Betsy Hermann
Betsy Hermann (born 24 October 2080) is a research scientist from Microteknique Industries Sublab 7475. Her life's work is finding a cure or innoculation forv variations the superflu.
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Betsy was born in Sweetwater, an affluent suburb in Greater Rivertown to a pair of research scientists who worked for the multinational corporation Microteknique Industries. As a child, Betsy was both highly intelligent and aloof from her peers, an attitude fostered by her parents. The family enrolled in Microteknique's scientific intentional community that, in its early stages, was similar to other gated communities but featured an underground living area that housed several laboratories. As the economic conditions worsened and social unrest grew, the underground facility grew making it one of the first fully functional sub-labs in the Greater Rivertown area, and the Hermans were among the first families to move in.
This foresight protected the family from the unexpected superflu that ravaged the planet and the scientists in the lab refocused their attention to working on finding ways to fight the fast-spreading disease. Due a breach in protocol, the disease was introduced to the sub-lab during Betsy's teen years. She was spared but her parents were not. Devestated by the loss, Betsy emotionally withdrew even further from the remaining members of the community and has elected to work in self-imposed isolation.
Betsy was never blessed with good social skills and after the trauma of losing her parents through the carelessness of a juvenile prank gone wrong, Betsy has become emotionally barren. Old enough to have clear memories of the world prior to its collapse, she deeply resents having to move underground, feeling that a proper quarantine could have averted the global catastrophe. She also does not understand why the terminally ill could not choose to sequester themselves of their own volition, dying far away in order to preserve what was left of the world for the survivors.
Her disposition has soured even further in the wake of the entropy that has slowly ground away everything she found tolerable in the sub-lab. While she used to take refuge in her work, technical and mechanical errors have brought her work--and its attendant distractions from her situation--to a halt. She believes she is by far the most intelligent resident in the sub-lab and that only she has worked out the futility of their situation. She treats the other members of the community as a troupe of foppish assistants, and resents it when anyone expresses an opinion or idea that does not agree with her own notions or understanding. Conversations with Betsy tend to be short and sharp.
Betsy deperately wants a better life and wants it now. She feels like the universe has conspired against her and her alone and that she is due a turn of good fortune. She believes that a rational, competent community of intelligent scientists and scholars surely must have survived the apocalypse but, unfortunately due to technical breakdowns, she has no means of contacting them.
Her dream is to be rescued from her vault and whisked away to a fully functional laboratory facility populated with people at least as intelligent as her and equipped with a persistent, reliable computer network. Betsy believes she could die a happy woman if only she found a way to tap back into a community of scholars and have access to past research. To this end, she would be willing to sacrifice anything, including the well-being of others.
Betsy lives exclusively in Microteknique Industries Sublab 7475. As a teen she would sneak out to explore the wastes with her peers, but after the voluntary withdrawl and death of her parents, she never again ventured topside.
Betsy has average physical attributes and will shun any physical challenge. She has a highly elevated level of intelligence but poor social skills. Despite her thorny personality and is uninterested in her own appearance, she is in fact a quite attractive woman. She has no relevant talents, skills, or knowledges outside the realm of scientific knowledge and research, in which she excels across the board.
At the conclusion of the project each player wrote a coda, or a concluding summary, of how they felt their characters grew or changed over the course of the role-playing campaign. Warning: each coda contains major plot spoilers! We recommend you spend time navigating through characters' vignettes before reading any codas.