Basic Info
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| Southey, ca. 1948, tweaking a friend's motorcycle. |
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Player: TeslaTornado
Position: Mechanic, Field Agent
Demeanor: "But times have changed, my friend. It's a brave new world, and you and I are a couple of dinosaurs, lumbering around, knocking into shit and making a nuisance of ourselves. The kids are not pleased."
- Ben Weasel, frontman of punk band Screeching Weasel, in a letter to Michael "Fat Mike" Burkett of NOFX
Nature: Somehow a hybrid of childish exuberance and calm authority, Harris has settled into his status as a lifetime member of Mobile Task Force Psi-7 with equal parts resignation to his fate and calm, almost Buddha-esque belief that he's where he has to be, doing what he has to do, and wouldn't rather be anywhere else. Most of the time, all of his mental faculties are dedicated to imagining the variety of ways he'd like to bang his wife or screw with one of the other members of the Engineering team, but he can buckle down and lay out hard truths when he deems it necessary, and he goes out of his way to make sure that his juniors - both in age and Task Force seniority - stay alive, sane, and in good health. Because he's been there, done that, and gotten the scars to prove it. And if proving it means getting a couple more scars, then, well, that's the price to pay.
Basically, he's the cool uncle that shows up to your house in a denim jacket and a 1970s Camaro blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd, shotguns a beer, then takes you to McDonald's and dispenses oddly timely and helpful life advice before pissing on your dad's favorite lawn gnome and doing a burnout in your driveway.
Description: A rangy, vaguely-handsome looking man with curly brown hair, brown eyes, and sharp features. His clothes are worn-in, but not shabby. He dresses plainly, in poplin shirts and blue jeans, and is rarely seen without some sort of headwear. He wears glasses to help him read, but his vision is otherwise perfectly sound.
- Update for Site 77: Harris' employment in the Foundation has taken something of a toll on his physical appearance. Although he's grown somewhat in stature, having a more burly, aged appearance, he has a tendency to slouch, walk more slowly, and occasionally limp from place to place. His hair has gotten longer, reaching near to his shoulders, and is intermittently streaked with grey. His face has taken on the crags and lines of someone at least ten years his senior, crow's feet and laugh lines dominating his formerly sharp, hawkish features and turning them into something almost statuesque.
Stats:
You have 36 points to distribute among Basic and Pseudo-Specialty Skills. Please follow the guidelines on the Game Mechanics page. Erase any skills you have no points in.
Health
- Physical Health: 7
- Mental Health: 7
Attributes
- Physical Defense: 4
- Mental Defense: 3
- Perception: 4
- Agility: 3
- Strength: 3
Skills
- Persuasion: 3
- Intimidation: 0
- Bluff: 3
- Melee: 3
- Ranged: 2
- Survival: 1
- Academics: 2
- Engineering: 3
- Medical: 2
Specialties
- Cool Headed: 3. Harris has never been a nervous person. Even as a child he was renowned for being calm under pressure, and this has benefited him several times throughout his life. Harris gains a bonus to MDEF in panic-inducing, non-psychically-influenced scenarios (i.e. car crashes, fires, etc.)
- Follow Me, Boys!: 3. A sharp eye and an innate sense of direction go a long way when you're twenty thousand feet in the air, and only have a map and compass to keep you pointed in the right direction. Harris has a keen sense of location, and can usually point himself in the right direction when he gets lost. When Harris finds himself unable to get his bearings, he can roll this skill in order to attempt to point himself in the right direction.
- Neck Deep In Grease: 3. If there's one thing that Harris can understand, it's how gears work. He's a whiz with engines and with a little time and the right equipment, he can figure out just about any machine you throw him at. Harris receives a bonus to Engineering when examining mundane industrial equipment (generators, motor vehicles, etc.)
