|

Name: Alejandra De la Rosa
Nickname: Alex
Age: 26
Theme Song:
Blue on Black  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2IfWu0Hz0M
All along the Watch Tower https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhTesTSJbsg
Class: Illustrian
Position in Game: Cybernetics/Robotics/AI -- Contestant
Character Visual: Anna De Armas

|

Appearance and Distinguishing features;
Alejandra De la Rosa cuts a striking figure standing just shy of 5’6”, with shoulder-length black hair, sea-green eyes, and a lithe dancer's build.  If you get close enough you can see the freckles on her cheeks but since she's rarely not wearing makeup, it's hard to tell.   Her natural tan combined with her green eyes belies her oceanic heritage which is unusual in Valport proper because not many Illustrians have it.  The southern reaches of Valport aren't as well off.  Her warm, welcoming smile lights up a room and makes her eyes sparkle. She is lean and muscled but not overly muscular, and she seems to glide when she moves, carrying an uncommon grace, a tribute to her love of dance.  On looks alone, one would never know she spends most of her day in an engineering lab.

When working she tends to wear jeans, heeld boots or shoes, with t-shirts and a hoodie.  Why heels?  It adds to her height so people have to look up to her.  And she just likes them.  Most days she's found in some sort of sundress or skirt, weather permitting.

When out on the town, she’s all glam.  Heels, long dresses with deep slits up the side (she likes the way it makes people trip over themselves when she shows a little leg.).  She also prefers to keep her hair down, styled neatly, with drop-chain style cuff earrings that follow the outline of her ear accompanied by matching rings, necklaces, and bracelets.  She likes blue or black dresses but will occasionally throw a deep purple, red, or white one on to change things up.



She will never go out without dressing up.  Even just going to work her hair is done and her makeup is on.

On the occasion she clubs, it's jeans or a skirt, knee-high boots, and a button-up blouse, something easy to dance in.



Personality: When attending a gala, there is no doubt Alejandra is an aristocrat.  She can pull off the imperious look very well but she can't hold it in for long.  Her warm personality and inviting smile eventually shine through and disarm even the most serious of doubters. Combined with her shapely figure and demure smile, there isn’t much she can’t talk the guys into doing for her.

She sees the fake laughs and false smiles, people pretending to be nice, how their expression changes from one person to the next.  Unlike her parents who seemingly ignore it, she can see it all.  Her analytical mind parsed and analyzed every action and reaction.  Everyone is so fake and she hates it.  Always calculating, always plotting.  That’s part of why she’s always smiling, bubbly and happy.  She refuses to play that game.

In the lab she’s a hurricane, bouncing from piece to piece, sometimes doing half the calculations in her head on the way to a workstation, seemingly distracted all the time.  She’s all business to the point of being short with co-workers when she feels she’s being obvious and they can’t keep up which often presents itself as dry sarcasm. She’s on the next level when it comes to theoretical engineering and forgets that not everyone can keep up.

To her friends…she doesn’t have many though not for lack of trying.  She’s an anathema to many of her contemporaries because the girls want to talk girl stuff or politics and Alex would rather discuss the properties of quantum displacement and string theory.  To the other scientists, she's just…too much. No one really gets her.

On the rare occasion when she lets her hair down to go out, she’s a party girl.  She wants to dance, drink and flirt, mainly to turn her mind off but she never goes too far.

Occupation: Mechanical/Robotics Engineer -- Selected for Trials
Special Talents: She has a good singing voice and on her own has taught herself how to play the piano and guitar.  She's also a talented Gymnast and dancer though she hasn't practiced gymnastics since Carl's death.  She speaks fluent Spanish thanks to her grandmother, though her parents frowned upon it as they felt it as a "low" language.  After finding her great-great-grandfather's videos and notes, she worked hard to emulate his accent just to bug her mother.     Perhaps her greatest and most puzzling gift is her ability to speak to machines.  Yes, she went to school for bio-science and robotics engineering like her parents, but she also inherited her great-great-grandfather's ability to understand machines on an intuitive level, and has a knack for cobbling together stuff that you'd never think would work again.  Old car parts, radios, TVs, robots. It lends a unique insight other scientists can't seem to grasp.  Sometimes she feels she can talk to them better than people.
As an Illustrian, her parents didn't feel it right to teach her firearms as it wasn't "Ladylike", however, one of her personal guards, Syrio Forel, taught her martial arts that complimented her dancer and gymnast skills under the guise of meditation, as well as knife fighting and throwing.


