Ules
Physical Description
26, tall, thin, frail. Stringy black hair that he wears in a relatively short cut. He has a cutting sense of fashion and always dresses well, favoring sleek, geometric patterns.
Ules often chatters about things that nobody cares about (celebrity gossip), or things that nobody understands(quantum physics). This tends to be really irritating.
History
You were raised to understand the paramount importance of fact, of rational thought, of cause and effect. Your father, the famous physicist Ailes, was a man dedicated to that trinity of scientific pursuit, who had forged rules and laws describing unbelivable phenomena. He had chained the unknown, by providing a framework in which its actions could be predicted.
He'd taught you from a young age - the only way to succeed in the world, as he had done, was to understand the myriad rules that science provided, and from there, to further refine them. To do so was to define reality and to constrain it. To do so was to gain dominance over the unknown.
You took quickly to your father's work; mathematics, stellar bodies, physics; your tutors and your father said you'd probably surpass him. You were not only a quick study in the basics; you saw things your father had done that hadn't been entirely accurate, and you took steps to amend his theories. Eventually, by the time you were 14, your father often came to you to double-check his logic. Your doubt often sent him back to the drawing board to work out the kinks; your acceptance often revealed a gleaming hint of pride in his eyes.
The one sphere in which your judgment was not considered was gambling. Your father had a passion for gambling, and a self-destructive one at that: Your mother had left him on account of the habit, and it was more or less what prevented his accrual of wealth. Ailes was convinced that there was a set of laws that governed probabilities, that with enough research, he could discover a way to predict with certainty the outcome of a random distribution of events.
This was a ridiculous idea; you'd told him that. You saw chance as just that: A common term for probability, which by definition was an uncertain thing. Your father didn't listen though. He didn't take your advice. He kept gambling, kept losing, kept getting poorer. Eventually, he lost you. Eventually, he lost his life.
Ailes had staked you, his own son, in a high-stakes hold-em game against a criminal named Tieg. When he lost, Tieg took you as a slave, and killed Ailes in a flash of anger - Your father's crusade against chance had stirred up something in this criminal's deranged head, and result was bloodshed.
You went to live with Tieg, and the life was brutal; he recognized your talent for "the numbers", and he had you running the books for his criminal empire. He treated you like dirt; you lived in a cell. Not a day went by that Tieg didn't remind you of how your father had died, and warn you "not to tempt fate." Your hatred for the man grew into a palpable thing.
Tieg had the same weakness as your father - he thought he could beat chance. He often enlisted your mathematical genius when he was playing, and that was all the opening you needed. After a few years, when you'd learned his tendencies, what buttons not to push, which modes of thought Tieg most agreed with, and after your advice had won him a substantial sum of money, he treated you like a right-hand man when he was out gaming.
One night, he was playing poker against a straight-laced man, someone named Gloval. Apparently he was a disgraced former captain of a famous jump-ship, fired for a mysterious reason. He didn't look interested in the game, which meant it was easier for you to feed bad advice to Tieg. He lost, in bits here and there, until so much money was on Gloval's side of the table it looked like he could buy his own ship. Tieg was furious. He had nothing left to raise with, and he didn't suspect you; all your advice had sounded good to his ears. He refused to leave so much of his pride and capital on the table, and raised with the only thing he had left: you. Gloval was somewhat shocked by this, and moved to withdraw from the game, but at this point Tieg wasn't having it.
"Don't tempt fate, 'Captain'," he said. "Sit down and finish the game." He'd pulled out a fearsome-looking firearm and was brandishing it dangerously.
Of course, Tieg had lost, and you'd gone to Gloval, along with a whole pile of money. The man was a bit flustered; he didn't know what to make of this bizarre situation. Worse, something in Tieg had broken, and the man was now a quivering, red-faced avatar of fury. He charged at Gloval; you pushed a chair to just the right position that he tumbled over it, crashing his head down into the floor with vicious speed.
The bystanders there, all they saw was a slave commit murder, and immediately called for your head. Gloval freed you from slavery on the spot, but that just spared you the death penalty. Braindance was what you got; that shit they pumped into you still makes your head hurt, and you say the strangest shit sometimes too.
A few years later, you got out. You got a job as a navigator, since you already knew pretty much everything you needed to about astrophysics, math, and whatnot. You spent a few more years at it, jumping from ship to ship, seeing the Gemini. Most captains got fed up with you after a few months; you chattered incessantly, and you never showed them any deference when they were obviously wrong.
You picked up gambling, against every fiber in your body - you figure it's a genetic predisposition. But the strangest thing happened when you gambled - you won! You guessed it was because you were always so fascinated with the people's expressions at the table that you almost always forgot about the game. You tested your theory, and you were right. Gambling wasn't about imposing limitations on chance; chance had nothing at all to do with it. Sure, your math helped you out, your ability to count cards and all that. But what really did it was that you could tell when someone was bluffing, you could tell when someone was in too deep, you could tell when someone had money that they were willing to piss away, and you were there to catch it when they did.
One day, you where whiling away some time between jobs on Patroclus, and you found yourself in the highest-stakes poker game you'd ever been in. This was serious business; you'd won so much money, you could barely see over the pile, and the guy across from you, Jass, kept buying in again and again. You thought for a minute that he was the mythical Money Spring, the person from which all tendered currency came fully formed, and that you had been chosen to distribute a substantial chunk of such currency amongst the finest alehouses on the planet.
Jass did run out of money, eventually; but he put something even crazier into the pot: the keys to his ship, the Golden Fleece. You won that too, and the man disappeared into the night (or maybe you imagined it?)
Well, now you had a ship. You went to go check it out, and it was broken. You didn't know what the hell you were going to do with a broken spaceship that looked like some kind of funny beetle, so you set up on Patroclus for a while with your winnings.
Then, just when you're about to leave, who should cross your path but Ivan Gloval...
