Character Profile - General Derrick Waquer

Age: Early 60’s

Height: Around 6’

Body: Once a strong and powerful man, General Waquer has lost much of his physique to age, a bit on the heavy-set side.

Hair: Medium Brown with grey edges, receding hair line.

Personality: General Waquer is a firm leader, shoots straight with people, and takes no crap from anyone. (Probably where Kara gets her strong personality from).

Basic Attributes: A dedicated GGI officer since a young age, General Waquer is a widower, but remains married to his job. Believes 100% in the current Cosmos1 assignment and does not hesitate to use his power as an officer to maintain control of any situation, no matter how desperate it may seem. He is very decisive and determined in his mission. He is also a dedicated father who will miss his daughter Katrina terribly when she leaves with Trevor.

Relevant history: Derrick Waquer is one of a decreasing number of GGI crewmen to have been born in space, prior to crash-landing on Procyon 1. This means he is as well-educated a person to the history of Earth as any, though much of his knowledge has depreciated since. Though he can never re-study what he learnt in his youth, he carries with him a deeper sense of humanity’s past than any other.

For the most part of his life Derrick Waquer had been good friends with Samuel Blake, based on their budding careers as GGI officers. They shared the particular bond of being part of the generation that reached the Procyon system, the last generation of space-farers. Derrick, however, was one of the fifth of the population who was never destined to be awake when they arrived, as he was in stasis at the completion of the journey. He was also in stasis when the ship was forced down to the surface of Procyon 1. Only a handful of those in stasis at the time of the crash would survive, and Derrick would most probably not have done so had Samuel Blake not foregone his own preparations for the landing to free his friend from the cryo-cell section. They both survived and maintained the very highest bond of friendship and respect for the next thirty-five years.

Derrick was a determined officer. He enforced orders as though they were his own, and took every initiative to see that they were fulfilled to the utmost. As a commander of men he proved himself time and time again to be both resolute and wise to the consequences of his orders. With Samuel Blake as his Intelligence officer, it may be that the Cosmos1 had never found a better General. He would be needed. For no General since the GGI’s creation had been placed in such difficult circumstances, and with the survival of the entire human race at such high risk. In the first years of his promotion to General, three people were invaluable to him. The first was his wife, who he married at the age of twenty-eight. They were a natural couple – that is, not thrust together by GGI laws, though his position as General did make him exempt – and they would soon have their first child. Kara Waquer was the second invaluable person to Derrick. With a young daughter growing up he could never falter in his belief that humanity would survive. The third person, of course, was Samuel Blake, without whose own wisdom and intelligence, loyalty and friendship, Derrick believed he would be half as capable a General.

No human being that has experienced Procyon 1 has experienced happiness, but when the General’s wife died at the age of just thirty two, after seven years of marriage, it was clear that fate would not relent, and no one would be spared from the accumulation of misfortune. She had not died by any means indigenous to Procyon 1, but through a natural illness, which had not been curable by the limited medical equipment left after the crash. He would never re-marry.

General Waquer was said to never be quite the same. Over time he came to harbor the deepest fears when seeing how Kara wished to join the GGI, and secretly wished she would not. He would have sworn that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown when waiting for her to return from her first expedition outside. Once more, Samuel Blake was an invaluable influence through these times.

It is natural then, to say that it was his most difficult of moral decisions to demote Samuel’s own son for saving Kara’s life, many years later. Derrick was understandably crest-fallen when having to rule the act as a personal insubordination which violated orders and cost the lives of two men. But again, in these circumstances, Samuel proved himself a true friend, and let the General know that he had no other choice. Of course, Trevor took it less well.

Nor was this the last time that Samuel Blake would easily forgive the decisions of the General, as he himself lost his wife under such terrible conditions, and essentially lost his son, many years still later. Nevertheless, he in no way put responsibility upon the General’s shoulders and let it be known that the GGI mission was all that mattered. Derrick saw that his old friend was truly devastated and feared for his failing health in those latter years. When Samuel Blake died, the General had only his daughter in his life, and she had been through her own anguish. When Admiral Dumet drew close to the General, he truly had little resolve to resist her.

The day would come when Derrick Waquer would look at his life, and see that the woman beside him was not his wife, but a woman who was potentially causing much disruption amongst the crewmen when she was supposed to be a keeper of the peace; he saw an Intelligence Officer that was ever-more secretive and reticent, and certainly not a friend as Samuel had been. His daughter seemed to be facing the odds every other day, and perhaps the most capable fighter in their ranks was in stasis. Worse still, Procyon 1 continued deteriorating, and seemingly so were the last generations of humanity. Were it not for the plans suggested years before by Samuel Blake, Derrick Waquer may have lost all hope. As it is, in the final years before the Genesis Mission would be launched, he found himself growing indecisive, hesitant, and fearful of the future. He is not exempt from the currents which stir through Procyon 1, and has developed a frequent, uncontrollable, nervous shaking of the hands, underlying the emotional upheavals within.

The situation on Procyon 1 has proven tougher every year, and time is running out.

Character Quote:

“Life is a struggle. We all know that, but a man is only defeated at that precise moment when he admits defeat.”

Many thanks to Mike Pantazi for his work on this.