Name: Josiah Laurence
Gender: Male
Age: 37
Occupation: Captain

Physical Description: Laurence is about 6’1” and weighs – well, we’re not going to say a particular amount, suffice it to say he is Not Small. It’s not the finely sculpted physique of a movie star, just a good amount of solid muscle mass. Whatever his original coloring was, after a year of the outdoors life his complexion is a medium tan. His hair is about an inch too long and sun-touched brown in color, and he’s fortunate enough that it looks best a little tousled and unruly.
Laurence doesn’t hold much with appearances. He prefers neutral colors to bright ones. He pins his captain’s badge to a battered jacket that he wears over whatever – he considers the “official” uniform to be too awkward and stuffy for the temperate, often-capricious weather. Anyway, he’s just going to get mud and possibly alien goo all over it, and then he’d have to wash it. Again. (The stain from that one time with the carnivorous plant drool never came out, no matter what he did.) Even his near-constant traces of slightly ragged stubble seem to say less “I am trying to be rugged and sexy” and more “I forgot about shaving because I also forgot to sleep.”
This is not to say he is unattractive. If you’re fond of the waifish bishounen type, Laurence isn’t exactly up your alley. But he’s fairly handsome, in a vaguely old-fashioned strong jawline and good hair sort of way. His eyes are a soft, light honey-brown, nearly hazel, and could almost be called pretty.

Personality: Laurence is good at looking after people and things. He’s practically a professional looker-after. He attaches himself to something (in this case his crew) and gets very intense and Mama Grizzly Bear about any threats to that something. It’s both a strength and a weakness – his single-mindedness can get him into trouble, and makes it difficult for people to see that yes, he does have a sense of humor and a personal life, what is this madness. He's also not the "multiple deep secret layers" type -- not a lot of ulterior motive here. What you see is what you get. Still, the captain is a hard man to put down or turn aside, and what he lacks in guile he more than makes up for in sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.
While Laurence IS a captain, and has a strong voice and presence when he wants to -- he can bark out orders with the best of them -- he’s actually very soft-spoken by inclination. He also, strangely enough, still tends to phrase everything in the form of requests when possible. A little “please” and “thank you” never hurt anyone; he’d rather build solidarity and comfort than enforce his own position of power. If someone starts taking his phrasing as an excuse to ignore their assigned duties, then he’ll start cracking the whip again, but until that point, he’s more comfortable talking to people as equals. These are people he may have to spend the rest of his life with, after all, making enemies would be an exercise in futility. (Interestingly, Laurence has no idea that he is potentially intimidating. To anyone. If told, he would probably be completely dismayed.)
Laurence is thoughtful and articulate (he works very hard at it, actually – he worries about sounding uneducated). But despite his best efforts, he’s not “book-smart.” He appreciates that science exists and will save him from himself, and he’ll even do his best to pick up on bits and pieces of the jargon, but it’s the equivalent of reading the Wikipedia article versus earning the degree. On anything particularly complicated, he needs a translation into English, please. He’s very much aware that intellectually he does not hold a candle to Captain Footliver’s technical expertise, but it doesn’t bother him tremendously. He devotes himself to some of the more practical aspects that his partner may not notice or have mental "room" to deal with.

History: Laurence was, strictly speaking, born in the Free Nation of Texico. However, he and his parents were deported when he was still in elementary school, and sent back to California. To this day, Laurence retains about this level of Spanish fluency. His childhood wasn’t much to speak of -- he was just that one kid who always struggled. C’s in school no matter what he did, virtually invisible to his peers, never quite seemed to find his niche. This lasted until he was about seventeen, when he got sick of it, dropped out of high school, left home, and maneuvered his way into a job on a cargo ship headed for Mars. (It helped that he looked old for his age – they figured he was eighteen or nineteen. By the time they checked, he was already on Mars and off running.)
He was fortunate enough to run into Caroline Tiercel before he ran into any authorities that would deal with him more harshly. Her vessel, the Invictus, was originally one of the token defense fleet, set up by the Greenland-Iceland-WTF alliance just in case any of the lunatic fringe got bright ideas in regards to the new colony. Once it became clear that the threat was past (everyone had seen what happened to the Congo) the Invictus was repurposed into an all-purpose vessel. Tiercel took a shine to the scruffy, serious-faced kid, took him in, got the proper paperwork arranged for him, and eventually forced him (Laurence claims at gunpoint, which seems unlikely) to get his G.E.D. In the meantime, he and the rest of the crew handled everything from chasing Martian dust storms to escorting diplomatic missions to maintaining order on the burgeoning colony.
After the Invictus crew’s swift action in the evacuation of ’94, when the Mars colony sector 3 suffered a temporary hull breach, things began to look up. The ship and crew earned a formal commendation, and Tiercel’s name was cautiously brought up as a potential candidate for captaincy on the at-that-time-theoretical Peregrine mission. Her neutral status, not being beholden to any single government, would make her an ideal candidate to sidestep some of the international power struggle snafu. Bizarrely, as soon as it became common knowledge that she was a top contender, Tiercel suffered an unfortunate but non-fatal accident (under quite curious circumstances) that earned her a hospital trip and an early retirement.
Perhaps this is why no one ever bothered to inform her second-in-command that he was the next choice in line until it was already finalized and too late to do anything about it. Laurence was very surprised.
Laurence has only been in a position of any power as regards the Peregrine mission for a couple years. While he has plenty of experience in the way a ship runs, that experience is mostly with a much smaller vessel with a very different purpose, which may explain both his constant worry and his less-than-cocky attitude. Still, he’s got the chops to back up his rank, and surviving his first year on a completely alien planet has given him a confidence that he didn’t have before. He’s grown a long way from the kid he used to be. No wonder he couldn’t find his niche on Earth – apparently it’s out here with the tentacle aliens and the lunatic crew, under a binary-star sky.

Particular Skills: He’s got solid training with most of the common weapons aboard the Peregrine. Laurence also has basic survival skills and a knack for simple cooking.
Other Stuff: Laurence has an irrational fear and dislike of cyborgs. Cybernetic limbs are still a relatively new emergent technology on Earth, and he finds them extremely creepy and unnerving. There’s no real basis for this, it’s just a mild phobia.