Kaiza's Questionnaire

Kaiza lives in the Messenger quarters, in a shared room near the front of the Messengers' floor. She has claimed the bunk closest to the door, her jumpiness getting the better of her, and she rarely spends much time there. Her bunk is actually pretty hard to sleep in, due to all the random junk that she's dropped off in it "in case she needs it later", but she usually just curls into a small ball on the pillow instead of trying to clean it up.

She sleeps here instead of anywhere else because if she has to be vulnerable somewhere, it's certainly not going to be near members of factions she's had to give bad news to or make hard requests of. She still doesn't really consider this home, though.

Kaiza gets most of her money from gambling, running illegal races on scavenging trips, and gambling on the illegal races on scavenging trips. She spends most of her money on gambling, running illegal races on scavenging trips, and gambling on the illegal races on scavenging trips.

Kaiza has always had a bit of a hard time holding on to money, a bad habit she picked up from her mother. When she's hanging out on the Odyssey in her free time, she enjoys both drink and drug. When she gets to go out on small ship trips to scavenge, mine asteroids, etc., she enjoys the freedom of being farther away from C&C and uses it to dive a little deeper into the seedier side of things.

Kaiza will break C&C, whatever that takes and however she can. She will rip them to shreds, burn them to the ground, kill the ones who will not back down.C&C took from her, and that cannot stand.

She would kill for it, having had the ones she loved most killed by them, and she thinks that she would even take a perverse sort of pleasure from it.

She would let herself be killed for it, if her death could be the tipping point for change. Martyrdom can go a long way in the right hands, as can a symbolic spark.

She knows there are those who wish to reshape C&C, to change them into a "better" form of government. She doesn't think that's possible, not anymore. There is only the desire to rip and tear and claw.

Betrayal. Lies. Death. All wrapped up in one awful night.

Kaiza grew up with her best friends Madge and Finn, the three of them as tight as peas in a pod. They got her through her father's death, and they swore to stick together always, even when they went into different factions. Kaiza and Finn ended up falling in love, and did their best to ensure that Madge never felt left out (and to try to help her find someone, too). Kaiza truly believed in the three of them, and in the better future that they wanted to work together to shape for the Odysseus.

Finn fell in with the Forgotten, making both girls promise not to say anything as he started slipping away more and more often or hiding things away. Kaiza wasn't interested in joining them herself, but loved Finn, and would have done anything to protect his secret. She thought that Madge would, too, until one night when Enforcers stormed into a poker night and ripped Finn from his chair. By the next morning, both Finn and Madge were dead, and Kaiza was left to pick up the pieces of her life.

Now, she knows only self-preservation, adrenaline, and how unsafe it is to trust.

Finn, her lover who she lost after a horrible betrayal. He was soft and sweet with her, highly protective against her mother, and always ready to do what it took. To the outside world, he was sharp and too sarcastic and more than a little dangerous, but very good at his job as an Enforcer. She was closer to him than to anyone else, and when he told her that he had been meeting with the Forgotten, she kept his secrets for him.

Madge, her best friend nightmare. They grew up together, closer than anything, even when Madge joined the Cultivators and Kaiza the Messengers. Madge was quiet, highly intelligent, and always fiddling with something anxiously. The night that Finn was taken by the Enforcers, Madge was nowhere to be found, and the next morning, she was found dead in her quarters.

Louisa, her mother. After Kaiza's father died when she was eight, her mother became bitter and twisted, blaming everything wrong in their lives on her daughter. She raised Kaiza to be distrusting of men, penny-pinching, and always looking over her shoulder... traits that Kaiza carries to this day, although not in the ways that her mother would like. They haven't spoken in years.

Kaiza's childhood was... not fantastic, is how she usually puts it. She was close with her father, not seeing how his alcoholism and gambling addiction was slowly wrecking both her mother and the life the three of them shared. Kaiza followed him everywhere she could, and often snuck into the places she couldn't follow him. Her mother did her best to keep Kaiza out of trouble, and to try to keep her in school, but Kaiza was not a fan of either staying out of trouble or staying in school.

