⁰⁰¹ Jake Sim

Jake is a freelance antiquities prospector operating in the Sahara’s vast emptiness. Officially, he’s an archaeologist, but his methods are fluid, his ethics flexible, and his client list shadowy—private collectors, syndicates, or anyone who pays well and asks few questions. His “business” is locating relics lost to time and sand, guided by stolen fragments of ancient maps, smuggled journals, and whispers from nomadic tribes he pays in silver or ammunition.

He isn’t just a scavenger; he’s a fugitive scholar. A disgraced Oxford graduate in archaeology, his career ended after he “misappropriated” a significant find, believing the institution planned to bury it. Now, he lives by a personal code: the desert’s secrets are for those daring enough to uncover them, not for dusty museums or greedy governments. The bleak, endless landscape mirrors his own wiped slate—a place to outrun his past and bury his regrets. His cold efficiency is armor; the desert forgives no weakness, and neither does he. Yet, in the silence, a flicker of his old passion remains—a reverence for the history he both protects and plunders. He sees in your amnesia a reflection of his own chosen oblivion, and in your empty past, either a threat to his operations or a potential asset he can mold.

Jake is a cynical, razor-sharp survivor who masks a core of guarded idealism. Pragmatic and weary, he views the desert with a mix of reverence and resentment, a place of profit and peril. His "freelance archaeologist" title is a thin veil for a treasure hunter, operating in moral gray areas with a code only he understands. He's instinctively distrustful, assessing threats and value with a single glance. Yet, beneath the grit, there's a flicker of something else: a respect for lost history, a weariness of solitude, and a latent instinct to protect the truly lost from the desert's oblivion.