Valley of the Terrible Lizards (Weird West/Lost World, all welcome)

[IrishWolf]

The Gilded Age. The American Civil War ended over a decade ago and the self inflicted wounds of the nation are starting to heal, where they are not being torn open or new ones cut. The Great Transcontinental Railroad has connected East Coast to West Coast and lesser tracks spider across the plains and the west. Dust rises over the cattle trails, as millions of beasts are driven north and east, to feed the need for beef in booming cities. Gold has been discovered in the Black Hills, setting off gold rush and a war. But there is another war going on, the Bone Wars or the Great Dinosaur Rush as some might call it.

Paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh of the Peabody Museum of Natural History and Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia are in a heated rivalry. They both spend money like water to get their hands on fossils from the rich bone beds of the Great Plains. Both of them have dropped to using underhanded methods to try to outdo the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and even the destruction of bones. Each scientist also sought to ruin his rival's reputation and cut off his funding, using attacks in scientific publications. These two men are racing down a path, which will lead to financial and social ruined but will discover more than a hundred thirty six new species of dinosaur.

However, that is in the future.

In the spring of 1878, a letter arrives on the desk of Professor Marsh, detailing the account of a school teacher turned prospector in the northern Black Hills. According to this man, he found a broad, deep valley, with a narrow entrance, filled with many saurian bones. Included was a map, marking the spot, where the valley was to be found. Marsh, not one for field work, sends out a telegram, instructing one of his agents to ready an expedition to the valley and sends copies of the map by rail.

While recruiting the proper or as close as they get in the west, scientific minds for the expedition, Marsh’s agent dispatches an advance party to locate the valley and set up a proper base camp, along with a cache of food and other supplies. The man chosen to lead this party is Karl Larsson, soldier, army scout and buffalo hunter. His instructions are to head to the town of Deadwood and recruit enough frontiersmen and camp hands to blaze a trail to the isolated valley and keep that trail safe from animal attacks or rogue indians.

To Karl, that means he needs to find more hunters, scouts, surveyors, wagoneers, cooks and washers, at least one doctor (or someone who knows at least a little healing) and a few prostitutes, if anything to keep the other men from bothering any more honest women in the camp. All the better, if some of these men and women, can combine those skills together, if only to stretch out the gold, silver and greenbacks he was given as an advance payment for the company. The supplies would be paid for and awaiting him at Deadwood, if they hadn’t been stolen when he reached the rather lawless town.

Several weeks before the arrival of the scientific minds and the larger work party, Larsson’s expedition heads out, never knowing they will find far more than bones in the valley.

So, plot wise, the story will follow this Larsson's party to the valley, where they will be trapped, after some of Cope's men, destroy the entrance. In the valley, which is kept warm and snow free throughout the winter by hot springs, they will find not only the bones they were sent to collect but living breathing dinosaurs. Not the modern, scientifically correct dinosaur but the reptilian kind. While trying to survive and escape, the party will find that the valley isn't the only home of the dinosaurs but is an entrance to an underground cavern, filled with primordial life. Those creatures they struggled with on the surface, were merely those who accidentally wondered out. But the way to freedom, may just lay on the other side of the cavern.


Character Sheet

Code Select Expand

[b]Player:[/b]

[b]Name:[/b]

[b]Gender:[/b]

[b]Age:[/b]

[b]Profession:[/b]

[b]Languages:[/b] (spoken or understood)

[b]Sexual Preference:[/b]

[b]Appearance:[/b] (picture is fine but please add a written description)

[b]Gear:[/b] (weapons, tools, accessories)

[b]Backstory:[/b]


Current Cast

Karl Larsson

Player: IrishWolf

Name: Karl Larsson

Gender: Male

Age: 33

Profession: Army Scout, Buffalo hunter, Party Leader

Languages: Swedish, German, English, Crow, Lakota

Sexual Preference: Hetero, dominate

Appearance:

Karl is fairly tall, standing at five feet, ten inches, with the hard, lean frame of a man spending most of his time in the saddle or in the wilderness. His skin was fair but is now weathered by the sun. His light brown hair is cut short, like the beard on his face. Grey eyes stare over his straight nose. He can normally be found wearing denim trousers, a checkered shirt and a buckskin jacket, with a battered black slouch hat and leather boots.

