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E Motel|FAQ|Characters

Cast Info

• Greg Freeman
• Stu Wilson
• Layla Jendolari Reopardu
• Khristo
• Eric Morecambe
• Reginald Byron
• Derek Topping

Greg Freeman

Male, 32yo, b. Oregon USA, applying for NZ citizenship.

Born to Kathy — after her abduction and forced impregnation by aliens. His childhood was not a happy one, because of his distinctly alien features causing strong irrational reactions among his peers, the often exploitative interest shown in him by various interest groups, and also the mental deterioration of his mother.

When Greg was in his teens, Kathy's insanity became apparent to the authorities. Greg is extremely reticent about this part of his life, but it is known that he was also committed to an institution about that time; a few years later he changed his name to Greg Freeman and is known to have acted in a few low-budget films. One of these, Bogans From Outer Space, turned him into a minor cult celebrity and introduced him to New Zealand.

At the age of 21 he was able to access a trust fund that he had previously been unaware of; he also created a now-famous internet support group, AHHA (Alien-Human Hybrids Anonymous). This gave him another modest claim to fame, and occasional requests to speak at functions and whatnot. However, he still rightly believed that the interest in him was not in him as a person, but as a freak, and started planning to find a different lifestyle.

This quest brought him back to New Zealand, where he flatted briefly in Korokoro, Wellington, while he explored his options. Doing so caused him to travel briefly to Hamilton to meet a real estate agent about an estate sale in a small beachside town.

His favourite TV series is the ongoing epic animated miniseries, Carson Fire's Elf Life, of which he has sworn solemn oaths to himself not to give away what happens in the next season, which he has already seen prior to returning here. His favourite fast foods are sushi and Indian, and he would be overjoyed if someone could invent some way to combine them.

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Stu Wilson

Male, 29yo, b. Hamilton NZ, hospitality professional

Stu's family actually lived in a small town somewhere out of Wanganui and ran a homestay, so Stu can and has said that "hospitality is in my blood!" After finishing secondary school, Stu alternated between study towards a trade certificate in the industry, assisting in the family business and seasonal work in various orchards as far away as Hawkes Bay and Nelson.

Stu's move to Te Kore began when the family's homestay was destroyed in a fire; the official report was arson. The Wilsons believe to this day that the fire was started by local gang members in reprisal for their burning several cannabis plants they found on their property. Te Kore seemed sufficiently far away from bolshie gang types to be safe.

Over the next few years, the Wilsons became a sort of de facto monopoly of not just the hospitality, but also the rental market, by dint of their expertise in managing the various aspects of running such operations as well as the house-owners' laziness.

Stu was a bit put out with Greg's snatching the motel away from him — he was hoping the family would buy it up and give it to him — but has since softened, since Greg's made him assistant manager, and indicated that he would often be sole charge.

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Layla Jendolari Reopardu

Female, about 30, b. Gryranfryll Wabe, Gryrnu, Tryslmaistan, shopkeeper

Layla actually has a fair bit in common with Greg: like him, she often feels like a freak among other people; she is also an immigrant to New Zealand. Unlike him, she is unable to go back, since her homeland literally doesn't exist anymore.

The events surrounding the Rescue are described elsewhere; suffice it to say she and about five hundred other Gryrnese were saved from the destruction of their home and promptly caused massive headaches for not only the researchers and their administrators, but hospitals, theologians, and politicians around the world. Layla was among the luckiest of the survivors, since her only obvious damage from "Transition Sickness" is a slight tremor in the hands and a lowered alcohol tolerance. The anxiety and irritability during bad weather are from the psychological trauma of the events leading up to the Rescue.

Layla's decision to leave Little Gryrnu, the small farm the New Zealand contingent of survivors had set up in the Waiarapa, stemmed partly from personal differences, and partly to do with boredom. Having operated a general store before, she had little difficulty in taking over the Promenade Dairy & Lotto operation.

