Elesia Corsana
| Biographical information | |
| Species | Hapan |
|---|---|
| Gender | Female |
| Born | Year -2, Day 211 |
| Age | 29 |
| Homeworld | Lorell, Hapes Cluster |
| Height | 1.68 meters |
| Hair | Platinum blonde (dyed) |
| Eyes | Dark brown |
| Career | |
| Occupation | Capital ship pilot |
| Affiliation | Independent |
| Ship | Second Opinion |
| Family | |
| Relatives | Ysolde Corsana (mother) Aurel Corsana (father) Mirelle Corsana (sister) Kestin Corsana (brother) |
from Ysolde Corsana
She is known in the trade for two things: putting very large ships into very small spaces without scratching the paint, and saying exactly what she thinks while she does it. Clients tend to forgive the second for the sake of the first.
Elesia was born on Year -2, Day 211, in one of Lorell's older city-districts, the same year the Consortium opened the planet to outsiders as its ambassadorial world. Her mother, Ysolde Corsana, was a Mists pilot who met inbound cargo hulls at the edge of the Transitory Mists and talked them through the gravity wells and ion squalls to Lorell's anchorages. Her father, Aurel Corsana, tended the public gardens of their district, work that Hapans count among the most honorable a person can do.
She was the middle of three children, arriving four years after her sister Mirelle. By every family account she was loud from the start, walked early, talked earlier, and treated the word "no" as an opening position.
During the standoff over Lorell in Year 3, Ysolde sent the children and Aurel to her own mother's home on Ut for a season while the transit lanes were closed to civilian traffic. Elesia, then five, remembered it mainly as the summer she was made to sing in her grandmother's courtyard choir. She also remembered the Hapan warships hanging in Lorell's sky as the family's shuttle climbed out, and asking her mother how anyone steered something that big. Ysolde's answer, "Carefully, and with a lot of shouting," became a family joke and, in hindsight, a career plan.
Elesia grew up during the Consortium's Second Golden Age, when Lorell was building outward and upward and its anchorages filled with foreign hulls. The family lived comfortably, if not grandly, in a white-domed terrace house with a rooftop garden Aurel never stopped expanding. Her younger brother Kestin arrived in Year 2, and by the time he could walk she had appointed herself his supervisor, defender, and chief source of bad ideas.
She was bright and bored at school, and her teachers' reports followed a pattern: excellent marks in mathematics and astrogation, poor marks in deportment. She was sent home more often than her siblings combined, usually for answering a question nobody had asked her. Her parents treated this less as a crisis than a weather pattern. Aurel's advice was to be right and polite. Ysolde's was to be right first.
From about age nine she spent her free days at her mother's pilot station, running transit simulations in the ready room until the duty pilots began betting on her scores. Lorell's cosmopolitan docks gave her fluent Basic years ahead of most Hapan children, a working grasp of Sy Bisti, and a vocabulary of spacer profanity her mother pretended not to hear.
Like most Hapans, she was born with poor night vision, and she spent much of her childhood walking into furniture after dusk. She learned to compensate early by memorizing rooms, counting steps, and keeping every light she controlled turned all the way up. The habit followed her into every cockpit she has flown.
The galactic recession of Year 14 thinned traffic through Lorell and cut into Ysolde's work. The Corsanas tightened their budget rather than their spirits, and sixteen-year-old Elesia took a job on the cargo docks, loading manifests and running messages between berths. She spent her first wages on a small line of Hapan script tattooed behind her left ear, an act her mother described as "vandalism of a perfectly good face." Ysolde stopped mentioning it within a month. Elesia has never told anyone outside the family what it says.
When traffic recovered, Ysolde began taking her daughter along on real transits as an unofficial second seat. She taught Elesia to read the Mists the way her own teachers had: by instruments first, by feel second, and never by guesswork. Elesia earned her civilian pilot certifications in quick succession, then logged hundreds of hours on bulk freighters and container haulers running the inner Cluster routes.
On Year 17, Day 260, at nineteen, she guided her first heavy container ship through the Lorell approach without her mother aboard. She brought it to anchor four minutes ahead of schedule and filed a report noting that the ship's own navigator "would have killed everyone on board by the second gravity shear." The report was accurate. It was also forwarded, with commentary, to her mother.
Elesia left the Hapes Cluster in Year 18 with a secondhand light freighter, a pilot's license, and her parents' blessing, delivered with a packed lunch. She named the freighter the Second Opinion. It has served as her home, office, and ride between contracts ever since.
Her work falls into a few steady lines. She ferries newly built capital hulls from shipyards to buyers who lack the crew to collect them, repositions laid-up ships for owners who want them somewhere else, and sits in as contract helm when a captain needs a steadier hand for a difficult passage. Her clients have ranged from mining concerns and freight lines to private collectors with more credits than sense. She works for none of them longer than a contract lasts, by choice.
Over the following years she moved up from corvettes and bulk carriers to frigate-weight and cruiser-weight hulls. Her reputation rests on hazardous-space transits, where her years in the Mists show, and on docking: she is known for berthing large ships at speeds that make station controllers swear and then ask her to do it again for the recordings. She also has a reputation for turning down jobs she considers stupid, and for explaining why in detail.
As of Year 27 she remains independent. She is based out of Lorell between contracts, returns home for family dinners as often as her schedule allows, and continues to deflect her mother's efforts to introduce her to "a nice pilot, or at least a nice person who owns a planet or two."
