Ashlyn Trainer

## Biography

Ashlyn was born into a comfortable life with the Trainer family, with little to worry about aside from petty school drama. She was introduced to and immersed in the world of science very early on, and it seemed to be her calling right from the start.

Many of her years thus far had been spent studying relentlessly for school and keeping up with her work. Even if she did have a few friends, Ashlyn had never made much time for a social life while she went through school, preferring to be the quiet person in the back of class that nobody paid much mind.

But, this life started to bore her. She started to desire a change: something to break the monotonous life that had built up around her. As she graduated high school with flying colours, Ashlyn decided not to remain cooped up in a lab for the rest of her life. She decided to study xenobiology, wanting to put skills and curiosity that she had in spades to good use, and acquired a bachelor’s degree at age 22.

Unfortunately, that desire for adventure came back to bite her rather quickly. Despite being something of a prodigy to those that taught her, Ashlyn, like many others, took her degree and left school early in search of a job. This landed her in the Imdali sector on the ocean planet Archimedes. The young scientist was tasked with searching for and analyzing life under the planet’s oceans. Her task was simple, until it wasn’t.

In late March 2180 CE, Ashlyn and her team, led by Cade Boyega, the lead scientist at the Archimedes Acquatic Research Center, came across something not a single one of them had expected to find. He discovered a primitive species that would come to be known as the Irikgan after Markus Kemp and the UNS Argo investigated Archimedes. Despite Kemp's crew leaving unscathed, first contact for Ashlyn's team was anything but peaceful. Boyega murdered and began to experiment on one of the primitives, despite numerous protests from his peers.

When some of the scientists started to threaten to notify the UN of his actions, Boyega stormed into the room that Ashlyn and a few of her colleagues had been working in and opened fire with a submachine gun from the station’s armory. Ashlyn was the only one lucky enough to hide before the massacre started, though not without a wound of her own. She was shot in the side by a stray round from Boyega’s weapon, but managed to crawl into a vent and wait the man out. When he left, she could hear him calling a meeting for all of the personnel on the station over the intercom, but that was the last place she wanted to be.

As her colleagues slowly started to starve in the meeting room, Ashlyn set a distress signal inside of the research center and escaped with the station’s only ship. She’d managed to stop the bleeding once the immediate danger had passed, and soon set off for the closest UN base: the Third Frontier Regiment outpost in the Flavian sector.

When she began to tell her story, Ashlyn was immediately sent up the chain of command due to the sensitivity of the situation until she eventually ended up in front of the Admiralty Board and her uncle John Kemp. While she had no knowledge of their familial connection, John knew exactly who the young woman was. It was there that she told them about what transpired on Archimedes, during which the Board came to realize just how overqualified she was for her job. The Admirals allowed her some time to recover before urging her on towards the Trailblazers. Yet, she was never quite the same after what she'd witnessed.

Her training with the Trailblazer Program began in due time, though it didn’t last long. The Ubiar Invasion hit only months into her new occupation, but her training was sent into overdrive as her father gave her a position as an Exploratory Lead for the Horizons Initiative. She departed with her brother on the second wave of the Andromeda Havens. Trained, intelligent, yet inexperienced, she looked to prove herself and start anew in the Andromeda Galaxy.

## Skills and Abilities

* Expert in xenobotany
* Knowledgeable in other fields of xenobiology
* Trained explorer
* Trained in basic first aid