Avalina Quinn

Appearance
Avalina Quinn has straight auburn hair, which she cuts near her shoulders and combs semi-regularly, and brown eyes, so dark that they seem practically black. She has soft curves but an athletic physique, retained from her time in the Imperial Navy. Her ears are mangled from an old war injury, resulting in noises above a certain volume causing her excruciating pain.

Avalina has an expensive prosthetic left arm, capable of relaying nerve signals and visually nearly identical to a real arm, as well as several sets of headphones which filter out ambient noise and keep everything below a safe volume.

Character
Avalina is an outwardly cheerful optimist with a penchant for trouble and a love for flying. Despite this vivacious personality, she is a pragmatic loner with a nihilistic streak.

Avalina uses drugs recreationally, in part to self-medicate for her post traumatic stress.

Early Years
Avalina Quinn was born on the metropolitan moon Nike on May 5th, 3976. She was raised by her mother, Nola, who was eighteen when she gave birth to Avalina. There were two men who might have been her father, but neither cared to stick around after finding out about the other.

Avalina moved around frequently during her childhood, bouncing from slum to slum as her mother worked various odd jobs to provide for them. Her mother encouraged her to focus on her studies, but as she grew older, Avalina began to work as well, hoping to alleviate the burden on her mother and improve their quality of life.

It did not take long for Avalina to realize there was more money in crime than honest work. She started out pulling street scams, pickpocketing, and shoplifting, until, at age thirteen, she was recruited by a member of a more organized gang of criminals. Before long, she was peddling drugs and boosting speeders.

Arrest
On August 17th, 3992, Avalina was identified by witnesses as the driver of a speeder used to escape the scene of a major burglary, and was soon after pulled out of class and taken into police custody. She was offered a deal, but refused outright, recognizing that testifying against her accomplices and her employer was tantamount to suicide. She couldn't risk herself, or her mother.

After a few weeks in prison - her mother couldn't afford bail - Avalina was brought before a judge. The evidence was so overwhelming that it only took ten minutes for her to be found guilty. However, the judge, a patriot of sorts, presented her with a choice. Instead of serving her time in a maximum security prison, she could enlist. She was young, but she had proven herself a capable pilot.

Avalina did not hesitate.

Military Career
Training was harsh, but Avalina, ever an unlikely optimist, persevered. Her natural talent as a pilot was refined, and she gained a number of combat skills that would save her life time and time again. In those days, she also made her first true friends. It was the first time she had stayed in one place for so long.

Years passed, and Avalina slowly climbed the ranks, surviving and listening to commands, in that order. She came to dream of becoming an officer, attaining a secure salary and a respectable status away from the front lines, but fate intervened. After over five years, on the verge of her promotion to ensign, a mission went horrifically wrong. Her squad was almost entirely eradicated, she lost an arm, and she suffered irreparable damage to her ears. The failure was blamed on her, and she was discharged on October 4th, 3997, not as an honored veteran, but as a crippled felon finished with their sentence.

Smuggling
Upon returning to Nike, Avalina quickly discovered that her status as veteran helped little in finding a job among polite society. Her old criminal contacts, however, had plenty of opportunities for a trained pilot with combat experience, and so Avalina applied her honorably attained skill set to her new profession: smuggling. Before long, she had a ship and a route of her own.