History: Alejandra de la Rosa (Alex to her friends) was born to the prominent De la Rosa family, well-regarded engineers who specialize in cybernetics and robotics. Her great-grandparents pioneered the first cybernetic limb that responded to brain input.  While they were well-off now, it was not always so.  Kara's great-great-grandfather, Roberto De La Rosa, was an Ignoble, growing up in port-side, a small ramshackle settlement far from the glistening lights of Valport.  From a young age, he was fascinated by building and constructing things.  By the age of 5, his parents realized he was a child prodigy as he was building drones, rudimentary cybernetics, and advanced computers in his father's basement, even having never attended school for it.  He would spend his time fixing things, often making them better, free of charge.  This helped his family's station because people started donating to them for his work and help.  By the time he was ready for secondary school he was something of a legend.

Eventually, his genius was discovered when, at the ripe old age of 9, he successfully hacked an Illustrian bank causing several million dollars to be sent to "outreach programs" for the Ignobles.   By the time the cyber crimes division caught up to him, the money was long gone and there was no proof he had done anything.  He learned later that they were watching him and he had great fun playing cat and mouse with the best hackers and computer experts Valport had to offer.

As with all criminal masterminds, his genius eventually caught up with him, landing him in juvenile lockup and eventually a foster home since his parents couldn't pay to have him returned.  While this was a boon for Roberto's future, it devastated his family.  The only benefit of being “incarcerated” in state care, is that he was able to compete for Illustrian sponsorships to attend University.  Eventually succeeding to gain sponsorship, he graduated with a PhD in Cybernetics, Robotics, and AI theory by the time he was 18.  Eventually, as is often the case among Ignobles, his parents grew ill and passed, or so he was told.  He hadn’t been able to see them in nearly 10 years and didn't even have a photo of them.  When their belongings arrived there wasn’t much left as it had seemingly been ransacked by the locals who took anything of value.  Roberto had a hard time believing this because they had been well respected and liked in their neighborhood.

Upon graduation, Roberto was accepted for a position at the university however due to his station he wasn’t allowed to teach or have access to the information and technologies he would need for his work.  Smarter heads prevailed and the university, in exchange for a 20-year contract, sponsored him, effectively raising him to the Prominent class.
During his years at the university, he eventually caught the eye of another engineer, Elizabeth Magnus, herself an Illustrian who was "slumming it" as she called it at the University.  They fell in love and he asked her hand in marriage and she accepted.  Her parents disagreed, an only child of theirs would not marry down but fate it seems, had other plans as both were lost in a car accident before Roberto would ever meet them.
As the new head of the house, Elizabeth had nothing holding her back and they were married.  She took his name and the Magnus family became the De la Rosa's.  For the next 80 years, the family prospered as Roberto and his children all became successful physicists, engineers, doctors, and scientists. The Magnus family estate was located near the northern edges of Valport in a rural area known for rolling hills and picturesque valleys.  While not the epicenter of Valport where the family also held homes, there was a certain quietness to it that kept bringing the family back.

Alejandra De La Rosa was born, the second child of four with a silver spoon in her mouth.  She wanted for nothing.  She had the best tutors, the best teachers, the best of what money could buy.  She was given everything and had everything she could possibly want, except one thing.  Time with her parents.  So devoted to their work, they commonly worked twelve and fifteen-hour days, relegating their only daughter to be raised by the help and her three brothers.  As a result, she had more in common with the nannies than her mother.  Alex and her brothers, because they had to take care of themselves, grew close and were inseparable until they all went their separate ways at the university.

As a child of no wants, she was given chances few others could enjoy.  From an early age and all through primary school, she learned swimming, horseback riding, piano, gymnastics, archery, martial arts (meditation and centering), proper etiquette, and dance.  Due to her intense tutors and teachers, she excelled in math and science though she preferred her time spent in sports and spent hours and hours working on and perfecting her gymnastics. It was the first time she had been part of a "Team" and she loved the feeling of belonging.

