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[b]Name:[/b] Dr. Itxaro Ibarra

[b]Species:[/b] Human

[b]Age:[/b] 35

[b]Appearance:[/b] Dr. Ibarra stands at 6'1 and weighs 175 pounds; tall for a woman, but not unusual in the 23rd century. Itxaro begrudgingly exercises, the motto "A corpo worked out today, did you?" still burned into her brain from primary school. As such, she is in decent enough shape, but by no means an amazing athlete; her recent penchant for cigarettes has made sure of that. Itxaro's left arm and shoulder are noticeably more toned than the other from lugging around the weighty prosthetic; which begins at a stump just after the elbow. Her hair, which had been going prematurely grey at 25, has since been dyed a muted white. 

Dr. Ibarra packed relatively conservative clothing for her time aboard the Jotunheim, a departure from her typically vibrant and stylish wardrobe. She currently sits somewhere between academic and blue-collar worker, opting for clothes that are muted in color and fully cover her body. When on duty in the engineering bay, Itxaro wears the typical jumpsuit and ties her hair back to avoid getting caught in any machinery.

[b]Augmentations:[/b] It can hardly be called an augmentation, but Itxaro's dominant hand and forearm have been replaced with a bionic metal prosthetic. Though significantly stronger than her organic limb, the replacement is heavier than modern, cutting-edge augments, and suffers from the occasional breakdown. These glitches can be easily resolved by Dr. Ibarra, which is part of why she keeps the older model. That, and being grafted with expensive prosthetics is something of a cultural faux-pas in the USASR. 

[b]Occupation:[/b] FTL Specialist

[b]Key skills:[/b]
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[*][i]Mechanical Savant:[/i] Dr. Ibarra is a titan in her field, one of the leading engineers in the entire USASR. Her knowledge of all things mechanical is vast and deep, and Itxaro is able to quickly pick up on abstract concepts she has never encountered, which is largely why she was chosen as the previous FTL specialist’s replacement. Itxaro specializes in theoretical FTL drives, and was pretty pissed when the Yenge blew up her spot with their vastly-superior tech. Dr. Ibarra thought she was damn close to a breakthrough. While she has spent much of her career as a researcher and designer, Itxaro is still comfortable wrenching on a ship's drive deep in a crawlspace or in an EVA suit. Still, she finds the entire field of engineering horribly boring. 
[*][i]Medieval Enthusiast:[/i] While Dr. Ibarra is a genius when it comes to anything mechanical, her true passion is medieval European history, with a specific focus on how common peasants lived in their day-to-day life. In her spare time, Dr. Ibarra reads massive tomes on ancient blacksmithing techniques, cooking methods, architectural plans, and any other literature she is able to obtain from that distant time and place. Itxaro also joined a medieval European martial arts club in school, dueling with a variety of weapons, and even now occasionally competes in local amateur tournaments when her schedule allows. She placed 5th in the last one, and was pretty happy about it.   
[*][i]Socialist Philosopher:[/i] Like all Cubans in the 23rd century, Dr. Ibarra is extremely knowledgeable concerning Marxian economics, eco-socialism, Ziotiomatian interplanetary class dynamics, Falcónist markets, and so on. This is a useful skill in space, right? 
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[b]Personality:[/b] If you met Itxaro on the streets of Havana, you'd never guess her line of work. She is excitable, fun-loving, and gregarious. She loves to dance, joke, and flirt. Itxaro is quick to make a friend and, on occasion, quick to anger. Itxaro is kind to those she seems worthy of kindness, generous with her time and affection, and has a deep love and camaraderie for all working people, the proletariat, all over the world. At the same time, she holds almost nothing but contempt for the wealthy, the bourgeois, who she believes are leeches that are responsible for the state of the world today. Itxaro is passionate about many subjects and has an insatiable curiosity for history, music, ecology, botany, and economics. So-called "hard sciences" rank very low on this list of interests despite her innate talent in the field of physics.  

If encountered outside of the USASR, however, you would walk away with an entirely different, and entirely false, perception of the engineer. Bitter experience has taught Itxaro to hide her true self, and present a facade to those outside the fold of the socialist world. Latin Americans have always faced ethnic stereotypes and flat-out racism, but this discrimination became even more rampant once most of South America was able to present a united front against their former colonial masters. Itxaro discovered as a teenager at an international science exhibition that a coquettish and mercurial Cuban girl is an easy target for spiteful foreigners. Rather than endure ridicule and harassment, she created a stoic, calm, and professional version of herself that she wears like a mask to protect herself and work with those outside the USASR. This defensive wall plays into the stereotype of the joyless, cold socialist, but Itxaro finds those insults easier to bear than ones directed at her personally. 

Beneath the disguise, and under her cheerful personality, there is a fear in Itxaro. The intensity varies, but the anxiety is always with her; sometimes it is a runaway elephant, big and panicking, threatening to paralyze Itxaro. Other times it is small and gnawing, burrowing into her as she tries to sleep.  Itxaro's bright mind is constantly running, and when idle, the fear strikes.  It is a relatively recent development, an aftershock of her near-death experience. She has tried to intellectualize it, tried therapy, but it continues to eat away at her. She’s gotten good at hiding it. 

