A

Species: human
Gender: male
Age: ~30
DOB: March 4, 1639 ET
Birthplace: Geneva, Switzerland
Praetor:
Occupation: fmr. temporal regulator; currently unemployed
Languages: English, Scots, German, French, some Italian, smattering of Russian and several other languages from the British Isles
Hobbies: reading, card games

Physical Characteristics
Height: 5' 10.5"
Weight/Build: twin, gawky
Hair: ruddy brown
Eyes: bright orange
Skin: medium pale
Face: "scrunchy"
Attire: usually a mix of various European men's fashions dated from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, his area of specialty

Personality
Daub is described as "manic" by casual acquaintance and involved party alike. He barrels through his life with reckless speed, jumping into things with little forethought, following his instincts and gut reactions even when they lead to cliff's edge.

This is hardly the type of personality typical of someone charged with making sure history is not rewritten, but almost paradoxically, Daub seems to possess the most uncanny luck for somehow getting things right despite leaping forward without looking. He has a great mind for improvisation, so even when things don't go as planned, he manages to end up on top. He's a quick thinker, maybe even the quickest. He constantly responds to changes in the world around him, adapting and shifting in nanoseconds.

His over-the-top behavior can rub people the wrong way, but Daub rarely cares what others think. As a temporal regulator, it was typical of him to leave things before people could get the chance to retaliate against him for anything. This bred a certain careless attitude, since if you don't have to worry about the repercussions of your actions, you can do whatever you like with impunity.

His antics started as a child. His father was distant, his mother absent, and he clamored for attention he never seemed to get unless it was a teacher or headmaster disciplining him. The tomfoolery was also a clever disguise against the sadness in his heart: so long as he kept people laughing, they would never notice it was there. He grew up generally lonely, with only his dream of becoming a temporal regulator to sustain him. (Well, that and the joy that can only come out making most of the authority figures in your life look like complete morons in front of your schoolmates.)

Daub has a fantastic imagination. It shows in his adaptability and the inventiveness of his many tricks. At the same time, he often has trouble distinguishing imagination from reality, a fact made all the more difficult when you have grazed the surface of a dozen times and lived a hundred disguises. He used to be able to distinguish fantasy and reality. Then his reality became too bizarre and painful for him to handle, and now Daub flits through life without knowing quite who he is. He's ephemeral, fleety, switching between modes of behavior with very little control.

The reality Daub tries not to face is the weight of his guilt. He lost the woman he loves, and twice his mother, and blames himself (not incorrectly) for both losses.

Daub can be wonderful and brilliant sometimes, but more often than not he's simply uncontrolled and crazy. He's lost his grip on his life and is spiraling out of control. He needs desperately to find something to hang on to before his frequently self-destructive behavior consumes him.

Collective History: the Mirror Universe
 

Individual History
Daub grew up not knowing his mother, who died shortly after his birth. His father was a professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva. Daub grew up in a boarding school in Cambridge, only seeing his father at holidays and on special occasions. As a child, he thought that if only his mother were alive, everything would be perfect. His father never answered any questions about the subject and there were no pictures of her anywhere. The only thing he had to remember his mother by was a music box with a crack on the side. From his birth certificate, he knew her name was Emily. When he was about four, he decided that he wanted to be a temporal regulator so that he could go back in time and meet his mother.

Daub was a fairly good student, bright but troubled. He was the class clown, always pulling that stupid stunt to make his fellows laugh so they wouldn't notice how much pain he was in. He egged the headmaster's car, then later the headmaster. He stole one teacher's speech and rewrote words in strategic places. Had it not been for the fact he was a top student and his father a very prominent and famous professor, he would probably have been expelled.

By the time he was sixteen, Daub was resolved to the fact that he would never meet his mother, because interfering in your own life is against the laws of time, but he still wanted to be a temporal regulator. He studied history at Oxford, specializing in Europe, seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. He did his postgraduate work at the College of Temporal Regulation in Geneva and completed the examination to become a certified temporal regulator with the Agency.

As a regulator, Daub was responsible for preventing malicious changes to the timeline. The Agency monitored the past and whenever fluctuations were noticed, dispatched a regulator to deal with the problem. Mostly this involved fixing damage done by tourists and temporal vandals. Daub was meticulous about the rules, never revealing information about the future, always striving for historical accuracy.

Then he met Lucy. A fellow regulator, she specialized in European and American history, 1800-1970, so their specialties overlapped in 1800s Europe. They met through their work. Lucy was actually born in 1500 ET, a hundred and forty years before Daub, but at the time of their meeting they were nearly the same age, close as they could estimate. (Temporal regulators usually lose track of their age, as they may spend days or months on an assignment, and then jump back to thirty seconds after they left. This also gives them very short lifespans relative to their own time, as they experience an average of seven years per year of service.)

Lucy brought light to Daub's life. Smart, funny, pretty, and someone who understood the difficulties of being a temporal regulator. Daub called her Diamond, a reference to the Beatles song she was named after, and she called him Bunny, in reference to both his nickname, Double-A (as in Energizer batteries), and his manic personality. As good as they were alone, they were even better together, and they fell completely in love.

When their assignment ended, they were forced to bid tearful goodbyes, as it was unlikely they would ever see each other again. Only, they both starting looking specifically for 1800s Europe missions and saw each other again almost immediately. Happily, they realized that so long as they both stuck to 1800s Europe, they would probably see each other a lot, and their romance continued. So long as it did not disrupt the flow of time, there was no harm in them doing so.

