Kana

Kana is a genetically-engineered human, raised from birth as a machine calibre pilot and soldier by the Galactic Alliance of Humankind, to fight for them in the Evolution War. She appeared in a hangar bay in the Blazing Umbra Station in her machine calibre K8352 “Scythe”, having fallen through a rift while engaged in space combat manoeuvres. After a long standoff with station security forces, she surrendered to Sal D’Amico and began the difficult process of adjusting to life in a strange new universe.

Profile

Name: Kana
Race: Engineered Human
Occupation: Mecha pilot
Origin: Galactic Alliance of Humankind
Temporal Origin: Unknown
Date of Birth: Unknown (Age: 19)

Personality

Kana is most politely described as socially ignorant. She was raised to be a soldier, and spent her entire childhood either in machine calibre simulators or in indoctrination sessions for war propaganda. She had limited human interaction before being assigned to her machine calibre at age 8, and after that would spend months or even years at a time in the mecha, her only human contact being via communications with teammates in combat manoeuvres. Her only “friend” for most of her life was her pilot support system, named Scythe. That remains true today.

At Scythe’s urging, she tries to interact with other people and engage with Blazing Umbra Station’s culture. Her efforts are usually awkward, and usually end in frustration, driving her once again to withdraw and avoid interaction. Scythe serves as a security blanket for her during these periods, until she can be once again coaxed to try reaching out to others.

Kana is generally intensely calm to the point that it unnerves others. Even when engaged in combat, she is composed and calculating, almost never getting notably angry or afraid. She is not emotionless, but it takes a lot to get a rise out of her. Ironically, while she is utterly unfazed by things that would make most humans highly emotional – such as combat, or life-or-death situations – she often gets highly emotionally aroused in everyday social situations that most people have no problem with. Such situations often end with her frustrated and upset, due to her inability to properly understand how to handle them.

When she is not being frustrated by her lack of understanding of socialization, she is polite, open, honest, curious, thoughtful, and helpful. She is completely non-judgemental; she does not seem to recognize any differences based on age, gender, or even species – she casually talks to Klingons twice her size the same way she talks to a Bolian child, for better or worse – though she can sometimes ask awkward questions in her naïveté. She has a sense of humour, but has a very difficult time understanding the humour of others. She also has no sense of propriety, modesty, or shame.

She is generally non-aggressive, but she will respond to violence with what appears to be astonishing viciousness. This is because she does not fight emotionally or as a ritual or a means to demonstrate dominance, but only for the express purpose of absolutely destroying enemies.

Appearance

Kana is quite tall – 180 cm – with fair skin, blue-grey eyes, and orange-red hair. Her body type is slim and athletic, with long limbs. Despite her height and long limbs, Kana moves with controlled grace, betraying her lifetime of combat experience.

Kana’s face is heart shaped, with high cheekbones, and an aquiline nose. She has faint freckling on her cheeks, and her fairness means that slight blushes are easily visible. Her eyebrows are thin, and sweep upwards, and her gaze – with its very light, blue-grey eyes, and generally suppressed emotions – is quite intense.

Clothing

Having spent almost her entire life in her mecha, with most of her interactions with other humans done via communicator, Kana has very little understanding of wardrobe. For most of her life, she has worn only a single garment: her highly-sophisticated pilot flight suit.

She still prefers to stay in her suit – without the helmet – which is form-fitting to her body, and covers her completely from just under her chin down. Its material appears rubbery on the outside, and is dark grey, almost black, with thin orange trim, and wedge heels, visible ribbing where it is reinforced, and hard points for connection to the life support systems in the machine calibre cockpit.

On the rare occasions she tries other clothing, Kana has difficulty properly choosing what to wear. She has no sense of style or propriety, and does not understand when certain types of clothing are appropriate and when they are not. She also has no sense of modesty, and thinks nothing of walking around with the upper part of her suit pulled down to her waist (and of course, she wears nothing underneath), or even wearing nothing at all.

Abilities

Kana’s skill set is extremely specialized, and extremely limited. She can operate her machine calibre with a skill that can appear to border on supernaturally competent – though by the standards of her own universe, she is merely moderately above average. However, there is very little else that she is competent at.

With the benefit of her engineered body, she can feign competence at many physical activities. She can play most sports and games better than the average human, so long as it does not require teamwork. She is clever enough to learn to operate most machinery and ship systems rapidly, but her brilliant piloting skills are limited only to her machine calibre. When operating other craft or equipment, her performance is merely average, or occasionally moderately above average if she can leverage a benefit from her enhanced reflexes.

Aside from piloting her machine calibre, there was very little else the Galactic Alliance of Humankind trained her to do. She is an amazingly good shot, and particularly skilled at the fast draw. But despite her lifetime as a soldier, she was never trained in any martial arts – there was simply no point, as the aliens the Alliance fought were space-based, so there would never be cause to fight one hand-to-hand. She can defeat unskilled opponents solely by having faster reflexes and greater agility, flexibility, and strength, but is outmatched by skilled opponents.

