Rukaiya Oakswann

## Background:

When the ships left Earth to head to Mars many years ago, there were many that did not make the trip. There were many reasons: a pride in their planet of origin, simple inability to make the flight for poverty, lack of contact, or injury, or even the disbelief that we could even truly survive on Mars. One way or another, what was once the pride of humanity is now a den of squalor that all struggle to escape from. Rukaiya was born in Switzerland, growing up under the wing of her father who taught her that it was not enough to survive on Earth as it was; she had to thrive, strive for more, and be better than those around her. Rukaiya never knew her mother, but had heard that she was left by her father after becoming too intertwined with organized crime.

The girl studied maths and sciences in the years where she was young, lacking any to teach her save for her father’s intelligent hand for the first while. She took to her studies quickly, discovering a sort of eidetic memory that removed the need to keep notes for more than the initial read. It saved her much effort as she could simply visit a bookstore and read it through, putting it back without ever making a purchase. In the same way she took a liking to her father’s study of the Norse countries, helping him with his note-taking and translation of the Old Nordic language that he hoped could help to make him rich. It never worked.

At the age of fifteen her father passed; falling ill to some dormant disease he was exposed to in one of his expeditions north. His inheritance was given to her in full, but she lost much of her drive to continue any research any Nordic history. Now more irritable and alone, she vowed that she would get off this planet somehow and do something about the conditions she lived in - by force or otherwise.

As her research grew more complex, Rukaiya started to toy with the workings of the mind. Though she made many discoveries in her own right, the culmination of that research resulted in the invention of Psionics; a talent that dealt with making willpower into reality. The will to move objects was her primary focus, and she developed a bracer connected to several chips in her mind (that she inserted herself) that allowed her to do just that without the need to physically touch the item in question. When she initially started to bring this tech to the government to show them how worthwhile it would be to take her on, she realized quite simply that she did not want her secrets to be revealed so easily. Though the demonstrations and applications for the technology had already been drafted, a deal most of the way complete, she turned down a life of luxury out of spite for the conditions she grew up in. In the end, she would just end up empowering those who had already left the people of Earth in the dirt. It was not the result she wanted, even if she would get to join them.

But that said, she still wanted to leave. Many attempts were made to steal her tech or force her to give up the data, but her notes were written in a dead language and she burned most of them when the agents came to collect them right in front of their faces. This continued for a few months before they finally struck a deal: She would join the fleet as a researcher for their cause and no longer suffer invasions of her private investigations, along with all the typical benefits in pay and health and so on. Rukaiya gingerly accepted, signing onto starfleet as a measly research assistant of all things. It angered her, but it was the best she was going to get…