- Who Wants A Piece Of The Champ?: 3. Having been a small-circuit prizefighting champ, and generally leading what could be considered a rough life at best, Harris learned quickly that the art of throwing a punch - as well as the art of taking one - is an essential life skill. Despite being mangy-looking, Harris can seriously put a walloping on someone. When engaged in ONE-ON-ONE MELEE COMBAT, Harris gains a bonus to PDEF and Melee.
Gear:
- Slouch Hat: Brown suede leather, with a braided band. Almost always wearing.
- Jacket: Waxed chocolate-brown leather jacket in civilian style. Corrosion-resistant metal YKK zipper, two interior breast pockets, two button-flap waist pockets. Sheepskin collar.
- Pants: Blue denim, knees and various other holes patched with red cotton cloth with printed paisley pattern; likely a handkerchief in a past life.
- Boots: Gusseted 8" Red Wing leather work boots; steel shanks and toe caps.
- Gerber Pocket Knife: Comes with two blades, file, and corkscrew.
- Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless: .32 ACP, 8-round magazine. Concealed-carry firearm with hammer covered under rear of slide for ease of concealment and drawing. Barrel un-threaded, cannot accept suppressor. Displays signs of having been dropped, thrown, and/or generally misused.
Unlockables:
- Lucky Rock: A stone which, when thrown at a target, will always return to the user. Has a high chance of dealing improbably large damage and generally causing accidental havoc.
- Returns to user within a round, luck effects per GM discretion.
- "Cowboy Dave's Molecular Gastronomical Beans: A can of beans obtained from SCP-261. The can is marked with a cartoon cowboy, instructions printed on the back label. Adding a turkey baster of the contents to a container of boiling water produces a mixture of what seems to be ham broth in combination with a series of tapioca-bubble-like objects which taste like beans. The consumer will experience gastrointestinal discomfort and severe gas for an indeterminate period of time after consumption.
Possessions:
- Lucky bolt (worn on a leather thong around the neck)
- Pack of Viceroys
- Several half-used books of matches
- Boxing tape
- Several posters and photographs depicting "Harrowing Harris" Southey of the Magnificent Magliazzo Cousins' Traveling Circus
- Several small broken machines and trinkets
- Alarm clock
- Small bottle of bourbon
- Baseball bat, mitt, and several balls
- Piles and piles of pulp novels
- Spotting glasses
- Backpack
- Bedroll, blankets, and pillow
- Three cartons of Viceroy cigarettes
Other Stuff: Harris left these things behind at Site-19. For pretty obvious reasons.
- 1949 Nash 600 Super, rescued from the motor pool's write-off list, with reinforced frame, improved steering response, brakes, and tires, and replaced engine and drivetrain.
- Plastic hula girl, on dash of Nash
- Fiat M16/43 medium tank, flown back from Egypt after grabbing the staff of Seth from a tomb in Egypt. Turret doesn't work. Everything else does. Sorta.
- Harley-Davidson Knucklehead. Who knows - it was Branko's; Harris never touched it, and made sure nobody else did, either.
Personal History
It's difficult to say where "Harrowing Harris" Isaac Southey (pronounced "suth-ee", and god save you if you say it wrong) got his roots. By simple providence, his birth records place his birthday some time in 1913, but records around his family are nearly impossible to locate - though he has claimed to having been mostly raised by his father alongside an older brother and sister, who were ranchers in the midwest prior to the Great War; in 1917, when the US was dragged into the fight, his father volunteered to go overseas - and never came back. The siblings began fending for themselves, traveling from town to town as sharecroppers. Harris grew up moving around a lot, learning a great deal of farm crafts as he grew up. He took a liking to the lifestyle in the west, though, and when the Depression started, he decided to stay out there while his brother and sister went abroad to search for work. He became a range rider, drifting from ranch to ranch and farm to farm, learning the basics of mechanics, crop harvesting, and other farm-related skills. In his spare time he took up prizefighting to keep fit, in addition to reading and playing mandolin. Eventually, though, the traveling laborer eventually found himself running out of farmland.
