Personal Details

Name: Sila Parris (first name pronounced see-la)

Callsign: Blink

Age: 28

Gender: Female

Colony of Birth: Scorpia

Hair Colour: Blonde, shaved on the left side

Eye Colour: Silvery Blue

Height: 5’7”

Weight: 124 lbs

General Physical Description:  Sila is relatively fair skinned for a native of Scorpia.  Slightly above average height and fit in a natural way, Sila’s eyes and lips tend to capture people’s attention, assuming they aren’t gawking at her hair or tattoo.  Her lips are most often found in a cryptic sort of smirky smile that can be expressing anything from boredom to mischief, the two being related, to liking or disliking the person she is with since she tends to keep her truest thoughts to herself.  She has striking eyes of blue that flash an argent hue when she is impassioned for any reason.  Told to cut her long blonde hair to a regulation length as an officer candidate, Sila kept one side long and shaved the other arguing that on average the strands of her hair were in compliance with regulations…which did not convince the instructors at the Academy and ended up shaving it all for a time.  Since being commissioned she has never grown out the left side, but keeps the other side as long as her current CO will allow and then a little more.  A single, interconnected vine tattoo runs from the left side of her head and down over her body to her left wrist and hand.

Personality:  Sila tends to be a mischievous sort, sometimes simply having fun with people, but at others simply and quietly bucking the letter of rules, regulations and even commands when she believes something she is doing is right.  Not the sort to seek permission or ask forgiveness, Sila simply does her thing and accepts the consequences, though she usually doesn’t fly a flag declaring her running afoul of the rules.  By nature and profession she tends to fly beneath the radar when she is on a mission, be it the one assigned to her or the one she has created and championed for herself and her squadron.  She has a wry sense of humor that borders on sarcastic and sometimes outright is with her comrades and those who outrank her, but she is respected as being almost fearless, personally loyal to anyone she respects and incredibly good hearted to those in need.  Sharp witted and valuing common sense over formalities and protocol she finds the spit and polish sorts to be walking bags of bull droppings and usually avoids them whenever possible.

Likes:  People who don’t take themselves too seriously, animals, especially birds, playing cards, reading both tech manuals and science fiction/fantasy, honesty and people not getting into her business or digging too deep into her past.  Writing code.  Music.  The outdoors, warmth and water.

Dislikes:  Judgmental types, no longer drinks or smokes, doesn’t mind if you are religious, but don’t try to press your beliefs on her.  Dress uniforms.  Dancing to music.  Being cooped up, bored and/or cold.

Hobbies:  Tinkering with her Raptor and other devices that usually end up becoming part of her Raptor.  She isn’t the sort that lives to work 24/7, it just happens that her work involves things she loves to do.  Writes extensively in a journal, but never allows anyone to read it, paragliding on Scorpia or wherever she can find a chance to do it.

Military Details

Branch of Service: Navy

Military Occupational Specialty: Raptor ECO

Rank: Lieutenant - O-2.

Time in Service:  9 years

Decorations: None.  Decorations attract attention and questions about how they were earned which is the last thing Sila wants.  She should have been decorated for achievements and valor, but the former were related to confidential ops and the latter were from a number of risky rescue ops she participated in.  Sila will do just about anything do keep her CO from recommending her for decorations and avoids wearing her dress uniform as if she was allergic to the thing.

History and Background

Scorpia tends to be looked own upon by most of the other colonies and her life growing up would hardly convince anyone to feel differently.  Her Mother was a beautiful, bright, charming woman who drank too much after losing her first husband to a shipyard accident.  The great love of her life lost, so was Sila’s Mother in many ways.  One of what became an a wide array of subsequent lovers, usually visiting from other colonies, was Sila’s Father, problem being that Sila has no idea which one and really doesn’t want to know, or so she tells herself.  Sila in turn ran wild, at first simply becoming a child of nature on a planet lush and full of life, and later by partying hard and becoming a fairly infamous hacker before even hitting her 17th birthday.  On a lot of colonies Sila might have stood out more, but Scorpia was in many ways the trashy place so many proclaimed it to be and her antics fit in all too easily.

Arrested several times, Sila was always able to get out of serious trouble by trading her skills with computer code and hacking for a lesser or no penalty.  Shortly after turning 19, Sila found her Mother dead drunk, literally, having drunk herself right into a very sad and early grave.  After the funeral, a pathetic thing in itself given how little money either of them had, Sila went out and got rip-roaring drunk.  That was the night her tattoo was begun, the vine imprint a common one on Scorpia.  A tribute to Dionysus, the patron of the planet, a traditional vine tattoo would be that of a grape vine honoring his association with wine making and consumption, however Sila’s ink is ever green and lacking a single grape as a promise to herself that she would not end up following in her Mother’s footsteps.  That night was the last time Sila ever partied, and after her arrest somewhere in the deep of the night she was given a choice of joining the military or taking a serious sentence of confinement at last.

Sila enlisted and applying herself to something innately productive and applying her immense skill with computers to her first few postings she was soon nominated for OCS, albeit more for her technical than leadership potential.  Since being commissioned Sila has risen as high as Lieutenant Senior grade and been busted back to Ensign twice.  Her most recent assignment was back where her story began, in the enormous naval shipyards above Scorpia, where she was assigned to work on a stealth technology project.

She was chosen for that top secret posting after several mods she made to her former Raptor assignments allowed her squadron to win a wargames scenario that was supposed to be unsurvivable by managing to cloak her ship and several others with a specially programmed jamming sequence that completely fooled Dradis, even up close.  She quickly transferred out of the program once she realized the tech she was helping develop was meant solely for Vipers and never intended to be applied to the Raptor fleet, or more accurately was busted in rank, again, and barred from the program after she was discovered to be writing a code modification of the stealth program to adapt it to a Raptor profile.

Though she wasn’t near to finishing her, ahem, side project and never had enough security clearance to see the whole scope and breadth of the stealth development program, it is still something she intends to work at as part of her new assignment to Andromeda…and as usual is not about to seek permission or approval to do something that clearly needs done and will save countless lives in her opinion.