Clear

Template:Character Clear is the Main Character for Clear and The Hopeless. She is of the Salmitton species, a race of people from the planet Mars often dubbed Martians. She is the last known of her kind so far and lives as a salvager aboard a derelict spacecraft named The Hopeful, which she then named The Hopeless. She is emotionally fragile on the topic of her people and often dreams and longs for those of her own kind. She blames humans for the destruction of her homeworld and views the spacestation Saffron Five as a symbol of their tyranical conquest of her world. Although she hates humanity on principle, she doesn't despise every individual human and even works with a human mechanic named Hebedee.

Description

Appearance

_{Also see: Salmitton}

Clear is a typical Salmitton, having bright red skin and stark white hair. Like all Martians she has blue internal colouring, so her tongue, the most visible internal organ, is blue. Her lips are bright pink as are the irises of her, otherwise, black eyes. Being alone most of the time, she doesn't care much for her appearance and doesn't try to keep herself tidy. Her hair is often in a messy braid, keeping it out of her way, and her clothes are normally stained with fuel and dust. When salvaging she will wear her brown leather gear that it quite form-fitting, with a heavy once-white scarf to protect her mouth and nose from the fierce winds of Mars. Clear doesn't concern herself very highly with hygiene or keeping herself looking tidy, due spending so many years all alone. When relaxing aboard The Hopeful she will wear loose-fitting one-piece clothes of her people. They look something like a sheet attached to the body.

Personality

Clear is often direct in her mannerisms and is not tactful in speech, as she is unused to communicating with others. She is likely to say the wrong thing at the wrong time and not even know it. She keeps much of her feelings to herself but when alone in her room she often laments her place in the universe and feels a great deal of sadness within her. She spends a great deal of her alone time drinking away the sorrows and staring at random pictures of other Martians, now long dead. She outwardly displays a hatred for humans, though she isn't above getting along with individuals. She hates the whole species on principle. She is naturally suspicious of others, especially humans, and is slow to trust someone. She is more open to trusting those she perceives as innocent or naïve in nature. However she can be easily led by someone that she does feel trust in, even if they should be untrustworthy.

Powers & Talents

Piloting

She is a competent pilot and capable of flying various kinds of spacecraft that she's encountered. She has a logical method of approach when applying herself to new craft, normally easily figuring out how it works. She is capable of field repairs to many vehicles, but especially small crafts like the Bug.

Salvaging

Her primary skill is salvaging. She can spot useful salvage from the useless and determine what can be done with it. Her focus is normally on what can be used for The Hopeless, but she is also capable of spotting items to be sold at high prices. She is able to bargain quite well, despite her lack of communication skills, simply because she is normally aware of the actual value of the products she is bartering over.

Possessions

The Hopeful

_{Main article: The Hopeful}

The Hopeful is the name of the massive derelict spacecraft that Clear calls home. It is managed by an Artificial Intelligence called Note. Note is not terribly efficient, however, and is meant for minimum system duties. His communications skills are barely existent and is far from being completely self-aware in the same manner as other A.I. such as CynthAI. The ship is decades old and is constantly repairing the damage from the battle that left it derelict. The captain of the ship, dubbed Icer by Clear, is frozen in time within the command deck of the ship. Clear cannot be named captain of The Hopeful by Note because its former captain is technically not dead.

The Bug

_{Main article: The Hopeful#The Bug}

The Bug is a small craft that acts as a shuttle for Clear aboard The Hopeful. The craft is capable of acting as a home, if required, having facilities such as bedrooms and a living room. However, like its mothership, the Bug is in poor condition and Clear is often envious of other, newer models of spacecraft that she sees. The Bug has no official designation and is merely called the Bug because it looks like a moth or a butterfly in its design.

