290: Rocket Rhosa

ENTRY 290: Rocket Rhosa

Every war has its heroes. In the fight against the TITANs, Rocket Rhosa was an armorer and pilot, known for her love of big guns and her innovative and flashy improvised weapons. She was known for having eighteen combat craft damaged or destroyed over the course of the conflict, and never wasted much time in getting another one and equipping it with bigger and ever more dangerous weapons. For the course of the conflict, she was one of the darlings of the Solar system.

After the war, her star fell. Rhosa never found a habitat where she fell at home, and her temper and taste for alcohol and explosives got her intro troubles legal and economic. For years she was reduced to the nominal position of pilot on an automated ore-trawler, because the owner was old-fashioned and preferred to have at least one transhuman on board to keep the AGIs honest. That was her low point, where she fell into dissipation from which she might never have recovered.

Then the space pirates attacked, and she found herself again. Now she's sober (mostly) and back to her chipper old self, piloting one rusty tub after another, each equipped with outlandish weapons of her own design - pirate hunters, smuggler outrunners, escort ships, whatever meets the needs of the job. She has friends in every port again, and most of them know to keep her off the sauce when playing with the plutonium.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
21	15	20	15	15	10	20	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
7	1	40	8	80	35	7	50

Morph: Menton

Skills: Academics: History (Explosives) 55, Academics: Sociology (Propaganda) 55, Beam Weapons 50, Demolitions (Munitions) 48, Free Fall 36, Gunnery 72, Hardware: Electronics 34, Hardware: Spacecraft 48, Hardware: Munitions 56, Interests: Big Guns 33, Interests: Exotic Weapons 30, Interests: Propoganda 35, Interfacing 23, Intimidation 25, Language: Native Greek 95, Language: Russian 90, Language: English 90, Language: French 75, Navigation 23, Networking: Firewall 25, Networking: Scientists 25, Pilot: Spacecraft 49, Profession: Arms Dealer 50, Profession: Demolitions Expert 60

Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Eidetic Memory, Hyper-Linguist, Math Boost, Multi-tasking, Oracles
Traits: Addiction (Alcohol, moderate)

Using Rocket Rhosa

Armorers are wonderful people that make things that hurt other people, and often will modify them to meet your specific needs at a reasonable price. They are often enthusiastic (if not always outgoing) professions with deep interests in their particular areas of expertise. Most players don't give much thought to their weapons past the raw statistics, and for most games this is sufficient - the idea of the rules and presentation being to induce a sense of verisimilitude of combat, since realistic depictions of science fiction battles is both difficult and open to wide interpretation. However, this does not mean that any idea or tweak involving weaponry can't be included in your home games - maybe the PCs see that the opposition has started "hotboxing" their beam weapons by modifying the settings to obtain higher damage at the cost of reduced range, lifetime, and the not-insignificant chance of exploding, and now the PCs want to hotbox their own weapons. Easy enough for somebody with the right skills - enter the armorer.

Rocket Rhosa for her part is a classic example of the out-of-work warrior archetype: enthusiastic when she has a project, and rather drunken and morose when deprived of purpose. Her specific purpose is blowing things up, which can come in handy for the PCs in many ways, but also makes her a deadly foe if she starts gunning for them (say, if the PCs decide to try their hand at space piracy). She's a loyal friend, but sometimes careless, and anyone that knows her for any length of time knows not to trust her when she starts disarming grenades while on her third bottle of whatever the locals distill.