#she never saw the girl's execution herself. she never did find closure for the guilt of having been the one to condemn her.

[outeremissary]

Although she was only played in one campaign (a 5e Greyhawk game), Carmen was originally put together for a 3.5 homebrew two years earlier. She had two radically different backstories between the iteration that only shared the concept of a knight errant with a horse named June. Depending on the iteration June's name had a few different origins:

June was a horse named after a dead girl

June was a girl polymorphed into a horse

Carmen believed June was a girl polymorphed into a horse; the real June had died

Although it never came up directly with the party either time, it was always a key point of her character that Carmen was devoted to this dead-or-alive June she had failed and had no hope of atoning to.

[kolbehq]

FILE // BASIC INFORMATION

Name: Aurora “Rory” Lindon.

Age: 28 years old.

Gender: Female.

Pronouns: She/her.

Species: Human.

Home Planet: Lysander.

Job: Medical officer.

Criminal Record: Voluntary manslaughter, conspiracy to commit an act of terror, criminal negligence, obstruction of justice, perjury.

Sentence: Life.

Faceclaim: Eliza Taylor.

FILE // BACKGROUND

Aurora Lindon should’ve had a perfect, beautiful life.

Her parents, both scientists of different disciplines, were transferred to Lysander before her older sister had been born. Their mother, Alexis, was feisty and stubborn, attributes she claimed had been positively endearing to her husband Alton, who was always the more level headed of the two. Adorably in love and passionate about what they did, Alexis and Alton Lindon sought not just a better life, but the perfect life for their perfect family. It was the opportunity of a lifetime for two Antigone natives; their affluent backgrounds simply eased an otherwise grueling immigration process, and seven months later, the first of the Lindon clan was born exactly where her parents wanted her to be, in the heart of the most breathtaking nature preserve in the galaxy. Aurora would soon follow, less than a year after her sister was born, and their perfect nuclear family had been created, ready to plant roots and grow - but a family of scientists should have known that nothing in space can grow the way it should.

It began with their father. The truth of what happened to him would forever remain shrouded in mystery to the Lindon girls - one day he went to work at the Chemistry laboratory, and then he didn’t come back. Aurora was only eleven, and more than anything, she just remembered going through the motions of what grief was supposed to be based off what she saw around her - shock, sadness, anger, guilt, grief. Blonde girls cloaked in black gowns, no burial because there had been no body, no closure because there had been no story. Even as she got older, there were no whispers from her peers or her mentors about what had happened that fateful day, what caused her father and allegedly three others to pass away so suddenly. There had been no alert of disease, no explosions, no fires - just poof, and her father was gone, leaving only questions for his daughters to inherit. Her mother was the most quiet of them all, a stark change from the woman who had raised them, and although Aurora was more than content with letting the dead ends die, her sister was much less forgiving.

The oldest Lindon daughter had become a teenage conspiracy peddler, sneaking out at all times of the night to do god-knows-what, and breaking almost every law an underage native could, the punishments for her infractions always just short of youth detention. Breaking and entering, theft of petty goods, hacking government systems, the laundry list of criminal deeds her sister had racked up before the age of eighteen was nothing short of shocking. Aurora couldn’t put enough distance between the two of them; she once had been her sister’s shadow, wanting to be just like her and their mom, but Aurora had come to realize that their father’s death, especially the sheer lack of closure, had affected her sister in ways she could never understand.

Adulthood was supposed to be her new start - with an inherited love of biology from her mother paired with the sheer intelligence of the Lindon genes, Aurora got into medical school with hopes of helping those who couldn’t be helped by anyone else. She loved a good puzzle, and diagnostics became her strong suit, although she was required by the Lysander government to have more than one marketable skill in her field - so she chose infectious diseases and the study of all things micro, inspired to follow in her mother’s footsteps as she neared retirement, although Alexis’ focus had always been plant diseases and viruses. Aurora didn’t make much of an effort to keep in touch with her family after leaving home - her sister was a lost cause, as far as she was concerned, and her mother was merely the shell of a woman she knew. It was selfish of her, but Aurora couldn’t stand to see the people she once placed on the highest pedestals fall before her very eyes, and so she left, on her own path to make a better world for herself.

She should’ve known better.

She had been working on a top-secret contract for a new biowarfare agent, originally commissioned by leaders on Antigone for the ongoing war before the project was hijacked by her own government on Lysander, most likely as a deterrent against any new colonization developments. She didn’t agree with bioweapons, but orders were orders, and she knew better than to not comply at this point in her career. Aurora walked into the lab one day, only to find the usual top-security safety protocols in place had been breached without a single security personnel in sight. She remembered what happened next like it was a dream, even if it was the subject of her worst nightmares.

