Rivka 'Dovie' Barbosa

Joy

23

Female

Human

None (born on Starship)

Civilian

Hazel brown-green

Black

Medium brown, slightly olive

Long, loose stride (uncommon in a person that short), lack of fashion sense, long hair.

Gunner's Mate

Chef and Seamstress

Dock Loader

Deckhand

Junior Technician

Junior Medic (non-certified)

Targeting Systems Assistant

Store Assistant and Technical Support

Starfleet Academy (non-graduated) followed by a wide variety of jobs on various civilian vessels and spaceports.

Finished highschool through a distance learning program, accelerated, with a 3.8 GPA.

Bachelor’s of Science in Chemistry

Starfleet Academy, School of Intelligence – Honorable dismissal from program; failed psychological battery.

Certificate in Tactical Systems (private accredited program)

The mixture of Hispanic and Sephardic blends nicely in Rivka, making her a very pretty person if she ever focused on her appearance in any way. Her hair is black, straight, and long, usually held back in a braid or piled into an updo. Her dark hazel eyes appear large in her narrow face. Her figure is small, spare, and toned, but not heavily muscled. She does not hold herself in a particularly feminine manner, but she is graceful in her own easy-going way.

Rivka seems to have no sense for fashion. She wears what fits and what is comfortable for her work, which usually means browns, greys, and sometimes greens of BDU-style outfits scrounged from wherever she can find them.

Rivka is warm and friendly, even when she’s explaining things in scientific and logical terms. She is an “innocent sage”, very knowledgeable in anything that is not well translated to the way real people operate every day. The random holes in her understanding lead to odd, uncomfortable situations in which she suddenly has no idea what’s going on or what she’s supposed to do. When people are friendly, she latches onto them quickly and divulges more information than they ever wanted to know. When they are stern, she quickly becomes afraid of them and avoids them whenever possible. She is young and seems younger.

Though guns are not her only interest or skill, Rivka has a special enjoyment of fire and demolitions. Her Papa taught her how to create a variety of homemade explosives, corrosive acids, and other mild catastrophes, and she takes a simple pleasure in watching things go to pieces. As a weapon’s expert, what makes her the most dangerous is her lack of ability to empathize with or otherwise connect with the humanity of her targets.

Rivka Barbosa never remembered her parents. She was raised from babyhood by a kind man who called her “Dovie”. His name, as far as she was aware, was “Papa”. Papa and “Dovie” lived alone in a cabin in the middle of the Northern woods in the former United States area of Earth. The nearest supply store was several miles away, and the girl grew up with little or no company besides her caretaker. He taught her everything he could, which was more than enough to fill their waking hours for fifteen years. Under his tutelage, she learned not only the typical reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and science, but she also learned how to hunt, fish, swim, trap, and perform numerous other survival skills. They lived as if in anticipation of some worldwide disaster, and he taught her self-reliance above all. As she grew older, she found that Papa began to test her skills, pausing in his words so that she could fill in the blank and repeat back to him everything he had taught to her… or so she thought.

When she was fifteen years old, she awoke one morning to find the old man lying dead in his chair.

After her initial panic, young “Dovie” quickly collected herself and walked all the way to the supply store, armed with one of her Papa’s many and varied sidearms for protection. Her plea for help brought a team of uniformed Starfleet personnel to the remote cabin, much to her surprise. She was about to discover that her entire identity was completely different than she’d known her entire life.

The little girl “Dovie” was positively identified as Rivka Barbosa, daughter of deceased Starfleet officer Joshua Barbosa and granddaughter of newly-deceased retired Starfleet officer Jonas Barbosa. “Papa” was a worn-out, highly-decorated Intelligence officer whose descent into schizophrenia and dementia was entirely unrealized by his tiny charge. Jonas had spent most of her lifetime unaware of who she was or where he was, simply rehearsing his skills for an audience who did not know anything about life except for what he taught her.

The one question that the investigation failed to solve was how she had ended up being tucked away from society for so long without somebody trying to locate her. As far as they could tell, two different organizations had both thought that the other was in charge of keeping an eye on his welfare and hers. Somehow she had slipped through the cracks entirely.

Rivka did not take well to her introduction into society. She had almost no social graces at all, no understanding of subtlety, and only very limited ability to read emotions in other people. Her attempted integration into a regular highschool did not go well. She simply had no way to understand where she was supposed to be and what she was supposed to do. She was finally placed with a couple looking to adopt a special needs child. They found that she was bright and well advanced in her coursework. She was also far more interested in schoolwork than socialization, and dealt with the upheaval in her life by delving deeply into the one constant… learning. They allowed her to learn at her own pace at home, and carefully integrated her into a very small group of friends. It was during this time that Rivka finished her highschool courses and entered college through a distance learning program. She remained at ‘home’, slowly learning how to approach other people while pursuing her academic interests, which led her into a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry at the age of 20.

The girl never forgot or despised her “Papa”, and her grieving process included a deep and abiding interest in this man whom she had only known in his twilight years. She was allowed to view a sanitized copy of his record. Neither she nor anyone else understood why he called her “Dovie” until she visited his grave a year after his death. Her attention was drawn by a tiny gravestone near that of him, his wife, and his only son—her father. The tiny gravestone bore the simple name “Dovie Barbosa” and a timeline that indicated only one day of life. Jonas’s infant daughter had not survived long enough to be recorded officially as a live birth, and so she only existed in that tiny stone and in the memory of an elderly lunatic.

By the time she was ready for Starfleet Academy, a couple of years behind her peers, Rivka had finally begun to answer readily to her own name and was able to interact well enough with others to get through her day-to-day socializations. She took the Intelligence track out of a burning desire to follow Papa’s path and “make him proud”, from wherever he might be watching her. Unfortunately, though her survival skills and general knowledge was excellent, her socialization skills still suffered and she did not make the cut. She could not take the advanced classes and become an Intelligence Officer. Crushed, she left Starfleet completely on an honorable discharge. Several teachers put complimentary notes in her file, hoping to smooth her way should she ever return and take her pick of Engineering or Science. She never tried, and so she never saw the notes.

Rivka headed out on her own with a simple backpack full of everything she felt she needed. She worked whatever jobs she could find. She never thought of using her chemistry degree to gain a high-profile position in a private company. Instead, she took to the stars, taking the kinds of jobs that her Papa had told her about long ago. She worked anything that was available, on civilian ships and planetary spaceports. Sometimes she slept on the streets, or lived for short periods of time in the wilderness of whatever world she happened to be on at the time.

When she was nearly 23 years old, Rivka began to look to her future. She was told that if she took her certification in manual calculation of older targeting systems, she would never lack a job, because those systems were common in civilian craft. Unfortunately, the war prompted high production of newer targeting systems, and once the war ended, suddenly everyone could afford them. She borrowed money to obtain certification for a job that suddenly dried up. Thanks to her general lack of knowledge of the business world and lack of caution in socialization, she ended up struggling to try to pay a financial debt held by an Orion syndicate. After receiving a message assuring her of ‘consequences’ should she fail to pay, she has been on the move, sending money back whenever she dares and working any job she can find.

Rivka Barbosa is intelligent, but socially inept. She treats everyone with the same incautious friendliness, and lacks knowledge of social cues and forbidden topics. She feels as if she is stranded in a universe that speaks a language she never learned. As a worker, she is capable and takes her duties seriously.