History

Pre-CatH

Tba

Clear and the Hopeless

_{Main article: Clear and the Hopeless}

The story of Clear and the Hopeless opens with Clear getting ready for a salvaging trip to Mars. The Hopeful, the ship that Clear calls home, is little more than a space-station orbiting the rust-coloured world below. The Hopeful is in a complete state of disrepair, barely kept in workable condition by the ship's Artificial Intelligence, Note, and the salvaging materials that Clear gets from abandoned cities and towns of Mars. To get to Mars she uses The Bug, an ugly, old transport ship that isn't supposed to be flashy, and gets help from the ALEX the robot, who is able to use his various tools to strip down metals and other resources Note requests of Clear. After a mission to Mars, Clear returns and visits Icer, the former captain of the ship who has been frozen in time in the Command Deck. This is a habit she's had for a long time, often alone on the ship with no one else to talk to. However she's interrupted when Note suddenly instigates a jump through space, something The Hopeful has never done ever since Clear has been aboard. During each jump she is automatically pinned to the wall due to the age, and therefore inferior quality, of the jump drives; all meant for her safety. After a few jumps Note states that salvage is required to make another jump, which Clear assumes will take them back to Mars. Hebedee, the mechanic living on the ship, believes that the unexpected jump is because the Earth went missing all of a sudden. Why Note was concerned with the Earth, Clear didn't care. She wants to return to Mars. She agrees to try to trade for fuel at one of the local inhabited stations. Before she leaves, however, she decides to check on the third, and newest, crewman named Green. As Clear nears Green's quarters, she finds the whole area is covered in magical plants and even insects living in them. When she meets Green, the human girl cannot speak. Instead she creates vibrations, using small plants, in the communicator to create speech through the radio. Green is very excited that Clear would ask for her help and is eager to make friends with her.When they get to the spaceport the narration speaks of the history of Mars and the human's acts of dominance over Clear's people - the human attack, the ushering of her people onto unfit reservations, the human diseases that finally killed her people and finally the human colonisation of areas of the planet (such as Saffron 5) - all of which she admits she learnt in a human museum, built from a derelict Martian spacecraft. Green, afraid of the technological spaceport, tries to get close to Clear but Clear is uncomfortable with such intimacy and tells her to back off. They find a low-life bar where Clear expects to find traders will to trade for low fuel prices and rare Martian goods. The leader of the crew she speaks with is Kaptin Kwanza and when he learns that she's a Martian, and very valuable, he and his crew try to chase her down.

Notes

Britt's Commentary

"The origins of Clear came hand-in-hand with the invention of The Hopeful itself. The original inspiration for the large and poorly manned ship, along with Clear being the very last of her kind, came from the BBC TV Show named Red Dwarf. Unlike Red Dwarf, however, I wanted a sense of loneliness to pervade the character and a feeling of being apart from society. This may be due to my own circumstances as a foreigner living in China, a culture apart from my old friends and family. Even her loss of her people, her home and her family may have been a subconscious reflection of my own sense of loss.

As I've always been better at designing characters than space ships, the exact dimensions for The Hopeful remain largely unspecified throughout the entire CatH series, while I began to form very clear and vivid depictions for Clear. The colour scheme of red skin, complimented by white and blue was loosely inspired by the Star Wars character Ahsoka Tano. While most sci-fi aliens still have the red innards that humans have, I thought it would be more interesting to specify that Clear's innards are coloured blue - including her tongue. I was also intent from the very beginning that Clear would mirror The Hopeful in its bedraggled state, so while The Hopeful is broken down, Clear is often unkempt and even unwashed."

"Although Clear is clearly meant to be socially and is seen to be more comfortable when alone, she was otherwise meant to have a very loose character that could be fairly "everyman", meaning a reader could more easily identify with her. She's rarely extremist in her opinions and actions and while this makes her less vivid in a readers' mind, it allows them to take her place in the story." - Britt the Writer

Britt: The Legend

"Britt: The Legend features a chapter wherein Britt takes part in the destruction of Mars and its people. This makes Britt a direct, though unknown, major influence on Clear and her circumstance. It was interesting to have a character that is essentially a good guy and hero of his own story, be the cause of ultimate misery for the main character and hero of another story." - Britt the Writer