Robert Arthur Miller (Savage Worlds Flash Gordon)
Preamble - Immersion
After Nana Lilly passed away, Robby's parents were left with the unenviable chore of clearing out the old farm house in the countryside that had stood empty for nearly three decades. It was too far from anywhere interesting to vacation at, and likewise too far from anyone's homes and jobs to go casually. All that was left was to clear it out, get the auction house representative in, and then sell it, so the funds could be used for Uncle Glenn's boat, or Aunt Rhonda's next snowbird winter in Florida, or, maybe Robby's college. No. Ha ha ha, they'd never do that.
So Robby was less than enthusiastic to spend two weeks of summer vacation west of Thunder Bay being eaten alive by mosquitoes and ticks between twelfth grade and starting his paramedic program and not working a job to pay for college.
He went into the house with a filter masks, gloves, and a hair net owing to the expected enormous amount of dust and mould in the house. Not his parents or younger sister, though, who laughed at him and made fun of his "germophobia", as they called it. He didn't care. He had passed biology, and his sister was taking as many non-science courses as the system would allow. His parents were economics and law professors and demanded their son join the real world on his own two feet. Robby wondered how he had ever been produced by those two people.
Apparently the old people had loved books, and there were at least a dozen book cases full of ancient, mouldering books. Penny and dime novels. Plenty of magazines detailing ancient lives that no longer made any sense to anyone. Armload after armload were dumped unceremoniously into garbage bags. He felt bad that they had been left to rot, but what could he do about that? Nothing.
At the back of one shelf, though, he spied three leather-bound volumes with tiny brass locks. Diaries of some sort.
"Hey, mom, who was ACC?"
"That's your great, great-grandfather Arthur Campbell. I don't remember what the middle C stood for. Why?"
"There's three books, looks like diaries, with those initials."
"You can keep them if you want, Robby. They might be of historical interest. Maybe you could sell them to a collector. Lots of exciting things happened back then."
"Like what?"
"American Civil War. Red River Rebellion."
"Cool."
Robby put the books in a shopping bag and then in his backpack in the car and returned to clearing the old house. It was long past sunset when he'd washed out the dust and mould and finished coughing and sat outside the motel room in an old faded Adirondack chair peering at the words written in a fine and regular hand. It wasn't a journal. The old man had written science fiction, of being astrally transported to an alien world he called Barsoom.
It sounded interesting, but it sure was hard reading. Big, flowery words. Long sentences. ACC was no Hemingway. Robby didn't think he had it in himself to clean up the old story and make a modern novel out of it. He put it back in the grocery bag with the other two, stuffed it into his backpack, pulled out the binoculars putting the strap around his neck, then picked up the beer bottle, and wandered away from the glow of the motel lights thinking to look for a planet or galaxy with the field glasses. At least you could look at the stars out here, he mused. Cool. Meteors. More than one. Hey, did that one turn? Freaky. Must have cracked. He watched the light show in the dark western Ontario skies a while, but eventually the mosquitoes became too thick, and he jogged back to his room swatting insects from his neck, arms, and legs.
The next day his parents took his sister and their SUV back to Thunder Bay to meet with a lawyer and Robby raced out to the old farm on his motorcycle. About a kilometre away from the house, however, he noticed a plume of smoke. He cranked the throttle and roared down the dirt road as fast as he dared, which was a lot faster than he liked. There was no cell service out here, and he couldn't just turn around to report a fire, unless there really was one. Maybe the provincial forest service would spot it, but maybe it would be too big by then. He had to know fast.
Rounding the bend and crossing the single lane bridge over the creek, though, he couldn't spot any more smoke. Pulling up the long overgrown drive from the road, there wasn't a sign of trouble. He stopped the bike, pulled off the helmet and looked around. The sun baked dust from the road stung his nose but other than the roasted long browned grasses filling the yard, the young pine and alders slowly overtaking the fields, there wasn't another scent in the air. Certainly no hint of a fire.
Robby sighed and stared at the house with dejection, finally deciding it could wait. He had all day to sweat and be dirty. He pulled his backpack and binoculars from the pannier, put his knife and hatchet on his belt, and set off across the field, passing the collapsed grey skeleton of the old cattle barn, the pile of bricks that had once been a silo, the grey and brown rusted out corpse of a Massey-Ferguson tractor and likewise ruined cultivator largely enshrouded in tall golden grasses and guarded by tall, thin pine sentinels.
Over a rise then down into a pasture engulfed by silence except for the cicadas and golden sunlight
Character
Name: Robert Arthur Miller (middle name isn't after his ancestor, but after the cartoon character)
Race: Earthling
Age: 18
Sex: male
Profession: student between grade 12 and trade college
Attributes:
- Agility d8
- Smarts d6
- Spirit d6
- Strength d6 (d8)
- Vigor d6
Derived Statistics:
- Charisma: 0
- Pace: 6"
- Parry: 2 + 1/2 Fighting die
- Toughness: 2 + 1/2 Vigor die
Skills:
- Driving/Motorcycle (Ag) d6
- Shooting/Pistols d4
- Fighting/Brawling (Ag) d6
- Knowledge/Science (Sm) d6
- Healing (Sm) d6
- Notice (Sm) d6
- Repair (Sm) d6
- Swimming (Ag) d6
Languages:
- English
- French d4
Edges:
- Adapatable (Ace, +2 Driving, Vehicle soak -2
- Gravitically Graced (+1 die Strength)
Hindrances:
- Loyal (minor)
- Vengeful (minor)
Commentary:
Definitely not done with the fiction. I found with both solo roleplaying and fiction writing the immersion into the characters' lives and immediate situations, into their heads, is a wormhole. I tend to get lost. That's why editing exists, though. And trust me, this blog gets next to no editing. One and done for the most part.
Between life and career events, I'm falling very far behind in getting characters out for the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge. I'll probably choose a small, rapid system and do a full party on the last day, but other things are taking priority.
Neither Flash Gordon nor Savage Worlds have ever really captured my imagination. Making this character helped some. Maybe I should have gone with Savage Rifts. As it stands, though, I've linked the fiction for my John Carter of Mars character with this one for Flash Gordon. And it could easily be a precursor story to Rifts. It makes planetary romance science fantasy sense, with all the transdimensional travel of the Palladium Megaverse that both Barsoom and Mongo could exist in the same campaign.
What the fiction lacks though is a weird science reason for the rocket ship - not yet written in - to appear. Should have put some etheric radio MacGuffin in the house.
Most of the sensory imagination is actually drawn from life in rural Nova Scotia, but I checked, and it looks like the old farms, the cicadas and mosquitoes, are just the same west of Thunder Bay as they would be anywhere in the Maritimes. The characters' family situation is a combination of situations drawn from my friends and acquaintances across Canada.