It was important to her mother that she learned to be a "lady" and how to act and dress so she grudgingly had to spend time learning which fork was what at dinner and how to look and act "properly".  The more her parents pushed, the more she withdrew, spending more and more time at the family's ranch than in the city.  It was during her time there that she discovered some old boxes of machine parts and her great, great grandfather's old notes stuffed away.  She was fascinated by it and started reading his diary and notes.  IT was here she learned he was born poor, not of the Illustrian class, something her family never spoke about it.   Her parents never really spoke about the family's past and she never questioned it but here it was, right in front of her.  The more she read, the more she actually looked into the past, comparing what was in his notes and diaries to the news stories of the time.  He had a very well-put-together timeline of his parent's purported disappearance. He was a skilled investigator, or at least a prodigy computer specialist who knew how to do his thing.  It was shocking, to say the least, and no wonder it was stuffed away in a shed.  The more she read and compared, the more she saw the discrepancies, the lies, the duplicity.  Almost, more importantly, she had an epiphany.

He was a gifted teacher and mentor.  She quickly discovered she had an innate knack for understanding the machines and her grandfather's teaching methods.  It wasn’t long until she had rebuilt nearly all of his old robots and computers to working condition.  She found she loved working with and on them to the exclusion of just about everything else.  When she was 11 she built her own lab.  And began questioning things.  It concerned and angered her parents who were very self-conscious about their status.

Her parents eventually stopped letting her go to the ranch, preferring her to remain in the city to study and work towards her future as they did.  She was stifled under their direct supervision and she began to resent them and their very strict regimen.  Her parents, father, Michael, and Mother Beverly were two of the top researchers in the bio-sciences department at Val-Tech, working on bionic limb replacement, a natural upgrade to the metal cybernetics their parents had built.

All was not well though.  By the time she was 13, Alejandra was attending galas, dances, and parties that her parents were invited to and she was able to see firsthand how they were welcomed yet shunned.  Her parents were absorbed in their work and never put the time into schmoozing so they weren’t as well regarded as many led them to believe. Something Alex saw right through but they couldn't or wouldn't, see. To them, their work was most important.

To fill the absence of her parents, she looked elsewhere for belonging, diving deep into her studies, doing just enough to keep them off her back.  She found freedom when she turned 16. If you listen to the way her parents tell it, it was a nightmare!

She first met Tony while walking alone in the garden in the family home.  She was scared at first, but he quickly put her at ease.  Most importantly he didn't try and kidnap her!  He wasn't like the others, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, his unkempt hair an unruly mop on his head, and a strange way of phrasing things.  When he left her that first night, she marveled at how he was able to seemingly climb the wall to the compound and vanish. Her first crush.

He would return every couple of weeks and their friendship led to her leaving the compound one night.  She met some of his other friends, they were all dressed like ruffians, but they weren't.  Not really.  She actually recognized many of them as her classmates.  None of them used their real names and seemed comfortable doing so.  The others she learned were not Illustrian but Ignoble or Prominent.  Here they were all treated equally.

Their club had a small hangout in an abandoned building near the edge of downtown where they could see the city lights on one side and the spreading darkness of the countryside on the other.   It was amazing.  As she got to know them, this group was a group of free runners, running through the city any way they could from climbing poles and ladders to leap-frogging walls and even jumping between buildings!  They went places they weren’t “supposed” to go and made great efforts to get videos of it.  They all wore masks and face coverings.  Like the grunge skaters of the old world, they were chased off the property and run off like hooligans.  They didn’t do anything crazy, but they broke curfew, and caused a little mayhem with security guards, but never stole anything or hurt anyone.  It was the first time she had freedom and she loved it!

At first, Rose, as they started calling her, didn’t really want to participate other than liking the fact she had people to hang out with that were fun, but the more she watched and ran with them, the more she went from holding the camera to trying stunts.  From her work as a gymnast, she was a natural!  The first time she lept from one roof to the next nearly 20 feet away she felt like she was flying.  Never had she felt so free.  They ran farther and longer, worked more dangerous climbs, and pushed the boundaries of where she lived.  Alejandra reveled in the freedom they gave her to be herself, not what her parents wanted her to be.  It wasn't without its bumps and bruises though and at times she had to do some quick thinking to appease her parents.

It was during these runs that she caught her first glimpse of how the others lived.  She had gone with her father many times to where the Prominants lived.   They left their gated communities for areas of row housing and apartments.  Some are well-manicured, some not but overall well kept and decent.  The vanguard was out here in their Police uniforms keeping the peace but she could tell they weren’t really needed that much.  The population here was much more than she was used to and people were not quite as friendly though their smiles seemed more genuine and less calculated than she was used to.  Michael prided himself on exposing his daughter to the “underbelly” of society but he hadn’t, not really.