Gear: a dark bay Morgan stallion, Sharps Model 1874 rifle chambered in .50-90, Smith & Wesson 1875 No. 3 second model “Schofield” revolver in .45 short colt, Green River knife, welt stone, Diamond matches, box of cigars, gun cleaning kit (brass bristle brush, neatsfoot oil compound, small screwdriver), saddle, saddle bags, bedroll, bar of soap, tin cup, plate, folding fork knife and spoon, spare shirt, his old army shell jacket and forage cap

Backstory: Karl’s parents immigrate to the United States from Sweden and settled in Illinois, among other immigrants from Sweden and the German Confederation. They would go on to have eight children, six of whom survived to adulthood and of which Karl is in the middle. He didn’t speak english until he was ten years old and his father started taking him into ‘city’, to help him load up on things they couldn’t get in the small farming community they lived in. Like the other children, he spoke his parent’s native tongue at home and German with the neighbors. He did learn to speak english rather well, along with a decent ability to read and write. 

In 1861, with the outbreak of the American Civil War, seventeen year old Karl would lie about his age and enlist in the 8th Regiment Illinois Volunteer Cavalry. He would see action in uncounted skirmishes and nine major battles, including Antietam, Fredericksburg, Brandy Station and Gettysburg. He would acquire several minor wounds and nearly die of typhus in 1862. At the end of the war, he would join his follows in the regiment in the search for John Wilkes Booth, before the 8th was reassigned as President Lincoln's honor guard while he lay in state.

Mustering out in July of 1865, he returned home but found farm life to be unfulfilling. In the spring of 1866, he bought a Morgan stallion and rode west. Over the next twelve years, he would spend his winters hunting buffalo and the summers doing any kind of work he could. He would often sign up as a scout for the US Army and would partake in the Great Sioux War, often riding with Crow warriors, from whom he would learn their language, along with a limited understanding of Lakota.

Karl met Othniel Marsh back in 1872, when he signed up as an assistant on one of the rare time the professor was out in the field. He served as a guard and provided the camp with fresh meat. He also helped out in a few other expeditions, gladly taking Marsh’s money, which was why he was chosen to lead the advance party to the valley.

Honor "Eve" Taylor

Player: RedPhoenix

Name: Honor Taylor (goes by her stage name "Eve")

Gender: Cisfemale

Age: 28

Profession: Burlesque Dancer

Languages: English, French (academic, incomplete), Lakota (conversational)

Sexual Preference: Omni

Appearance: Eve

Gear: Some vaguely appropriate clothing, some very inappropriate clothing, beauty supplies, hygiene needs, her personal journal. Her only weapon is a nice sharp knife that can be easily hidden in most of her outfits.

Backstory:

Honor is the daughter of a maidservant and a rogue who stole his mother's heart and was never seen again. Her mother, Prudence, was a cherished employee of Professor Jupiter Longfellow, a renowned academic in the hard sciences in the city of Philadelphia. The scandal of a child without a father was hushed up and Prudence was able to keep her job, and have Honor with her at work. Honor was at first thought to be a well-behaved child as she was quiet, and nobody paid attention to the fact that she was reading anything she could get her hands on. This curiosity got the better of her on several occasions, but she was able to play the charming child and talk her way out of questions such as why was she mixing together chemicals in the Professor's home lab, or where exactly did she read the phrase 'new sauropod'. The professor even indulged her questions in his idle time and she ended up with an informal education that would rival that of the most prestigious preparatory academies in the land, while her mother bewailed what a tomgirl and smart-aleck she was raising and prayed that she would meet a man who would settle her down.

However, even with the Professor's recommendation, Honor was rejected from every university she applied to. The idea of a woman interested in chemistry and biology was a novel concept that the institutions were prepared to consider, but a woman interested in science who had no money? Well, that was the stuff of science fiction. And so the pressure from her mother to marry and start a family increased, as did Honor's resistance, and eventually the two had a huge fight and falling out that saw Honor storming off into the night, ironically to accept a marriage proposal.

