Frank Brenner

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IamLEAM1983
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Frank Brenner

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Name: Frank Brenner
Age: 47 years old
Gender: male
Species: Drifter, claims to be of Pilus ancestry

Strengths: the Pilus are, according to Frank, known for their porous, soft and gas-based exoskeleton. This gives him a natural resistance to pushing or stretching forces, such as increased gravitational forces, and makes low-gravity environments particularly tolerable. Considering how physical blows aren't much more than localized and sudden forms of pressure, Brenner has been subjected to a number of beatdowns from irate and criminalized customers, and has come out of them smelling like the proverbial rose. His vascular and nervous systems both seem designed to weather pressure, the absence thereof or the sudden localized application of pressure; so he doesn't bruise often, if at all.

If anything, his nature discourages assaulting him. His species, obviously not being the result of an emerged apex predator, seems to be the rare case of a prey species developing such precise and effective defensive measures so as to be able to evolve further. Those defensive measures involve the fact of his vascular system being gas-based, instead of relying on nutrient-carrying plasma and cells.

Simply enough; hit him or puncture him, and you'll cause him to uncontrollably let out a ripper of a fart... As these involuntary discharges often tap into the processed gasses he stores until he's finished depleting their nutritional contents – and those emanations his body is normally able to silently evacuate – they can be extremely noxious to anything other than his fellow Pilus, who are racially inclined to respond to the smell the way we would to the sight of a bleeding individual. Most people who think they can shake him down or scare him into lowering his costs usually end up running the other way, gagging their hearts out.

His nature also makes him resistant to falls and rather easy for his occasional helping hands to move him about. While he can walk on his own with a fairly obvious waddle, his being four feet six and barely weighing five pounds with his clothes and hardware on makes it easy for just about anyone to pick him up like a large balloon. He'll regularly ask of his customers that they prop him up on this or that shelf, so he can demo whatever it is they're interested in. Once he's done, he simply swings himself down and lets himself fall.

Considering, his species isn't exactly known for maintaining a fear of heights. As soft and pliable as they can be, being dropped from one of Hope's skyscrapers would only knock him out cold for a while. Similarly, being basically nothing else than one giant lung on legs, Pilus speech has evolved in order to allow him to require an air intake only once every ten minutes. He can go on fairly rapid-fire and long-winded sales pitches without showing the need to gasp for air.

Otherwise, his only remaining physical advantage stems from his hardware. As punctures can still be a problem and stiff breezes would normally knock him around and all over the place, his fairly ordinary-looking belt buckle actually doubles as a force field generator and a kinetic stabilizer. Artificially giving him the proportionate gait and vertical stability of more common bipedal species, he only temporary shuts it off to allow his clients to pick him up and relocate him around the store or scrapyard. Its ablative module is designed to stop any reasonably fast-moving objects for a few seconds at a time. Thanks to it, he can stare down the occasional would-be hold-up perpetrator with his own firearm while not having to worry about knocking away his own chair.

As a so-called legitimate businessman, Frank has access to Paradise's weaponsmiths and engineers, as well as to the space stations' guest Terran corporations' own stock. Considering, he keeps fairly close ties to the city's alien diaspora as well as to mid-tier lieutenants in most local criminal elements. Being an unaffiliated middle man, Frank has no loyalties to guarantee, he makes sure his clients know it, and is ultimately concerned with lining his pockets with as much cash and as many credits as possible.
Weaknesses: the Pilus only have one considerable structural worry to take into account, and this is being punctured. Frank's kinetic barrier can stop a few bullets before recharging, or one point-blank shotgun blast. Double-tap him and he more or less is done for. Considering his anatomy, single points of entry are fairly easy to heal. Just patch him up like you would a leaky tire or beach ball, apply some Medigel on occasion, and wait for his tissues to regenerate – which can take several months, in the case of gunshots.

Otherwise, fairly intense and artificial sources of heat or cold are also concerns. The usual means, from air conditioning to lighter clothes to warmer ones, can all take care of summertime heat waves and wintertime cold snaps. Localized examples, however, will be problematic. Heat him too much, and his stored gases will begin expanding. What starts as mild discomfort reminiscent of your average case of heartburn turns into his flesh threatening to split open.

