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BACKSTORY / DEETS
In the year 2018, humanity made first contact. Rather, they made contact with us in a manner far from peaceful. Their technology was beyond anything we'd ever seen, and their ruthlessness far surpassed anything we were prepared to handle. Humanity was subjugated in a matter of months; those who fought were slain. Those who complied were taken for processing. The remainder of humanity lives in rural areas on the outskirts of civilization. Collectively, they began to refer to themselves as the Judge - a conquering race that goes from life-bearing planet to life-bearing planet, weighing their crimes against their benefits and deciding whether or not they're worthy to keep the life they've been given. When a civilization fails that test (as Earth unsurprisingly did), the Judge takes up residence and begins to strip it of all of its precious materials. Metal, natural gas, mineral deposits, anything that can be harvested and used to enrich their war fleet is salvaged.
This process can take decades, and requires a lot of manual labor. Because they consider themselves a righteous, benevolent race they don't slaughter indiscriminately. Humans who submit are given two options - manual labor in a work camp, or voluntary suicide via what's been colloquially coined a suicide bus. Very few people know what that entails, as anyone who boards a bus isn't ever seen or heard from again. The Judge and its forces are drawn to areas rich in metal; they can detect anything larger than a sedan and systematically hunt it down. Unsurprisingly, larger cities are conquered first.
Those who survive in freedom do so in wooded areas, clustered in groups making due with what they can. Farming, looting, surviving, and if you're particularly brave, mounting a resistance to free the taken from the work camps they've been forcibly taken to.
Before all of this, Ian was an adjunct professor at Berkley, giving lectures on engineering in between jobs. When all hell broke loose, he was holding a god damn frozen coffee from Starbucks. A year later and he's more used to holding a gun, and he hasn't had coffee in longer than he can remember. Everyone he knew, everyone he loved, everyone he cared about died in the culling - or they're presumed dead, because it's nearly impossible to get a list of the names of people surviving in the work camps. The sad thing is there's nobody important enough to him that he'd risk breaking into one himself to find out.
He's taken up with a group of survivors outside of Crater Lake National Park, doing what he can to improve their day to day life without risking everything they've worked so hard to build. He can't say any of them are what he'd consider friends, but they've all bonded well enough to trust and respect each other. That's what matters.
→ ABRIDGED FACTS
• 34 Years Old
• 6'1" Tall, 176 lbs, lean
• Decent shot with a rifle
• Really misses good coffee
• Kind of a hipster
• Ravenclaw, Virgo, creative thinker
• Easy going, good natured, calm
→ ADDITIONAL INFO
m/m or m/f for shipping; negative cr OK, assumed cr okay with prior discussion, if playing on a meme that doesn't fit the world's backstory it will be assumed he is taken from pre-invasion and culling probably.
For AUs involving powers, urban fantasy, etc - Ian will have the power of matter creation. Essentially he can create something from nothing if he can visualize it in his mind - picture a rose slowly forming itself together as if drawing from the air around it. The limitations on this - he has to know something in order to create it. For instance, he can't create a book he hasn't read or the pages will just be blank. The larger and more complex an item is, the more difficult it is for him to make. He uses this gift often in engineering work, creating models or piece parts. If pressed he can also create entire machines if he intimately knows their inner workings, but frankly it's less exhausting just to make things by hand.