Jay Novachek (Ben Dickinson)
Player Background:
Truck Driver: Out of high-school you hoped to escape your hopeless small town life by becoming a cross-country truck driver. The part you liked best about the job was that you could set your own schedule. By high-balling it for a couple of days, you could manage to give yourself long weekends to spend as you saw fit. As a result, you found yourself getting involved in a number of small town baseball leagues as a stand-in. Along our regular route, the various teams looked forward to your arrival as you were an excellent player. Eventually, you were noticed by a minor-league talent scout, and offered a permanent position on a team. The pay seemed roughly equivalent to what you made trucking, so you agreed.
Athlete: So in the summer of 1985, you entered the minors. You spent the remainder of the decade hopping from bush-league team to team hoping to break into the majors. The only break you got was to your right kneecap. An injury that ended your athletic career in one fell swoop…but not before you had become a well-recognized player. The city newspapers regularly covered the games and you were a bit of an unsung hero among the sportswriters.
Journalist: In early 1991, you managed to get a job on the Kansas City Sun as a sports reporter. Your specialty was covering the high-school and college sport scenes. Despite your knee injury, you still tried to keep in shape as much as possible…all in all, it wasn’t such a bad life. On October 17, 1995, you were sent to cover the Kansas State High School championship game. A small nothing town called Stamen had managed to produce one of the final contenders, and was in fact hosting the game. You arrived shortly before sunset and went to the small motor inn on the outskirts of town. There was nobody in the office, and as far as you could tell, there was nobody in the entire motel. Not wanting to miss the game, you continued into town, and found more of the same. The traffic signals were operating, but you saw no sign of any cars. Despite the deepening gloom, no interior lights were turning on in any of the buildings you found. On the far side of town, you thought you had found your answer…the high school stood off to the side of the highway, with a parking lot packed with cars. You parked in the lot, and approached the school. Despite the large number of vehicles outside, there were still no sounds coming from within. The lights inside the gymnasium were on, and the scoreboard proudly proclaimed that with 1:32 to go in the first quarter, the home team was winning 14 to 9. The scoreboard clock was still ticking. There was an abandoned basketball lying just beneath the visitor backboard. There were a number of cheerleader pompoms along the two opposing sidelines. The stands appeared to contain a number of fan possessions. But nowhere in the entire gym did you see any people! Suddenly the oppressive silence was broken by the buzzer signaling the end of the quarter. The noise only served to point out just how quiet it was around here. The silence was broken a few seconds later by the sound of a small child crying. The cries came from the stands to your right, and you glanced up to see a small girl of about four or five years looking around with wide and terrified eyes. You ran to the top of the bleachers and tried to find out what had happened to everyone. After a few minutes you managed to calm her enough to find out some information. Her name was Cindy, she was four and a half years old, she was there to see her brother Michael play in the game, but had fallen asleep shortly after the game got underway, the buzzer had awakened her, and she desperately wanted her Mommy. Unable to think of anything else, you took her to your car and headed back into the center of town. The last thing you remember was the engine stalling out at the main intersection and the car being bathed in a blinding white light…
Your Current Situation:
…and the next thing you remember it was two days ago and you awoke in the desert, lying beneath a decomposing lean-to. You were covered with a combination of scrub brush and sand. You sat up quickly and pushed a pile of tumbleweeds off your chest. There was a rattlesnake asleep at your side which immediately startled into an attack posture…its tail rattling and neck poised to strike. With lightning reflexes, your right hand shot out and caught the snake just behind the head. As soon as you grabbed the snake, your vision in your left eye was obscured by what appeared to be scrolling lines of computer printout:
Earth Life Form
Classification: Crotalus atrox
Common Name: Western Diamondback Rattlesnake
Length: Approximately .75 meters
Weight: Approximately 800 grams
Defensive Capability: Insignificant
Offensive Capability: Poisonous biteYou were so taken aback by the printout that you dropped the snake, which promptly lurched forward and bit your right hand. You reached out quickly with your other hand, grabbed the snake by the tail, and flung it away from you. As the snake arced away from you, a set of targeting crosshairs appeared across the field of vision of your right eye, tracking the snake and giving you vector and range information. The snake struck the ground 46.7 meters away, flipped itself over, and crawled under a rock to sulk. You quickly looked down at your own hand. The “heads-up” display information disappeared. You could see two small puncture wounds in the web of skin between your thumb and forefinger, and your initial reaction was one of horror: “My god, I’ve been bitten!” You wrapped your left hand around your right wrist, thinking to cut off the flow of poison with an increase in pressure. Imagine your shock when your right hand dropped neatly off your arm with a small *click*. The stump of your right wrist contained a smooth metallic socket, the mate of which was the protruding end of your hand…now lying at your side. You picked up the lifeless hand and examined the snakebite area more closely. Instead of seeing blood welling up from the wound, you saw only a dark, fibrous layer beneath the skin. You plugged the hand back into your wrist socket, and sensation and movement immediately returned. You examined your right wrist and were unable to see any seam or other indication that moments ago it had been totally amputated from your wrist. Now that you looked more closely, it appeared that your arms were completely lined with this strange meshwork of fibers. Since that morning, you have discovered that this same meshwork is beneath the skin of your entire body…almost like having a bulletproof vest beneath the surface of your skin. Yesterday, you found a small town, and learned from the gas-station attendant there that you are somewhere in west Texas. And if what he told you is true, fifteen years have passed since the night of the basketball finals!
Personality Traits:
In general your personality is dictated by events that have shaped your life so far. You are very confused and more than a little angry about the time you have lost. Not to mention the fact that your once handsome features have been tainted by the presence of the body armor.
Special Abilities:
Just to look at you gives a person a feeling of unease. Although you are the approximate height and build of any number of normal humans, you are definitely unlike other humans. Your Caucasian skin is the same pale color as always, yet now the delicate tracery of veins and arteries is no longer visible beneath the surface. When the light hits you just right, your skin will appear black and artificial, because beneath the outer skin, is an inner meshwork body armor. Every part of your body is lined with the interlocking network of carbon-steel cables. As the meshwork flexes beneath your skin, it will sometimes move closer to the surface, and appear to darken that area of skin. This has a most disturbing effect on others…especially since your face appears to shift in color as you speak.
Interesting Possessions:
Your right hand is removable. Apart from being slightly stronger than your left hand (which is not removable), it appears to have no other special abilities.