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[b]Name:[/b]
[indent][color=CCCCCC]Dr. Karina Pulaski [/color][/indent]
[b]Gender:[/b]
[indent][color=CCCCCC]Female [/color][/indent]
[b]Cycle/Age:[/b]
[indent][color=CCCCCC]10 cycles | 40y/o[/color][/indent]
[b]Appearance:[/b]
[indent][color=CCCCCC]At 5’6”, seemingly average build, with light brown hair, brown eyes, and lightly tanned skin, Karina’s body has the desirable effect of “being part of the crowd”. She dresses in neutral colors and tends to keep her head down when she is in public places. Her facial features are sharp, and her resting face has often been described as unpleasant. The woman seems to shrink into herself when she stands and has a soft voice that hardly qualifies above a mutter. [/color][/indent]
[b]Lunos:[/b]
[indent][color=CCCCCC]Acid[/color][/indent]
[b]Weapons:[/b]
[indent][color=CCCCCC] [i][b]The L&M P-15 Peacekeeper (colloq. “Loud & Messy”)[/b][/i]

A personal defense weapon noted for its obnoxiously loud warm-up sound, ugly design, and its extremely explosive and gory stopping power. Similar in appearance to an old flare gun down to its garish orange color, the P-15 fires a single, large explosive slug that can punch a fist sized cavity through the chest of a lightly armored attacker and effectively stop most hostiles with a single shot. The P-15 was marketed as a self-defense weapon used to dissuade violence, and thus when the trigger lock is disengaged it begins to emit a loud noise similar to that of a turbine engine as a warning to any hostile targets that they are about to have their day ruined. In hindsight between the high-risk of collateral damage and the time it took to reload the single shot weapon, the advertising of an extremely powerful hand cannon to untrained civilians was a particularly horrible idea and the “Loud & Messy” was quietly pulled from the market. Still, the sound of a readied Peacekeeper humming inflicts the same iconic, pants-shitting fear today as one would have centuries ago when they heard the slow pump of a shotgun being cycled or the loud click of a revolver being cocked. [/color][/indent]
[b]Equipment:[/b][indent][color=CCCCCC]
[i][b]
The SideALECK V2 by Zone[/b][/i]

A grossly expensive tablet that features a data scanner that can almost instantly pull up any known information on people, places, and things just by capturing it on the scanner’s camera that can let any user of the SideALECK, to quote the advertisements, [i]“know-it-all any time, right on time, every time.”[/i] Comes equipped with a VI (ALECK) that responds to voice commands, a nifty holographic projector, and options for an extended one-year warranty. V2 now comes with the much demanded feature of a silent mode for the VI, which was met with rather lukewarm reaction by the public due to what some considered having “the most goddamn annoyingly cheerful voice ever known to man”. It also comes preloaded with solitaire and the award winning album by everyone’s favorite pop duo JAM-n-I. ([i]”Coming Soon: The SideALECK V2.02 optional premium upgrade which has minor bug fixes, faster load times on shop interface, and allows for the award winning album by everyone’s favorite pop duo can now be deleted from music library. The SideALECK V2.02, from Zone. Get In It.”[/i])  

[i][b]The Canary Masque [/b][/i]

A face covering gas mask resembling the beak of its namesake, the Canary Masque is a popular item that can collapse down to the pocket size of a handkerchief when not in use. The device can detect harmful toxins in the air, and will begin emitting a chirping warning like a carbon monoxide detector when the air is considered harmful for humans to breath. When worn, the chirping can be silenced in favor of the user relying solely on the HUD that displays information regarding the severity of the toxicity and the lifespan of the chargeable filter. It’s considered a must-have for Husk miners or Acid Lunos users. As does a pretty good job at just hiding a face and making someone look real suspicious when it is in use publicly. 
[/color][/indent]
[hider=Character Bio:]
[indent][color=CCCCCC][center][i][b]The First Cycle
[/b][/i][/center]
Karina remembers her early life in snapshots. She was born in a place called Warsaw. She recalls not being the smartest student, but she was always the most dedicated to her studies. She cannot remember the names or faces of her childhood friends; perhaps because they never were. There was four years of university in her hometown. Four years of med school at some place called Oxford. Six years of residency in Montreal. Several hundred thousand dollars worth of debt so that she could deliver hundreds upon thousands of naked, screaming infants into the world like clockwork. A happy marriage with her college boyfriend. Trying to have a kid. The knowing winks and side nudges from her colleagues warning her that the only fun part was the trying. An ever increasing feeling of anxiety and stress. Being late. The excitement. The miscarriage. A progressively less happy marriage. An even unhappier separation. Grief counseling. Couples therapy. A surprise rekindling of their romance. Adoption. A son. Their son.

