Madrilene Sorrin

History
Madrilene Sorrin was born to Jerel and Wilryn Sorrin on a night when the stars were perfectly visible from the hospital's delivery room. Her mother said that the first time Madrilene opened her eyes, she was looking at the stars and it was the one thing that stayed constant in her life. She was joined a year later by her brother Palis, who became her constant companion. He nicknamed her ‘Ril’ and it stuck to the point where even her parents called her that. They grew up dirt poor but with the government sponsored Lessons, every child had a chance to succeed and improve their lot in life. Almost all of her family has a talent of some sort. Her mother could flick pans around like they were nothing and had an ore finding talent, her father works the docks as a heavy telekinetic, and Palis had a talent for knowing just what was wrong with a machine (which is why he attained the rank of Tinker so quickly). Madrilene, by twenty-one hadn’t even cracked Seed.

From the age of fifteen until twenty, Madrilene attended pre-Flight, an academy where the best and brightest were chosen to become Prowler pilots. Out of her class of one hundred applicants, she and five others were chosen to begin final examinations to eliminate the rest for one of two spots in the Prowler program. The rest would be on reserve if the Merge failed to take, Madrilene was chosen for one spot, but instead of taking her interim year off, she wound up taking an advanced navigation course instead along with her Prowler Pilot basics and preparatory tri-sim classes that prepared her for how it would feel to Merge with her Prowler. She was assigned an off-world wingmate, which meant she had to wait a few more months for his arrival before they attempted Merge.

During this time, she logged around three hundred hours in the sim environment and passed a series of tests, Kar, the training master, had her put through. Unbeknownst to her before she had even passed the test, he’d put in for her Prowler to be grown. Once the ship was grown and her wingmate, Kieron Serrel, has arrived, they were left with their Prowlers to be Marked and took their first flight as a Merged unit. To say it was a ‘post-Merge ecstasy’ doesn’t quite do the initial Merge process much favor. Imagine your entire body able to feel the slighest wind shift, your mind expanding and able to calculate and adjust for many probablilities within the blink of an eyes, and all your senses alive. This is what a Merge entails. When it heads into a Transition, there’s fevers, chills, and then the augmentation begins down to the genetic level. The first physical changes are at a cosmetic level -- silver strands or flecks appear in the eyes -- sometimes there’s color changes within the skin pigmentation or in the hair. In Madrilene’s case, she acquired a streak of pure white on the right side of her head. She also cracked Seed simultaneously with the end of her augmentation.

Personality
Ril is the kind of person who puts serious thought into whether or not she wants a person as part of her life or not, and once she’s chosen, that’s the end of it. She doesn’t hold grudges, generally likes everyone, and does her best to find the good in everyone. She’s frank, completely open about her wants and needs when it comes to people and doesn’t hesitate to speak her mind. That said, she’s an introvert and would rather be squirreled away reading the latest tech news than be in a crowd. Her new position as Prowler Pilot, however, makes that generally impossible.

She's also the type of person who believes that doing the right thing is what you aim for, but that it's not necessarily something that means the same thing to everyone. She prefers to look at a situation based upon the views of others, to stand apart from the situation, look at the logic, and apply a fair resolution to the problem that has a chance of doing the most good possible. If she's coming at a situation with foreign morals, political situations, or logic that doesn't quite work the same way that her own does, she tries her best to get to know all parties involved and to understand them before passing any sort of judgment. As a Pilot, she is expected to resolve matters that could end or begin wars, and this is something that she takes very seriously. It means that she won't back out of a situation unless there is a compromise between the two parties or at least a stand down if violence is involved. That said, she knows there's a time a place to pick one's battles, and the ability to see when that time to act is right is something that she needs to cultivate. It's an ongoing process and she's still really new at it, but she does her best. In short, she tries to be as tolerant as possibly and as diplomatic as possible when it comes to dealing with beliefs and customs, or situations that are alien to her.

