Character Profile - Trevor "The Snake" Blake

Age: 32 Height: About 6' Body: Strong and muscular Hair: Dark Brown Personality: A smart-ass to most people! Resentful and Stubborn. Basic attributes: A very capable warrior both in melee and ranged combat.

Relevant History: Born on the planet Procyon 1, Trevor Blake has never known any other existence than the GGI and the Cosmos1. The light of the Explorer is his personal sun, as it has been for many of the crew. As with most children, Blake would spend his early years in various sections of academic quarters, raised and educated to know the ship as his surrogate mother and father. He would spend a small portion of time with his actual father, Samuel Blake, who was a high-ranking officer, greatly respected and considered a close personal friend of General Derrick Waquer. As a result Trevor Blake and Kara Waquer, respective children of these officers, were destined to share many aspects of their childhoods – a relationship that would mature over the years into an unspoken affection.

Trevor knew his mother more closely, as she lived primarily in the so-called “public quarters” of GGI operations. She was a well-respected biologist amongst her team and was often commended for her work in studying the indigenous life of Procyon 1 as well as the necessities of human adaptation to the surrounding environments. She tried as valiantly as anyone to maintain an actual family through the hardship of their lives, and succeeded as well as anyone could, though individual duties would forever take precedent over personal affairs.

It was believed that Blake would follow in his father’s mould and be a valuable addition to the crew. He showed an early aptitude toward military procedure and worked his way into basic training, which could be undertaken as early as thirteen years of age. He was sixteen when first permitted to travel outside the ship, accompanying a small research team.

Though a natural enough choice he would be recruited into full service, at the age of eighteen, by pure necessity and in the next two years Blake established himself under genuine threat, not merely surviving skirmishes outside, but saving several crewmen’s lives in the process, for which he was highly applauded.

When he turned twenty he was officially recruited into the Special Operations division, well aware that Kara Waquer was moving rapidly through the ranks, and was likely to soon join him. He swore a personal oath to General Waquer that he would do everything he could to be sure of Kara’s safety, little understanding in his youth that there was no room for such honorable sentiments in humanity’s current plight. It was inevitable that mistakes would be made by every officer given the circumstances, but when performing a lower deck ‘sweep’ with Kara at his side, Blake would enforce his oath to protect Kara at the inadvertent cost of two crewmen’s lives. For this he was demoted to the regular ranks of infantry, and spared a dismissal on the grounds of previous actions. Of course, the GGI needed every officer it had and few were ever fully dismissed.

After his demotion he was sometimes known to volunteer for Special Ops maneuvers. It earned him a reputation as something of a hothead. In truth, he only wanted to be by the side of his childhood friend, joining as additional manpower, but relations with his father were strained – his relations with the General, still more so. Trevor’s career as a GGI officer faltered and progressed very little in the following years, but his friendship with Kara remained strong.

The day then came when a small research team was to be escorted outside on a reconnaissance assignment. Amongst the research team was Trevor’s own mother. They would be scouting an unknown area, and they would find an unknown threat. The team was forced into retreat by the attack of several creatures, one of which had wounded Blake’s mother. Though he was initially more concerned with getting her back to the atmosphere of the ship, he was soon alerted to a horrifying outcome. It seemed that the attack of the creatures had infected their victims with a microscopic flesh-eating bacteria, and it took effect before they could return to the safety of the Explorer. Though Blake’s mother would survive this terrible assault, she was left in a sickening condition. It proved too much for Blake to bear, to see these shocking events unfolding and leaving his mother in an agonized state of near-death. His only hope was that she was too incoherent to know what he had to do. Having put his own mother to rest, Blake was overcome with shock, grief, and rage – the likes of which he never knew existed within. It would be easy to say that he was driven temporarily insane by these events, but in fact a multitude of internal and external factors drove him into a kind of mental spin, in which all of his former self was lost.

While carrying his mother’s body back to the Explorer, Blake would come across several others of the research team, similarly effected by the previous attacks. In his abnormal state of mind, Blake came to a frightening conclusion. He knew that some of the team had made it back to the ship, and believed that the entire crew was now at risk of infection. It would mean the end of the human race in the most appalling way. He left his mother’s body with the others, and returned to the Cosmos1. In his blind fury he believed he had but one option ahead of him. It was better by his thinking that the crew should be spared such a fate, at any cost. In truth, the crew was not at risk of suffering the same fate as Blake’s mother. The bacteria could only be transmitted into the bloodstream to be effective, and while not one injured member of the team survived the attacks, the outbreak was contained. He did not know this. Once aboard he refused quarantine, attacking those who sought to calm him, and fought his way to the engineering sections. His intent soon became clear, as he began to divert power from life-support systems in an attempt to fire up all engines, including the Transverse drive. It had long been suspected that this would be catastrophic to the Cosmos1 – no one knew how the drive would react to the conditions on Procyon 1, and it was thought best never to try. If the drive was powered up only to fail, it would likely tear the ship to pieces. Blake was delayed, however, by a lack of access to critical systems, and resorted to firing on them instead. As this was happening he was finally accosted by a security team – and sedated.

Trevor was judged to be an extreme threat, and was immediately placed in stasis. Though his crime was one of rage, he had threatened to destroy the entire ship, and for this act a projected sentence of ten years was lenient even in the extenuating circumstances. The situation would be reviewed annually but external monitors showed that Blake’s brainwaves were being abnormally divided into two distinct patterns, and it was often feared that he would fall into a coma, or worse, that he would emerge from his incarceration with nothing like the personality of his original self. For this reason he would be retained in stasis until the data showed a marked improvement or the completion of the sentence. His father was devastated by these events, and lost his natural vigor over the months and years which followed. He would die during the period of Blake’s incarceration.

More than half of Blake’s sentence would be served before it became apparent that he was not the only crew member to suffer an extreme emotional reaction to external stimuli. He was only the first. Though he was not aware of it at the time of his being placed in stasis, the few other chambers nearby were unused, but when eventually woken, they would all be quite full.

The period of his stasis would be unlike any that he had known before. Stasis was usually thought of as being a protracted form of sleep, where thoughts, dreams, and memories all flowed into one, languid, stream. External sounds could reach into the static mind, but never disturbed its course. Time was a concept for those who were awake and had no power over this place. Yet, this was no ordinary form of stasis. It is to be expected that Blake was disturbed by the terrible imagery of his last memories, but there was more. He felt in his dreams that Procyon 1 itself was somehow alive, watching him and the Cosmos1. He could hear the dissenting voices of billions, perhaps trillions of minds, and often dreamt that the world was being overrun by hordes of unknown, space-faring, creatures; the world was breaking apart, shattering into great chasms and fissures which threatened to swallow the Cosmos1 whole.

Of course, it would be shown in the fullness of time that these abnormalities were not unique to Blake, or to those placed in stasis. It may be, in fact, that his stasis only suspended the course of this natural disruption. When Blake would eventually be freed from his sentence, it would not be him that was unlike his original self, but seemingly everything, and everyone, else.

Character Quote:

“It’s funny how things go wrong in a hurry. You spend your whole life trying to prepare for the unexpected and then the universe shows you how little you really expect. This is Endgame for humanity. We both know it. We just get to decide how it happens.”

Many thanks to Mike Pantazi for his work on this.