Leena
“You know what they say; we're the biggest family on Kepler.”
Name
Leena Heikkinen
Age
Twenty Three
Gender
Nonbinary, female presenting, They/Them.
Company
Janus Shipping Corporation - "Family comes first!"
Personality
Leena firmly believes in the role of capitalism in a society. Through hard work, loyalty, dedication, blood, sweat, tears, and bootstraps one can achieve the wealth and luxury on display by their superiors. Their dedication to their job as a shipping intake dock worker is commendable, and their willingness to sacrifice personal luxuries such as housing space, food budget, break hours, and PTO will surely be rewarded by Janus Shipping one day. Their hobbies include meditation, technical manual reading, enthusiastic walking, and general health and fitness pursuits.
In short, Leena is a slave. Willing, perhaps, but a thoroughly indoctrinated fool dedicated to the corporate objectives of the Janus Shipping corporation. They blind themselves to the abject horribleness of their circumstances, scrounging a poverty wage to purchase meagre supplies, and justify themselves with the dream that they will one day get promotion and be able to repeat the cycle with a modicum more comfort. Their dreams dare not extend beyond this singular desire; promotion, and the never-ending pursuit of the next rung of the ladder to escape the deplorable state of their current life. A state they are entirely blind to, fearing that however bad they may have it now with Janus that surely, without doubt, the other companies have it worse.
History
Leena was born mid-flight to Kepler. Originating on the Moon, the Heikkinen family was one entirely belonging to the lowest of social strata within the Janus Shipping Family, and therefor Leena's celestial-maritime birth upon a Janus vessel accrued immense debt for the family that they could never have hoped to pay off due to the family's lack of corporately provided health insurance. Naturally, due to being born on a Janus Shipping vessel, the medical personnel and provider was also Janus Shipping.
Leena's birth was another step in the forever-cycle of the Heikkinen family's spiraling lease-to-live status, and they began to work in the efforts of achieving 'The Janus Shipping Dream' of luxury and opulence at the age of thirteen in The Gate of Kepler Station. Their initial paychecks were entirely dedicated to the interest rates of the debt accrued by their own birth, and their job was to mount and scrub docked vessels via Spacewalk. Two years later their father died at the age of forty two from work related stress injuries. Leena got a promotion the same day. The funerary costs and the airlock fees were added onto their debt.
They were now a Senior Ship Scrubber, in charge of other youths in their peerage as well as other grown adults of such little prospects that their sole utility was 'expendable janitor for a nearly defunct and purely corporate-aesthetic posturing position'. Janus Shipping had the cleanest ships, and Leena was now one of the people held responsible for that. Leena now needed to take care of a mother whose own leg injury had delegated her to purely clerical work at a significant pay cut, as well as compensate for the debt of their birth, their father's death, and the spiraling food bill.
They managed to achieve a period of stagnant interest rate payments from the ages of fifteen to eighteen, where their now-veteran crew of ship-scrubbers had achieved a 2% efficiency increase over their competitor sibling-crews. Leena was, naturally, put up for promotion. This lead to a sharp decrease of their former team's efficiency (A notable drop of 36%, the blame of which fell solely on their replacement), but Leena themself was at long last safely within the confines of Kepler Station and given yet more responsibility. They were certified to operate the industrial powered truck vehicle (a process that took an intensive four hour training program! Unpaid, of course.), and were attached to a crew of intake-offload personnel.
Their mother died two years later, and at the age of twenty Leena was promoted again. Some consider their career meteoric, even. The funerary costs and airlock fee were added to their debt. They now had their family's hab-block entirely to themself, which meant that their habitable space had increased 200% through their life- which meant that they were absolutely miles ahead of their sibling-peers of equivalent age. Truly, they got to stretch their legs within the 300 square feet of designated living space their family unit had earned with their service to Janus Shipping.
Hell, their hab-space was only a twenty foot walk from their designated work station as Intake Manifest Review Analyst! Their duties included those of their new position as well as the ongoing assumption of all prior duties as senior offload crew manager. The work kept their mind off things. The work kept them busy. Their pay was marginally higher than the interest rates and hab rental fees.
For three years, life has been good. They may even buy a plastic hydrangea soon; they've been eyeing one in the Janus Employee Leisure emails for a while now.
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