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I did it all for the penguins. |
About Sven Iscidae
A brilliant student and gentle soul, Sven was heading to a Greenpeace rally when his bicycle was struck by a knuckle-dragger driving a coal roller. Sven was in a coma for 87 days and missed his PhD thesis defense, but the school went ahead and granted him the degree by unanimous consent of his advisory committee and faculty sponsor. His work was superb; he had continuously engaged his committee, and everyone believed he was going to die anyway, so why not? It would be nice to see PhD on his tombstone.
Much to their surprise, Sven one day opened his eyes and demanded to speak to the Secretary General of the UN. Disappointed in that request, he opted to get out of bed and learn to function again. Upon his discharge from the hospital, he resumed living in his apartment, where he nailed his degree to the wall and buried all his cats, regretting that he had never given his closest friends an apartment key. His friends were happy to see him, but soon dropped away when his conversation turned again and again to penguins. How nobody had ever really studied them, not the way Goodall studied chimps or Fossey studied gorillas. And who was in the most immediate danger from global warming? Penguins. Somebody needed to do something, and fast!
First, though, he agreed to press charges against the man who had struck him. The trial was scuttled when the driver, apparently in the grip of despair and/or remorse, was found drowned in his toilet, obviously a suicide. Sven shook his head, dusted off his PC, and started firing off grant requests in an effort to save the penguins. As his accident seemed to have made him something of a grant-writing savant, he managed to wrangle funding for Antarctic studies of penguins, which he threw himself into with gusto.
Rapidly increasing global temperatures made him re-prioritize his efforts, and he managed to get yet another a grant to winter over (or summer over) this year in order to test new Antarctic construction methods. His goal is to build an isolated biosphere containing part of the Antarctic land mass, ice shelf, and sea waters and keep it cool enough to preserve the whole ecosystem, and thus the penguins. He disappears for hours at a time out into the dark, testing construction techniques and doing gods only know what else.
