Bay 12 Games Forum

Name: Ms Aubrey Brakhadakh
Nickname: Does not utilise nicknames
Gender: Female
Race: Neo-Crow
Age: 40?
Profession: Mind-Hack Augmented Smuggler (kind of cross-class Tech-Infiltrator / Pilot?)

Description: At first glance Aubrey is a passably handsome yet bland looking no-longer-entirely-young adult female Neo-Crow. She dresses practically and sensibly - that is to say, for a Neo-Crow, very rarely, not fully understanding the concept of or reason for fashion. She understands, of course, that creatures must produce offspring, but does not understand why one would mislead as to one’s suitability as a mate by dressing up or discolouring one’s face. Anyway: Aubrey rarely adorns herself, but if she has to she favours dark colours, greys, that kind of thing, even though she is really not at all into gloomy emotional music. She grooms particularly well, of course, as this has obvious health and professional benefits.

She is of average Neo-Crow height, being around 3’9” and a 10 foot wingspan. She is both slender and muscular: she is quite athletic. Gymnastic, even. She is more nimble than strong.

Background: Back in the day Aubrey was a petty criminal and a thief. A hustler too, although really quite a bad one, her skills being much more in the area of acquisition than sale.

She started off in a fairly standard Neo-Crow career path – college in her twenties, academic training in technological manipulation, with her parents hoping that she would continue into a respectable position as an advanced programmer or perhaps scholar.

But… that was boring, or not so much boring, but much more boring than music and poetry, which started to fill up her evenings and nights. She liked to sing and write poetry of the glory of the stars, how unfair it all was, the thrill of thrills, that kind of thing. All rather juvenile, she thinks now. This was rather unusual for a Neo-Crow, to say the least, and her parents were even more alarmed when she started spending quite a great deal of her time hanging out with a Neo-Cat, the well-known and mildly disreputable Jao Venograf. And becoming a scholar of anything was much less exciting than becoming the friend and, indeed, tamer, of such a dashing figure.

What’s worse, from her parent’s point of view, was Aubrey’s becoming the partner – the business partner, ha – of Jao Venograf, which brings us back to the beginning.

Aubrey could get nearly anything, but she couldn’t lie, or haggle, or hustle, or really actually even sell to save her life. Jao could get nearly anything too, and could certainly sell anything, but although he was daft enough to get a bore jumping rig, he wasn’t exactly the technological type. Together though, they were amazing. Aubrey could fly in, lower defences, let Jao jump in, jump out, escape safely, and then boom – they’d be away before anyone knew anything. They did smuggling, theft to order, that kind of thing. Not ever anything intentionally violent, of course. For Aubrey it was the thrill of the challenge; for Jao the thrill of a victory. The cash was kind of secondary.

Aubrey learnt how to fly fast and low. She learnt how to get in and out of defences without anyone knowing afterwards what had happened. She learnt how to sneak in the dark and how to run – but she didn’t learn how to run quite fast enough.

Yep – after a few years, a pretty good run, really, she got caught. A tip off, she suspected, although she didn’t know from whom. Turns out it was her parents, who would do anything to get her back on the straight and narrow.

But prison isn’t a good place to go straight and narrow, and inside she made some new friends. Not quite… as clean cut or academic as her old friends. Hell, not even quite as clean cut as Jao, of whom she thought often, and who had managed to get away.

And then, one day, there he was – bam, right in front of her, opening her cell. And it was her who managed to get away this time, and he who was left behind. She had never known he cared so much, and had never known she was quite so attached.

He was shot in the back as he sprung her from prison (and to think she only had a few years left, but for him it had been a debt, or perhaps more), and she couldn’t look back as she fled. To her it was the greatest tragedy of her life – far more so than the loss of her youth, background, home, and parents.

But it was also the start of the rest of her life. She got a Mind Hack installed so that she would have to be opened up to ever stop her getting into and out of trouble. She got in touch with some of the people she’d met in prison, through various means. She changed her name and got an advanced pilot’s licence. Most of all, she left her home system.

She started doing shuttle runs for people who didn’t want to let others know they were coming and going. Or for goods that perhaps weren’t meant to be traded. She can lower a facility's defences and get you in and out before security even knows it should react. It helps to be able to deceive detection systems for this kind of thing. It helps to be able to fly a small ship like she was flying herself.  Sometimes it helps to be able to wait in the dark. Sometimes it helps to have a wide range of contacts that might be able to help out. And sometimes, just sometimes, it helps to be really damn angry at how shitty everything’s turned out.


Before prison, Aubrey had started discovering what she was good at and what she was meant for, and perhaps one day, she hopes, she’ll find someone else that she's good at doing it with. Perhaps she’ll once again find a comrade.

Notable Quotes:
Aubrey: “I…?”
Jao: “Aubrey, please. Leave me, this time…”

Aubrey, tilting her head and blinking: “…?”
Aubrey: “What did I say that was wrong? No, really?”
Aubrey, after a manoeuvre: “Apologies, crew members: should I have requested seats to be firmly adhered to before that manoeuvre?”

Traits:
Easily exasperated.
Easily exasperates.
Expressive blinker.
Expressive head-tilter.

Clean Record...?
Friends in Low Places
Shadow Pilot
Social Incompetent
Expressive Headtilter
Repressed Poet