Name: Harold Buell
Harold, 17 years oldA young man who would blend seamlessly into any crowd of servicemen were it not for the burn scars that crawl all over the length of his left arm, Harold is a fine specimen of modern soldier, with a lean, and slightly toned musculature that belies great strength. Brown of hair and blue of eye, his features are primarily Caucasian and rather mild, except for his cheeks, which are gaunt and rather sunken, giving him an air of grimness. His exceptionally pale skin from being born into a family of station-dwellers adds to this effect.
Male
Age: 22
Rank:Cadet - Alexandria Naval Academy
Ensign - After graduating from Starfighter course
Lieutenant, Junior Grade - After Battle of Alexandria
Cadet - When transferred to Framewerk unit
Cadet (Squad Officer) - After Mock Battle
Experience: 47% - Base
59% - After Mock Battle
57% - After Resurrection
Synchronization Rate: 55% - Base
61% - After Mock Battle
65% - During Training
71% - After Resurrection
Personality:Despite his slightly vampiric appearance, or perhaps complementing it, Harold's sense of humor is primarily sardonic when among friends and none at all when among strangers or new acquaintances. As he is at the forefront of humanity's struggle against the alien menace, there is little occasion for him to smile, and people may only witness sheer anger at the height of battle as his peak emotional response. Nonetheless, he is a loyal comrade who, having known the pain of loss, will go to great lengths to save his brothers and sisters-in-arms and assist them otherwise in the field of battle.
Harold is fond of literature. A short novel may often be found on his person while he engages in light reading during free time.
The new, cloned Harold has temperamental issues and is prone to bouts of anger especially when engaging Cruxi forces.
Background: Harold was born to Donnell and Caitlyn Buell as the youngest sibling of an older brother and sister aboard Sigma VII-E56, a habitation station orbiting the gas giant Rostosov in the Pugh System. As the planet's orbit was quite some distance from its mother star, the people of Sigma VII lived at all times in artificial lighting conditions, as the sun's luminosity was often too dim. With the Buell family living in the station steadfastly for several generations, their skin was often paler than most, and they shared this complexion with other established clans. Harold, through overwhelming genetic chance, inherited this trait, and early on he could determine Old Blood and New Blood in the station by the phenotypes of the people around him.
He went through a mostly normal childhood, attending primary school with the infinitely stretching helium clouds of the gas giant Rostosov just beyond the diamantine-glass window. He was often distracted by the planet's weather even though it was an everyday spectacle, due to the frantic energy the sickly blue gases displayed as they roiled and curled inwards and outwards in an eternal storm, and from the occasional aurorae burst when Pugh's solar output rose for short periods of time. Scolded more than just a few times by the Mistress for being distracted during lectures, a fascination for space travel began to take root in the young Harold's mind, and it wasn't long before he yearned to walk across the stars.
His first taste of void travel came during his secondary education, when youths were trained in drills involving extra-vehicular activity, basic first aid, and rudimentary station repairs. As the stations around Rostosov centered their economies around mining Helium-3 from the giant and either exporting it raw or as refined starship fuel, industrial occupations were held in high esteem. Harold's Sigma VII was no exception, so when he graduated at age 16 and began his apprenticeship, he chose one that allowed him to operate a Monitor and Control Overseer that hovered among mining probes in Rostosov's upper atmosphere in order to detect and fix any problems coming from them. This choice combined three things: one, family tradition, as Buells for generations have worked in Sigma's mining industry; two, the fulfillment of what would be expected from a young man such as himself in the society he was raised in; and three, his fascination for space, even if he could only go as far as the other stations.
Although he did acquire a love for literature when he found out that, yes, it was uncommon for a mining probe to fail and he needed something to pass the time, Harold was never one for flights of fancy. He knew, as his family and peers did, that he will never be a glorious captain in the Fleet, leading a strike force of Battlecruisers and Carriers to victory against the alien menace, because he was merely a member of the working class. Content to live his life in the shadow of great, cerulean Rostosov, he got a big break when a bunch of Navy officers suddenly visited the quiet, rustic Sigma Stations, whose combined population for 20,000 made for a ridiculously small recruiting pool when compared to urban centers like Sirius Secundus, which boasted sprawling, massive cities wherein up to a billion people lived. He was 19 years old during this time.
They stuck out like sore thumbs among the working-class crowd, with their pure white uniforms made of real silk, steel-tipped gazes and proud bearing whose manner bordered arrogance. Medals shone on their chests, more than Harold could count and of such variety that it left him bewildered. These men, who fought for humanity and its place among the stars seemed like aliens to the young man, but when they spoke of seeing the length and breadth of the galaxy and pushing back the Cruxi tide, his adventurous side couldn't be suppressed. The moment they asked for volunteers, Harold raised his hand immediately.
Boot camp at Bastion Alexandria proved to be tough on Harold, as he was aspiring to be a starfighter pilot, whose training regimen demanded only the best from cadets. The schoolwork that entailed officer training also proved to be difficult for the young man of a rustic background. Regardless, he pushed through, although only scoring average to above average in all exams, whereas quite a few of his friends excelled. However, Harold was among the third that appeared to have the right stuff for voidborne combat, as opposed to the other two-thirds of his batch that flopped out. In the culmination of a year of intense effort, he graduated, received his Golden Wings badge, got massively drunk with his friends, and then got handed the
worst possible post for a pilot with a shining, freshly-minted Ensign bar:
Instead of being sent to the front, he was being held back to instruct a new batch of recruits.
