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Little Bill QUOTE I try not to talk without a lawyer, but it's way harder than I thought. | PROFILE Full Name: Lorena Aaliyah Negasi Date of Birth: July 22nd, 2157 Species: Human Gender: Feminine Age: 26 Occupation: Alliance Corsair and Sexpert Service Rank: Second Lieutenant, Alliance Navy (Corsair) Profile: Engineer Powers: Belongings:Overload Incinerate AI Hacking Combat Drone Kassa Fabrications Polaris Omni-tool Ariake Technologies Katana Shotgun Ariake Technologies Raikou Pistol (White-and-gold colorway) Two spare datapads Well-worn Micah Black jacket (white-and-gold colorway, made from real shifty-eyed cow leather) |
PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE
Liyah is a woman who wants to live life to the beat of her own drum. She tries to make acquaintances, not connections, and chafes at the idea of strings attached to her dealings with people. Her speech is informal, her relationships are casual, and her wanderlust is eternal; most of her life has consisted of meandering along a string of opportunities that seemed intriguing at the time but quickly grew stale. If something begins to sound and feel like commitment, she begins to subconsciously look for the exit sign.
The same can be said for her professionally. Her time with the Corsairs has taught her the meaning of expendable resources, and left her with one of her few deeply-held beliefs: that everyone sees each other as expendable. Though she probably wouldn't consider herself an example - or, more likely, she doesn't think about her own behavior deeply enough to really dwell on it - she exhibits this particular selfishness when things get tough. She has quite an aversion to snitching or brokering deals at the expense of others, but this loyalty only really extends when she's put under pressure by things she considers higher authorities. Instead of betrayal, she prefers escape. She has a knack for survival situations and talking herself out of certain permanent survival alternatives, and is skilled at overselling her value when in need of shelter or underselling it in order to appear innocent. Such innocent manipulation is characteristic of her, but it is genuinely done as a habit and without malice - whether that makes it better or worse is up to the person interacting with her.
But when Liyah can't talk, she's more than capable of vanishing. She does have concern for others, but it's usually fleeting; if someone isn't willing to take the chance to flee with her when they have the chance, she's usually not going to offer a second one. She always intends to be the one alive to tell the tale, which she will often do with heavy embellishment after the fact.
These self-centered, manipulative traits paint a negative picture of a woman, but much of Liyah's effectiveness comes from the fact that she's not an unpleasant person to be around. In fact, the opposite is true, as many of the ties Liyah has tried to escape from over the years were forged by people who found her enthralling enough to get close and raise her hackles. She is charismatic and quick-witted, always primed with a joke or one of the many factoids about human or alien cultures she aimlessly clicks through on the extranet in her off hours. During her youth - and even as a Corsair - she was often the mysterious benefactor behind much of the smuggled alcohol or recreational drugs that comprised the entertainment of parties, and she still keeps an itemized list of some of her favorite contemporary music in her head. If she can't find a party, one will usually form around her - although she'll also be one of the first ones to leave the scene, especially if higher authority rolls through.
Her skill with people helps ingratiate her in most social or group dynamics, and she provides a font of empathy for those in need of advice or grappling with doubts. This empathy is more than capable of being compartmentalized in order to protect herself, however. She refuses to let the problems of others, or others' problems with her, harm her emotionally, and is quick to remind people which certain uncomfortable topics are not her business.
The same can be said for her professionally. Her time with the Corsairs has taught her the meaning of expendable resources, and left her with one of her few deeply-held beliefs: that everyone sees each other as expendable. Though she probably wouldn't consider herself an example - or, more likely, she doesn't think about her own behavior deeply enough to really dwell on it - she exhibits this particular selfishness when things get tough. She has quite an aversion to snitching or brokering deals at the expense of others, but this loyalty only really extends when she's put under pressure by things she considers higher authorities. Instead of betrayal, she prefers escape. She has a knack for survival situations and talking herself out of certain permanent survival alternatives, and is skilled at overselling her value when in need of shelter or underselling it in order to appear innocent. Such innocent manipulation is characteristic of her, but it is genuinely done as a habit and without malice - whether that makes it better or worse is up to the person interacting with her.
