Athletic, taller than average, perhaps 30 years old, neck-length dirty-blonde hair, bangs. Her coveralls don't have name tape on them, but there is a faded spot where one is supposed to go. Either these are modified military fatigues retrofitted for civilian use, or simply a  damaged uniform.

***

Initial Backstory

"Fine," Kayla sighs. "Let's get to the cockpit. Bigger windows."

The crew follows her to the pilot's module,the path to which her feet find without so much as a passing thought. Once there, she motions at the wreckage through the viewport.

"Behold, the Winze.  Or what's left of it. An experimental vessel that was part spaceship, part space station, and part prospecting platform."

Kayla points out various bits and bobs as they whiz about, dubbing them various designations that may or may not correlate with their present shape -- though inaccuracies could easily be ascribed to their current warped and damaged state.

"Now before you get all worked up, no, I didn't design the thing. Laughable. Ick. No, I just flew the thing. My job was to put it through its paces."

She shrugs gently.

"I have a knack for flying barges and the like, and an aptitude for figuring out what went wrong when something invariably does. Those skills bought and paid my way through college, and they got me into the pilot's chair of the Winze, as well. Things were going great. Everything was comin' up Kayla."

The pride blooming across her features withers almost as soon as it had blossomed.

"That is, until I saw what was really going on."

Kayla's eyes widen slightly as she dips into the pools of her memory.

"I wasn't supposed to. See, I was going through the Winze's data dump after a particularly stressful day of testing. I was red-lining every gasket and module. That's the job, right? And Winslow -- sorry, that's what we called the Winze's AI -- coughed up some data packets I didn't expect. That I never called up. Charts, graphs, topographical maps, diagrams. That kind of thing.

"It seemed innocent enough at first. There was a map of Martian space, clearly showing Mars, Phobos, and Deimos. Another of Venus, a third of Earth and Luna, and a fourth that was labeled Titan. Good thing, too. I'd have never recognized it otherwise."

She puts a gloved hand against the viewport, arching her fingers against the transparasteel lightly.

"But then I saw the inventory lists. Standard shipping manifests, at a glance. Gold. Iron. Granite. Silicon. Salt. Steel. Water. But further down the page, it got weird. Blood. Plasma. Sugars. Phosphates. Adenine. Guanine. Cytosine. Thymine."

"My curiosity got the better of me. I followed the data trail to where those other shipments were being delivered. Where they were sourced. I made copies of everything. And then, once I had everything organized as well as I could, I made a grievous error."

She smiles ruefully.

"I took it to my supervisor."

Kayla turns from the viewport to look at the crew.

"It unraveled quickly from there. My supervisor told me to wait in the office. She left with my files and returned with a security team, which informed me that my employment had been at-will and was now at an end. The last thing they said before tossing me out the door was that if I told anybody what I had seen, they'd force me into financial ruin."

She shakes her head and smiles hopefully.

"You're probably wondering how I ended up waaaaay out here, among the rubble of the Winze. Being that you're the IDA, I don't feel particularly inclined to incriminate myself over the particulars... unless you can offer me some kind of immunity package in exchange?"

Kayla puts a hand on her hip and waves the other in the air as though tallying math on an invisible chalkboard with her finger.

"That's in addition to the shower, bunk, clothes, food, and lift back to civilization, of course."

She pulls her face into a playful, pleading smile.

"Please don't space me?"

***

Aboard Persephone

"You already know my story," Kayla says, shooting Xander a commiserating look. "Grew up in the Northern European Union, single mom sacrificed everything for me. Couldn't afford traditional higher education -- and didn't really want it -- so joined a local mechanic's union. Learned how to make engines purr."

She tucks an errant strand of hair behind an ear.

"One of our clients was a military man -- I know this because he never stopped talking about it. I think he was a little taken with me. He said if I was tired of fixing appliances and passenger vans, he could probably get me an interview at his local hangar. I took the tour when he offered it and fell in love in the idea of working with planes and ships."

She shrugs.

"I flubbed the interview a bit, but he must've pulled some strings for me because I got the job anyway. Got clearance and everything, all paid for by the government. I learned a lot from the techs there, and ended up working there for about a year. When things when south with me and my patron -- and believe me, they did -- I took my leave. Mom'd been...gone...for a while at that point, so there was nothing really holding me there."

"My work with the hangar gave me the chops to start working with government and corporate entities. I started small and worked my way up. It helped that I was mobile, untethered, enthusiastic, and affordable, of course, but I think mom was watchin' over my shoulder somehow to keep my luck from fading."

