Difference between revisions of "Doctor Drakken"

Revision as of 00:23, 26 August 2014

Primary Writer: Ross Van Loan

Donald Van Loan had initially intended his Fenspace time to be purely a weekend respite from the grinding horrors of teaching High School English; then his accidental 'Wavium exposure deferred the termination of the break. Permanently.

A bookish 5"11' brunette with the capacity for spontaneous waggery & full-throated Munsch-ian story declamation (His favourite being The Paper Bag Princess.), Van Loan was usually the quietest man in the room, nose buried in book ; mouth buried in coffee. He spent his weekends supporting his near bibliomania--his apartment was his bookshelf--and his recent interest in Fenspace by producing serviceable costumes for cosplayers, LARPers & Fen through his online business, Togs & Cogs.

The sudden windfall of an esoteric inheritance from the familial noir ruminant kicked interest into praxis. Uncle Dirk's old titanium Alvin sphere that he had installed in his own submersible, Treasure Bath, suddenly dropped like a mammoth gleaming machine pearl into Van Loan's life. It didn't take long for him to figure out just exactly it was that the elegant sphere could accomplish.

He began configuring a Fenspace identity around a highly modified variant of H.G. Wells' Professor Cavor, with the Pièce de résistance being the Cavorite Sphere redress of his Alvin pressure hull.

Obtaining 'Wavium from costuming contacts he had made, he proceeded to carefully--he thought-- render his transport spaceworthy. However, he had become so engrossed in his Wellsian pastime that he began to treat his 'Wavium as if it were Cavorite. The irony was that his attention to detail ended up with a near catastrophe not unlike the almost space launch of Cavor's house.

A miscalculation sent the sphere skywards. The major problem with this was that Van Loan was on the wrong side of the curved hull, clutching to a section of the louvered propulsion system. The other problem was that he was bathed in the excess 'Wavium that he had been applying to the antigravity panels under each individual louver.

Somewhere in the stratosphere, he managed to clamber in, pressurize, and hope for rescue as he hadn't completed the painting process ; wasn't even certain if it would work as he had anticipated.

It was only when he was rescued by a member of the Senshi^[1] that it came to his attention that he was now a stunning shade of cyan. It took a little longer for the other alterations to become evident.

Unwaved traits

• Sham Slammer : He's on a bit of a quest to remove as much decidedly dumb Dane pseudo science from Fenspace as possible. Towards this goal he has a network of likeminded book agents & collectors, Epitome. Because he could never bring himself to actually destroy any book, he stores them in the Sham Slammer vault secreted away within a belt asteroid he has coined, Tome Tartarus. He keeps the best copy of each idiot work within the section of his personal library dedicated to idiots like Erich Von Däniken.

Waved traits

• Blueberry cyanosis makes you brillianter? : He's bright blue probably from a combination of ultra high altitude & 'Wavium exposures. Brain chemistry altered in a way that made him much smarter if also much wackier than his previous self.

• Tinker : He has the capacity to create eccentric devices. The equation is : the stranger and less useful the device is the easier it is for him to create. The invisible super computer Deep Clear was a breeze ; the tripod 'body' harness for his smart-bomb photographer employee, Twenty, was an epic scientific & engineering struggle. There is one curious exception to this rule : he rocks hard at the application of botany to life-support system technology. This is very odd seeing as his only gardening talent used to be dandelion hunting & houseplant overwatering.

• Tailor: His cosplay outfits are no longer merely serviceable : they're wearable Sistine Chapel ceilings!

• Declaimer guy: He's very melodramatic, effusive & declarative. His biggest soapboxes are : providing free specifications for low-cost, sustainable life-support for Fen ; rallying all Fen to pull together & cooperate ; and the odd bout of professional, purely for fun villainy.

Minions

• Twenty : A self aware smart bomb, Twenty was somebody's castoff approximation of the apocalyptic planet-cracker bomb of John Carpenter & Dan O'Bannon's student movie, Dark Star. The Doctor (not that Doctor!) found him languishing in a curio shop in New Hong Kong ; recognized him, and couldn't resist signing him up for some sort of position within his burgeoning empire. He quickly discovered two things about his newest employee : Twenty had a talent for photography ; he actually had an inherent explosive charge--nothing even remotely resembling his filmic forerunner--that was apparently an integral part of his consciousness. Drakken refers to it as Twenty's Id-splosive. Twenty has as much interest in exploding as a card carrying member of the NRA has in giving up his guns!
  Twenty was put to work as a photographer for Doctor Drakken's fashion company, Cyan Sway, where he quickly discovered that he had a photographic fetish for feet.

• Caruthers : A major-domo of extraordinary magnitude (Just re-watched The Kentucky Fried Movie), Caruthers No Last Name That Can Be Determined is an Alfred-Class butler/jack of all trades.

Notes

1. ↑ Age of Sail subfaction