Assignment 2 - Characters

Hmm, past the deadline when I wanted to get the posted by.  I'm working the over night shift at my "day" job right now so my sense of what day today falls on is a little bit skewed.  While writing this I realized that I had made every single character idea here male, so I went back and changed a bunch to female.  Made for an interesting shift of perspective on some of the characters.  Immediately pulled a few of them out of areas where they could have easily fallen into tired old tropes.


Scene: Someone is caught cheating at a game of (space) cards

1) Construction Foreman - She is down to her last few credits and desperately needs to win a few good hands in order to get off this waste of a rock and get back to her family.

2) The Bartender - He fingers the handgun hidden under the bar as tension rises, he's already been shot twice this year as a result of a card game that turned bad.

3) The Shark - she's worked hard to get as good as she is, she's lost many games and more credits than she can count, she's not going to stand for some no skill hack beating her on a cheat.

4) The Patsy - Gambling is not something that she was very skilled at, but she needed the money, her man was sick and there was little hope of being able to afford the meds required from the company pharm.  The street dealer's prices were still extortion, but, less so that buying from the company.  He was at least sympathetic and had offered her some advice, and a card counter at a high discount.

5) The Puppet Master - He knew that The Patsy wasn't good enough to fool them for long employing the cheat that he'd provided, but, then again, she didn't have much choice but to try did she?  A tussle over the game would provide more than enough distraction than was needed.

6) The Thief - She just had to bide her time, not look obvious, and stay clear of the majority of the ruckus.  Was hard to rip someone off when you ended up unconscious on the floor because you took a stray bottle off the dome, left you with one hell of a headache the next day too.

7) The High Roller - Luck had finally turned her way, she'd come into some credits unexpectedly and she would finally be able to leave this mud ball and start living the good life up on station.  Soon it would be time to get down to the nitty gritty details of leaving this dull life behind, but tonight just like it had been for the last week, it was time to celebrate!