Alex "not in love with a spaceship" Kamal

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Britt
AGE: 32
JOURNAL: daestwen
IM / EMAIL: daestwen@gmail.com
PLURK: daestwen
RETURNING: yes

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Alex Kamal
CHARACTER AGE: Late 30's, Early 40's
CANON ORIGIN: The Expanse (TV)
CHRONOLOGY: End of third season
CLASS: Hero
HOUSING: Random

BACKGROUND:

wiki

PERSONALITY:
Alex Kamal is an amiable, friendly, slightly broken man. He works hard to keep up appearances and his attitude on the outside, as much as he can, over-friendly with strangers and colleagues alike. It comes from a place of earnestness - Alex wants people to like him, because he really likes people. He talks too much, calls people pet names almost immediately after meeting them (darlin', cowboy, hoss) and just generally makes himself likeable. He seems like an immediate far-too-open book.

He isn't.

A lot of Alex's friendliness is a defence mechanism to keep people at arm's length. If they think they know everything about you, then they don't have to dig any deeper, right? He lies about his family and the state of his marriage to everyone save his closest friends, and even they generally have to drag it out of him. He keeps the things that cause him pain tight to his chest, and doesn't reveal them unless he's forced to. It often makes him a hypocrite, and if you know him, potentially a liar: he'll say things about his wife and son that imply he has a healthy relationship with them, when in reality he fled from his family out of sorrow and grief, and even let them think he was dead after the destruction of the Cantebury. He might be a good cook and be ready with fatherly wisdom (citation needed) for his crew, but as an actual husband and father he is a failure, and feels like one. At this point in his canon, his wife has filed for divorce, and he hasn't seen his son in person for five years. He's too much of a coward to go back and face them on Mars.

So why the failure, Alex? This is because Alex should never have gotten married in the first place. He wants so badly to do the right thing by his family that he did what his parents told him to, and got married to a nice girl and tried to settle down with her. But he was never meant to be ground side. He was meant to be in the stars. And trying to deny that to himself only ever damaged him and his relationships.

It also didn't really work, for a while. He joined the Mars Congressional Republic Navy straight out of school, and flew ships for them for ten years - but he wasn't considered fit to pilot gun ships. This, along with his failure as a father and family man, have instilled a deep sense of shame and self doubt in him that even becoming a hero has never quite managed to fix. He sees his failures well before his successes, and they effect him deeply. Even ones that no one else would count as failures - like not managing to save a breaching craft full of people while he was trying to protect one of his crew from dying at the same time. Instead of allowing anyone, even his captain, to absolve him of guilt, he just firms his expression and says "next time, I'll save them all."

He has an enormous amount of faith in people where he doesn't have it in himself, but he also sees himself as the only thing holding his family together. Oh, not his wife and kid. No. He doesn't hold shit together, there. His new family. His found family. The Rocinante and her crew. This is the family he always should have had. Not the one expected of him, but the one he found and grew naturally and is fiercely protective of. But he's not just protective of their physical welfare - he's protective of their relationships, too. He will call any of them out, in a minute, if they are treating each other badly - or even treating him badly. Through and with them, he's been learning self esteem but also how to exist in a family unit without just running from your problems at every opportunity. He already ran from the two people he loved the most, and he can't go back. But he can love his crew just as fiercely, and do right by them where he never did right by his wife and son.

Alex has a fierce sense of right and wrong, and a fierce loyalty to his planet. Unfortunately, these things have collided, recently, and he's had to learn that being loyal to your country means that you have to face up to them when they're doing the wrong thing. And he has unfortunately learned that basically all the governments are doing the wrong thing, at some point.

Slowly, Alex has been learning who he is, outside of everyone else's expectations. He's also seen some horrifying, horrifying shit. But that horrifying shit is what helped prod him out of his stasis setting of cowardly depression and helped him be a part of the crew that saved the entire human race from destruction.


POWER:

GRAVITY CONTROL

To put it simply, Alex can do minor effects with the force of gravity on himself and other objects. This isn't like telekinesis - he can't make something float towards him. Instead, he can either assert a high g-force on an object (make it very very heavy) or make it weightless. This counts for himself, too. But like on a space station, to really move that object (or to move himself), you have to push it in the direction you want it to go. It won't stop until either he lets Earth assert its normal gravity, or it hits something else. Other than himself, he can only use this one objects up to the size of a person. He can only affect up to five objects at a time, and it depends on the complexity / size of the object. So he can only really do himself and one other person, but he could do himself and four oranges just fine. I will not be using the power on players without their express permission in every circumstance.

GRAVITY ASSIST SLINGSHOT

This one also uses gravity, but it's a little more complicated. Instead of affecting general gravitational force on an object, this allows Alex to fling object no bigger than the size of his hand around other things in the environment, as if they had deep gravity wells. (Like sling-shotting a satellite around the sun to speed it up.) His aim for this is very good and instinctual to the power, and he can speed up small objects to near bullet-like speeds depending on how many gravity assists it requires. However, the more gravity assists involved (aka the more times the object has to go around other things), the more likely it is to just crash into something else on its way. Gravity assists are dangerous business, folks!

SOY AND MUSHROOMS

Alex just has to think about soy beans or mushrooms and a meal-sized portion will appear. He can do this three times a day. They aren't cooked, he has to do the cooking himself.


〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉

COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[ Hello again, MoM! It's your resident genuine Martian cowboy, here, if you assume the word cowboy has literally no meaning to this situation at all. He's a pilot? He's a pilot. But he's smiling broadly and warmly at the camera. When he speaks, it's with a weirdly thick Texan accent. ]

Now, I been around long enough to meet a few people an' get to know ya'll, and I was thinking. We got all sorts of people from all over the place, right? So why don't we have ourselves a good ol' fashioned cook off?

Everyone can come on down, cook somethin' that they'd make at home - long as they can find the ingredients, anyway - and we can all have a taste of all the cultures that this weird old meltin' pot has brought together. Whad'ya say?

I'll be makin' some good old Kamal family recipe Martian lasagne. For those of you who don't cook, that ain't to say you can't come! Just sally on down and have a bite or two, make some new friends, get to know each other. We're all stuck on this boat together now, ain't we?

[ And he smiles warmly again. ]

I know I end every post I make with this, but - just in case - Holden? Naomi? Amos? If you're out there, check in real soon.

Kamal out. [ And the feed cuts. ]

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
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FINAL NOTES: