Futuristic Unlit CS

[Solar Daddy]

PLAYER RULES:

1. 1 paragraph MINIMUM for replies. It does not need to be a particularly long paragraph, but 4+ sentences. 2 paragraphs would be GREAT!
2. Absolutely NO “bunnying”, or “Ghost-owning” or however you say “taking control of another player’s character.” It’s super uncool.
3. 1. You can, however, work with the other person through discord or DMs and (after discussing it with GM or Co-GM) post a collaborative post for a scene wherein it is only the two characters. This may not be more than 7 paragraphs long, and neither player in said collab can post until another person posts. Ex: Collab, post by another person, then player 1 or 2 can post.
4. Rule 2 does not apply to GM and Co-GM. If you do not respond to anything (messages, discord, DMs) for a week (or less if it is determined necessary), we WILL take control of your character. If you remain unreachable for longer (typically two to three weeks, but it depends on our judgement) we will kill off your character. If you are going on vacation and can’t use the internet for a bit, let us know. We will probably take control of your character, but we’ll take very good care of them, promise
5. No more than 5 posts between two people. Ex: person 1, person 2, person 1, person 2, person 1, STOP. You cannot continue this until AT LEAST 1 other person posts.
6. If you are consistently intentionally causing problems in the discord, we will kick you from the RP and the group with little to no warning.
7. GM and Co-GM have the right to ignore any of these rules as we see fit. We are not dictators but we will not let a few bad apples spoil the bunch.
8. You must have a discord and be willing to join our group and accept DMs from GM and Co-GM.
9. If you have an idea for something that might make waves or even cause a whole arc (ex. Something big with a character’s backstory, a character losing a limb, etc) TALK TO US. We’ll work with you.

By submitting a CS, you are AGREEING TO THESE RULES.

CHARACTER RULES

1. NO NEKOS.
   NO EXCEPTIONS
2. Your character can be a half-breed or a full-blooded alien. But, you have to discuss this with us first. Please make a CS, but instead of posting it, DM it to The Jenkins Curse (the GM).
3. 1. Your alien cannot be a neko in any interpretation, seriously guys. Why do I have to add this.
   2. Your alien shouldn’t be annoyingly naive. Nobody really likes that alien who doesn’t understand basic slang or swear words or the simplest of customs.
   3. Your alien’s abilities, if any, should not be OP and must be discussed with GM and Co-GM.
4. Your human can be biologically altered! Just nothing OP.
5. You want a tragic backstory, GO FOR IT, but don’t make it intersect with another player’s backstory unless you talk with them, and us, first.
6. NO characters under the age of 17.
7. Use the format for CS provided.
8. See the game rules before posting. By posting, you agree to these rules.
9. Your CS may be rejected for any reason the GM and Co-GM deem reasonable. We don’t have to let you modify it if we do not with to.
10. This is a high-interaction RP. Make your character interactable. If it is a character that will spend all day in the corner of their room, they will not see much interaction and will probably barely be active in the roleplay. If this is how we read your CS, we will ask you to change it.

Long story short, if you have a question, DM us.
Co-GM: Dragongal

Useful information when making a CS for this universe, as well as common-knowledge lore:
- Thanks to medicine and replacements, humans can live to be 350 years old roughly at the latest, but can have the appearance of someone who is a younger age. Of course, aliens and other beings can be older than this, just as long as they're not super sentient gods who have been alive since before time.
- Wealthier people live closer to the 350 age mark since they can afford the replacement parts for their bodies, but keep in mind the more body parts missing, the more of an outcast someone is. This is due to the fact that Andriods are humans that are now entirely machine, and most of them attack anything on sight. In short; rich people live longer but eventually become evil robots.
- Most people can fly singular seat spacecraft, but it takes intensive skill to become a pilot of a crewed ship.
- Less than 95% of people travel outside of their local cluster of galaxies. If a character is from outside this space, they're likely going to need a good reason to have left their cluster, as well as a sort of fish-out-of-water aspect since technology varies throughout the universe.
- Humans are the dominant species, since this takes place at the edge of human-colonized space, or "The Frontier." Most inhabitants are human, but its not odd to see aliens or mysterious plant life or terrain. Since humans need to know about an entire galaxies worth of locations, groups and races, its not uncommon for inhabitants to not know about someone or something.
-There are two main factions in this region of space. The first is Waning Stars, a government-like group that acts as a military police and upholds laws. The second is Icarus, a sort of radical anti-government group that believes everyone should take care of their own safety, dealings and security. These two groups clash often, but neither side risks civilian casualties if they can help it.

 

[Solar Daddy]

NAME

(nickname)


APPEARANCE AGE

ACTUAL AGE

SPECIES

APPEARANCE
(Include 2 pictures and a description. Pictures cannot be anime or manga art, or actual pictures. See first two CS’s for examples)
Weight, height, eye color, hair color, etc.

PERSONALITY
Positive traits
(3+)
Negative Traits
(3+)
Full personality description (One paragraph min.)

SKILLS (One paragraph min.)
(you may leave parts out if you discuss it with GM first)

POLITICAL ORIENTATION (Waning Stars or Icarus, as well as how radical this orientation is)

BACKSTORY (Two paragraphs min.)
(You can leave parts out if you discuss it with GM first)

 

[Solar Daddy]

Silas Burns
“Sideburns”

APPEARANCE AGE
28
ACTUAL AGE
38
SPECIES
Human
APPEARANCE

Weight: 210 lbs.
Height: 6’-2”
Eye color: Blue
Hair color: Black

PERSONALITY

Positive traits
-Is almost always polite and respectable
-Perceptive and booksmart
-Will always put his team first
-Works best with a team

Negative Traits
-Self conscious and always afraid of messing something up
-Can be hard to regain trust after its been lost
-Tendency to forget/ignore
-Doesn't follow the 'rulebook' and tends to make his own plans

Full personality description
Silas isn't very good with people and definitely better with machines, but finds it easy to trust others when they've shown their good intentions. He opens up to those who stick with him, and never seems to give up his polite attitude and happy-go-lucky charm. Still, he always tries to make his own path, and will occasionally disobey orders if he deems them not morally right.

SKILLS
Burns spent a lot if time with machines and can work well with them, primarily in ships and weapons. He isn't the best shot, but can hold his own in battles. Silas has basic know-how of survival and knows what's needed and what's not if the situation arises. Lastly, he can be a great asset for foreign diplomacy and can show the more gentle side of humanity.

POLITICAL ORIENTATION
Silas finds more comfort in the thought of Waning Stars keeping peace in the galaxy, and believes they’re vital for the survival of a prosperous civilization. While he is fairly set in his thoughts, this doesn’t stop Silas from disliking anyone who believes more in Icarus. As long as they work alongside him, he’ll consider them an ally.

BACKSTORY
Silas Burns was a simple kid who grew up on a backwater farming colony. His family was a caring and nurturing one, who supported his wildest ambitions until the day he parted with them at age 19. He abandoned his backwater home for a more industrial style of life, working for various technicians and learning his skills with machines. His father was a technician for a spaceport, often bringing home pieces from scrapped ships to let Silas work on them. Instead of toys and games like other kids, Silas tinkered with ship parts. This early love for his father and his work is what drew him to a job that gave him the freedom to work on almost any ship he could've dreamed of. He continued to hop around planet to planet whenever he got bored with his old work setting though, never sticking with the same crew for over a few years.

His longest stay was with his most recent crew, which had disbanded after an accident occurred half a standard year ago. In the accident, most of them died; save for a few, one of them being Adira Rik, the pilot. Burns decided he was fed up with working in the same stationary spot after this long, and had contacted Adira in hopes to start a new exploration crew, starting with the two of them. After some convincing, the two combined their savings and bought one of the cheapest ships their funds could buy. Silas hopes to find an auspicious crew to work with them, and has recently put up a notice across the Porphyrion solar system in hopes of attracting new talent.​

 

[Dragongal]

Adira Rik
"Cap"


Appearance Age
Mid to late 20s

Actual Age
~35

Species
Full human (?)

Appearance
Adira is 5’7 and rather slim, weighing in at 120 pounds. She has to struggle to put on any visible muscle, no matter how strong she actually may be. Her hair is black and long, with white tips; it is her one vanity. She has blue eyes with silver and gold flecks, a visible manifestation of her biological enhancements. Her skin is on the pale side. Adira always wears her jacket with specific boots and pants that join into a single suit capable of withstanding empty space with the help of her helmet, which she keeps collapsed in a box on her belt.

Enhancements:
+ability to better withstand pressure from outside environment
+can handle cold better than the average human
-often becomes nauseous and weak when exposed to higher temperatures, especially for long periods. This can include being in a hot kitchen for a few hours.
+universal translator implanted in her neck allowing her to speak and understand almost all languages.

PERSONALITY
Positive traits:
- Smart - Inventive - Loyal (almost to a fault) - Great speaker - Disciplined (when she cares to be)

Negative traits:
- Temper - Overwhelmed in crowds - Doesn't easily trust people, and trusts groups/organizations even less - Can't think clearly when infuriated - Internalizes issues


Full description:
Adira is a natural born leader. She takes command only when needs be, trusts that her crew is confident in their abilities, and helps them if they're not. Adira's very quick-witted, not too quick to trust, and she's willing to take risks. Though it's not immediately obvious, Adira can be very kind and caring, and quite humorous when she wants to be, which helps her sweet-talk her way into and out of anything. She is motherly and protective of those she values.

Her morals are very strong, which tends to get her into trouble as she doesn't particularly care about her own fate. Her strong morals also mean that she hates any restricting rules; her biggest problem is that she's headstrong and doesn't care who is in her way as long as she gets to whatever her goal is. She has no qualms with killing. Never has she thought of herself as a saint or a hero, but quite the opposite; however, she knows that what she does is right, even if there's nothing right in the way she operates. In her mind, it is better that she go to hell while helping someone than to just go to hell, for she knows she has done considerable wrong in her life.

SKILLS
Adira is a damn good, but not perfect, shot with her phaser. Her fighting skills are supplemented with hand-to-hand proficiency that focuses on using an opponent's weight against them, since she doesn't have much weight to throw around. She also knows basic medical skills, and can pilot a ship. Having trained in a military academy, she is capable of military bearing, formation, and complex group maneuvers, but greatly prefers a more rogue lifestyle, where she doesn't feel like a liar in a uniform. Her knowledge of the darker parts of society is not to be doubted, and if someone needs something smuggled, or if someone she deems unworthy of life needs to perhaps go missing, she can make it happen. Because of this, her lying skills are not to be underestimated at all. The exception is that her false personas and masks tend to slowly fall apart with people she actually knows and cares for, making her crew a weak spot, no matter how hard she may try to remain stoic. However, her main ability lies in strategy. Whether in a battle or in a negotiation, she is ruthless and will gladly wing it - unless there is something she values on the line. In that case, though, her temper runs the risk of taking over.

Political Views
Adira herself is mostly a moderate, but with definite leanings toward Waning Star on certain issues. However, she cares little for politics, as they take up too much time to think about. She only has a problem with people who are too far on either side of the political spectrum. Adira does have grudges against Waning Stars and Icarus as organizations, due to past incidents.

Background
Adira appeared to the Frontier for the first time as an illegal hitch-hiker on a Scientific Research transport ship leaving the icy planet 502, and hid in the Engine room. She managed to befriend the crew of the ship and prove her worth as a crewman, and when accepted, she recorded her age as approximately fifteen. After spending a few months on that ship, she dropped off the records again and appeared a month later aboard the Constellation, again as a hitchiker who convinced the Captain to let her stay. There she worked in the medical bay, mostly cleaning and handling medicines and stock. This gave her a knowledge of medicine and basic medical skills. Again she dropped off record and reappeared almost a year later, but when that Waning Star ship had been attacked, she defied direct orders and risked her life to save her crewmates in a daring infiltration. Aboard another ship months later, she took control after the crew abandoned ship (and believed her to be with them) during an attack by pirates and technically took on the battlefield-rank of Captain when she destroyed the enemy ship.


Later she went to the military academy, and by age twenty five was an official Captain with her own crew on the ship Stargazer. Adira's crew assisted her on a number of "moral missions" and Waning Star looked the other way, and her tactics in exploration gave her both fame and infamy. However, legal troubles appeared for the young Captain a number of times, and after a final argument, Adira was planning on retiring herself as Captain at the age of thirty-three. However, she was fond of her crew, and decided to stay with for a few more missions. Then the explosion happened.

After the explosion, Adira was left mostly uninjured, but that was the final straw. Some would say that she snapped. And they probably wouldn't be entirely wrong - there was quite a bit of pent-up anger vented on the upper ranks of Waning Star. She officially retired with a number of honors, and some bad blood between herself and Waning Star. She went rogue for a while, and did whatever felt morally right to her, no matter how illegal it was; she left quite the swath of blood behind her. Then Silas reached out to her, and she agreed to join him in gathering a new crew - this time, though, they would not be constrained to Waning Star’s rules.​

 

[Epiphany]

Kestrel Cavanaugh
"Cal" (short for Calvary)

APPEARANCE AGE
Mid-twenties

ACTUAL AGE
33

SPECIES
Human

APPEARANCE
Kestrel is a tall (5'10"), athletic woman with strong shoulders and wide hips. Her eyes are the soft blue of the sky after a storm and though her expression is often firm when working, smile lines around those eyes show a generous spirit. Her voice is a measured alto, with tones that suggest a trained singer or at least someone practiced at speaking, and her accent has a distinct lilt to it, characteristic of a native of Mutters Spiral. She's much heavier than she looks (250 lbs) but otherwise there's little sign of anything different from human baseline. When she walks, she has the kind of calculated stroll that suggests she's sudden death on two feet.

PERSONALITY
Positive traits

Highly motivated: one of those people who doesn't know how to quit.​

Personable: friendly and charming.​

Level-headed: doesn't panic or get easily flustered in high-stress situations ranging from hostile aliens to diplomatic dinners.​

Negative Traits

Mistrustful: trained from infancy to watch for deviance in others, expecting the worst.​

Cautious: ample experience with disaster has made her hesitant to jump into situations without adequate reconnaissance.​

Depressed: the loss of her family, her home and her culture leave her feeling deeply alienated and without much hope for the future.​

Full personality description
Kestrel is swift to smile but cautiously careful by nature, about situations and people alike. Bred in a generation ship, she finds the broader universe bewildering and frequently frustrating as no one acts the way she's used to. Kestrel has a deeply protective streak and sees taking care of her crew as not just her duty but her birthright. She's surprisingly good with people, for a soldier, though perhaps not surprising for someone who grew up in a closed environment where you couldn't get away from people you couldn't get along with. Kestrel enjoys humor and looking for the positive in things but does so more out of reflex and expectation than actual 'feeling' at this point. Her professional demeanor masks a profound despair that she'll never see her home again.

SKILLS
Kestrel's a well trained soldier, quite capable with pistol, rifle and hand to hand combat. Her unique heritage gives her a wider skillset than many, though with a few large blindspots. Kestrel's familiar with ship weapon systems and targeting. She's also something of a specialist in surviving hostile planetary environments as well as scouting out salvaged, inoperative ships with defense systems. That said, Kestrel's never fought in formation or had any training whatsoever in large-scale military action.

Due to her upbringing as an Cavanaugh on the Mutters Spiral, Kestrel also has basic training in security, from conducting patrols to investigating crimes. This knowledge is largely academic for her, though, and she has little practical experience in actual police work. Kestrel also has the kind of basic mechanical and electrical fluency that comes from growing up in space on a venerable ship, and she's reasonably able to effect repairs when given the right tools and direction.

POLITICAL ORIENTATION
Kestrel is mildly pro-Waning Stars, mostly due to a lifetime of respect for a society's need for rules. She certainly approves of government, and government keeping people safe especially from each other. That said, she enjoys her independence and doesn't especially consider herself subject to any planetary or system government. This makes her sympathetic to the Icarus point of view.

BACKSTORY
Kestrel was born aboard the Mutters Spiral, one of the original Crusader-class generation arks deployed in the 37,000s to explore the uncharted depths of space for colonization. While the ship was successful in reaching its objective, settling large swaths of space two Frontiers ago, a subset of the Mutters Spiral crew elected to keep their ship running instead of disembarking and standing down the ship. The 'world' Kestrel grew up in was a lovingly maintained ship millennia old, where every person had their place chosen out for them at birth based on their clan, a social structure built out of the original families that'd kept the ship going.

As an Cavanaugh, Kestrel was raised to police the populace, investigate crime and defend the ship against all threats. By the time she was twenty, she was considered a full adult on the Mutters Spiral, specializing in inter-ship combat tactics, reconnaissance of foreign vessels and survival methods for alien worlds. Kestrel spent most of her twenties escorting scientists and industrial workers as they stopped by various worlds to refuel, refit and scavenge for resources the Crusader-class generation ark needed to keep flying. It was on an unexplored world with marginal atmosphere that her team set down on a mountain and inadvertently mined into an alien facility. A species none of them had ever seen before overrun the team and Kestrel bought time for the surviving members to evacuate before she fell before the onslaught.

A crew of surveyors woke Kestrel when they stumbled upon the same now abandoned facility. She discovered she'd been sealed up in some kind of stasis pod, the aliens were long gone, this world was part of the Porphyrion system, now terraformed and called Granite...and that at least a century of time had passed since the Mutters Spiral left orbit. What's more, a medical exam revealed that the aliens had conducted invasive surgical examination, something that'd shredded her somatic nervous system as it had the other captured Mutters Spiral crew members left behind. She was the only one to survive their 'treatment', some kind of experimental nanotechnological somatic nervous system replacement.

Altered, alienated, and left behind by not only her crew but her whole world, Kestrel spent several years serving in Granite's military before finding rules she hadn't grown up with too confining. Kestrel had been trained for exploration and she yearned to be spacebound once more. When she spotted an advertisement for a commercial explorer hiring out of the Porphyrion system, she jumped at the opportunity to get back into the stars. And maybe save enough money to someday go looking for home.

EQUIPMENT:

• Mutter's Spiral Chipset: Every member of her generation ship received an implant at birth. This includes a transceiver that ties every citizen into​

into SudnoNet, the Crusader Class vessel's mainframe, as well as the vessel's passive presence sensors so services could respond in the event of an accident. The proximity transceiver in the Cavanaugh line has additional functionality, constantly 'listening' for the unique frequency of a Spiral chipset as a means for tracking criminals and being aware of nearby citizens. This chipset also pipes HUD telemetry from ship, suit or weapon sensors through the visual cortex in the occipital lobe, allowing her to 'see' data without looking at a screen. Her transceiver can then broadcast and stream telemetry to other receivers, forming a 'TacNet' with any compatible technology.​

• Micro Drones: She has a micro-manufacturing unit about the size of a smart phone on her waist. It can make a drone a day but requires a compound of materials to resupply, typically purchased on shore leave. It stores 20 at a time; each drone is only the size of a thumbnail and nearly that thin. Each drone has contragrav technology, allowing it to fly almost soundlessly through the air. It's minuscule mass and low sensor signature make them very hard to detect. It's primarily used for reconnaissance, sending telemetry back through Kestrel's integrated Chipset. They can also be used to record or, in rare cases, they can be intentionally overloaded to create a tiny explosion about as impactful as a bullet. Kestrel can only 'pay attention' to about 8 streams at once (with 6 being more her comfort level) and she gets cautious about drone deployment after 10 have been used, given replacements will take a week or more to fully restock.​

• Both her rifle and her pistol use micro-scaled mass accelerators partnered with projectile shavers. A small block of dense metal is stored in each gun. When the trigger is pulled, a projectile shaver carves off a sliver. Mass-reducing fields and magnetic force is then used to propel a miniature 'slug' to lethal speeds.​

​

Spoiler: THE IMPLANT

The experimental nanotechnology inside of her features iron carbon composite alloy rods with micro conductors several molecules thin branching into node clusters every millimeter of her body. They're centralized in a set of embedded chip circuits grafted to the alpha motor neurons of her brainstem. It functions as a parallel nervous system, effectively bypassing the damage the aliens had done to her original nervous system. The micro conductors near the skin end in sensors grouped in the same way as her real nerves, replicating their function and emulating all sensation she'd normally feel. This unique augmentation has a number of effects:
Nervous System Enhancement: Kestrel can dial up or down the sensitivity of her nerves reflexively, thanks to the adaptive circuit in her brainstem. This allows her to largely ignore pain when necessary. It can also increase her sensitivity to touch, though she's largely found little success applying that feature to her professional life.
Musculoskeletal Augmentation: Over the years, the implant has largely replaced most of her bones and some of her muscles with iron carbon composite, making her incredibly durable (if somewhat heavier). Additionally, the implant's complete control over her somatic nervous system means its able to maximize muscle contraction time and force, giving her explosive lift and push abilities as well as impressive running speeds. Kestrel's still human brain sadly lacks the speed for truly superhuman reaction time.
Progressive Iteration?: The implant is a alien prototype without an off-switch. Whatever it's original intention, it's continued to operate for more than five years now, gradually making Kestrel composite metal as much as flesh. So far, it's chief symptoms are a craving for a steady supplement of iron and vitamin pills, as well as incremental but steady weight gain as her mass is replaced. Kestrel has enough metal in her body now to set off any metal detector. Although the rate of replacement has slowed significantly, it's entirely possible her body will reach a tipping point and die in the next ten to twenty years. Needless to say, it's complexity makes removal impossible and deactivation potentially lethal.
EMP Sensitive. The iron carbon composite of the implant is resistant to uncontrolled electrical surges, as are the chip circuits of the impant itself. However, sufficiently strong voltage (to say nothing of an actual EMP strike) are enough to shut the circuit down. Until the implant reboots itself, Kestrel is effectively paralyzed.

 

[Viper Actual]

NAME
James "Linebacker" Stratton

APPEARANCE AGE
45-47

ACTUAL AGE
51

SPECIES
Human

APPEARANCE



Full Body

Height: 184cm (6ft 7")
Weight: 87kg (191lbs)
Build: Average build, somewhat athletic.
Eye color: Grey
Hair color: Grey
Physical description: Stratton's appearance bear the hallmarks of a hard-working man. His somewhat average build conceals his many scars and weathered outside. Due to years of stress from military service at an early age and intensive work within the Waning Stars administration Stratton's body has taken a toll. Wrinkles around his face and grey hair are only two bi-products of his occupation.

Stratton has a faded tattoo on his right arm, most likely a relic from his younger and more rowdy days.

PERSONALITY

Positive Traits:
- Honest
- Compassionate
- Loyal
- Dedicated
- Good at forming connections

Negative Traits:
- Mission above all else
- Stubborn/Wrongheaded
- Morally Ambiguous
- Temperamental
- A bit of a gambler

Full Personality Description:
Stratton is a dedicated, honest and loyal man. He's compassionate in the sense that he believes in fighting for the "little man", providing security for those who cannot do so themselves. Due to his current occupation as an envoy/liaison with the Waning Stars Stratton have mastered the art of forming connections with all kinds of people due to his professional and honest nature.

On the bad side though Stratton can be somewhat narrow-minded, believing that the mission goes above all else. Should anyone question him they will soon discover that he can, at times, be incredibly stubborn. A side-effect of his stubbornness is his fiery temper which also comes into play whenever he believes that someone's made a mistake.

Stratton is also morally ambiguous when it comes to people loyal to Icarus or who believe that they are better off without the safety and order offered by the Waning Stars.

SKILLS
- Basic military training
- Degree in Diplomacy & State Relations
- Trained in Intelligence Recovery

POLITICAL ORIENTATION
Stratton is a hardcore loyalist of the Waning Stars faction. He believes that peace and justice can only be accomplished once all accept the order and the security offered by the WS government. Democracy and security are key fundamentals to any functioning society and as such Stratton detest Icarus and their radical anti-government beliefs which he view as anarchists.

BACKSTORY
James Stratton is a conscript-turned-diplomat. Three decades ago he left his military life behind, instead opting to serve his state by establishing diplomatic connections, alliances and treaties. While he's mostly kept out of the larger state-scale affairs due to his rough look Stratton is known as a reliable resource when it comes to colonial relations.
Raised on a colonial world himself it's easy for him to sympathize with smaller communities and independent worlds while also offering them the benefits joining the Waning Stars.

When he isn't out on a frontier world educating farmers on the benefits of democracy Stratton often finds himself gathering intelligence on Icarus movements (which he forwards to his superiors) or acting as a liaison for the Waning Stars wherever he's needed.

Some of his older friends and colleagues refer to him affectionately as "Linebacker"- a reference to Stratton's reliability and his ability to quickly mend relations with far-away allies.

 

[queendilettante]

NAME: Laoise Ward (leesha)
Laoise is an Sciti (Irish) name and, when speaking normally, Laoise has a fairly thick Sciti (Irish) accent.
Sciti is the evolution of the Gaelic cultures/languages reflective of modern day Ireland/Scotland
APPEARANCE AGE: Late 20s
ACTUAL AGE: 31
SPECIES: Human
SEXUALITY: Bisexual
APPEARANCE
Weight: 155lb
Height: 5’5
Eye Color: Green
Hair Color: Ice/Platinum Blonde
Laoise wears fairly comfortable clothes when she’s not suited up for smuggling or combat. One might think that her armor and weapons are a bit above her station, but she “found” them in crates “allegedly” owned by military contractors.

PERSONALITY
Positive traits

• Resourceful. Laoise always “knows a guy” and can get people whatever they need.
• Personable. Her “day job” as a merchant has her constantly interacting with people. As a result, she’s great at small talk and keeping a conversation going.
• Good at picking up social cues. Laoise can always read a room and she tries to keep tensions low.
• Assertive when needed. She’s been burned on deals before and won’t make those mistakes again.
• She operates according to her own set of morals and refuses to baselessly kill anyone or ever wrong children.

