Stars Without Number - Dr. Ramesh Ramapudi

I've been participating in Ark's Redshirts campaign, where we play... you guessed it!  Expendable, low level characters hopelessly out of their league sent out to do the jobs nobody else wants to do.

Continuing my ongoing efforts to create characters as ill prepared for combat as possible, no matter the game, I created Scientist/Lieutenant "Professor" Ramesh Ramapudi.  Lieutenant Ramapudi carries a Laser Pistol, but barely knows which way to point it.  He is far more proficient with his Dataslab, Compad, Metatool and Survey Scanner.  He started off rather bland, somewhere between the guy that manned the science station when Spock was on a mission, and Microsoft Tech Support.  He was quiet, supportive and hung around mostly with his assistant, Petty Officer Owlicious.  He used his survey scanner to communicate with an intelligent AI, and communicated effectively with a clan of flying mosquitos.

All was going well until this mission.  This mission, the party hijacked an ancient ships warp thingamabob, discovered and awoke a shibboleth, which picked poor Ramesh up and would have eaten him, had Ramesh not been able to convincingly describe a process that would send it home (scientifically!).  The shibboleth didn't buy it, instead shaking him violently and screaming, "HOOOOWWWWWWWWWW" at him, but hey!  It didn't eat him!  The group only barely escaped the beast after a security officer sacrificed himself to take it down, detonating all of his rockets.  Escape they did, however, hacking down tree-limb sized crab legs as they went for food, finally getting back into their own ship just in time to escape being warped to god-knows-where. 

Over the course of the session, Dr. Rampaudi's calm exterior began to crack, and his fundamental, primal personality began to crystallize - calm and collected until he is placed under stress, and then the SCIENTIST SUPREME is revealed!.  The SCIENTIST SUPREME is not to be questioned or denied, as evidenced by the constant berating of his team mates for examining med packs instead of teleporting the monster into the vaccuum, for burning a round using their tactics skill to determine the best angle from which to shoot the giant frikkin monster, for wanting to shoot firearms in the room that had the warp thingamabob in it, etc etc etc.   Whenever the word "Why" was used in the form of a question, the answer was, inevitably, "SCIENCE!", and he may have, at one point, ordered a security officer to gun down a possessed team member, suggesting that he could be lazarus patched back to life later.  That last was unconfirmed, and did not make it onto his evaluation report for the session.

So it turns out that he would not have made for a good Customer Service Agent after all.  Or at least, not if he had to perform Customer Service in a war zone. 

In fact, he is sounding more and more like Dr. Nemesis, from recent X-Men comics!  Here are some of Dr. Nemesis' more choice moments, some of which actually align fairly well to situations that occurred last night....