Player: Derrick
Class: Scientist
Role: Teamster
Appearance
Five foot ten and lanky for a teamster, with pale skin, short light brown hair, and strong blue eyes. His face is a little elongated, with a small nose for its size and structure and a square chin that sits oddly on the rest of it. Reading glasses live in his shirt’s chest pocket.
He works in grey coveralls stained by years of the job, over a light blue graphic shirt faded so far past legibility that nobody can tell what it used to be, and comfortable medium-grey slacks.
He scowls by default, and always seems mildly annoyed when someone speaks to him — not haunted, just interrupted. He keeps to himself; when he isn’t working or eating he is in his bunk or reading something alone.
Origins
Bernard rarely speaks about the years before he became a teamster, and when he does, the details never quite match. Those who dig deep enough might discover he was once an accomplished scientist specializing in exobiology, pathology, and zoology, assigned to a remote research installation studying a newly discovered alien lifeform. Something went catastrophically wrong — whether it was the specimen, the researchers, or the orders they were following, Bernard refuses to say. He survived when many others did not, escaped with knowledge he was never meant to leave with, and became convinced that returning to civilization under his own name would be a death sentence.
Now he hides behind freight manifests, heavy machinery, and long-haul contracts, using his experience with industrial equipment to stay useful without attracting attention. Nightmares still wake him, and certain sounds or smells can leave him frozen for a heartbeat.
The Price of Air
Bernard keeps to himself aboard The Second Chance, taking on freight and heavy-machinery work without drawing much attention. When the crew needed the corpse of a creature that had torn its way out of Marge analyzed, Bernard’s buried expertise finally surfaced: the “buns” it had come from were alien eggs, psychically imprinted to look and taste like whatever food the person encountering them loved most — an effect that fooled cameras and lab equipment as thoroughly as it fooled people. It was the first real crack in the story he tells the rest of the crew about himself. (Note: introduced in chat as both “Bernard” and “Barnard” — spelling unconfirmed.)
Bernard was held at gunpoint in the med bay through most of the Iron Cross boarding, passing the time playing chess against himself. When the ship lurched he got up off the floor and went after his guard — a pirate named Zeid — with a crowbar, and kept going until a cybernetic arm came up and stopped the swing dead. He jammed the med bay door shut behind him on his way out — badly enough that the control panel exploded and the door has been cycling open and shut at random ever since — and made it to the bridge in time to flood the compartment with fire suppressant to reveal Tanya, the cloaked Iron Cross swordswoman stalking Carl. He couldn’t shut the suppressant off again, and passed out on the deck beside Carl.
He came around on a med bay table with the ship’s air already going bad, and spent the rest of the night as the closest thing The Second Chance had to a chief engineer. He sent Arnold’s blood sample off for analysis, found the environmental monitoring slashed to nothing, went down to the controls themselves and read the real number off them: three of four scrubber filters cut apart, on a ship rated for twelve people and carrying thirty-two. So he began closing the ship down section by section — guest quarters, the captain’s quarters, the galley, the pantry, the utility bay, the lift — pulling the air out of each one into the compartments that still had people in them, and announcing every one of them over the comms except the brig, which he drained without comment. Zeid was in it. The man had surrendered at gunpoint an hour earlier with his terms still being carried to the captain, and Bernard took the air out from under him and said nothing about it to anyone. He talked Etna through patching her garden into the scrubber loop, inspected the filter Arnold cobbled together out of the captured dropship’s mismatched parts, pronounced it better than nothing and installed it himself, and brought the system back to about three-quarters.
While the others went into the terraforming station, Bernard stayed aboard at the air distribution panel with an oxygen bottle against his face, rationing one real filter, one cobbled one and Etna’s yellowing garden across thirty-two people until the station’s air came in through the opened airlock and the readings began to steady.
Attendance Log
- Session 1: The Baobun Incident July 26, 2026
- Session 3: The Night of the Prophet August 29, 2026
- Session 4: The Air We Have Left September 20, 2026
- Session 5: Welcome, Traveler October 4, 2026