On the opposite end, leave him out in a freezer for a while and you might run the risk of finding a shrivelled-up alien prune in the baggy remnants of a suit and tie, a few hours later. The lowered temperatures will naturally stabilize his gases, initially making him sleepy and sluggish, until he'd find himself dying in his sleep, his failing organs crushed by his collapsing mass.

Finally, Pilus culture comes with a few unique social mores most of everyone else seems to have trouble accepting. The occasional odourless fart is inevitable, to the point where a certain modulated expulsion is considered an appropriately produced greeting. Mating involves the production of a certain smell – scientifically distinct from your average silent-but-deadly emanations – but socially indistinguishable for most bipedals. They'll all agree it smells totally different, but it's just as unpleasant. Not to mention that being one of the most alien species out there even by Drifter standards, even his fellow Paradise expats can have trouble understanding that one smell means Hello and another means I am showing genuine concern for your well-being as a friend. While Frank can speak as much as anyone else, he can't quite stop his body from reacting to his own emotional output.

Appearance: at four feet six and a whopping five pounds, Frank Brenner tends to look like a greenish-brown beach ball covered in leathery, mottled skin, with stout and flexible limbs poking out from his roly-poly mass. Only his head seems somewhat defined, apart for his lack of a neck and the fact that his nose and upper lip both have a bit of an aardvark-like quality to them. Four blunt-looking teeth adorn the insides of his mouth, with faint and scraggly patches of brownish hair growing irregularly around his scalp and chest's general regions. Otherwise, with oversized eyes of an odd verdigris tone and oddly shaped pupils, and a scraggly and seemingly un-shaveable stretch of hair about the face; he seems to excel at giving himself a sympathetic, yet undeniably sleazy countenance. Judging by his eyes, he probably is able to visually perceive those pheromones we poor Terrans all too frequently ignore, which explains his fairly uncanny ability to lie, wheedle and cajole his way to getting you to purchase something you might not really need.

What's obvious to most people is that he lacks a traditionally recognizable skeletal system. His limbs instead feel like those of an inflatable toy, bending in a recognizable way out of simple and sheer will on his part. Bending his arms or legs in odd ways only seems to be a source of annoyance for him, and not one that could cause outright pain. Judo-endowed thieves have tried arm-breaking holds on him, only to have him click his tongue in annoyance and ask if they were done fooling around.

Considering his nature, smoke and gas-producing elements are part of his everyday balanced diet. Specially imported Paradise cigars provide him with a slow and steady release of nutrients, while quick pick-me-ups don't so much involve coffee as they might beans or soda.

Usually, you'll find him wearing specially tailored suit pants, shirts, ties and jackets, along with a belt and suspenders. His buckle is a tad oversized and lined with what looks like extraneous LED lights on either side, but a quick experiment in getting him to tip over while the device is powered reveals its true function. Being the unique representative of his species in Hope thus far, he tends to get a lot of questions about what he exactly is and what makes him tick. As long as they're asked respectfully, he has no trouble giving a demo of what being a Pilus in an Paradise-class gravitational environment involves. Kids, especially, tend to be amused by his native language's chief reliance on pops, chirps, trumpeting sounds and trills and, yes – voluntary burps and farts as well. To the average human, it sounds like a fairly inhumanly fast, controlled, logical and multi-layered take on beatboxing.

Unfortunately, the Pilus are also known for their lack of common aesthetic taste... Frank's clothes being a simple concession to West Terran habits, he doesn't really care about or understand the importance of sartorial logic. As far as he's concerned, a tie is a tie is a tie, and a jacket's a jacket. Period. Colour and coordination seem to be tertiary-level concerns. Expect horrendous, dated or just plain kitschy pattern or fabric choices, based on whatever he could get refitted to his body on the cheap.
Behaviour: despite the name and his medium-rare Moscow drawl, he hasn't set a foot in Russia before in his life. He's simply picked up English on Paradise, thanks to Russian mob operators there who regularly transacted with his former business venture. That sort of oddly vavering, sometimes thin and sometimes thick accent, combined with his decidedly chummy approach to sales and his unabashedly liberal definition of what constitutes a good and fair price, has contributed to a fairly unrepresentative vision of aliens in Hope. His being an embezzler, a small-fry fraudster and a seller of alien goodies on the fast and cheap on the shores of Mertown definitely hasn't helped the docks or Hope's alien populace – to the point where he tends to reply to barely restrained hostility from other Drifters or incensed Karthians with a smug smile, a thumb under one of his suspenders, and a contented puff from his stogie.

