Mississippi Queen

* **Name:** Janet Blanche Lucia DuBois ‘The Mississippi Queen’
* **Position:** Freelance shipping owner/operator
* **Metatype:** Human (*Homo sapiens sapiens*)
* **DOB:** 12/3/2024, St. Luke Parish, Louisiana, USA (now CAS)
* **Education:** Saint Scholastica Academy (New Orleans, CAS), Tulane University [unfinished], CASAF Pilot’s Corps training.
* **Family:** Vivian Lanier DuBois (Mother, St. Luke Parish, Louisiana CAS), Stanley ‘Brick’ DuBois III (father, deceased), Stella DuBois-Shannon (sister, New Orleans, CAS), the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (brother-in-law, Havana, Carib League), Blanche Shannon (niece, New Orleans, CAS), Stanley ‘Big Daddy’ DuBois Jr. (grandfather, deceased)

So the name ‘The Mississippi Queen’ is a little misleading. Technically Janet DuBois is the owner/operator of the seaplane of that name. But the name fits this Lady so well that its come to be synonymous with the pilot.

And make no mistake, the lady is a Lady. Born of old Louisiana gentry in a crumbling mansion out on the bayou, with more dignity than money. Her father, Brick, riding the reputation of his father (“Big Daddy” DuBois) gave the family profile a boost when he threw his support behind pro-secession politicians when the CAS split from the UCAS in ‘34. This gave him the cache to borrow heavily and send his daughters to the best schools.

When the money ran out and the loans came due (During Janet’s third year and Stella’s first at Tulane) the girls had to make some choices, with Stella, the good, mild one marrying the wealthy, charismatic but unstable clergyman the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, and Janet, the wild one, running off and joining the Air Force. She did one tour of duty, in which she was decorated fighting pirates in the Carib, quit, joined the Free Marines, saved up enough money to buy a seaplane (the first ‘Mississippi Queen’, twenty-five years later, she’s on her third or fourth) and go into business for herself.

That business is shipping. And almost from the beginning, the ‘Queen’ was involved in both legal and less-than-legal shipping, generally between the Caribbean League, CAS, UCAS, Quebec, PCC, Aztlan, the Oceti Sakowin, the Niswi-mishkodewinan and Amazonia. As the years have gone on and her reputation has grown and the legal side of her business has dwindled away to just a cover for the smuggling that keeps her in pink champagne and plane parts. She has an old-school charm that has been just as much as an asset in getting past CASsie border security and Azzie enforcers as her natural talent at piloting.

Today, after a quarter century in the Biz, she has contacts across the continent, not just with cops and other smugglers but with whole swaths of useful people (she’s still welcome at Free Marine headquarters on Borinquen, while in Denver she’s a regular at The Hardpan and generally does business with High Crane, drek, the way I hear it she even has a ‘connection’ with a voodoo guy up in the RRDMZ…). And she is enough of a people person that she is legitimately good and close friends with pretty much all of them.

Little known fun fact: the Janet DuBois that pilots the plane is and is not the same time the same Janet DuBois that owns the plane. I mean, yeah, they both refer to the same flesh-and-bone human being, sure, but legally speaking the ‘Janet DuBois’ who owns the company and plane is legally dead (with her crimes absolved thereby) and the Janet who smiles at border guards has a completely different SIN, which has no convictions in a court of law. Some serious digging brings up several “dead” Janet DuBois SINs in the system, showing that Janet’s been utilizing the absurdities of the system for quite some time now.

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