Negative Traits

• She can sometimes interpret lack of social skills or awkward behavior as a threat and becomes very defensive.
• She has no moral restrictions about stealing. She also isn’t above harming others if she believes they’ll recover.
• She’s survived as long as she has by sticking to her guns and has a hard time following orders she disagrees with. Insubordinate.

Full personality description
Laoise is very personable and a natural leader. She’s great at organizing people and downplaying potential conflicts before they become too serious. Her childhood as an orphan in the slums toughened her up and made her somewhat defensive, but her years of playing merchant and bartender have (almost) completely rewired her into a social butterfly brimming with energy. She can put her foot down when needed and knows how to handle herself in a fight. Her morals are questionable, as she’s survived as a smuggler and professional thief, though she’s strongly opposed to murder in (almost) all cases and she has a soft spot for helping and protecting children. Her natural leadership qualities make her a bit headstrong and resistant to being ordered around, though she can follow someone else’s lead when she agrees with the leader and/or has her questions and concerns addressed ahead of time.

SKILLS

• Excellent smuggler and thief.
• Excellent martial artist (though predominantly the street fighting style).
• Proficient with handguns, blades, and blunt weapons.
• Excellent at holding people’s attention and keeping them distracted.
• She’s a convincing actor with a talent for accents.
• Proficient with many languages and rarely requires the use of a translator (including Russian, which is not translated automatically through any known translators).
• Passing knowledge of how to fly most ships, though not terribly well.
• Can determine something’s usefulness/value at a glance down to its specific function within a machine or larger mechanism, though she’s unable to build most weapons, machines, or large scale tech herself.

POLITICAL ORIENTATION:
Laoise has a disposition toward Icarus for their freedom, but she makes a lot of money smuggling in Waning Stars territory. She hopes that their conflict continues so that she can continue to ride the line between making money and retiring to her home in freedom.

BACKSTORY
Laoise grew up in the forgotten slums of a forgotten city. Her parents were killed in a fire when she was young and she was forced to fend for herself on the streets at only 10 years old. An old homeless man she knew from before her parents died taught her how to defend herself and put an end to aggressors. Within a few years, Laoise had organized a group of orphans into a semi-functional gang. The teenagers would mediate territorial disputes and be a way for rival gangs in the area to trade between themselves, though indirectly. When Laoise was 19, her best friend, Eva, was killed by a jealous gang member that Eva refused to sleep with. To avenge Eva, Laoise stole everything the man owned and sold it to his gang’s rivals. She was pleased with herself, but she couldn’t get over Eva’s murder. In a drunken rage, Laoise took a match a set of rowhuts that the murderer lived in and fled to stow away on a ship before she could see the fallout.
For the next decade, Laoise traveled from planet to planet and outpost to outpost. She quickly organized another crew of smugglers to keep the money coming in. As a front, Laoise started playing at merchant during the day and bartender during the night. In doing so, she was able to keep tabs on all of the other merchants coming and going through whichever outpost she was currently staying in. She would organize her crew to rob enough from each passing caravan to not cause suspicion and sell it back to them or others the next day. With each passing year, Laoise got better and better at playing merchant and bartender. Eventually, she was bored with the “same old same old” of her daily life and fled her group of smugglers. She’s been hitchhiking her way across human settlements ever since.

 

[Vudukudu]

Wei Lai-ku

The Bard of Bannos


APPEARANCE AGE: Late 20s

ACTUAL AGE: 30

SPECIES: Human

APPEARANCE

Wei stands at an even 6’2 and is a tapestry of digi-tattoos, LED lights threaded beneath his skin to shimmer in a variety of colors. He’s undergone substantial gene-carving to survive the vagaries of asteroid-mining operations, but nothing visible on the surface.

PERSONALITY
Positive traits
Charmer, Will At Least Shoot You In The Front, Social Chameleon

Negative Traits
Hotheaded, Overly Ambitious, Dangerously Cocky, Shallow, Revenge-Driven

Full personality description: Wei is a rebel and a charismatic leader, the sort to tear down governments and spit on folks at the bar just to get in a fight. There’s another softer side to him, though; he doesn’t do what he does out of greed. Wei’s rebellious nature is the result of oppression, and he punches up for the sake of everyone who’s ever been down on the ground with him. He is deeply compassionate toward those he finds deserving, and a nightmare to those who get in the way of his eternal revolution.



SKILLS:
-First Aid: Wei’s training in combat medicine is strictly uncertified - he attended no academy and he certainly hasn’t earned a degree. Wei’s first aid skills come from a life spent on the battlefield, learning from actual doctors in the field and manuals when he finally learned to read. Fortunately, a lot of modern first aid is just a matter of using the right dose of the right drug.
-Violence: Wei has killed in most every way one could imagine in a dozen different environments. In particular, he is extremely handy with his fists and blades.
-Zero-G Warfare: If it flies, Wei can get inside it from the outside. He can even keep it functioning afterward, sometimes. He is entirely comfortable in zero-gravity, and has distressing agility in the void.
-Infiltration: Wei has a way with words and an even better way with making closed doors become open doors, or just circumventing them entirely. He's rather used to thinking around problems, thanks to his time mining in space.
--Rocker: Wei’s a living legend on guitar, and put a microphone in front of him and he’ll cause a riot. Hits spreading across the Cypher-Net include “In the Chamber,” “We All Become,” “I See You,” “My Father Told Me,” “Shallow,” “Helldiver’s Anthem”, and “The Ballad of Samuel Thunderfuck.”

Spoiler: The Esskoat

The Esskoat: The Esskoat (Ash Men in their tongue), have drifted in dark corners of space for centuries. Their history is ancient by modern standards, but to them it is a constant burden. They had a world once, until they bathed it in nuclear fire and ash from slamming asteroids into their own cities. The survivors withered under radioactive dust storms until the first Ash Men rediscovered the dual secrets of space travel and gene-carving. Rendered infertile by the skin-scorching radiation, their numbers dwindled until they developed the technology to vat-grow infants. Naturally, they took things a step further. First, they made their people resilient to the hazards of the surface - encoded their DNA with protections against radiation, gave them the strength they needed to survive the nightmarish surface conditions, and began the long generational task of getting a ship off the ground. Decades of warring against other survivors for the world’s scant remaining resources made them a war-like people, taking what they needed from those who could not hold them back.
The Ash Fleet has expanded ever since, drifting in the dark spaces between stars, preying on fringe mining outposts and explorer ships. They mastered the Great Black Sea, growing in number and strength with every ship seized. The legend spread - men and women crawling among the asteroid belts like spiders, leaping into the void and carving their way into hulls to loot and slaughter. Waning Stars deployed a patrol fleet to quell the rumors - it disappeared, and then deep-space outposts, well-defended, began to drop off the grid. Scorching from energy weapons matched those of the missing Waning Stars cruiser. Waning Stars sent out a retaliation fleet and found their missing cruiser adrift and packed with life-signs. Wanting to reclaim the ship, they boarded. Their marines found hundreds of vat-cloned husks on board, mindless bodies generating enough heat to show up on scans, shortly before the reactor went nuclear and vaporized the vessel with them on board. Then, like vultures, dozens of heavily modified Ash Fleet vessels emerged from FTL, boarding and capturing the entirety of a Waning Stars patrol fleet.
In the intervening years, the Esskoat have made a treaty with Waning Stars after it became clear to them that they would get better salvage and to Waning Stars that they would only suffer further humiliation attempting to hunt the space nomads. Now, they wander the stars - some continue to raid, others sell their gene-carving expertise and facilities to planets, and some pursue mercenary work. Others have become traders, and if you need something moved safely through dangerous space there are few better to do it than Esskoat pilots.

