David Schreiber ||'''Str''' || 7 || ||'''Dex''' || 4 || ||'''Int''' || 18 || ||'''Con''' || 7 || ||'''App''' || 10 || ||'''Pow''' || 17 || ||'''Siz''' || 13 || ||'''Edu '''|| 18 || Born 1893 – Boston, MA David is currently a minor, but reasonably successful merchant, being part-owner of the 141ft coastal schooner, the ''Barinthus'', in an equal share with his older brother Eric, the ship's Captain. David manages the local side of the business, which ships whatever bulk cargos are available up and down the Eastern seaboard of the US, typically coal, bricks or lumber. Increasing competition from the railways and steam-tugs is starting to make life more difficult, but trade is still fairly good. The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 requires trade between states to only use US built, owned, and manned ships; which has given the business a needed boost. The value of the schooner is about $30,000; it was mostly financed by a trust fund left by grandparents for the explicit purpose of setting up a new business. He is from a long-established New England Jewish family, and along with most of his family follows the Reform movement. David is tall but slightly built, slim and dreadfully clumsy. He is also ferociously intelligent, but becomes frustrated when he gets confused over words and fails at attempting to explain himself to others. Now he realises that he has a condition doctors call “congenital maladroitness”, as a child he was just clumsy and awkward. He initially struggled greatly at schooling, but an inspired Rabbi recognising his natural ability and managed to help him overcome his disabilities. He was educated at Brown University, after failing to get a place at Harvard when a particularly embarrassing interview where the nervousness all but removed his ability to speak coherently. He studied sociology under the well known Professor Lester Frank Ward. After graduating, he decided to stay in Providence, partly to escape his somewhat overbearing family, but also because his brother persuaded him to invest his half of the trust fund in the shipping business. <<< Just to make sure you know, Unity has it's very own JenkinUniversity, comparable to Brown in most ways. The two share a (mostly) friendly rivalry (although occasionally delinquent elements do things such as setting fire to trees on the way back from football matches). It's not a problem for David to have been to Brown, but I just wanted to make sure you were aware of the background. -- RobHague >>> <<< I was aware of it, I guessed a sort of Cambridge/Oxford thing might be going on. Rivals in many ways, but with a lot of academics moving from one place to another. I wanted David to be coming into Unity as something of an outsider, but from a similar background. -- AndrewMobbs >>> <<< I guessed that might be it; sounds good. -- RobHague >>> He has recently come to dislike the urban expansion of Providence and decided to move to a quieter town, but still needs to live somewhere with good communication and transport to the city, so has chosen Unity. He is becoming bored with business and toying with a return to an academic life. He has hobbies of geology and palaeontology, keeping up to date with current theories spending spare time wondering the local shale cliffs looking for interesting fossils. He has become interested in the causes of ice ages, having seen the dramatic effects on the local landscape and reading about Milankovitch's recent theories on astronomic causes for them. <<< Does he know about TheUnitySociety? (AaronCohen at BethAchdusSynagogue might tell him about the club...) If so, has he found a sponsor yet? -- SimonBooth >>> <<< Yes, being told about the society at the synagogue would work. Regardless, he's coming to a new town so would want to meet a group of intelligent people both to socialise and to help his hobbies so would be keen to get involved. I don't know enough about the structure of the society to know how best to do that. -- AndrewMobbs >>> <<< Being sponsored by Aaron might work, although we'd need to come up with some reason that he'd hang around with the other PCs (aside from the old fallback, happening to be in the tea room when the Weird``Phone rings). If he's trying to get onto the Jenkin faculty, he could be cosying up to either RobertJohnson or AlsoudHassam, although their subject areas (English and Archaeology respectively) aren't particularly close to his. He ''may'' have helped out GrayImports in the past, but I get the impression that that's not his sort of thing. Equally, I guess he doesn't really hang out in the Unity art scene (ruling out Jack and Rebecca), at the station (Eric), unlicensed medical practices (Julius), or with TheMob (Bennito, but definitely ''not'' Lisa). Have I missed anyone? -- RobHague >>> <<< Aaron's not a member IIRC, so he wouldn't be a sponsor - looks like he's most likely to have introduced David to Robert or Alsoud. I guess since Tristan is in TheGreatestShowOnEarth and Steve isn't, it's probably going to be Alsoud. -- SimonBooth >>> <<< Just to confirm AaronCohen is not a member -- MikePitt >>> <<< I guess Archaeology is closer to Paleantology than English is. In any case, Aaron knows both of them, and is familiar with the club, so if he knew that David was looking to meet Jenkin people, plus find somewhere to socialise, it's plausible he'd have pointed him in their direction. I guess he could be introduced as a new probabationary member in the first scene of TheGreatestShowOnEarth, assuming you don't have anything else in mind. -- RobHague >>> <<< Sounds fine. I'll leave it up to the infinite imagination of SimonBooth to sort out the fine details. I'll try to turn up promptly this evening to work stuff out. -- AndrewMobbs >>> <<< Rob, you seem to have an impression that Robert is an English professor; he's not, he's an expert in Medieval European History...! -- [[SteveMcIntyre|Steve McIntyre]] >>> <<< Or we could resort to the dreaded NPC nomination. Someone unspecified in the geology department nominated him? -- MikePitt >>> He is thus far single, to the increasing dismay of his parents. He has a tenuous and somewhat distracted relationship with a woman, Deborah Spitz, in Boston, mostly carried out by correspondence. There's pressure from family to turn this into a marriage, but neither Deborah nor David are particularly interested. David sometimes suspects that they're both just maintaining a facade to keep their families from railroading them into an even less suitable match.