Name: Zsaryna Adrelana
Age: 23
Race: Ni-Kunni
Birthplace: Eshafahn II, Mishi IV
Parents: Lt. Shala Adrelana and Capt. Kamaran Za-khayem, of the Interdictor class vessel True Faith.
Height: 5'3
Hair coloration and preferred style: Auburn hair usually tied back into a ponytail or a bun when she was in the Navy, or cut short.
Weight: redacted, 'none of your damn business' has been written next to it on her military ID.
Distinguishing markings: freckles upon her face and many small scars likewise across her face, severe scar tissue on her back and legs. Burn graft using apparent artificial skin on her right leg, indistinct tattoo on right shoulder which can only be seen under ultraviolet lighting.
Zsaryna was born to a military family on a military base as an only child, her siblings having shipped off to boot camp before she was born. Her parents, whilst loving, were usually away from home on Navy business and as a result Zsaryna soon grew up into a headstrong and independent young girl who wanted to follow her parents into the navy as soon as she could. It is said that she could name every single rank in the navy from rating upwards by the time she was four years old, and could press and iron uniforms and bull shoes by the time she was eight. This was noted with concern by Shala Adrelana who did not want her daughter to be following the same path as her two parents, knowing where it would lead.
Thus Zsaryna, who had till that point been learning at the base's own school, was packed off to a Seminary, an experience which changed Zsaryna's life forever. Whilst before, she had been fairly accepting of God in her life, the Seminary's curriculum was far more in depth than that of the naval school, which focused on more practical subjects. It was also a far harder environment for the young girl to grow up in, with corporal punishment and reduced rations being far more common in the seminary.
Zsaryna grinned and bore it as any good Ni-Kunni ought, however it did not take her long at all to get rather tired and annoyed with the whole thing and at age eleven, still in her nightshirt, she broke out of the seminary and walked the ten miles home, much to the disappointment and annoyance of her mother. However not everyone was disappointed with Zsaryna's rejection of seminary life, and Zsaryna's uncle, Mostafa-Mehrak Adrelana, a decorated special forces officer took the child under his wing for training in some of the more basic military disciplines such as camouflage and concealment and navigation and even some basic unarmed combat training. There is a limit to how much you can train an eleven year old after all.
At age fifteen however, things changed rather abruptly. The day before Zsaryna's interview for the Cadets, the intense training programme that prepares all individuals for officer ranks in the Navy, ere was a knock on the door and two men were standing there, dressed in Navy dress uniform and holding a folded golden flag. Both her parents had been killed whilst on patrol in Blooder space, or so Zsaryna was told.
The next day, when Zsaryna's extended family arrived (six aunts, five uncles, both sets of grandparents and various assorted cousins, nieces and nephews) arrived at The Adrelana residence, they found that Zsaryna had taken a case of belongings and left for the academy. Whilst her family was burying her parents, the seat reserved for the child of the deceased remained empty. Zsaryna was disowned by the Adrelana family, a move they would come to regret. At the interview, Zsaryna came across as cold, callous and professional and her asessors were very pleased with her tactical decision making skills and her ability to make choices under extreme duress, if less impressed with her willingness to sacrifice everything at the altar of mission completion. However they weren't willing to let something like that stand in the way of her candidacy, after all Imperial soldiers are supposed to give their lives to God at some point or other anyway. Zsaryna was rapidly accepted into the Cadets and served well during the three years of training that all Cadets have to endure. The training was rigorous and intense, after all any recruits provided by the Ni-Kunni must measure up to the standards of those provided by the Empire, so training must be commensurately tougher to compensate for the fact that they are not True. Zsaryna was in her element here, as reports from most of her instructors show.
Trainee Adrelana is above average in marksmanship, tactical maneuvering and starship navigation. Her theological scoring is low however. Her decorum and choice of dress is woeful and her grace and poise are more suited for a barge. - senior training assessor Malik Nafomeh.