Unfortunately for Captain Thaddeus Birch, while his marriage proposal may have been in earnest the only part that Honor had been interested in was that he was being sent to San Francisco. And so the two boarded a train together to set off for their new life. She gave it a try, she did, but it soon became clear that the Captain wasn't interested in a wife who read or had thoughts of her own or time to do anything not involving babies. Halfway there Honor couldn't take it anymore and changed her plan from ditching him in San Francisco to ditching him at the next stop. Thus, she ended up in Deadwood. Expecting a dismal backwater, Honor was surprised at how lively the town was. What with the outlaws, the gold mining, the constant movement of goods across the country, and all of the prospecting going on, the place was thriving! She made a decision at this point to stop trying to wedge herself into a man's world that didn't want to take her seriously, and start making money off of it. Thus she joined the burlesque.

A year or so later, under the stage name Eve "the only woman you'll ever need" she is considered one of the top attractions in town and often enjoys the attentions of very high paying high bidders. When she heard about the expedition stocking up, her curiosity and need for a break from her normal routine caused her to seek it out. She settled for a price far less than she'd normally take, although higher than perhaps the expedition had expected to pay (a good compromise leaving everyone unhappy) and packed up for the trip.

Dr. Mayson Gate

Player: Lux89

Name: Dr. Mayson Gate

Gender: Male

Age: 35

Profession: Surveyor, Cook, Army Surgeon

Languages: English, Latin, Civil War slangs

Sexual Preference: Gay

Appearance: His pale corn-straw colored hair makes people think he is a farmer, and he does look like he has the quiet humor of one too. His warm whiskey-colored eyes are sad, inviting, squinting, and angered with something to prove. His gentle tired-of-your-shit face is stubbly, lightly mustached. Crossing his arms when really he's holding himself, he tries to impress others with a manly and confident gait but instead Mayson ends up seeming a boyish try-hard slightly uncomfortable in his own skin. He keeps his hands mostly to himself and washes them religiously. The word 'germophobe' did not exist until a year from now, coined by William A. Hammond in 1879 when describing mysophobia, compulsive hand washing, so nothing now explained the dread that sank in his chest. You could sense his jitteriness and recoiling to keep distance. Thick neck and strong shoulders. Athletic; his barreled arms suggest he could be a man of baseball, boxing, log-sawing, and horseback riding. Has legs of a dancer or swimmer. Big feet that he sometimes trips over.

Gear: Volcanic pocket pistol, .31 caliber, 40 bullets, soap, towel rags, Civil War Surgeon's Chest including cleaned tools such as: vials of chloroformum, ether, and "Spiritus Frumenti" aka whiskey used for anesthesia, a file, pick, tweezer, scissors, forceps, extractor, bone saw, spiral tourniquet, variety of sized knives, tenaculum which is used in amputations for pulling the arteries out from the stump so that they could be tied off, a canteen of quinine which is essential in treating malaria, a bottle of Dover's Powder, a mix of opium and ipecac that is used to relieve pain and induce sweating, and last but not least, a black handkerchief and reading glasses.

Civil War Surgeon's Chest

Volcanic Pocket Pistol

Backstory: In the 1860's, Mayson Gate had to leave his sister Charlotte with their sickly mother alone on their barren Nebraskan farm to join the war for some money. At that year, both the Union and Confederate were extremely understaffed and with the growing numbers of wounded soldiers, both sides began taking anyone who considered themselves a doctor. Preferring the Union, Mayson had zero experience with anything as such, but because of his afflicted mother, he decided he would give it his all and learn something out of it. He was fortunate to borrow a nurse's military surgery manual written by Dr. Samuel Gress, which would be the guide to performing life-saving emergency operations. Dr. Mayson Gate was there, humble and diligent in the background when Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman won victories at Shiloh and Vicksburg.

