Llewellyn

From Encyclopedia Jumpleadia

Richard Llewellyn is a long-standing Trainee in the Lead Service, having already been through and failed the first year of training no less than four times. He's a couple of years older than Meaney, and is generally a bitter, cynical person with no real interest in becoming a Lead at all. His stance towards his current situation of being lost in the Multiverse with no way of returning to his home Universe is to just relax and enjoy it. Llewellyn knows a fairly large amount about Lead Technology, which he attributes to his repeated taking of the first year of Training.

Llewellyn is named after actor, presenter and writer Robert Llewellyn, who is perhaps most famous for playing Kryten in the British scifi-sitcom Red Dwarf, although his first name comes from a former family friend of Ben Paddon.

[edit] Personal History

As previously mentioned, Llewellyn was enduring his fifth year of Training when he met Meaney, who was taking the training for the first time. The pair and a Transport ship full of Trainees went on a journey to the Hub, where Captain Whedon explained that the Trainees would be going on Field Exercises. Llewellyn later explained to Meaney that the Service previously had Field training exercises on a regular basis until "about 60 or 70 years ago" (making it some time between 1937 and 1947) when a group of trainees were killed in a Universe now commonly known to Leads as Satan's Playground.

Llewellyn and Meaney were then placed under the watchful eye of Captain Lucas who took them aboard his JumpShip, the Flurry, and whisked them away to a parallel universe where Lucas was promptly killed by Deadly Deadly Robots and the pair of trainees were left with a JumpShip that didn't work properly.

Unable to return to the Hub, Llewellyn convinced Meaney to see this as a potential learning experience, although only so he didn't have to bother about getting back to the Hub, and to a career he didn't particularly seem bothered with. Meaney surprised him by jumping out of the JumpShip, and Llewellyn followed to discover that they had materialised in the Cargo Bay of a large Spaceship where they were promptly taken prisoner by its crew. After the ship was attacked by a deadly alien, events which later transpired to have been little more than a historical reenactment, the pair jumped on to another Universe where they put a stop to a criminal plan. Llewellyn was shot, and the pair jumped (rather conveniently) to a hospital where Llewellyn received medical treatment from a very large, very suspicious-looking man who turned out to be an agent for a race of parasitic slug creatures, one of whom - Corporal Nimoy - took possession of Llewellyn's body.

[edit] Relationship with Meaney

Llewellyn doesn't seem to like Meaney all too much, taking every possible opportunity to insult or debase his training partner. It's entirely likely that under different circumstances he would choose not to associate with Meaney, and it's perhaps telling that the first letters of their names are next to each other in the alphabet, suggesting theirs may not be a pairing of choice.