While wandering between jobs, Harris found an advertisement for a traveling circus that required a stunt pilot. Having never flown a plane before, but having a lot of time on his hands to do it and no family (and more importantly, no insurance company) to threaten the circus if he died, he went right into it. Christened "Harrowing Harris, the Dust Devil of the Dakotas," Harris spent the next twelve years as the mainstay of his circus act, storming barns, flying under bridges, and chasing trains in a variety of biplanes and eventually fixed-wing monoplanes before a dispute with the ringmaster led to his being thrown from the train in the middle of the night. Limping to the nearest town, Harris sucked his wounds and eventually found a job in the postal service, moving by virtue of reputation to the Air Mail Service.
In 1955, Harris was flying over ██████, when he encountered inclement weather patterns. Unable to reroute, Harris was forced into the storm cell, where he was faced with not a regular rainstorm but a particularly vicious storm. Specifically, a storm consisting primarily of localized areas of distorted gravity, as low as 0.2G and as high as 1.9G, manifesting at ground level up to an altitude of 30,000 feet.
Somehow, Harris managed to navigate the storm and land his plane mostly intact in a field just beyond the edge of the storm wall, just in time to be discovered by a Foundation weather team as he was touching down. He reported that the storm was "up to some mighty strange stuff," and when questioned as to his arrival at that particular field, he just shrugged and said "I flew through that storm o'er there."
He was offered a commission on the spot, and immediately accepted.
Languages:
- English
- Fragmentary Spanish
- Fragmentary Italian
- Fragmentary Chinese
- Fragmentary Creole
XP: 9
Runs
| Name of Source/Purchase | XP Change | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Psych Ward | +2 | 27 January 2015 |
| Schadenfreude and Other Painful Things | +6 | 31 January-1 February 2015 |
| In The Name Of The King | +5 | 2-3 Feb 2015 |
| Who's That Knocking On The Wall? | +2 | 7 February 2015 |
| The Light of Five Suns | +2 | 18 February 2015 |
| The Birchmen | +2 | 15 March 2015 |
| Grass Is Always Greener | +6 | 27-28 March 2015 |
| The Abandoned Town | +3 | 4 May 2015 |
| Lacrimosa | +6 | 5-6 May 2015 |
| Character Reactivation | -28 | 1 May 2016 |
| Untitled Daedalus Run 1 | +4 | 29 June 2017 |
| Untitled Daedalus Run 2 | +3 | 30 June 2017 |
| Backwater Gospel | +3 | 16 August 2017 |
| Lucky Rock | -8 | 16 August 2017 |
| The 1959 Anderson Robotics Expo | +4 | 25th February 2018 |
| We Are Building A Religion | +3 | 11th-12th March 2018 |
Events
| Name of Event | Date of Event |
Miscellanea
| D.O.B | ??/??/1913, celebrates birthday on New Year's Day |
| Place of Birth | Undocumented, assumed somewhere in Kansas/Oklahoma |
| Father | Edwin Raymond Southey (d. Second Battle of the Somme, 03/21/1917) |
| Mother | Charlotte Patience Southey, nee Inglis (d. during childbirth, ??/??/1913) |
| Siblings | Roland James Southey (Brother, Alive, Fabricator, San Francisco Naval Shipyard), Rosamond Lilly-of-the-Valley "Rosie" Southey (Sister, Alive, Switchboard Operator, San Francisco) |
| Relationships | Estella Gomez (Former fiancee, d. 1937), Melanie Carter (Wife, alive) |
| Level of Education | Informal, mostly self-taught/vocational. Possesses advanced reading comprehension, basic mathematical skills, and above-average mechanical aptitude. Struggles in theoretical sciences, average in physical sciences. |
| Favorite Color | Red (specifically hex code b2735) |
| Favorite Food | Beignets |
| Favorite Song | "Trouble in Mind" - Cisco Houston |