BACKSTORY:
Wei Lai-ku is a son of The Sand Drake, grown in its vat-birthing facilities and raised in its halls. There, he learned much - how to make war, how to keep a ship running on spit and prayers, how to harvest the wealth of asteroids, and how to play guitar. The Sand Drake is an old mining vessel, stolen long ago by the Ash men, and it found its natural home in the Bannos Asteroid Belt. The vessel has been there for decades, working alongside wildcat miners and other independent mining operations hoping to strike it rich in one of the galaxy’s most dangerous asteroid belts - wracked by gravitational anomalies, pockets of explosive gas, and a great many pirates. Given the extensive retrofitting it has undergone, the Ash Men’s ship serves as a processing facility and defensive platform.
Wei never exactly took to mining, though he learned how to pull his weight. Hunting pirates and “settling disputes” always suited him better, but he was always really meant to be on stage. Wei and his friends in Kessler Syndrome (Hanna Beltway, Samuel Thunderfuck, Leo Twelve-Fingers, and Bimbim Shodo) were a ragtag group of Esskoat and one outsider (Bimbim) who made a name for themselves locally streaming their music over a jerry-rigged radio station and playing live on asteroid bases across the belt. They proved to be rather skilled across genres - though their most popular songs were always their Esskoat metal pieces, they could segway just as easily into frontier folk rock. All of their music, however, is born of the same independent strain.
That’s why Kessler Syndrome is responsible for igniting one of the bloodiest Corporate Wars in recent memory. The Tecklin Mining Corporation declared control of the Bannos Belt and moved its private military in to pacify or coopt the locals. When the Tecklin fleet arrived to establish control, their call to the locals to stand down and join the Company were answered by the sound of Wei’s guitar squealing the opening line to “In The Chamber.” The massive asteroid belt became the site of a six year long war as Tecklin hired mercenaries and pirates and sold portions of their claim to Bannos to other mining corps in return for military aid, and traded shares of the company stock for private warships. The Ash Men and wildcat miners responded by converting their mining rigs into Star-Shells, battle-ready suits of void-capable power armor. A guerilla war ensued among the chaos of the asteroid belt, bleeding Tecklin dry and involving a final casualty count over 200,000 with a loss of wealth in the billions of credits.
Wei spent much of the war at the forefront, piloting his personal Star-Shell when he wasn’t keeping morale up with Kessler Syndrome. The war drew galactic attention - Tecklin drew all sorts of bad PR for their handling of the matter, and everyone loves a good rebel story. Kessler Syndrome rocketed to the top of the charts, though the proceeds from all their music went to sustaining their insurgency. The war finally ended when Kessler Syndrome, leading a small assault team, breached the Tecklin flagship, executed the retired Waning Stars Admiral Echo, and then broadcast “In the Chamber” over Tecklin communication frequencies. The Board of Tecklin decided the humiliation and loss of wealth was no longer worth it and ceded its claim, returning Bannos to its independent status.
They didn’t, however, give up. Pirates with suspiciously high-grade gear continue to plague the Belt. Assassins have attempted to kill members of Kessler Syndrome, including a successful attempt on Sammy Thunderfuck. The on-stage assassination of one of their own convinced the band to take a hiatus and scatter across the galaxy, where they continue to collaborate remotely on new songs while laying low and channeling resources and connections they make to benefit Bannos’ people. Wei has been taking mercenary work under pseudonyms, playing gigs, and getting involved in all manner of criminal enterprises for the last couple years.

1. Star-Shell: Wei’s armor is a vacuum-sealed body-glove covering him from feet to the top of his neck. His head is protected from the cold vacuum of space by a small force field, permitting him to remove his helmet freely, though the helm also can lock into place to seal completely. The suit is equipped with directional thrusters, as well as electromagnets in the palms of the gloves and soles and toes of the feet to permit him to latch onto metal surfaces; two-inch hooked claws can be used to punch into asteroids for handholds. The Star-Shell is too heavy to achieve lift anywhere with higher than about 0.4g, but is very agile in space when worn by a suitable pilot. Shock absorbers and the thrusters can be used to survive significant falls. The suit is armed with the following:
   1. Wrist-mounted frag grenade launcher
   2. Deployable shield, rated for ballistics and blanketed by an energy shield, on the left wrist
   3. Spider-legs: Deployed from the back of the suit, the “spider-legs” the Esskoat are known for are robotic limbs used to latch onto vessels and other objects in space and crawl across surfaces.
   4. Drilling Laser - a wrist-mounted laser drill with a range of a couple inches, used for breaching airlocks and cutting through rock.
   5. Speakers - used primarily to blast disorientingly loud sounds to terrorize enemies.
   6. Retractable mohawk
2. Personal armory - mono-edged short sword, a combat knife, a high caliber pistol, a pump shotgun, and a modified Ora-tech K9 assault laser.
3. Surface Gear - flak vest, shield belt, casual clothing.
4. First Aid Kit

Genetic Modifications:

1. Enhanced muscles and skeleton, as well as other features meant to help his body endure changes in gravity.
2. Duskviper Gland: A small gland in Wei’s throat gradually builds a reserve of acidic bile he can vomit on command in small quantities. It is sufficient to melt flesh and eat through plastic and extremely thin metal surfaces.
3. Radiation Resistance - Proteins bonded to Wei’s DNA protect him from most radiation.
4. Secondary Heart: Both of Wei’s hearts, and his circulatory system, are enhanced to allow him to endure high Gs without blacking out.

 

[Vudukudu]

ALEXANDER CAVANAUGH

Titles and Accolades:
The Third Sword of House Damocles
Finalist in Gourmet Chefs of Sidereas holo-cast competition
The Butler
Chieftain of the Two Rivers Tribe

APPEARANCE AGE: Mid 30s

ACTUAL AGE: 128

SPECIES: Human

APPEARANCE

Spoiler: Image

Weight: 300 pounds, metabolically stabilized
Height: 6'3

PERSONALITY
Positive traits
Clever, Personable, Dedicated, Born Leader
Negative Traits
Too Stubborn To Quit, Compulsive Risk-Taker, Dangerous to Himself and Others
Full personality description:
Alexander took a great deal of time to come into his own. The younger brother of Kestrel Cavanaugh, who he was constantly compared to despite their age gap, Alex used to suffer with confidence issues among other problems tied to being the lesser sibling. He loved her dearly, and her disappearance took a great toll on him - his respect for the command staff of the Mutter's Spiral that abandoned her without even finding a body crumbled, his sense of self wavered, and his commitment to the generation ship cracked to its foundations. He found a new life, a rejection of the old; power and dignity, not service to distant masters. Today, he is cunning, vicious, and possessed of a domineering charisma that demands respect and service. The Alexander of old is no more, and in his place stands something perhaps more monstrous - a man who is used to spending lives like currency.

SKILLS:
Swordsman: While Cavanaugh family training didn't provide much in the way of melee weapons expertise, his time serving as a Praetor for House Damocles made him a renowned swordsman, though by no means the best his adoptive planet has to offer.
Butlering: Alexander is a trained butler, practiced in the many arts of culinary practice, arranging entertainment, household management, and related administrative functions.
Espionage and Counter-Espionage: Between his training in police work as a Cavanaugh and service as a butler for House Damocles, Alexander has become a fearsome counter-espionage agent, which requires a great deal of familiarity with espionage practices themselves. He is stealthy and has some training in infiltration practices.
Master and Commander: While never put in charge of a full battlefleet or army, Alexander has the strategic and tactical knowledge of ground and space warfare required to lead substantial numbers of troops or small squadrons of ships in battle.
Falconry: A favorite hobby, Alexander owns a cyber-falcon produced by Kurosawa Industries.
Combat: Alexander is a warrior by nature and training, and while he has grown somewhat slower in his old age, he is still rather dangerous.

BACKSTORY:
Alexander Cavanaugh was born to the Cavanaugh line, born to police and soldier for the Mutter's Spiral. Constantly trailing behind his sister, six years his elder, he never quite managed to come into his own while aboard the Spiral. He lacked the self-discipline to keep up with his peers and was always prone to prioritizing socializing and womanizing over his training, which naturally earned him few friends among Command. His lack of confidence materialized as disrespect for authority, and he eventually spent more time being punished for transgressions than he did actually doing his duties. Were it not for the stubborn insistence of his commanding officer, he would have been drummed out well before he ever truly started.

As it happened, fate had other plans. While Alexander was never particularly close to his elder sister due to her relative success and the confidence issues it bred within him, he did love her all the same. When she disappeared along with her team during a routine survey mission, Alexander was the first to volunteer for a search party. When they discovered the bodies of her team, but not his sister, he insisted they continue the search, if only so that she could be buried properly. Command rejected his plea and he was brought home, believing his sister to be rotting in the sun on some nameless world, abandoned by the people she served. He never forgave them.

Kestrel's "death" catalyzed several changes in Alexander's life. He left the Mutter's Spiral in search of new ways to use the skills he'd been given, and eventually found himself on the world of Govanti. After Waning Stars left the planet, its wealthy elite utilized the cloning facilities they had for the production of meat to produce human labor instead, constructing a stratified caste system of genetically modified laborers, soldiers, and, naturally, gave themselves and their children every genetic perk they could unlock. As a foreigner, Alexander was treated with suspicion by most. House Damocles saw something more - a consultant.

Off-world expertise in espionage practices, a different mindset, and his innate talent were all highly valued by the up and coming House Damocles, who naturalized him as a citizen, adopted him as one of their own, and put him through a rigorous training program. Alexander saw a chance to make something of himself outside his sister's shadow and the control of people who would spend his life like pocket change, and he took it. He excelled, adopting the culture as his own and internalizing their virtues - modesty is a flaw, cunning is a virtue, power is borne of the strength of one's arms and the sharpness of one's words. Your servants are less than human, and you are without peer in all the galaxy - greatness and grandeur is your inheritance, for you and your brothers and sisters are a step above. Sculpted bodies, sculpted minds, and a right to conquer.