But when Liyah can't talk, she's more than capable of vanishing. She does have concern for others, but it's usually fleeting; if someone isn't willing to take the chance to flee with her when they have the chance, she's usually not going to offer a second one. She always intends to be the one alive to tell the tale, which she will often do with heavy embellishment after the fact.
These self-centered, manipulative traits paint a negative picture of a woman, but much of Liyah's effectiveness comes from the fact that she's not an unpleasant person to be around. In fact, the opposite is true, as many of the ties Liyah has tried to escape from over the years were forged by people who found her enthralling enough to get close and raise her hackles. She is charismatic and quick-witted, always primed with a joke or one of the many factoids about human or alien cultures she aimlessly clicks through on the extranet in her off hours. During her youth - and even as a Corsair - she was often the mysterious benefactor behind much of the smuggled alcohol or recreational drugs that comprised the entertainment of parties, and she still keeps an itemized list of some of her favorite contemporary music in her head. If she can't find a party, one will usually form around her - although she'll also be one of the first ones to leave the scene, especially if higher authority rolls through.
Her skill with people helps ingratiate her in most social or group dynamics, and she provides a font of empathy for those in need of advice or grappling with doubts. This empathy is more than capable of being compartmentalized in order to protect herself, however. She refuses to let the problems of others, or others' problems with her, harm her emotionally, and is quick to remind people which certain uncomfortable topics are not her business.
DETAILED HISTORY
Liyah was born on Terra Nova before it was Terra Nova. At the time of her birth, the second and final child of two adventurous colonists, the quiet heart of the Exodus Cluster was but a first uncertain step for humanity at large. She was part of her species' first generation to spend its formative years outside its home solar system, and the same joie de vivre and desire to live ten lifetimes in the span of one possessed Liyah - still going by her given name, Lorena, in those early days of her life - the same way it had her parents. In her early childhood, this manifested as the usual childhood misadventures, but as she grew into adolescence, her mischief similarly blossomed into the much more daring, much more stupid escapades of teenagers testing the boundaries of society for the first time. She was the cornerstone of many a school prank or failed relationship in her teens, and as the Terra Novan capital of Scott began to blossom into a true metropolis, Lorena began to spend less of her time focusing on the future and more time drowning in the various distractions available to her.
By now, the kernel of dissatisfaction at her life path had bubbled over into resentment at what she saw as stagnation. On the surface, she was doing everything right; she had gotten herself into a prominent tech academy on Terra Nova, on the fast track towards success in one of the corporations capitalizing on the recent platinum boom in her home planet of Terra Nova. She found the idea distasteful, though - cementing herself on her homeworld and watching her life go by had been anathema to her own parents, so why were they trying to pigeonhole her down that path? She found the recent colonization boom on Bekenstein slightly more compelling, in a get-rich-quick scheme sort of way, but in the end even that was just the same corporate anchor on a different planet. To Liyah - the abbreviation of her middle name she now answered to almost exclusively - it was starting from square one, not a fresh start. So she went through the motions of her classes, grades slowly plummeting, while waiting for the perfect opportunity to knock.
She may have waited forever if not for the Blitz. In the aftermath of a pirate attack on Elysium, the Systems Alliance began an aggressive recruiting drive, touting the vigor and benefits of a life in the military. Vignettes of paradises such as Elysium and Eden Prime were also used, to lure in prospective recruits with tantalizing visions of the 'good life,' or at least a daring life exploring the stars beyond Citadel space. To Liyah, a better opportunity seemed unlikely to fall into her lap, and her eyes were admittedly swimming with the visions of a life where she would never be bored again. So she enlisted, one of thousands taken in by the promises of the vids.
Perhaps they came true for the rest of the recruits, but unfortunately for Liyah, someone had bothered to look at her technical aptitude tests - which she had, in a desperate effort to show her worth, decided to take seriously for once. Perhaps she had done her job too well, because she quickly found herself a systems analyst shackled to Arcturus Station. Besides Earth itself, Arcturus was the seat of Alliance power, and to many it would seem like a prestigious posting. But to Liyah, who felt she had been promised a life outside of simple Alliance comfort, the post felt like a death sentence. For months, she planned against cyberattacks that never came and updated systems long neglected by Alliance Parliament, its budget, and its political constraints. Underpaid and overworked, it became harder and harder for Liyah to keep her once-buoyant attitude afloat at all.