Back in Paradise, his ethos was fairly commonplace. He'd look out for Number One, make sure his bottom line stayed in the black, and he chose his business partners wisely. Not so much for their ability, for largely for his ability to potentially knife them in the back, if he had the slightest suspicion that they might attempt something of their own. Casual and breezy financial paranoia was and still is a way of life for him, which contributes to his tax evasion schemes and the other six or seven ways he's found to bring in income unobtrusively, discreetly, and at a complete disregard for Earth's established trade laws. A very mercenary fellow at heart, Frank's loyalty and friendship can be bought, provided your credit chit is full or you're willing to drop more than a few Benjamins on an under-the-table “patronage” of his establishment.

He's also one of those people that would peeve Percival, Katherine or Spearhead to no end. Self-preservation is one thing, most people will definitely have a little of it – but others carry it to a whole other level and enter the realms of frustratingly creative cowardice. His alibis are always solid enough to stonewall investigations long enough for him to provide questionable “proof” of his assertions, and his schemes are so undeniably small-time that even Aldergard would admit that stamping him out would be too much effort for too little reward. Ever since the Battle of Hope, Earth has been teeming with a garden variety of alien hucksters, all operating as a collective problem, but individually insignificant. In a sense, Aldergard could say, stopping Frank would involve stopping part of the import-export industry, crippling legally authorized Drifter weapon-smiths and risking that one strike being interpreted as a sweeping, bigoted blow against the entire alien diaspora. All things considered, it seems much more profitable to stop his purchasers, as then all actions attempted against Frank become justified. He'd compare it to thinking that stopping one Nigerian email spammer involves dealing a decisive blow against the entire 419 industry – when it clearly doesn't.

Moreover, Brenner's proven useful to both cops, private investigators and Shield alike. If anything, maintaining that focused and productive cowardice seems much more rewarding on the long run than making the threat of prosecution or imprisonment a palpable one.

Beyond the sleaze and the protective layer of smarm, beyond the racially encouraged gross-out tactics, however – there's still a fairly nice guy. He appreciated a decisive customer, and furthering someone's pet project or hobby is something that brings him a fair amount of pride. He's liable to waylay you into buying some useless piece of junk if you just dither about or visit him with the sole intent of gawping at the gas-bag, but it becomes quickly obvious that he has a healthy respect for people who know what they want, and who know their gravitic stabilizers from their gyroscopic thrusters. He's also been on Earth long enough to respond well to seriously nice sorts, as he appreciates being able to let his nonexistent hair down every once in a while. The Drifter standard undercurrent of tension and inherent mistrust is something he enjoys being able to pocket away long enough to spare a toothy grin for a nice kid with a precise project in mind but no real idea of how to proceed ahead. While his physique doesn't give him much cause to be a mechanic, his technical knowledge of his offered hardware gives the impression that he's worth as much as a lifelong gearhead – just, without the caked grease under the fingernails or the stained jumpsuit.

Plus, he gets a little kick out of unsuspecting folk, when he offhandedly asks them to pick him up and put him on the top shelf over there, so he can show off the monoframe antigrav engine over there. Asking that of actual kids gets the accompanying parents to lower their guard a little, while the tot gets his jollies out of lifting the funny-looking alien and holding him out to his mommy or daddy. His ego is fairly malleable as a result, as able to affect prideful smirks after a successful sale as it is to listen to a customer's demand for a refund with an affected – or perhaps even genuine – look of serious concern. Depending on who he's dealing with and how often he deals with them, he'll be less of a cheapskate and more of a decent and trustworthy adviser or listening ear.

Stop by often enough, trust him with your money often enough and show enough signs of not being your average easy mark, and he'll eventually respect you enough to tell you that, honestly, what he sells to Average Joes isn't worth shit. With a little patience, he just might be able to get you a friendly discount straight from the source. The less bombastically happy he appears and more more straightforward he is, the better things are for you on average. Repeat and long-time customers might even get the chance to browse around after closing time, or a casual invitation to join him for lunch or dinner, at the nearby eatery.

When you reach that point, you can be fairly certain the only instance in which he'll still try to fleece you is Texas Hold 'Em. He might not be the most steadfast friend on the planet, but he'll be there for chatter, drinks and the kind of quiet, genuine concern the old Paradise instincts usually discourage.

