotic aspects of human behavior, he is decidedly disinclined to get involved with them himself.