Valery Caviss

**Valery Caviss**, born **Julia Kalothes**, was a female Symmerian settler and pioneer who served the United Cassiopeian Republic as part of an expedition to the planet Jalanthea. Caviss helped found the Orla Quarry settlement on behalf of the UCR, alongside fellow pioneers Nikola Sulitan, Patrick Bareketh, and Laurent Hanousek. Unbeknownst to her, Caviss was the twin sister of Rustica Kalothes, the Queen of Greymend on Jalanthea.

## Biography

### Early Life: A Different Family

In 5460 ASA, Julia Kalothes was born on the planet Jalanthea in the southwestern Central Expanse. Julia and her twin sister Rustica were members of the royal family of Greymend, a parliamentary republic. When Julia was still an infant, a conspiratorial plot against the royal Greymender family threatened her life. In order to protect Julia and to protect the family as a whole, Julia's parents sent her off to a faraway world, separating the Symmerian twins.

She was soon adopted by a family on Pya Mozis, a backwater world located tens of thousands of light-years away from her birthplace. The Caviss family gave her the name Valery, and so Valery grew up happily in a village on Pya Mozis for over a decade.

### Destruction of Her Village

When Valery was 13 years old, she went to pick berries in the forest outside of town. When she returned to her village, she found it completely wiped out, pillaged, and destroyed by bandits. With no sign of her family, Valery swore to enact her revenge against the ones who took her home away from her. She survived on her own for several years in the Pya Mozis wilderness.

#### Vengeance and Future

A year had passed since Valery began her quest for vengeance. She built up quite the skillset, from learning how to use a firearm she picked off of a dead bandit to learning how cook for herself. With the skills needed to defend herself in a fight, Valery infiltrated the base of the bandits that destroyed her village. Once inside, she set aside runestones around every hidden corner of the base and fired at the stones individually, setting off a chain of explosions that killed most of the encampment. Valery personally dealt the final blows to any surviving bandits, completing her year-long mission in less than an hour.

For a week after, Valery wandered around aimlessly through the forests of her homeworld, no longer with a sense of direction and purpose in life. Luckily, she was soon discovered by a group of traveling privateers who stumbled upon the planet Pya Mozis. Seeing as Valery had no home or family of her own, the privateers offered to take her to a world where she could find a new home for herself. Valery agreed, taking flight into the stars for the very first time thanks to the kindness of the privateers, who took her to the city planet Cassiopeia II.

### Life on Cassiopeia II

On Cassiopeia II, Valery lived a relatively comfortable life in foster care for several years. She gradually became accustomed to life on the insulated city world, allowing herself to let her guard down through therapeutic treatments and happier experiences. She learned to relieve her stress through physical training and self-defense classes. By the time she was 18 years old, Valery was able to live on her own. As a young adult, she met a Serkorian man named Fletcher Oriolo. The two entered a romantic relationship together and eventually wed. Thankful for the times she was taken in by a family separate from her birth family, Valery made the decision to adopt two children of her own. For many years, she made a living as a housewife, caring for the children while her husband worked and tending to their home. She also worked part-time for an architect for over a year.

Ultimately, Valery and Fletcher's relationship worsened. The couple divorced and continued to share joint custody over their adopted children. Valery kept herself afloat by working as a cook at a local restaurant. Eventually, she found a job cooking for the Cassiopeian Military.

### Settling on Jalanthea

In 5500 ASA, Valery Caviss was selected by the UCR to join an expedition team to the planet Jalanthea in the southwestern Central Expanse. Her team's goal was to establish a base for the UCR and gather resources, as well as to create connections with the Jalanthean inhabitants. Leading Valery's assigned team was Nikola Sulitan, who had also worked with the Cassiopeian Military as a physical instructor. The others assigned to the small expedition team were the two herbalist physicians Patrick Bareketh and Laurent Hanousek. In that same year, the four UCR officials founded the Orla Quarry base and settlement.

A few weeks into Orla Quarry's existence, an escape pod crash-landed near the base, containing an amnesic Gazetan woman named Laverna Rye. The physicians Bareketh and Hanousek nursed Rye back to health, to which she was deeply grateful for. Because Rye had lost most of her memories and had no other place to go as a result, Valery and the other Orla Quarry founders offered Rye a home within the town, to which Rye happily accepted. After half a year had passed, Valery and Rye grew close enough to eventually become lovers.

## Personality and Traits

Valery was a Symmerian woman with orange-colored skin, messy black hair, and black-colored eyes with orange pupils and scleras. Her eyes were sensitive to light as a result of a birth mutation.

As a child, Valery was extremely vengeful and used her fury as fuel to accomplish her goal of avenging her destroyed villaged. By the time she was an adult, Valery had become considerably well-adjusted thanks to years of therapy and help. She was an organized, friendly, and ambitious person who was happy to work alongside others, which made her a valued candidate for the UCR expedition to Jalanthea. She had a thoughtful, measured, and confident approach to most things in life. While she was often kind to others, Valery preferred to be in smaller groups and grew uncomfortable when around too many people. As an experienced cook, Valery was quite the critic of food and expected a certain level of quality to whatever she ate.

## Skills and Abilities

Valery's violent experiences in life, as well as her self-defense training, made her an expert in combat. She was very skilled with firearms and a professional in martial arts. Working alongside an architect for over a year gave Valery extensive knowledge in construction work and planning for things in general. She was a capable cook and had basic familiarity in a number of other skills, including gardening and crafting.

## Trivia

* Valery is based off of a randomly generated colonist character from the sandbox video game *RimWorld*.