"Anyway. The rest you know. I worked steadily as a test pilot and mechanic, hopping from job to job, ultimately working on a hush-hush ACE project that I lucked into. Great pay. Great benefits. Amazing technology. A dream job. I put their prototype ship through its paces, learned that it was really a genocidal weapon designed to quell some kind of civil war brewing under Martian soil, stole it, got shot down, was left stranded in deadspace, and then..."

She grins slightly.

"...got rescued by team of daring commando forces on a top-secret IDA mission to Ceres, where we nearly died about a hundred times while doing battle with a psychotic scientist and her hordes of mutant slaves."

Kayla clears her throat.

"Not that I'm complaining, of course. If nothing else, it has been interesting!"</quote>

***

An Auger?

Kayla remains quiet while Rebecca tells her story.

"That's...an awful lot to take in," she says at last, holding up her hands and looking at them as if doing so for the first time. "But it doesn't make any sense. I can't do the kinds of things you can do."

She puts her hands back down and slips them beneath her thighs, sitting on them.

"The files I saw aboard the Winze -- the ones I took to HR, and then lost when they were confiscated and I was fired simultaneously -- detailed a genetics programs on Mars. An aggressive one. They were growing the perfect laborer for that environment and for the business of mining."

"I didn't parse them carefully and I don't have any copies, but based on what I did read, there were cells that had escaped and were living in the mines. Rebels, of a sort. That's all in the story I told you when we first met, though. It's not news."

She shakes her head slightly.

"Now that you mention it, though, I do recall there being a section involving something called the Flux Initiative. I thought it was a buzzword, but you're telling me it was a man? An...auger? With gravity powers?"

Kayla furrows her brow.

"That's interesting, because I knew somebody at ACE who also exhibited powers like that. But she wasn't a man, and she wasn't called Flux. Her name was Cassidy, and she handled security around the Winze's test sites."

"I didn't think she had been...made...or anything, though. She looked normal. I figured she was a regular auger -- whatever that means. Someone they'd hired, you know? But to grow them? That's terrifying, but...not surprising, if that makes sense? If they can make molemen, they could make enforcers, too. But if they had that kind of technology, why not monetize it? People would pay a fortune to gain powers like you've described."

Her expression falls.

"Or maybe not. They'd have to be registered with GENOME...they wouldn't be able to trust their own bodies...there might be side effects..."

She shakes her head again.

"Regardless. You've got it all wrong. I'm not an auger, and I don't have magical gravity powers. I'm just...really, really lucky."

Kayla motions to the holstered pistol on her belt.

"I have to use this worthless thing to defend myself. You may have...anecdotal evidence, but I'm the one living my life."

She smiles incredulously.

"If I had powers like that, I think I'd have noticed by now."

***

Awakening

Kayla finds herself soaring through the air, slammed by a giant tentacle, and looks down at the uninviting waters as she tumbles toward them.

"-k!" she mouths, completing her earlier expletive. Her rifle remains on the Dock, where she set it down to recharge, but she somehow kept a grip on her pistol.

As the water threatens to close in on her toward the end of her descent, a parade of images cascades through her mind at lightning speed.

quote:

Fleeing the flaming cockpit of her old ship, the Winze , the vessel coming apart around her as ACE's starfighters raked its armored hull with their laser batteries. She raises her left hand, palm out, in terror...and she remembers the debris coalescing around her to create a protective canister among the wreckage before the vacuum of space could claim her.

quote:

Standing with her back against the walk-in freezer on Ceres, a pistol held in both hands and both cheeks streaked with tears of fury as she unloads its entire clip into the mutated monstrosity blocking its entrance. Bullet after bullet plinks off the thing's dense flesh, useless. The mutant brandishes its claws as it advances upon her. She raises her left hand, palm out, in fear...and she remembers the creature being slammed roughly into the side of the freezer's steel walls so hard that it became embedded in them.

quote:

Aboard Persephone, standing among her friends as the ship hurtles away from Ceres. Billy looking at her carefully. "Kayla, how did my brother get six inches into a refrigerator wall? Rebecca tugging on her sleeve. "I can see augers like us. We started our travels with a man named Flux...he was able to control localized gravity. Later...we met another 'fixer'...She also was able to control localized gravity."

quote:

Held in Fiernas's warm embrace back in their shared quarters on Titan, his lips brushing hers as he whispers, "If you do have powers sleeping inside you somewhere, now would be a great time for them to wake up."

Kayla's eyes snap open, and something flickers behind them. She raises her left hand, palm out...

[Gravity Manipulation: 63]

...and her fall abruptly ends, leaving her suspended in mid-air, mere inches above the lake's surface.

"I...I'm..." Kayla breathes, looking down at the water and over at her hand. "I'm flying."