One thing he didn't abandon was his theoretical knowledge of espionage and counter-espionage from his Cavanaugh police training. He applied it ruthlessly, becoming a spymaster of considerable infamy and an integral part of the fledging House Damocles' rise. He commanded armies, led sieges of Govanti's greatest cities, commanded raider fleets across the asteroid belts and over the moons of his new home system, and crowned a king. For his service, he was framed a traitor, denounced, and exiled to a nameless rock to die forgotten, his legacy erased from the histories of his house. There, he made something for himself - uniting the barbaric tribesmen under his armored fist, he gathered other crash survivors into a community that controls access to the largest freshwater supply within miles. He has ruled there ever since atop a throne of dirt and blood, content to rule even if it is over scraps.

 

[dae mec]

Luciana Lee​

Name: Luciana "Lu" Lee, or Lu-Lee to her friends

Age: 32

Gender: Female

Height: 5 ft. 5 in.

Appearance:

Spoiler: augmentations

(Face plate appearance similar to above.)

Brown hair, brown skin, brown eye (ignoring her cybernetic one). She’s stocky, generally careless about her appearance, save for her hair: she keeps it long and silky. Her injuries are scar tissue now: so it's probably like a faded pink, but still noticeable. She has a face plate that she can use to cover it up (that's a pretty close match to her actual face), and she will use it when she has to, but she complains it itches.



Augmentations: Her left eye and most of her left face is synthetic due to a mech accident that severely burned her. Luciana also lost her hearing in the same incidents, so she has hearing implants and the accompanying neural implants for all her augmentations. She has some structural implants on her back, but it's usually covered by clothing. She has a mold that she can use to hide her cybernetics, but she usually goes bare (metal) faced. Baseline hearing, about average strength. She has net access.


Personality: Wry, snappy, and with a sense of humor some find too odd, Luciana isn’t the most popular person. She has her friends, yes, and her coworkers find her easy to work with (especially when she isn’t talking), but Luciana isn’t going to win “personality of the year.” Some might say Luciana likes making people uncomfortable with her dark jokes and refusal to cover her scarred face. They wouldn’t be wrong. She can take a joke just as well as she dishes them out, and on the occasion someone does manage to offend her, she’s just as quick to forgive. Luciana does forget that others don’t feel the same way, and sometimes she pushes too far. She's perfectly professional with her patients, however, working with brisk efficiency and a confident bedside manner.

As a work partner, ribbing aside, she’s oddly considerate. Luciana will go grab coffee in the mornings (just the way you like it, two creams and sugar) and doesn’t mind letting others take the lead. In fact, she prefers it. Because of that, most people like working with her, but they tend to increase the volume of their music or sigh repeatedly due to her odd and chatty nature. Her colleagues would like her more if Luciana didn’t include them in her stupid jokes and comments.

Her main hobby is bad reality TV and soap operas. If she’s zoning out, it’s probably because she’s watching some melodramatic trash in her ocular implant. She also tends to tinker around with her own augmentations: they’re far away from factory settings now. Oh, do "bad jokes" count as a hobby? Luciana isn't very good at that, though. It's hard to tell when she's poking fun and when she's being serious since her facial expressions are rather deadpan (having been hindered by the face plate).


Position: Medic

History: Luciana was born to an average if slightly poor family. Her father worked as a mechanic who specialized in household appliances, and her mother was a teacher. She grew up with two older sisters and one younger sister, and Luciana was the boyish one of the group. Although there were occasional fights, Luciana had a very close relationship with all her siblings. Her childhood was filled with comings and goings of various aunts and uncles, though most on her dad’s side. She has family practically everywhere—her youngest sister studies on Corverant on a scholarship, a multitude of cousins live on Granite, and so on.

She performed decently in school, though she was uncertain where she wanted to specialize in. Unfortunately, she was injured in a ship crash, resulting in severe burns to her face and body. Luciana was fortunate enough to have a wealthy sister who paid for high quality cybernetics. After all the implants and physical therapy were done, she discovered that she rather liked the medical field. She changed job fields, got her medical certifications, and found a job on a ship. As someone who can fix up people and the things in people, Luciana is quite a bargain. She's quite happy floating around on whichever ship hires her. Or at least, she had been happy, until her ship crashlanded on this planet in the middle of nowhere.

She's useful as a medic, so she's been with a group of survivors for the last few months, patching people up. At least her implant gives her access to a huge library of downloaded media, there's no way she'll get bored... for a few more years, at least.

 

[0stinato]

NAME: Qyilim os datha dei-Enth
(nickname): suggestions?????

APPEARANCE AGE: Mid 30s
ACTUAL AGE: 40
SPECIES: Zirzolan
Species Explanation:

Zirzola is a small, arid planet whose soil isn’t suited for large-scale arable farming. This situation facilitated the evolution of the humanoid species known as the Zirzolans (or Zirzol). They are functionally carnivorous, due to their need for pastoral farms due to the planet’s form and are also noticeably larger than Terrans by about 5%. This size difference has been theorised to have improved survival through both athleticism and water retention on a dry planet. (Moxie et al.) Zirzolans also have the ability to process blood, and seem unaffected by prions (Zaggeb and Phil), which explains the numerous records of cannibalism among Zirzolans at times of famine and desperation. When this finding was released into the scientific sphere, it resulted in some negative connotations, and resulted in Zirzolans being referred to negatively as ‘Zampires.’

Zirzolans began to develop brain functions to ‘catch and interpret projective psionic activity’ (D’ran et al.), allowing the Zirzolans to understand strong, simple projective thought of their farm animals. Farming would become much easier, since a Zirzolan farmer would instantly know what their animals needed, and which ones might be unwell. In addition, Zirzolan brains develop in childhood to project their own psionic activities to a much lesser extent, meaning, from the age of about 4-5 and onwards, a Zirzolan cannot ‘catch and interpret’ the psionic activities of another Zirzolan. This also appears to be a method of species survival, as a parent Zirzolan can instantly understand the needs of their infant through their psionic interpretation. Most other species project psionic activity, and so a Zirzolan can interpret simple, strong feelings or apprehensions as they would with their own young, or animals.This has assisted in rocketing Zirzola into the socio-political eye of the galaxy, and many Zirzolans have used their psionic interpretations to become skilled interrogators, lethal combatants and charismatic leaders. However, the downside of being surrounded by other species is, according to many Zirzolans, having to withstand a near-constant cacophony of psionic noise which cannot be ignored. It is not uncommon for an off-planet Zirzolan to seek out certain narcotics which dull their sensitivity to psionic projection.

APPEARANCE

Qyilim os datha dei-Enth’s Mugshot, year 3993:


Qyilim during his bounty hunting days, year 3990:

Qyilim stands at 6’10” (208cm) and weighs 280lbs (127kg); the other notable aspects of his appearance are his prosthetic right arm, which is rather bulky due to enhancements such as storage space, and similar prosthetic right leg. He has dark skin, and a fair amount of dark brown body hair. His braids are a vibrant red, which he insists is natural. He has two tattoos: on his right arm is a bandolier, with every bullet representing someone he has lost. It is designed in such a way that it can be added to if he faces more losses in future; his second tattoo he got just before exiting prison. It states, 'ONCE MORE WITH FEELING' and is positioned across his upper chest.

PERSONALITY
Positive traits
- Professional. Qyilim is a trained interrogator. As many Zirzolans tend to be, he was a natural choice for this training.
- Having worked in a team before, he has a healthy amount of protective nature in him.
- Academic. Although he looks like nothing more than a jock with a gun (or a bloodied knuckle on occasion), he understands the political climate of the galaxies quite well. This also stems from his bounty hunter days, where, at times, they had to acquire permissions to enter certain parts of the galaxy.
- Since serving his time, he has developed a ‘new’ perspective on life, which at least stops him from straying from the terms of his parole.
- Has honour in combat: if someone surrenders, he will accept it. He also says he upholds the Zirzolan standards of honour but, since he can interpret psionic activities of non-Zirzolans, that doesn’t really matter. Hard to uphold honour when you can ‘see’ what the other person is about to do.

Negative Traits
- Sometimes, the painkillers come first. Well, quite often, actually. This is one of the main things he will lie about, since he’d rather know people distrust him rather than are disgusted by his habit.
- If he is on those painkillers, his ability to do any facet of his job is completely wrecked. He might as well be a human, and who wants to be one of those? (Apparently everyone given the quantity of humans in this CS thread.)
- Past melancholies sometimes get the better of him, which in turn lead to reckless action brought on by his need to emote rather than think.
- A little cocky around firearms. His past as a bounty hunter made it necessary for him to learn how to use a variety of weapons. Being a Zirzolan, he was an asset in quick-decision situations. Though, on the bright side, he is more like a big brother: assumes he knows best, but at least offers to help you out. Or is that worse?
- Is actually quite fond of his criminal days and often says he would have done certain things differently. This kind of thing is not widely regarded as a positive in the parole world.
- Constantly hungry.