One night, tinkering around at her workstation to amuse herself, Liyah stumbled across a minor security blip on a parliamentary system. The Arcturus network had flagged a set of financial transactions directly from an MP to an unrecognized party - small amounts, but all placed simultaneously, broken up in an attempt to avoid notice. If the unwitting MP had simply bided his time between payments, it likely would have gone unnoticed forever; as it was, the computer only wanted a simple confirmation that Arcturus security had not been breached. Of course, it hadn't, so Liyah allowed the payments to go through - but to someone who would find a much, much better use for the money than the parliamentary mistress that inevitably came forward when her hush payments never arrived.
The theft had lit a fire under Liyah, and what's more, it had enlightened her - not only did the men wielding most of the political and military might of the Alliance not understand the tools that governed all their lives, but she did. She had no interest in selling state secrets to alien bodies or leaking anything to the press, but if they had all this money they were capable of handing out to secretaries and actresses, why should she feel guilty about making off with some of it for herself? It even had all the thrill and unpredictability she had even enlisted in the Alliance for, and so for the rest of 2077 she would occasionally use her security clearance and adjust certain purchases on networked extranet terminals, or perhaps divert some money from a proposed budget into her own pocket. Having learned from her unfortunate "mentor" in money laundering, she made sure to break up the payments and disguise them as expenditures for necessary supplies or public events. She was good at doing it, she was good at covering her tracks, she was making bank and she was having fun. She might have gone on with it forever if she could have.
Unfortunately for her, a freak twist of fate, much like the one that had brought her into the Alliance military, served as a second bookend for her time at Arcturus. The Systems Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy, in an attempt at mutual goodwill, had begun development on a new class of frigate together, marrying the best of each military in an attempt to incorporate humanity further into the galactic community. Arcturus Station was the staging ground for this project, and though she knew little and cared less about the ultimate result of the project, she knew that the expenditures necessary to host turian engineers and soldiers on Arcturus, even temporarily, would be a great place for her to hide some paychecks. Her first such attempt, embezzling an amount of credits slightly more reckless than her usual amounts, was under the guise of special expenditures for massive amounts of dextro-amino protein food.
But the turians found themselves embroiled in some last-minute Council red tape, and their small delegation's initial trip to Arcturus found itself postponed by months. They didn't arrive, and neither did their food. But the Alliance had noticed they had footed the bill for it anyway.
By the time Liyah realized she was caught, it was too late to do much about her situation. Her work history was looked into and credits found, and she was stripped of rank and sent to an Alliance military prison, where she languished for several months, miserable and alone. But the rays of fortune turned on her again in the next year, 2078, with the raid on Torfan.
A brutal raid undertaken by the Alliance there had served its primary purpose - retaliatory measures against the batarians who many found responsible for the Skyllian Blitz. However, with the flight of the batarians from Council space, the Alliance realized it had only left the job half done - many of the pirate interests behind the Blitz, batarian or otherwise, had been armed with deep pockets - and most of that money was still out there. The Alliance had found little evidence of financiers from the Terminus Systems or Batarian Hegemony on Torfan, and after Torfan it was increasingly politically difficult for the Alliance to ensure its enemies couldn't fund a bloodier sequel to the Blitz. So, reluctantly, it turned to a clever money launderer they knew they had on hand.
Liyah was offered what the Alliance described as a sweetheart deal - she would be sprung from military prison and released on her own recognizance, but her service to the Alliance was far from over. She would serve as a Corsair, an initiative by the Alliance to store unscrupulous or problem soldiers under independent starship captains, to do jobs the Alliance refused to commit to record. She would be stationed on crews such as these indefinitely, until the Alliance felt she had worked off enough of her initial sentence to be given an OTH discharge - other than honorable, which, far from honorable, was at least not a life-altering kick in the ass from the military. Unwilling to waste the rest of her youth, Liyah did what she had done when recruitment was dangled in front of her - jumped at the chance, unsure if she would see another as good.
