by Max Barry

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The Dominion of
Inoffensive Centrist Democracy

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2

Notable people

Nova's Earthlings



Aerospace Technician

Charles "Charlie" Kattenby


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Not a particularly photogenetic type.
OOC: Not my image, obviously.

Person of Interest

Occupation:

Engineer

Stationed:

Alamogordo, New Mexico (1949-1952)
Groom Lake, Nevada (1955- Present)



Born:

1927

Spouse:

N/A



Father:

William Kattenby

Mother:

Ida Bissel

Background and Role
"With enough energy you could make a giant rubber duck fly."

Charles "Charlie" Kattenby is an aeronautics engineer/technician assigned to the "Midget Zone" of Groom Lake, better known as Area 51. A neurotic young man described as having the temperament of wiggling Jell-O, his obsessive tendencies nonetheless have proven to be an asset in a line of work that demands precise solutions and which leaves no space for failure; so, Kattenby is sometimes content in not going out much and giving it all to his job, a fitting lifestyle for somebody that works in a top-secret military installation with space aliens.

His family surname could have been Katz generations ago, but it was anglicized to Katt and later Kattenby, though it's unknown if the new name was an accidental misspelling of Katterby or not. Like a lot of people in the base, Charlie Kattenby was given a chance to work there because his dossier reveals a highly solitary life and/or strained relations with his family. Hailing from a well-off family of New York real estate businessmen, Charlie is the youngest son of William Kattenby and Ida Bissel. Psychological reports blamed his overtly Jewish mother for being smothering and counter-productive to his self-esteem during childhood, though Charlie comments that he knew plenty of (Jewish) playmates whose mothers weren't "overbearing, nagging or narcissistic". Ida pushed Charlie to excel academically and often compared him unfavorably to his three elder brothers and she could have been responsible for forcing her son to cancel several teenage romances.

Charlie ultimately left New York to enroll in the MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and subsequently left the East Coast all-together to enter a defense contracting job. He was among one of several of Vannevar Bush's "whiz kids", who were initially sent to a certain New Mexico USAF air base to analyze the partially-wrecked Roswell Craft some time in mid-1949. He met Nova at around this time, first from afar, but he also partook in questioning her on technical matters during an interview from 1951. In said meeting, the conversation veered into small talk that went on for five hours and Nova took an immediate liking to him.

Currently, Kattenby's job is to aid with the reverse engineering of one of several flying saucers granted to the USAF by the Domain. As a result he lives in a small apartment around Las Vegas and is flown to the desert base that he calls his job every day in a testing range away from the conventional USAF/CIA operated "black jets", purportedly near a set of hangars carved into a nearby mountain range where up to six Domain-manufactured aircraft are hidden from peering eyes. He has an easy job, that doesn't involve the mentally straining labor assigned to theoretical physicists scheduled to work on the Model 6, also known as the "Unicorn". Instead, he was assigned to work on the Model 5E, (E for Electric) craft, incidentally the one designated for Nova to pilot occasionally.

As Kattenby could attest, if he didn't sign a legal document obliging him not to reveal such information, most of the craft given to the US Government are driven by an electromagnetic propulsion system powered by a "highly advanced" nuclear engine, though he's convinced it's an antique trinket for the Air Domain. In principle, cooling lasers are focused on super-conductive electromagnet (or magnets) that can be focused on different angles. Their ultra-fast vibrations release energy that can be silently focused to the desired direction to propel the craft to the desired direction.

Much to Kattenby's pride, he devised a rudimentary plan where the central electromagnet was attached to a handy gimbal system attached to the controls of the craft in order for pilots to better control the unconventionally shaped saucer as the Air Domain didn't export the digital stabilization technology required to fly it without tilting, solving a big problem around instability in horizontal flights. Nova later remarked that digitalized fly-by-wire systems could've eased the problem had they cannibalized a flying wing with those features but praised his innovative capability even if they didn't particularly enjoy riding the E5.

