Freelance
TravellerChuck Chambers
This article originally appeared in the June 2013 issue.
Chuck Chambers C682CA Age 46 Cr110,000
7 terms Rogue
Cutlass-2, Forgery-3, Ship Tactics-1, Streetwise-1, Snub Pistol-0
Cutlass, 2×Auto Snub Pistols, 6 Magazines HEAP, Low Passage
Chuck is a big man, with limited social skills and a penchant for off-color humor, good (or at least expensive) food, much drink, and especially any media of a military or naval character. His favorites are naval tactical simulations. He carries a cutlass wherever he legally can, and fancies himself somewhat of a pirate. He is in fact a fairly good forger, who is sought after throughout the subsector. Chuck is dangerous with a cutlass, in all senses of the word. He has been taken care of by a number of underworld leaders, who have need of his services, but realize that he needs watching. It is not unusual for him to have a sidekick, who is actually a minder. It is not that Chuck is naïve, but rather that he does not have any sense of where he himself fits. He is very well-read on history, especially military and naval history, and in fact can be rather a bore about it; he also understands the types of forgery and forgery detection methods across the various tech levels, from TL4 to TL15. In spotting or evaluating a potential forgery, he is to be treated as Forgery-5.
His father was, he was told, a pirate captain who was killed in a raid while leading his crew in a boarding action. The details may have been embellished, but Chuck’s reality centers around his father as a mythical and heroic pirate, which he has unsuccessfully emulated. He was never able to be a pirate, but had a gift for both the written word and falsifying it; he has become in fact a pirate in the sea of documents. He is also rather a buffoon, however valuable he may be to his minders.
Aboard ship, if he is on a commercial vessel, he will often be mostly kept in his cabin, often playing at commercial simulations of fleet combat. More frequently, his “mission” will require him to go “incognito”, so his minders will have him go by low berth. It is about the only way that these poor souls can keep him from doing something criminally stupid. He has a record of arrests and charges for assaults, assaults with a deadly weapon, brandishing, and disturbing the peace; most have been dismissed, under suspicious circumstances.