Steelhead IC Information:
Name: Rhynold (Ryne) Beck
Known Aliases: None
Age and Date of Birth: Around 40 and 1847
Place of Birth: United Kingdom
Known Relatives: None.
Occupation: Doctor of Medicine
Current Home: Steelhead City (Shanghai), Oregon, USA
Background: Ryne was shipwrecked just north of Steelhead and having no family to return to, settled in the city. Dr Beck was horrified at the squalour endured by the poor locals and even poorer migrant workers and sailors who called the waterfront slums of Shanghai their home. He rented what he could afford and, for the second time in his life, set up a clinic to care for the poor of the parish
Storylines: All storylines are marked clearly and linked on this site or on my blog here.
Steelhead OOC Information:
Name: Rhynold (Ryne) Beck
Known Aliases: None
Age & Date of Birth: Arund 40 and 12th July 1847
Place of Birth: Manchester, United Kingdom
Known Relatives: Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, Wife, 2 Children - All dead
Occupation: Doctor of Medicine
Current Home: Steelhead City (Shanghai), Oregon, USA
Background: Ryne is from a very different world to the one he finds himself in now. Born a mere six years before the great mage, Dimitri Rasputin, enslaved Queen Victoria to his will and brought the United kingdom under his twisted control, Ryne has never known peace in his adult life. After the fall of the Lincoln Line to the mechanised Eldrich armies of Queen Victoria and her consort Dimitri Rasputin in early 1857, the great cities of the North of England were systematically burnt to the ground. Wales, Scotland and Ireland were crushed and Europe was soon locked in a terrible war with Russian and England. Ryne grew up in the ruins of Manchester and learnt how to be a doctor with his father, a surgeon who worked to relieve the suffering of the poor.
A resistance movement had sprung up in the North almost as soon as the Eldrich armies and their Mage Generals had destroyed it, and although Ryne was not part of a guerrilla unit, he did treat their wounded. When, in 1885, Prime Minister Slough Feg sent the Eldrich armies to finally crush the rebellion Ryne found himself escaping on board a fishing boat along with dozens of other refugees and his wife and children. Driven ever north by the weather and the Imperial Navies of England and Russia, the boat was pushed up to the very edge of the great frozen seas around Greenland and beyond. They had little choice but to attempt passing through the treacherous Northwest Passage.
The journey cost many lives, including those of his family, and took many weeks, but eventually they emerged around the coast of Alaska and limped south. Heading for North America, Canada being one of Her Majesty’s lands and therefore unsafe, the few survivors ran into a terrible and strange storm that sank what was left of their boat. Clinging to whatever flotsam they could, the three survivors drifted for days until they washed up north of Steelhead. Ryne was the only survivor.
It took many weeks for him to recover, but once he was well enough he began to realise something was very wrong. No one in Steelhead knew anything about Great Britain being a slave of Russia’s arch-mage, Europe was not at war, Canada was not a hostile neighbour. Something had happened on his journey here, something to transport him to another world, identical to his in many ways, yet completely different in so many more. It seemed that he could, after all, go home.
Except he was to discover he could not. In this world he and his entire family simply did not exist. Great Britain did not recognise him. He had no home. And yet he did. He settled into Steelhead’s Shanghai district and set up a clinic for the poor of the parish, all the while searching for an answer to his arrival in this strange world…
Second Life OOC Information:
Name: Ryne Beck
Known Aliases: None
Alts: HeadBurro Antfarm.
Place Of Birth: North West Sansara
Current Home: Steelhead City (Shanghai), Oregon, USA
Background: I created Ryne purely as a roleplaying character waaaaay back in 2007, but have never found a role for him. He was intended to enter the dark urban RP sims but I didn’t really like them. I tried the CSI sim, but again it fell flat. Until recently he hadn’t logged on for over a year. It was when I was thinking about HBA’s next storyline after “Lost & Found” ended that I decided to have Ryne come is as a British doctor caring for the poor of Shanghai’s slums – this was in part inspired by a recent RL trip to Steveston Museum in Vancouver, Canada where I saw how poorly the migrant Japanese & Chinese fishermen had been treated in the 1800s. After that I developed a quick alternate UK history to explain how he ended up in an alternate version of America – that was fun! :)
Links:
Blog
HBA & Ryne's Tales
Twitter (RyneBeck)
RL Information:
Name: David
Age: *cough* nearly 40 *cough* How did that happen!?
Location: Lancashire, UK
Timezone: GMT/UTC +0 which this means I’m generally SLT+8
Online Times: Mon to Sat 12noon to 3pm SLT. Sun: Not very often
Links:
Twitter (rather sweary): DaftApeth
