Name: Sėle Ceallach, or more often Sheila Kelly
Species: it's hard to say, but she maintains she's a space elf, albeit a much larger one than usual. Space elves are highly similar to space humans, with the minor differences that a space elf has a slighter build, paler skin, usually fair hair, and the major differences are that they are capable of telepathy and also do not experience old age quite like human beings, in that they don't really physically age. Instead, a space elf grows at a steady rate with age, and never stops doing so. This eventually leads up to a moment where the elf in question grows too large for their body to continue to function (the circulatory system and the bones being the first ones to suffer greatly), and originally this meant that the average space elf would eventually just fall apart more or less spectacularly with age. Now, in our age of space and enlightenment, a space elf has a wider variety of choices on how to preserve themselves well into their second, third, fourth or even umpteenth century (in Earth years for scale - one year on the Planet of the Space Elves (the space elves refuse to tell anyone their name for it, and it's suspected they don't have one, just like they don't have a name for their race) is about five Earth years. These include mechanical augmentation, cerebral transplants to smaller bodies and, of course, a containment chamber to hold their body together and inhibit further growth. Sheila's gone for the latter option after a fashion.
Job: chef extraordinaire, resident telepath, machine operator
Backstory: when asked how she came to be on this ship, Sheila usually brushes it off. For all intents and purposes, she's been here since the beginning, and may in fact be one of the original financiers - she does not hesitate to say that she spent her life savings on this dump, especially her own little galley, which seems to be an expansive chamber filled with some sort of oxygenated, medicated gel that she apparently can dermally absorb oxygen with. The procedures she's used to extend her own life are clearly a bit old, in that the result seems to have been to remove her bones, confine her in a room and redo her circulation to the point where it seems like the gel (which is also apparently what her blood is) does most of the work. This appears to have had the unforeseen side effect of supercharging her growth process as well - might be some of the hormones in the gel, but she hasn't dared to touch the settings much, and nobody else knows enough about the machine to do anything about it. Over the years she's grown to occupy much of the chamber - the majority of it, in fact, to the point where ingredients can't be kept inside of it anymore. Luckily for the crew, however, elf-flesh is one of the more delicious meats in the galaxy, and Sheila's always got plenty of that (a vast surplus, in fact, which consumption only serves to keep at a steady level) as long as base nutrients get pumped into the gel on a regular basis. And she's not one to toot her own horn, but she's probably the foremost (and not the only, she'll then add) authority in the galaxy on cooking elf, having mastered more than seven dishes incorporating it as the main ingredient and occasionally experimenting with a few more ideas in her spare time. In the process, she's also managed to master the operation of robot arms, since both operating the excision machinery and the robot arms doing the actual cooking (which happen to be a repurposed part of the excision machinery in a repurposed, very small, airless part of the waste disposal system), since you really don't want the preservation gel getting into your food.
Special talents: Sheila has had quite a lot of practice at cooking (mostly elf-flesh, but sometimes other things in very small quantities), and also operating robotic arms. She is something of a talented and self-taught telepath, able to communicate within the ship's boundaries, and perhaps slightly beyond as well, though not at all familiar with any telepathic combat techniques that, say, a space elf military operative would know, or at best superficially familiar with them. The rest of her skills, if she indeed had any before getting on this ship, are lost to time.
Other things: Her room is a sealed-off 45 cubic meter galley, of which her body takes up about thirty seven. Thanks to her bonelessness, she can fit in just fine and leave some room for the control consoles she uses to cook, excise and adjust her painkiller supply in case of need. She doesn't really have any personal possessions on her, either, since the chamber doesn't allow for them.
Also, I propose that every ship is accepted as its own entity, and the end result is all of them inextricably mashed into one another, perhaps due to a docking accident or worse, done on purpose to pool resources after each one proved individually non-spaceworthy.
Author
Topic: Universal Menagerie (~/5) (Read 7438 times)