It wasn’t until she joined her “crew”, that she really saw how the Ignobles lived.  She'd never seen their slums.  It had a profound effect on her considering what she had learned about her family's history, but it would be years before she realized it.  With her little group of misfits, she eventually made her way to these slums.  Stark apartments and high-rises where people lived in squaller. She never went alone for she could never fit in no matter how much she “dressed down”, but she made some friends, Annabell, a baker who made the best fresh bread she’d ever had, Ricky, a mechanic who worked on motorcycles and tinkered with robots that she was able to bounce ideas off of and who easily could have been in any one of her advanced classes.  There was Mick, the shoe shiner, and Robert who worked the deli.  There were others as well but none she really ever called friend.   She found ways to help where she could, leaving tips and other "gifts" anonymously with those she liked to spread around.  It was also here that she learned why she was forced to take self-defense lessons when some unsavory types tried to put their hands on her.  As scary as it was, it was exhilarating!  The fight was quick, after they overpowered her initially, she was able to take stock of what was happening and she was able to fight back.  It didn’t take much, none of them were trained.  Once free she ran, and they chased but before they knew it she was up a fence, over a balcony, and on a roof.  She smiled down at them from on high when she heard her friends call.  They ran and ran some more.  For a short few years, they lived!

As a result of her extracurricular activities, her grades slipped, sports suffered, and her scholarships were threatened.  She had lost interest in the other "noble" things her parents thought she should be interested in.  Her forays would eventually come to a terrible halt when one of the boys she was running with slipped and fell to his death.  He was right beside her.  She heard him scream and she knew she couldn’t save him even as she reached for him.  She has never forgotten the look of surprise and fear in his eyes as he fell, the separation of their fingers touching.  She’d never seen anyone die before.

She became depressed and as news that one of her classmates had died, her parents put it together and her father forbade her from ever going “out” without an escort again.  And so she was a prisoner.  Angry and alone, separated from the only friends she had, she railed at the injustice of it!  Eventually, she did the only thing she could, she threw herself into her studies and training, resenting her parents and everything about them.  She found solace in her programming and building. It was the only way she could keep the demons away.

Staying to herself, she went back to the things that made her happy, building.  She joined the engineering team at school and quickly became one of their best builders.  She found that she couldn’t go back to Gymnastics.  Every time she tumbled or worked the beams she would see Carl’s face as he fell, a damning accusation on it of why she couldn’t catch him!

Unable to perform she did the next best thing, she took to her martial arts training and to dance.   The kung fu meditation techniques helped her center herself and working with her grandfather’s gadgets brought her inner peace.  Her grades came back up and she became the “daughter” her parents always wanted.

Alex was accepted to the university on an academic scholarship.   It was here that her talents really came through.  She found her niche, working in Robotics and AI but even after so long, it was clumsy compared to her great-great grandfather's work.  Her thesis was on Artificial Intelligence and its ability to enhance the human condition.  To this end, she worked on human-machine interfaces and AI structures.  Her goal was to create artificial intelligence that could assist in her research without requiring direct commands.  She also used her resources to keep looking into the past.  Why did her great-grandfather's teachings disappear?  When did they diverge from what she saw in h is old lab to now?

This research became broadly defined and inevitably led her to research the trials and the reason for their being.  She'd always watched them with fascination and she loved the Conquerers!  Her research led her to attend more of their events, making it a point to try and meet all she could.  It was something she'd not done since she was a child when she'd been chastised for it by her parents.  They didn't feel these people were to be looked up to.  She needed to find a conquerer that had been around a while, that may have remembered the past.  This is when she first met Jordan Felmore.  Except it wasn't.  The moment she saw him and his bushy eyebrows she flashed back to being 10 when they met at a Gala her parents were attending. He had just won his second trial! She recalled vividly the feeling of his gaze on her, intense, calculating, but warm.  Her parents, not believing in sports worship, had taken her other conquerer photos but she kept this one hidden from them so it was crumpled when she pulled it out.  She never forgot his smile, or the way they talked for what seemed hours until her parents found them at the horsdurves table looking out over the city.

Seeing him again after all this time brought her right back and she felt like a stupid little girl all over again.  She pulled out the old tattered photo he'd signed so many years ago.  Her heart melted, however, when she saw the recognition as she pulled out the old photo.

