Name: Elias Riemen

Age: 33

Appearance:
Elias is a very large man, well above two meters and though seemingly of naturally lanky build, he has certainly put in the work to put meat on top of bone to make an overall very intimidating figure. The hair on his scalp is black, whilst facial hair is red while his skin is a brassy tint not entirely clear if brought on by a tan or natural complexion. Very rarely do people do see many of the rest of his traits for he typically covers them up with a kefiyeh or similar items of clothing. The reason is quite banal: as a result of torturings from the reavers he is missing the whole of his nose, tongue, lips, and ears.


Skills: Elias knows his way around a good deal of machinery from ship engines to kitchen implements to firearms. He knows the basics that many a spacefarer might need like fighting (though in this he prefers to work either by intimidation or brute force rather than particular skill), cooking, first aid, but his keep has always been earned by fixing things.

Personality:
As a whole, the man has developed a personality that is very patient, and calm. This is an all but inevitable product of his slowness in communication. However those who have tried to mentally slot him as a gentle giant have at times been sorely disappointed, for - perhaps as a product of insecurity - when said patience expires he typically begins to refuse any sort of compromise and will lose most inhibition from crude methods like violence if they will lead to what he needs and wants.

History:
Though born on the frontier, Elias was largely spared the muck, poverty and backwardness that many other such people are forced into. This is owing to his family being landowners. Back in the day, it made them traitors of sorts when the war started for they relied upon the central government of the Alliance to enforce their rents and other means of income. It was thus that they became refugees for the duration of the conflict, only returning triumphantly to become the even more despised overlords of the population that was now under a new order.

It was thus into their friends in the core worlds that the Riemen family retreated, frequently flying to the parties of their socialite contacts and such. With four sons and two daughters and Elias being the youngest, it was quite inevitable that with Elias being the youngest his mother and father found the suggestion that he best be enlisted into the military to further augment their status and expand their contacts into the military industrial complex to be very, very enticing.

It was thus that a fairly cushy position as a Chief Engineer aboard a vessel patrolling the frontier was guaranteed, which while comfortable and close to home relative to the postings most soldiers not of privileged backgrounds could have, it nonetheless felt like an exile of sorts.
But as with most men that come to wander the stars, all would not be well forever. There was a laxity upon the vessel that Elias served on, one that would make them wholly unprepared for a visit from the Reavers. The vessel seemingly came from nowhere, masking its approach with an asteroid belt such that the navy men were entirely unprepared to be boarded. In their triumph the reavers not only got themselves a new vessel and many weapons, but also a great deal of captured spacemen: Elias among them.

All fears of the Reavers were proven true in his brief captivity, the sadists cutting pieces of him one by one. Though by influence of his family rescue eventually came, it was far too late for Elias was now a mangled man.

Though in future years he would realize this wasn’t entirely reasonable or accurate, Elias felt betrayed by his family that had pushed him into service, and immediately upon rescue took the first flight off world that he could before starting to wander the stars. Now for some time he has wandered planet to planet, scraping by with what his education in Engineering could provide him. Though typically it was work and fare that he considered far beneath himself, Elias has to this day been far too stubborn to come crawling back.

---

Lyen stands about 5'2" with a lithe frame, dark brown hair typically restrained in a long braid. She has almond brown eyes and wears a bright orange kasaya robe which denote her vows.


Lyen's past sports all sorts of sordid activities, but that was more than ten years ago before she took her oath and handed her life over to service of the Temple on Santo. A year or so after that saw Lyen studying medicine under the tutelage of a somewhat famous Dentist-turned-bushdoctor on a Firefly class ship across the 'Verse. She still knows her way around an infirmary, but her skills have needed to evolve due to lack of resources. Most importantly, her penchant is for matters of the heart and soul.


Sister Lyen has been a nun for thirteen years--with all the patience her station affords any woman who chooses the cloth. She is kind and earnest. Life experience has taught Ly that nothing is black and white, and so her grip on the harsh precepts taught to her at the Temple long ago have loosened over time. Underneath her skin, there's still a rebelious woman who has her own demons to face.


Lyen's parents were taken from her while she was a child, but not by plague or war. Her father was a miner, her mother was a taven worker; one left the family out of selfishness, the other lost her life to chemical coping. Self destruction was a common theme for young Lyen Giu.

