Player: Derrick
Class: Marine
Role: First Officer / Security
Appearance
Six foot, with short curly black hair and green eyes, and fair, light-toned skin. Thicker through the body without being either muscular or heavy — nothing about him is a standout feature, which is arguably its own kind of useful. He dresses plainly: a white t-shirt, black cargo pants, black military-style boots kept from his security days, and a black ball cap with an alien-styled logo on the front. His resting expression is not a friendly one.
As a kid he looked much the same, in graphic shirts and shorts and sneakers, with his hair grown out to the tops of his shoulders.
When he isn’t actively working he is working out, stripping and checking weapons, or walking the ship looking it over.
Origins
As a kid, Dax was one of the four who broke into Superstar Games chasing rumors of Grand Theft Space 6000 — he and Carl were the ones who ran down the courier and took the data, right out from under a young, low-ranking Yandee. Dax suffered trouble from the Bratva in the aftermath; for safety, he joined the local branch of a mercenary company, where he honed his skills. He was sent on a couple of actual military actions, but his time was primarily security/police work.
The worst of it: a station crew sent word to their company that they were under attack by an unknown force, then went silent. The merc company was hired to investigate; Dax, a newer recruit, was left as sentry at their insertion point. Shortly after the team went in, they were attacked — Dax listened over comms as his comrades went silent one by one, followed eventually by horrific screams, never able to identify the enemy before they died. Eventually the team’s android returned alone, badly damaged, carrying a large bag, and used special override authority to order Dax back to the ship to depart immediately — refusing to explain what happened, citing classification. Dax was the sole survivor of that team; the screams and unanswered questions still haunt him.
After a few years, Dax got tired of the mercs’ corruption — sick of watching Tempest do anything for whoever paid the most; his contract was terminated after a mistake led to his duty partner’s death. Trying to find work to get off the station and make money, he rejoined his old friends (the future crew of The Second Chance) and has been working with them since.
The Price of Air
Dax fills the roles of Security/Weapons, heavy labor/muscle, and general helper aboard ship. He’s heard rumors that Cutter, the Tempest guard he and the others once distracted on their way into the Choke as kids, has since risen to head the Tempest Mercenaries — not a person Dax was fond of during his own time in the mercs. When the crew’s warp core needed repairs, Cutter poured Dax real whiskey and offered him a deniable, off-the-books bounty: track down James Ramirez, a Tempest merc who deserted after repeatedly refusing to fire on civilians, dead or alive, for 5,000 up front and 5,000 more on delivery.
Dax took the worst of the night the colony rose. He wrenched a shoulder ramming down Franco’s door to collect the family’s passage fare, then walked into the open at the colony office to hail the cultists behind the barricades and was raked across the street by an automated sentry gun that shattered his armor plate — ending up pinned at gunpoint on the wrong side of the line. When an enormous scarred convert got both hands around Arnold Wilkerson’s skull, Dax hit all three of them at a dead run and finished the man with a knife through the heart, taking his shotgun and every shell he carried. Inside the building he reloaded the turret and shoveled a live grenade back out through the breach. Aboard The Second Chance he killed the Iron Cross sniper, Mara “Three Cut” Thrall, with a shotgun in each hand, and ended the session in a vac suit, running out of the airlock alongside Bennett II onto the salvage arm.
Dax spent the following night in vacuum and came out of it better than anyone. Clipped to a safety rail at the stern with the anti-materiel rifle, he put a round through the dropship’s engine housing to stop it tearing the salvage arm off the ship, killed one of the two EVA pirates who came out to cut the claws free with a shot through the faceplate, offered the other his life if he would stop and drift — and then spent his last round on the dropship’s cockpit window instead, which emptied it of both pilots and left it dead in the claws. Later, with Tanya holding Marge, Jackal and Gaal pinned at the workshop, he crossed to the far airlock, overrode a computer that wanted to know whether he was sure, and blew the compartment out into the open cargo bay, taking the cyborg and Dixie Doss with it. He held onto the frame while the air went past him, and his only warning to the people inside was a radio call asking whether the captain was any good at playing catch.
The station’s docking records finally turned up James Ramirez’s ship, the Talon: it had docked there, refuelled and gone down to the surface, with its owner and captain scrubbed from the record. At the terraforming station Dax opened the airlock from behind the crew’s barricade and took point down the jetway, then laid out the plan to weld the docking ring shut on both sides of the salvage party. The giant that hunted them through the station wore the face of the convert he had knifed on the planet, and it singled him out — it’s your turn to see death, my friend — promising he would rise as another of Bishamonten’s spears. Dax blew apart the planter in the Zen garden whose vines had Arnold by the arm, and on the factory floor he stopped backing away from Tanya, walked straight at her yelling Face me, bitch!, and took her head off with a shotgun at close range. He carries her vibro-blade now, with her severed hand and forearm for its grip.
Attendance Log
- Session 0: The Choke (date not specified in the source 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