During her third year of school, her parents surprised her again.  Her father arranged a marriage for her.  A rather uncommon practice but not unheard of.  Long ago a Vanguard officer saved his life during an insurrection when the ignobles stormed the Illiustrious houses.  Her father offered him the moon for this deed but the man simply asked for a future favor to be determined.  Michael agreed and the deal was struck.  The future favor became the hand of Michaels's daughter to his son so that his family might be elevated through their children.  And so it was done. Upon her graduation from the university, she was to be wed to a man she had never met.  She could refuse and bring shame to her family.  This would not only result in losing face for her family but the possibility of her being cast out.  It was the worst two years of her life preparing for a wedding she could not get out of.

Saul Richards, a captain in the Vanguard, was a nice man, well built with a strong jaw and piercing eyes that while fierce, were also soft.  Broad of shoulder and tall in stature, he greeted people with a nod and a strong handshake, a tribute to his military upbringing.  Well respected in the vanguard, he was a fast riser that many predicted would make General one day, if his status would permit it.  He was well-mannered and appeared to be everything one expected from an Officer.  He'd been groomed well by his father. Neither of them wanted it but neither had a choice. Their marriage was kept quiet but information like that can't be quiet forever and they were watched carefully by interested parties as marriages like theirs weren't very common.

While on a trip to one of the border outposts to see Saul, Alex saw Tom, whom she hadn’t seen in nearly 10 years, at one of the market stands and tried to flag him down.  They were at the edge of the border between the Ignoble quarter and the farmlands so she a vanguard escort.  Tom appeared not to notice so she slipped her vanguard escort and disappeared from her convoy so she could talk to him.  She was trying to get him to come over to her when the Vanguard soldiers busted in on them from a nearby alley.

The people with Tom tried to scatter as a shootout ensued.  Ducking for cover she made eye contact with Tom who finally seemed to see her, his eyes widening in recognition.  As the bullets flew he took off.  Saul wasn’t a part of the group that attacked but he joined in to try and protect Alejandra and was wounded badly while his Father who was in the convoy as well, was also critically wounded.  Alex was stuck, not quite sure what was happening, taking cover and trying to save her fiance's life, wondering what Tom has gotten himself into.  She didn't want to be forced into this marriage but the man just ran unarmed through a hail of bullets to save her, that had to count for something.

When it was done, several vanguard soldiers had been killed along with a few Ignobles.  The remaining ignobles escaped into the dark underbelly of the city.  Having ridden in the ambulance with Saul, Alex found the Vanguard police waiting for her at the hospital and she has quickly whisked away.

There was no reason given, not a word was spoken about what was said inside the holding cell, but she was held for a week before being released.  She was able to visit her fiance when she was released and it was then she also learned his father had been badly wounded.  She has ignored or refused all interview requests and spent most of the time in her labs away from people.

When the names were read at the Trials, she was the only one in her family not surprised her name was called.

Family:
Parents: Bethany and Michael De la Rosa Bioscience Engineers at Val-Tech.
Siblings:
Older brother Steven
Younger brothers Christobal and Sebastian

Likes and Dislikes:
Genuine people, people not afraid to ask for help, people who help others, science, engineering, mechanics.  She's an adrenalin junky and now the only thing that really gets her moving is riding her motorcycle since she can't run or tumble due to her mental block on it.



Dislikes
Fake people, liars, hypocrites, bullies, people that only do "just enough".

Worst Fears:
(1) Falling....she has nightmares about reaching for Carl, one of her best friends, who fell to his death. She was next to him when he slipped and she wasn't fast enough to catch him and watched him fall.  The look in his eyes to this day haunts her dreams.
(2) One thing Alex has never told anyone, is that she had been drugged and raped at a Gala by a group of Legacy Family heirs. She had woken up much later in the back of a limo with some other girls and had almost no recollection of the nights events, just hazy details, and how she felt physically after.  There is only one way a person gets sore in certain areas.



Additional Information:
Alejandra's family worked hard to distance themselves from their Ignoble roots to the point of all but ignoring their past, they are very self conscious about it.  She knew nothing of their history until she found her great-great-grandfathers own notebook and diary.  He was considered a great teacher after researching it, nearly all of his teachings had been altered in the books of today.

Her parents only go to Gala's and events because they "must", not because they're trying to meet and greet or create contacts.  This has isolated them from many potential friends and allies.   Her Grandmother still taught her Spanish though it's considered a "low" language in Valport and isn't very common outside the southern districts where her grandfather was born.