OOC Entry 97 - Character History

I have somewhat painted myself into a corner with my last story.

Sure, everyone is back. Keram is racing to return to Anoikis to see whether Alira is ok, Cedrien is doing his political games with Arclight alliance, Alira and Sylera have recovered from their coma and found that they are bonded by the experience, Shisei is catching up with his old friends in Caldari State.

The problem is, I had Sandrielle be returned to her old home: The Hive.

Nobody ever escapes from The Hive. They can not be bargained or reasoned with. They are the ultimately dedicated fanatics. Hell, Sansha Kuvakei looks nice in comparison to those guys.

So, apart from writing a character off or coming up with some extremely unrealistic deus ex machina, I have no idea how I could get Sandrielle out of that clinch.

So while I make up my mind and find some way for this situation to resolve itself, I am taking a break from the current narrative to deal a bit with the past.

Since we are on the subject, it's going to be Sandrielle's past.

The one that had always been shrouded in mystery.

Where does she come from. What happened between her and The Hive? How did she escape? Where did she get all that sophisticated martial arts training and her abilities to manipulate people?

Those are questions which never got answered so far, and I thought it would be fun to go down that road for a while.

So, there I go, shedding some light on to that character's history.

I hope you enjoy it.

Credit for the artwork goes to Lisa Liang

22 - Metamorphosis - Part 1

23 years ago ...

Bhikkuni Kalsang steered the convent's old ground-effect vehicle around the forested outcropping which lay between her and the plume of smoke she and her sisters had spotted earlier this morning. The wizened Intaki woman had seen enough forest fires to know that this was not one. The smoke was too dark and too dense for burning wood. So she had gathered a group of four younger sisters – among them Ayang who had an aptitude with technology unsurpassed by any other – and went out to investigate.

Once the unstably floating old transport vehicle had completed it's detour around the natural obstacle, the five women encountered a scenery of singular devastation. Trees had been snapped like they were mere twigs, rocks had been shattered and small fires were smouldering everywhere. The swath of destruction formed a convenient path to follow to the source of the acrid clouds which darkened the sky ahead. Several hundred meters down the scar in the lush landscape of Intaki V they found it: A twisted and shattered mass of metal, solar panels and composite materials. It was a spaceship. Not a large one by any means, nothing larger than a frigate. With it's wings broken into translucent shards and the bent metal fuselage, it looked like a gigantic mangled insect.

Bhikkuni Kalsang was by no means knowledgeable about such things, but Ayang immediately called out when she saw it 'It is an interceptor! A Stiletto or Claw class frigate of Minmatar design!' Kalsang nodded, satisfied that she had brought the young disciple along. Although the order did not concern itself with worldly matters, it encouraged study among it's members, and Ayang had focused mostly on the technology of interstellar travel and the engineering of starships.

The Intaki nun veered the rickety floating vehicle around the wreckage and set it down at a suitable spot as close as possible to the burning remnants of the fighter craft. The younger women left the vehicle before she could heave herself from the driver's seat. Gentle Tenyu gave her a hand and Kalsang smiled thankfully at the girl.

Ayang was the first to approach the crashed spacecraft. Before she could even get close enough to need her breathing filter for protection against the smoke, she stopped in her tracks and pointed at the wreckage. 'Look sisters' the young woman shouted to her companions.

The other women respectfully kept pace with Bhikkuni Kalsang as she approached carefully. Once she had arrived at a point close enough to see, the old Intaki looked in the direction her young disciple pointed to.

Where the main hull had broken open, a rounded shape lay split among the remains of the fuselage. Inside the seed-like shell, a smaller kernel of transparent composite material was slowly leaking a viscous fluid from several cracks, and within that, a human body floated suspended in the same liquid.

A woman's body by the looks of it.

Bhikkuni Kalsang moved closer, helped along by one of her disciples, and pulled the respirator over her face to protect herself against the toxic smoke that rose from the burning wreckage.

As a nun of the Ida she lived in seclusion, but she knew enough of the world to recognise what she saw. 'It is a capsuleer.' she whispered with surprise in her voice.

'What is a capsuleer?' disciple Tenyu asked. Despite being very knowledgeable in medicine, that girl had come from a very sheltered home and knew little about the outside world.

'A human being who has sacrificed their spiritual rebirth to become one with a machine.' the old nun replied. 'They live inside their spaceships and have gained unnatural immortality through the use of technology.'

Ayang, followed by Keioki – the Achura convert – climbed carefully into the ship to inspect the capsule.

