Project 99: Meet Solstice

"99 squad leaders have to demand the respect of their peers. Solstice is known for incinerating an obstinate Outlier warlord refusing to surrender with the trigger words 'fine, be rude'- She has a habit of making disrespect look like the chump option..." 

Say hi to your initial squad leader. Solstice is a lady that's had one hell of a life, but one that's prevailed despite it. She's what happens when someone who understands that one of their greatest talents is for fighting and killing, and yet despite that, Deals With It and all the mental stress that it entails, actualizing and thriving through the strife. She doesn't call Hell home, because home is where she rests- Hell is just her office building. That level of confidence, she reckons that it's a condition that she and other quantums have, as a side effect of their psychic reception: she knows exactly who she is, because she knows exactly how others perceive her, mask off- all the respect, all the admiration, all the attraction, all the fear. If you want to know what the knowing smirk is about? It's that- having that sort of knowledge in your head is a buzz unto itself.

Solstice - Arissiyan Thermokinetic

The deepest cruelty of the Consortium, is that sometimes the worst fates are the ones people are just born into. An example of this: what happens when pregnant Consortial citizens of just the right level of poverty are conscripted to give birth aboard Quantum Cultivator ships. Aboard these nameless leviathans, hundreds upon thousands of lives are brought into being, month by month, aboard comfortless month-long displacement voyages, designed to efficiently mass produce Quantum Displacement Psionics the only known reliable way: immediate pre or post-natal exposure to displacement space, from a yet-mysterious interaction with Nuon particle emissions and the developing neural structures of numerous hominid and demihominid species. Those that survive the trip and give birth to a non-quantum child are allowed to go about their lives as normal, at least until the next time a Consortium penstroke renders them yet another ball bearing in yet another faulty corporate axel joint. For those who do bear a psionic child: the child is confiscated and immediately conscripted into service; the mother is rewarded with a voucher for 10% off all goods in Consortium space for the next fiscal year, as payment for good services.

The prospect of raising an infant conscript is about as dicey as one would expect, further exacerbated by the low standards of empathy the average member of the Consortium’s dwindling middle class displays, let alone the hardline loyalists entrusted with such a task. An unfortunately low number of these young quantums will see adulthood, and even if they do reach their maturity, they won’t know it as a person, only as an exotic weapon and tool. The term for these individuals once they are production complete is a ‘Court Sorcerer,’ though the phrase frequently found in psi-med texts is ‘Massed-Line Artificial Quantums.’ If you wonder why so many quantums prefer the term witch or warlock? It’s because being called an M-LAQ feels like the worst kind of slur. The woman who grew to call herself Osya Forosso, a name that could be equivalent to a ‘Tabula Rasa’ or a ‘Jane Doe’ expressed in a slightly more flowery pen, is one such individual who developed into a production complete model. Her parameters: Overwhelmingly Overt in her abilities, an individual who once instinctively triggered a progressive full-body combustion in a DNA technician as a toddler. He had thoughtlessly and roughly grabbed a palmful of her hair and ripped it free with a twist of his wrist, and in a moment of incandescent two-year-old pain and rage, she instinctively and reactively lit his blood’s carrier cells ablaze like a line of gunpowder. Inadvertently, she’d provided the Consortium with fascinating data, as that man burned for literal hours and was alive for about 5 minutes during the entire process. Conversely, her Covert development was almost null and void, unable to hear overtly hostile thoughts directed at her from within whispering distance. To her facilitators, she was a particularly simple but also very desirable variety of psionic: the kind of weapon you can use to threaten people who are numb to having a gun to their head, someone that could roast a target alive inside of their getaway car, or freeze and shatter them from inside their power armour, all without the promise of someone who might be listening through the control devices in her own insidious ways…

But of course, she could. It wasn’t known then, but it is known now, that any quantum with confirmable development displays some degree of covert manifestation, coming in the form of surface reading and surface broadcasting. Osya was perfectly capable of hearing the absolutely wretched things they were directing toward a child, it’s just that their detector wasn’t strong enough to detect her reception, and she wasn’t about to assist in her own torture with people whose minds she could read. Call it a strange upbringing, someone devoid of any positive role models but for the fleeting glimpses of decency and guilt that she felt in people who never lasted long at their post, but somehow, Osya managed to find a sense of self in the mess. Despite the hostile, suppressive input that was her upbringing and training, she sewed together a quilt of a conscious, an identity and a will to rebel. In a later-life interview, she described her sense of ethics and moral center as ‘an altar of votives’ made out of all the guilt, hesitation, and genuine sadness she could feel in the people assigned to shape her. In time, she found her animus toward the more mentally vulnerable facilitators around her to diminish, encouraged by what she instead saw as small sparks of change in their worldview. In remotely convincing them to develop those parts of themselves, she strengthened her skills as a covert quantum- still one of technically low power, but a capable remote social engineer. This was ultimate downfall of the people that trained her and sold her into service of a House Threlani subsidiary, to serve as a personal defense weapon for Baron with a love for fire. In that court, Osya lit a different fire, one of a slowly progressing growth of ethical conscious among members of the house staff, guard and even lower nobel members of the Baron’s family. As it turns out, the sire’s fancy new gun also had a hell of a therapist in it, one that had the opposite effect when the petty little bastard like to point her at people. Osya never knew who exactly it was that reprogrammed the Baron’s control remote to her amp and motivator, but she sent out good vibes to whoever let her rebel the first time she tried against the miserable fuck- the Baron died screaming, trying to have her light a family pet on fire for soiling a fancy rug. As their body turned to fine ash, consuming nothing but themselves, all that was left was for the now masterless crew of a noble’s star-yacht to displace into the Freelands instead. It was supposed to be a pleasure cruise for the Baron, and instead, it was his burial at sea. For more than 20 years since, Osya, now known as SOLSTICE-01, has provided her skills to F-SOE in exchange for the finest tactical training the Freelands can provide. Across dozens of interstellar-theater operations, Solstice has proven herself an elite-level squad leader, one empowered with both unbelievable amounts of psionic firepower, as well as the practiced psi-insight to hold her people together remotely. Those that work with her for a prolonged period frequently grow a respect for her, because of her tendency to be there as a mental bolster in moments of vulnerability, not to mention her knack for shattering the confidence of Op4. She’s become known as the Combat Therapist because of this, though folks tend to pay her quiet respect with that name with an intentional surface thought she can hear, rather than calling her it as a nickname.