Member
Badarby
Bingelly
Flarbinia
teenangstlife
MaeB
Lunamaria Hawke
Thayr
Terrans
Ikan
Name
Caleb “Cal” Mercer
Gender
Male
Age
36
Appearance
Tall (6′1″) and rangy, with sun-browned skin, a hawk nose, thick chevron moustache, and tousled chestnut hair worn just long enough to sweep beneath a battered slouch hat. A thin saber scar runs from his right cheekbone to jawline, a souvenir from the Sudan. Favors a weather-worn leather vest over a cavalry shirt, leather gauntlets, and stout lace-up boots. Carries himself with easy confidence, blue-green eyes constantly scanning like a predator gauging the wind.
Nationality
Colonial Australian
Personality
Equal parts roguish charm and soldier’s discipline. Cal greets danger with a crooked grin and a wry quip, yet observes unfamiliar peoples and creatures with genuine curiosity and respect.
Role
Expedition Scout & Forward Reconnaissance Lead
Skills
- Crack rifle and revolver marksman (colonial sharpshooter champion, 1887)
- Wilderness survival & path-finding in jungle, desert, and alpine terrain
- Competent sabreur and knife-fighter; trained in bush horseback riding and camel handling
Personal Belongings / Equipment
- Greener–Marston 11 mm lever-action “volt-rifle” (steam-coil boost gives silent, low-smoke shots)
- Webley top-break revolver
- Remington-Eclipse Model 8 “Steamwinder Carbine”
- Modified Nikjaer Arms Pump Shotgun
- Bowie Knife
- Collapsible brass spyglass, sextant, and pocket chronometer for over-land navigation
- Spring-loaded grappling launcher with 30 m silken cable
- Weather-sealed journal/sketchbook and charcoal pencils
- Miscellaneous clothing
- Leather backpack
- Bandolier and water canteen.
Background
Born on Melbourne’s ragged waterfront to a Cornish railway engineer and an Irish school-mistress, Caleb seemed fated for the ordinariness until a brawl with a drunken officer saw him “volunteer” for the Victorian Mounted Rifles at nineteen. He shipped out with the Sudan Expedition scouting wadis for the relief column at Tamai. There he earned both a silver marksman’s clasp and the scar that creases his jaw, surviving a night ambush by Mahdist raiders.
Mustering out with a taste for dust and danger, Cal drifted up Africa’s east coast after a five year service. He guided ivory caravans across the Kalahari, where he once tracked a wounded bull elephant for three days with nothing but a cracked compass and a single canteen. In Zanzibar he crewed on the coastal steamer SS Meerkat, rescuing a German zoologist from slavers and earning a battered Walther field glass as payment.
His wanderlust next carried him to the Crown Jewel of Asia. In the Indian Highlands he earned bounty by hunting rogue tigers that had learned to stalk rubber plantations like orderly rows of prey. A local shaman taught him to read jungle bird-calls for signs of storm or hungry felines. Those lessons saved a dozen Hindu workers when a flash flood roared through the Ganges River gorge.
Mercer continue on with his ventures, landing in the Amazon's where for two seasons he hacked survey lines through choking rain forest to reach the half-swallowed temple complex of Kuma Dara, the first outsiders to set eyes on its stone doors since the Portuguese expeditions. Cal sketched glyphs and dismantled clockwork traps alongside French epigrapher Dr. LaSalle, gaining an amateur appreciation for dead languages and a sprained wrist resetting a twenty-ton pressure plate to avoid being crushed.
By 1889 he had found the sky more forgiving than the jungle and signed on as deck gunner aboard the tramp-dirigible Cloud Wombat, hauling freight (licit and otherwise) from Darwin to Valparaíso. During an unsanctioned salvage run over the Aleutian archipelago, he rappelled onto an ice-locked Russian packet to recover sealed survey cylinders, only to flee when volcanic tremors tore the floe apart beneath his crampons. The incident caught the attention of the clandestine Eclipse Consortium, which quietly retained Cal for “delicate retrievals.” Among these was extracting a jade astrolabe from a booby-trapped antechamber deep in the Burmese Delta, where mercury-weighted idols still swung on ancient counterweights.
Weeks ago, the Consortium forwarded a discreet letter: financier-explorer Natan Wright requires a scout with experience in particularly dangerous territory for an airship venture to a “primal continent.” The pay was handsome, but it was the phrase “uncharted interior teeming with yet charted megafauna” that sealed Mercer’s answer. He sold his share in the Wombat, topped off his volt-rifle coils, and booked the first aircoach eastward, keen to add one more impossible story to his growing repertory.
