Nebula Brume

Player Name: Pixie

Full Name: Nebula Brume

Nicknames and Pseudonyms: Vixen (Callsign), Vix, Vex. Homewrecking Slut

Age: 25

Birth Date: June 13th 2288

Blood Type: O-Neg

Role on Ship: Pilot

Homeworld: SS Artemis

Significant Relations and Affiliations: Her family, Nihar (Father), Niara (Mother), Neptune (Sister), the people aboard the Sila, and her ship Starling (An A.I. Navigation Programme). She has few friends and they are very far between. Literally. Nebula usually picks a person at every port to spend her time and energy on but rarely contacts them when she's not docked up, leaving a trail of people she cares about scattered across the known worlds. 

Bonds, Obligations, Debts, and Warrants: There are a few minor warrants in her name for participation in illegal racing circuits or flying recklessly in the vicinity of stations and populated moons. 

Appearance: Nebula has curly dark brown hair with the occasional blonde highlighted streak running through it. As an Artemisian, her body is smaller and more frail than it should be at 5'5” tall and 45kgs soaking wet. Her limbs are a little longer than a planet-grown person, due to generations of her family growing up in low gravity and her own time spent off-station in shuttles when she was still maturing.

Her style floats somewhere between rich party girl and grease monkey, making it as likely that you'll see her in leathers and tank tops or silks and slinky glittery things that barely cover skin. She leaves her hair wild enough that it looks like she doesn't care, but anyone who has dated her can attest to the long hours of maintenance she puts into getting those curls perfectly formed so that they look good in a riot.

She has a scattering of tattoos, mostly old-world style representations of alien flora and fauna. Notably a Starling made of interposing lines flies up directly between her shoulder blades in an approximation of her ship's hull shape. On her chest, with its muzzle pointed down between her breasts, is a fox's head with detailed fur patterns and a suspicious gaze. The plants working their way up her right thigh are all fatally toxic, and the plants crawling up what is left of her left thigh are flowering varieties of medicinal herbs as well as a single cherry blossom in the space between leaves, these tattoos terminate abruptly where her left leg has been amputated. There is a relatively new flowering vine from Paradise on her upper right thigh, curling over her hip to touch her waist, and a similarly sized shark tattooed to curl over her left hip with its jaws open. What scars can be found in light lines against her olive skin are decorated at their points with stars to create small constellations, these are touched up when they begin to fade or blur.

Her left leg is missing, amputated midway along the femur, and she can be found either with a prosthetic attached or with crutches (sometimes just one crutch) to get around more easily. In zero G, she doesn’t bother with either. 

Personality: As a rebellious ex-rich-girl, racer, and stunt pilot, Nebula is cocksure and stubborn as hell. Femme and flirtatious, as well as pint-sized, the young woman is constantly underestimated and feels like she's always having to prove her worth to the people around her. Despite her cushy start, Nebula can space rat with the best of them, hauling pieces of dead ship to port for cash and then spending every bit of it on a ticket to race for the next most exciting thing she can find. She has trouble backing down from a challenge, and absolutely loves to brag on herself or her friends.

Nebula is loyal to a fault and holds a grudge like she's trying to squeeze the blood from a stone. Her mouth can get her into trouble, mostly due to the lack of filter bred into her through a lifetime of being too rich to really see the consequences of her actions on a station where most people weren't built for physical violence. She can be a little suspicious, secretive, and protective of anything she deems to be hers or important to her.

She doesn't really consider herself bi, probably something she should unpack, but she definitely has an interest in more than one gender as long as they suit a very specific type. Her preference in men tends to run older, rugged, and heavily scarred/tattooed while her preference in women flips between the elegant, aloof, hyper-femme types and the tough-as-nails, no-nonsense, rough-housing types.

Recently her fuck-you-positivity took a rather serious knock after the loss of her leg, and she sometimes feels like she’s play-acting the woman she was before that happened. It helps though, truly it does, to keep on pretending she thinks she’s invincible.

