Lawrence McCrawford

[Wildkins]

Lawrence McCrawford was born in 798 A.S. to a small, lower middle class family on Planet Manhattan, in the area known as 'lower Manhattan', an area of apartment complexes and housing projects below the towering skyscrapers of upper class Manhattan. Lawrence was remarkably average in his home and school life. He had some friends, not insanely popular but not unnoticed either, and his grades were good but not great. He however, had one thing going for him. As he realized he didn't have the mental gifts or the wealthy parents to support him, he determined that only honest, hard work would get him out of his situation. So for the next four years or so, he worked hard - doing any job he could get his hands on. He worked the scrap metal refineries of Planet Pittsburgh, the slow, boring life of a Cargo Handler on Newark, and many more even less popular jobs. At the end of the day, he had enough money to afford a basic shuttle of his own. It wasn't much, but it was his, and it was his ticket away from the New York system. He took the next year or two of his life roaming around the fringes of Libertonian space, flying into dangerous asteroid fields or docking at various Freeports and conversing with members of other Houses or freelancers like himself. He tended to purchase goods at these Freeports, stuffing them into the compartment below his seat that the salesmen had referred to as a 'cargo bay', and selling them for a meager price at his next stop. He realized that perhaps, life as a hauler would suit him - he had a knack for being able to work as hard as possible, pulling long hours if he needed to get the job done, plus it would let him see the sights - the most profitable trade routes tended to take you far, to other House space or even into the vast unknown of the Border worlds. So, he turned his little ship back around one day, and headed for Liberty's core once again - New York. At Newark Station, he checked the neural net for job offers - recruitment bids from Interspace Commerce and Deep Space Engineering caught his mind. But in the end, it was the prospect of DSE that caught on quick - the movement and construction of jump gates and trade lanes meant he would go far, allowing him to explore space like he wanted - and the profit margins weren't bad, either. He traded in his shuttle for a used freighter and signed up the next day.

The recruitment officer for DSE that day looked a bit frustrated. Lawrence figured he was having a bad day - maybe he'd seen one too many fighter jocks who thought this was their ticket into the Navy's finest, not the heart and soul of Liberty's construction backbone. Regardless, his application process was relatively painless - it, in some ways, was more lenient than the scrapyards he used to work for. The next week he got a call from the Vice President of DSE himself informing him he was to start work immediately and that his civilian freighter would be replaced with a more capable ship. They called it the DSE)Stratolifter, a Mammoth-class transport with a sizable cargo hold and enough armor plates to take a torpedo and live to tell the tale. The thing was a beast as far as what Lawrence had seen, and it was even more weird when they told him he was in command of it. It had a crew, and Lawrence wasn't exactly the kind of guy who was a commander, y'know? He worked hard but he wasn't inspiring, and he didn't have what he considered to be "leadership qualities".

Still, it was his ship, and his first order of business was the movement of Trade Lane parts to Bonn Station in the New Berlin sector. Apparently they had an accident with the local militia and one of their trade lanes suffered a critical fault, so they were requesting DSE's assistance in the matter. Within the hour, the Stratolifter was loaded up with parts and shipping off to Bonn Station. "I've never been to Rheinland before.", Lawrence commented. He hadn't, really. The farthest he got was Bering - at the time, a Navy Siege Cruiser was engaging a handful of what looked to be Rheinland assault ships and he didn't want to stick around, so he stayed away from that territory. But now, with the lane parts and the DSE IFF, he felt safer. The delivery went well, well enough that they asked him to bring another shipment back for repairs if needed. He did that, too, and then shipped a whopping eight shipments of trade lane parts up to Nagano, in the northern Kusari territories - the system had no trade lanes whatsoever, and the local government was paying a premium for the delivery of said parts so they could begin construction on a trade lane to the local jumpgate from the Planet Tomioka. Stratolifter accomplished it, and he did it well. He did so well, apparently, that the DSE officials saw fit to upgrade his ship to a "DL" Border Worlds Transport - now this thing he'd never seen before. It was gargantuan compared to his Mammoth, and had more guns than most capital ships, he reckoned. Turned like a boat, too, but that was fine - the extra profit from the increased cargo hold was more than welcome. With the new ship in tow, but the old name for legacy's sake, he pushed on, hoping to make a name for himself.

//That's it for now, probably going to edit this a lot once I realized I cut out half my RP events so far. Also, run-on paragraphs are great.

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