Day in the Life of an Idiot

The insanely talented bcholmes drew my Star Trek: RPG character for me and it's just too awesome not to want to share with everyone:


Image: Rochester LeRoux, chief science officer, so damn ready for retirement it's not funny.

Indulge me for a moment, will you? There are so many things I love about playing this character. For one, his core value is literally, "Do whatever is necessary to make it to retirement," so far that has included impersonating a god and watching a lot of alien porn (for SCIENCE!)

But, my true all time favorite thing is that I have always loved that in "Space Seed," we discover that there is, on the original Enterprise, a ship's historian.... which immediately poses the question, what other useless jobs could I get on a SPACE SHIP??

With this in mind, I said to myself when creating this character (who I made to replace the one who swanned off with a handsome Romulan marine,) WHAT IF your chief science officer was not, as is typical, cast in the mold of Spock, a "hard" science expert, but one with ONLY focuses in the HUMANITIES?? Thus, the Chief Science Officer of the USS Alan Turing has ONLY skills that would be considered "soft" sciences... or art.

In fact, one of the things I intentionally chose a skill set for this guy? Watercolor. FIRST OF ALL, THE MANUAL GAVE ME THE OPTION. Why would I NOT chose to be a skilled watercolorist?? In fact, I made Ro so good at watercolor that he taught courses watercolor at Star Fleet Academy. In fact, that's how he knows one of the characters from the past (looking at you sabotabby !!)

So, imagine if you will this: in any crisis aboard the USS Alan Turing (of which there are legion, this being an RPG), my character's main job is to gather his very best science officers, get them clipboards, sticky tape, and a white board and... pop popcorn and get the replicators zipping out lots of hot chocolate while shouting out encouraging things like, "Science is cool!" "Your astrograph looks amazing! Love those curves. Don't know what it means, but you could FRAME that it's so pretty!" and generally act as kindly gay space dad to a group of much more science-y people than himself.

He's weirdly proud of his science team and likes to encourage the kind of colligate work environment where officers engage in podcasts about everyone's favorite program "My Space Love."

In fact, the reason he gained an expertise in alien porn is because it was the first thing that actually fell into his scientific wheelhouse. When we encountered a new species running around in the Shackleton Expanse the first thing we picked up about them was their advertising spam, malware, and porn. What's a good anthropologist to do but gather it up and try to extrapolate something meaningful about their culture?? (I will forever love tallgeese for making me spend several hours of my Real Life considering what can actually be LEARNED from ads and porn about what a culture might ACTUALLY value, etc. Mason and I had a fascinating discussion about how you would even begin to interpret a culture completely new to you if this was all you had access to. It has actually made me want to write a first contact story based on this idea.)

Because he's a character of mine, he's also got this elaborate backstory of having grown up on the ice moon of Andoria (yeah, the blue people with the antennae). Even though it is illegal to augment human DNA, speaking of "Space Seed" and Khan, he happened to be born when there was a rescue mission gone awry. His mother, pregnant, was one of the only pilots around when a distress signal came in during a terrible ice storm, she gathers up a crew to go save whoever this is, and they rescue the person but end up stranded themselves. She goes into early labor and it's one of those "we can save the baby or the mother situations," but this being Star Trek and there being a Denobulan doctor along, it's actually "Or both, but with some genetic tinkering, which might be legal for your race, but not for mine!" and the crew all decides in a typically human way, "Welp, we'll sort out the legalities later, provided everyone makes it back alive." ... and everyone makes it back alive and suddenly you have this "illegal" human child who was altered to survive extreme cold, nothing else. Star Fleet is unhappy with this, but it's a baby and the whole crew totally comes clean about the whole thing. Their compromise is that Ro just has to be tested every so often so that no new superpowers develop.

Of course, one of the complications that happened? A new superpower developed. Here he is, READY FOR RETIREMENT, having made it through his whole life without ever mutating (much, but we won't talk about that) and he suddenly develops a spontaneous psychic bond with jiawen's Betazoid first officer.


I will stop there as I am no doubt at risk of becoming that person who starts frothing at the mouth to tell you about their supercool RPG campaign... (OMG, my crew is super amazing! I love the game so hard!)

The point of this post is:   I think BC captured Ro's essences pretty exceptionally, honestly, right down to the personable yet, "oh shit do I have to go on an away team again??" expression on his face.