Aurora heard them first. The chorus of wet, soft wheezing noises - the sound of men dying as their lungs filled with fluid - punctuated by a half whispered, half hissed argument. Rounding the corner, her eyes fell on her mother and sister, alone in her lab, covered in the burgundy splatter of drying blood, bodies scattered around them. Her bioweapon out of its safety container, held in the air like the deadliest trophy as her sister whipped around and caught Aurora’s gaze over their mother’s shoulder for the split second before she pulled the trigger, and Aurora watched a hole burst out where Alexis Lindon’s heart had been. They were surrounded by military police only a moment later, but of course, it was too late.

The official story went as such - after the mysterious disappearance of their father, the Lindon sisters did everything they could to uncover the truth about what happened to him. While the eldest did this in any capacity she could, often illegal, the yougest opted for a more conventional route to infiltrate the enemy from within. At some point, the Lindon sisters had discovered that the Lysander government had found their father guilty of treason to sell secrets of the state to an independent militia group on Hermes, which had been accidentally reported by his wife, who thought she had discovered a mole leak. This was enough grounds to deport him back to Antigone, where he was executed for capital treason. The Lindon sisters recruited their mother to aid them in an act of penance to their father’s memory - to destroy Lysander’s most expensive medical laboratory, where the youngest Lindon was stationed, using the very same research her parents had worked on. She had inside knowledge of the lab, the security detail, the weapon, and all possible exits. With Aurora’s help, they broke in to steal the bioweapon to be unleashed on the lab itself, but something in the plan went amiss, leaving Alexis Lindon dead and her daughters without an escape route.

This wasn’t even close to the whole truth, but the truth didn’t matter once the government’s version of the story came out. Almost instantaneously, the Lindon family were the poster children for anti-immigration idealists of Lysander, already milking the tragedy in an effort to remove any further colonization of the planet to protect the nature reserve. Aurora had literally nothing in her favor, including an “accomplice” who was more than happy to implicate her - her sister had disabled all of the lab’s cameras, looked enough like her that passerbys had assumed she was her, and had even programmed an incriminating amount of evidence into Aurora’s personal devices. It had been her fail safe, lest something go wrong and she needed a scapegoat, it had to be enough information that Aurora would spend the rest of her life fighting it, allowing her sister all the time in the world to roam free. Without their mother to testify another side, it was literally Aurora’s word against hers, and Aurora’s word apparently didn’t count as much. It didn’t help that the story of their father broke right alongside theirs, terrorism apparently running in the family. Behind closed doors, the prosecution was happy to give Aurora the plea deal she sobbed for, given how much circumstantial evidence they were relying on and how little she fit the criminal profile of a long time conspirator, murderer, and terrorist, they knew she might be able to win empathy points with a jury if put on a public trial. She was given a choice, and she chose happily - to escape the life she had been subjected to by the hand of her kin on Lysander as well as put as much distance between herself and her sister as possible.

FILE // CURRENTLY

Aurora Lindon died that day on Lysander, and Rory rose from the ashes to board the ship. Unlike many of her co-inhabitants, Rory actually enjoys life on an exploration ship, despite the whole “space grave” inevitability. As part of her contract, she is allowed to serve as a medical officer to the greatest of her abilities except in the presence of a raw contagion - apparently, she’s considered a potential risk for bio-terrorism, who knew? She’s mostly utilized for diagnostics and petty tasks, her “violent” past making some of her superiors wary to give her more responsibility. Although Rory isn’t happy with how life panned out for her on Lysander despite her best efforts, she’s trying to accept the things she cannot change, and is enjoying the peace of mind that has come with escaping her home planet once and for all. She especially enjoys being able to help people who cannot help themselves, her original purpose for becoming a doctor before the expectations of adult life muddled her path, and certain other people simply destroyed her ability to have a path in general. Rory is haunted by the things she saw in the lab, and has recently come into a bout of insomnia after her dreams left her more haunted than rested. Most days, she keeps to herself aside from polite conversation with her co-workers and patients. Rory understands she has a pretty “impressive” rap sheet despite her innocence, and she allows it to precede her for now instead of establishing a new reputation. It’s taken her whole life, but she believes she has finally learned she can’t trust or rely on anyone but herself, and she needs to watch her own back at all times, making her a little paranoid aboard the ship.When she’s not required to work, she spends her free time reading and drawing, though she often doesn’t share what she’s working on. If it seems like she’s a little spaced out, it’s because she is - after what happened, Rory feels stuck, unable to stop replaying and analyzing every moment of her life since her father disappeared to see if she can find the tiniest detail that could help her appeal her conviction and maybe set her life back to normal.