Just don't ask him for romantic advice. He'll be the first to admit his take on serenading the lucky lady would be likely to drive any non-Pilus carbon-based organism into rather violent booing fits worthy of gladiatorial Rome. Being wooed by a gas-bag either means he has to adapt to Terran standards, or she has to absorb the complex system of Pilus grammar to understand that a specifically modulated burp, delivered with operatic gusto, is one of the most heartfelt ways his species has to express its undying adoration to a special someone...

Goals: what he still believes is that he's operating on his old cut-and-run modus operandi. The moment WySec or the FBI gets a little too wise, he tells himself, he'll simply hightail it to Armstrong Station, on the Moon, and retool his selection of goods to scientific and medical purposes.

Watch his morning routine, however, and you realize he's put down roots in Hope. There's a few faces he hopes he'll keep seeing, a few people he doesn't mind being honest to – and a terrific basin of easily impressionable Terran geeks to wow. All told, this city alone has to be able to nurture him for at least twenty more years, by his own count. Afterwards?

He tells himself he'll leave – but he loves Lucky's apple pie too much. He loves Mertown's air too much and even the Mac Loch's fairly hostile gazes have come to elicit fond, if amused and cheeky smiles from him.

All that – plus baked beans and soda. Gods, baked beans and soda! For us, these are fairly ordinary examples of food and drink. To him, though, maple syrup-slathered baked beans and a tall glass of regular Coke is a meal worthy of heroes and champions.

How could he possibly leave Earth after tasting these? The thought seems unbearable to him!

History: born in 1978 in Paradise, Frank Brenner wouldn't actually become Frank Brenner until his naturalization as an American, several decades later. Within the confines of Gilese's hollow planetoid, he was raised much in the same way as other Pilus are. A simple fertilized spore grown out of his mother's outer skin, his actual Pilus name would be considered unpronounceable by most Terrans. Roughly speaking, his personal sequence of sounds spells out “Quick Study”, if transliterated in English.

That, he certainly was. Pilus as a whole tend to rely on client species for their personal safety, as required by their own diminutive stature. The Brenners, to simplify things, weren't exactly pint-sized kingpins of crime. They got along by aggressively cultivating the best deals in Sector Six, doing everything they could to remain necessary to the locals. A generational entreprise, their combination showroom and chop-shop provided nearly everyone with a little bit of everything. Some overpriced and fastuously imported Terran food was on display, as were some of our own gizmos and gewgaws. Considering, the Brenners were largely the first and cheapest line of access towards easily dismantled weaponry and tools. A quick revision on any moderately handy Drifter's workbench and your average Walther PPK became a quick and dirty flechette pistol, for instance.

Considering, the Brenners regularly ran business with all sides of the station's natural and criminal elements, from the ancestral Drifter gang leaders vying for control of the station to the more pragmatic human, anthro and Karthian newcomers who tended to be attached to criminal interests. Business wasn't exactly clean, but it was certainly good.

However, there was one fly in the ointment. Largely, the fact is that Drifters alone have some culturally enforced patience for double-crossing merchants. With resources being scarce and recycling being more or less part and parcel of the station's industry, it's expected that purveyors of those rare and entirely new goods will get their business where they can, how they can. Threats are usually exchanged, glares are traded, physical harm might be caused to express some amount of displeasure – but death is rarely, if not never part of the plan to begin with.

Someone evidently forgot to give the Russians the right memo.

The indigenous populace was and still is, in some sense, getting used to the bossier, somewhat arrogant and more up-front Terran criminal groups. None of the Brenners' usual contacts precisely knew what to suggest them, in their dealings with Alexei Dolnikov of Sector Two.

The displaced Russian lieutenant started with threats and demands of exclusive merchandise. Mommy and Daddy Brenner worked every tool of their trade to save their rented pod, their livelihood and their son. The Russian tongue was painstakingly learned and every effort was made to more or less blend in – as if acting Russian would defuse any tense situation. That was Pilus logic, something that had worked well enough in Paradise, but that only succeeded in riling up the fair-haired segment of the station's human contingent.

It'd be years before Alexei's patience would reach an end. In his mind's eye, he'd tolerated just about every deviation, every dalliance and every shady preferential deal offered to those blue-skinned alien rats. He'd accepted the fact that Frank and his family would always prioritize their own. It was how the station worked, after all. There came a time, however, when business was business, and you just didn't spend your time backstabbing your human customers with overcharges and shoddy goods!