Full personality description
Qyilim has a rather lucid personality. Being Zirzolan, he is very socially competent, though has certain defences which are noticeable. Despite this, he is good-natured and protective, though has a stoic side. When combat arises, his personality changes gear a bit: he is driven, professional and quick, engaging in whatever needs to be done at the time. He listens to commands, though will break those commands if he feels he really needs to.
[Qyilim’s personality may change during the RP; he is a new character and I still getting to know him.]

SKILLS
Qyilim is a trained interrogator. One of his specialties is rapport establishment, as he knows what to say at the right time. It has been proven this is not simply down to his psionic interpretation abilities, since he can interrogate other Zirzolans successfully too. With military service under his belt, Qyilim is adept with many kinds of firearms. Preparation is also a skill of Qyilim’s from his time serving as a Sergeant. This was enhanced by his vocation as a bounty hunter.
Keeping his body in check is just as important as keeping his spirit strong, so he engages in both gym sessions as well as meditative exercises. One thing he would love to be able to do is cook, though his carnivorous diet doesn’t leave much room for fancy trimmings.

POLITICAL ORIENTATION
Qyilim used to be much more loyal to Waning Stars; he is still loyal, and believes things would be better under them, though has also seen some of Waning Stars’ failures after his bounty group fell apart. He can’t see Icarus being a good solution to the galaxy’s problems (though, there never is a ‘good’ solution, is there?) but finds the idea of their own-law policy to be interesting in theory. He follows the conflicts between them closely.

BACKSTORY
Below is Qyilim’s monologue which he delivered while handcuffed at his parole hearing.

“Being Zirzolan has a few benefits, benefits I think are best utilised out in the galaxy. I have always been a servant of the galaxy, doing the dirty work no one else wants to do. Starting when I was 22, I served 8 years in the Waning Stars military, achieving the rank of Sergeant. Due to my skillset, in particular my interrogation abilities, I was offered a Specialist position on a small private team dedicated to tracking down known or suspected war criminals. [Note: this small team was considered private but was provided with equipment and a ship by the WS military.] I served with 3 humans, one Tethian and one Liborian. What I learned was patience, synergy and efficiency, to be abstract, and there is little point me listing my more physical lessons, since they are uncountable. We were a solid group, powerful and known in our own small way, and, when I was incarcerated, all I requested to have with me was the photo of us standing in front of our last ship. I say last for a reason; the group was extinguished after one of our more notorious targets detonated explosives on us. [Note: Qyilim's account of this is purposefully vague due to instruction by the Waning Stars military.] Two of our group were lost, and the other three of us on the ground were injured. Our pilot, who had stayed with the ship, was our saviour that day, and I owe my life to her. [Note: Qyilim pauses here, though analysis shows it was because of stress and grief. The identities of those he served with are briefly detailed below:
Alma Brath, Human, Stealth Scout, alive
Marika “Paprika” Duncan, Assault, deceased
Rayla Shy, Tethian, Pilot, alive
"Zeke" Zezkeszka, Liborian, deceased
Victor Liber, Human, Assault, alive
The group went down after that. Funding went to ensuring we injured three were given decent treatment, and funereal arrangements for the two we had lost. Over the course of three months, I lost my right arm and my right leg. I could not work and had no money to ensure I got good prosthetics. For a long time, I tried to earn money in an honest way, but I became desperate. I am sure many of you in this room have felt the sting of desperation at times, the worry that you will barely be able to afford to keep your residence. I had that, and the knowledge that I needed to fix my body. [Note: Qyilim here looks around the room for the sake of garnering empathy.] You all know what I did to try and earn my money. And for that, I have served my time. [Note: Qyilim’s crime is one account of smuggling of contraband, though his sentence was reduced due to his taking of a plea deal, where he provided the names and cover identities of other smugglers.] If there was any other way out of it for me, I would have taken it. But when you are on the edge, barely hanging on, weak in body and weak in spirit, the prospect of easy cash is the only crutch that helps you stand up. At the time, the risk was worth it. Now, it would not be. I wish to return to a life of doing the better thing. Of serving. Of bettering the little world I exist in. Please. As I stand here before you, I implore you all to see my stance. I am a person of many skills, skills which are best utilised out in the galaxy, and not in a jail cell. Thank you.”

 

[Daisie]

NAME
Chanterelle Pilz
"Chantelle" or "Chante"

APPEARANCE AGE

ACTUAL AGE
35

SPECIES
Human.

APPEARANCE

With her 5 foot, 10 inches of height covered head to toe in armor, Chanterelle weighs 150 lbs. Her suit - a modified CCG Personal Containment rig somehow acquired from Icarus's Contagion Containment Group - shows visible signs of years of wear, though it's clearly been repaired, sanded, and polished many times - slightly rugged, but obviously very well-loved. Though she's managed to maintain most of the suit's white colour, the odd nooks, awkward edges, and hard-to-reach spots have been roughed up or blackened with time. She never leaves the armor.

PERSONALITY
Positive traits
- Stoic: Most often she keeps her feelings to herself, and will stay on guard at all times. You'll be hard-pressed to hear her complain about pain.
- Determined: Her drive to survive and achieve her goals is unparalleled. Regardless of the task, if she has her mind set to it, she will get it done.
- Observant: She pays very, very close attention to her surroundings, as well as the strengths and flaws of those around her.
- Quick-thinking: Fast situations are her forte. She doesn't freeze up in the midst of danger, but she thinks rapidly and with precision.
- Self-sufficient: Very rarely does she ever require help. She insists on doing all medical care on herself, and though that seems like it's not always the best idea, it's worked out well for her so far.
- Curious: Behind her cold, reserved shell is a genuine hunger and curiosity for the secrets of the universe. The most engaged she gets is when learning, and it doesn't matter what about - from engine mechanics to a twisty stick.

Negative Traits
- Quiet: If you don't know how to talk to her, she can be difficult to hold down a conversation with... and she doesn't generally engage socially if she has nothing to gain from it.
- Secretive: She keeps to herself and has very short tolerance if she feels she's being pressed for too much information. She does not talk about herself.
- Socially incompetent: While she has very firm boundaries for herself, she's bad and respecting the boundaries of others - not out of malice or anything, she's just quite oblivious.
- Lacking humour: Most jokes fly over her head completely. Does she even have the ability to laugh? No one knows.
- Distrusting: Trust is not given out for free from Chante, rather it's something that's earned. She'll probably be questioning your motives six ways from Sunday for a good, long time.
- Prosopagnosia: Not quite a personality trait, but regardless, Chante suffers from a condition often referred to as "face-blindness", meaning that she can't identify facial features. Instead, she identifies most people via different giveaways, like voice, clothing, hairstyle, or skin colour. This also means it takes much more time for her to recognize people and remember names.

Full personality description
Chante is quiet, and when she speaks, it's usually in a fairly low or monotone voice - an odd detail that makes it difficult to tell whether she's feeling excited or bored. On the far introverted side of the spectrum, she prefers to be left to her own devices, though this doesn't mean she's afraid to speak up when she sees something wrong, nor will she flinch at the idea of working alongside a team when it comes to the greater good. Indeed, though she is quiet and secretive, she is anything but shy. Oftentimes she's as blunt and succinct as words could possibly allow, particularly around people she's just met. She truly despises large, wide-open spaces, and is much more cozy in a small, cramped, and dark room.

SKILLS
- Picked up from being aboard the Favrus station for quite a long time, she is fairly knowledgeable when it comes to the handling of gasses and toxic/dangerous/explosive materials.
- She also has a good sense of direction and three-dimensional space, which is a talent she uses well as an amateur, self-taught pilot. She's no expert by any means, but in a pinch, she'll do quite nicely.
- Surprisingly enough, she has a big green thumb. She can generally identify toxic plants and fungi upon immediate glance. Despite her hardened exterior, her potted companions mean the world to her. Harm them, and she will harm you.
- Cooking, though not the most important skill one could have, is arguably her best and most practiced one. Despite never letting herself be seen eating her own food, she's an excellent chef who will make some of the most delectable meals you could ever taste, even out of poor ingredients... though she will never cook with mushrooms.

POLITICAL ORIENTATION
Mostly apolitical, as she stays near completely uninformed about ongoing political dramas... but if she had to lean one way or the other, she would lean towards Icarus, as their stance on privacy is more... convenient for her.

BACKSTORY
Chanterelle was born with quite a few medical issues, many of them rare enough to remain unnamed. Apparently she has been afflicted from a very young age with many immune disorders, making it quite dangerous for her to be outside of her suit for any space of time. This, combined with a cocktail of strange vitamin and mineral deficiencies, means that she is required to take a special, home-made supplement twice per day via injection through a special port in her suit. She keeps these stocked-up and refilled at all times. All of this along with the aforementioned "prosopagnosia" (Face-blindness) makes life interesting for Chante.

