Rommel Salazar

United Sol Armada

*"We fly where no one else goes."*

Rommel Salazar is an ace pilot for the United Nations of Sol and the Martian Space Force. He is currently the flight lieutenant of the fighter wing of the Destiny II.

## Strengths and Weaknesses

### **Skills**

* Ace Pilot: While not a space age equivalent of the Red Baron, Rommel Salazar is evidently a highly skilled fighter pilot. He has fought off numerous pirates during escort missions in the Andromeda Galaxy while piloting his trusty starfighter.
* Marksmanship: Compulsory part of military training. He can handle any gun as long as it looks familiar enough.
* Cooking: Rommel often makes meals for the other pilots; he is said to be a master of the culinary arts. He was taught by his nanny during his younger days in Mars.
* Xenophile: For once, someone could actually get along with the aliens in the ship.

### **Weaknesses**

* Crippling Depression and Nightmares: After the crash landing on a jungle planet in the Andromeda, Rommel went through some terrible events, which give him nightmares as well as persistent depression.
* Xenophile: Many humans see him as a xeno loving heretic; however, they often do not know that he is half alien.

## Background

Rommel Salazar was born to a prominent patrician family in the city of New Valenzuela, Mars. The Salazars are proud of their heritage as one of the first to take up the call of revolution during the wave of unrest that eventually saw Mars becoming an independent nation all by itself, helping to fuel the movement with their enormous political clout and financial power. To this end, they were and still have remained a prominent family in the city's upper echelons, holding significant shares in the manufacturing industry.

Rommel, who was an only child in his immediate nuclear family, was a bastard scion of the Salazars, born from a drunken one night stand when his mother, the eldest daughter of the clan's head, met a particularly charming Dhasath man in a night party. One thing led to another, and now the Salazars found themselves with another thing to cover up to save themselves from the shame of having the heir to the company do something that would be so disgraceful in the eyes of the city.

Despite being held with disdain by his half cousins for being born out of wedlock, Rommel had a supportive mother (who eventually got together with Rommel's alien father, though the city at large does not know this), and he would fulfil his dream of joining the space force at 23, becoming a fighter pilot that helped escort trade ships in and out of the wormhole. Rommel Salazar would be known as a fighter ace in the two years of service.

One day during his second year of service in the starfighter corps, a seemingly ordinary merchant run would become an unmitigated disaster. A pirate band, a gibbering cavalcade of former Kiellar Command Navy ships and personnel, decided to attack the convoy that he and his squadron were escorting. The pirates were repulsed with seeming ease, but at the last second, one of them that still remained landed a successful hit on Rommel's fighter, forcing it to crash land in the nearby jungle planet. It took a month of searching to find the crashed pilot, and what the rescuers found was a man that would not say what had happened over the last thirty days, for maybe it was too terrible to recall. Either way, it took no less than two more years in a specialized facility for him to recover, after which he was deemed able to reenter into duty.

After another whole year of doing nothing, Destiny called. It needed pilots, and damn good ones. And Rommel Salazar was to be one of them.