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[Calania]

A fair-skinned woman makes her way from the bar of Deck23 to the Krusual section. Her movements are stuttering, at times almost mechanical. The small device at her ear whispers commands and information about where she must go, and she follows. The tell-tale signs of being a capsuleer are evident where the collar of her grey jacket gives way to her short hair.

Dissatisfied looks are sent her way, but she does not seem to mind them, even register them. With a fizzy, sweet-smelling drink, she makes her way to an empty alcove and sets the drink next to her. It is only when she looks up and displays white eyes with no iris or pupil that it becomes clear that she is blind.

After a while, after she senses diminished interest around her, she shifts backwards into the alcove, the glass barely making a sound as it is pushed off the edge of the faux-stone to impact on the carpeted floor. Perhaps showing that the personal assistant is some sort of hacked and cobbled-together device, a transparent blue holoscreen flickers into being in front of her as she quietly begins to dictate.


/header
Name: Calania Maharyn
Date: 19.08.117
Time: 17.35.52 (cluster standard)
Time since last entry: -
Encoding: Custom

/body
In the midst of one of the most tumultuous periods of my life, I am left lower than I ever was. I sense great clarity of purpose just beyond my reach, as if I was on the cusp of something, and I have forgotten, knowing only that it has just slipped my grasp. Fingers grasp and claw knowing not at what, and so it slips inexorably away.

Diaries have never been for me. Those who needed to know either already did, or would be told. But there is reason, now, to save what I can in a more archaic form. Let me start with what I remember, and what public files have been able to tell me:

I wave goodbye to my mother at the family estate on Yuhelia, and transit back to the starport. I have finished training to become a capsuleer, and so her dreams for me are fulfilled. No more pressure, no more direction. She places no demands, merely told me to go out and act. The journey to the Imperial Armaments station near the fifth planet is without incident. I enter the pod, and buy a shuttle to make my way to Bagodan, where I pay for installation of a spare clone at the Sarum Family station.

Over three years later, standard cluster time, the clone is activated. I am told that I have been off-grid, unresponsive to any form of contact, for over a year at that point.

Three years, at least, of capsuleer experience, flushed down the drain. The Bagodan clone was an afterthought, one I apparently never since bothered to keep updated. Strangely, there were no reported medical malfunctions, yet all other clones had perished, and this one was rendered blind.

I immediately installed another clone, but it came out as the current one did. The personnel at the station were unable to explain the phenomena. It was as if the machines refused to fix the damage, or as if the clone body actively degraded whatever they attempted to build.

While I consider what this means, I have chosen to do what records indicate I did before: Join the Tribal Liberation Force. A half-breed, fairly privileged, Amarr-raised girl among her supposed half-kin. It will be interesting. I apparently endured it once, and so I shall again.

When next I have a moment of quiet, I will record for myself an overview of what lead to this perhaps peculiar situation

/end

[Arrendis]

Oh, very nice!

[Calania]

/header
Name: Calania Maharyn
Date: 21.08.117
Time: 10.21.45
Time since last entry: 40.45.53
Encoding: Custom

/body
Topic: Pre-capsuleer life, in brief.

Decades later, the earliest thing I can recall is something strange, but ultimately inconsequential. Running across the grass to a low hedge, and jumping through it more than over it. I was perhaps three years old. I remember standing in a hallway, waiting for my big sister to pour a drink into a glass I held outstretched.

When she turned six, we were separated, each given a stone cell. Perhaps, in times past, they had been used by those with more monastic inclinations. For us, they were simply cells. Life became regimented then. Everything was scheduled. Training, learning, eating, hygiene, training, learning…

I was taught the faith, but secretly encouraged not to buy into it. Mother wanted us to be able to live in the empire, not fall under its sway. I did not understand, but I cared less and less. She grew more and more distant, and none of our teachers were allowed to have more than a passing, professional relationship with us. They could not stop us from being sisters, though they tried.

Krusual and Amarr. Supposed slave and master, intermingled. Mother never hid what we were from us, nor did she hide that our father was dead. I never considered it then, but she probably had him killed.

Once, I asked her why she had fallen for him. She laughed. She never fell for him. But the tribe stubbornly resisted, and that meant that there was a trace of strength in them perhaps unknown to the Amarr. I was simply part of a breeding scheme. Not to make a better Amarrian, not to elevate the family, even, just to be a next step on the ladder of evolution.

As time went on, I think I ceased to think too much about her. I did not love or hate her, but she was irrelevant. She told me much later that that was what she wanted. A free agent, someone unfettered by belief, familial ties, anything. Someone free to experience the universe and come to if not original, then personal, untainted conclusions about it.

When becoming a capsuleer became a possibility, it was the next logical step in her plan. Theresa was sent off to be tested and scanned first. She returned with a negative answer. Unlikely to be able to handle the rigors of becoming and being a capsuleer. My mother never bothered to tell me that she had returned, it was only during a run around the estate that I saw them converse just outside.

They hugged awkwardly, doing a poor job at projecting a familial atmosphere that was never there. Theresa presented mother with a report. Her polite smile never wavered as she nodded to the nearest of four guards. I had stopped running at this point, just staring. The guard raised his metallic baton, and cracked Theresa over the back of the head. There always was a certain fascination with base things in my mother, and violence was a peculiar interest of hers. She could have had Theresa stunned, or drugged.

Instead, she was struck, fed some little thing that mother made her bite down on, hands fastened around my sister's jaw. A little jerk of tension, a visible but inaudible sigh, and then stillness. That was all it took. When mother raised herself again, there was no emotion in her eyes, not even cold control. This was a failure, one she cared less for than any number of pets. We shared a look, and I soon continued running, wondering who I would now brawl and wrestle with. She would find someone, certainly. And I would not speak of this.

Years later, I came back with a positive result. She sent me off with one of the first smiles I had seen from her in over a decade. This experiment was a success.

I shall not spend words on capsuleer training, as mine was no different from that of so many others. I transcended my humanity, in a sense. I think I even transcended my mother, though I have never felt at ease with that thought. She seems to have felt no shame at my choice to fight for an enemy of the empire. I acted, and that was all she seemed to want.

Since my reawakening, I have not yet tried to contact her, and she has not tried to contact me. She still lives on Yuhelia according to public files, but I cannot go there now without waivers and great danger. I doubt she worries much, or cares. Whatever I did, whatever I do, she seems to be of the opinion that it fits into her half-prophesies and cryptic recitals.

Perhaps I shall record some of those next, or perhaps a battle with the Amarr forces. For now, I will rest. Not because I am weary, but because I feel as if I should be after all this, and after a recent death in Kourmonen.

/end