She grew up only with her adoptive father, an isonaut deep in space who took care of her alone for most of her life. When he passed, she found work aboard the Favrus station, where living life on her own hardened her. She became more and more distant from her compatriots and coworkers before she suddenly bought a ship, stocked up on resources, and quit her job to explore the stars.

Trying to get any of this out of her would be twisting arms.

 

[Vudukudu]

Eska Cavanaugh

Age: 17

Species: Human, Cloned

APPEARANCE

6’0, ~180 pounds, yellow irises

PERSONALITY
Positive traits
Clever, Personable, Perseverant

Negative Traits
Too Stubborn to Quit, Compulsive Risk-Taker, Naive

Full personality description:
Eska Cavanaugh is what you get when your “father” is the sort of megalomaniac who clones himself seeking to create the perfect legacy and culls a dozen of your siblings before settling on you. Her perfection streak is driven by the acute awareness that anything less might mean her death, and growing up on Tartarus has only sharpened that edge to a mono-molecular razor. She has learned to be quick-witted, cunning, and with the potential for cruelty, but privately sees all the things her father calls flaws in herself: generosity, mercy, empathy. She teeters on the edge, just a few bad days from becoming her father or a few good ones from being the person he was in his youth.



SKILLS:
As you’d expect, she takes after her father. Eska is a well-practiced swordswoman (with a few kills to her name, even), skilled in the culinary arts, well-versed in tactical and strategic theory (even if she’s never seen a starship doing anything but crashing), falconry, musical talent, and has a keen eye for administration.

POLITICAL ORIENTATION: Absolute Monarchist.

BACKSTORY
Eska was born three years after Alexander’s arrival on Tartarus, some time after he had staged a coup and co-opted the old levers of power on the backwater world. Her ten siblings, of which she was the ninth, were born in cloning vats found on a crashed vessel, gifted with their father’s genetic enhancements but lacking the rest that couldn’t be encoded in his DNA. No one but Alexander knows why he decided to gene-tailor one of his potential heirs to be a girl - maybe it was simple curiosity, some lingering memory of his older sister, or something else that drove him, but Eska emerged from the tank alone amongst brothers.
Seventeen years later, after a decade of the most grueling childhood Alexander could devise for her and her siblings, she is the only one that remains. Swordplay, gunplay, the art of rulership, and skills like cooking and singing that she could never quite understand the need for were instilled in her early. She excelled where her brothers failed, displaying an animal cunning and viciousness that delighted her father. She never was allowed to have a childhood, and the perceptive glint in her eyes hides the same calculating intellect that created her and molded her into someone fit to rule an empire. She has spent much of the last year managing an outpost on the frontier of Alexander’s territory exerting her father’s will.

 

[queendilettante]

Hanako Inoue
The Huntress

Gender: Female (she/her)

Species: Human

Appearance Age: Mid Twenties

Actual Age: 34

Sexuality: Bisexual but mostly dates men.

Allegiance: Her employers; currently Waning Stars.

Occupation: Bounty Hunter

Height: 5’1

Weight: 130lbs

Build: Average

Hair: Straight, black hair. Often cut into a neat bob with brow length bangs.

Eye Color: Dark Brown

Complexion: Clear, often with makeup

Distinctive Physical Features:

• Hanako has a cybernetic left arm.
• Hanako has a few bullet wounds across her body that have healed to varying degrees of success.

Typical Clothing:

• When not on a mission, Hanako keeps it fairly casual. She tends to prefer sleeveless tops because of the way sleeves feel awkward on her arm. Tank tops, ripped t-shirts, jeans; the works. She’s barefoot if she can find an excuse for it, else she wears combat boots.

Personality:
Hanako is very outgoing, often being the first person to comment on something or reach out to someone nearby. She’s been described as “boisterous,” especially among her relatives growing up, but she just likes to take life a little less seriously than everyone else.

Hanako is adept at utilizing her charisma and somewhat-flirty personality to find information on her targets and lower people’s guard. She prefers to bring her bounty targets in alive for myriad reasons, primarily the thrill of deception and the look on their face as she collects her pay.

She’s frequently torn between loyalties, often struggling to choose between ideology and a paycheck. She tries to claim that she’s just “opportunistic,” but she’s a bit more cowardly when push comes to shove than she’d like to admit.

Quirks:

• When confused or caught off guard, Hanako will almost assuredly begin her sentences with a prolonged “Uhh…”
• She has a hard time keeping eye contact in conversations unless she’s mildly drunk.
• On that note, she hiccups incessantly after a single drink. It’s an unfortunate and incredibly obvious tell.
• Hanako has to fight the near-irresistible urge to twirl things in her hands - especially weapons - whenever she picks them up.

Skills/Equipment:

• Deception. Hanako can put on the performance of a lifetime as a patron at a bar, club, or public space to find information on a target.
• Hanako’s cybernetic left arm has numerous built-in tools and other goodies that she likes to surprise people with.
• Hanako prefers to fight with dual-wielded handguns to rifles but is also fond of explosives when the situation calls for it (or she can argue that the situation calls for it).
• She isn’t terribly strong, so she prefers to avoid melee combat, but she’s decent with a knife.
• While usually against “cheat tactics,” like this, Hanako has been known to, on occasion, drug people’s drinks to deal with them quickly.

Bio/Backstory:
What calls people to bounty hunting? Is it the thrill of the chase? Boredom? Poverty? Sadism? Hanako found herself drawn to the profession for a mix of all four, but she tells people different things whenever they ask.

Her story isn’t especially different from most other bounty hunters who’ve been in the trade longer than a few years. Her family life was less than stellar, her career prospects lacking, and her ambition was nearly fried. So, she took up a badge for sale. It was power over another and she could do it without thinking or questioning the morals of it. No one would put a bounty on an innocent person, after all.

Right?

Eh, no matter! She lived and found more success than she’d ever have dreamed of in her parents’ konbini manager aspirations for her. Everything was sailing smoothly on still waters until this weird ass planet trapped her there. It hasn’t been for an especially long time, all things considered, but annoyance mounts quickly when you’re held against your will.

 

[Dragongal]

NAME
Miles Moss

Nickname
Moss

APPEARANCE AGE
28
ACTUAL AGE
28
SPECIES
Human
Appearance:

Miles is often seen casually wearing a kevlar jacket over typical black cotton shirts. He has tattoos on his shoulder, bicep, collarbone and side, but most of these aren't usually visible. He keeps his hair in a relatively short comb-over and shaved close on the sides. He has two almost invisible hearing aids in his ears.
Weight: 180
Height: 5'9"
Eye Color: green
Hair color: reddish-brown

PERSONALITY
Positive traits
Endlessly Optimistic
Very Patient
Dedicated/Loyal
Conflict resolution
Can keep a secret
Negative Traits
A (Harmless) Flirt
Remorseful
Stubborn
Borderline Pacifist

Full personality description
Miles is extremely upbeat and optimistic. He's always smiling and is very social; while he is a flirt, he has very good boundaries and makes notable effort to not make people uncomfortable. He's a social butterfly, and knows when to tone down the optimism and instead be more gentle or quiet. He's a great listener, and a good support for people. Miles is kind, but still competent, and knows when to defend himself. He will kill if needed, but only if it's a last resort.
SKILLS
Endless optimism - is your team in a bind? How nice would it be to have someone who can actually make a joke about it! He's also great at verbal conflict resolution and de-escalation. Miles is extremely proficient with firearms and most ranged weaponry. He's trained more for on planet skills than in a ship in space, but his skills translate over well nonetheless. Miles is also very skilled in repairing firearms and making use of broken or discarded items - he's been trained to be dropped in desolate areas with no contacts and survive long enough to be picked up. Again, this training is for on planets, but translates decently to onboard ships.
POLITICAL ORIENTATION
Miles is aligned with Waning Stars, however, he believes communication and compromise can solve most issues and does not automatically hate Icarus allies.
BACKSTORY
Miles was born on a booming colony planet. He was the third child out of seven and comes from a very loving and close-knit family. He joined the Waning Stars military when he was 18, hoping to get to travel the solar systems and get to make a career out of his love for the mechanics behind weaponry. He also wanted ot be able to have spare funds to send home to his family.
Miles was discharged from the WS military one year ago following an incident that has left him deaf and with a brain injury. Due to the complexity thanks to the brain injury, and the fact that he refuses any cybernetic implants, he uses rechargeable hearing aids. They work very well, and can hook up into comm systems, but he does take them out to sleep and the like. He is learning sign - while he's pretty proficient, he's not fluent yet, so he carries a notepad with him.