All his amputee patients survived their operations but died from a variety of diseases including dysentery, typhoid, malaria, yellow fever, small pox, syphilis, and tuberculosis and even poisoning from mercury treatment. No one thought of a need to wash hands or paraphernalia between surgeries. To them, pus was a good sign when in truth it was a sign of infection. While reasonable and responsible physicians advocated bloodletting, purging, and blistering, some physicians developed alcoholism from abusing their alcohol supply.

To make matters worse, he watched hundreds of ambulances arrive, leading some surgeons to overwork themselves to death. Finally, it was recently that hospitals took notice that washing bandages in hot, soapy water in order to reuse them caused infection rates to decrease unlike other hospitals that weren’t doing it. Since this correlation, sanitation was in motion. The war gave rise to ambulatory evacuation, not seen prior to the 1860's. It was dire that the wounded be carried off the battlefields to a nearby station, attended to before being taken to a hospital. The war was soon over by five years later. Having had enough of that life and feeling rather bold with his expertise, Dr. Mayson Gate hastily returned home to the farm. Only there, he discovered Charlotte and his mother had died from disease, and the farm was already taken.

While he was greatly saddened, he had seen too much to dwell in a story he knew was over. There were no hospital corps either until 1913, so until the 1870's, Dr. Mayson Gate roamed the Midwest as a family doctor, caretaking, cooking, and even traveling and camping with his patients at their request. Some were surveyors and cooks who taught him much, and they learned Civil War medicine in return.

He settled in Deadwood, South Dakota in 1874 and remained in practice by spring 1878. When approached with the expedition to go fossil hunting before the whole world does and that it could be possibly slightly dangerous not like a civil war at all, why, the idea was strikingly charming!

How could Dr. Mayson Gate possibly turn Karl Larsson down?

Henrietta "Henry" Cabot

Player: MBBlack

Name: Henrietta "Henry" Cabot

Gender: Female (but disguised as male)

Age: 22

Profession:  Grad-Student

Languages: (spoken or understood): English, French, Latin (academic)

Sexual Preference: Currently a virgin, though ... open minded.

Appearance:  Blonde and blue-eyed, Henrietta has a sunny smile, and the sort of soft features that hint at an aristocratic background. While short and slim, she's still managed to take care of herself through a variety of 'ladies exercises,' such as riding and archery. Not that one would get much opportunity to see said toned figure, as when dressed as "Henry," she opts towards clothing that conceals her figure (for obvious reasons). Eager and enthusiastic, "Henry" is a quintessential city-slicker (those glasses certainly don't help), though with the occasional bit of practical knowledge to back things up ...

Gear: (weapons, tools, accessories): Glasses, men's clothing, good boots, Archeology tools, pencil, journal, big knife, Lemat Cavalry Revolver w/ ammunition, bedroll, Official-Looking Letter from Dr. Marsh, envelope of cash sewn into the inside of her jacket.

Backstory:   The Connecticut Cabots, a family of some minor repute, are a picture of the Gilded Age dream. A large house, a comfortable mercantile business, and so on. They have two children-- Elijah, a the eldest, had a scholarly (if sickly) disposition, while his younger sister Henrietta was fortunate enough to have a more robust constitution-- and a mind just as sharp as her brother's. Henrietta spent her childhood alternating between reading over her older (but only by a year and a month!) brother's shoulder, and amusing herself with various outdoor pastimes.

When Elijah went to study at Yale, Henrietta followed-- ostensibly to care for him should he be taken by another consumptive episode. However, in doing so, Henrietta took in the same studies that he did-- including classes from Dr. Marsh himself. Elijah rather distinguished himself in the field of paleontology, to boot, to the point where Dr. Marsh offered him a position on this new expedition.

Unfortunately, before he could take up such an offer, Elijah came down with another of his 'episodes,' ... at which point he and Henrietta hatched a mad plan. Dressed in her brother's clothes, and bearing Dr. Marsh's letter of recommendation for one of his star students, "Mr. Cabot," Henrietta has rushed westward on this grand adventure! Which may prove more dangerous than those dime novels might suggest, but that's what she brought that gun for, isn't it?

[RedPhoenix]

I love this concept.

Life is too crazy to firmly commit to anything but I'm definitely interested in the setup.

[lux89]

Same! I stake flag of interest! Will mull over a character today.

