Name: Leia
E-Mail Address: [email protected]
Other Weyrs/Clubs: 9th Pass Ista

Name/Nicknames: Rachel Bowen
Gender: Female
Rank/Position: Sled pilot + instructor
Age: 46
Birthplace: London, Earth

Physical Description: Untidy is the predominant impression. Despite years in the military, the enforced neatness didn't last more than a week once she left.

Clothes are whatever was nearest to hand and clean(ish) when she woke up that morning. Colours tend to the eclectic as she lacks utterly any interest in or talent for fashion (and some would say taste!)

Hair is mousy and kept long enough to be pulled back in a ponytail when she wants it out of the way, but short enough that she leaves it loose a lot of the time. In either case it tends to be in need of a comb.

Personality: Practical, fatalistic, and almost unflappable. Firmly believes that whatever is going to happen *will* happen so there's no point doing anything other than throwing yourself in and getting on with it.

Not renowned for her tact and diplomacy she has a tendency to speak her mind at badly-chosen moments.

Very dry sense of humour, most often aimed at other people's perceived failings.

Can be impatient, doesn't suffer fools gladly and has no time at all for those she considers dull or ignorant. This frequently comes across as arrogance or unfriendliness.

Background: Despite loving anything to do with air or space craft from an early age, after years of serving as a pilot in the Nathi War she was almost sick to death of flying. The crowded airspace of Earth and near colonies, and the not-so-crowded but distinctly more hostile space in between was no longer appealing and she considered giving it up altogether. The prospect of the empty skies and clean lands of a new colony convinced her otherwise. Not entirely sold on the agrarian, low-tech approach, she nevertheless took the pragmatic approach that such a culture was unlikely to materialise overnight. She guessed that the colony would quite likely be using sleds for long enough to keep a now middle-aged pilot in business until a respectable retirement age and she probably would have been right if Thread hadn't intervened.

Eight years in and she was happily settled in a mountainside stake (planning for the future, she had almost as good a view from up there as from the air). Pern was just about everything she'd hoped and she was adoring even the simple day to day flights transporting people and goods between stakes and scouting out new areas.

When the first Threadfalls came and people started to revert once again to a centralised system, she seriously considered sitting tight, up in her stake with her sled, and trying to ride it out, but reluctantly she did submit to an ingrained sense of duty and joined the others at Landing.

She still believes that the sleds will outlast her, but now for rather different reasons--she's seen too many pilots killed in formation accidents, the young and the experienced both.

Trying to avoid more such accidents she found herself involving in instructing, more through need than choice. She is just as blunt with her students as everyone else and fond of reminding them that they're a lot more time-consuming to replace and difficult to fix than the sleds they fly so to "ruddy well be careful". Anyone caught *not* "being ruddy careful" is likely to find themselves in for a few biting remarks!

Family: None on Pern

Friends: Bit of a loner her small circle of friends is confined primarily to the other senior pilots.

Hobbies & Skills: About her only interest outside of a sled cockpit, and one which she sold heavily to the colonisation selection committee as her "low-tech trump card", is an interest in natural textiles. Since arriving on Pern she's done a fair bit of experimentation with the local flora investigating dyes and fibres suitable for cloth and yarn making. The results of some of these experiments account for her somewhat ad-hoc state of dress.

If your persona were a song, the title: Spirit in the Sky

Pets: none