Engineered abilities

Extremely skilled pilot

Due to being trained from birth, and live combat experience since childhood, Kana can fly her machine calibre with skill that is impossible to match.

However, Kana’s superhuman piloting skill is strictly limited to her machine calibre. When piloting other vehicles, her skills are average, unless she can benefit from her enhanced reflexes and coordination, in which case her skill would be moderately above average.

Enhanced reflexes, agility, flexibility, coordination, and strength

Kana’s body was modified to fly her machine calibre in combat far more effectively than an unmodified human. Her physical capabilities are enhanced to a degree comparable with top-tier athletes.

Enhanced healing

Kana’s body can heal cell damage at a rate many times faster than unmodified humans. This does not mean she can heal broken bones or regrow lost limbs, but cuts and scrapes clear up in hours rather than days, and she can heal damage caused by radiation or other types of poisoning.

In particular, this means she can drink to the point where an unmodified human would have to be seriously concerned about permanent damage from alcohol poisoning without concern; she simply needs to sleep off the effects, then she is as good as new.

Photosynthesis

Kana’s food requirements are much smaller than an unmodified human’s. She can survive without any food at all, indefinitely. The secret is that her skin has the ability to photosynthesize food out of light in a broad range of wavelengths in the ultraviolet and visible light spectra. The more intense the light, and the more skin she exposes, the more energy she can absorb.

Though she could survive without food, relying only on photosynthesis, she would have very little energy to spare. In practice, she prefers to eat normal foods, though at irregular intervals. She will often go for days without eating, then stuff herself with a massive meal – heavy on luxury foods and deserts.

Enhanced protection against radiation and other poisons

Kana can survive hard radiation and other types of poisons that would kill unmodified humans in short order. She is not immune to these things, but merely affected much less by them, then her enhanced healing repairs whatever damage was done. She can still be killed with an intense enough exposure, or one that goes on too long.

K8352 “Scythe”

Kana’s machine calibre K8352 “Scythe” serves as not only her primary weapon and her preferred mode of transport, but also as a safe haven and confidante.

Relationship with Kana

Although a machine calibre pilot support system is not strictly sentient, and its intelligence, comprehension, and motivations are limited to its designed purpose of keeping pilots’ combat potential at maximum for the Evolution War, Scythe is the only “person” who fully makes sense to Kana in the strange new universe she finds herself in.

Kana has, perhaps, an unhealthy attachment to the AI, preferring its company over most everyone else. She spends almost all of her time in the hangar bay Scythe is stored in, and even on the rare occasions that she leaves Scythe’s side, she continues to talk with the AI via her communications link, and rarely talks to anyone else. Had it not been for Sal D’Amico forbidding it, she would probably even sleep in Scythe’s cockpit, and with the machine calibre being able to support its pilot for over a decade without resupply, it is possible that she might have chosen to live in the cockpit full-time, almost never leaving.

Ironically, it is Scythe that most strongly encourages Kana to interact with other people. Kana’s current situation is far outside of a pilot support system’s pre-programmed parameters, forcing Scythe to reinterpret its understanding of what is “best” for Kana. It has come to the conclusion that since there is no way for Kana to return to the Evolution War, she has lost her primary purpose for living. Thus, integration into the local culture, and finding a new purpose for herself there, is what would be “best” for Kana. Despite Kana’s reluctance to engage with the strange new universe, she trusts her support system’s guidance so much that she tries to find ways to fit in, often awkwardly.

Practical use

While Kana may appear awkward and out-of-place while wandering around the station outside of her mecha, once she gets into the machine calibre and takes it out for a flight, things change drastically.

Kana’s control of the mecha is superb – far beyond the expectations of people who haven’t literally grown up piloting a vehicle. Even though Scythe’s technology is centuries behind that of her contemporaries on the station, through sheer piloting skill Kana can often evenly match them in combat.

The primary way that Kana contributes to the station and its society is by doing exterior construction, repair, or other work in Scythe, or by using Scythe to do heavy lifting indoors. Despite the machine calibre’s size, under Kana’s skilled control it can do delicate work very rapidly.

Equipment

Machine calibre flight suit

Kana’s preferred and only garment, her flight suit is actually a sophisticated life support system. Though it is intended to be connected to the life support systems in the cockpit of her machine calibre, it can function on its own for several hours at a time. Combined with Kana’s ability to resist radiation damage, the suit can keep her alive in open space for hours. She has lived in it for literally years.

