Ils soufflent des trous dans mon beau vaisseau, mec! Arrêtez de les laisser faire ça, pour l'amour des dieux! Grant relâcha sa blouse à deux volets sur la veste du matelot de pont, retournant son regard vers le canon devant lui. Le canon avait, par un miracle malchanceux, été frappé par un tir opposé, déchirant toute la moitié avant du canon métallique. "Casse-toi." Il a dit, pas pour la première fois. «Reste en paix, Mackenzie», dit-il, puis se dirigea vers le matelot de pont. "Vous! Continuez à tirer! Les bâtards veulent tuer mon bébé, tu vas tirer en arrière, bon sang! Allez! Allez! Il poussa doucement l'homme vers le canon intact le plus proche, prêt à tirer.
C'était un problème. Chaque canon avait son but, chaque tir, une cible. C'était un boomber, et maintenant ce n'était pas un boom. Il avait un tonneau de secours dans l'un des magasins derrière lui, mais il avait besoin de quelqu'un d'autre pour l'aider à le soulever. Le truc pesait une tonne, au moins. Il ne pouvait épargner quelqu'un ici : Jackal était à terre et il faisait froid, et ils avaient déjà été sous-effectifs quand le combat s'était produit. "Les pirates damnés", murmura-t-il, pas pour la première fois. "Continuez à tirer!" Il a encore rugissé. "Vous avez vos ordres, et vous êtes tous des gars intelligents! Continue sur eux, et ne les laisse plus faire des trous! Je reviens tout de suite!"
Puis il était parti, en train de s'écraser sur le deuxième pont du navire. "Salut!" Il rugissait, pour quiconque l'entendait. "J'ai besoin d'un mec! Ou une fille! Littéralement, tous ceux qui peuvent m'aider à soulever quelque chose vont le faire!" Il a répété l'appel encore et encore, même s'il savait que personne n'était en bas. Tout le monde était sur le pont supérieur, en train de traîner avec les pirates. Il les avait tous vus et savait où tout le monde était, mais ça ne voulait pas dire qu'il pouvait courir là-haut et espérer survivre. Il avait son couteau et son arme, et c'était tout: pas exactement un arsenal.
Gun dans la main, il a sorti sa tête d'une des trappes, regardant vers Fletcher. "Oh! Capitaine! Vraiment, quelqu'un pourrait vraiment avoir besoin de moi pour m'aider en bas!" Espérons que sa voix porterait pour que quelqu'un l'entende. Il a tiré sur un homme qui s'est précipité vers lui pour un effet supplémentaire, espérant attirer l'attention du capitaine.
Name: Grant Meagan
Alias(s): Guru, Wiz, Oracle, Obsessed
Age: 34
Height: 5' 9"
Weight: 150 lbs
Hair Color: Dark Brown
Eye Color: Dark Brown
Crew Position:
Chief Engineer
Physical Appearance:
Grant has been cursed to a life of average build and height. He is fit, in a workman's sense: he can lift, run, hammer, torque, throw, pull, and swing with the best of them. That being said, he's not bulky and never will be, nor do his muscles pop from under his skin. He is built to build, not for combat or athletics.
Grant's fingers twitch almost constantly, as if they are all brushes and the air a canvas, or an orchestra waits to be conducted before him. On rare occasions, he will tense his arms and twist them around, to try and "get all the energy out".
Attire:
While Grant has an appreciation for the fancier clothes of his fellow pirates, after his expensive cape got caught in the gears of one of the loading ramps, he decided to forgo bells and whistles, so that he wouldn't ever nearly get crushed again.
Grant wears light colors to help fend off the deathly sun, at the cost of the clothes being invariably dirty by the time he finishes working on the ship. It's almost a personal challenge to see how clean he can keep himself each day.