However, deep in Itxaro, there is a hard streak, a rocky outcropping in her character as tough as stone. It is a cultural holdover from the early days of the USASR, when times were bad and people had to buckle down and do whatever rough business their country required of them. Itxaro is able to call upon this hard streak to push through whatever her she feels compelled to do for the socialist revolution. She used it to forsake her ambitions and become one of the leading FTL engineers. She used it to put her career first over her broken marriage. She used it to hold together her ragged stump of an arm for six days in zero g. Now, Itxaro is calling upon her hard streak once again to travel far from home aboard the Jotunheim.

[b]Backstory:[/b] Dr. Itxaro Ibarra was born in Havana, Cuba, the heart of the 150-year old Union of South American Socialist Republics (USASR). The federal union was formed after the People's Republic of China capitulated to the United States in 2113 after a 30-year cold war between the two superpowers went hot. The proxy wars were largely fought in resource-rich Africa, with both countries redirecting most of their economies toward the conflicts; their allies made only a token contribution, instead opting to watch the superpowers burn themselves out. The war came to a conclusion after a brief but brutal direct confrontation between both countries in Alaska, followed by a decisive cyber-attack by the United States, which paralyzed the Chinese military and the country's infrastructure. China was balkanized into a variety of smaller puppet states controlled by corporations and European countries, while the US was forced to privatize most of its economy to private enterprise. The end of US hegemony gave way to the age of the megacorporation, which saw the hyper-exploitation of most of the global south. Cuba, one of the last countries without a megacorp presence, was able to back a series of revolutions over the next 30 years in South America to expunge the megacorporations, leading to the creation of the USASR. 

Dr. Ibarra grew up in Cuba's countryside, the daughter of an agricultural worker and a philosophy professor, surrounded by siblings in their modest home. At a young age, it became apparent that Itxaro was a mechanical genius. Both of her parents gently encouraged her to advance her education in engineering, but it was Itxaro who made the decision to study engineering at the Universidad de la Habana. While her interests lay practically anything else, Itxaro knew she was given a gift, and to instead spend her life writing awful poetry or studying picked-over ruins somewhere in Europe would be a total waste. She had the chance to help her country, and she took it without regret or hesitation.

Itxaro quickly became Dr. Ibarra, flying through university at a pace rarely seen. Itxaro chose to specialize in faster-than-light travel, the Holy Grail of technology, but also developed a deep familiarity with multiple ship systems, since an FTL drive would work in tandem with many. Since the 22nd century, Cuba had been a leading innovator in space travel, more out of necessity than anything since the tiny island nation was isolated from the corporate world and had few natural resources available; the only way for them to access the raw materials they needed was to go up. The USASR had established a variety of colonies throughout the solar system, but their ships were beginning to lag behind, so the government began subsidizing further breakthroughs in space travel. Dr. Ibarra left the university with a PhD in theoretical engineering and FTL physics, joining the USASR's robust space program.

Because so many of their space-faring resources are off-planet, Itxaro was immediately shipped to a shipyard hidden in Saturn's rings, far from prying corpo eyes. She spent the next several years with a team of engineers, scientists, and pilots testing, testing, and failing. It seemed like there was a missing piece to the puzzle, but the collective wisdom of the human race couldn't find it. Dr. Ibarra advanced to the head of the team, and after what seemed like a lifetime in cold space, they were on the verge of a breakthrough. The moment of truth was cut short when breaching pods shattered the thin skin of their habitat, sending in squad after squad of corporate mercenaries who grabbed whatever crew they could and executed those they couldn't. Dr. Ibarra and a few others managed to reach an escape shuttle, but the mercenaries had rigged the shipyard to blow; just before they cleared the blast zone, Itxaro's former home exploded, disabling their shuttle with shrapnel and sending it hurtling into deep space.

Dr. Ibarra spent the next countless days clutching her crudely bandaged bloody stump of an arm, watching helplessly as her friends slowly succumbed to similar wounds. They didn't send out a distress signal until a week had passed, knowing the mercenaries would come to finish them off. By then the shuttle had traveled so far that it took the nearest USASR patrol ship another three days to recover them. Out of the nine survivors, just two had survived.

After recovering, Dr. Ibarra returned to Havanna just in time to learn that their efforts were wasted; a spacefaring species called the Yenge had beaten them to it, crashing into their solar system and promising to share their secret of faster-than-light travel in exchange for a safe harbor. Somewhat disillusioned, but not dissuaded, Dr. Ibarra returned to the Universidad de la Habana as a professor now, sharing her successes and failures with the next batch of scientists, as well as researching whatever scraps of Yenge technology the USASR's spy network could gather. 

Just as Dr. Ibarra became content with her position, she was contacted by an agent of the USASR's space program; a corporation, Tamerlane, had fused Yenge and human tech to create the first drive capable of faster-than-light travel. The previous FTL specialist had vanished, either picked up by a competing corporation or disappeared of their own accord to sell the secrets, and Tamerlane was desperate to fill the FTL specialist slot before their deadline. So desperate that they were willing to accept a USASR citizen.  
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