The suit is made of smart fabric that wicks away moisture and fluids from her skin, and even helps regulate her temperature. She can feed through her skin via chemicals delivered through the suit material, and the suit has a catheter and other facilities to remove waste and keep her clean and healthy. It stiffens in response to impacts, providing light armouring. It can self-heal small tears when connected to the machine calibre, and when it detects that Kana is bleeding, it can apply pressure to the wound. It can also stiffen to provide support for broken bones.

Communicator

Usually attached to the throat of her flight suit, her communicator allows her to keep in constant contact with Scythe, her machine calibre pilot support system.

Pistol

A simple plasma bolt pistol, crude by Federation standards, but effective.

It has two modes of operation. Bolt mode fires a plasma bolt at a target that explodes on impact, causing extensive heat damage and impact trauma. Beam mode creates a short, sustained plasma torch beam – its maximum effective range is only around 30 cm – that can be used as a cutting beam.

It has no stun setting.

History

The Galactic Alliance of Humankind

Like all soldiers used by the Galactic Alliance of Humankind in their centuries-old war against an alien enemy, Kana was born in the breeding vats. She never knew her father or mother, who presumably donated the fertilized egg to the war effort. After extensive engineering, the zygote was allowed to grow into an embryo, then finally a human child. That human child was given the designation “Kana”, and put into the pilot training program.

Kana was raised by the Alliance military, along with millions of others, and spent every waking hour of her life being prepared for combat. When she wasn’t being tested for suitability as a soldier, she was either in a machine calibre simulator, or a propaganda indoctrination session. There was very little time set aside for play or recreation, and socializing was generally not a popular pastime – hardly surprising since every day thousands of children were being culled for being unsuitable soldier material, or dying in live-fire training exercises. There was little point in making friends when it was so unlikely that your new friend would survive the week.

At age 8, she was assigned to the machine calibre that she would be spending the next twenty years of her life in: K8352 “Scythe”. Scythe, the pilot support system artificial intelligence, became her teacher, her partner, and her only friend.

For the next eleven years, Scythe and Kana fought in over 400 battles, across almost as many star systems. Some battles lasted a few hours, others dragged on for weeks. Between battles – and sometimes during battles, if they dragged on – they would dock at resupply ships, where Scythe would be repaired and rearmed, and Kana would undergo perfunctory physical and psychological examinations to ensure she was still capable of fighting, and still unquestioningly loyal to the Alliance. Then it would be back into Scythe’s cockpit for another deployment.

At age 18, Kana was duly granted her first clearance for leave at the Alliance world Avalon – purportedly a paradise world, where she could relax in idyllic nature for a few weeks, and even breed if she wanted to. She declined the offer. In her formal response, she suggested that she would prefer to postpone the leave until she was 21, at which point she could combine it with the leave granted then, to enjoy a longer break rather than two shorter ones. But the real reason was that she could not imagine what she would do, outside of battle, outside of Scythe.

Arrival at Blazing Umbra Station

A year and a half after she turned down a trip to Avalon, Kana and Scythe were in a fierce battle around the sixth planet of system 435, when they fell through an inter-dimensional rift. They found themselves in a hangar bay of the Blazing Umbra Station, and were just about to blast their way out when they noticed that the occupants of the hangar bay were humans. Human meant ally, but there was something very strange about these humans. They did not appear to part of the Alliance. Yet they appeared far too advanced to be mere pirates. Scythe and Kana opted to stay quiet, and observe.

They stayed like that for almost a full day, while Blazing Umbra Station security formed a perimeter around them, and waited. Finally, Kana exited the cockpit, and was met by Sal D’Amico. After having the situation explained to her, Kana formally surrendered to Solas Tempus.

At first, she requested permission to stay with Scythe 24/7. She was denied – station security was not keen on allowing people to sleep in fully-active war machines. Because of this, she has been forced to make a home on the station, though she still spends virtually every waking hour either in Scythe, or nearby.

Life on the station

Considering their new situation, and the apparent impossibility of returning to the war, Scythe decided that Kana should make an effort to integrate with the new world she found herself in. Kana reluctantly makes an effort to meet people, and join in activities with them, but her complete ignorance about socializing has caused numerous misunderstandings, usually leaving her hurt and frustrated, and driving her back to the familiarity of Scythe and its cockpit.

While her efforts at forming a social life have been miserable failures, she has nevertheless managed to find a way to make herself useful. Scythe is thousands of times faster, more manoeuvrable, and more dexterous than the standard workbee, especially with Kana at the controls. She can do the work of ten, possibly even twenty, especially when that work is out in space. Even when working within the cargo bays, Scythe can quickly handle very large containers with the greatest of ease. She and Scythe have become quite popular among the maintenance and cargo crews – whenever something big or something outside the station needs, a delicate touch, or needs doing in a hurry, she’s often the first name they think to call for.

As for Kana, she enjoys work. It makes her feel useful, and it allows her to spend more time with Scythe... and it provides a handy excuse for shirking any social obligations, and for avoiding having a social life altogether.