#test pilot was just a money bag you kept punching for coam

[kivaember]

Honestly Index Dunham gets essentially no appreciation, do you happen to have any thoughts on him?

me digging through old asks in my inbox fhhghgh

I DO. HAVE SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT HIM.

I hc that the RLF are split up into multiple factions and all of them have their own idea of what a liberated Rubicon looks like. You have those that follow Father Dolmayan that have a religious reverence/fear of the Coral, and want to stop its industrial use once they kick the corporations off Rubicon.

Meanwhile you have other factions that want to reclaim control over their planet and regain their position as the powerhouse in the galaxy - which means exploiting Coral, industrially and defensively. Where Index Dunham falls, I haven't quite decided yet, but from his arena profile which says he was a worker...

Well, either he is a very, VERY spry 70+ year old unaugmented human or there was still illicit Coral mining going on under the PCA's noses - which we know because of BAWS hiding a small Coral well in their arsenal. No doubt Dunham was probably working in one of those illegal mines, trying to harvest as much as possible to feed the mealworms which in turn feeds the dwindling Rubiconian population...

Then the corporations crashed the party, and they sniffed out every single small well that the Rubiconians were using, punting Dunham out of work but still in possession of a BASHO AC.

I don't think Dunham has, like, big ideological dreams like Flatwell and Dolmayan do, or even ambitions like Ziyi does as a Coral Warrior. I feel like Dunham is someone who just desperately wants to eke out a life where they're not scrounging for scraps they can't even survive off of. The only way he can do that now, though, is fighting corporate forces in a repurposed construction AC, and putting up a pretty decent fight considering. Guy tried to solo three ACs at once, and if you sit back and just let Iguazu and Volta handle it - yeah, they win eventually, but it's very, very slow going.

Dunham, in another life would've been an amazing AC pilot. In this one, someone who just wants these scavenging hyenas off his planet so his people can stop being starved to death.