Understandably, he was deeply bitter about the whole thing, and he shared this feeling of resentment with others who'd also been held back. Harold and the rest of them did not spend a year training and studying - vomiting in the simulator cockpit and vomiting in the real cockpit - just so their friends could get medals and glory while they got absolutely none. Buell and the others soon learned, however, even through thorough government censors, that their batchmates took part in a failed offensive that saw most of them dead, and the Carrier wherefrom their strike group operated, destroyed.
Somewhat humbled by that grim news, Harold and his fellow instructors nonetheless went about their duties with repressed frustration and ire. However, whereas some others vented by yelling at recruits or forcing them to do another 2-hour solo flight with only emergency and back-up navigational tools active, Harold instead joked, and his dark, sardonic humor, aimed mostly at the cadets, proved somehow popular among them. Such was the culture in the classrooms and training hangars of Bastion Alexandria.
Halfway into the schoolyear, however, there was a change in the major naval base: assets and scraps of what remained of what was once whole battlefleets were being pulled back from the Halo Stars in a somewhat hasty and disorganized effort at regrouping broken forces from shattered fronts. The grimness of the war situation was only made clear to Harold when his eyes beheld the
Augustus, a massive ship-of-the-line, warping in with barely a quarter of her engine block functioning and almost sliced in half by some sort of beam weapon that had raked her amidships. As the buildup of Human forces increased and reserves from stations to the rear of Alexandria were called up, he and his fellow instructors hounded the recordkeepers with questions of their friends, the men they'd graduated with - and it turned out that they were all dead.
Not soon after that revelation, the Cruxi attacked. It was an organized, deliberate effort on their part, conducting a sophisticated operation with some of their finest warships and soldiers. While the Siege of Alexandria was mainly a fleet operation, the base itself did see boarders. It was there that Harold first met the enemy, and killed his first.
He, his fellow instructors and their students of course did not compare with the Marines in surface warfare against the boarders, but in the few sorties they made in the opening stages of the battle, they surprisingly acquitted themselves with distinction, taking down a large number of Cruxi boarding pods and some of their escorting fighters. Taking some losses, Harold's strike group managed to stall the Cruxi ground forces' operations for some time. Continuing to do sweeps and harassment tactics against the smaller enemy ships while the dreadnoughts brawled it out in massive gun battles as the day passed by, they eventually found themselves whittled down. And with the arrival of a Cruxi carrier, the few dozen remaning fighters of what was once an air group of over six hundred were given the order to abort mission.
Complying, Harold lead his team into hasty crash-landings into Alexandria's battered hull. Protecting the crash sites were human Marines whom they joined in the Station's defense. Harold managed to kill two Cruxi stormtroopers before his inexperience in surface operations lead to him being wounded by a plasma grenade that had detonated towards his left side. With serious burns, he fell down unconscious, but was thankfully kept from dying at the hands of a veteran Marine medic. Even with modern medical regeneration technology, the extent of his wounds was such that his left arm never got rid of the ugly, curling burn scars.
Harold, along with the rest of the servicemen who fought to save Alexandria, were then regarded as heroes by the government, for without their tenacity and sheer strength of will, the enemy would not have been delayed to the point where Battlefleet Primaris arrived as it did and turned the tide in favor of humanity. For Harold's personal conduct during the battle, he was awarded the Knight's Cross for Valor, and promoted from Ensign to Lieutenant (jg).
His wounds, however, were more serious than first thought. Rather than just leaving behind superficial burn scars, it was found that some nerve damage was irreparable - and to a pilot of starfighters, whose controls require the most delicate haptic inputs, this basically meant that the ability to fly such craft now vanished.
Harold was devastated. For days, he lay stewing in the hospital bed, mourning both his lost friends and the loss of his ability to avenge them. He then received an unlikely visitor, however, in the form of no-one but the sector's supreme commander himself! When the junior officer saw the aging man enter, he made haste to salute as best he could with most of his body wrapped in bandages, but Admiral Mikawa proved to be a friendly, genial personality who didn't care much for military formality.
Their conversation was a short one, not even reaching ten minutes. The Admiral told Harold that he greatly admired his courage and valor during the battle for Alexandria, and understood that the younger man was devastated at his loss of the ability to fly a starfighter. So then, Mikawa offered him a chance to fighting again, this time in another unit, piloting a different vehicle.
Curious, Harold asked for details. He was met with a curt reply that stated quite plainly that he was asking for classified information. The Admiral, still smiling, nonetheless produced a document and a pen, and held it out to Harold.
"Just sign here," he said. "And you will be able to fight again."
Harold, even if struggling, did so. Repressing grunts of pain and keeping his face as straight as possible, he scrawled his signature in the most hideous chicken-scratch. Mikawa, however, was pleased by this sight, and calmly informed Harold that he will be receiving new marching orders soon.
Harold in his original form served briefly as the Framewerk unit Team Sigma's platoon leader. He was ultimately felled fighting new and deadly Cruxi war machines and his Framewerk's corpse was scuttled by fellow teammates to complete their mission. Killed in action, Harold was thereafter cloned and resurrected.
Notable Deaths: -Lt. Cmdr. Hugo Kimmel - Commanding Officer
-Lt. (sg) George Pius - Friend
-Lt. (jg) Revak Tomiel - Friend
-Ens. Vernon Micheel - Friend
-Ens. Rubik Sarpedon - Friend
-Ens. Frederik Suter - Friend
-Ens. Umar Torgaddon - Friend
-Himself
Ariamis,
PrinceAlexus,
Thayr