Then the comet came. It’s strange, Karina can barely pull together the faces of her husband or her son from the deep ocean of her memory, but she remembers the the day her wedding ring instantly dissolved in her hands as a small cloud of toxic gas stung her eyes and burned her nose. Within months, many of her associates from medical school found themselves being replaced by people who had been granted healing powers by Lunos. Like her colleagues, Karina remembers being distraught that her Lunos was not one that helped people. Unlike her colleagues who had gone on to become surgeons and physicians, an obstetrician’s job was not one easy replaced by people who waved their hands around and magically made that acute lead poisoning wound dislodge the bullet and seal itself shut. Evolution be damned, she still had babies to deliver.

But each year, it was less and less. Each year, there were more complications during pregnancy and birth, more cases of infertility, and a drastic decrease in the demand for contraceptives. News broke about the vast increase in infertility around the same time as the first wave of Healers began to collapse and die from overuse. Humanity, so it seemed, had been dealt a pretty terrible side effect by Lunos. Karina remembers things getting pretty dark back then. A lot of people gave up. A lot of people started to show their true nature. But some rose to the occasion. Karina was one of those people, and for that she was given a new body when hers was close to dying.

[center][i][b]The Second and Third Cycle
[/b][/i][/center]
Karina’s started her second cycle by burying her son. He had been on the waiting list for a new body when he had passed. She can’t even remember when her husband had died. She does remember being sad, and how she had felt the same harrowing emptiness before. Even today, there were sounds, touches, scents, and phrases that could easily rend her as much as they confused her. Most of her second cycle was spent transitioning from delivering the lucky children that were born to trying to improve the process it took for them to grow new bodies for the remainder of the population. By the end of her second cycle, she had witnessed more humans gestate in cylinders of viscous ooze for eighteen years at a time than children being born naturally from their mothers. 

During both of her second and third cycle, Karina began learning more and more about DNA splicing, gene therapy, and Lunos. She spent years and years researching and experimenting on the wildlife of Awilix. She spent years and years experimenting on willing subjects—women who had been able to give birth, men who were deemed not impotent. With permission from their leaders, she and her small team of scientist were even allowed to try to alter the genetic makeup of the human doubles they were growing in an effort to revert their genomes to how they had been pre-Lunos. For years and years she racked up further failures, further embarrassments, and further distrust from her superiors.

[center][i][b]The Fourth Cycle
[/b][/i][/center]
She had not produced any results. Karina was told that the leaders needed all of their scientific minds focusing on methods that, while not solving the problem, helped diminish its effects.  Karina’s team was dismantled, but she was kept on to work with the team of scientists and doctors. Karina had heard whispers that the only reason she had been brought back for a fourth cycle was because she was one of the few doctors who were still considered dependable enough to deliver babies when a woman did become pregnant. It made her valuable, but not if she cost more than she was worth. 

[center][i][b]The Fifth Cycle, the Sixth Cycle, the Seventh Cycle, & the Eighth Cycle[/b][/i][/center]

So she worked herself nearly to death just to prove her worth. No time to think about restarting a family. No time to think about her prior research. No time to think about forming friendships. No time to think about anything but what the leaders wanted her to study, really.

She worked and she worked and she worked. 


[center][i][b]The Ninth Cycle[/b][/i][/center]

Karina Pulaski knew what was happening. She remembered it from her youth, her first youth. The truth. She did not learn it in a medical class, she did not learn it in a hospital. It wasn’t the words of some great scholar, or some great leader. It was her husband. He had said something once, something she had forgotten. Something that had dissolved from her memory like her wedding band had dissolved from her finger, but still lingered in her senses like the phantom smell of the toxic cloud. She remembered laughing at the comment at the time because it had made her uncomfortable, playing it like it was an off-color joke.

He had said that, sometimes, extinction was a good thing.

She got it now. He wasn’t referring to the human race. He was referring to their generation, the generation the leaders belonged in. Before her time, generations would die off and the culture and mentality of society would shift, progress, and evolve. The leaders feared that. They did not want to cure infertility. They did not want humans to thrive again. They wanted things to stay the same so that they could remain in power. It’s why they did not fund her studies. It’s why they forced her to continue chasing symptoms instead of curing the disease. They were letting humanity grow stagnant, condemning it to a state of purgatory until they inevitably drained Awilix of its resources and moved on to leech off of the next habitable planet. 