Personality:
Agreeability
Grant is not an argumentative man, in most cases. He enjoys what he does, how he does it, and although he'd never admit it to anyone, he likes knowing more about the Ocean Horizon than anyone else on the ship. He doesn't like being on bad terms with anyone, and he's always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, provided they don't waste his time. Grant likes almost everyone he meets, and he likes to think that almost everyone likes him in return.
Excessive Focus
The real problem with Grant comes when he actually begins working. Once he zones in, Grant cannot pull himself away from whatever he is doing until he is finished, or interrupted to the point where his focus collapses. He knows he should take breaks, and he knows he should pay attention to others, but he is mentally incapable of severing himself from his work.
This trouble occurs with anything that Grant does: exercise, building, reading, eating...anything that requires focus, Grant will focus on it to the exclusion of all else. He can be pulled away by an outside party, but oftentimes this will result in Grant becoming irritable or short tempered.
Eccentricity
Grant's been working with the Ocean Horizon for about a decade, tinkering with everything he could take a tool to, has resulted in Grant being at the center of many...strange events. For example, it's not uncommon to see Grant sprinting from one end of the ship to the other to tweak a valve or replace a burst pressure transducer. On occasion he will be on fire, or scorched, or screaming. While working, he has a tendency to mutter to himself, and sometimes reply to his own mutterings.
He is very particular about how "his" ship is handled, and for good reason: more than once an unforseen error in the ship's protocols has led to an emergency of the "everything is on fire" variety. In an effort to prevent such emergencies, Grant tries to keep a tight rein on his engineers and workers.
Collected - Sort Of
To an outside observer, it would appear that Grant totally lacks organizational skills, but really he just lacks the ability to convey them. Every Atlasday, he cleans his desk. Every Edranday, he cleans his personal tool set, and has two of his workers clean the workshop. Never mind the fact that his desk is cluttered the next day, or that the tools never seem to stay clean past three hours.
Despite those issues, Grant's mind and memory are ridiculously powerful, and very organized. He remembers anything related to the ship with unconscious ease, displaying a practically eidetic memory where patterns, machinery, or aeronautics is involved. He has no need for notes, and he unintentionally keeps the current time, date, and direction in his mind without even meaning to. Interestingly, however, when tasked with remembering literature, art, images, biology, or any other non-mechanical/mathematical piece of information, Grant is as normal as anyone else.
Still...all that mental processing power, and yet somehow his desk just refuses to stay clean.
Weapons & Equipment:
Grant is no fighter. His only constant weapon is an expensive Damascus Steel utility knife that he picked up on a Wandering Island in a card game, after memorizing the entire deck order. Grant uses the knife with reckless abandon, plunging it into searing hot crevicies and using it to chisel metals off of the walls in an attempt to increase weight efficiency.
Under his bunk, he keeps a Cryslock pistol for emergencies only. He's only had to use it twice, and he'd prefer to never have to increase that number.
Much of what Grant carries around are tools. Hanging from a loop at his belt is a comprehensive set of keys to the ship, stuffed into a pocket to silence them as he runs around. In his satchel are a set of wrenches, a screw driver, a mallet, a set of calipers, a pair of pliers...enough tools to outfit a small army of work monkeys, if he'd ever gotten around to inventing them.
His most important piece of gear is his coat: fireproof and heat-resistant, the white material has protected Grant from more than one early grave.
Shard Ability:
If Grant has seen, touched, or heard something within the past few days, he is able to list the exact location of that something, as well as its current visual form, audible form, or physical construction, respectively. This applies to machinery, people, conversations, etc. He uses this ability to great effect, testing the interaction of parts on opposite sides of the ship, or tracking his lazy workers.
Of course, Grant does not know the surroundings of that "something" he is tracking, limiting his ability's use for finding enemies or spying on others.
Part of Grant's knowledge of the ship comes from his unique abilities, while the rest comes from his incessant tinkering and experimentation.
