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Digithe Joined: 24 Aug 2003 Posts: 884 | Posted: Sat Dec 19, 2009 2:52 am Name: Dr. Janika Brekkur
Age: 30 Occupation: Doctor on the Wessel Alliance: Janika fights to keep the living staying that way. He won’t expand any further Personality: Janika treats sarcasm as a way of life. Sarcasm, and women. These two do not always go hand-in-hand, of course—in fact, Janika prefers it when they’re separate. His particular brand of sarcasm tends to be directed towards people who he feels are, for some reason or another, being stupid. If he is speaking plainly with a woman, that is generally a good sign that he finds her to be, at the very least, acceptable. Janika has no tolerance for stupid people. That is not to say that he is prejudice against people with low intelligence. Rather, he cannot handle those who lack common sense. He treats these sort of people as though they have an infectious disease, screwing up his nose when they say stupid things, as though some vile, noxious gas is emitting from their mouths. On the other hand, Janika has very open arms when it comes to attractive women. Though he is not quick to relax his intelligence standards just for a pretty face, he does enjoy the company of a good woman, and is not often seen without a charming young lady on his arm when on shore leave. However, it is rare for him to be seen with the same one for more than a few months. He claims that, on the whole, it is better for everyone involved if they decide right at the beginning that they will treat it as a game, which can end at whatever time the relationship is no longer convenient. Though not particularly tall—true, he is taller than average, but not by much—Janika has a way of towering over everyone. His piercing, blue eyes are at once judging, like a great set of scales to weigh your worth, and, contradictorily, inviting, as meeting an old friend. His hair is a light brown almost to the point of being called blond, and is kept at the longer limits of being called short. Despite his often gruff, indifferent personality, Janika actually has a very strong regard for human life. When it comes down to it, he will willingly—if not apparently eagerly—treat even his enemies given an opportunity, and while he might claim to, he does not actually have an intelligence requirement for potential patients. Though he carries a sidearm for self defense when going out on jobs, extensive practice with the weapon and study of anatomy lets him use it without inflicting a lethal blow. The reason for his irritation with crew mates returning with injuries is not that they were “stupid” or “careless” as he claims—well, not primarily, anyway—but because they could have lost their lives. He also has a similar regard for other people’s feelings—something which few would expect or believe. In the absence of any dislike towards a person, Janika is very careful to keep his disparaging remarks within reason. Well, at least if he knows that he’s actually caused that person to cry because of his comments. In the absence of tears, anything is game. One of his favorite pastimes is making up exaggerated or outright untrue explanations for even the most inane minutia, purely to see how gullible his company is. History: Janika was born to an aristocratic family on Londinium. His father, Bjorn Brekkur, was a somewhat low-ranking member of Parliament, while his mother, Vienna, stayed at home to manage the household. Janika was the oldest of four children, and was consequently shouldered with a great deal of responsibility. In addition to the standard education, from swordplay and etiquette to literature, mathematics and science, Janika was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a politician, and he eagerly set on that path from a young age. Things changed for Janika shortly after his twelfth birthday, however. His mother, who had been the stabilizing force in his life, when his father worked late nights or went on extended diplomatic trips, suddenly fell ill. At first, it seemed to be nothing serious. At Mr. Brekkur’s insistence, she went to the hospital, and while the attending physician consented to keeping her overnight, he insisted that it was nothing worse than the common cold. Three days later, Mrs. Brekkur was dead. Janika’s father was beside himself with despair—when Janika asked to be allowed to become a doctor, he was allowed almost immediately. Sure, Mr. Brekkur had argued, but Janika was insistent, and his younger sister Jane was more interested in politics anyway. Janika’s decision was fueled by more than just grief. The postmortem analysis revealed that Mrs. Brekkur had a rare but treatable disease—if the doctors had been smart enough to catch it, he believed, his mother wouldn’t have had to die. The young Janika hoped that he could “avenge” his mother by become a better doctor than those idiots who had sat by and done nothing while her life slipped away. And so he studied hard, entering the most prestigious medical academy on Londinium. Through sheer grit and determination, his were among the top marks in his class, and he graduated with a specialty in trauma surgery. If the administrators hadn’t had eight foot long steel rods up their asses, as Janika put it at one point, he would have had a dual specialty in rare diseases and diagnosis. As it was, however, this was merely listed as a secondary specialty, and that much only with Mr.Brekkur’s intervention. Looking back on it, he probably would have gotten it if he hadn’t gotten into an argument with the professor on the most effective methods of identifying and treating Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria, among other things. Also, refusing to sit for the final because of those discrepancies probably hurt a little. There was also the matter of him calling that same professor an “out-dated, ass-backwards, frustratingly and frustratedly stupid old mule.” Nevertheless, Janika breezed through his internship and was assigned to a big hospital. Things went well for him thereafter, and he enjoyed his work. He didn’t mind spending extra hours in surgery, or helping out with a diagnosis, and lived happily on three hours of sleep and armfuls of double-brewed coffee for most days out of the week. One night, when Janika was running the emergency room, a small squad of Alliance soldiers came in with an injured man. Only, he was clearly not Alliance. He was ordered to fix the man up enough to be questioned immediately. It was a fool’s errand, really; Janika could tell at a glance that, if he didn’t die immediately, the man would be in excruciating pain if he was allowed to wake—unless he was under enough sedation that interrogation would be impossible—and, even after surgery, would be in critical condition and kept sedated for several days. When he explained this to the soldiers, they told him he had seven hours to get the man at least semi-conscious. They were fine with him suffering—in fact they imagined it would get him to talk more—but he had to be alive long enough to be questioned before morning. Janika was faced with a difficult decision. He desperately wanted to save the man’s life—every time he failed to save a patient’s life, he felt like he was somehow failing his mother—yet to do so would sentence the man to extreme suffering and a slow death anyway. The humane choice would be to let the man die peacefully on the operating table, but not only would that contradict everything he believed in, it would get him in big trouble with the hospital administration. It took him five minutes to decide. With a sick feeling in his stomach, Janika “accidentally” increased the man’s dose of the sedative during the surgery, and the man died peacefully. Of course the soldiers could do nothing to him besides shout angrily, but word of the event somehow spread in the hospital, and Janika caught people calling him “Kevorkian” behind his back. He didn’t much care; if they didn’t understand the right of his decision, they were idiots anyway. The Alliance hospital administration, it seemed, were among those idiots. Within a month of the incident, Janika was transferred to a hospital on a planet at the very edge of Alliance influence. He begrudgingly accepted this assignment for a few months—the number of patients was drastically lower than on a central planet, and the number of interesting ones was particularly low; on the other hand, he struck up a nice relationship with the secretary in charge of doctors’ records. When at last Janika decided that he’d let his irritation with how he’d been treated stew long enough, he enlisted with the Independents as a field medic. Jennifer, the secretary he was with at the time, was kind enough to fudge the records so it looked like he was still on duty for a few months, with some extended leave afterward. Janika had a hunch that they couldn’t win, and wanted to keep his license after the war. He only joined because he figured they could use his help more than the Alliance. OOC: woo hurray for breaking writer's block. I wrote like 90% of the history just now, so it may be subject to lots of editing. Will add the part where he joins Evie's crew whenever we figure that out |
The Ace of Spades Joined: 7 May 2006 Posts: 398 | Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2009 6:50 pm I <3 Janika!!! I guess we need to fine-tune some details regarding how they ended up on a ship together... |
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