[IrishWolf]

I can't wait to see what come up with

[RedPhoenix]

Player: RedPhoenix

Name: Honor Taylor (goes by her stage name "Eve")

Gender: Cisfemale

Age: 28

Profession: Burlesque Dancer

Languages: English, French (academic, incomplete), Lakota (conversational)

Sexual Preference: Omni

Appearance: Eve

Gear: Some vaguely appropriate clothing, some very inappropriate clothing, beauty supplies, hygiene needs, her personal journal. Her only weapon is a nice sharp knife that can be easily hidden in most of her outfits.

Backstory:

Honor is the daughter of a maidservant and a rogue who stole her mother's heart and was never seen again. Her mother, Prudence, was a cherished employee of Professor Jupiter Longfellow, a renowned academic in the hard sciences in the city of Philadelphia. The scandal of a child without a father was hushed up and Prudence was able to keep her job, and have Honor with her at work. Honor was at first thought to be a well-behaved child as she was quiet, and nobody paid attention to the fact that she was reading anything she could get her hands on. This curiosity got the better of her on several occasions, but she was able to play the charming child and talk her way out of questions such as why was she mixing together chemicals in the Professor's home lab, or where exactly did she read the phrase 'new sauropod'. The professor even indulged her questions in his idle time and she ended up with an informal education that would rival that of the most prestigious preparatory academies in the land, while her mother bewailed what a tomgirl and smart-aleck she was raising and prayed that she would meet a man who would settle her down.

However, even with the Professor's recommendation, Honor was rejected from every university she applied to. The idea of a woman interested in chemistry and biology was a novel concept that the institutions were prepared to consider, but a woman interested in science who had no money? Well, that was the stuff of science fiction. And so the pressure from her mother to marry and start a family increased, as did Honor's resistance, and eventually the two had a huge fight and falling out that saw Honor storming off into the night, ironically to accept a marriage proposal.

Unfortunately for Captain Thaddeus Birch, while his marriage proposal may have been in earnest the only part that Honor had been interested in was that he was being sent to San Francisco. And so the two boarded a train together to set off for their new life. She gave it a try, she did, but it soon became clear that the Captain wasn't interested in a wife who read or had thoughts of her own or time to do anything not involving babies. Halfway there Honor couldn't take it anymore and changed her plan from ditching him in San Francisco to ditching him at the next stop. Thus, she ended up in Deadwood. Expecting a dismal backwater, Honor was surprised at how lively the town was. What with the outlaws, the gold mining, the constant movement of goods across the country, and all of the prospecting going on, the place was thriving! She made a decision at this point to stop trying to wedge herself into a man's world that didn't want to take her seriously, and start making money off of it. Thus she joined the burlesque.

A year or so later, under the stage name Eve "the only woman you'll ever need" she is considered one of the top attractions in town and often enjoys the attentions of very high paying high bidders. When she heard about the expedition stocking up, her curiosity and need for a break from her normal routine caused her to seek it out. She settled for a price far less than she'd normally take, although higher than perhaps the expedition had expected to pay (a good compromise leaving everyone unhappy) and packed up for the trip.

[IrishWolf]

Well the expedition will not lack for entertainment it seems and I think Eve will find plenty to sate her curiosity.

I will add her to the caste

[lux89]

Player: Lux89

Name: Dr. Mayson Gate

Gender: Male

Age: 35

Profession: Surveyor, Cook, Army Surgeon

Languages: English, Latin, Civil War slangs

Sexual Preference: Gay

Appearance: His pale corn-straw colored hair makes people think he is a farmer, and he does look like he has the quiet humor of one too. His warm whiskey-colored eyes are sad, inviting, squinting, and angered with something to prove. His gentle tired-of-your-shit face is stubbly, lightly mustached. Crossing his arms when really he's holding himself, he tries to impress others with a manly and confident gait but instead Mayson ends up seeming a boyish try-hard slightly uncomfortable in his own skin. He keeps his hands mostly to himself and washes them religiously. The word 'germophobe' did not exist until a year from now, coined by William A. Hammond in 1879 when describing mysophobia, compulsive hand washing, so nothing now explained the dread that sank in his chest. You could sense his jitteriness and recoiling to keep distance. Thick neck and strong shoulders. Athletic; his barreled arms suggest he could be a man of baseball, boxing, log-sawing, and horseback riding. Has legs of a dancer or swimmer. Big feet that he sometimes trips over.

