Name: Berne, Ruben
Gender: Male
Age: 37 (Born 23rd of April, 2488)
Birthplace: Far Isle, Outer Colonies
Appearance: Ruben's skin is tinged with an auburn perma-tan, paying deference to his Armenian mother without distinguishing him notably from a well-sunned Caucasian. Silvered wisps of helmet-mottled hair drape irreverently over his face, pressing, in patches, to his sweat-glistened brow ill-cooled by the haberdashery of his visor's vents. Ruben is customarily athletic, though his Olympian form is spoilt, somewhat, by blotched, ill-pigmented skin and copious freckles that can only have been a heritage of his Celtic past. In his armour, Ruben stands around a clumsy 6'1", having been a rank and file barrack-bound solider for much of his career, and a privileged pencil-pusher before that, his military experience has not afforded him the appearance of grace when standing in 80kg of vacuum sealed spacesuit.
Rank: Sergeant (Assigned through ONI's command structure)
Specialization: Translation, Flora Expert
Callsign: Ruben has not acquired a nickname as of yet, his surname "Berne" being sufficently snappy so as to serve as his diminutive form.
Psychological Analysis: Results of extensive ONI observation would suggest the operative in question is, at all times, motivated by an entrenched inferiority complex, perhaps the direct result of his being impressed as a young child and subsequent installation into a hostile civilian environment. The UNSC is, of course, culturally amorphous, but owing to his origin, the son of willing subjects of a rebellious and famously ill-fated colony, Ruben attempts anyway to present himself as a model, reactionary citizen of the inner colonies. Whilst it is unclear to what degree this is a front, Ruben becomes quickly angered when mention is made of the demise of his home-world, and seems often to present himself as that colony's "redeemer", proving to the world that those of his stock can excel both militarily and academically. Far from indulging in what seems to be a cultural norm among his age-group, political dissent, Ruben never misses an opportunity to speak to the superiority of home-world culture seeing as it graciously stepped in to raise him the wake of his destructive rebel parentage.
In addition, the general absence of parental figures in Ruben's upbringing has made him both extremely cynical of others, and at the same time, grasping at affection. Having been subjected to a strict military regime and a series of loveless foster-homes, Ruben generally distrusts the affections of others, finding making any form of emotional en-treatment to any other person to be exceptionally embarrassing, and scoffing at the attempts of others, despite himself. However, those who do show unexpected and unprompted affection can expect a degree of emotional dependency and jealousy. Within the confines of the military, however, Ruben's approach is entirely ideal.
It should be noted that Ruben's entire animus centres around his inherited guilt for Far Isle's rebellion, without any significant attachments to the inner colonies, his general "prove-it-to-the-world" attitude may suffer a shattering reversal were any remaining threads of the Far Isle insurrection to encounter him. A perfect agent to use against the Insurrectionists, it is important he make as little contact with the general population of contentious worlds as possible.
Military Background: Sgt. Ruben Berne, born to a mother and father of Armenian and Irish maritime origins, respectively, spent the first four years of his life on the fringes of Far Isle, a water-world colony with only a single city of perhaps only 700,000 inhabitants. The majority of Far Isle's inhabitants belonged to two petty classes - the subjects of the Amphora Agrarian and Maratime Conglomerate, a company sponsoring colonists with extensive experience in farming and fishing industries, and one which particularly appealed to the descendent of traditionalist subsistence communities, swallowed up by Earth's extensive conurbations - and the subjects of the UNSC sponsored IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), which sought to use the colony as an "Ark-World", and had lobbied the UEG for quite a significant sum of credits for the task. Regardless of these trivialities, the friction between the peoples of AAMC, who saw their agraian needs increasingly disregarded by the "intellectually aloof" UEG, and the IUCN fostered the circulation of insurrectionist political material within the AAMC's population.
In 2494, shortly after Ruben's 4th Birthday, elements of the insurrectionist sympathisers forcibly accessed a UNSC drydock, and, whilst much of the details are redacted, it can be inferred that the UNSC's subsequent deceleration of CODE: BANDERSNATCH, and razing of the colony, can have only been in response to attempts by these forces to break out of the planet's blockade and deliver warships to the greater insurrection.
Regardless, desperate to reshape the political narrative following the admittedly despotic destruction of an almost entirely defenceless colony, the UNSC deployed its medical corps to tend to the wounded, and used public funds to provide suitable upbringings to those orphaned in the blast. Of course, ONI recognises the need for model, inner-cultured outer-colonists to fill the ranks of the fight against the Insurrection, and therefore, a portion of the allotted humanitarian funds were plied into the
military upbringing of some of the rescued children - Ruben amongst these.
In this line, Ruben was installed on Earth, in a series of military schools and academies in the old United Kingdom, borded during the school-year and fostered with retired ONI agents in the summer months. By design, these agents generally possessed apathetic personality tenancies, or were themselves raised in strict and particularly unfeeling homes, in the hopes that this would illicit within Ruben a set of insecurities and dependencies that the military could subsequently fill.
Being an outer colonist, and of mixed race, it was deemed useful that Ruben be instructed in the usage of multiple languages. Whilst the core systems are dominated by the use of English, Spanish, Chinese, and French, the outer colonies have extensive eastern-European and Eurasian influence, with Hungarian, Slavic languages, and Armenian being common. Indeed, many of the UNSC's own battalions in these regions are far more familiar with these tongues than with any commonly used by the EDF or EEF. In this vogue, his military education, in addition to extensive seminars on command and battle-tactics, particularly with focus on Ruben's personal fascination, the illustrious Admiral Preston Cole, was tailored towards a degree-patch which might ingratiate him to the outer-colonists just enough that he may be a persuasive ambassador. Upon the completion of his studies, Ruben was not only a well-prepared ONI-enlistee, he was also a Master-degree Holder of Biological Engineering with Language Studies.
Following his graduation at the age of 25 as an ONI Sergeant, Ruben was then installed as a NCO at the barracks on Eridanus II, tasked with overseeing the mining colonies upon the moon Ehilend, which, at the time were considered particularly prone to sublimation by the Insurrectionist threat, commanding a group of locally sourced recruits. During the 2513 rebellion, Ruben distinguished himself when, as the barracks were assailed by requisitioned scorpion-class tanks, he was able to emphatically persuade his charges to not only refuse to turn over their arms and join their fellow colonists and families in rebellion, but to make a daring nightime assault to sabotage their artillery line, saving the ensuing UNSC reinforcements countless lives and expenses on the loss of military hardware.
Whilst Ruben, in this endevour, showed little athletic or combat excellence, it was this the ingenuity for this covert-op that tapped Ruben for the ODST corps, and as such was subsequently reassigned to the Epsilon Eridani Defence Fleet over Reach to undergo his training. It was here, in 2524, nearing the completion of his training, that a perhaps fortuitous event occurred that may secure the loyalty of Ruben against the insurrectionist threat - the destruction of the "
National Holiday" cruise liner over Reach, in full view of Ruben's practice-drop-pod.
Following graduation roughly 18-months ago, Ruben was reassigned to ONI's Red Glare Prowler and its ODST squad, bound for a frontier role in OPERATION: TREBUCHET.
Loadout:- BR-55 Battle Rifle
- M6C Magnum with HUD-linked Holographic Sights
- Combat Knife
- 4x Smoke Grenades
- Holo-Pad with multiple dictionaries and extensive translation software
- HUD with Closed Caption generating software to aid with translation
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