The rest of her young years saw pain as she fell in with gang life on Santo. After a seminal moment in her life, Lyen took a sharp turn into the cloth and her vows at the Temple of the Order of the Interverse. She spent the next ten years learning about the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

At the end of ten years she was tasked by the mothers to go out into the world and to do good, saving as many people as she could. And so following that charge, Lyen found herself in the company of a captain of a Firefly class ship, traveling between plantes on the rim.

When her time ended aboard the ship, Lyen, still following her calling, stumbled upon a blight upon society in the Blackout Zones of Osiris. Since that time, and for years hence, she has been working to alieviate the suffering of the subjugated and enslaved in the dark underbelly of the most 'just' city planet in the 'Verse.

Name
Len Boone

Age
48

Physical Appearance
Boone is bald, tattooed, muscular, and big. He is well over six feet tall and has the sort of battered meatiness to his face most boxers have at the end of their career. Boone looks like he's been curling weights and eating canned protein for nearly thirty years because he has, during which time he has also gone to great lengths to painstakingly cover himself from head to toe in threatening tattoos, mostly of weapons, predatory animals, and death-related iconography. When he smiles -- which is often -- one can see that he has had all of his visible teeth capped in silver, save for his right front tooth, which is missing. Boone's easiest-to-miss detail, though a hard one to not stare at once you've noticed, is that he is missing his right pinkie finger from the second knuckle up, a tell-tale sign of his criminal past. For all his muscle and tattoo ink, his wardrobe seems to consist solely of nonthreatening pink polo shirts.



Skills
Boone was trained to fly starships in prison using a flying simulation module, also known among those in-the-know simply as "Sim-flying", popular within Alliance training facilities, amusement parks, and the game rooms of particularly wealthy, doting parents of the core planets. Despite having no experience with actual ships, Boone has logged over twenty years of sim-flight time on nearly every class of transport ship, from city-sized Blue Sun Super Freighters to the smallest Peregrine Class a buyer could want to squeeze themselves into. Accordingly, Boone is an excellent pilot with a working knowledge of dozens of types of ships.

Before Boone was a sim-flying jailbird, he was a high-ranking member of some sort of shadowy interstellar mafia, and accordingly, has a long list of unsavory skills, ranging everywhere from fighting to money laundering to body hiding, though this does not include marksmanship. Boone couldn't hit a target in his best days with anything that didn't spray ten bullets per second, and he has not improved twenty-something years out of practice. Additionally, while he is a huge, strong, and experienced fighter, he has sworn a vow of non-violence and refuses to take a life or inflict even potentially lethal harm on a person.

Personality
Boone is almost sickeningly sweet, a clash with his appearance that most find more off-putting than if he acted like a surly outlaw. He sleeps with a well-loved teddy bear, tends to a small bonsai tree named "Chuck", exclusively refers to people as "Mr. Firstname" or "Dear", and pursues domestic hobbies such as knitting and baking with the same passion as his intense prison workouts. He does not drink, smoke, or curse, which stems from the firm Christian convictions he picked up in prison, and frequently quotes relevant bible passages. He is an optimist able to see the silver lining in anything, from a bad meal (Only bad meal's a missed meal!) to getting robbed (They must need it more than them that don't rob!) though this does not extend to his fear of reincarceration, which borders on paranoia. Boone oftentimes acts like he is still in prison, asking the captain for permission to go to the bathroom, hoarding items under his bed, and crafting strange prison-replacements for things freely available to even the humble standards of China Doll's crew. Additionally, though Boone has grown oddly comfortable with tight, confined spaces for such a giant man, he has a strong phobia of wide-open spaces and refuses to do space walks.

History
You would never guess it (and he would never tell you) but Boone was born on Londinium -- the poorest, most Alliance-neglected ghetto on Londinium -- but Londinium, nonetheless. He had no father, but a hard-handed mother who unsuccessfully tried to keep her son off the streets for as long as possible. Boone started out as the largest of "The Fly Boys", a youth gang on stolen hoverbikes, eventually collecting debts for local bars and bookkeepers throughout his adolescence, graduating to being jumped into a more serious street gang -- the No Hearts Killers -- and later leaving even them for the big leagues of Londinium's organized crime, the Red Fang Clan.