Strengths, Talents, Abilities: Nebula is a killer pilot, unafraid of high speeds and able to fly with fewer inertial dampeners engaged (therefore a lighter ship) due to the slightness of her frame. Before the loss of her leg, she was incredibly fleet-footed as are most of the people from SS Artemis. These days, her top speed is a little lower, but she’s pushing through physio and looking lovingly at running blades in her spare time.

The first 20 years of her life were spent teaching her about savings, stocks, and bonds. She learned about investments, how to broker a good deal, and what should or shouldn't be included in a contract for any particular service offered. Nebula trained under her father to run his little entertainment empire and, while she hated every boring minute of it, enough of it sunk in that she's managed to skate around any incidentally indenturing language in contracts she has signed now that she's out from under Daddy's thumb.

In an effort to have any fun at all, Nebula spent a lot of time learning how to sneak in and out of her security-dotted home without raising any alarms, so she shares a lot of skills in common with a cat-burglar as well. She loves to dance and sing, and spends a great deal of her off-time (as well as many of her last few years on SS Artemis) in bars and nightclubs coaxing people onto the floor with her so she can expend some of her overflowing energies into the music.

She won't offer up the advice on her own, but asking Nebula about hair care is like going to a personal stylist with years of experience. She can set someone up with a list of products and a routine designed to make their hair's natural beauty shine through the space dust and the grit of living life in the vacuum.

Weaknesses and Fears: As mentioned, she loves to dance and sing but, while she's great at the former, she's completely terrible at the latter. Anyone who enjoys the sound of Nebula singing is probably from Paradise or shares their propensity for hearing loss. She is still a little dizzied and afraid around large bodies of water, having never grown up on a station, but has recently been learning how to swim when she can.

Nebula is attracted to people most often when they're bad for her. Aloof or dangerous, locked into a contract or stuck in the armed forces, even a few manipulative and vicious types who took her for a ride and ditched her at her most vulnerable. She carries a torch for people long after a reasonable person would have put the torch down and stepped away for their own mental well-being.

She lives in a low-level constant fear that the bottom will finally fall out of her little adventure and she'll finally have to tuck her tail and limp back home to whatever derision and shame her family is waiting to heap onto her. The idea of ending up stuck at some desk like her father, and now her little sister, trapped on the station with no time to go anywhere else... it's a literal nightmare to the space-loving speed demon.

History: On SS Artemis her family owns a few casinos and nightclubs under the umbrella of Brume Corp, a parent company which manages the press, legalities, and general PR as if each casino and nightclub were an independent contractor. As the oldest child, Nebula was supposed to follow in her father's footsteps and take over the family business. She was raised and groomed to be a perfect creature above reproach and, for the first fifteen years of her life, she leaned into that image like a second skin. Desperate to please her father, but rarely successful, the young teen Nebula found a kind of twisted joy in finally throwing off the shackles of his expectations.

She would disappoint him on purpose, shattering the carefully manufactured image of a sweet and doting daughter looking to take on the 'family business' by dragging home men twice her age with ten years of hard living on their faces. She got herself in trouble, and called her Daddy to come bail her out. And, when he finally stopped running to get her out of a bind, she started flashing his name around to get her way. Nebula would have said she was just trying to be herself, but in hindsight the truth was that she just let that man run her life in a whole new way. She dropped things she loved because she couldn't bear to do anything that made him smugly praise her for behaving, and got into a few things she wouldn't have just to watch the rage boil beneath his brow.

It was during this time she slipped down into the Wrench District and fell madly, deeply, truly in love with racing. Watching the little hot rods come in to get tuned up and repaired, going home with the occasional pilot or engineer, she found one of the other great loves of her life: Moxie. Her first real friend, and quickly the best one she’d ever had. Moxie provided a kind of safety to Nebula and a stabilizing influence, a place to stay when she was too afraid or too drunk to go home to her parents (or with whatever brute she’d laid eyes on that night), as well as someone safe to flirt with. Nebula had been attracted to women before, not that she would have called it that, and with Moxie her walls came down naturally. She took pleasure in ruffling the other woman’s feathers, and made a point of being physically close without really considering Moxie might be getting mixed messages.

