"Noodles" Agashi

Name: Toshio "Noodles" Agashi

Primary: Pilot Specialization: Navigation

Secondary: Wilder - Type Unknown

Homeworld: Nishimara, Wakimori Empire

Race: Human

Age: 23

Description: Noodles is a fairly typical-looking Wakamori man of medium height (5.5"), with spiky black hair and dark eyes. He usually wears tank tops, baggy pants, a sturdy belt with attachments for tools, and a pair of goggles perched on his forehead. A bolt pistol is holstered on his belt, and his fingerless leather gloves have metal knuckle reinforcements.

Personal History: Toshio Agashi was a star student, despite his rural beginnings. With brilliant marks in mathematics, he was offered a scholarship to a prestigious university on Miji. To save money on transportation, Toshio found a cargo vessel willing to let him earn his passage as a space hand. During the loading process Toshio was outside the ship, using an exoframe to maneuver a stack of crates when an accident occurred. The freighter's transit drive activates, sending the ship into hyperspace. Toshi was barely inside the transit envelope, his exoframe's maneuvering and com systems overloaded by the transit field and it was an hour before anyone even realized he was out there. It as a very long hour, in which time he got a very good look at the transit field, and at hyperspace beyond it. And something in hyperspace looked back at him...

Once rescued, Toshio spent the rest of the trip unconscious. On Miji, he attempted to start his university courses, but found himself no longer able to cope with the studying required. Still, on his first upper math exam he found himself able to instinctively work even the most complex mathematical equations in his head, often starting to jot down the answer before he'd finished consciously reading the problem. He was nearly thrown out for cheating before a professor realized what he was seeing.

Toshio was 'convinced' to let the university's medical research department examine him, and they did extensive scans of his brain. They could find no pinpointable alteration of his brain makeup, but Toshio had gone from being a genius with a penchant for math to an otherwise ordinary young man who could do lightning calculations - but with no conscious understanding of what he was doing or how he was doing it. Frustrated, the researchers kept up the testing until finally Toshio had to threaten legal action to make it stop.

Leaving the university, Toshio tried a few different things to make a living. Most trades were either beyond him or too boring, until he signed up for a course in commercial piloting. Maneuvering vehicles in all sorts of environments fascinated him, and his instinctive understanding of the forces involved made him a natural at it. Once he started the courses on hyperspace navigation, however, is when his capabilities truly took off. An experienced navigator could cut the energy expenditures of a transit jump by 5%, taking several hours to plot the course. Toshio could cut it by as much as 20% and do it in less than half an hour. The moment his navigation test scores became public, job offers came pouring in as well as requests to study his brain again. Some of them weren't requests.

No fool, Toshio skipped Wakamori space at the first opportunity. Making his way to Mile, he started taking jobs for independent ships, using his abilities to cut their energy expenditures by 7% in return for reasonable pay and no questions. Until he met Casavir Degrayne, however, no captain could convince him to stay with a ship past the second voyage. He has been with Degrayne and Amarantha for two years now, not paid nearly as much as his services could command, but living with a peace of mind that's worth more to him than buckets of sols.

Character Traits: Ever since his transit accident, Toshio has been rather eccentric. He claims to have seen a "Great Ramen Beast" in the depths of hyperspace, and at least once a day he consumes a large bowl of noodles as an appeasement to it. He has stuck to this story no matter what, and as a result very few people remember his first name, instead calling him "Noodles". If he's insane, he's not dangerously so. On the whole he's very easy-going and friendly, especially where women are involved. Still, Communicants find his thoughts incomprehensible and are often uncomfortable around him.

Toshio has travelled quite a bit in his years as a free spacer, and has collected a lot of stories and gossip. Despite being Wakamori, he doesn't know martial arts and he can't cook anything that doesn't involve pasta. He doesn't even like anime, though Wakamori romance-dramas can reduce him to a disgustingly-unmanly blubbering mess.

Author: Ron Stratton