Aarla (Unit 067)

## Original Application Details

### Personality

Morality was a concept left untouched by Aarla’s training. There was only ever success and failure, her orders and disobedience, her objective and any obstacles in her path. She was raised to be an effective weapon and little else, with her handlers paying little attention to guiding how she developed as a person. Such an upbringing was hardly conducive to the development of a normal personality, and Aarla’s abilities also have a habit of wreaking havoc on the psyche of those who wield it over time. Killing and hurting others comes easy to her, and to a certain extent her prowess on the battlefield offered her an escape from the suffocating restrictions of the rest of her life. Sometimes she found that her missions could even be part of a game, and she came to approach them with a playful and carefree attitude that made her actions appear all the more callous. But despite all that, Aarla can’t help but think that there is something missing. After being given orders and tasks her entire life, she aches for the opportunity to steer her own fate and is willing to risk it all for just one chance.

### Background

The Skrim drive opened the door to the cosmos. It is the foundational technology of galactic civilization and is the glue that binds together the disparate worlds of all of Andromeda’s peoples and empires. By enabling faster-than-light travel, it gave the sentient races of the galaxy the ability to reach for stars that lay beyond the realm of traditional physics. It does this by shunting ships into hyperspace, where the rules of spacetime no longer apply and where Einstein’s limits can be broken. It is hyperspace that allows for galactic civilization to exist, and yet it is scarcely understood by scientists throughout Andromeda. The Skrim drive itself only scratches the surface of the Other Place, sending ships on what could be considered short skips across the thin surface of Hyperspace – never truly piercing through the veil into the depths that lie beneath. It’s not that species haven’t tried to understand it, far from it. But it is hard to run experiments on a place that you can’t comprehend, and that you aren’t really even sure how to visit. As such, hyperspace remains one of the great enigmas of the cosmos that lie waiting to be understood. One thing was quickly grasped by the Kiellans at least: its potential is not simply limited to space travel.

Whatever Hyperspace is, ever since the first Skrim drives punched holes between it and real space its influence has been felt. Its energies seem to react to the minds of lifeforms – sentient beings especially. Somehow it appears that consciousness – one of those other scarcely understood concepts of modern times – is able to bridge the divide between dimensions and influence hyperspace. While this is true for all beings, some in particular seem to thin the wall between here and there around them. Within the Command, these beings are known as Psykers, and their abilities are both a blessing and a curse.

Aarla can’t really remember her family. She definitely doesn’t remember when her birthday is, although she’s pretty sure the planet of her birth began with an ‘r’. She might have been born into slavery like so many others within Kiellan society, or maybe her parents did the just and patriotic thing when her powers manifested and turned her over to the authorities. Aarla stopped worrying about her past when she realized that surviving the present was more important. Like all identified psykers, her rights were forfeited, and she grew up as the property of the Kiellan military in a training facility built just for such a purpose. Alongside other children – from multiple species – who manifested psyker abilities, Aarla had Implants and modifications made to both help control and enhance her abilities, while a rigorous training regime forced her to learn how to fight and struggle. The operations were excruciatingly painful, and the mortality rate from the grueling program was high, but ultimately considered acceptable by Command.

Those children that hit puberty had survived the most dangerous procedures, and it wasn’t long until Aarla was sent on her first mission. She would distinguish herself as a brutally efficient operative, dealing with both domestic threats and enemies of the state within the neutral zone. The standard missions came first: raids on pirates, attacks on domestic rebels, assisting Kiellen forces on the border. She was deployed as a weapon, sent to wherever she was deemed most useful in the moment. But as Aarla’s record grew more attention from her superiors, her objectives became increasingly diverse. There were assassinations both within and without of Kiellen territory, pre-emptive attacks on suspected dissidents, and false-flag operations that could always be blamed on another rogue psyker driven mad by their abilities. Aarla didn’t even consider the difference at first, eager as she was to succeed and prove herself. She did notice other changes though.

It wasn’t that she was suddenly struck by a moral realization, or an epiphany that shook her worldview, but rather a nagging curiosity in the back of her mind. It was an inquisitive thought that occurred to Aarla one day and stuck around in the back of her mind like a parasite until it consumed her thoughts. She began to question her instructions while her interest in her missions waned. It didn’t affect her performance, so not firm action was ever taken, but Aarla all of a sudden found herself wanting to know *why*. It was a question that would cause her to wonder if what she was doing was what she was actually *supposed* to be doing. But she could do nothing to act on these questions. Or at least she couldn’t until one day when she was being transported in stasis aboard a certain prison ship, en route to another deployment, when an unexpected opportunity would present itself.

## Strengths and Weaknesses

### Skills:

* **Psychic** – The abilities of a psyker can be varied, with different individuals often developing lightly different capabilities. Aarla can feel movements in hyperspace, be they caused by vessels or the ripples of conscious minds as they go about their lives. It’s not an ability that can be easily controlled, and often the sensations are difficult to interpret beyond a gut instinct or a hunch. On its own, vague whispers and instincts would not be terribly effective, but space and time act very differently in hyperspace. The divide between now and the future is blurry while the past can sometimes fit between them. This effectively makes Aarla a walking radar and early warning system – albeit an unreliable and easily misunderstood one.
* **Lethal fighter** – Beyond her raw abilities, Aarla is trained in both weapons usage and hand-to-hand combat. Having endured training that would make even the toughest Kiellan special forces blush and with the added benefit of her abilities guiding her movements, Aarla can be a frightening force on the battlefield. However, she can also be unpredictable, which can make her difficult to work with in a team.

### Weaknesses:

* **No skills outside of fighting** – Aarla was only ever meant to have one purpose in life, and her training was designed with that purpose in mind. Outside of fighting and completing her mission, anything else was considered superfluous. From history and academics, to cooking and simple life skills, Aarla was never taught what she was never expected to need.
* **A lifetime of captivity** – Growing up not only as a slave, but as a living weapon considered less-than-human from birth, Aarla was never given the opportunity to learn how to function in the outside world. Social norms and etiquette fly over her head while friendships and socialization are foreign concepts.
* **Bad swimmer** – Call it an oversight in her training, but Aarla was never taught how to properly swim. This is an even greater shame since she loves being in the water, although she knows to stick to the shallows where she can easily stand.
* **Psychic** – While a psyker’s connection to hyperspace grants them powers and abilities beyond what is normally possible, it also opens them up to great peril. It can be hard for the mind to withstand the raw energy of the Other Place, let alone control and interpret it. Utilizing a psyker’s abilities is taxing and inevitably causes damage over time. Efforts to enhance a psyker’s abilities through genetic modifications and cybernetic implants only exacerbates the risks, with side-effects ranging from migraines and hallucinations to panic attacks, false memories, insanity and – eventually – death. Psyker’s are also vulnerable to shocks in hyperspace, with the large waves caused by vessels using their skrim drives often clouding their abilities. It has also been said that the destruction of a ship mid-jump can be excruciatingly painful for psykers in the immediate vicinity.
* **Curiosity** – It is said to have killed the cat, and likely many, many more. With newfound freedom comes a desire to use it to explore and learn about what she’s been missing. This might cause Aarla to stumble into danger that she may have otherwise avoided.