Ayang found an instrument panel that had miraculously survived the crash. It showed lifesigns on it's flickering display.'I think she is still alive!' she called out, her voice muffled by the respirator which she was now wearing.

“We must get her out of there.” Kalsang said and then addressed the disciples beside her. 'Tenyu, Lahoi bring the toolboxes from our transport.'

Apprehensively she looked over the red and green markings of the crashed ship. She noticed the spiny, multi-legged form of an ebailla insect, almost invisible under a layer or soot. It was an instrument of warfare, and the markings looked threatening. Bhikkuni Kalsang hoped they did the right thing by rescuing that crashed capsuleer 'May the ancestors be with us.' she muttered under her breath.

***

Bhikkuni Kalsang was still straining her mind to come up with an explanation for this whole situation while she looked at the girl moaning and writhing on her bed in the recovery room. Tenyu knelt beside the young capsuleer and dabbed sweat from her brow with a cloth.

'She has bad dreams.' the disciple said with a concerned look on her face.

'Not surprising.' Kalsang thought. 'She must have endured horrible things. Who would do such things to a young girl like that.'

When they had taken the capsuleer from her ship she was in a deep coma that she had not woken from in the five days since they had found her. When the nuns inspected her for injuries, they found scars and burn-marks all over the girl's body. Some of them looked so old that they must have been inflicted on her years ago. Someone had abused and tortured that poor girl for a long time.

Her features looked Gallente, and she would be pretty if it weren't for a hard cast to her features which spoke of hardships, both physical and emotional. She was not much older than the youngest initiates of the convent, but there was nothing girlish about her. Her lean body looked more like that of a stray animal than that of a girl.

'Who turns children into capsuleers like that?' Kalsang asked herself.

Suddently, with a scream, the capsuleer girl rose from the mattress and opened her eyes.

With the panicked expression of a caged beast she looked around herself quickly. Then, without a moment of hesitation, the girl grabbed a pair of scissors from the small, low table beside her bed and hurled herself at Tenyu with a feral growl.

The attack was savage but still dangerously well executed. This girl knew how to fight and kill. Tenyu would have ended up with the scissors lodged deep in her throat if it weren't for the nun's own martial training. Thanks to that, she reacted quickly. Tenyu sidestepped the attack, caught the girl's wrist and spun downward dragging the attacker with her while sweeping the legs from under the capsuleer while she turned.

With another scream the capsuleer girl crashed into the ground and ended up with her arm twisted onto her back and Tenyu pushing a knee into the small of her back to hold her down.

Kalsang stood up with a sigh and walked over to kneel down beside the girl who squirmed and screamed under Tenyu's hold. The younger nun looked pleadingly at her elder, clearly at loss how she should deal with this obviously disturbed young capsuleer.

'Please, calm down.' Kalsang begged the girl who hissed and spat at her. 'We mean you no harm.' the old Intaki continued. 'We rescued you from your wrecked ship.' she added.

The girl seemed to calm down a bit, or maybe she had just exhausted herself. 'My name is Kalsang, I am a Bhikkuni, a practitioner of the way of Ida.' the old woman said calmly. 'Would you like to tell me who you are?'

'There is no me.' the girl growled back at her. 'There is only the swarm of The Hive and it will come and kill all of you and burn your whole planet.' The last words were delivered with such a conviction that Kalsang felt a momentary chill crawl down her spine. With a sad expression she stood up and walked over to the medicine cabinet at the far wall of the small chamber. She retrieved a sedative injector and returned to place it against the girl's neck.

'It is better for you to sleep some more. Maybe we can talk once you wake up again.' Kalsang said and pressed the release.

Tenyu rose when the girl finally relaxed under her. 'What was she talking about? What is that Hive she mentioned?' the young Bhikkuni asked with a troubled expression.

Kalsang looked at her disciple earnestly. 'When I went to town last time to get supplies, there was an information bulletin about them. When I saw the symbol on her crashed ship I recognized it. The Hive is a group of capsuleer terrorists who have killed thousands of innocents recently.'

Tenyu looked at her elder aghast. 'Then she is very dangerous. We should bring her to the city and give her to the authorities.'

Kalsang shook her head. 'No, that would only make matters worse.' She looked down at the sedated capsuleer on the floor. 'This poor young girl has endured too much already. We have to heal her.'

Tenyu looked puzzled. 'But her injuries are healed and she has clearly recovered her strength.'

'Not her body my dear sister.' Kalsang said. 'We must heal her spirit.'

