Character Sketches

These are character sketches of four of the five characters I've written about so far in NaNo.

Fantanelle
14, Female. She is one of the earlier generations of children whose parents essentially sold them to corporations to have their DNA scientifically encoded. (Their DNA was encoded to maximize their intellectual capacity and ensure health to become corporate workers). The work done on her wasn’t entirely successful. It just didn’t take. So she became a ward of a corporation, in an orphanage-like facility, where there are many like her. She’s gotten most of her information about the world from electronic sources.

Owen (maybe the son of Irma?)
Male, 50s. Sheep farmer in a region that used to be Canada, but is now made up of tiny privately owned provinces. He makes wool and grows cotton. (Natural fibers are very rare.) The sheep are prized Marinos, originally from Australia, but moved northward by his great grandfather, who bought them for a song just before the country was submerged. He’s a radical, anti-corporate crusader. He’s watched and disapproved of by corporate spies. They thought him a terrorist and stalked him until several years ago, when he got them to give up on him due to inactivity. They thought he’d grown out of his radicalism, but really he’d just gotten smarter and gone further underground. They still check up on him periodically. His woman is Bea.

Bea
Female, late 40s. Bea is extraordinarily beautiful. She’s always worn her hair long. She is less offended by genetically modified living than Owen is, but she obliges his wishes in the home. Although she does wear synthetic clothing and make-up at times. She has equal scorn for corporate control and was more dangerous than Owen when they were more active, planting several lethal bombs, killing more than 30 head figures of government corporations. The government always regarded her as a danger, due to her proximity to Owen, but never suspected her of the bombings or killings. She currently processes, dyes and weaves the wool and cotton. She also runs an old-fashioned print out of their subterranean home where she prints the anti-corporate literature that she and Owen write, turning them into coded literature. The pamphlets are coded in an ancient dot matrix that looks like printer errors at a glance, but it’s really a series of symbols that are a combination of morse code, Braille-like arrangements and binary scripting languages.

Ridley
Male, late 20s. Lives alone in a countrified suburb of a bigger city in a corporate-owned housing development. He has straight red hair with a parted-to-the-side haircut that never sits flat against his head, even though he wants it to. He’s very tall and lean and favors a particular micro-fiber shirt style adapted from glen-plaid flannels of yore. He is smart, but slightly socially mal adept, and so doesn’t mesh well socially. He always sits a bit on the outside and doesn’t ever really know why. His work is agronomy, and he’s very interested in his work. He spends most of his time in the lab testing soil samples for fertility, contamination, etc. He never wanted to work for a government corporation, but ended up conceding, as it was the best way for him to get access to the lab and all of the supplies he uses for his own experiments and research. He is nice and earnest.