Player: Nick
Class: Teamster (switched from Scientist)
Skills: Expert Pilot, Master Computers
Role: Pilot / Helmsman
Appearance
Early thirties, medium build, and permanently slouched — he stands the way a man stands who is only really comfortable sitting down, weight on one hip, shoulders back against whatever wall is nearest. Hair buzzed short and faded at the sides, three or four days of stubble along the jaw, a small stud in his left ear. Pale blue-green eyes, red-rimmed and a little sunken; the face of someone who sleeps in a pilot’s chair.
He lives in an orange quilted flight jacket — insulated, puffed at the shoulders, high collar, grey-blue panels across the yoke, ribbed navy cuffs and waistband, a small white delta stitched at the chest. Hauler issue. The company patches have been picked off. He wears it open over a grey thermal and a white undershirt gone soft and yellow, with grey utility trousers and suspenders unhooked, hanging in loops at his hips.
A bulky terminal is strapped to his left forearm, screen glowing green — flight computer, nav scratchpad, and the reason the messages from Huey, Munns, and Jones are never more than a glance away.
There is almost always something bundled in one hand: a folded blanket, a strap, a roll of harness webbing. Just a comfort thing.
Origins
As a kid, Carl was one of the four who broke into Superstar Games chasing rumors of Grand Theft Space 6000 — he and Derrick were the ones who ran down the courier carrying the data, right out from under a young, low-ranking Yandee. After that adventure, he became obsessed with “Grand Theft Space” and decided to try it in real life. He fell in love with flying but was sent to jail for it. After getting out, he dedicated himself to flying again, eventually landing a corporate job as a cargo hauler pilot. When pirates ambushed the ship, he damaged it beyond repair getting it home, and crashed part of it into the dock trying to save his crew — which he did, mostly, though the cargo and the ship itself were both lost. Corporate didn’t care that most of his people survived; he was fired anyway, and is still being sued by nearly everyone with a stake in it: the cargo’s owner, his old employer, the dock association, even the Teamster’s Union. Now blacklisted from flying, he joined up with his old friends — the only people who’ll still let him fly.
The Price of Air
The law firm of Huey, Munns, and Jones has been trying to reach him about all of it; his inbox is full of their messages.
Reidmar, the union rep for Teamsters Local 32819L, offered Carl a way to start paying down what he owed the dock: smuggle a case of psychotropic mushroom powder out to Siddhartha’s Peace and deliver it to the tea house there, for 10,000 credits. Refusal, Reidmar made clear, was not advised.
When out of cryo, Carl lives in the cockpit rather than his assigned cabin, sleeping in the pilot’s chair more often than not. His station is a cluttered mess of energy drink cans and knickknacks that he insists is organized, and he always flies with a blanket nearby — “just a comfort thing.” He cleans his station spotless before every hyperspace jump, then lets the clutter build right back up.
Carl held the shuttle through the uprising at Siddhartha’s Peace — taking Franco’s family aboard with a mylar sheet and a chocolate ration, and watching from the cockpit as Ensho badged open the landing-field gate and walked the Abbot and a Straylight employee into the space elevator at gunpoint. He named the dropship the Hot ‘n Ready that night, brought her over the colony office on a floodlit low pass to scatter the cultists, then clipped a power pole on the way out and put her down on the roof hard enough to snap a landing gear. He salvaged Arnold’s failed repair by tearing out the wiring for the ship’s exterior lights, and flew her into orbit through small-arms fire and a missile strike to a stabilizer. Aboard The Second Chance he found the pirates’ sabotage of the impulse engines with a quiet diagnostic, blew the salvage bay hatch to throw the boarding party off their feet — and then reached an apparently empty bridge, felt with total certainty that he was about to die, and ducked a heartbeat before Tanya — cloaked, invisible, and already sitting on the self-destruct — sheared the top half of his chair away with a vibro-blade.
Carl spent the whole of the night after the boarding unconscious on the bridge deck, a few feet from his own chair with its seat-back still cooling where Tanya’s blade had gone through it. Marge carried him and Bernard to the med bay one on each shoulder, and Gaal got him onto oxygen and onto a machine that scrubbed the carbon dioxide out of his blood. He was still under when the crew gave up waiting for a pilot and let Jon fly The Second Chance to the station himself.
Carl came to in the top half of his own chair, found his blanket, and read the damage off the boards: sensors, communications, an empty fuel tank. He went into the terraforming station with the inner party. He lent Jon his body camera, bottled a sample of the station’s conductive gel in an empty gun case, and pocketed a stim from the security office floor. He was nearest the prayer-chamber door when the giant came dragging past, and was the one who saw the scarred convert’s face on it and shut the door. In the Zen garden he threw himself onto Bennett II’s legs and held him against the vines from behind a pillar. When the giant’s fist hit the elevator it left him certain that every one of them was going to die there — we’re doomed, man; I should have never come — and by the time the fuel was flowing he had stopped talking altogether. Bennett tied a rope from his own waist to Carl’s and brought him along.
Attendance Log
- Session 0: The Choke (date not specified in the source log)
- Session 1: The Baobun Incident July 26, 2026
- Session 2: Welcome to Siddhartha’s Peace August 16, 2026
- Session 3: The Night of the Prophet August 29, 2026
- Session 5: Welcome, Traveler October 4, 2026