Briar Mason
Female
|| 31
|| Life Support Systems Engineer
Role
As a life support systems engineer, Briar's job is quite simple. For any given species, she must create and maintain a stable environment in which they can survive. Her first position was at a zoo, where she helped design enclosures for new species and and maintain their current habitats. She had briefly worked on a cruise line, which was her least favourite job; as interesting as it was to try to accommodate whatever species were on the cruise, many people there were rather condescending and reminded her too much of her family. She rather liked the aspect of being able to leave her planet, however, and from then on she jumped from one crew to the next, drifting further and further from her home planet.
Appearance
5'4". Her preference towards layered, structured clothing hides her lean musculature, so people are often surprised by her strength. Briar is quite pale, as is common with humans from her planet because they live on the ground of a planet blanketed with tall, dense foliage. Her particular subspecies of human features denser bones than average, making them a bit more durable, but their bones are also more more
narrow than average, so most of them have a small frame. Some people on her planet also have soft, downy feathers on their extremities, including Briar — although she typically wears clothing that covers them. Their eyes are slightly larger proportionally than average, though nothing that she thinks is too noticeable, and perhaps as a consequence, members of her subspecies typically have acute eyesight and can see a bit better in the dark. They also tend to have better hearing, as well as a larger lung capacity (granted, these are not things you can really see). The planet she lives on also features a species that co-mingles with humans who share many of these characteristics, so she imagines interspecies relations may have helped with that, and the fact that these characteristics are quite useful for their planet continued the process. It's a shame they did not inherit the other species' wings, but the humans mostly live on the ground, anyway. Many humans are rather good at climbing as a consequence; although they have vehicles that can bring them up to the towns of the anorung, it is easier to traverse their space if you are capable of climbing and swinging over the gaps between buildings.
Goal
In a sense, she's running away. She didn't particularly care where she went. Certainly, running off to
Earth might be a bit of an overreaction, but Briar deserves to be dramatic sometimes. Besides, she is admittedly curious about what they might find. And a small,
small part of her may be cautiously optimistic that they will find good results and she can make a name for herself as part of the team who returned to Earth.
Personality
Briar is, first and foremost, an actress. She's had a great deal of practice growing up. She plays the optimist, the kind and sharp-witted girl who aspired to live up to the expectations of her family. Drop the act, and you are left with an utterly apathetic woman, who gets up every day more out of obligation than the desire to live. She'd given up on living up to her family's impossibly high standards long ago, although their opinions always make themselves known in the back of her head. It's difficult to run away when their thoughts seem to follow her wherever she goes.
Once she's more comfortable with you, Briar is genuinely nice, if a bit abrasive. She is forgiving to the errors of others while being incredibly harsh on herself. The slightest fault in any of her work will be on the forefront of her mind for days afterwards, and she'll beat herself up over even perceiving missteps. Not in front of others, of course, because there's no greater fault than causing trouble for others.
For a person from a culture that values music and sound as much as they do, Briar is shockingly quiet. She's always preferred to listen than to speak. Besides, the trills and hums that she often likes to use, picked up from the anorung
kyjiri who had raised her for much of her childhood, are not something that are generally understood outside of her planet. Even the humans on her planet can get confused at times.
Background
Xerlos was a thriving planet, not only bursting with colourful flora, but also a wide range of fauna. Among them were the anorung, an aerial species with somewhat humanoid characteristics, once you looked past the brightly coloured feathers and the wings attached to their arms. They were a friendly species that happily welcomed their land for as a place to visit and rest. When they heard about the humans, who tragically lost their home, the anorung were quick to offer them a place to stay.
Due to the density of the plants, the anorung rely heavily on sound; communicating with trills and song. The humans never completed adapted to it, but they too, learned over time to communicate with their new neighbours. In turn, humans taught them about the worlds they have explored; the anorung had not travelled as far as the humans had, and they greatly valued the stories they learned. Over the generations, the species comingled, slowly inheriting each other's characteristics and cultures. They never quite blended completely. There were simply too many differences between them, even if their clashing edges dulled over time. Even when it came to where they lived, there were differences — the anorung lived up high, making their homes in the dense foliage that characterized the planet. But humans could not fly. While they loved to visit the cities built in the trees, most of the humans did not find it feasible to live there. So instead they went down, building their homes on the ground. It was quite dark in many areas, but nothing some lights couldn't fix! But that was long ago. This story takes place much later.
Briar was born in a family of geniuses. Business moguls, inventors, top-rated actors — the careers her family members chose varied, but they always came out on top. In comparison, Briar was disappointingly average. Whatever she did, there was always someone better, and her family never let her forget that. She grew up being criticized by her parents and taunted by her siblings, only to have to smile sweetly next to them at galas and business dinners to pretend they were all one big, happy family. Even then, she was faced with nosy people who pried into her life and thinly veiled insults when they compared her to the rest of her family and realized she just wasn't on their level. Briar greatly preferred the company of the anorung in her community; while they shared much of the values as humans after generations of living together, Briar's family was always much more focused on the humans of their community; comparisons were fewer when they had only heard of her family in passing. And she loved the being high up among the osiwo, seeing the bright sky that was hidden where humans lived on the ground. However, this only made the humans around her more critical of her, the odd child who preferred the company of another species over her own.
Their words tore at her for years until she promptly cut them off once she reached adulthood. She ran away from them, as far as she could, and when faced with the opportunity, she would run away even more. Her work as a life support systems engineer was fine. She did good work, although never anything particularly groundbreaking or noteworthy. It is important work, in her opinion, even if often underappreciated, and even if she is not particularly smart or talented, she can at least look back on her work and say that she did something
good. At least she was helping in a way, keeping things alive, whether it was baby unanturas at the zoo where she briefly worked or other humans, travelling between planets.
More importantly, her career allowed her to keep running away and explore the universe beyond her shockingly homogenous planet, such as allowing her on the mission to Earth, a place that had only ever been a story, told by parents who were told by their parents and their parents before that (not hers, though. They never bothered with those kinds of things). It was really as far as she could possibly run, so she had not hesitated to sign up.