Unlike Arcturus, for the most part, Liyah loved being a Corsair. It was a badass title, for one, and she found a freedom under starship captains that she'd never known in Arcturus or even as a gifted student on Terra Nova. She served on two ships over the next few years, the Tin Hau and the Gungnir, investigating post-Elysium and Torfan financial transactions on behalf of major suspected batarian terror financiers, as well as connections to the disgraced pirate lord Elanos Haliat, Omega, or other Terminus System interests. Each ship found her service exemplary and was sad to see her go. But each transfer came as the feeling of being under the gun from the Alliance had begun to grow overwhelming, and at a point when Liyah was finding less satisfaction in doing dirty work around people who had begun to know her a little too deeply.
For the past eighteen months, Liyah Negasi has served ably onboard her third vessel as a Corsair, the Jannah, investigating reports of renewed Eclipse financial activity in the area of black market bio-mods. Now another transfer order has come in - not to a ship, but to the Citadel, gleaming white heart of the galaxy, and with an assignment that comes tailored to the bright, disaffected young woman's skill set - larger and livelier than Arcturus, with all the uncertainty of being a Corsair and the certainty of her own talents. She jumped at the transfer order.
Not that she has any choice.
By now, the kernel of dissatisfaction at her life path had bubbled over into resentment at what she saw as stagnation. On the surface, she was doing everything right; she had gotten herself into a prominent tech academy on Terra Nova, on the fast track towards success in one of the corporations capitalizing on the recent platinum boom in her home planet of Terra Nova. She found the idea distasteful, though - cementing herself on her homeworld and watching her life go by had been anathema to her own parents, so why were they trying to pigeonhole her down that path? She found the recent colonization boom on Bekenstein slightly more compelling, in a get-rich-quick scheme sort of way, but in the end even that was just the same corporate anchor on a different planet. To Liyah - the abbreviation of her middle name she now answered to almost exclusively - it was starting from square one, not a fresh start. So she went through the motions of her classes, grades slowly plummeting, while waiting for the perfect opportunity to knock.
She may have waited forever if not for the Blitz. In the aftermath of a pirate attack on Elysium, the Systems Alliance began an aggressive recruiting drive, touting the vigor and benefits of a life in the military. Vignettes of paradises such as Elysium and Eden Prime were also used, to lure in prospective recruits with tantalizing visions of the 'good life,' or at least a daring life exploring the stars beyond Citadel space. To Liyah, a better opportunity seemed unlikely to fall into her lap, and her eyes were admittedly swimming with the visions of a life where she would never be bored again. So she enlisted, one of thousands taken in by the promises of the vids.
Perhaps they came true for the rest of the recruits, but unfortunately for Liyah, someone had bothered to look at her technical aptitude tests - which she had, in a desperate effort to show her worth, decided to take seriously for once. Perhaps she had done her job too well, because she quickly found herself a systems analyst shackled to Arcturus Station. Besides Earth itself, Arcturus was the seat of Alliance power, and to many it would seem like a prestigious posting. But to Liyah, who felt she had been promised a life outside of simple Alliance comfort, the post felt like a death sentence. For months, she planned against cyberattacks that never came and updated systems long neglected by Alliance Parliament, its budget, and its political constraints. Underpaid and overworked, it became harder and harder for Liyah to keep her once-buoyant attitude afloat at all.
One night, tinkering around at her workstation to amuse herself, Liyah stumbled across a minor security blip on a parliamentary system. The Arcturus network had flagged a set of financial transactions directly from an MP to an unrecognized party - small amounts, but all placed simultaneously, broken up in an attempt to avoid notice. If the unwitting MP had simply bided his time between payments, it likely would have gone unnoticed forever; as it was, the computer only wanted a simple confirmation that Arcturus security had not been breached. Of course, it hadn't, so Liyah allowed the payments to go through - but to someone who would find a much, much better use for the money than the parliamentary mistress that inevitably came forward when her hush payments never arrived.
