Sparks (Character Sheet)

[Sarah McFarlen]

Sarah McFarlen

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But she wanted to be a Rogue, and this idea amused him to no end. This prissy little thing wanting to fly with the dredges of society."

Dervin Malfient, 814A.S
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

The Basics

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Nickname(s): Sparks
Gender: Female
Age: 25 Years
Birthday: 24th October 798A.S
Birthplace: Gregory Private Hospital, Lenox Hill, Planet Manhattan, New York
Place Of Residence: ITV Adventure Galley
Affiliation: Freelancer
Known Craft:

• ITV Adventure Galley - Serenity-class Transport

Appearance

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Height: 189cm
Hair: Auburn
Eyes: Hazel
Distinguishing Marks: Though the spots themselves have long since faded, Sarah still bears the ghosts of freckles, a string of pale dots meandering across the bridge of her nose.

Tall and wiry, Sarah is the sort of woman who always looks one strong breeze away from falling in a sprawling heap. More often then not, a smile lingers beneath pale blue eyes, radiating the same quiet sort of fool's confidence that has graced officers at the head of countless doomed armies in ages past. She walks with the casual loping slide of a lifetime runner, pushing a pace shorter companions often struggle to keep, arms hanging at her side, and mind often somewhere else altogether.

Personality

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Sarah is an eternal wanderer, the sort of person who would spend an hour watching the enigmatic dance of a nebulae for no other reason then that she believes it deserves to be seen. Every kilometer traveled brings with it something new to see, every ship on the scanners another wonder. A mechanical prodigy, Sarah sees past the mundane motion of a ship drifting through space to the complex process required to design, construct and launch tonnes of terrestrial metal into deep space, and in that, she finds a certain poetry. People; however, she finds far more complex.

Carelessly blasé when it comes to risk Sarah is, perhaps, not so much unaware of her own vulnerability as she is in denial of it. Whether the challenge is running a mile or flying point on a bomber mission, Sarah's hand is always among the first up, ready for the next adventure. Born and raised in suburban Manhattan, Sarah still carries remnants of a high-society education, though time among the rogues has instilled in her a dangerously ruthless streak - one that she struggles to ignore.

History

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Born to Tanya and Johnathon McFarlen on a warm October morning in 798A.S, the youngest McFarlen lived what passed for a modest early childhood among Manhattan's elite. When Johnathon, working on contract for the Liberty Navy, was granted license to market a discontinued navigation project, the resulting profits catapulted the McFarlens into the upper echelons of the already-affluent Manhattan society.

Denied nothing, Sarah's monthly education fee alone was more then a wage slave on Pittsburgh would have seen in a lifetime. Particularly well-versed in the practical sciences, a work-experience program at the local spaceport resulted in a part-time job patching micrometeoroid holes in the hulls of shuttles. Still; however, she chafed at the confines of a planet-bound life. When a spate of high-profile kidnappings prompted Manhattan's wealthy to pull their family ever closer, Sarah pushed against the boundaries that she felt settling over her life, and that of her newborn little brother. Where others feared the unknown, Sarah craved it and, ultimately, the romance of a life of piracy was too great for her to deny.

Shortly after midnight, a month after Sarah's sixteenth birthday, the CSV Mundane Intervention lifted off from the pad at Normanton Spaceport. The owner, a man who would later be identified in LPI reports as a Junker by the name of Jack King, was found dead in a swamp two weeks later and two hundred kilometres from Lenox Hill, another apparent casualty of Manhattan's underground drug trade. Half a star system away, Sarah had set out to find the Rogues, oblivious to the army of private investigators that had their names etched on Johnathon McFarlen's payroll. Like so many before them, they found nothing.

Ultimately, it was the Rogues who found Sarah, a failed shield capacitor and misjudged attitude adjustment sending her stolen CSV careening into one of the asteroids that dotted the Badlands. She was unconscious by the time the Hyenas found her, carrying her back to the cold rock of Buffalo base in a Bactrian's cargo bay. In the end, it was the skills she'd learnt in Manhattan's spaceport that saved her from a life under Malta's yellow sun, and she was put to work repairing and retrofitting the rag-tag fleet that carried the pirates to the tradelanes and hauled their takings back again.