Under the Red Fang, Boone continued working his way up the criminal ladder until his imprisonment at the Urvasi Penal Colony at 24, resulting in a 20 year prison sentence, eventually increased to 24 years for fights and infractions in prison. During this time, two very big things about Boone changed: The focal point of his life became flying starships, and he gave himself up to God. Now, Boone is a strange walking paradox, as threatening-looking as a person can be, but reading aloud to his bonsai all the same.

Name: Penelope Abernathy (nee. McGinnis) Nickname: Penny
Age: 36

Physical appearance: Penny is an attractive woman. She stands 5’ 6” tall and slender. She has long black hair, cascading down her back or swept over one shoulder. Her dark brown eyes, mysterious pools. She is actually stronger than she appears, lean, conditioned from years of hard work and exercise. There was a time when she dressed in more fanciful attire, but her husband passed away four years ago. He left her nothing that was his. She was on her own, plying the verse for an income. She maintains investments in the inner planets but found passage on ships by working her way from planet to planet. She tends to wear loose fitting cotton trousers, a low-cut work boot and button-down blouses of varying color. She prefers more vibrant colors but has a few solid shirts as well. She even wears short-shorts and has a fleece lined bomber jacket, hat, and gloves for inclement weather.



Skills: Penny has been working jobs as a deck hand and as a cook for the past four years. She grew up on a farm and knows well how to tend to the livestock as well as harvesting the crops when needed. Penny knows her way around a firearm, her father taught her well and the boys who lived on her family’s farm reinforced those lessons and more. Even as a female, they included her in their roughhousing, teaching her how to defend herself.

Personality: Penny is confident, vivacious, with an excellent sense of humor. She has moments of sarcasm mixed in with a serious streak of honest empathy for others. She easily invests herself in someone until they prove her wrong. She has no filter at times saying what comes to mind rather than bite her tongue. She is easy to excite, be the life of the party and just as quickly flare into anger if someone or something disturbs her. She does not hold grudges and comes down within twenty minutes of being angered.

Character Back Story: [Told as an interview by the woman herself.] So, you want me to tell you my life story?

…umm. OK. Not sure where to begin…Ok. I will do that.

My name is Penelope Abernathy and ah grew up on a farm on Hera. My daddy owned the farm. He had darn near three hundred fifty acres o’ land. We farmed, we tended cattle, horses, chickens, goats, pigs, you name it. Our farm provided food for near half the planet.

Abernathy? That were mah husband’s name. Ah was a McGinnis. Ah have a Ghuh-Ghuh named Walter. He was named fer our pa. My brother? Mi Tian Gohn, ah honestly don know where he run offt to. He somewhere in the ‘verse. Mebee trolling the dark fer all ah know?

Daddy loved tah farm. He an’ momma took in orphans too. We had at one time eight boys livin’ on our farm. They came to us as toddlers or infants. Momma didn’ take no teens. They was all Yīng'ér. Well, they was close to me and Walter’s age, but we was babies too. [giggles]

They was Lenny, Jake, Paul, Winston, Jo-Jo, Derek, Carl, and Theo. Lenny was the oldest. Momma called him Lenny and referred to him as Bad Apples. You see, Lenny was mean. He muss’ ah come from a bad place. Ah conjure his daddy beat him when he was young. That’s why he came to live with us. He didn’t like the name, “Lenny”. His name was Leonard. He told the other boys and me to call him Leo and we did. Leo was mean. He beat the other boys merciless. He never laid a finger on me, but my brothers? He beat them to pulp sometimes. This is when they was young too.

Ah remember him beating Jo-Jo this one time. Jo-Jo an me were about ten year old and Leo was a head taller ‘n Jo-Jo. Joe was a dark boy. We had two dark boys, Jo-Jo and Theo. Theys the only ones the rest was white. So, Leo tried to get Jo-Jo angry. But Joe kept his cool. He knew what Leo was doin’. Leo didn’ care. He kicked Jo-Jo hard in the stomach. The boy doubled over in pain and fell to the ground. Then Leo kicked him in the head, the ribs, the thighs, the testies. You name it. Leo kicked that boy near tah death. But you know. Leo did that tah all the boys.