Being a Pilot also comes with a life-long commitment to both her wingman and her ship, Eth. She's only met maybe one or two Pilots who have lost their ships, and they seemed haunted by the loss to the point where they barely register the world around them. In most cases bonding with another craft is near impossible, but it can definitely be done if the pilot is completely willing. The Builders will need to go through the same process as the first ship where they image the Pilot's brain, and then integrate the neural scans into the ship's nascent brain. No to grown ships have the same signature, so the severed Pilot needs to be completely ready for a re-merege. Historically, there is less than a 10% chance at a successful re-merege in any given Pilot population, which is why unless the need is great, Pilots generally don't attempt the highly dangerous process. Eth is as much a part of Ril's neural pathways as Ril is part of hers. Losing that connection, and their bond, would be very difficult to counter. Generally, it's like losing a limb -- only worse because it's a limb that feeds your mind and your senses. Severing that is like pulling out all of your senses at once, leaving you with this strange limitedness -- like your life has been snapped abruptly in half. That said, Ril knows that she'd fight for herself, and fight not to lose herself should that connection be terminated. Crawling out of the black pit of depression and trauma is something that she would work with and for each and every moment of her life if it did happen. Hopefully, her love of science would become her focal point. If she hadn't been a Pilot, she would have been a fantastic Navigator, which might been a placement option if a severing occurs and she survives it. Part of the reason why she melded so well with Eth was the fact that she had an incredibly strong need to serve, to keep the peace, and above all to fly. Without that need and drive, she, like so many before her would have been rejected -- which would have caused Eth to waste away as well.

Family and friends are the same to Ril, once she forms a connection with someone that progresses toward friendship, she is as loyal to them as she is to her own blood relations. Her family, poor as they are, are the best people she knows. They are hard working, good, honest people, and she would give her life -- and Eth's -- to protect them. She brings this dedication with her and out into the stars -- and New Dodge. Despite the snarky attitude she presents, Rill genuinely loves all kinds of people. This interest in people was among the driving forces that lead her on her career path as a pilot. Meeting new people, as extroverted as it seems compared to her more introvert nature, is something she enjoys because it means learning something new and from new viewpoints. It is a necessary part of being a Pilot as well, and her innate curiosity has been enhanced as part of her merge -- it helps combat her base need to withdraw to science and flight study rather than engage the world around her.

She does accept change easily, which makes accepting the offer to help New Dodge out an easy one. Maybe it’s not part of her Sector, maybe it is by extension, but she’s ready to lend a hand and test her mettle. She’s pretty sure it’ll be interested, and back home, they haven’t even gotten their first assignment. With the chance to put her skills to the test, it can only be positive.

Some other little quirks/habits she has are things she's done from an early age. She tends to unconsciously verbally group things in threes. Ril has an almost Scottish accent (usually referred to a City-speech) but it's colored with something alien about it. When she's angry, the pacing of her words tend to accelerate and she'll bite words out and punctuate savagely (sometimes with her hands). She's usually pretty articulate, save when she's faced with something emotionally charged (in which case she goes silent for awhile in order to figure out how to best say something).

She absolutely loves water. Growing up, she was used to sonic showers and other waterless means of keeping clean. For example, before merging with Eth, she hadn't sat in a real bathtub with real water for about ten years when she granfa had one. On her planet, water is scarce and reserved for high classed citizens, which didn't include her or her family. Ril shares her water rights with her family, and sends most of her pay to them to help support them. She knows her mother's saving it to get a real water bath or shower to replace the sonic one that her husband put in years ago. Ril is quietly pleased with the fact that she can give her family some means of comfort. Having access to water is like being given a million credits and told you can do whatever you want.

Ril can tolerate most foods, but beef/red meat makes her violently ill, and she doesn't drink (mostly because she might be called up to fly patrol or something at a moment's notice). While she's always had an adverse reaction to red meat, this may very well be an indicator for those who are better Pilots. There are still several studies on-going about the correlation.

