The Personal Logbook of Lieutenant Ksenia Radoslava Atlanta, Once of the Ivonian Naval Airship, Mary Rose, and Now of the Pirate Vessel, Night's Journey.
OOC Entry: Ksenia and the Ghost Ship
Name: Lieutenant Ksenia R. Atlanta
Age: 29
Race: Human, but her great-grandmother is said to have been an Angel of Fire. Or some such being.
Weapon(s) of choice: Sword, rifle, shotgun, revolver, and if need be, all types of ship's guns.
Role(s) on the ship: Mechanic. Good with any machine, device, engine, or armament.
Appearance: Atlanta is five feet six inches tall, with long legs and long, nervous fingers, and a habit of smoking roseleaf cigarettes when not wielding a wrench, rivet gun, welding torch, or weapon. She has light-colored, flyaway hair, cut short. Her eyes are a soft hazel brown, but they light up fiery gold when she laughs or gets mad. She has a theatrical streak in her nature and will occasionally come gallivanting onto the ship in some extravagant costume, such as the one she scrounged for the Easter celebration (a white silk top hat and a Victorian skirt made of six square yards of billowing pink lace). But for the most part she dresses as she did on her last ship, where the captain and crew were a mighty casual and practical bunch; thus, her typical attire is tight jeans, boots, a white t-shirt or two, a warm jacket, and her battered old officer's visor cap or an ordinary baseball cap.
History: She came to Gaia by way of the trackless abyss between universes, aboard a military airship registered as the Mary Rose in an incalculably distant world. She was born Ksenia Radoslava Atlanta, the daughter of a dockworker and a machinist. She grew up in the heavily industrialized port city of Abantiare, in the country of Ivona. At the age of sixteen, she enlisted in the Ivonian Navy and served on a series of ships, working her way up from deck hand and into various skilled occupations such as gunner, electrician, and airframe and powerplant technician. At one time or another, she held the position of crew chief in each of these departments, under the lieutenants who were the official department heads. With the aid of a three-month stint at Reserve Officer Training School, she finally made the leap from enlisted rating to junior officer. She was then ordered to the Mary Rose, a fast, heavily armed cruiser assigned along with other craft to protect the commercial shipping lanes, particularly the mountain and offshore routes where the pirate ships were most likely to set up their ambushes.
And here follows The Tale of the Mary Rose: crying
(Cut for length. I couldn't write a short summary to save my life! eek)
The term “pirates” included the usual freebooters but was also a euphemism for the armed traders of a neighboring nation, who regularly braved both the forbidding wall of the central mountain chain -- and an Ivonian naval blockade -- to buy and sell goods in the island kingdoms and republics and in the continental hinterlands. Ivona and Vohemar, the two leading nations of that world, uneasily shared a single, floating continent and its myriad islands, above a dense, surrounding ocean of cloud, whose depths were as yet unexplored. They were not officially at war, but neither were they at peace. There was fierce economic competition between them at all times, no holds barred. They had a history of armed clashes, punctuated by brief periods of truce, that stretched back three generations. Ivona had the larger, more expensively equipped military, but Vohemar had much experience fending off invaders and rivals – and it could also rightfully boast of possessing the most organized and effective pirate fleet. The Vohemarian pirates were Vohemar’s unofficial military force; during times of war they became official. But all nations produced pirates (it was such a lucrative business), and all were plagued with them. And many of the pirate ships would rob any merchant vessel that crossed their path, regardless of nationality, and both governments were expending considerable energy to combat them. The Ivonian cruisers had standing orders to shoot down any craft identified or even suspected of being a pirate ship, and the pirates treated the military pirate-hunter craft in much the same manner. At times, the conflict raged so openly and so fiercely that it might as well have been a declared war.
The Mary Rose, however, did not go down in battle. Instead, it was the victim of a series of ridiculous chance events that pitted the captain and her first officer against one another. In that world as in any other, war does not have to be an international event, it can be a strictly personal one and may be every bit as murderous. Commander Ineko Hashida and Lieutenant Commander John MacAlpin had worked together successfully for years, but their careers were on the fading edge, and years of unbroken field duty and the relentless tension of the times took their toll. They completely lost awareness that their real dissatisfactions were not with each other, and they had a serious falling out. Eventually, MacAlpin contrived an occasion to separate the captain from her other officers, in order to create an opportunity to fire a pistol at her. But he didn’t come away unscathed. While he was limping up and down the passageways trying to convince his subordinates that the captain had gone mad and shot him for no reason, and asking them to help him break down the door of the bridge house where she had barricaded herself, the Mary Rose was jumped by a couple of pirate vessels. The seven junior officers, including Lieutenant Atlanta (now in charge of all ship’s maintenance and repair operations), had to scramble to meet two dire emergencies at once.