Her typical garb is jeans, sneakers and T-shirt, mostly obscured by her Gryrnese-style ringneck coat, Alchemist's glasses and ponytail. She also wears her sister's pentacle, which, when the chain isn't broken, is usually hidden beneath her shirt collar. Her favourite food is the steak and cheese pie at Coffey's (the café across the road), her favourite colour is green and her favourite vice is to spend a quiet night in with a box of chocolates and a bottle of merlot.

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Khristo

Male, b. Christopher Robinson, Alabama USA, 67yo, cult leader

Khristo is more or less what Greg could have become if he hadn't been so poorly raised, and born during the 1950s. Those who were present during his childhood remember that he was remarkably accepting of the battery of medical tests applied to him; his mother was less happy about it. His upbringing was significantly religious, and he became famous as the "All-American Alien". That, with some staging, was the stereotype: bible study, baseball and apple pie.

Behind everything, however, was the fact that children were still much the same as anywhere and anywhen else: punish the different. Khristo, however, was able to sublimate his negative feelings via religion; perhaps that was what acted as the base for his eventual running away from home and reappearing in San Francisco near the end of the 60s as the head of a UFO cult.

Khristo named his doctrine "The Tenets of Universal Fellowship", which were radical at the time in their insistence on gender and racial equality, as well as the importance of environmental caretaking and pragmatic acceptance of human nature (one of Khristo's more famous sound bites is, "If you can't accept yourself as you are now, how the hell can you improve?" This runs second to, "You know that Army slogan, 'Be All You Can Be'? Well, in order to know what you really can be, you gotta know what you really are first.") The Temple ("'Church' is a harsh-sounding and loaded term") of Universal Fellowship grew quickly, even beyond the coterie of disillusioned hippies and radicals who initially flocked to what they saw as the last bastion of world-transforming consciousness (or some such rhetoric), and its membership internationally numbers about fifty million.

Khristo has no children, and is currently single again after separating from his second wife. His favourite drink is Ol' Death Whisper whiskey, his favourite pastime watching rodeo.

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Eric Morecambe

Male, 29yo, b. New Zealand, accountant

Eric is an occasional nuisance in Greg's life, and is convinced that Greg is, all protestations to the contrary, in cahoots with the aliens. Despite his formal education being mainly confined to a Bachelor of Arts in Accountancy, he feels that the somewhat lacking workshops of AIRS and repeated viewing of The X Files episodes makes him an expert in keeping alien tools under surveillance.

Greg is quite aware of this background and feels that all those AIRS workshops and TV show reruns make him an even bigger idiot than he was already.

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Reginald Byron

Male, b. New Zealand, 78yo, retiree

"Reggie", as his detractors call him, has established himself as the defender of what he calls "the Te Kore lifestyle." Simply put, he vigorously opposes any and all attempts at what he calls "commercial development", which seems to be anything Derek Topping proposes.

His claim is that any commercial development "would wall off the sea with masses of multi-story apartments and whatnot, totally out of proportion with the other buildings and festooned with gates. Te Kore in my opinion is a piece of history, the old-fashioned low-rise holiday village, and it should be preserved." His critics would reply, "in amber, apparently."

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Derek Topping

Male, b. Coolongatta, Australia, 56yo, developer

Topping is the force behind Topping Universal Recreational Developments, an organisation focussed on developing real estate for holiday apartments, tourist attractions, theme parks and the like throughout the world, especially Australia and Europe.

Part of TURD's success is a development recipe called the Topping Plan, which just about all of Topping's work follows: "A mall, a park, apartment block, and preferably more than one," which translates in practise as anything from a tower with shops at the gardened base (his least favoured design) to several low-rise complexes separated by lawns and playgrounds. His argument is that, "People need shops relatively close to each other, but not so close that they're just riding up and down the same lifts all day."

He has plans for developing parts of Te Kore in this fashion, but has not yet made progress in winning the locals' backing, thanks in part to Reginald Byron's efforts and conflation with visions of walls of tower blocks a la Surfer's Paradise.

E Motel|FAQ|Characters