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Dr. Raliegh The character I think has held up pretty well, considering that it was supposed to be written by King, and that Abe picked it up a day or so before the game. I remember he called me on the telephone and warned me he might not have a sheet for me to play, because King hadn't written it. I told him it was quite alright, and that I'd get a briefing from him onsite, which is how I came to end up sitting up with he and Walker and drinking most of the night. It's a role for a self-starter. The good Dr. Starts out with only a few allies, and has to effectively challenge the Martians. That was a challenge and felt very exhilarating at the time.Dr. Raleigh You were born to a well to do New England family, but your parents died young, lost in crossing the sea. Your younger sister was raised in England, while a bachelor uncle reared you, giving you a respect for the sciences, but little love or warmth. Not accustomed to crowds, you ever sought the frontiers, and made few friends, and had need of few other men. You chose to study paleontology, and geology as it presented the possibility of travel still pleasing to the scientific mind. But it was the future, not the past, you would exhume. Like the character of Bellamy's Looking Backward you have traveled through time and seen the future. However your journey was not one way. You travelled in the machine built by Thomas Edison Sr., (not the inventor of Menlo Park, but the father of the Mississippi boy genius). The inventor had gone quite bad, and become a pirate, and you were captured as you were on your way to the Badlands to excavate for dinosaur bones for the Peabody museum. He held you on board his air-cruiser for some time, much as Nemo held Professor Arronax, though you found his accommodations a bit sparser. The mad inventor was working on a time machine, and wished a volunteer to determine if it would work properly. You were weary of your captivity, and acquiesced. So you were catapulted forward a hundred years in time, and would have fallen to your death (for you were on board an airship) had not you fallen into a snowdrift. You had a long walk out of the bleak frontier to civilization, but it is lucky that you did so. There crouched on the edge of the Badlands you found a band of humans - barely - whose tribe took you in for you were like to them in appearance. Speaking a pidgin of English, various Indian languages, and African slang, you at first took this for a community of half-breeds, but shortly you realized that these were the remains of American civilization. The lowest and highest driven from the cities had at last consented to intermingle out of necessity for survival. Otherwise, there was little to recommend such a brutal existence. But you were told that it was preferential to a soft life further south, with a house, and a hearthfire. For there a man would seldom reach his twenty fourth year, and a woman seldom past forty, ere they would be harvested to feed the awful diet needs of the Martian conquerors - for they lived on human blood. You learned a little of their lore - they dimly remembered a time of good when the President had ruled a place known as America before a single Martain Spy overthrew the order of the world. You had to find out for yourself, and made your way further south. There, narrowly avoiding capture, you beheld the horror of the Martian feeding mechanism. Moving about in their strange crablike mechanical cars, the Martians gathered their human livestock, who went docilely to their deaths, bleeding out upon a steel tray for the nutrition of their octopus like alien masters. The whole world you learned was in such abject slavery. Only on the fringes of civilization and in deep places in the earth did man live. In the captive lands, some men were excepted from slaughter for many years - serving as guards and bloodhounds for other men - guarding them with sophisticated electric guns which the outlanders had come to prize and fear. You realized that you could not easily return to your place of recall and carry back this odious news in the time remaining, so you became bold. You had seen that certain of the crablike machines were adapted for the guards, and you attacked a guard, seizing his rifle and his car. The other guards would still have caught up with you, but you took a dose of a drug which you had seen them use called "Accelerator," which slows down time around the individual. With dire urgency you trekked north, and reached the position of your "entry" into the future only a few days short of the time of recall. You fabricated a balloon from skins and ascended, and on the day of recall were successfully returned to the deck of the airship only a few minutes after departing. Your mad captor thought nothing of your account of the future, but branded it lies, and threw you into the hold on bread and water. You had hidden your electric gun and "Accelerator" though, and you used them to jump ship in the Rocky Mountains. Perhaps you could have convinced your captor had you been willing to show your discoveries, but a man such as him would likely put them to ill use. You returned to the East and sought men you respected. You settled on Dr. Schultze the noted Eugenicist, for you were certain that he was both intelligent enough to grasp what you meant, and was a man with a long range concern for the wellbeing of the human race, not a man who would sacrifice the future for today's gain. He was electrified at your news, but of course wary. You gave him the gun, and the Accelerator. His first thought was to imitate the Accelerator, in hopes that perhaps it would be a surprise weapon against the Martians. He has been working with Dr. Frankenstein to analyze it. In the meantime, he has suggested you contact Nick Carter, a private investigator who might have the best chance of finding the Martian spy. |