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PLAYER
Player name: Fade
Contact: mirrorfaded
Characters currently in-game: Maketh Tua.

CHARACTER
Character Name: Miriam Day
Character Age: 16
Canon: Original
Canon Point: After getting her hand chopped off.
World Description: Short version: Miriam hails from a scifi-horror hybrid world constantly at risk of being torn apart by various warring factions and a species of recently discovered monsters. She’s a small, sassy fish in a big scary pond. Hilarity ensues.

Now for the longer version. Start with your basic, interplanetary scifi universe. Long-range space travel has become the norm, more than fifty planets have been terraformed and colonized, and humanity remains as unique and hopelessly divided as it’s ever been. Pretty standard. But then add in a pinch of weirdness just for fun. See, about twenty years ago, a group of explorers woke something up on a half forgotten moon. It killed half, infected the rest, and stowed away on their ship, blasting through quarantine with hardly a hello, and went on its merry way. It’s been infecting the galaxy ever since.

Oddly enough, that’s not the main conflict in Miriam’s world. The galaxy is a big damn place, and the Tar plague has been relatively contained to uninhabited planets and ghost ships floating out in dead space. More recent conflicts have given it the opportunity to slip out, however. For Miriam, her life has largely been defined by two events.

First, the Blue Moon Mutiny. Ten years ago, when Miriam was a wee lass, a group of six sailors on the Imperial warship Janissary released a weaponized plague into the onboard air filtration system, murdered everyone on board, and fired several missiles on the Imperial flagship – essentially crippling the entire command structure in a single blow. Over a million people were killed during the mutiny and the chaos that followed. The sailors who orchestrated the mutiny called themselves the Sons of Plunder and while they had reasons for their actions, that’s a different story all together.

What matters here is what happened afterward. See, the problem with groups like the Sons of Plunder is that while most of them had noble intentions, a few of them did not. One of them, Commander Marisol Aro, eventually wrestled control away from the others and used the Janissary’s arsenal of weapons to establish herself as the regional superpower. Thus, the Sons of Plunder created not revolution like they’d hoped, but an army of mercenary soldiers armed with weapons of mass destruction – all of them under the command of a sociopath. Following the death of Imperial High Command, a great many ships flocked to Commander Aro’s banner. Others were destroyed by the Inferno Corps, the main group of resistance to the Empire – and now the only one with any way of opposing the Sons of Plunder – who they had ironically helped rise to power in the first place.

Those who remained either fled, or banded together to create the Betrayed. Aside from the Inferno Corps, the Betrayed is the only organized force actively standing against the Sons of Plunder. However, they are forever at odds with the Inferno Corps, and the two often attack each other rather than combining their forces. All of this is due to the simple fact that the Betrayed fills their ranks with former Imperial soldiers, the very people that the Inferno Corps was created to destroy.

And thus began the Alliance Wars.

This leads to some interesting times, to say the least. All of the groups are too busy fighting each other to really bother with maintaining the structures of their various infrastructures, and the laws tend to change radically from place to place. If you’re born outside one of those groups, you’re at risk of being preyed on from them.

Oh, and there's also a space plague. Just in case things weren't interesting enough.

History: There isn’t much to say about Miriam’s life before the start of the Alliance Wars. She had a life but she doesn’t remember much about it, only fragmented memories of a flower garden and parents who took her to the library and read to her. Then the wars happened, and things become much clearer in her memory.

Her parents died. This much she’s sure of. Miriam doesn’t remember their names, but she knows she’s been alone for a long time. They dumped her on Echo Six in the care of a prostitute named Gilly and that was all she wrote. Life was pretty good for a while. Miriam made a living as a scavenger and small time hustler, running messages between ships and doing favors for the local sailors, essentially living from moment to moment. She amassed a ragtag educated and expected to join up with a merchant ship once she looked old enough to sign on the dotted line.

Then things went bad. The Sons of Plunder came and tried to set up shop. Miriam found herself cornered and thrown into a gladiator match -- because, honestly what are bored psychopaths going place bets on but a free for all death-match? Things looked pretty damn bad for a minute until a stranger stepped in. This is where Miriam met Bethany Lestan, a former soldier working for the Betrayed, and very pissed off pit fighter. Bethany saved her, got her out, and became Miriam's adopted mother. And under different circumstances this could have been a very nice story about found families and overcoming obstacles in a crazy world.

