Harish Akashaman

IRC Nickname: Exacerangutan

Character Name: Harish Akashaman
Original Dimension: Original setting

Race: Human (Exile)
Age: 21
Sex: Male
Height: 6'6"
Weight: 175lbs
Likes:
Dislikes:

Physical Description:
Harish is a tall, scrawny young man with medium-brown skin and black hair with modestly slanted blue eyes. He would be attractive, but tends to seem gangly and awkward whenever he's standing still; contrastingly, when in motion, Harish is exceptionally graceful, as is typical of his people. Also typical of his people, he exhibits a combination of the Terrestrial ethnicities most strongly represented among the Exiles, particularly Southern Asian, Eastern Asian, and Eastern European.

Harish likes to wear bright colors, but almost never wears any loose clothing. He tends to wear natural plant fibers when he can, especially cotton, finding them somewhat exotic. His voice is surprisingly low and gravelly, unsuited to his appearance. He sometimes becomes unpredictably agitated in response to something about a ship not 'feeling right,' or the engines sounding 'off,' or particularly an anomalous draft which might warn of decompression.


Powers and Special Abilities:
Harish has no superhuman powers, although like most Exiles he is superbly well-adapted to a wide range of gravitational fields and even variable fields, having grown up playing as a boy in his native cityship's spinchambers. He is perhaps most at home in microgravity, but is exceptionally graceful and acrobatic in all normal-range fields. He is expert with vacuum suits and all other typical paraphernalia of ship maintenance, and is a highly gifted engineer with a knack for learning about devices and systems by tinkering with them—sometimes in ways outside the comfort zone of others, but always within the limits of his ability to undo, and with a profound respect for the bounds of safety. Having grown up aboardship, Harish has an excellent intuition for ships' systems, often able to detect subtle malfunctions by the sound or feel or look of some system, and has a vast collection of clever quick fixes and tricks to rely on, which could be applicable to sabotage, as well, if necessary.


Weapons and Gear:
Harish mostly just has standard maintenance tools, and (having been commissioned as an officer cadet for the sake of making things official) an Aegis which he wears rather awkwardly. He almost always wears VOSSRA (Vacuum Operations Self-Sealing Reactive Armor, a vacsuit cousin to LACCRA) under his clothes, and always has on his person a “fleximer” foldable vacuum-plastic helmet with integral rebreather in case of decompression. He tends to wear a bright green vest with deep pockets, full of all kinds of widgets and tools that you-never-know-when-you-might-need-one.


Weaknesses:
Harish is intuitively wary around large, regimented military organizations, based on past experiences, and tends generally to assume the worst about their nature and intentions. Since the Irregulars are, well, highly irregular and often hardly regimented at all, he has gotten along quite well with them, but other organizations and even ISF regulars give him the heebiejeebies.

Although very fit, Harish needs to take frequent breaks during very strenuous activity. He recovers quickly (his cardivascular condition is excellent) but his lung capacity was compromised in a shipboard accident, reducing his capacity for uninterrupted aerobic activity. Due to the same accident, he has great difficulty speaking above a normal conversational tone, and prefers to speak more quietly.


Background:
In Harish's native reality, humans had been exploring the stars since the middle of the 22nd century AD; the year AD 2146 was later reset as SCY (Standard Colonial Year) 1. Prosperity and power struggles led to conflict, however, and in SCY 84, these conflicts led to a number of rebellious colonists being driven from their worlds onto run-down, ill-maintained spaceships, becoming the first Exiles. Their numbers later grew drastically with an influx of refugees fleeing the Colonial War early in the second century SCY, and with the sympathetic patronage of the wealthy Belt Miners' Association, the Exiles were able to become relatively self-sufficient.

Harish was born aboard one of the original four ships in SCY 159, a fourth-generation Exile. He grew up among Exiles, learning to fear and distrust the large, planet-owning interstellar societies which treated Exiles like gypsies at best or pirates at worst. He learned, like all Exile children, to work effectively under any acceleration the cityship might likely experience, and to make himself useful working with any and all of the cityship's systems. The ship was life; everyone was expected to be useful. Harish grew to be rather tall and thin, like most Exiles, although he became somewhat more so than was typical; his agility, too, surpassed even the grace typical of other Exiles. Like most Exiles, he was raised Conservative Voidist, a member of the Cosmic Church of the Primordial Abyss (a belief system based on the observation that there sure is a lot of Empty out there).

When Harish was 15, his cityship was fired upon by a Confederacy of Unified Worlds police vessel for alleged noncompliance during an allegedly routine customs search—in fact, the Confederacy had a long record of “mistaking” Exiles for pirates in their very high-profile, ongoing antipiracy campaign despite the Fahrenheit Treaty's clear statements on Exiles' Rights. Although the ship was not critically damaged, several lives were lost as the breach ripped open several dozen meters of hull, opening many rooms to vacuum. Harish was in a room adjacent to those compromised, and the explosive decompression ripped the air from his lungs before autocontainment activated, rupturing many cells in the linings of his lungs and throat. Although he was saved, his lung capacity was greatly reduced, and his voice became gravelly and harsh from scarring to his larynx.

Although he had been something of a slacker beforehand, at least as much as any young Exile was allowed to be, Harish was driven to activity by his personal brush with death and with Confederate antipathy. Compelled to find ways to protect his people, Harish became a much better engineer, and left his cityship, joining a BMA team working on developing more advanced FTL engines, with the hope that they might make Exile ships better able to evade their aggressors. After a few years, the team was ready to try their first launch of the unmanned prototype. Unfortunately, the launch was sabotaged by a Shivan Fundamentalist (a member of an extremist sect of Voidism), ruining the FTL engine's fine tuning and causing a tremendous explosion and a spacetime rupture which propelled Harish into the TOR Solar System.

Harish was recovered by the ISF and, after coming to grips with his situation and deciding he wanted to do something that could help people, was commissioned as an officer cadet, and sent to Evening Star Labs to study up on standard technology so that he could make himself useful as an ship's engineer for the Irregulars. He was also taught how to use an Aegis, which he holds about as confidently and naturally as Luke Skywalker handles a lightsaber. He is due to return from his crash course in ISF engineering whenever he's approved.