She had wasted hundreds of years trying to appease them with hopes that she was working towards something great while monitoring the human gardens and checking and double checking the wiring of humanoid robots. Instead, she felt as if she had just been little more than a pawn in a giant, pointless game of chess. Worst still, nobody else saw that the leaders were quietly betraying the rest of humanity. Of course, Karina had no proof and knew that shaking the status quo would take more than spirit and a soapbox. If she provided the public with a solution to the Lunos problem, however, then the leaders would be left behind in their old ways. In private, she restarted her research—but it was quickly put on halt by the announcement of a pregnancy. 

It was a rather major event for the people of Awilix. The mother was essentially a celebrity (whereas most reputable news sources were kind enough to avoid airing the scandal surrounding the line of men who were claiming to be the father). It had been months, years, a decade even since Karina had delivered a child, yet she was still the most qualified for the job—secretly Karina knew that as long as there were no complications most childbirths simply handled themselves. For nearly nine months, Karina spent her days beside the new mother. And then the day came when the mother was ready to have the child.

There were complications during labor. The child was not receiving oxygen. Karina knew what had gone wrong, knew what to do to fix it, but her body refused to cooperate. It was too clumsy, too worn down from sixteen-hour long days of researching and monitoring, too used to handling dead metal instead of real life. Her tools felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. The child died. To Karina, it was a failure that could have been averted if the leaders had funded her research centuries ago. She tried her damndest to explain the situation to the media in a way that allow them to open the eyes of the public and see that the true failures here were not the doctor that had been so out of practice because there were no infants to ever deliver, but the leaders that had refused to see the bigger picture years ago.

Her explanation was not aired. Overnight, Karina went from a minor researcher and occasional obstetrician of little importance to The Landing’s most infamous and hated individual. The media twisted the story. Claimed that it had been premeditated for this reason or that reason. A tribunal was being demanded, or so she heard. She didn’t wait around for the arrest. Karina knew that the leaders would not approve of her going into a new cycle, not after she had so quickly thrown them under the bus in a moment of panic. Likewise, she knew that the public would not listen to somebody that was being painted as a child killer. 

Karina Pulaski’s body was found smeared across the pavement outside of her apartment building. A note sealed the case closed pretty quickly, and the media coverage began to peter out as no sign of foul play was discovered. Meanwhile, a small clerical error made one of the new body’s in the human gardens disappear from the books, allegedly disposed of due to “technicalities”, about three hours before Karina’s reported suicide. By the time the connection was discovered, the real Karina Pulaski had disappeared into the underbelly of The Landing with nothing but a grudge, a fake name, and hundreds of years of knowledge and copied design docs for human cultivation and robotics manufacturing. 

All she needed was some interested investors.
[center][i][b]
The Tenth Cycle [/b][/i][/center]

People talk about the Doctor in hushed tones. They say she used to work for those bigwigs up in City Hall back in the day. They say she has a warehouse hidden somewhere underground where she’s been growing bodies, and if you agree to sign a certain contract you can get yourself some of her “life insurance” and get your name put right on the spot for when your next cycle comes. No waiting lists, no being bumped for those with deeper pockets—assuming, of course, that you get on her good side. They say that nobody ever hears about those that get on her bad side. They say that lately she’s been trying to get in touch with the Children of Umbra, seeing as how they both have a mutual opponent. 

People tend to say a lot of bullshit, but at least it makes most scared to come knocking.

Karina Pulaski was operating a cycle shop, and she did have a warehouse full of new bodies at one point. Of course, the woman was a doctor and a researcher, not a mastermind criminal, and at some point they found her trail. She escaped, but her research was lost, the bodies were offloaded to a government facility, and her warehouse was liquidated. Now she’s not only wanted by the authorities but by the seedier individuals who had put a body on layaway and would soon find that the woman did not offer refunds because, well, she had spent all of their money. She is seeking to get in touch with the Children of Umbra, although largely just so that she can be safely harbored by them until the heat dies down and she can continue her research. [/color][/indent][/hider]
[b]Long Term Motivation:[/b]
[indent][color=CCCCCC]At this point Karina can’t tell if she wants to find a solution for the Lunos problem and cure infertility or remove the old leaders from power more. In a way, she believes both will inevitably cause the other to happen. [/color][/indent]