Nova, Charlie and their respective crews were later switched to work on a craft described as a "semi-saucer" or a "cresent-like flying wing" that was easier to control as it actually had an integrated stabilization system and it was almost entirely made on Earth. In this case, Kattenby's job was still to respond to pilot feedback, be it the commentary of Nova or other USAF pilots in order to weigh in on how conventional piloting interfaces could be used in the cockpit.

Away from work, Kattenby's guilty pleasures are cheap "True Crime", "Western" and "Spy Fiction" pulp novels and he often escapes from mundanity by imagining he were in the shoes of a super-human and lantern-jawed Noir detective, a daring gunslinger or a suave and good-looking man of espionage, in either three cases, surrounded by curvaceous and sultry women. Needless to say, Charlie's true self is a far cry from the men of action featured in stories about adventure and lurid entanglements of seduction. Nebbish and more than a tad used being a doormat in work environments, the engineer is quick to accept extra work if it means he can get away from people that push him around; conversely, it seems to be a strength of his as Charlie tends to single-mindedly focus on problems at hand and deliver stressful projects on time, purportedly working for 10 to 15 hours that are only interrupted by coffee breaks and strolls around the hangars and plane taxis. Considering how little the Anhu sleep and how extroverted Nova is towards the humans of Earth, it is unsurprising that the two began to cross paths even away from the hangar.

Nova is sometimes annoyed by Kattenby's lack of straightforwardness and finds his passivity to be inadequate more often than not; on the other hand, they also feel relaxed around Charlie because he has never once lacked any respect for them nor has the engineer ever tried to overtly impress Nova. As the space-pilot is surrounded by "lonely airmen who haven't seen a skirt for months on end" whom sometimes try to demonstrate their skills and talents to (possibly) woo them, Nova finds showing off too strongly to be incredibly off-putting and notes that "military men try too hard to a establish pecking order" . It should come to no surprise that Nova's favorite working friends on Earth are older men who can keep home where it is or younger men capable of following orders on a 9-to-5 basis that can adhere to rigid protocol.

Outside of work, Nova and Charlie have also gotten a bit closer. He is possibly the only Earthling to earn Nova's trust after an incident in an Air Force club that occured during the Christmas Eve of 1956: the diminutive Spacer was intoxicated to near the point of sedation and a (now transferred) airman tried to force themselves on them and Charlie intervened in a fight that cost him a bloody nose and he dropped the alien off in their quarters. Nova did their best to apologize for getting Charlie in trouble and in the administrative drama that happened after, the Anhu insisted they'd only work with Charlie as their main engineer.

Kattenby is so close to Nova that they're often together even after work hours or breaks, they're known to talk a lot while alone with each-other during walks around the base's perimeter; it is unknown if the extent of their relationship reaches a more intimate level as the Anhu advisor tries their best to not get enveloped in emotionally demanding ties with Earthlings and would consider it contrary to their duties and they'd consider it would be a failure to set an example as a commanding officer, even if they don't like to admit that they like Kattenby "a lot". For his part, Charlie finds Nova to be a very caring and mostly nice individual who's also quite lovely, but he fears she could raise plenty of eyebrows and turn a lot of heads outside of the base and is unnerved by their more assertive and "unfeminine" traits. Nova once punched Kattenby in the gut when he awkwardly phrased out that many guys with foreign wives see their spouses as a last resort as they couldn't get an American girl, expressing that they'd "never be a consolation prize."

It is unlikely that Kattenby and Nova are circumstantially allowed to develop a normal romantic relationship. Nova requires special permits from the Air Domain and the US DoD to venture in areas outside of the base. They even require a permit from the Domain's Air Fleet to leave work and get pregnant should they even think about starting a family. Furthermore, there is little reason to believe that Charlie would have the incentive to suddenly take "her" home to meet his family even if he could, in his words: "Mama would make a fuss about a sweet blonde American-as-Apple-Pie kind of gentile girl, let alone an eerily uncanny one from a hollowed-out asteroid near the Martian orbit who came to Earth in a silver-chrome UFO."

