OOC Chatter

Introducing Dardan Kela, a 36 year engineer born in Cairo, of Albanian ethnicity.

A typical child of the European middle class, in British administered Egypt, Dardan went to university to study engineering, and graduated at 24. He saw duty in the Great War, as part of the British armies engineering corps, but was lucky to escape seeing heavy action. Companionable and friendly, Dardan often has a smile on his face, and is quick to laughter.

He considers himself a man of the modern age, and believes everything can be explained by science. But he does retain some of the religious beliefs, and superstitions, from his culture. This extends to his lucky monkey wrench, which he always carries around with him. People who notice this will often make fun of this affectation, which he laughs along with. But he still continues to carry his lucky wrench.

He has an equal interest in both history and the occult, and this in turn has led to him seeking work with the archaeological digs in Egypt and Libya. Dardan has a working knowledge of Arabic, something considered valuable to the many American and European nationals who run the digs.

His greatest hero is Giles Lambert, an reknowned British engineer who has worked extensively in Egypt and the middle east, and who was for a time involved in Howard Carter's famous dig. It is his ambition to be part of a dig which unearths a treasure as famous as Carter's. Not so much because of the treasure, but because of the approval he would hope to get from Lambert for Dardan's own engineering skills in making it possible.

Married with 3 young children, he spends most of his time working away from home. He takes his work seriously, and is always open to new knowledge. The times when he is not working in the field he will spend at home with his extended family. He will regularly visit with his fellow engineers in the various clubs, and in the British university at Cairo, learning of advances in the field. He has a love of animals, and some skill in handling them, so will often take European tourists on treks out to the pyramids on his small stable of camels.

Arthur is a British Foreign Correspondent working for the Pall Mall Gazette. He is small of stature and prematurely balding. The many missions abroad, mainly in the Mediterranean and Middle East, gave him a tanned complexion making him a bit of an oddity back home.

With the Pharaoh-mania that followed Carter's discovery of Tutankhamen's Tomb, his paper sent him to cover this new archaeological dig, to quench the readers' apparently insatiable thirst for all things Egyptian with his field reports.

Arthur was born into money and idolises his Mother Evelyn, from whom he caught the traveller's bug, having joined her in her Grand Tours since a young age. He enjoys the luxury hotel accommodations and foreign travels his profession grants, as well as the social perks of being part of a community of Western Expats abroad: the contacts, the partying, the gossip.

"Hello Mr Morecambe, a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Oh, mind that tunnel buttress, we are still trying to get those steady. All these tonnes of rock above our heads, makes me a little nervous, and I'm the engineer!"

"So your the group I'm looking for?" Alistair sighs looking around at them, "I write books about the future, mind you a terrible future but you should really read them, I'm here to research Hieroglyphs because that's what the New Order uses for secret communications. So I need to see some real writing according to my Editor."

Dardan enthusiastically shakes Baz's hand, somewhat taken aback by his outlandish foreign outfit.

He gives Alistair a confused look, that quickly turns into a smile. "Well, you came to the right place to study the writing of the ancient Egyptians, but I do not know of this New Order you speak of. Maybe they are in charge of the dig down by the south entrance?"