Player: Todd
Class: Scientist (functions more as an Engineer in practice)
Role: Salvage Specialist
Origins
As a kid, Arnold was part of the crew that broke into Superstar Games chasing rumors of Grand Theft Space 6000 — he got his foot caught on the tracks halfway across a bridge with a train bearing down, and was one of two who had to scramble up a rusted, collapsing ladder to get back to the surface afterward. He’s never quite shaken what came out of the ruins that day — half-melted animatronics, one of them enormous and monstrous right up until it saved them. Now, when his own creations come out looking a bit too animal-like or bipedal, he gets some flashbacks.
Arnold wants to build his own robots — likely small drone-style creations. He’s more skilled with the hardware side than the programming side.
Appearance
Young — late twenties, maybe just past thirty — and mostly hair. An enormous cloud of dark curls sits high off his head and spills over his forehead and down past his ears, thick enough that it arrives in a room before he does. Underneath it the face is lean and long rather than round: high cheekbones with a hollow beneath them, a straight nose, a full mouth, and dark heavy-lidded eyes set deep with a permanent smudge of shadow under them, the look of a man who has been up all night with a half-built machine more often than not. Patchy uneven stubble comes in light along the jaw and never quite becomes a beard. He is slight through the neck and narrow through the shoulders, with no muscle to speak of — unimposing, faintly rumpled, the sort who wins by knowing rather than by lifting. He lives in a ribbed coverall gone a washed-out plum from too many cycles through a ship’s laundry, the collar of a dusty lilac undershirt turned up beneath it, grease worked into both, a hand tool and a marker clipped into the squared chest pocket.
Visual reference:
The Price of Air
Arnold serves as the crew’s salvage expert, building and operating salvage drones. He picked up a dead, mechanically-modified rat at Siddhartha’s Peace and kept the metal parts, half-planning to work them into one of his kitbashed models.
His workshop on the ship is a study in contradiction — tools and hardware meticulously organized and labeled, while every other surface disappears under salvaged books and printed material, some in languages he can’t fully read. Half-built kitbashed models (a tank with airplane wings, say) sit around the space. He doesn’t appreciate anyone moving his tools.
Arnold had a night. He charged across open ground at the colony office barricades with a nail gun, caught a burst from the sentry turret that snapped a bone in his left arm, spun with it, kept running, and nailed a cultist to the barricade anyway. Then he tried to hoist a man up as a shield and was turned around and used as one instead, and finished the fight with an enormous scarred convert’s hands closing around his skull. Marge set the arm on the shuttle floor, painfully. He welded the snapped landing gear back into one solid piece and melted the control lines doing it — a mistake Jon caught and Carl repaired — and then redeemed the whole night at the reactor, working one-handed with a borrowed tool kit to get the crew halfway to shutting down the self-destruct.
The night after was his, start to finish. He went down into the reactor pit in a rebreather after Weaver and Benny Letcher, watched the badge on his own collar go black, and rigged a paracord hoist with Jackal to pull both men up out of the carbon dioxide. When Dixie Doss vanished from her station leaving her goggles and a smear of blood behind, it was Arnold who went into the ducting after her — shoulders wedged, arms pinned, blood the whole length of the crawl — discovered somewhere in there that he is in fact claustrophobic, found claw scratches where the shaft turned upward, scraped a sample for Bernard and came out of it shaking. Later he suited up and walked out onto the salvage arm in mag boots to replace the servos the pulse had blown; the arm woke under him, remembered Dixie’s last order, and began hauling the captured dropship in with him still standing on it, and his boots let go — he spent a while at the end of his own safety line watching the ship go past. He finished the night by stripping the environmental filters out of the captured dropship, finding them built to a different standard entirely, and turning them into one working filter with spacers cut from the ruined units and a great deal of sealing tape. He was, by his own assessment, certain it would outlast anything corporate.
On the terraforming station Arnold welded the docking ring’s bulkheads shut on either side of the salvage party, and opened the Security and Administration door through its own panel. On a security monitor he saw an eye pierced by a burning sword turn to follow him, and then go black. In the Zen garden the vines tore the torch out of his hand and nearly bored into his chest before Marge’s crowbar took the head off the last one. The giant’s fist hitting the elevator left him shaking with terror, and his attempt to reinforce Bennett II’s broken spine in the maintenance bay slipped and hit a nerve. He came out of that bay with a flamethrower, set part of the factory floor alight with it by accident while Tanya came at them, and then took her arm off at the elbow with his torch so Dax could carry her blade.
Attendance Log
- Session 0: The Choke (date not specified in the source log)
- Session 2: Welcome to Siddhartha’s Peace August 16, 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