Elesia is quick, sharp-tongued, and almost impossible to embarrass. Her humor runs dry and sarcastic, and she uses it the way other pilots use a sensor sweep: to find out what she is dealing with before committing to anything. Those who mistake the jokes for carelessness rarely make the mistake twice.
Underneath the wit she is intensely driven. She holds herself to a standard most clients never notice and would not appreciate if they did, rehearses difficult approaches in simulation the night before a job, and takes a botched docking as a personal insult. She is competitive with other pilots, impatient with incompetence, and slow to admit when she is tired.
She carries the Hapan pride in beauty and craft, but turns it on herself with a wink. Raised among people for whom striking looks are ordinary, she was surprised to find that outside the Cluster her face opened doors and closed conversations. She now treats it as one more tool in the kit and has little patience for anyone who confuses it with her qualifications.
Her flaws are the obvious ones. She talks when she should listen, picks arguments she could walk away from, and refuses help long after she needs it. She is also fiercely loyal, generous with her time to family and friends, and unfailingly honest, which is either her best quality or her worst depending on who is asking.
At 1.68 meters, Elesia is slight and below the Hapan average, much to her chagrin. She is slender and long-limbed, with fair, porcelain-toned skin, delicate features, and dark, almond-shaped eyes that tend to narrow just before she says something cutting.
Her natural hair is dark brown, but since her late teens she has kept it a long, pale platinum blonde, usually worn loose or pulled back for flying. The small line of Hapan script behind her left ear is visible only when her hair is up. Her voice is low and slightly husky, noticeably softer than her words.
On the job she favors practical flight wear: dark trousers, boots, and an oversized black flight jacket with the sleeves pushed up. Off duty she dresses with the care of someone raised on a world that takes appearance seriously, and she enjoys the double takes from clients who have only seen her in the jacket.
Elesia's core skill is capital ship helmsmanship. She is qualified on hulls from corvette to cruiser weight and is regarded as an exceptional hand at precision docking, formation keeping during convoy moves, and maneuvering large ships in confined or hazardous space.
Her years in the Transitory Mists made her a strong astrogator. She plots routes around gravity wells, ion storms, and dust concentrations with a caution that surprises people who only know her mouth, and she will refuse a jump she does not trust regardless of the client's schedule.
- Languages: native Hapan, fluent Basic, conversational Sy Bisti, and a broad command of spacer slang.
- Starship systems: competent at diagnosing helm, sublight, and hyperdrive faults, though she prefers to leave actual repairs to engineers and to supervise loudly.
- Small craft: a capable freighter pilot and an indifferent starfighter pilot. She calls fighters "for people with short attention spans."
- Singing: a trained voice from her Ut-born mother's side of the family, used almost exclusively alone on the flight deck during long hyperspace jumps.
Her chief physical limitation is the Hapan night blindness. She compensates with instruments, memorized layouts, and cockpit lighting set well above regulation, and she will not fly a darkened bridge.
The Corsanas are a close, noisy, and openly affectionate family, and Elesia's parents have supported her career from the start, even while worrying about it out loud.
- Ysolde Corsana (mother): Born on Ut, she spent nearly thirty years as a Mists pilot at Lorell before stepping back to train younger pilots. Elesia inherited her nerve, her instrument discipline, and her habit of being right first and polite second.
- Aurel Corsana (father): A civic gardener who took his wife's family name at their marriage, an older Hapan custom he describes as "the best trade I ever made." Calm where the rest of the family is loud, he is the person Elesia calls when a job goes badly.
- Mirelle Corsana (older sister, born Year -6): An architect who designs the white-domed civic buildings of Lorell's newer districts. Married with a five-year-old daughter, Pia, she is the responsible sibling and Elesia's most frequent sparring partner. The two argue constantly and would cross the galaxy for each other.
- Kestin Corsana (younger brother, born Year 2): A pastry chef in one of Lorell's commercial districts and the family's main source of gossip. He is Elesia's closest confidant and sends her boxes of pastries that never survive the first jump.
CORSANA FAMILY CHANNEL247 UNREAD
- She nicknames every ship she flies for the duration of the contract, regardless of its registered name.
- She holds the Corsana family record for being sent home from school, a title Kestin has formally given up trying to take.
- The Second Opinion is the only ship she has ever owned, and she refuses to upgrade it on principle.
- Despite growing up surrounded by her father's gardens, she cannot keep a houseplant alive aboard ship and has stopped trying.
When Elesia was six, she made her mother write the phrase on a card and pin it above her bed. It stayed there for ten years. At sixteen she took the card to a tattoo artist on the Lorell docks and had the line copied exactly, in Ysolde's handwriting, in old Hapan script.
Ysolde was too appalled to look at it closely for most of a month. When she finally did, she recognized her own hand, stopped calling it vandalism, and has raised the subject only once since, at a family dinner, to point out that her handwriting was very good.
Kestin helped plan it and kept the secret for eleven days, which remains his personal record. Mirelle still maintains it should have gone somewhere less visible. Aurel says it is the only good advice anyone in the family has ever written down.
When strangers ask what it says, Elesia gives a different answer every time. Recorded replies include "Regulations," "None of your business," and, occasionally, the truth, which nobody believes.