Capital H App

[nothinbut_therain]

Name: Meagan

Pronouns: She/her

Email address: sentienthair at gmail dot com

Preferred contact: megaparsecs on tumblr, megaparsecsyo on AIM 

Other characters: none 

 

 

Name: Captain Kara Thrac

Aliases: Starbuck, Harbinger of Death, you may refer to her as God 

Canon: Here’s more than you need to know. http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Kara_Thrace Short version: hot shot space jockey who’s one of the few survivors of Terrible Robot Apocalypse. Since she’s The Best Pilot she ends up being pretty important to the (now very small) military, and also helps find Earth through dreams or whatever. Half of the cylons want to bone her.  She died once, but she got better. At the very end of the show, she just Disappears into thin air, which is when we join her. 

Role: Superhero

Species: Human? But Ancient Astronaut Human. Also that part where she died and came back means: not really human anymore. 

Gender: Female 

Age: 28 (this involves a lot of guesswork as her age is never given in canon, but it seems about right.) 

Appearance: http://static2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090601070411/galactica/images/5/55/Kara_Thrace.jpg

 

Origin story: After the events of the series finale, Kara finds herself transported to LA. She’s not sure if this is her final reward or her final punishment, but it beats the heck outta hanging out on prehistoric Earth and farming or whatever the hell everyone else’s planning on getting up to.

Kara was sent to modern day LA by mysterious Powers that Be that have already intervened in her life on at least one occasion, and are responsible for the whole returning to life that one time. These PtB are your standard Comic Book Wise Interdimensional Being, the Guardians of Oa but with metaphors about spirituality instead of oaths, robots instead of rings. 

They, as beings that have witnessed (and perhaps had a hand in) the rise and fall of several whole planets due to robot warfare, felt that there was a sea change that was going to occur that would inevitably tip the scale and lead to the beginning of the whole cylon/human struggle all over again. They want to break that cycle, and for some reason, they think Kara Thrace is the woman for the job. This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re correct about that assumption, of course, but it’s why they thought that Starbuck should be where she is. She has the necessary context and paranoia to do something, though whether they intend her to go along a diplomatic route, nipping the perpetuation of AI/Robot vs. human violence, or a more Sarah Connor-y route, remains to be seen. Starbuck will likely feel the urge to go Connor, but as a more mature person than she was at the start of the Cylon War, won’t do anything drastic at first, and might go the more diplomatic route, if she ends up buying into any of this at all. 

CONDOR, presumably, picks her up almost instantly (through science detecting things that detect Strange Occurrences) and brings her back to their headquarters for testing/interrogation. Normally you’d never believe someone who told you the story Starbuck told them, but the fact she appeared out of nowhere right when there was a weird Technobabble Science Spike in the Science Measuring Things helps out quite a bit. As does the fact that, when they look at her DNA to see if that’ll give them any clues as to whether or not she really originates from another planet, it indicates that she might be pretty darn close to your average human genetically, but couldn’t actually in any way have been born in the here-and-now. (Sorry I’m handwaving so much here, my philosophy re: the end of BSG is to just go “it was space magic,” because otherwise you gotta spend a lot of time reading up on mitochondrial DNA.) 

Upon learning of her military background, CONDOR invites her to stay and work with them. Of course, she knows that they’re also offering to employ her because they want to keep a close eye on her, but she doesn’t much mind. She’s been living in LA for about six months now, in an apartment provided by CONDOR, and is just about getting used to living on Earth in modern day. 

Personality: Starbuck’s most comfortable in a military setting, since she grew up a military brat and spent her entire adult life flying fighter jets, so CONDOR suits her just fine. She’s starting to wonder if maybe they’ll let her train some Trailblazers on the finer points of combat, or how to fly jets. She’s starting to miss being a flight instructor. Also missing: getting to fly a shitload of jets. She once sweet-talked a half organic half machine alien robot enemy ship into flying her back to the Galactica, she can and will steal one. 

Starbuck is also quietly deeply religious. Having once already been given a seemingly nonsensical and impossible task by forces unknown makes it pretty easy for her to roll with appearing in modern day LA in some ways. 

Even throughout her terrible and often hopeless experiences in the aftermath of the annihilation of her civilization, Starbuck always retained a sense of humor. Though a lot of incredibly shit things happen to her, she’s honestly one of the characters we see laugh and have fun and enjoy herself the most, and that’s something that carries over to her time in LA and with CONDOR. 

Starbuck has a monumental lack of interest in any sort of romantic entanglements. Right before she was brought to LA and the present day, her husband died. Though she had ample time to begin the grieving process before his death (he was basically brain dead several months before), she still doesn’t feel like it’s right or necessary to involve herself in that sort of thing. 

Due to the fact that, like, you know, robots developed sentience and then killed everyone she ever knew, Starbuck is pretty consistently paranoid re: technology. Advances in AI technology and robotics wig her out to no end, and though she has fun utilizing the internet, she still regards it with a certain air of suspicion. She would like to poke it with a stick until it tells her what it wants. A major arc in the series is “all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again,” so to Starbuck the Terminator series is more prophetic than fictional. 

Differences from canon: Towards the end of her canon character arc, Starbuck was going through a lot of heavy shit, and was only finally starting to grasp her purpose in life and the value of herself and others when she disappears. I’d like to see how what she goes through in the final episodes of BSG carries over if she gets longer to live and a fresh start — a still brash, still cocky, still reckless, but more mature Starbuck. Someone who can be content with her accomplishments even as she works through the emotional baggage she has from the war.

 

 

Power level: D

Powers: Starbuck’s only canon powers are “best viper pilot ever,” “sees prophecies in dreams sort of kind of” and “death harbinger,” so I’m going to take some liberties here. She’s extremely experienced in aerial combat (well, space aerial combat) as well as hand-to-hand and military strategies. I’m counting those as powers because I think she’s good enough where that matters. Beyond that, carrying over the idea of her as a doom harbinging angel-prophet, she has visions that give her information about the direct future. She won’t be warned if she’s going to get in a fender bender or if the milk’s sour, but if, say, a group of super villains were planning something incredibly big, she’d get vague forewarnings about it. As time goes on, she’ll get better at piecing together what the heck her visions mean. Basically, it’s got to be a significant enough event that the powers-that-be that gifted her with her visions would be concerned. 

I hesitate to add “and she’s really good at finding things” because that sounds like such a joke super power. But I’m thinking about the way her visions/Destiny work in the series, it makes sense that that would be a thing? Mostly this is wish fulfillment, as it means she’ll never lose her keys. 

Team affiliation: CONDOR

 

 

First Person Sample: 

TO: CONDOR STAFF, LA 

Attention all — 

Ha ha, yes, the talking toaster gag was very scary the first time someone did it, and it was extremely hilarious the second and the third and the fourth time too. 

But I just spent the last twenty minutes trying to figure out how to turn this frakking thing off. So whatever jackoff left this one on my desk — this is your official notice. You think you’re funny? We’ll see how funny me kicking your ass is.  

Smith, if you did this because you lost at poker last night, maybe you should learn how to bluff before you go up against the big guns. Just saying. 

— Thrace 

 

Prose Sample: test drive meme