But they didn’t understand the real situation between the captain and her first officer. Moreover, the wounded Hashida, not knowing who might be in league with MacAlpin, refused to open the door. And because it was essential to the survival of all that they have access to the bridge controls, Lieutenant Kurosaki, the gunnery officer, blew the door open with a makeshift explosive device. The concussion and the flying door slammed the captain into a bulkhead and knocked her unconscious. Before Atlanta’s and Kurosaki’s horrified eyes and before they could stop him, the first officer rushed inside, aimed his revolver, and shot the captain point-blank in the head. The two lieutenants disarmed him and dragged him outside. In the ensuing battle with the pirates, MacAlpin was killed. (At least, that’s how Atlanta says it happened.) And so were a lot of other people. But the junior officers and their crew chiefs took control of the ship, fought off the pirates, and brought the severely damaged vessel down from the mountains and in for a safe landing at a small-town airstrip on the Ivonian side.
The junior officers were court-martialed and came pretty close to being convicted of mutiny because they had apparently helped the first officer murder the captain. But the press loved the tale of the heroic seven who had fought against terrible odds and brought the ship home, and the story was splashed all over the airwaves and headlined in the newspapers. At that time, due to an unfortunate serious of political disasters, the Ivonian Parliament and the Navy desperately needed the good will of the press and the public. So, instead of being hanged, the seven were exonerated. They were then promoted from junior grade to full lieutenants, split up, and sent to various godforsaken shore-duty outposts or to undesirable old buckets of airships that were barely air-worthy. The Mary Rose was hauled off to a naval dockyard and scrapped.
The seven were all haunted by this experience for the rest of their lives, which in some cases were short. And as it sometimes happens, an unlucky ship with a soul and a valiant history does not die when its life is over. Several years later, the Mary Rose began to be sighted in the skies over the mountains where it had hunted its pirate adversaries, skimming the peaks and canyons or coasting along the desolate shores of the Sea of Cloud, whence it had sent many a fierce and valiant opponent down into the merciless depths. And at various strange junctures in the lives of the seven, the Mary Rose came for each of them. Lieutenant Kurosaki was picked up shortly after he was drowned when his ship capsized while on a voyage of exploration in the turbulent Arctic Ocean, far below the surface of the deep cloud layer. Lieutenant Atlanta was crossing a field in the middle of the night at Neely’s Point, a barren cape jutting from Ivona’s rocky north coast, where she was keeping a lighthouse. The Mary Rose glided in for a smooth landing and sat amongst the weeds, glowing eerily. Atlanta, as though in a trance, climbed up the ship's boarding ladder onto the deck and went to seek orders on the bridge. And the ship took off.
There were others aboard by that time, Atlanta barely remembers who, except for her seven friends – and the captain and the first officer, who, strangely, seemed not to harbor any grudges against one another – they were there, too. And friends they all were, because the bond of combat and of shared hardship and of sorrow and guilt drew them together. They voyaged who knows where, and had who knows what adventures, in who knows how many worlds. But reality is not a neat, cleverly-crafted story, and the adventures of that crew ended as raggedly as they began. MacAlpin left the ship first, disappearing without an explanation. Atlanta, as the most senior of the seven lieutenants, became the acting first mate at that time. Hashida, too, departed one day, saying a quiet and reluctant farewell to those who had counted on her. At one of their ports of call, Lieutenant Kurosaki fell in love with a beautiful and kindly man and stayed, though it is rumored he came to a bad end in that place. The others left the vessel one by one, but that indomitable ship continued on, and finally, only Atlanta reached Gaia.
And a few months after Lieutenant Atlanta arrived, the Mary Rose decided to go off on its own, without warning. (At least, that's what Atlanta says happened…) But by that time, Atlanta had met Captain Araiya Runestone, and learning that the captain was recruiting to fill slots left vacant in Night’s Journey’s vanished crew, Atlanta inquired as to whether she could join them and was, happily, accepted. heart
Note: This was Atlanta's part in the backstory of an alternative-universe character I played at The Sky Tides, a now-inactive steampunk roleplaying game at Livejournal. The character was Hisoka Kurosaki from Yoko Matsushita's manga and anime tale Yami no Matsuei.. He's copyrighted to Matsushita and Viz Media. Atlanta is entirely mine.
And this entry is a modification of my character description for the Airship Night's Journey roleplaying guild, which is captained by Araiya_Runestone.
