Post by Pawel on Jun 5, 2021 16:34:53 GMT
Slackjaw
Slackjaw is a sorry excuse for a dolphin and he knows it.
His mother must have been truly awful too, a hopeless and reprehensible individual, surely, otherwise she would never get cast away by her pod the way she did. A decent person would have had a midwife and a bunch of relatives assist her during calfbirth, or at least a Whalesong attendant. Someone would have helped her make the right decision when they saw the pitiful creature she brought into this world, in the low-oxygen wastelands of the Arabian Sea. Someone would have remembered her name after she left her stunted offspring with the whistle/gums/snap/togetherness foster pod and disappeared forever on the other side of the equator. Slackjaw wouldn’t have forced himself to forget the memory of her voice, the texture of her songs, if she wasn’t a complete, loathsome bag of scum.
Slackjaw was a terrible juvenile - one of his foster carers, a transient orca named Geiger, made sure he was well aware of that. They were all just the worst. Pathetic runts of the litter, abandoned by the Cetacean Cultural State and the rest of the civilised world. The whistle/gums/snap/togetherness pod was a school of hard knocks for shunned marine mammals of all kinds and Slackjaw was the flappiest fluke of them all. Geiger took a particular interest in his upbringing over the years, pushing, prodding and slapping him, until the scar tissue on the young dolphin’s hide was suitably thick.
Slackjaw’s first job involved remote supervision of garbage robots in the Gulf of Aden and managing the vast reefs of filth encroaching the easternmost ports of the United Islamic Republic. It was a Sisyphean task, shared with hundreds of other humourless blowholers and aquaformed jackasses, and it would have consumed decades of his miserable life, if Slackjaw had decided to stay in the Arabian Sea and just take what the currents of fate had offered him. But he wasn’t this kind of a cete. His dorsal fin was malformed and thrice-bitten, his beak a memento of bad choices and some very uneven fights. He tried his luck at a number of different jobs, all of them relatively low-skilled. He ate mackerel in nearly every ocean on the face of the world. Defensive, nervous, self-conscious and a bit of a recluse, he nevertheless hunted with countless pods of charitable strangers, partly due to the necessities of survival, partly because he was searching for something - or someone. For a group, a school, a family of mammals, where a creature like him could feel like it belongs, despite not wanting to.
The fact that his ticket to Poseidon had been purchased and donated to him by an unknown party unnerved him to no end. This was obviously his mother’s doing. She must have still been alive in some polluted, sewer-fed, Song-devoid corner of the ocean, nursing her conscience or whatever other failed organ. For a time, Slackjaw considered ripping up the ticket or gifting it to someone more deserving, like a marine engineer or a happy-go-breaching artist with a heart full of hope. But in the end he decided to go, of course. He needed the timeout offered by the long, cold, IHMS sleep. And a change of scenery was promising too. A waterworld echoing with alien tunes, an ecosphere barely touched by civilization, a whole new planet for him to explore his mommy issues in.
The Lesear Effect freed Slackjaw from his innate drive to find a pod and instead sent him on a journey to find himself. All of Poseidon was his to see, to listen to, to experience. All of Poseidon was likely to eat him every single day and every night. Fishing drones are poor substitutes for podmates, so he would still hunt with others where he could, slowly thawing to the concept of companionship but nevertheless keeping his social bonds loose. It’s not like other cetes were queuing up to befriend such a bitter long face anyway.
Slackjaw definitely won’t die of old age. He’s a feisty little fellow, a smart and cautious carnivore, who challenges his new reality to either murder him or drift aside and let him pass. Armed with a fleet of semi-legal remotes acquired from questionable sources, he roams from island to island, picking up odd jobs and sticking his beak into all kinds of trouble. Those who get to know him a little better - and very few do - eventually discover a bruised youngster under his scarred, prickly demeanour. They might even find a defender, vicious beyond all measure, if they ever find themselves in danger, no matter how big or toothy.
Common dolphin newcomer
Attributes
- Cognition: 1
- Psyche: 0
- Coordination: 3 / -7
- Physique: 1
Skill sets
- 4 Cetacean Culture -> Mixed pods -> Solitary dolphin
- 3 Marine technician -> Industrial maintenance -> Hydraulics
- 4 Electronics -> Computers -> Remote operations
- 3 Streetwise -> Wary -> Vicious
- 2 Poseidon Survival -> Navigation -> Foraging
Ties
- Mother. Slackjaw is a resentful orphan. He’s prone to make mistakes and errors in judgement whenever he lets himself associate a situation with his mother.
- Vacancy. Without fully realising it, Slackjaw is looking for the right pod. Once he finds his podmates, he will discover new strengths and vulnerabilities.
Equipment:
- Sonic trodes
- Hunter remotes
- Black market CICADA