Personality
Ryk just wants to be left alone with his machines. Machines don't lie to you or take advantage of you (and if they do, he can fix them so they won't). Machines won't leave you to die on some backwater planet. Machines won't die and leave you to be taken prisoner and dumped out on a world that immediately tries to take advantage of you.
Sentient beings suck. They're really only good for one thing -- and he does love that one thing.
Background
It begins with a baby, alone and abandoned on a backwater planet. Was he born there? Was he left behind when another invading force found nothing but dirt and poor farmers inhabiting it? Who can say? All the farmer who found the baby knew were two things: one, the baby looked human enough and two, the child would die without looking after. So it was that a son came to the house of Rigus Shortman and his wife Edda.
The child was only identified by a single word on a bracelet around his wrist: Auryx, a name that became 'Ryk' to his new parents and would be his primary name for the rest of his life. A big, robust child, he was a welcome addition to the farm, particulary when he started exhibiting a real talent for repairing the dilapidated machinery around the dirt-poor homestead. By the time he had seen thirteen Terran years, he had fixed all the machinery around the farm, and was taking in repair work from neighboring spreads.
The backwater planet he lived on had one thing going for it: proximity to a highly-contested planet that was coveted for the abundance of natural resources it possessed. Ryk's home planet was a perfect staging area, and it was not uncommon for invading forces to stage there in anticipation of the attack. It was during one of these stagings in his fifteenth Terran year that Ryk's life changed forever. The nearby planet, sick of invaders, decided to attack the staging area and head off the most recent attack. The planet was carpet-bombed, with civilians and invaders alike falling in wholesale slaughter. Even Ryk's home didn't go unscathed: the farm and his parents were destroyed. A fact Ryk discovered when he awoke several hours later, naked and unharmed. He was alone. Literally.
Wandering around the smoldering remains of his home, Ryk was found by a patrol from the nearby planet, and taken prisoner as suspected enemy agent. He was taken to the neighboring world, where his innocence was determined and he was released.
Stunned by the well-advanced technology of the new planet, Ryk drifted for several days until hunger drove him to find work in a hangar as an assistant. Before too long, he was a full-on mechanic, and drawing the attention of several important people, not all of them on the up-and-up. Given the option of working forever for a violent criminal enterprise or being murdered, he chose the only obvious option: he hired onto the first vessel heading into deep space. Who knows what adventure he'll find out there?
