Name: Arabella 'Ari' Turcott
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Sexuality: Lesbian
Personality:
Backstory:
(The 'real world' portion of her backstory is based roughly on Fort Michilimackinac.)
Born in 1748, Ari is from a family that runs several generations deep with fur trappers and traders, and lived her early life in and around a fur trading post and military fort in northern Michigan. Much of her childhood was defined by the French and Indian War, and by the highly contested nature of the land she called home. When the war ended in 1761, and her home was forfeited by the French and annexed by the British, she found herself freed from the turmoil for only a few short years. In 1763, she would find herself in the middle of a massacre. A group of people native to the area in and around the trading post would grow dissatisfied with the change in relations between themselves and the fort caused by the change in rule and later stage a sporting event outside the fort as a ruse to gain entry so that a gruesome massacre could ensue. It was during her desperate attempts to flee this massacre that Ari would accidentally step through to another world, not to return to Earth until over two and a half centuries had passed.
Ari arrived on the surface of Penrum and nearly perished due to inhalation of pen gas. She was fortunate enough to be saved by a group of scavengers with a spare filtration mask, but not without the loss of her left arm.
Her arm would later be replaced with a bionic one, and she would grow to become an expert scavenger under the guidance of her rescuers. Over the course of nearly fifty years in Penrum time, she would experience many adventures scavenging and toting goods between various cities. She would even become the captain of her own airship, the
Pinwheel, after about twenty-five years as a scavenger. She learned to be incredibly proficient in the gesture-based language of Penrum, and would get many tattoos of her own, so that she might be easily distinguished from other members of her scavenging crew.
The life of a scavenger is dangerous, however, and increasingly so with age. When she had reached about 65 years old in the aging convention of Penrum, her crew was caught in an ambush of several car-sized beasts mutated by the gas. It was during this ambush, that a tunnel back to earth was opened once more for Ari, in a tunnel beneath a crumbling building that must have been centuries' old. Though, in the confusion of the ambush, she did not realize where she was going until it was far too late. She had only meant to regroup and come up with a plan of attack to defeat the beasts, not to abandon her crew.
Upon her return, there was no record of her having existed, and she claimed not only to be from the 1760s but also to have spent fifty years in another world. Needless to say, she was placed in a psychiatric ward where she spent about 6 months before being recognized as a returned by a visitor and recommended to the camp. At this point, Ari's body had aged to about seventeen years, as her body had only aged about a year and a half from the time she left earth to when she returned.
World:
Penrum experienced an approximately hundred year period of rapid technological expansion caused in part by a massive world war. During this period of war, a fuel source was discovered. This fuel source, known as penru crystal, was capable of providing nearly limitless energy to airships and various other technologies that would later be used on all sides of the conflict (think of them as similar to khyber crystals or power crystals seen in other science fiction settings). This war culminated in an event that would make the planet's surface nearly unlivable and drive its inhabitants to take to the skies to survive.
The event that would end the war and drive the planet to ruin occurred when one side of the conflict bombed a penru refinery that provided fuel to the opposing side. At this moment, the inhabitants of Penrum would discover that penru crystals formed a dense and incredibly volatile gas that was toxic to most species and caused serious mutations and aggression in those that survived. Overnight, the humanoids dwelling on the planet's surface were poisoned or torn apart by the species made aggressive by the pen gas. By the time this event occurred, the planet had developed a bustling trade network in the sky thanks to the usage of penru as fuel. Trading posts and villages had been made to float in the sky and airships puttered along between them. These small trading posts had possessed a small number of livestock animals and crops which would be used to sustain the people of Penrum. The community that had formed in the sky was small, but large enough that Penrum was able to rebuild a new society in the sky.
This was the state Penrum had reached by the time Ari arrived. The sentient inhabitants of the planet would only travel to the surface to collect salvage and resources, and could only do so with the help of highly sophisticated masks that could break the bonds between the pen gas and the breathable air. Because of the incredibly hostile flora and fauna that were able to survive the gas, only the bravest members of society would dare brave the surface to gather resources.
On Penrum, even the air where people were capable of dwelling was prone to cause aggression, disease, and in severe cases, serious respiratory illness. Masks that provided some degree of filtration were worn outside even at high altitudes. Due to this, and the noise level caused by airships and floating cities, the people of Penrum rely heavily on hand gestures to communicate, and have minimal recognition for the meanings of facial expressions, or even the ability to distinguish each other by facial features. Due to limited resources in the sky, only the wealthiest had the luxury of revealing their faces outside of dining and bathing facilities.
People of Penrum also rely heavily on the usage of metallic colored tattoos to distinguish each other. Because of this, they almost never cover their arms or necks, to allow others to identify them. Thankfully, the pen gas is only dangerous if inhaled.
Penru crystal is used mostly as a power source for airships and floating cities, though other applications do exist. The most notable of the applications is bionic limbs, which are used most frequently among air traders that frequent more dangerous trade routes threatened by aggressive sky beasts and even more so amongst the scavengers that scour the surface for resources.
Appearance:
Ari stands about 5'8 and has a thin frame with comparatively broad shoulders. Her frame is accentuated by the type of lean musculature one would expect from someone who spent half a lifetime scurrying around on a hostile planetary surface gathering resources.
She has brown eyes with hints of green that appear golden when the afternoon sun hits them just right, and dark hair. She wears her hair rather short -- a habit she picked up in her many years of scavenging -- the back and sides are shaved down, and the top portion is generally slicked back and almost never more than a couple of inches long.
Her left arm has been replaced with a mechanical substitute, powered by a penru crystal from home, and fashioned of dark chrome plates. This arm has many horizontal bands painted on it, all of which mirror the tattoos on her left arm. They are painted in the same color as the metallic tattoos on her natural right arm -- bronze. On her throat, three short horizontal dashes are tattooed in bronze: one just below her jaw, one just where an adam's apple would be on a man, and a third just above her collarbone. The fingers of her right hand each have a small rune tattooed on them. Her mechanical arm and tattoos are some of the only reminders she has of her home.
Other details:
-Ari presents very masculine, mostly as a side effect of her life as a scavenger, but partly due to the relief of being spit back into a society that allows women to live how they please.
-Some things she loves include mayonnaise, coins, birds, and wind-up toys and anything that uses gears.
-Yellow is her favorite color. It was one she seldom got to see on Penrum because nearly everything was awash in purple and blue light due to the pen gas in the atmosphere.
-She keeps a few penru crystals on her hoping that she could use them to repair her arm if the need ever arose. And, secretly, hoping that someday Earth could have a floating city.
-Though technology on earth has advanced significantly since she left, Ari has managed to pick it up to some degree. She owes this in part to the fact that being dropped in the middle of unfamiliar technology is not unknown to her.
-Carries several trinkets that seem special to her, though she has yet to talk with anyone on earth about what they mean to her.
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Fauxbia Done for now!))