Brief History:
Grant's life began as any common tragdy might: his mother gave birth in a small inn within Horus, and his father left them to avoid the responsibility. Unlike most common tragedies, however, Grant's mother Alena had two older brothers who swept her and her child up without any hesitation. The eldest, Randall the merchant, and his life partner Remaro, gave them a place to stay and all the food they could eat, and the middle child, Callum, provided the growing Grant with work in his carpentry shop. From age 5 to age 10, the boy worked with his uncle to repair the shambles of Horus, one two-by-four at a time.
It quickly became apparent, however, that Callum was rapidly running out of things to teach the young Grant, who soon had a better knowledge of the workshop than Callum himself. The three siblings were thrilled with the child's brilliance, and Remaro, being a scholar of Cagen's archives, was happy to take the boy under his wing for a time, until the day that Grant learned of the Immortal Archivist and his legendary libraries.
From then on, it was "Cagen this" and "Cagen that", and "please mother, please" day in and day out, until one day, on the boy's thirteenth birthday, he was sent to the Southern Tower. Remaro accompanied him for a time, to ensure the young boy's safety. The boy and his uncle's husband arrived in the city just in time for one of the biggest festivals of the year: the changing from the Summer to the Storms. Grant was captivated.
Unfortunately, Grant did not immediately get to learn from the Archivist himself. He was accepted into Cagen's library, but under the tutelage of one "Pollock", an Archivist who quickly proved himself to be wise and shrap as any man Grant had ever met. It was Pollock who Grant worked with for the next few years, and it was Pollock who encouraged Grant's interest in the physical side of learning: engineering, mechanics, mathematics, chemistry. Pollock proved to be the biggest enabler of Grant's technical know-how, and it was Pollock who first learned of the boy's interesting ability at age sixteen and a half.
Once his ability was known to the Archivists, it was then that he was finally introduced to Cagen himself. Grant nearly fainted on meeting the man, but the immortal was nothing but kind and smiling. He offered Grant the chance of his dreams: Sky Ship engineering. It would be tough learning, he was told, but in the end he would be designing beautiful ships which soared through the sky. Grant didn't even blink before he said yes.
What followed in the next four years was the most grueling, extensive, and painful learning of Grant's life. From age sixteen to age twenty, he was put through the wringer, studying astronomoy, meteorology, material sciences, aerodynamics, propulsion, and more. His head was fit to burst by the end of it all, and when he finally was given the piece of paper which showed his expertise, Grant sat down on the side of the awards stage and had a quiet cry.
It was only then, in a meeting with Cagen after the ceremony, that Grant learned he had accomplished in under four years what took most shipbuilder-hopefuls eight years minimum. Grant felt much better after that.
Even more exciting still was Grant's first assignment. He was to look at the ancient stabilizer fin designs still being used by some small skycraft, and attempt to optimize their fuel effciency. It was then that Grant learned his biggest limitation to progress was not his own calculations, it was material availability and scheduling conflicts. Only so many test cells were available at any given time, and he was often stuck for weeks waiting for one to open up for his testing.
Eventually, after a year of snail-like progress, Grant hunted down Cagen with fury in his eyes and asked, rather ferverently, if he might be allowed to build his own test cell where he might finally get his shit done, if it wasn't too much to ask. Cagen blinked in confusion, asking what had taken Grant so long to ask?
For the next two years after, Grant multitasked heavily, working on his optomizing and his own personal test facility. It turned out to be a hell of a lot more complicated than he'd imagined it would be. But when it was done...ah, it was his dream come true. Within a four months, Grant and his small team had finished the assignment, and another two more besides. From then until his twenty-fourth birthday, Grant was a battering ram of pure, unadulterated science, giving unto the skycraft world paper after paper of improvements to the tried and true designs.
But the most interesting part of his life had yet to come. Cagen again came to his door, offering Grant a very hush-hush job: the maintenance and repair of an ancient ship, predating the flooding of the world. Grant had never even imagined that the world had ever been unflooded, so, of course, he agreed.