By the time Frank found his parents' deflated corpses lying flat against their pod's floor, he'd turned 28. Alexei had endured more than enough, and it was time for him and his boys to collect their due...

Thankfully, Frank was able to make his way out of the pod and to attract the attention of Tyler Renny, the largely anonymous commanding figure of the Dusters, who'd been patrolling nearby. A depleted uranium slug put an end to the Russian mob's decidedly violent take on customer service reviews. However, the Dusters never allowed themselves to pick a side. They did whatever was needed to ensure the station's relative stability. Warning the gas-bag that he wouldn't be able to protect him the next time, Renny advised the Pilus to stay away from the other largest human criminal contingent in town – it being the Yakuza.

Considering this, Frank's only option involved exile. He booked illegal passage out on the first freighter to Hope, finding himself in Post-Battle Hope, circa 2008. The city's infrastructure still being very much in a state of flux due to its ongoing reconstruction, Rhode Island's supernatural jewel proved to be a haven for offworld criminals looking for a fresh start in a naive new world that wouldn't know enough to press charges as soon as they breathed their first dose of Terran O2.

On paper, he merely wanted to serve as a reseller of Drifter and Karthian bits and pieces, a grey-market re-seller for parts you could still purchase on the up-and-up, but at a prohibitive price. In practice, there wasn't a lot of grey to his inventory and a heck of a lot of black... Having picked up Russian and English off-world, he applied for naturalization with the Immigration office, knowing it'd be hard for his clients to remember him by based on smells and nonverbal sounds alone.

By the time he celebrated his first New Year's on Earth, he'd been officially rechristened as Frank Brenner. With that done, the only thing he really needed to take care of was establishing contacts with the local Commission as well as local law enforcement... That took some time – the best of about a decade, in fact – during which his income was severely stymied by his inability to skirt the bounds of the law. As much of an American as he now was, he was well aware that his origins marked him out as someone who'd be more than likely deported if he so much as dared to let out a mundane burp after too much soda... People who took in what he was in those first ten years tended to assume that every sound he made that wasn't a word had to be an insult of some kind, or some kind of juvenile and deliberate attempt at grossing them out. It took quite some time for the Mac Loch, in particular, to come to tolerate having an alien living on their shores. Say what you will about Mertown, its locals have the hostile “Innsmouth look” down pat. Of course, even city boys got their fair share of glares, but it didn't change the fact that Frank felt noticeably singled out.

That certainly wasn't a pleasant experience, at first. It reminded him of the way Dolnikov had harassed his parents before his own untimely demise, and the Captain couldn't quite punish or reprimand his own people for making a rather immature point of walking by the store even if their shopping routes didn't require them to. “Glaring at the Gas-Bag” was, for a time, a fairly common practice amongst Mertown residents.

It took some more decades, but the glares and annoyingly insistent walk-bys or drive-bys dissipated. Frank knew well enough not to sell his shoddiest or shadiest goods to Captain Seamus McLoch's extended kin, and he'd come to understand that the cap-wearing phocine dragon also served directly underneath the Chief of Police...

Giving cause to this particular Mac Loch was the last thing he wanted to do. Not to mention that Cordatus and Aldergard's own presences put additional pressure on him. Hope was and still is filled with opportunities, but a single mistake will apparently get sleazy little miscreants imprisoned in an instant.

Despite this, the expected levels of caution didn't force him to neuter his business. Dealing directly with the Commission and greasing the palms of pre-Shield officers wanting something to give them a little edge, in the absence of an Exosuit division, was more than enough to keep his books healthily blackened.

Years kept on passing, and Brenner had soon faded into Mertown's woodwork. He's generally happy being an anonymous and entirely forgettable Schmoe, but having been in Hope for most of his life by now, he's grown aware of the fact that people who need things always seem to find the adequate purveyors. The tinker-happy Drifter expats and curious Terrans come to him, the old-fashioned types have Gammell's workshop and toystore, and most of everything else is manufactured by native enterprises across the globe. His market is a decidedly niche one, and it tends to appeal to the adventuresome or the criminally inclined.

That's something that keeps coming back to him, whether he likes it or not. He thinks it's best to make the most of it while the city isn't undergoing another event of titanic proportions involving power-hungry Earthlings and those strange emanations everyone keeps talking about and that he's never really had a chance to understand...
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