When Leo was 18, he left the farm and we all said, “Good riddance!” He raped a girl in town, then he killt her. They say, he killt her just to see the girl die. He laughed when she died. He found her death amusin’. He was juss a mean ole cuss. No one liked him.

But what Leo did to the boys was teach them to fight. Ah conjure he thought hisself a hand to hand combat instructor of some sort, but he was juss an asshole. He would tell the boy he was fightin’ tah put his hands up. To not let them drop. Then he would box the boy and jab him in the head, the face, the chest or the stomach. He would laugh when he punched the boy. Eventually, the boys got good at fightin’. They fought amongst themselves. They learned from Leo, regardless of how painful it was.

Fighting amongst the boys turned into a game. They practiced fighting but didn’t punch each other as hard as Leo did. That boy was simply mean.

When ah was a young girl, my momma would teach me to cook. We cooked all sorts a recipes including cakes, pies, cookies, and muffins. Not juss meats, soups and sauces. Ah enjoyed the cookin’. Mebee it’s because my best friend, Jo-Jo was always with me. He and ah were best of friends. We did everything together.

When we was 17, ah wanted to kiss him, but momma kept a close eye on us and ah didn’t want her getting’ upset. Ah never had a beau, juss Jo-Jo. Ah do believe he was sweet on me too. Ah think the only reason he learned to cook.

But then the war happened. The boys all joined the Heran Militia and went off to war. None of em came back home. They all died in that God awful war. [visibly saddened by her loss] Ah really do miss mah Jo-Jo. He was such a dear sweet boy.

When the war ended, the purple bellies came to the farm. Walter an me were in the barn that day. We decided it best we did not go outside straight away. From the barn we saw them drag our ma and pa from the house. One of them beat pa in the head. He fell to the ground. Mamma dropped on top of him. Ah heard her wailin. Then another a’ the purple bellies raised his rifle and fired two shots. One into ma and ta other into pa. They killt em juss like that. Fer no reason.

Anyway, Walter and ah waited until dark and left out of the farm. Ah hear the purple bellies seized the farm, hired workers to take care of it, now they’s providing food for the big whigs on Londinium. Anyone we met on Hera who knew us, we tole ‘em to say we was kilt juss like our folks. We didn’ want no one chasin’ us.

Walter an me left Hera. We jumped a ship and left. He worked as a deckhand and a mechanic. He fixes engines on cargo ships. Keeps em runnin’. Ah worked as a cook for a bit, but somehow juss took odd jobs for a few years. I even learned proper diction; how to elucidate syllables. I was educated in history, social studies, music, art, literature and politics. It was to enable me to find better employment for some very wealthy men. I performed whatever service they needed. They enjoyed my company and paid quite handsomely for my...friendship.

James Abernathy, a businessman from Ariel City claimed me as his own. Not as property. He rescued me from a coveted life and provided me with different form of coveted life as the wife of a wealthy businessman from one of the central planets of the universe. Being a farm girl from Hera, I did not know much about business or legal matters. When James died four years ago, I learned, the bastard left me nothing. Well, nothing except my daughter Isabella Rose, aged 11. Izzy is my sweet angel. She comes with me everywhere I go.

I did manage to squirrel away some money. I have an account in the inner planets valued at over 55,000 credits and I have a satchel with roughly 2500 credits in my belongings. The money in the account, I can only access when I am in the central planets. This is why I carry so much on me when I am in the rim or in the black. That account is mine and only a fraction of what that bastard had accumulated.

I have been traveling most of the time. I pick up odd jobs here and there. I have worked as a cook on a cargo ship, even done some time as a deck hand. [giggles] Yes, little ole me working as a deckhand. I do enjoy my life now and would like to have a better life for Izzy even if that means we have to travel on various cargo ships.

Anyway, I was deposited on this planet two weeks ago and am looking for employment as a cook. I’d even be willing to move crates around if I have to.

I do carry a few firearms. My daddy taught me to shoot, and I would be remiss if I couldn’t defend myself. I carry a .357 revolver and a 12-gauge shotgun. The shotgun’s barrel has been reduced to 16 inches from its original 24. It makes the weapon great for short range and easy to maneuver around in tight places. I have considered buying a rifle, but I just haven’t had the opportunity.