The contents of this page are preliminary. They won't become canonical until the first version of the Tale of Tifa Walbatnuwa Siina is up. - DPH

Roger Kerr

I'm Roger Kerr, the creator of this website. For those of you who are interested, this page contains a history of how I got to be on Umuto in the first place.

I was born in Ulónnuvill, Vermont in the year 2358. I was trained as a linguist by the University of Bueno Aires (although in Southern Africa, not Argentina) and began work for the Grandsire Institute studying Icetalk, an Icelandic/English creole.

Then, in 2383, the gladifers arrived.

I find that young adults today, even though they were children during First Contact, have no idea how greatly this affected every aspect of academia and science. Suddenly what had been the entire extent of human knowledge in a field became just a small corner of it. Especially in fields like History, Linguistics, and Biology, but even in Physics and Mathematics, suddenly we were all town school children, just learning how much there is to be learned.

One effect of this was that it suddenly became easy, in fact hard to avoid, becoming the human species' primary expert in some area. You could, for instance, start reading the output of some literary movement which flourished on one of the lesser known colonial gladifer planets thousands of years ago and you would soon know more than any other human about a subject that a whole community of gladifers devote their lives to.

Like every other linguist at the time, I applied to the Unified Human Representative Committee to study Gladilatian. To my surprise, I was chosen. The reason they chose me, who had much less qualifications than a lot of applicants who were passed over, was that I had a knack for pronouncing gladifer phones. Keep in mind that this was not only before there were automatic translators between Gladilatian and any human language, but before the Capetown Mapping was invented, or even thought of.

So in 2384, at the age of twenty-six, I crossed a port for the first time and found myself living among aliens I hadn't known existed a couple years earlier. Once I got up to speed in Gladilatian (no human was really an expert in those days) I was employed as a translator, working for Jerry Montilla, whose claim to fame was being the first to describe Gladilatian alphabetization (which should give you some idea how young the field was then).

Then, in 2385, Jerry asked me if I wanted to accompany him on an expedition to Umuto, home planet of the asiit. At that point I hadn't paid much attention to the other sapient species, although there were those who picked one out and concentrated on it as another way to become an instant expert in a wide field of study. All I really knew about the asiit was that they were the most human-like of any of the other sapient species. For this reason they were usually considered less interesting than the others, and there had been suprisingly little research done on them to that point. I was excited about being one of the first humans on a sapient species' home planet, though, so I said yes. The ironic thing about this assignment was that the asiit had the most human-like pronunciation of any sapient species, so after being hired by the UHRC because I can pronounce bizarre phones, I ended up studying languages with nearly human sounds.

So in the year 2385 Gregorian, in the year 339'1'1'3 by the SSildifian calendar, I arrived with the Haddad Expedition in the city of Xaulbato on the island of DDiimudo on the planet Umuto. I have been on Umuto ever since.

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