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Three Thousand Club
- Concept/Backstory
- Primary Appearance
- Basic Chara Information
- Aptitudes
- Reputations
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- EGO Notes
- Morph/Eidolon
- Muse and AIs
He was born to and raised by an old money family with a long and distinguished history with the British civil service and the nobility before it. His father, a high ranking member of the Ministry of Defence, inculcated his love of the history of the Royal Navy into James from a young age. He entered the armed forces and showed remarkable aptitude for strategy and leadership, eventually being given command of the Essex, a combat starship.
The Fall, of course, changed everything. By the end few functional starships remained, and those that did ensured they operated as far apart as possible to prevent friendly fire should their systems fall into TITAN control. It had long since become clear that victory was no longer in the cards, and the primary mission of all orbital combat platforms was to interdict the TITAN advance and buy time for vessels to escape Earth. The Essex had already launched all five hundred of its re-entry capable kinetic penetrators when James received the order to withdraw. He sat, his chin resting in his palms, his face barely visible in the pale blue light of one of the few still active displays in the blacked out CIC and replayed the message he had received three days earlier: his wife Jeanette with their two daughters, assuring him they would reach an evacuation ship soon. The ship was damaged and operating on minimal systems with virtually no communications to limit attack vectors, but it still had forty 35 Megaton nuclear weapons rated for atmospheric re-entry. If there was any chance he could give Jeanette - give anyone - a chance to escape rather than be captured by those monstrosities he had no choice.
He had already had most sensors and guidance systems stripped out of the missiles days earlier. The weapons were crude and inaccurate, but over the next 18 hours the Essex employed all forty of its nuclear weapons in interdiction manoeuvres calculated to maximise the number of refugees who could successfully reach the few remaining functional escape vessels. James couldn't stop himself from calculating the expected number of refugees he had killed, nor forgive himself for rendering most of the south of England a nuclear wasteland. The precise impact of the efforts of the Essex are still widely debated, but it is commonly agreed that though only two additional vessels successfully escaped Earth orbit before the defense wall came online, the much greater impact was the time bought for hundreds of thousands of additional egocasts.
He spent the next few days of chaos searching for his family amongst the refugees and, reluctantly, amongst the infugees with no success. He was arrested and court martialed for his refusal to withdraw and the near destruction of the Essex. In an eloquent and heartfelt speech he testified he believed the orders to be yet another TITAN effort to disrupt the evacuation and all organized military resistance. He was formally reprimanded, but not discharged, and transferred to public relations where his growing minor celebrity status could be of use. He became one of the go-to talking heads for any military related topic in Hypercorp media for months after the fall.
Old money was in his blood, and he would always have friends of the family in the inner planets. He was lauded by the Autonomists for shirking established military order for the betterment of his fellow transhumans. The Reclaimers saw a man willing to do anything to save humanity and fight to the last breath to defend the Earth. The Media saw an icon and a meme which could be leveraged for profits and control. Firewall saw all of this and more.
Eventually the media frenzy died down and he was allowed to transfer to an active command within the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance navy hunting pirates and smugglers. He made few friends on this tour, and more than a few enemies both amongst the criminal elements of the system and amongst his superiors for his loudly voiced and unpopular political opinions on reclaiming Earth and treatment of Infugees. Still morose and coping primarily through substance abuse, he mustered out after its completion and took command of a collectivist cargo hauler used to supply Autonomist and Brinker stations in the outer system. Routine handling of the ship rarely taxed his abilities, and he became almost pathologically obsessed with playing games of strategy in his copious spare time. Some of his opponents would later accuse him of using psychosurgery to compel him to study. Two years after being discharged he was farcasting to half a dozen solar championships - often forking for the safety of the ship - and regularly placing. In the last year he took six championships in N-Dimensional Chess, Go, and a faithful recreation of the fictional game Pai Sho, among others, and has earned himself a cult following for the breadth and depth of his skill. He is currently on Gaia to compete in the first prototype Azad tournament ever held.
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