The theft had lit a fire under Liyah, and what's more, it had enlightened her - not only did the men wielding most of the political and military might of the Alliance not understand the tools that governed all their lives, but she did. She had no interest in selling state secrets to alien bodies or leaking anything to the press, but if they had all this money they were capable of handing out to secretaries and actresses, why should she feel guilty about making off with some of it for herself? It even had all the thrill and unpredictability she had even enlisted in the Alliance for, and so for the rest of 2077 she would occasionally use her security clearance and adjust certain purchases on networked extranet terminals, or perhaps divert some money from a proposed budget into her own pocket. Having learned from her unfortunate "mentor" in money laundering, she made sure to break up the payments and disguise them as expenditures for necessary supplies or public events. She was good at doing it, she was good at covering her tracks, she was making bank and she was having fun. She might have gone on with it forever if she could have.
Unfortunately for her, a freak twist of fate, much like the one that had brought her into the Alliance military, served as a second bookend for her time at Arcturus. The Systems Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy, in an attempt at mutual goodwill, had begun development on a new class of frigate together, marrying the best of each military in an attempt to incorporate humanity further into the galactic community. Arcturus Station was the staging ground for this project, and though she knew little and cared less about the ultimate result of the project, she knew that the expenditures necessary to host turian engineers and soldiers on Arcturus, even temporarily, would be a great place for her to hide some paychecks. Her first such attempt, embezzling an amount of credits slightly more reckless than her usual amounts, was under the guise of special expenditures for massive amounts of dextro-amino protein food.
But the turians found themselves embroiled in some last-minute Council red tape, and their small delegation's initial trip to Arcturus found itself postponed by months. They didn't arrive, and neither did their food. But the Alliance had noticed they had footed the bill for it anyway.
By the time Liyah realized she was caught, it was too late to do much about her situation. Her work history was looked into and credits found, and she was stripped of rank and sent to an Alliance military prison, where she languished for several months, miserable and alone. But the rays of fortune turned on her again in the next year, 2078, with the raid on Torfan.
A brutal raid undertaken by the Alliance there had served its primary purpose - retaliatory measures against the batarians who many found responsible for the Skyllian Blitz. However, with the flight of the batarians from Council space, the Alliance realized it had only left the job half done - many of the pirate interests behind the Blitz, batarian or otherwise, had been armed with deep pockets - and most of that money was still out there. The Alliance had found little evidence of financiers from the Terminus Systems or Batarian Hegemony on Torfan, and after Torfan it was increasingly politically difficult for the Alliance to ensure its enemies couldn't fund a bloodier sequel to the Blitz. So, reluctantly, it turned to a clever money launderer they knew they had on hand.
Liyah was offered what the Alliance described as a sweetheart deal - she would be sprung from military prison and released on her own recognizance, but her service to the Alliance was far from over. She would serve as a Corsair, an initiative by the Alliance to store unscrupulous or problem soldiers under independent starship captains, to do jobs the Alliance refused to commit to record. She would be stationed on crews such as these indefinitely, until the Alliance felt she had worked off enough of her initial sentence to be given an OTH discharge - other than honorable, which, far from honorable, was at least not a life-altering kick in the ass from the military. Unwilling to waste the rest of her youth, Liyah did what she had done when recruitment was dangled in front of her - jumped at the chance, unsure if she would see another as good.
Unlike Arcturus, for the most part, Liyah loved being a Corsair. It was a badass title, for one, and she found a freedom under starship captains that she'd never known in Arcturus or even as a gifted student on Terra Nova. She served on two ships over the next few years, the Tin Hau and the Gungnir, investigating post-Elysium and Torfan financial transactions on behalf of major suspected batarian terror financiers, as well as connections to the disgraced pirate lord Elanos Haliat, Omega, or other Terminus System interests. Each ship found her service exemplary and was sad to see her go. But each transfer came as the feeling of being under the gun from the Alliance had begun to grow overwhelming, and at a point when Liyah was finding less satisfaction in doing dirty work around people who had begun to know her a little too deeply.
For the past eighteen months, Liyah Negasi has served ably onboard her third vessel as a Corsair, the Jannah, investigating reports of renewed Eclipse financial activity in the area of black market bio-mods. Now another transfer order has come in - not to a ship, but to the Citadel, gleaming white heart of the galaxy, and with an assignment that comes tailored to the bright, disaffected young woman's skill set - larger and livelier than Arcturus, with all the uncertainty of being a Corsair and the certainty of her own talents. She jumped at the transfer order.
Not that she has any choice.