Wealth offered tremendous power; however, and even the Badlands fell within the reach of those with the credits. Aigis, an artificial intelligence hired with her father's money eventually found Sarah and machine and mechanic struck up a friendship, of sorts, that would outlast Sarah's stay in the Rogues. For reasons known only to artificial mind, it chose not to reveal Sarah's location and, as the years passed, her file slowly slid from the LPI's missing persons watch. Under the watchful (and semi-invisible) eyes of Christopher Dangen and Aigis, Sarah escaped major harm in those early years among the Rogues, eventually, in the chaos that followed Warlord Ashes' departure, rising to become the Rogue's chief mechanic and what might, to the socialites on Manhattan, have been referred to as senior management, but to the Rogues was toasted over half-drunk ales as an Underboss.

Quickly forced on by more ruthless members of the Rogues, Sarah's stay as Underboss was brief, but hectic. Almost single-handedly responsible for returning the pirate capital fleet to operational status when a series of errors grounded the Rogue flagships, Sarah's work tightened the Rogue strangehold on piracy in central Liberty and all but ensured a brief dominance of smuggling routes in the core worlds. When Sarah left the Rogues, it was like leaving a second family. Leave them she did, though.

Professing to be sick of piracy, and saddled with the weariness of a woman three times her age, Sarah left known Sirius for a time, signing aboard as drive engineer with the Zoner exploration vessel Star's Soliloquy. With her passion for the unknown reignited, Sarah took up an interest in the alien artifacts that littered the Edge Worlds, finally returning to known space in 819A.S. Turning to old allies in the Rogues for assistance, she acquired and began outfitting the former prison liner McCreary, rechristened Contents May Differ, intending to use the vessel as a staging point for an expedition into the so-called 'Nomad Systems.' Well and truly dry of any credits earned from her sojourn aboard Soliloquy she worked briefly as a Freelancer, taking jobs where they came to finance the continued work on Contents.

Plans for the expedition came to a grinding halt in late 820A.S, when a trip through Bremen drew the attention of the Rheinland Military. Loaded with artifacts, and straying dangerously close to an unknown military facility, the liner's hull quickly buckled beneath the resulting onslaught of fire. Sarah, loathe to see Contents in the hands of the military, plotted the dying ship on a course for Bremen's sun before flicking the release switch on her escape pod. Contents May Differ died in the glow of a planet-sized fusion reaction, a fate Sarah was lucky to escape. The pod drifted through space for a day, tiny thrusters carrying it to the only significant mass within range - an oversized asteroid that its Bundschuh party inhabitants called Cloppenburg.

With nowhere else to go, and her own plans burning in a nuclear furnace, Sarah directed her efforts toward assisting her new hosts. For perhaps the first time in her life Sarah had the opportunity for true altruism and, after nearly a decade of self-interest, clutched to it like a dying man to a raft. Sarah, going under the pseudonym 'Sparks,' carved out a rough existence among the idealists, opportunists, and self-confessed patriots of Erich Klugmann's Widerstand. Surviving on technology that others would have stripped for scrap, 'Sparks' found a niche maintaining the ancient communications satellites and installations that kept the Widerstand hidden from the sleepless eyes of the military. It wasn't to last.

In early 821 government satellites located a Widerstand task force, escorted by the Natio Octavarium battleship Metropolis, orbiting alongside Zwickau Depot. The military response was as swift as it was brutal. Dead and dying ships lit Dresden's skies as tugs laboured with flickering thrusters to tow Zwickau to a safer orbit. The station survived, but at tremendous cost. Sparks was dispatched with damage control teams working desperately to seal wounds in man and machine alike. Only in the aftermath of the disaster did the true scale of the loss become apparent. Dozens of revolutionaries were never found, crushed in failing passageways or lost to the void, ships becoming coffins. An unfortunate engineering team were vaporised when a plasma bolt ripped through a hangar door. Defeated on their home soil, the Widerstand suffered a tremendous blow to their manpower, materials and morale that was only exacerbated when the sect's leader failed to return from a routine patrol.

Bruised and bloodied, the remnants of the Widerstand put up a cry for vengeance, and the movement began a slow slide towards the militarism of their predecessor, the Volksfront. Under the command of former Volksfront Oberst Freya Eistochter a series of increasingly ruthless policies inched in to Sparks' day-to-day existence. Matters came to a head when Christopher Dangen, going under the alias of Vaelin, threatened Bruchsal Base in response to veiled threats to Sparks. Sparks was promptly exiled to ensure the safety of the increasingly-radical Widerstand.

As 822A.S rolled by Sparks once again found herself facing the universe alone.

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"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."

- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.

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