22 - Metamorphosis - Part 2

15 years ago ...

Bhikkuni Kalsang watched her young trainee while she was perched cross-legged on a rock. At moments like these she had to think back to the early days after they had found the girl. She had been strong even back then. Marked by abuse and neglect, but hardened by a life that few children ever had to endure, and fewer still would survive. The feral strength of her then lean teenage body had been cultivated over the years into the lethal grace of the young woman who now performed her training sequence under Kalsang's scrutinizing gaze.

Just like her body had matured and redeveloped, so had her mind. Back when they found the girl she was a savage creature. Very much like the insect which The Hive - her abductors - used as it's symbol she had no sense of self and a boundless aggression against everything that did not belong to her “swarm”. The weeks and months which followed her recovery from the crashed ship had been difficult, both for the girl and the sisters. More than one sister got injured because of the girl's ceaseless attempts to break free or at least hurt her caretakers. So much work had gone into healing the ravaged spirit of that stranded young capsuleer, but eventually they had managed to soothe her pain and free her mind from the harsh lessons imprinted on it by The Hive.

They had named her Keitu - the Intaki word for comet - because she did not remember any name of her own. The Hive had taken that from her too. The sisters taught her how to be a person again, and when she finally became an individual in her own right, she turned out to be a quick learner.

One good thing had come from the things which The Hive had done to Keitu at a young age: They had erased everything that she was before, emptied her completely and created within her a single-minded determination to dedicate herself fully to any task at hand. Once the sisterhood had broken the chains which The Hive had forged to bind this girl, she became an eager and quick learner due to this conditioning. Philosophy, martial arts, medicine, the art of psycho linguistics; whatever Keitu was taught, she picked it up at a speed that was almost prodigious. 

Right now, however, the young woman's actions interrupted Kalsang's reverie. The old Intaki spiritualist tapped her cane three times against the rock she was perched on. Keitu stopped in the middle of her sequence of movements. The evening breeze picked up and made the long grass of the forest clearing move like the surf of the sea. The trees all around rustled and groaned as they were moved by the sudden gust of wind, and Keitu's black hair swirled about her head as she turned to face her teacher.

'Stop!' Bhikkuni Kalsang commanded. 'What did I tell you about the form of the moon emerging from behind the parting clouds?'

Keitu relaxed her stance. 'That it should be executed in one fluid movement without any pause.' the young Gallente woman replied.

'Right. And what did you do right there?' Kalsang asked.

'I paused, my sister.' Keitu said humbly.

Slowly Kalsang slid off the rock. The years had taken their toll on the old Bhikkuni, but what the years had taken, experience and long training had done their best to compensate. With an agility well beyond what one would expect from a woman her age, Kalsang began the sequence and executed it slowly but faultlessly. 'The movement of the arms should be like swimming through the air, while your body moves forward. The power of the movement comes from the legs, and when your arms move backwards you settle your weight. Like this.' Kalsang stopped and touched her disciple to guide her through the movement. 'Do not use the strength of your arms to pull back, have them follow your weight as it settles into your root.' The old woman frowned momentarily. 'You are so tense Keitu. What is on your mind that distracts you so much?'

The dark haired Gallente stepped away from her teacher and bowed her head. 'Sister.' she said 'My mind is occupied with an announcement I saw in town.' 

Kalsang raised a thin white eyebrow and a map of wrinkles appeared on her forehead. 'Tell me about it girl.'

The olive-skinned Gallente closed her eyes and lapsed into a recall trance. Even her voice was modulated to almost sound like the recorded announcement she had seen on a holoprojector downtown.

'Intaki people. The savage and inhumane capsuleers of The Hive have invaded your homeland, the Intaki Syndicate. Those mindless killers have slaughtered hundreds and thousands of your kin. The Serpentis enforcers you tolerate, the Mordu's Legion mercenaries you hire, your own defense force. All of them are powerless against this threat. We are the capsuleers of the Rasen Zoku. We are your only hope against The Hive. Join our crews! Man our ships, and we shall liberate you from the terror of The Hive.'

Keitu stopped the recital, opened her eyes again and looked at her old instructor.

Kalsang exhaled slowly and shook her head. 'You think that by joining with those capsuleers you will set things right?' she asked. 'Have you learned nothing during the years with us?'

