Sample Berk Character: Sericea Nix, Librarian Researcher

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Name: Sericea Nix
Species: Human
Faction: Librarian

Background:
As the daughter of two Librarians, Sericea Nix was raised among the stacks of the Great Library. She spent a lot of time in the most isolated parts of the library reading and staying out of people's way.

For years, Sericea preferred her own company and had few friends. Though she learned what anyone would teach her and showed great promise in the Librarian fields of information studies and martial training, people found her withdrawn and unpleasant. Her teachers wondered if the quiet girl would ever find her place, or if she would continue to aggravate people all her life.

Things changed for her when she was in her mid-teens. She was sitting at the base of a window in a dimly lit hall full of books when a Librarian walked by. She had never seen him before: he was covered with scars and wore cobbled-together armor. She got up and crept behind him, following him to a room where he met with other Librarians. She hid outside the door and listened as the man made his report. He was a Researcher who had recently returned from a trip into the Deep City, and Sericea listened breathlessly as he nonchalantly described how he had encountered Vegan Cannibals and Bearcoons in his quest. Then he revealed what he had found. Sericea couldn't help but peek around the door to see what it was: a large, colorfully illustrated book describing giant lizards who had lived millions of years ago.

The Librarians naturally caught her. She expected to be punished for sneaking about, but instead, the Researcher handed her the book and invited her to look through it. She had seen books about dinosaurs before, but something about this book made them seem much more vivid and real.

Sericea did not realize until later that the moment she looked through the book was the first time she truly appreciated the worth of all the books in the Library, which had been won at such high cost by the generations of Librarians who came before. She resolved that she, too, would become a Researcher and seek out lost information for future generations.

Appearance

Sericea Nix is a slim yet muscular young woman in her early twenties. Her outfits tend to be practical, with thick fabric and many pockets. She favors jackets and cargo pants, with thick-soled boots. She wears spectacles with small, round lenses and has dark brown hair that she cuts short in a boyish style.

Like all humans in the post-post-apocalypse, Sericea Nix is a mutant. Her most noticeable mutation is that she has two sets of ears: in addition to the regular set, she has a smaller, second set of ears located above and behind the first. It can be hard to see them, since her hair and first set of ears covers them up. Though she can hear through both sets of ears, the location of the second set and the smaller size of the ears means that Sericea's hearing is not noticeably better than that of a human with a single set of ears.

Equipment

Like all Librarians, Sericea carries CIRCE, the Compact Information Retrieval Computer Encyclopedia. Sericea's version is a chunky beige model that has been passed down by many active Researchers, with well-worn buttons and scars across its case. It has a black-and-white screen with bright individual pixels.

Her main armament is a Kenner energy rifle. It is a long, boxy model with a white ceramic shell and a black rubberized grip and stock. Its most distinctive feature is a spine-like vent along the top, blackened by the heat the weapon generates.

She also carries a single-shot needle pistol that fires needles coated with a powerful sleeping agent. Her melee weapon is a blackened steel machete, its blade scarred with much use.

In addition, she carries a variety of tools in her pockets, including a flashlight, a multitool, a box of matches, a lighter, a short length of thin, strong rope, needle and thread, a small flask of acid, and a plastic toy dinosaur (for luck).


Greatest Secret
Sericea does not care for Jeff Foxworthy. When people find out about this, they usually assume that she is a devotee of Dave Barry (seen as the Marlowe to Foxworthy's Shakespeare). She lets them go on thinking that, when really she does not like Barry, either; secretly, she prefers Steve Martin.