And from then until now, Grant has been with the Ocean Horizon, tinkering, experimenting, and improving the ship, while trying to figure out the mechanics of the ship which Cagen never told him. Where did the light crystals turn to energy? At what point did the energy combine with the shells to be launched out of the ship? How did such a large ship contend with the wind blowing i around? How did such a ship fly? Moreover, how did any of the ships fly?
Grant had always told himself he would decipher that particular riddle "one day", but here was a magical old ship that he was tasked with working on. Grant decided it was a beautiful coincidence. So many things had simply been accepted by the skycraft design world, secrets of flight locked away in Cagen's brain. If he could unlock those secrets, what more wondrous things could be done with their resources?
Two years after he began his work, the ship was gifted to a young captain Fletcher, and in that sense Grant was gifted along with it. Grant had heard about the man, but had never really put too much thought into it.
Eight years out, and Grant is still doing what he loves, where he loves to do it. Except now things break a lot more, and there's more fire, and he still hasn't figured out what purpose the etchings on the lower deck could possibly be used for.
Good thing he has the rest of his life to figure it out.
Relationships:
****Here I'll put down what I'd imagine the relationships to be, and everyone can confirm them if they like it?****
Fletcher Payne
A good man. Grant's been with Fletcher since the Ocean Horizon launched, and good thing too: Fletcher can be over-zealous, and the keeping the ship afloat is no easy task. The two are close friends, after all their time together, although Fletcher's excitement and confidence can sometimes rub Grant the wrong way.
Grant trusts Fletcher with his life, and he knows that Fletcher trusts him the same. He has to, after all: Grant's the one who can make the flying ship fly, or a falling ship fall.
Petros Avakin
Good kid. Does his work, doesn't touch what he shouldn't, and hasn't yet been responsible for anything catching fire. He also doesn't talk much, but Grant doesn't need talkers, he needs competence, which Petros brings in spades.
Alcides Demophon
Interesting guy. Grant likes his fanciful air, but he refuses to let Al anywhere near the inner workings of his ship while he's dressed like a pirate caricature. Too many chances for fire and death. The two instead bond over the card table, where Grant's memory and Al's guile consistently struggle for dominance.
Poole
To Grant, Poole is like a miracle. The man--more of a thing than a man, really--is almost entirely a machine, yet he works with the most precise accuracy, and needs no external lubrication, and rarely requires maintenance. That being said, Grant understands the man's need for privacy about his past: it's like Grant's desire for other people to not screw with his ship on a whim. Grant likes to think they're friends.
Carlos Cunningham
Grant, being absolutely not a fighter, doesn't spend too much time with Carlos. The trust is there, of course, because they live and die together on the ship, but he just can't identify with the younger man all that much.
Fergus Gallagher
Grant likes the big man, but avoids working with him if he can help it. Though no fault of Gallagher's, the man simply lacks the dexterity required to work with parts of the ship that regularly try to eat people. Grant happily talks with the man, telling stories and discussing manliness, in all its possible forms and formats, but he really does not ever, ever want to see Gallagher's pants burn away again.
Silver Kingsly
Although a newcomer to the Ocean's Horizon, Grant likes Silver already. A mechanical genius? Yes, please. More than once the younger man proved to be a sponge for information, able to help Grant with many of the more menial tasks of ship maintenance, and sometimes with the more exciting ship experiments as well.
Maria Siddiqui
Apothecary is of great interest to Grant. Anything involving systems and patterns is, although he is not good at remembering the biological side of science, as much as he wants to. Grant is usually busy, and so he doesn't get many chances to see Maria, but he finds her work essential, and interesting to boot.
Yara Loras
Grant thinks Yara's electrogeneration is the coolest thing. When she came on board some time back, he was in awe of her abilities, even more so than the young Fletcher's wind-whoosy-flooshy thing. He asks her for help with his tinkerings and experiments when she is free, and likes talking with her.