Miscellaneous Trivia:

  • Out of all the things that Kattenby could've said about Nova, his remark that she embodied all the "MiG virtues of toughness, lightness and simplicity" (when discussing captured Soviet jets in Area 51) was a commentary that the Anhu saw as very romantic.

  • Kattenby and Nova sometimes "act" as if they were the characters of the trashy adventure novels, an activity spurred by Nova telling Charlie that "interactive fiction" is a popular format of "virtual novels" in the Air Domain where people choose to act out on the choices of imaginary characters. The two even made a rough draft of a story that involves the two being spies on an island called Las palmeras, with Nova naming their character after a Caribbean volcano island, "Montserrat", whom has cat ears. When asked by Charlie why that is possible, Nova merely said that it would be funny as she took the term "sex kitten" too literally and later claimed that the Anhu could make people be born with cat ears if they wanted to through genetic engineering, though Charles was unsure if this was another joke.

  • Nova's closeness to Charlie have also prompted other Anhu personnel to quietly accept his presence in their work-space after dark, to the point that he's eaten with them and they've exchanged lunch sometimes.



"G-Man"

Alan "Al" Grimes


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"Trust in the Government".
OOC: Image from Morita Rui's Warera Contactee.

Person of Interest

Occupation:

Special Agent

Stationed:

Groom Lake, Nevada (1953- Present)



Born:

1896

Spouse:

???



Father:

In a graveyard

Mother:

See above

Background and Role

Grimes is an intelligence liaison to the Anhu on Earth and he also observes the counter-intelligence on the base sometimes, notably by tapping the personal communications of the civilian staff employed on the base as well as monitoring them. He would desire nothing more than to peek into the subterranean bunkers assigned to the small detachment of the Saucer People considered sovereign Air Domain territory. Nova knows little of him, but sincerely, they really don't want to. It is said that he was an OSS (Office of Strategic Services) or Naval Intelligence operative during the Second World War, others claim he was a bureaucratic pencil pusher for the War Relocation Authority during the time and only entered the intelligence community when he realized that Japanese Americans he worked to intern weren't fifth columnists but was too ashamed to back down. Nova fittingly nicknamed Grimes "the G-Man".

Whatever his real background may have been, Grimes was sent off to New Mexico some time around early 1951 to try a heavy-handed if not subtle approach to extracting information from Nova during their captivity (8/July/1947-29/Oct./1952). As Nova had been previously buttered up in formal dinners with the light-handed approach to little avail, he repeated the same process but drugged the extraterrestrial's wine with a truth serum, an event that only embarrassed him publicly when his "guest" babbled on about bread sticks when they said they were too bored to talk about the big secret of particle physics.

Once, Nova flatly told them that they consider that him having a career where he spies for the Government, lies to people (including family and co-workers) for a living and would possibly kill for it as well to be less than a heroic personal ideal; when he rebuffed Nova's frank words and bit back that "she" and her friends were caught spying and that they're not too different, Nova simply retorted that Signals Intelligence and Aerial Reconnaissance are a lot less personal or intrusive than human intelligence and that any lies fabricated after Roswell were those of a soldier fulfilling their civic obligations, not those of somebody who signed up to do it. Nova also simply concludes he's a sleazy old man.

After the Holloman Treaty of 1952, Nova has been instructed by their superiors to fully cooperate with the US DoD in the event they get double-crossed and held against their will. The officer's superiors consider that though Nova and other Anhu staff can reveal a lot more about confidential technical specifications, the people of Earth lack the technological sophistication to reverse engineer Air Fleet craft under the sufficient time and quantity to be effective.

Driven on by Nova's gab about particle physics and the recently introduced Standard Model (that outlines the Fundamental Forces of nature), Grimes has been motivated to learn more about one of the Saucers, which is dubbed the "Magical Model" or the "Unicorn" as it defies the known laws of physics, apparently working with similar principles (energy deflection) of the Electromagnetic series but having a much more sophisticated mechanisms, namely harnessing an unknown type of energy speculated to be dark matter or anti-matter to purportedly expand or contract space and time around itself however the Air Domain didn't provide the "Physics Package" (technical assistance and pilots) necessary to operate it. It should be noted that the outdated Roswell craft probably was of intermediary sophistication as it had a mechanism that denied inertia through gravity manipulation out of safety for the pilots but flew on electromagnetic means.