The time he spent with Lucy was simply electrifying. Daub felt happier and more alive than he ever had. Unfortunately, Lucy became pregnant and had to abort the child before it caused any problems, as there was the smallest chance the child might be Daub's ancestor given the lack of data on his mother. Lucy never quite recovered from the experience despite Daub's efforts to cheer her. At best, he could make her laugh through the tears.

After the mission during which she had the abortion, Lucy stopped taking 1800s Europe missions for a short while, but then she was back. She was still upset about the abortion, but she loved working with Daub too much to give it up.

On an otherwise routine mission in 1831 AD, Daub and Lucy were tasked with stopping a fugitive from their era. In the course of chasing him, Lucy was shot. She was wounded so badly she could not use her own modulator, and the modulator required someone actively tuning it for at least three minutes. Daub was faced with a choice. If he stayed to activate and tune Lucy's modulator, the criminal would escape and further damage the timeline, perhaps irreparably. He chose to go after the criminal. He succeeded in apprehending the man, but by the time he got back, Lucy was dead.

Daub was distraught. He could not even send Lucy's body back to the future where she might be saved, for regulations stated that when an agent died on mission, the proper thing to do was incinerate the body to prevent temporal corruption. So again he did the right thing, and incinerated the woman he loved.

Devastated, Daub shuffled through his next few missions, going through the motions but totally devoid of the joy he had once felt traversing history. He was having a nervous breakdown, but no one could distinguish it from his usual manic personality, and he had no friends who knew him well enough to tell the difference.

He decided to kill himself on his next mission. It was a boring, routine mission: shadow a group of tourists across Europe for three months, but it started off in 1790s Germany, a decade Daub had always liked, which seemed as good a place to kill himself as any.

On the first night of the mission, he was preparing to jump off a building when one of the tourists, Spork, approached him. She managed to get him talking, and once he had started he could not stop. Feeling some sort of a connection to her, Daub told her his entire life story and she listened. She did not leave him that entire night, nor the next day when the tour commenced. Instead, she stayed with him and they continued to talk.

They talked about everything, from the great questions of philosophy to food. When Daub mentioned he loved liverwurst sandwiches with red onion, Spork started making him sandwiches and sneaking them into his coat pockets. During the day, he'd reach into his pocket, usually to check his watch, and find her sandwich there.

She wasn't Lucy, but he loved her all the same. She was shy and cute and laughed at all his jokes, even the really bad ones. She was well-attuned to his moods and knew when to cheer him up and when to let him be sad. More than anything, she stayed at his side, so that he never felt alone and never had the chance to try and jump off any buildings.

They were in Austria when they passed a shop selling music boxes, and Daub insisted they go inside. There, he found a set of music boxes just like the one his mother had left for him, only without the cracked side. When he opened one, it played the same tune, so he bought it.

He and Spork also had a conversation involving the laws of temporal regulation. During the conversation, Spork asked Daub if there were ever any situations under which he thought a person should be allowed to change time, for example, to save someone's life. Daub's answer was a resounding no, and he went on to say that he could never forgive that sort of thing.

It was the last day of the three-month tour. Daub was trying to prepare himself to say goodbye to Spork, only to his surprise, it turned out she was not part of the tour group. The tour group had assumed she was a temporal regulator like Daub -- it was not uncommon for regulators to show up in pairs, as Daub and Lucy often had. Daub was still trying to process this information when three regulators appeared and announced that Spork was under arrest. They also used her real name. Emily. Spork was Daub's mother.

Somehow, Spork knew that Daub was going to kill himself that first night and she went back in time to save his life. How she came into that information was never discovered, but merely possessing the information was crime enough. Spork had compounded her guilt by travelling through time to change events. She did not protest to the charges or try to escape. She did not do or say anything, merely stood silent as the charges were read. The penalty for her crime was death.

Daub was too stunned to speak. He had been preparing to give the music box to Spork as a farewell present, but in his shock he dropped it, and the side cracked before he handed it to her. Daub was sent back to his own time without ever saying anything more to Spork. He was put on indefinite hiatus from his job, but not before he managed to get his hands on the sealed files involving Spork's trial.

He learned the terrible truth. Spork had gotten a stay of execution because she was pregnant, and the Temporal Authorities would not murder an unborn child when doing so would corrupt the timeline. While awaiting her execution, she was involved in a study on temporal crimes being conducted by a psychology team from the University of Geneva, a team which involved the man Daub knew as his father. They had a paper marriage while she was incarcerated so that he would gain custody of the child.

Worse, Daub was born five and a half months after his mother's incarceration, and whether Spork had been pregnant before traveling back in time was not known. Genetic tests were inconclusive. There was a chance Daub was his own father.

Daub tried to reconcile these facts but his mind could not handle it, and he came down with temporal fracture disorder, his brain unable to sort his memories into any sort of timeline. He did not leave his apartment for over a month and barely ate. At some point, he either fell asleep, knocked himself unconscious, or just fainted from lack of eating. When he woke up he was somewhere else and feeling much better.

Post-Extraction
 

His nickname, Daub, is short for "Double-A" as in "Anthony Arthur (Andrews)" and AA batteries (a la Energizer). Why is it not Triple-A? Well, like so much else about Daub, it doesn't make sense.