When she was eight, her father didn't come home after a night out drinking and gambling. Kaiza watched from a closet as his gambling "friends" beat him to death over his debts to them, and as soon as they were gone, she ran to fetch her mother. She had to convince her mother to come, her mother refusing to believe what she was saying, and then she had to watch as her mother broke down screaming and hitting her husband's body. Her mother blamed Kaiza for not having stopped it and for not having been good enough to make her father want to change his ways, and never shied away from making sure her daughter knew her blame in his death.

Yes, she was in love, the greatest kind of love. The kind of love that lifts you up and spins you around until you're upside down, and all you can see is your loved one's face and the stars that surrounds the two of you. The kind of love that will always protect you, that will take you on the greatest adventures, that will ensure you get to see the world, that will make you feel untouchable and unbreakable, that will show you how no harm can come to you as long as the two of you have each other.

Her childhood best friend, Finn, who would have done whatever she needed without so much as a reason, simply because they were in love and they were a unit against everything.

Well, almost everything.

The third member of their best friend trio, Madge. Kaiza knows without a doubt that Madge is the one who betrayed Finn's status amongst the Forgotten, and that Madge is the reason Finn is dead.

Madge is dead, too. Good. Kaiza doesn't think she ever really loved her, anyways.

Kaiza doesn't have much, but she has a lot of possessions, at the same time. None of it is worth anything, nor is it even sentimental. But it's the most important stuff in the world to her.

She keeps random nonsense in her bag, in case it's useful. Duct tape, some superglue, a wire cutter. A lighter, in case she finds some of the good stuff (or needs to set something on fire). Whatever else gives her a good feeling for the day.

She keeps even more random nonsense in her bunk. Scraps of cloth she picked up, loose screws that might end up being useful, empty vials that should probably be in a Command evidence locker, bits of paper with random codes and flight paths plotted out on them.

She knows none of it is important, really, but she loves it all. It reassures her to have all these little things she can fidget with or burn or cling to, when she has nothing else. And having the clutter in her bunk makes her almost feel like she's surrounded by something homey again.

The only things that are truly sentimental are her dice. They were her father's lucky dice, and she watched as they rolled around and around the floor while he was beaten to death on the game table above them. Over and over, she watched them land on snake eyes as his blood dripped down onto them, covering the pips. When the group was finally gone, and she crawled out from the closet to try to rouse his bloodied body, she snatched up the dice before running to fetch her mother for help. She could only tell that they had finally landed on double sixes by the feel, running her fingers over them as she tried desperately to clean the blood from them. Her mother burned the rest of her father's possessions, but Kaiza hid the dice. They've never left her pockets or hands since.

Not everyone understands that everything is okay. Not everyone understands what family is. She can fix this, of course, but it'll take time and resources, and she isn't particularly good at waiting or at holding onto resources.

They'll make everything okay, for everyone, soon. Spark is a good enough shot, and she's good enough with a knife. That can take care of some resistance. But Command has some pretty big guns, and some pretty big groups of enforcers, and the controls to the airlocks. So they'll need to get someone who can take care of that.

Getting someone in Command to help would be huge. Getting someone in the Engine would be nice, if Kaiza could stand any of those cult-y idiots. Maybe when everything is okay, they'll be a bit calmer. She thinks that's probably too much to hope for, though.

Kaiza is working on being enough of a people person to get into people's good graces and move this along. She really, really hates people, though.

Wake up from nightmare. Wipe away tears. Pretend she's not still crying. Resist the urge to wash Madge's name out of her mouth with soap.

Make sure there's no one else in the room. Glare at them until they go away, if there is. Steal whatever they left behind.

Shove stuff into her pockets until she feels like she has enough stuff to take care of whatever issues she faces that day. Grab one more knife.

Tighten the laces on her boots, and make sure there's a knife in them still. They're usually a bit loose in the morning after sleeping in them.

Make sure she's got her dice. Give them a nice polish.

Go find coffee. Drink far too much of it. Drink some more. Eat a handful of nuts or something.

Go find some shit to stir up. A fight to start, or a mission with moonrovers she can race, or something. Anything to get her adrenaline pumping.