World Information

 * “All things are connected. This is the first thing that is taught, the first words that are said. All things are connected. Some called it Zen, others call it Oneness, some call it The Power, others have no name for it at all. Long, long ago there was a voyage deep, deep into the farthest reaches of space, so far that time itself stood still. A man, a woman. Two. No more and no less. This is what the Histories say. This is how all that is came to be, with two elements and the Heart of the Universe spiraling together in an infinite merging, an infinite revolving of the primals. But, all you need to know is that in an instant, the Universe was remade. A wave unlike any other crashed through worlds and echoed for all time in the Voices. Some were among the Touched and were gifted with unique talents, some were among the Cursed, driven mad by those very gifts, warped and perverted to extremes no man may grasp. Each child born after the Merging possessed the potential to become something phenomenal, something more than their species. The histories say, also, that the Merging gave each planet a soul.
 * The Voices that gifted or damned by the child's thirteenth to sixteenth birthday (though rare few were gifted at birth) were said to be Avatars, a dark for every light, a sign for every planet, a whisper for every constellation. Each and every one of them, the same face of the Three Aspects. Solon, the man, the Protector-Shaman, Iidris, the woman, the Mother-Warrior, and the Heart of the Universe, called Priis in the old language, the Healer. As a single unit they are The Power from which all things come and the one thing that gifts the many worlds with life and sometimes magic.”

-- The Amalthi Transition

Set in the far-flung future in an entirely different galaxy, The Amalthi Transition world is high technology with spaceships, and psionic abilities called ‘gifts’, ‘talents’, or ‘powers’ depending on the planet or sector the individual comes from. These powers are also oft referred to as Seeds, each and every last one in the galaxy has a Seed. When a child reaches a certain age, the ‘crack Seed’ and find out what their gift(s) are. Some never crack Seed, some are early to crack, others are late. Some are Pilots, who crack only upon Merging with their Prowler (a techo-sentient space fighter grown specifically for a Pilot after graduating pre-Flight school and beginning the final stages of their training as Prowler Pilots). There are Prowler Pilot training academies across the galaxy on many worlds, but once graduated from the rigorous (and potentially mind damaging) program, they come to one world to be joined with their Prowlers and have their wingmate chosen. This assignment is a lifelong thing - once two pilots have been set together as a unit, they will work together until one of them is killed or passes beyond. In rare cases there have been wingmates who survive the other’s death and are re-paired and their bond is reforged. They have a certain sense of each other, an awareness, and they know exactly when the other one needs them. A Merging with a Prowler is a taxing process that begins simply enough with the Prowler ‘Marking’ their pilot at the back of their neck -- a nanotech injection that syncs the brain with the Prowler’s main sensory organs, allowing the pair to share a bond. The bump usually goes down within a few months, though some Pilots never get rid of the raised area where it’s located. Rare few have actual patterns, like tattoos, instead of the mottled look most have. All Pilots have enhanced senses from hearing to eyesight, taste, and smell. Their reflexes are faster, and they are generally enhanced in the gift/talent area as well.

The first successful Prowler Pilots, called the Amalthi Pair, had three lines and three dots and were a male/female pairing. With this pair came a dreadful warning and a terrible war that nearly exterminated all life. It was known as The Weeping, when it was revealed that not all of those who were blessed with gifts were safe, some went mad and were cursed. Several Prowler Pilots went that way, murdering millions. The war was won over a thousand years ago, and there has been a deep silence since that time. The stories of the Amalthi Pair are now legends, but for new Prowler Pilots Madrilene Sorrin and Kieron Serrel, they may be more than that. For the first time in that thousand years, the two twenty-one year old Pilots are undergoing a full Amalthi Transition.

This can only mean that change is on the horizon and it’s dark.

Canon Point: Ril has undergone the remaining training needed to official secure her position as Prowler Pilot for the sector(s) she and Kieron are assigned to cover. It's been one solar year and change and she's faced diplomatic crises, hostile alien takeovers, gotten nearly killed on multiple occasions, faced down a Beta Niner gone with hunger (which had her laid up for awhile), and is still eager to do her job.