Grimes and his superiors were particularly frustrated over how many experts simply quit when trying to decipher the inner workings of the Magical Model, so much that it's rumored that several ex-Nazi scientists bought from Operation Paperclip have had nervous breakdowns, either because they can't solve the problem or because it's an ego-crushing job for people usually accustomed to being right most of the time.



"Gramps, this isn't a real date."
OOC: Illustration from Morita Rui's Warera Contactee

Grimes is also, perhaps understandably, somewhat unnerved by the Air Domain's power and he's unaccustomed to imagining and accepting that the USA is on the receiving end of gunboat diplomacy and condescending donations as the Air Fleet regards the world's premier superpower as if it were a backwater Banana Republic whose transparent obligations to it ended after they gave some downgraded saucers and a handful of misfit advisors to Uncle Sam but received a 100 year lease to fly over US territories and even got a military outpost. The fact that the Air Domain knows the sufficient power outage to interfere or eavesdrop in all of the Earth's frequencies means that he's well aware the best that the US can do is utilize specific telegraph wires or written letters to deliver State secrets and hope that the Anhu linguists and cryptographers can be occasionally stalled, though this only exacerbated his general mistrust of the Saucer Pilots.

Following a mostly uneventful career trajectory trailing Nova around, he triggered an incident in which he followed to a flying saucer set to do a demonstration and accidentally transported the two to an alternate dimension of Earth, where they had to bargain for gold in order to repair circuitry that Grimes fried when his space-time fold overheated some components. Though Nova was suspected of wrong-doing, security footage within the craft absolved them in the eyes of their superiors at Air Fleet. The same could not be said of Grimes however, as the Ahnu sent a formal letter of complaint against the breach of trust that the Special Agent had committed in their eyes.

As a consequences to Grimes' actions, tighter security measures around the saucers were devised against "unauthorized personnel" and the more State-of-the-Art models were placed in underground bunkers in floors staffed by mostly Ahnu personnel, also decreasing the amount of demonstrations. Grimes' own superiors were furious at his upfront approach and he was ultimately forced to resign in 1958, after a decade of work. Though Nova attended his retirement party and put her best face as they supposedly parted ways amicably, she felt relieved at his loss in Area 51. Ultimately, Grimes represented a first generation of alphabet soup agency operatives whom saw the Saucer Pilots as a more advanced and duplicitous red kibitzers, and one who bought into the line of thought that the Air Domain was a stagnant society for relying on women and aging machinery.



Know-it-All (Defense Analyst)

Charles "Chuck" Meyer


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"I heard you like diners."
OOC: Inio Asano's Dead Dead Demons Dededededestruction.

Person of Interest

Occupation:

Intelligence Officer

Stationed:

Groom Lake, Nevada (1958- Present)



Born:

1922

Spouse:

???



Father:

Tom Meyer

Mother:

Nancy Landry

Background and Role
Charles "Chuck" Meyer is Special Agent Grimes' replacement after the 1958 Interdimensional Travel accident. He is confident to the point that it borders arrogance, he's insufferably fond of always being right and he has childishly egotistical motives in his job as an intelligence officer: he sees reading enemy intentions as a thrilling challenge and a game to get high off of, and less of an ideological crusade or a patriotic and civic duty. Unlike Grimes, he's also a bit of a xenophile: Chuck Meyer was born and raised in LA, where he willingly observed and picked up on the customs of the Mexican barrios and little Chinatown, wanting to know more about other cultures' mindsets when a good chunk of White society wouldn't have found it worthwhile...and he also did it to pick up women in different languages.

