Starmaster: Captain Crane Simpson, Squad Leader, Investigation Team, Code Alpha

Like most humans, Crane had no memory of her first birthday. Nor her second. Nor her third. Neither did she have any recollection of Terran Unification Day, though she was five at the time, and her grandmother made 1,000 cookies in honor of The One Thousand, and the entire floor of their domo tower smelled like perlant chips for a week. These are the kinds of things that most humans remember. But Crane wasn't most humans.

Crane's first memory, as clear as any crisp deciduous morning, was of the porcelain fingernail at the tip her left index finger stroking a thin line up that warm shaft, the sweet smell of the afterflux seeping from the chamber and up to her thin, oval nostrils, and crawling it's way up her nasal passages and burring itself deep into her hippocampus like a hungered Thuzzendahg. After all, it's not every day a girl fires her first Stermer blaster.

She'd come by it honestly. It had been her father's before he died liberating the Ekerats on what is now New Callisto. And it had been his father's before he granted it to Darmon Jr., Crane's Father, on the day he enlisted in the Terran Exploration Corps. It was Crane's mother's wish that Crane never find it but, as these things go, fate trumps desire every time.

It was fate that brought that blaster home with the remains of Crane's father and put it in the hands of Crane's mother, Ophelia. And it was fate that brought Crane to live with her grandmother when Ophelia died from a blood parasite. And it was fate that drove Crane deep into the far corner of her grandmother's closet where she found the burled Fellwood box, engraved with her great, great, grandfather's initials, and heard the voice of destiny calling to her from inside.