Navasi - Eijel's page

Born into a prominent family on Absalom Station, the envoy who calls herself Navasi spent much of her childhood avoiding her parents in their “sky-villa,” as they called their sprawling, six-story home in the Nyori Palisades. Navasi’s mother had designs on her canny-but-headstrong daughter inheriting the family’s business. Her father had visions of a queenly young woman sitting in silk among the station’s most prominent socialites.

Navasi wanted neither. A quip on her lips, she eschewed glitzy playdates and family soirees in favor of zipping through Absalom Station’s streets with her best friends, the children of the household employees. She’d take the rush of riding a screaming hovercycle over the pompous sniggering of the wealthy any day of the week.

As she befriended more and more stationers from less privileged walks of life, Navasi’s irritation with her parents and their deliberate aloofness from the rest of society turned into outright disgust. The inequities of Absalom Station, where the rich lived in fortified enclaves and the poor lived in little more than metal boxes, pained her. She began to dream of a fairy-tale life in which she could steal the affluent’s unearned wealth and give it to those truly in need, and idolized the Free Captains of the Diaspora—pirates living by their own rules. Navasi could only imagine the fun she’d have with such freedom—and the good she’d do, of course.

On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, Navasi sat in her plush quarters, staring at the gold-fibered holo-gown that was to be her debut dress. Two choices stood before her: She could don that false uniform, attend the gala, and accept her mother’s gift of an executive position in the family company. Or she could leave.

It took less than an hour for Navasi to slip out of the manor and stow away on a ship bound for the Diaspora.

Navasi arrived on Broken Rock with a pocketful of stolen credsticks and a gleam in her eye. She quickly signed up as a “procurement specialist” with a contracting firm called the Sixth Finger—little more than a starfaring thieves’ guild—ready to use her new position to steal from exploitative corporations and make herself a hero to those in need.

The reality of life in a pirate enclave hit her like a meteorite. Having quickly blown through her money, and too stubborn to return home in shame, Navasi found she no longer had a choice in which jobs she took. Under the guildrunners’ threats, she roughed up innocents, stole from the less fortunate, and worse. Though she never completely lost her egalitarian beliefs, she hardly recognized the naive idealist she’d once been. A few years in the streets showed her how much of her former life she’d taken for granted, and taught her that if she wanted to take care of others, she first needed to take care of herself. That, at least, she was good at, and she quickly gained a reputation in the gang as the best fast-talker and facewoman around, spinning bold plans and quick wits into fat paydays.

Navasi found that the wealth from her scores brought little joy without friends to share it with, and she took comfort in the hardscrabble survivalists and secretly softhearted rogues she recruited to her crews. Yet it was in one particular woman that Navasi truly found herself again. Purple-haired and tattooed, with eyes like blue supergiants, the newcomer was outspoken against those in power. She bucked the pirates’ authority and operated alone, pulling the sorts of righteous jobs Navasi had once dreamed of. She was the bravest, most exciting woman Navasi had ever met, and the two quickly became inseparable.

That all came crashing down the day the Sixth Finger arranged to knock over a medship full of supplies bound for Absalom Station. To the gang’s leaders, the ship’s mission— aiding refugees of a war-torn star system—was inconsequential compared to the valuable drugs in its cargo bays. Navasi’s objections were overruled.

It was the final straw. Together, Navasi and her partner formulated a plan, alerting the medship to the imminent heist and carefully sabotaging the fighters the gang had designated for the assault. It all might have gone unnoticed, had the gang’s resident technomancer not decided to check the security cams one final time. In the ensuing ambush, Navasi and her partner were pinned down, their backs to the sole spaceworthy ship—a single-seat fighter with enough life support for only one of them. Unwilling to leave her companion, Navasi prepared for them to go out in a blaze of glory—only to have her partner shove her into the cockpit and slam the canopy. As Navasi scrabbled with the latch, the other woman winked, pulled the pins on her grenades, and sprinted straight at their ambushers.

The wealthy scion of Absalom Station died that day, as did the pirate she’d become. As she made her way back to Absalom Station, knowing that neither the Sixth Finger nor her spurned family would ever stop looking for her, she forsook her previous lives. Abandoning her old identity, she took the name of her fallen love—Navasi—and swore that henceforth she’d carry on the fight they’d started together, stealing only from those who deserved it. Knowing she’d need a new appearance as well, she continued borrowing from her partner, dyeing her jet-black hair purple and adding a single blue contact lens.

Navasi has built a reputation—perhaps more than is wise for a woman with a price on her head—as a talented freelance captain, putting together crews for adventures ranging from planetary scouting and private security to her old talent for “procurement,” though she’s careful about what jobs she and her friends take on. Navasi still believes in freedom for all, spreading the wealth, and taking plutocrats down a peg—but she also knows the value of earning credits, and takes pride in taking care of herself and her crew (though she still has a sometimes inconvenient tendency to empty her pockets for those in need). As a scoundrel and a brilliant negotiator, Navasi is happiest when the chips are down and lives hang in the balance, as that’s when you truly know who your friends are. Above all, she knows to always look beneath the surface, for like Navasi herself, nothing is ever quite what it seems.