Round 10 [Rasputin the Translator v. Time to Die]

Rasputin the Translator (Shockah rank: #1, Burley rank: #13)

v.

Time to Die (Shockah rank: #6, Burley rank: #10)

Don't mess with Texas. Unless--you know--you really wanna.

Rasputin the Translator
In a World contacted by a sentient and potentially violent alien race, one man--bearded and wild eyed--is the only person on earth who can translate between the languages of humans and the language of the aliens. But this strange man is not only hostile to both sides of the debate, he is also untrustworthy, and possibly manipulating the negotiations to his own ends. With all of Earth being turned into a prison as the stakes, one government has a very limited time to not only unravel the mysteries of the alien language, but also the history of the interpreter.

Character Sketch: Jacob Anatoli
Relationship to Story: Protagonist

I was going to draw this sketch of our Rasputin himself, but I decided that he should remain shrouded in mystery. I know that eventually, as a writer, I'll need to know him better, but I'm delaying that day as long as possible. Part of the appeal, in my mind, is that he's really an unknown quantity for much of the film. Instead, I focus on who I see as the protagonist--the President of the US Domestic Policy Advisor, who takes a front row during the alien crises and becomes the primary negotiator with the Rasputin character.

Jake never thought he'd work in the White House. He was raised in Colorado, where his father was the mayor of his small town, and Jake always helped out with his campaigns. Jake was always a bit of a loner, and as soon as he was old enough, he'd take himself into the wilderness to go camping. He explored the Southwest, sometimes with buddies, sometimes on his own, learning the land well.

When he was 16, Jake had a friend that everybody called Rapid. They would camp a lot together, and Rapid would always bring along some weed or speed. Jake didn't like getting high and always refused, but Rapid would indulge every time. Rapid came from a pretty troubled home, but Jake really didn't like being around him when he was high all the time and started extricating himself from the friendship. Rapid killed his father and then himself on his 17th birthday, and it came out that he had been molested his entire life. Jake realized that Rapid had tried to tell him a few times, but Jake had never really listened correctly, and so carried some guilt over the event.

He excelled at his studies, and was accepted into Yale, where he graduated summa cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in American History. He won a Rhodes Scholarship, and so studied at Oxford and then returned to the states to take a PhD in Arabic studies at Harvard. While there, he met and fell in love with a Turkish born woman named Cemile, who was finishing her PhD in the women's studies department focusing on women's issues in the muslim world.

While at Oxford he befriended another American, Jones Alan Porter, a charismatic and somewhat wild young guy. He played rugby and could drink Jacob under the table, but Jake was drawn to Jones' earnest persistence in the capability of people to change their own worlds. He was especially keen on learning all of the things that Jake knew--but took for granted--about electoral politics after helping his father get elected for so many years.

While Jake was at Harvard, Jones studied law, and within 10 years of graduating was governor of Connecticut. He reached out to Jake, and Jake came to work for the governor as an advisor. This was during the great economic expansion that took the east coast by storm. Riding a wave of popularity, Jones Porter was elected president, and appointed Jake as his domestic policy advisor.

Jake was, generally, a centrist. He believed in fiscal conservatism, but had a core belief that government should aid and assist people--should level the field so that any person could have the opportunities that he and Jones had. His domestic policy was driven on this, streamlining agencies so that they were forced to be responsible for themselves and as lean as possible, while still providing services to the countries population. He also drove a strict environmental policy, based on the assumption that it was the fiscally responsible thing to maintain the land for all Americans.

Jake was not, by any stretch, a showboat--and part of his job was watching the president take and receive all credit for everything that Jake did, but on the other hand, Jake was able to walk freely around Washington DC without security, and lived a fairly normal life with Cemile, who was working for a think tank. They had three kids--a girl, and then twins, one of each. It's not every family that has pictures of their children with the president and first lady.

He had just gotten to work, and hadn't even taken off his overcoat the morning the alien transmission came in. The situation room was alive with energy, and as the nearest thing to a linguist, Jake was given the task of trying to decipher just what it was these aliens wanted, and where they came from....

Time to Die
In a World where death itself is beaten by genetic regeneration, a guard is killed during a riot on the prison planet. One woman--his wife--faces sure death to retrieve his body in time to bring him back to life. It's a race against time, with one nearly resourcesless woman willfully fighting like a juggernaut against the prisoners who are holding his body hostage, and the powers that be that think she should just give up. All to simply save the man she loves from eternal death.

Character Sketch: September Rose St. Germain
Relationship to Story: Protagonist

She was named so that she'd never forget the terrorist attacks on New York. Her grandfather was a fire fighter who had died, and throughout her very large and close-knit family, honoring him was a part and parcel of the culture. She was raised in New Jersey in a suburban development that was overrun with members of her family, who all kept houses near each other. She had nearly total freedom to wander the neighborhood as a child--somebody was always looking out for her.

September was never an excellent student, but she got by. She was socially very easy going, and never seemed to care much about fitting in, but that could be because fitting in was effortless for her. While she wasn't part of the "popular crowd" per se, she had a certain charismatic gravity that pulled people to her. Within no time, she had her own small social group.

Her teenage years were pretty uneventful, save for a mugging. She had snuck into the city to go clubbing with some friends from school and had been jumped by some thugs who stole her mobile iCompuPhonePod and smashed her into the side of a building when she deigned to raise a fuss. She broke her cheek on the bricks and spent a few painful months trying not to smile, but eventually healed up. That's when she started taking martial arts, first as a confidence builder, and then continuing it as a good form of exercise.

She went to college at NYU studying marketing and management. Out of college her first job was PR for a aerospace firm called Tangenilent, working on campaigns selling some of the first personal spacecraft available on the market. She lived in New York in a tiny apartment with two other women she knew from High School, one who worked as a dominatrix at a freelance dungeon, the other a stripper who worked in a private corporate club. They used shoji screens to divide the main room into three small sleeping nooks, and had understandings about bringing men home. They spent a lot of time together out on the town.

One night at a bar she met the man who would become her on-again off-again boyfriend, and eventually her husband. He was finishing a degree in law enforcement, but after graduating got rejected for his desired job in the New York Police Department due to a heart murmur. He was able to find a job with new off-land security agencies that secured the contract for the brand new prison planet. He worked six months on, six months off and sent home large amounts of money for his trouble.

September hated the emotional up-and-downs of the schedule at first, but after a few years of being together, it actually grew on her and she found herself relishing both the time she was alone, and when he was around to keep her company. With his help, she could afford a large one-bedroom apartment in a nice area. She stayed with Tangenilent, working her way up to director of marketing and having quite a bit of a say in her work schedule so long as she was meeting or exceeding expectations. The craft were selling extremely well, thanks in no small part to September having created a buzz about them that made them cool and desirable before they even launched. When she wasn't on, she competed in martial arts competitions for fun, honing her competitive sense and keeping her body strong.

Her boyfriend proposed to her, and they were married on the moon, her company loaning her one of its crafts for a honeymoon drifting in space--the latest craze people were calling tin-can camping. You would get everything you need, set a course for nowhere and spend times sleeping under a glass bubble that showed you the stars, planets and suns. The craft could be programmed to randomly pop into exciting areas of the galaxy on auto pilot, and still safely return you to Earth to the docking station before your oxygen or fuel ran out. Then, you could take the space elevator back to Earth, and after spending a few days in the underwater hotel readjusting to the atmosphere, you could fly home.

They settled back into their routine until the morning that September got the call that her husband had been killed during a prisoner uprising. And there, as they say, our story begins....