Her mother was a nearly absent figure in her life, frequently sick and frail even for an Artemisian, she spent huge portions of her day in bed or reclined in the living room looking pale. Nebula feels the most guilty for leaving her behind, but her tacit approval of the way her husband treated their daughter was enough to ease that guilt a bit. When Nebula did speak to her mother, it was rarely about anything of consequence. Even small stresses could press the woman to withdraw to her bedroom and leave Nebula and her little sister Neptune to face whatever they were dealing with alone. It was hard to blame her, really, for something out of her control. But Nebula has always felt betrayed by her mother's lack of interest in her daughters.

Neptune, by contrast, shouldered none of the familial responsibility and was often allowed a lot of leeway in her behavior that Nebula envied deeply. Unlike Nebula, however, Neptune strived to please their father even up to the day Nebula fled the station. Occasionally Nebula hears something in the feed which mentions her family, usually their presence being noted at a gala or grand opening, and when these are accompanied with pictures, she will print them out and store them in a small lockbox under Starling's cockpit. A small nostalgic urge she allows herself without too much recrimination.

Eventually, after one last argument with her father about making better life choices, she decided to strike out on her own. How hard could it be? With a sporty, new, two-seater ship (Starling), and an empty trust fund, she made her way out into the world and learned what it felt like to starve, to run from the cops, and to work her little ass off for everything she earned. Turns out, making it on her own was pretty rough! She skipped from station to moon, rarely venturing down onto actual planets for fear of the gravity stress and the plentiful large bodies of water. Her pockets were never full for long, but her prowess as a pilot got to be known in certain circles. Vixen, her callsign, started appearing more and more in the illegal racing circuit, and was eventually shortened to Vix by her friends and Vex by the people who lost to her on the regular.

She sent a few messages back home, eager to tell Moxie what was happening in her new life, but when she didn’t get a reply Nebula took the hint and stopped reaching out. It hurt, more than she was expecting it to, but hadn’t she run away to start over anyway? Nebula threw herself into the stars even harder, and the next woman who flirted back ended up in the pilot’s bed. Despite this, Nebula really does think she’s straight. Mostly. Stars help her.

In all her back-and-forthing, a few notable people and places rose up.

• On Heritage there was a guy dating a droid (CJ), a great drinking buddy and a source of many of the reference images for her thigh tattoos. He stopped being easy to find a few months ago and, after a long and threatening conversation with his newly-ex-droid, Nebula found herself on a ship with him and his tight knit crew. She’s even forgiven the droid. 

• On Hermes Station she frequented a couple clubs and made close friends-with-benefits with one of the bouncers who sports a nasty scar from forehead to jaw from a broken bottle in a brawl years back. He was a little shy about his scar at first, and took offence to her interest in it, but eventually he relaxed into her reassurances that she found it gorgeous and let her pet her fingers down it whenever she came to visit.

• On Mori's Landing, as of a few months ago, Nebula started treating a few of the miners to free drinks when she was feeling flush, and she has her eye on a woman who likes to linger a little longer than the rest. She's cautious of Nebula, and has explained her interest in something more committed, but Nebula isn't about to sign on for that. She figures either the woman will decide her interest in Nebula trumps the hope for permanence, or they'll end up great friends with a flirtatious undertone. No harm either way.

• And on Warden Station, where she goes to have work done on her ship that's less-than-legal, there's an older guy she thinks is either ex-mob or ex-military who works on her ship. He's prone to flattery of the greasy-cat-call variety rather than romance, but he's faithfully married and not interested in the attentions of a messed up twenty-something who definitely shouldn't find his disgusting comments enticing. Still, they've got something of a friendship going... as long as she doesn't owe him too much money at the time. 

Anything Else: She knows a bit of Paradisian Sign, but isn't fluent. Fluent in English, French, and Japanese.

She's a sucker for expensive skin and hair care products.

Her main hobby (outside racing and loving on her ship) is the study of old Earth fauna and flora, hence her tattoos. She views them as mythological creatures, since she hasn’t seen many of them, but is aware that they’re just interesting animals.

Nebula doesn't really understand monogamy and doesn't choose to participate in it. Has a bad habit of forgetting to check if her partners are cool with that. 

Model: Tatiana Maslany