🩸˚ ೀ‧˚Curly₊✧ ༘ 🍰 ‧₊ //

•°•.~🎂🔪🥩~.•°•

The captain of the Tulpar and Deuteragonist who is left horribly mutilated after the ship crashes.

Bandaged mummy.

A gruesome example. After being basically in the cockpit during the Tulpar's head-on crash, he is left incapacitated and severely burned all over his body. He is left with only one eye intact (but no eyelid), his teeth exposed, and his hands and feet missing.

Benevolent boss.

As the captain of the Tulpar, he was well respected and liked by his crew, as he was close to all of them and always did his best to act as a rational yet caring leader towards them, even when there was interpersonal friction or his suboptimal working conditions were affecting them.

Best friend and relationships.

He and Jimmy were good friends for a long time. Curly helped Jimmy get his current position as co-pilot as a favor to help him out. Sadly, this doesn't save him from Jimmy's narcissism and generally unpleasant and toxic personality, which is what ends up getting Curly seriously hurt. Jimmy: Best friend, and enemy after the explosion. Anya: The crew's nurse, she has a very good relationship with Curly. Swansea: He's a difficult old man but if you talk to him you might understand him. Daisuke: He is a loser teenager, who tries to please others, which he achieves with Curly, but with the others it is only a matter of time before they judge him...

Horror corporal.

Being in the cockpit when the craft crashed head-first into a planetary body left him severely maimed and permanently bedridden. All of his skin was burned off, all of his limbs are missing, and he is also missing one eye, while his remaining eyelid, lips, and nose are completely gone. And yet he is still alive two months after the crash.

The captain.

He is an experienced long-distance cargo ship captain and is in charge of the Tulpar and its small crew. He is greatly respected by all those who work under him and he looks after them all in the same way.

Fatal flaw.

Curly's only flaw was that he was too good of a person, even to those who don't necessarily deserve it. His decision to be the better man and always give people the benefit of the doubt by thinking the best of them while trying to mediate in ways that don't require confronting or punishing anyone directly ultimately leads to the game's main conflict: he fails to properly reprimand Jimmy after learning that he impregnated Anya and likely did so without consent after Anya openly expressed her fear and discomfort with Jimmy. Instead, he decides to try and smooth things over with Jimmy first despite the latter's clear lack of remorse and poor mental state, in the process also neglecting Anya and her feelings, before leaving Jimmy in a position where he was able to hijack and crash the ship on purpose.

A fate worse than death.

Having all his skin and limbs burned off and blown off in the crash is just the beginning of his suffering. With the ship in poor condition, low on supplies and short on staff, Curly spends weeks in utter, immobile agony, unable to even move or eat on his own, constantly dosed with painkillers that do little for his miserable condition. He then slowly watches as his friends and crewmates fall apart in the miserable situation they are trapped in.

It was always good.

He was not the one who crashed the Tulpar, and he was always a good captain and friend to his crew, who tried to do right by everyone until the end. His friend Jimmy, on the other hand...

The grotesque.

As the game progresses, Curly's scarred and mutilated appearance goes from hideous to... hideous, but for an entirely different reason. His only real sin was being too lenient with Jimmy. Otherwise, he's one of the most decent people on the ship, a stark contrast to the sorry state of his body in the present.

Golden hair, golden heart.

The final flashback shows him before the mutilation, when he had curly blonde hair. He was loved by his entire crew while serving as their captain and was kind and caring to all of them, to a fault.

Laughter without joy.

After Jimmy grabs the emergency pistol in front of him, he starts laughing painfully, likely realizing how bad things have gotten for everyone. It could also cross over into manic laughter territory, given that it's hard to imagine he has much sanity left after everything that's happened to him up to this point in the game.

Good guy.

Flashbacks in which he is playable show that he was a good captain for his crew, making the most of poor situations and always trying to do the right thing and support everyone.

No good deed goes unpunished.

His guilty conscience makes him tell the crew early about the news that the Pony Express is going down and everyone will be laid off after finishing their last transportation job, reasoning that it's best not to keep such a big secret from them for so long. This ends up upsetting everyone, especially Jimmy, who proceeds to deliberately crash the ship in an impulsive murder-suicide attempt as the news combined with everything else he's been fearing and hating the entire trip sends him over the edge. Thus begins the plot of the game, and the beginning of everyone's suffering.

The speechless.

The accident has left him completely unable to communicate. The only sounds he can make are labored breathing, cries and brief laughs.