Born and raised on a spaceport orbiting a gas giant and its myriad moons, Homura was obsessed with space travel from an early age, and dead-set on joining the Imperial Starfleet, irrespective of her parents' wishes; she collected stories from every spacefarer who passed through, and began conditioning herself based on those tales- even going so far as to lie about her age to the Starfleet registrar to volunteer a couple years early.
Eventually, her persistence paid off: while she didn't qualify as a marine, she had a natural talent for (co-)piloting ships (despite being constantly paired with brooding, morose, and otherwise boring assholes), and was deployed shortly after emerging from the local Starfleet Academy near the top of her class. Serving for a couple short years, she was having the time of her life, well-to-do in her dream career... until the Incident.
It was never determined exactly what happened, or how- but while in transit though warpspace during routine maneuvers near the edge of Imperial space, the ship's warp drive unexpectedly cut out, shunting it and crew back into realspace... not only near the wrong planet, but in the midst of a group of unidentified ships, the largest of which immediately opened fire on them. Still reeling from the sudden unplanned transition, Homura and her co-pilot could neither fight back or flee- despite their skill as pilots, their assailant cut down each of the patrol craft's systems one at a time with ease- communications, main engines, escape pods, sensors, weapons... and once the ship was little more than a burning husk, they silently disappeared back into warpspace, leaving the ship and what remained of it's crew to be inexorably sucked into the planet's gravity well.
Fortunately, part of what remained of the crew were Homura and the ship's engineer- unfortunately, part of what remained of the crew wasn't the other pilot, forcing her to try to take full manual control of the ship, and wrestle it into a crash landing, even as it broke down and burned up on entry... she almost succeeded. Thankfully, the spectacle in the night sky meant that emergency first responders were on the scene as soon as the ship touched down, and even as Homura, burned and broken, lapsed into a coma from the physical and mental strain while trying to crawl from the wreckage, they were able to bring her back from the brink, if nobody else.
They say that when you stare into the void, the void stares back into you... whatever fantastic dreams or terrible nightmares she may have had in the four weeks she was out, however, Homura refuses to say. She didn't let the incident stop her though- once she returned to the land of the living, she was back into simulators before she was even able to walk again, and despite the loss of her eyes, the trauma left her with a bizarre and inexplicable new ability: to taste (and, to a lesser extent, smell) colors.
Obviously, once she was debriefed on the incident (or what little she could remember of it), she was honorably discharged for her injuries, and given her lack of any real wealth or other applicable skills, once her body was repaired enough to return to society at large, she headed straight to the spaceport, to head back up into the stars with whomever would take her.
Homura is tall, pale, thin, and somewhat gangly, but not entirely lacking muscle. Her hair is black (though she occasionally dyes colored streaks into it) and perpetually messy-looking, despite her best grooming efforts; it reaches nearly to her shoulders, and her bangs cover almost all of her face: aside from missing both of her eyes- it- like most of her body- is a disaster composed primarily of cut and burn scars.
She has multiple reconstructive cybernetics: Metal grafts in her left leg, abdomen, and ribcage; an artificial lung and liver; and both arms have been replaced wholesale, though she retained most of her right hand and forearm. At the base of her neck, a regulator implant keeps her dosed with the cocktail of drugs that keeps her functioning normally in society (insofar as she could be considered normal to begin with, and other, more recreational drugs notwithstanding).
Generally, she's an active, curious, and gregarious (if not always entirely lucid, and quite self-conscious about her appearance) sort; virtually fearless, but not necessarily fierce, except where her few actual friends are concerned. Piloting and music- her primary hobby and other passion beside piloting- also serve as means for escapism (along with the aforementioned recreational drugs) from the limitations and constant pain of her condition, but she's almost always chatty, cheerful, and optimistic, given to pestering the crew and/or playing her creations over the PA, regardless of her partner's wishes.
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Topic: Ballad of the Stars (OOC) - Now Accepting Waitlistings (Read 7230 times)