Gear: Volcanic pocket pistol, .31 caliber, 40 bullets, soap, towel rags, Civil War Surgeon's Chest including cleaned tools such as: vials of chloroformum, ether, and "Spiritus Frumenti" aka whiskey used for anesthesia, a file, pick, tweezer, scissors, forceps, extractor, bone saw, spiral tourniquet, variety of sized knives, tenaculum which is used in amputations for pulling the arteries out from the stump so that they could be tied off, a canteen of quinine which is essential in treating malaria, a bottle of Dover's Powder, a mix of opium and ipecac that is used to relieve pain and induce sweating, and last but not least, a black handkerchief and reading glasses.

Civil War Surgeon's Chest

Volcanic Pocket Pistol

Backstory: In the 1860's, Mayson Gate had to leave his sister Charlotte with their sickly mother alone on their barren Nebraskan farm to join the war for some money. At that year, both the Union and Confederate were extremely understaffed and with the growing numbers of wounded soldiers, both sides began taking anyone who considered themselves a doctor. Preferring the Union, Mayson had zero experience with anything as such, but because of his afflicted mother, he decided he would give it his all and learn something out of it. He was fortunate to borrow a nurse's military surgery manual written by Dr. Samuel Gress, which would be the guide to performing life-saving emergency operations. Dr. Mayson Gate was there, humble and diligent in the background when Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman won victories at Shiloh and Vicksburg.

All his amputee patients survived their operations but died from a variety of diseases including dysentery, typhoid, malaria, yellow fever, small pox, syphilis, and tuberculosis and even poisoning from mercury treatment. No one thought of a need to wash hands or paraphernalia between surgeries. To them, pus was a good sign when in truth it was a sign of infection. While reasonable and responsible physicians advocated bloodletting, purging, and blistering, some physicians developed alcoholism from abusing their alcohol supply.

To make matters worse, he watched hundreds of ambulances arrive, leading some surgeons to overwork themselves to death. Finally, it was recently that hospitals took notice that washing bandages in hot, soapy water in order to reuse them caused infection rates to decrease unlike other hospitals that weren’t doing it. Since this correlation, sanitation was in motion. The war gave rise to ambulatory evacuation, not seen prior to the 1860's. It was dire that the wounded be carried off the battlefields to a nearby station, attended to before being taken to a hospital. The war was soon over by five years later. Having had enough of that life and feeling rather bold with his expertise, Dr. Mayson Gate hastily returned home to the farm. Only there, he discovered Charlotte and his mother had died from disease, and the farm was already taken.

While he was greatly saddened, he had seen too much to dwell in a story he knew was over. There were no hospital corps either until 1913, so until the 1870's, Dr. Mayson Gate roamed the Midwest as a family doctor, caretaking, cooking, and even traveling and camping with his patients at their request. Some were surveyors and cooks who taught him much, and they learned Civil War medicine in return.

He settled in Deadwood, South Dakota in 1874 and remained in practice by spring 1878. When approached with the expedition to go fossil hunting before the whole world does and that it could be possibly slightly dangerous not like a civil war at all, why, the idea was strikingly charming!

How could Dr. Mayson Gate possibly turn Karl Larsson down?

[IrishWolf]

I like the good doctor and he has been added to the list.

Hopefully we will get another character or two but if anything I will get us started sunday evening/some point monday

[lux89]

Yays! Can't wait to take care of those nasty dinosaur bites and goodness grief, will there be giant disease-carrying mosquitoes?
Dr. Mayson Gate is ON it. May his party be in complete fitness and health. *makes a holy cross gesture, mutters Amen, thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers*

[RedPhoenix]

A few more good characters and this could be lots of fun. :)

[IrishWolf]

Okay, a little later then I planned but sunday was rather rough. We now have an In Character Thread and an Out of Character thread

Recruitment is still open!

