Name: Althea
Age: aged like a fine wine
Contact: sakurasummons @ plurk
Characters Already in Teleios: none
Reserve: Reserve over here

Character Name: Kara Thrace, callsign: Starbuck
Journal: alwaysruns
Age: 28
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Canon Point: Season 3, Episode 13 "Taking a Break from All Your Worries"
Debt:

Class A: 801
Class B: 42
Class C: 1146

Striking a superior officer asshole.
Insubordination.

GRAND TOTAL: 917 years, 6 months

History: You know, everyone I know is fighting to get back what they lost. I'm fighting because I don't know how to do anything else.

Personality:

Kara is easily one of the most complex people onboard the Battlestar Galactica. She's cocky and brash and flies by the seat of her pants. As a pilot and a shot, she's damned good at what she does and she knows it. People admit she's the best in the fleet, including Colonel Tigh who just can't stand her. She admits that she's not afraid of dying and every time she gets in the cockpit, she figures she's going to die. It's what makes her utterly fearless in a fight. She's something of a hothead too, not hesitating to punch one of her superior officers in a fight, tell them off, call them on their shit and their failures.

Her own failures are another issue entirely. One could say that Kara is always running. Running into trouble for one. But running the hell away from herself, her past, looking at her own shortcomings, away from commitment. She gambles, she drinks, she smokes, she'll sleep with anyone that's a decent lay. This things aren't really failures to her, it's just how life is and by damn she's going to enjoy herself. But she blows at anything smacking of commitment. She got drunk and made out with her fiancee's brother, Lee, while Zak slept on the couch in the same room. Later she sleeps with Lee, tells him she loves him, then runs off and marries Sam just to avoid committing her life to Lee for real. Later, she goes back to sleeping with Lee, but won't leave Sam because she made a vow in the sight of the gods. When Lee tells her every time they have sex, she's breaking that vow, she smirks and replies 'that's just bending the rules.'

She lives to bend the rules, or buck them entirely. More than once, she's ended up in the brig for ignoring orders, bending the rules to try to force what she wants, or blatant insubordination. If she can't avoid looking her troubles in the face, she's just as likely to blow them off with a joke. Serious makes her uncomfortable. And when both her mother and Leoben tell her that she's special and she's got a destiny, she reacts with rage. No one is going to tell her what to do. Kara writes her own damned fate.

She cannot stand Cylons. Something about watching them nuke all twelve colonies and reduce the human race to no more than 50,000 survivors sealed that deal. Kara's not got the least bit of trouble torturing a Cylon prisoner to interrogate him, and when she's held captive on New Caprica, she keeps killing Leoben, taking pleasure in dishing out suffering to him. When Sam tells her he'd still love her if she was a Cylon, her response is "If you were one, I'd put a bullet in your head." (Ironically, after she dies and returns, and then finds out that he is in fact he is a Cylon, she manages to change her mind because he's 'just Sam.' But at the point she's coming from? It's ALL about the hate.) She's so adamant about putting the Cylons down, she slams a loaded gun down in front of the President and tells her "If you think I'm a Cylon, then I'm your enemy. You shoot your enemy." It's gutsy but it's not a bluff. She's damned serious that you don't play mercy games with your enemies. You kill them. Period.

For Kara, fighting is easy. Killing is easy. Living like a hedonist is easy. You don't think, you just do. And that's the way she prefers to live her life. Because in those rare moments when she slows down to think, she's far more fragile and broken than her hardass approach to life would reveal. When her father left, she never touched the piano again... to punish him, because he'd been a musician. Her mother used to abuse her, even going so far as to slam Kara's hand in a door, breaking all her fingers. But it's these things that make her hard. She's got no interest in being a mother or having a family, partially for fear of passing on her mother's abuse, partially because it's another one of those nasty forms of a lifelong commitment. Honestly, she's not cut out for it anyway. Maternal does not apply to Starbuck. But somehow she's come to believe that life is pain and she deserves to suffer (thanks to her mother). Her addictions and escapism is her way of escaping pain... both her own and to stop her from inflicting it on others. Because deep down, sometimes she just wants to hurt someone.

And yet, there is a softer side to Starbuck, which she hides well and manifests rarely. She is deeply spiritual, praying often in times of emotional pain or worry to the Lords of Kobol. Specifically she worships Artemis and Aphrodite, and has turned to an oracle for guidance when she's truly been at a loss. For all of her commitment problems, she truly loves Bill Adama like a father, and despite the UST going with Lee, loves him as much as she's capable of, same as she does Sam. Her head seems to be screwed on in the right place when it comes to certain aspects of morality, cringing at the idea of firing on a civilian ship when it's suspected of being a Cylon plant... because that's a lot of innocent people involved. And even as violently as she reacted to the notion of Kasey being her kid, she was genuinely distraught when the child got hurt, shouldering the blame for being negligent.

Powers/Abilities: Pilot, sniper, holds her liquor like a pro...usually. Seriously, she's otherwise just a normal human being. A solider and the best damn pilot and shot the Colonial Fleet has. Her words. And the XO's. She's also something of an amateur artist and has somewhat decent skill playing the piano, though she hasn't since she was a child.

Appearance:



Samples:

Actionspam Sample:

Permission is overrated.

Prose Sample:

Kara sat back in her seat and kicked her feet up on the table in front of her. She took a long drag off her cigar, looked up, and blew the smoke into the air, watching it as it billowed out over her head. Real stogies. And real booze that hadn't been cooked in a jimmied still made out of spare parts. Food that wasn't a variety on algae mash. A real bed and not just a rack on the Galactica. Toothpaste, real toothpaste. Yeah, this place was a real paradise for what amounted to a prison sentence.

And it was a prison. Even had to work off her karmic debt or what the frak ever. It all made a sick sort of sense to her. Gods knew she'd been a world-class frakup as long as she could remember. Her sins? Yeah, she knew every last one of them. Never stopped her from committing them though.

She reached over and grabbed her drink off the table, quaffing the rest in one gulp. A relieved sigh escaped her. It was no ambrosia, but it'd do just fine.

The bit about being a candidate for Utopia or whatever that was the lady was talking about? Sounded like the biggest joke Kara had ever heard in her life. Punishment she understood and could get. The nice half of the welcoming speech in the temple? Didn't make a lick of sense. Like Starbuck ever deserved something akin to happiness. But here she was, living in a temple, even recognized some of the names of the Lords of Kobol in the list of deities. Seemed they were living with everyone, like the paradise that was supposed to be Kobol before the exodus.

Kara turned the empty glass in her hands, considering the contents it had held. How long had it been since she'd breathed fresh air and not had to look over her shoulder for a Cylon. To just have a drink and a smoke and decent food. Not the algae planet. Certainly not New Caprica, that place had been a damp, cold hell. Not even as far back as when she went to Caprica to retrieve the Arrow of Apollo and met Sam.

"Huh. Wonder what Sam would think of this place." Sam. Frak. She loved him. She hated him. She loved Lee. She hated Lee. And now all she could think about was the mess she'd left behind. Both of them. The old man. Hell, right now she'd even be grateful for a sight of Tigh. As much as she hated commitment and ran like hell from it, she couldn't stand the thought of being alone either. Not here. She didn't deserve the good of this place and more than deserved the rest of it.

Frustrated, she threw her empty glass across the room. It shattered and that noise pleased her. "Well what now, Starbuck? What do you do now?"