'No sister.' Keitu answered. 'It is not for my own peace that I want to do this.' She knelt before the old Intaki and grasped her wrinkled hands. 'You already gave me that peace. You have made me a person. You gave me a name. You taught me many things. But now I feel the need to repay my debt.' she looked down and tears rolled over her smooth dusky face. 'I feel like I owe so much to the Intaki way of life. I can not stand by to let the Intaki people be ravaged by the ones who took everything from me.' Pleadingly she looked up into the face of the venerable Bhikkuni. 'Who will be there to save the likes of me if The Hive wins?' Desperately she shook her head. 'I must do this.'

Bhikkuni Kalsang looked deep into the black eyes of that young Gallente woman she had poured so much of her knowledge and her wisdom into over all those years. She remembered the day that the teenage girl she once was had first embraced her, wracked by deep sobs. Kalsang remembered the laughter she enjoyed when Keitu had first managed to even sway her own mind with the perfectly chosen words and appropriate modulation of her voice, proving that she had mastered the art of psycho-linguistics. She remembered how impressed she felt when she had seen what Keitu could do in spaceship fighting simulations, and the incredible progress the Gallente girl had made in martial arts training.

Finally Bhikkuni Kalsang nodded. 'If this is what you must do, then it shall be.' she helped the young woman up. 'Walk with me back to the convent. You should spend one last supper with your sisters to say goodbye.'

The present day

'You must be kidding Cedrien.' Keram transmitted across the communications link. 'That wormhole entrance will maybe last another hour at most.' Nervously the Amarrian looked at the timer displayed before his mind's eye. 'If we get cut off we will be stranded out here in the ass end of nowhere. Do you have any idea how far away from everything Omist region is?'

'All I know is, that it's pretty close to Tenerifis, and that's where Rasenzoku make their home these days.' Cedrien replied across the communications link.

'Yeah great.' Keram growled back. 'So if we actually find them before being shot to pieces by a bunch of local capsuleers, they might actually hear us out before podding us. Is that your plan?'

'Since when are you the one to be so risk averse?' Cedrien taunted.

'Since we are sitting in the middle of a warp disruption bubble with nothing but two frigates, in the name of the empress' tits.' Keram shot back.

Space around them seemed empty. The ancient gate that had been built centuries ago as part of a long line of connections back to settled space, floated in space more than a hundred kilometers away.

Some local capsuleer pilots had anchored a warp disruption field generator right at a point where it would drag passing ships into it's artificial gravity well. A standard trap in the outer regions of New Eden where the Yulai Convention served only one purpose: To register the official claim of capsuleers to dominion over an unsettled system. This particular one was claimed by a group calling themselves The Southern Cross, and it was the choke point between their claimed space and the handful of systems Rasenzoku called their home these days.

Systems like this one were highly contested. Capsuleer alliances kept fighting over such strategic points on the map of New Eden. Wars on a massive scale would start in such places.

Aware of the danger, the two wormhole capsuleers had taken small frigates out to this remote region through a convenient portal into New Eden. With the recent losses Awakened Industries had endured, it would be reckless to risk a full crew compliment in something that might possibly be a suicide mission.

When more than a dozen combat ships suddenly appeared on their sensor scan after hours of waiting, it seemed like that was exactly what this was going to turn out to be.

Only seconds later the combat squad appeared within fighting distance and began to establish sensor locks on the two frigates they found inside the warp-disruption field.

Unsurprisingly the incoming ships carried the sun-and crucifix markings of Southern Cross.

Keram resigned to a quick death and inwardly cursed his commander, but then a new ship appeared on his tactical scan and ripped open a tunnel through the space-time continuum. A new force seemingly appeared out of nowhere shortly after.

The squadron of advanced black ops ships which emerged bore other markings. Their hulls were coloured metallic blue with stylized white spirals. As Keram and Cedrien maneuvered to avoid incoming fire, a storm of destruction broke loose that blotted out the light of the local sun. The carnage was over in minutes with the spiral-marked ships being the only ones left on the field.

Again the two wormhole capsuleers became the targets. Gallente designed recon ships rendered their warpdrives inert and flooded their sensor systems. Minmatar vessels enveloped them with powerful strands of electromagnetic energy to slow their ships down.

Keram was expecting the wrenching sensation of clone transfer, but it never came.

'Who are you? What are you doing here, and why are you marked as allies on my targeting overview in the first place?' a harsh voice with an Intaki accent demanded.

'We are friends of Sandrielle Jaunes'. Cedrien replied on the hailing frequency. 'We hoped to meet you.'

'What do you want of the Rasen Zoku?' the disembodied voice asked.

'We are looking for help.' Cedrien answered. 'We need help to rescue Sandrielle from The Hive.'