Secondary Character

[img]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/09/15/article-1055915-0257C41D00000578-913_468x462.jpg[/img]

Ester Baum

Occupation: Horticulturalist

Age: 27 

Appearance: 5'6'', pale skin, dark brown hair and eyes

Ester Baum, a descendant of German and Polish Jews that moved to Israel after WWII, grew up in the ever present threat of terrorism and civil war of her country, served in the IDF like everyone does for 2 years before going to college. Did some graduate work in Japan, learned to speak Japanese, along with English, Hebrew and Arabic. More often than not if she's not working, she's got her head down on her notepad, reading books stored on it or using the drawing program. Dreamed of going to the space station one day to experiment in growing plants in space and did her thesis on the subject (more details of that when I figure it out) and recruited by the Mountain to work on their program.

She's rather quiet and soft spoken, intensely focused on her work and fascinated by green things and their silent world. A woman with a gentle nature but a steel core, having grown up in a land of war and human suffering over what would come to be such small things, such as difference in religion and blood. Reflecting on that, after the Change happens and humanity is nearly wiped out and the fact she's from a people known for things like the Diaspora when they were forced to leave their homelands and went out into a hostile world to make their way and the Holocaust which wiped out so many. So she looks forward to the new Caanan, where humans might make a better world.

Ester is one of the lucky ones, her immediate family were all members of the project at the Mountain. After her recruitment she read the writing on the wall and managed to get her father who is a geneticist and her mother who is a pediatrician aboard. That was followed with her younger sister, Naomi and her brother in law, David. Her sister is a computer tech and her husband had military experience as well as mining. All of them were awake for the second shift, which Ester was supposed to be a part of but the wife of the pair that ran the horticulture project had a baby, there for did not go to sleep when it was planned. She stayed up to birth and care for her infant until she was old enough to sleep. Now Ester is on the third shift but she is not alone. Naomi is pregnant and cannot go into stasis with her husband and parents.

Ester and Naomi, who is 24, grew up on a kibbutz, a communal farm near Haifa, Israel. While her mother practiced in the nearby town, her father often was gone for long stretches, guest lecturing or working on projects in places like Tel Aviv, Paris, Cambridge, Berkley, and Tokyo. Though their parents were both professionals, they had grown up farming as did their parents before them. Rather than move their girls to the city, they wanted to instill a love for the land and the skills to live off of it, to appreciate hard work and what would be gleaned from it. Both daughters served in the IDF, where Naomi met David, her future husband. While Ester began work on her PhD in agricultural science, her sister got a good job in as a software engineer and David went into security for a mining company, eventually getting interested in that industry. 

Where Ester is quiet, introverted and observant, her sister is talkative, outgoing and friendly. Their mother always called them her moon and sun and they have close if not always smooth relationship.

Naomi Ben Zeev née Baum

Occupation: computer software technician

age: 24 

[hider=Naomi][img]http://kennesaw-dentist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/pregnant-woman-black-dress-brunette.jpg[/img][/hider]