Like his predecessor, Meyer can also be cocky at times; however unlike Grimes, he solely dedicates himself to being a Military Liaison Officer, even if the job assures that he does get to read flight logs and some other intelligence aspects. After many generals were left fuming at what Grimes' stunt had cost them, they wrangled the liaison post in Area 51 from the CIA and got one of their own men to report directly to their little faction of the Department of Defense instead. Meyer started his career as an intelligence analyst, whose scathing reviews among works published by the LinkUS Army Historical Division gave him a reputation of thinking outside the box, even if it also cost him the ire of his superiors for being very blunt and contrarian.

In specific, Meyer called out several German marshals and generals as self-serving and unreliable narrators whom blamed Hitler for their own failures despite always going on about their own operational genius and implying that they could've beat the endless, mindless Russian hordes if given free reign. Meyer contrasted the generals' testimonials with Russian newspaper reports on the progress of the war, month by month, as well as by contrasting the accounts between rival generals, and reading Axis geographical logs over winter weather to conclude that the Nazis genuinely believed that they could knock out the USSR in a few months. That is, that the Germans underestimated their enemy, which despite having many flaws of its own, could adapt and ultimately provided the winning strategies. He then blamed those very same German generals (whom always claimed to be politically detached, operationally-minded professionals) for buying Nazi dogma over Slavic inferiority and having such a "short-sighted" view of their opponents; and worse, Meyer decried that the German losers continued to give their readers skewed war insights in their memoirs.

Meyer's reviews were all meant as warnings to the US Army that the victorious Red Army was better organized than what the Germans were letting on to believe and that the Soviet Stavka proved to be more cunning, more resourceful and operationally superior to Nazi High Command in terms of leadership. For his efforts, Meyer was lambasted by many of his peers and readers as "alarmist", as many of Meyer's critics came to think that he over-estimated the Soviet Union. Others were puzzled that he used an analysis of institutions, culture and Nazi ideology to help his argument that the ex-Nazis' lived in an echo-chamber instead of just focusing on army matters. Meyer's critique also got him angry letters from an ex-Wehrmacht marshal, which he kept as a trophy.

Chuck Meyer was ultimately re-assigned from his job as a result of unfavorable office intrigue, but his reviews caught the eyes of one of the MJ-12 generals that were among the first to participate in the Roswell cover up. Consequently, Meyer got personally recruited to do what he did best: to "think outside the box" and try to decipher an inescrutable Otherness. After being informed on what he'd be working with, he took analyzing the Ahnu military apparatus as the ultimate challenge to overcome.

Meyer coined the term "Greys" to denote the bogies that Nova's US Obsevation Group (the Ahnu mission to the USA) was confidentially tracking; he (correctly) deduced that the Greys were Ahnu, but that they extra-State actors of some kind, either pirates, smugglers, criminals or other misfits on the margins of Air Fleet whom operated on a grey legal standing seeing as how Air Fleet seemingly sought to suppress them but never destroy them. His idea gained traction after an Ahnu drone crashed in the Nevada desert in 1952 and a "Soviet" satellite fell in the Pennsylvania woods near Kecksburg in 1962, as both were confirmed to not have any known Air Fleet markings or Ahnu script with government markings, as well as by being made with noticeably less quality. Unbeknownst to him or his superiors, the US had retrieved wrecks from UAVs owned by Ahnu poachers.

Meyer's by-the-book work into Ahnu logs led the Air Force and Majestic to create a secret special operations unit to try to locate and obtain Ahnu technology before Air Fleet cleanup crews got to them before. Though a daunting task, it wasn't an impossible one after the consolidation of the North American Air Defense Command, later known as NORAD, and its computerized Space Detection and Tracking System. And of course, it also helps that Nova's US Observation Group is under-staffed. Though its unknown if Chuck Meyer knows that his reports helped gain traction for these projects among his superiors, it's not as if his ego is lacking fortitude in any way.

In terms of his relationship with Nova, they're work-friends, in the sense that he's a "friend" that the little alien has to put up with even if he's nowhere near as intrusive as Grimes was. Nova likes Meyer more though, considering he's more generous with outings to town and indulges in Nova's culinary cravings when they talk about business.

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