Description
Tall, dark, and heavily-armed. Pan Striker is a caucasian male with dark black hair and light brown eyes. His face has several scars across it and one of his eyes has been replaced with a cybernetic implant, but he still exhudes an aura of youthful exhuberance. He has a lean build and stands a bit over six feet tall.
Pan is typically seen wearing a loose-fitting black space jumper with two heavy utility bealts criss-crossed over his waist.
Personality
Pan is as brash as they come. He owes loyalty to no person, faction, or cause but his own whims. When he sees something he wants, he goes right in and takes it, consequences be damned.
His survival philosophy is that, if you aren't strong enough to survive, it is best to fool people into thinking you are. He is a boastful, overbearing man never lacking in witty combacks or shameless boasts.
Equipment
Pan never travels without his combat knife, which he usually keeps holstered on a strap across his arm. He also carries a laser pistol, a folding titanisteel sword, a hyper-advanced smartphone, and a grappling rope. His cyborg eye-patch allows him to see in normal color or infrared light.
He travels in a lightweight freighter-class starship named Runaway. Is is armed with a laser turret, a low-power tractor beam, and two rail-guns. Its maximum speed is 130xc (one-hundred-and-thirty times the speed of light.)
History
Pan Striker was born in the slums of the planet Archimede. His parents were killed by one of Archimede's many roving gangs when he was eight, and he fled his home. He wound up working at the planet's primary spaceport as a manual laborer for several years. After hours, he would hang out at a nearby bar and gamble. One day, he managed to win a starship from a particularly drunk card-player. He considered selling the thing, but decided that he would rather learn to fly it and leave this trashy planet. He stopped going to the bar and saved every penny he could to buy pilot's manuals, star-charts, travelers' guides and the like, and spent every free minute either studying these or tinkering inside his new ship, which he had re-christened the Runaway.
At the age of seventeen, he quit his job and blasted off from Archimede Station. He made a decent living raiding interstellar supply lines; enough to upgrade the Runaway and hire a few crewmen to keep it running properly.
After a near-fatal run-in with an Solar Empire battlecruiser, his crew has jumped ship at port, leaving Pan Striker to pilot the Runaway alone with the Solar Empire on his back. He has stopped in at Gambit's Bar to see if he can replace his crew.
So begins...
A man in a black jumpsuit tossed open the door of Gambit's Bar and strode in. The tall stranger surveyed the crowed with his both his organic and his cybernetic eye. He went up to the bar and held a fistful of coins up in the air, then slammed them onto the bar theatrically. "Who's lookin' for work around here?" he shouted.
Realizing that no-one was paying attention to him, Striker scooped up the coins he had lain on the bar and put them into one of the satchels on his belts. If he wanted to find the help he needed, maybe he would have to look for recruits one-by-one. Then again, he decided that he didn't want to get to work right away; the flight here had been a long one, after all. He looked around to see where he could find an empty seat, preferably near a pretty woman.
noticed an empty seat next to Shiraike Sanjiyo. Now there was a pretty woman - although tired-looking. Striker slinked his way over to behind her. "You look like you could use a drink," he offered.
Pan Striker ordered two glasses of red wine. "So," he began, "what brings you to this crazy place?"
"Ooh, classified," Striker said sarcastically, with a sly smile on his face, "are you a secret agent?" He took a long sip of his wine. "No, I'm from a faraway planet," he explained. He liked that explanation. It sounded epic to him.
"Uh-huh....." said Striker slowly. He looked behind him for a split-second, as if checking to see if someone were filming his reaction. Was this chick for real? He decided to play it cool. "Sounds like there must be quite a story behind that. By the way, did I catch your name?
"Well, nice to meet you Shiraike Destroyer of Worlds. Where I'm from, people don't need to tell kids scary bedtime stories. The kids have enough to worry about with the warlords and the space monsters." This girl was dark. He might as well be dark right back, he figured.
Pan Striker glanced at the glass shattering in Shiraike's hand - with his cybernetic eye that is. No-one could tell what he was looking at with that eye. He kept his other, normal, human eye locked onto Shiraike. "The name's Striker. Pan Striker," he said with absolute nonchalance. "and I think you hit the nail on the head. You take what you want, you know, and if you're strong enough to get it, then you deserve it. That's how I see things."
Pan Striker took a big gulp of wine.
Pan Striker did not even pretend not to leer at the soaked young woman who had just entered the bar. She could wait, though. He was busy courting this Terran lunatic for now. "Actually," he said calmly, turning back to Shiraike Sanjiyo, "I've found that it's better to let the people you take things from live. That way, they can tell others about you. That's how you get to be imfamous." He winked. "Of course, you've got a scary beditme story about you, so I suppose I don't need to be givin' you advice in that department."
The woman was obviously unhinged, but that was fine. Crazy was better in bed, in Striker's experience. "Taking over a kingdom, huh?" he shook his head. "Sounds stressfull." He finished off his wine and ordered two more glasses.
"More for me, then," replied Striker with a shrug as one of the bartenders passed him the wine. He took one glass in each hand. "I suppose you probably would like having thousands of handsome guys at your beck and call." He gulped down some wine from his right hand.
"Now someone's gone and turned the fire protection on," muttered Striker, looking up at the water pouring down on them. "I guess you'll be fine with that umbrella of yours. I'm gonna' go find somewhere dry to sit." With that, the space pirate stood up and walked away from Shiraike Sanjiyo.
Pan Striker sat down in a plush chair near the fireplace, which just happened to be in a small area untouched by the sprinklers (which had shut off now, anyway.) The girl in white was nice to look at, but he did not do so obviously. Instead, he watched the fire and sipped one of his glasses of wine, ever-so-subtly listening in on her conversation with the younger girl. This time, he wanted to know ahead of time if the woman he was flirting with was going to turn out to be a psychotic warlord.
Oh, dear. Split personality. Murderous history. This broad was screwed-up, too. A horrible thought occured to Striker: what if there were no beddable women in this entire dimension? He shuddered at the thought.