Choice of dress and decorum were all things that Zsaryna had no taste for. She had joined up to be a soldier rather than a dress up doll. Zsaryna passed out of cadets with distinction, one of the first Ni-Kunni females to be awarded the Chamberlain's seal, an award that Zsaryna had to destroy a few years later when Karsoth was deposed and executed.
Officer candidate school was a completely different experience for Zsaryna. For the first time in her life, she was among True Amarr and she didn't like it. Their smug superiority rubbed her the wrong way and she got in quite a bit of trouble for rubbing their faces the wrong way. Chiefly punching a young Amarrian overlord after he asked her to come and let him conduct an inspection of her uniform in private.
That, coupled with several other incidents earned her the enmity of some very powerful and dangerous people. Many times the camp commandant would receive letters from angry parents about the 'Ni-Kunni who doesn't know her place' however he reasoned that the Ni-Kunni would kick off had he discharged the child of a celebrated military family for anything less than a serious offense which hadn't occurred yet. Zsaryna was nothing less than exemplary and the six month long Officer Candidate School only let Zsaryna spread her wings even further, if not for her Theology scores and her inability to grasp manners and basic behavior standards that officers must meet. In truth there was a reason for this but Zsaryna wasn't ever going to tell anyone about it.
However these basic standards and manners became more important as officer school went on and Zsaryna began to fall behind. Then came the Party that changed everything. It was hosted by one of the Heirs as a test of the officer's skill in polite conversation and the like and whilst the Heir himself conducted himself impeccably, one of his sons did not and he made several sufficiently disparaging remarks about the Ni-Kunni and their noses among other things, and then he came to Zsaryna and politely asked if the weight of her nose made it hard to hold her head up on parade. Her response has since gone down in military legend.
"No sir, it only adds to the force of a blow" with that, she promptly gave the young male a swift lesson in courtesy, issued by her knee to his groin.
The fact that the heir didn't like his firstborn son all that much was all that saved Zsaryna from being booted out of the Navy. As it was, she was summoned to the Commandant's office for a long discussion, which ended with her being told she would be reassigned away from the more prominent posting she had hoped for, of a posting to a ship of the line. Instead, her 'unconventional' methods were to be utilized in the Naval Reconnaissance Commandos. She would be sent ahead of the lines in small cloaked destroyers and frigates to insert teams, conduct sabotage operations and generally make a nuisance of herself behind enemy lines.
Commando training was one of the most brutal experiences of Zsaryna's life. Age nineteen she was put through another three months of pure hell, consisting of everything from long range navigation to 'dead reckoning' or navigating by eye alone. Then came the escape and evasion training, followed by conduct after capture drills and various other experiences designed to try and break Zsaryna. Breaking however, is something that other people do.
Zsaryna served three years in the Navy's reconnaissance commandoes, leading multiple strikes against republican targets on every side of the border, including several highly successful strikes upon hardened targets. She amassed a wealth of decorations and experience and earned her name in her own right. Throughout all of this she maintained only minimal contact with her family, save her uncle who she wrote to regularly and wrote back just as frequently.
All this changed however with Op Massacre. It was fairly straightforward. Get in, blow stuff up, get out. This was all achievable or at least it was in theory. A full imperial special forces task group was assembled and launched against the target, which was defended by a single republican capsuleer. Op Massacre lived up to its name alright.
Zsaryna came out of that battle minus one leg after said capsuleer had blown her ship apart. Only twenty crew survived. However they had got in close and managed to land key shots on the capsuleer and above all keep him distracted long enough for the larger ships to do the killing.
However a medal in column A doesn't replace thirty good lives in column B, and th powers that be were rather concerned by Zsaryna's lack of engagement with what happened. When they asked how she felt, her response was 'I lost a ship, it happens all the time' with those remarks, she worried the brass enough for them to kick her out of the Navy, or at least withdraw funding for a prosthetic, same difference really. Zsaryna's surviving crew managed to get a whip round for a replacement leg, but in career terms, Zsaryna was done.
It was when she was getting fitted for her new leg however, that the medics did a blood test, which told them something rather surprising. With that, a new chapter in Zsaryna's life was about to begin.
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Topic: [character] Zsaryna Adrelana (Read 1569 times)