This one takes a turn when Miriam turned fifteen and the Sons of Plunder decided to take another shot at Echo Six. Things didn't go so well for the locals that time. Miriam ran, got caught, and found herself in the company of none other than the woman who ran the Sons of Plunder. Known only as the Commander, she was bored and wanted a project. Training a successor sounded like fun. Miriam didn't want to die, so she went along with it.

This lasted a year before the Commander got bored with the whole thing and dumped Miriam and Barnaby off at a space station - though not before cutting Miriam's right hand off, because you don't just leave the Sons of Plunder without paying a toll. And that is where the story starts up again.

Personality: Smart but lazy when it comes to things she’s not immediately interested in, Miriam drifts between a hundred different worlds in a day, inserting herself in conversations and making impressions – good and bad – wherever she goes. Picking up information, cataloging it, learning how to adapt and grow. She’s always underfoot, always listening, always watching. She doesn’t like to be alone, ever – and even if there aren’t any people around, she always has the dog with her. Recent events have exasperated her hyperactive tendencies and she's always doing something. Holding still is the worst feeling in the world for Miriam, second only to being alone.

Above all, Miriam is a survivor. She's grown up in a world that can turn nasty in an instant and either hardens people or eats them alive. She used to be the sort of person who lived solely in the moment, following a fuck the past and don't worry about the future kind of mentality, but then life happened in a way that she couldn't brush away. She had to face the facts.

Miriam has since grown a little older and a little wiser. Though she still loves the present moment with everything in her being, she's beginning to plan and plot. The future is no longer a nebulous maybe, but something that she means to seize. And it's going to take a lot of work and cunning to get there.

Not that she'll let that get her down. She'll put a smile on it and con her way to greatness with Barnaby at her side.

Inventory: First and foremost, there’s His Royal Highness Sir Bartholomew Barnaby Barks A Lot The Third. Barnaby the Rottweiler has been Miriam’s companion for four years now. He was a gift from her adopted mother and is essentially a cybernetically enhanced protection dog. If he’s commanded or if he senses that Miriam is in danger, he’ll attack. However, he usually goes for a tackle instead of a bite. Threaten Miriam and the teeth come out for real, though. Normally he’s a quiet, inquisitive teddy bear who likes to get his ears scratched. He sleeps in Miriam’s bed and doesn’t like it when people bother her. Barnaby wears an armored harness that can be hitched to a cart, though the cart sadly did not make it through the Door.

Miriam, unfortunately, has gotten too tall to ride him like a horse.

For her part, Miriam has the clothes on her back, a stun baton, a pistol in a concealed holster, and an armored jacket with the Sons of Plunder logo on the back.

Abilities: Above all, Miriam is a charmer. She’s made a living by inserting herself into other people’s business and talking them into letting her stay. She’s good at figuring out what people need and then making herself uniquely useful to them. Or, if that doesn’t work, groveling and making herself look utterly pathetic and harmless. The last part has been getting a little harder now that she’s bigger, unfortunately. But she'll still smile, sweet as you please, and knife a man in the back as soon as he looks away.

She plays a mean game of cards, cheats at dice, and reads fortunes for fun.

Though her formal education is lacking, Miriam is fairly smart and tends to pick things up quickly. In her life, Miriam has worked as a merchant, pickpocket, lookout, and armor girl. She’ll pour your drinks, clean your guns, or polish your boots if you make it worth her while. Above all, she’s versatile and proud of it.

Though she's not a strong fighter in the traditional sense, Miriam is a scrapper. She'll fight dirty and knows how to hurt someone with a stun baton or a knife. Don't expect her to play fair. The Sons of Plunder taught her how to win. It's not pretty.

Flaws: In essence, Miriam’s world is very small. Everything she knows and believes is shaped by her own experiences. As such, how she relates to people and situations is directly related to how they impact her personally, and not the rest of the world. Everything is taken in context to her own life and she'll ignore a great many wrongs if the person committing them is on her side.

Though she puts up a brave face, she’ll grovel the moment she’s backed into a corner and out of options. Though Miriam isn’t very proud of it, she’s a survivor at heart. She’ll do whatever she has to in order to see tomorrow.

SAMPLES
Action Log Sample: here