In-game name: Blinkie
Age: 40
Character background:
I was just a normal Cambridger youth, raised to love the Cavaliers, hate the Hokkaido Herons and with dreams of studying at the School of Agrarian Sciences.
Cambridge is a nice place-- plenty of food, good standard of living. Don't expect me to tell you I suffered through my childhood. I played ball with my friends, explored the fields and orchards at the outskirts of the city, constructed forts to defend from imaginary scoundrels and watched every space adventure vid I could get my hands on.
I outgrew my dreams of adventure in space and turned my attention to getting a PhD, like my parents. Halfway through my graduate studies the Shogun and Kusari Emperor started their buildup to wage war on Bretonia. As the Queen's Breadbasket, Cambridge was tasked with stockpiling food for the war effort. What this meant was that we all had to tighten our belts and feel some real fear for once. And funding for the universities was severely cut. Most of us were encouraged to join the officer corps or quit school to aid in the war effort.
This was when my family lost a lot of our wealth. Two of our properties had to be sold due to the downturn in our fortunes and the reduced incomes my parents could earn with their careers in academia. My father passed away during this time and my mother ended up in a condo, with most of the family savings going to support her after she lost her job in the university.
My hopes of inheriting anything dwindled down to nil, so I eked out a living until I could finish my degree, but then found myself unable to find gainful employment in my field (Informational Science).
So, despairing of finding any good opportunities planetside, I cashed out my trust fund and purchased a Firefly so that I could try to make my living on the trade lanes. I have been successful enough to trade up to a Shetland Train, but find the life of a trader to be lonely and perilous. I could lose everything at any moment to pirates, my pilot is an ex-Marine who speaks in sentences of no more than three words and apart from catching up on my reading and researching the markets I have little in the way of stimulation.
So I began to think that there might be more security-- and some welcome company-- if I were to join up with an established company. When I started thinking this way, Gateway Shipping was the first to come to mind.
Motivation for joining Gateway Shipping:
I was never a big fan of the war, so I liked Gateway's focus on economic and humanitarian concerns as we prepared for the invasion. My sense of Bretonian identity has always been more about science, innovation and exploration than anything else. The way Gateway works together with other underdogs around Sirius is, to me, a proper Bretonian outlook. We may not have the most resource-rich region in Sirius, but we have the wherewithal to make the most of what we have, without needing to be be oppressive to our neighbors or belligerent about our borders.
Maybe I'm just a liberal Cambridge boy who doesn't know what he's talking about, but I like what Gateway represents and how they treat their employees.