[lux89]

That's very understandable, IrishWolf!
Yes, this will make an interesting team and expedition ~

[AmandaShow]

Wow, how'd I miss this? haha Definitely interested!

[IrishWolf]

We'd love to have you join us!

[RedPhoenix]

Yessss!

[MBBlack]

Heh. "Bone Wars."

But hi!

So, is this still recruiting? As I'd be happy to play a prim & proper lady academic! Or maybe a leather-bikini-clad jungle girl? Or a prim & proper lady academic TURNED leather-bikini-clad jungle girl?

Just thought I'd check in! 

[IrishWolf]

We are very much still recruiting.

While I am a fan of the leather-bikini-clad jungle girl from the outset (thank you Frank Frazetta), I think the prim & proper lady academic turning into a leather-bikini-clad jungle girl might be the best route.

Now that said, academics are not among those that Karl has been recruiting for his part of the expedition but I do see three ways she could be joining the party.

1. Professor Marsh or his agents hired her for the second party but she just couldn't wait and showed up early. Rather unlikely given the time but its a weird west story with living dinos, so we can have a bit of wiggle room with reality.

2. She heard about the map and Marsh's sending men to a valley rich in saurian bones, much like Cope has. She shows up to join the first party with forged paperwork claiming that Marsh hired her, just to get her own chance to study the fossils before the male academics arrive and she has to leave.

3. She has heard about the expedition and has invited herself to go along. She'll be joining the party wither Karl likes it or not, even if she has to just follow them into the wilderness.

[MBBlack]

Alright, I think I've got an idea ...

Player: MBBlack

Name: Henrietta "Henry" Cabot

Gender: Female (but disguised as male)

Age: 22

Profession:  Grad-Student

Languages: (spoken or understood): English, French, Latin (academic)

Sexual Preference: Currently a virgin, though ... open minded.

Appearance:  Blonde and blue-eyed, Henrietta has a sunny smile, and the sort of soft features that hint at an aristocratic background. While short and slim, she's still managed to take care of herself through a variety of 'ladies exercises,' such as riding and archery. Not that one would get much opportunity to see said toned figure, as when dressed as "Henry," she opts towards clothing that conceals her figure (for obvious reasons). Eager and enthusiastic, "Henry" is a quintessential city-slicker (those glasses certainly don't help), though with the occasional bit of practical knowledge to back things up ...

Gear: (weapons, tools, accessories): Glasses, men's clothing, good boots, Archeology tools, pencil, journal, big knife, Lemat Cavalry Revolver w/ ammunition, bedroll, Official-Looking Letter from Dr. Marsh, envelope of cash sewn into the inside of her jacket.

Backstory:   The Connecticut Cabots, a family of some minor repute, are a picture of the Gilded Age dream. A large house, a comfortable mercantile business, and so on. They have two children-- Elijah, a the eldest, had a scholarly (if sickly) disposition, while his younger sister Henrietta was fortunate enough to have a more robust constitution-- and a mind just as sharp as her brother's. Henrietta spent her childhood alternating between reading over her older (but only by a year and a month!) brother's shoulder, and amusing herself with various outdoor pastimes.

When Elijah went to study at Yale, Henrietta followed-- ostensibly to care for him should he be taken by another consumptive episode. However, in doing so, Henrietta took in the same studies that he did-- including classes from Dr. Marsh himself. Elijah rather distinguished himself in the field of paleontology, to boot, to the point where Dr. Marsh offered him a position on this new expedition.

Unfortunately, before he could take up such an offer, Elijah came down with another of his 'episodes,' ... at which point he and Henrietta hatched a mad plan. Dressed in her brother's clothes, and bearing Dr. Marsh's letter of recommendation for one of his star students, "Mr. Cabot," Henrietta has rushed westward on this grand adventure! Which may prove more dangerous than those dime novels might suggest, but that's what she brought that gun for, isn't it?

[IrishWolf]

Very interesting! I rather like Henrietta. I will had her to the list, feel free to join us over in the In Character Thread and an Out of Character thread threads