#1 – Danielle Kostra

 

And we’re off!  Since today was rather busy on the day job front, I only have a pencil image today.  In any event, please give a warm welcome to Danielle Kostra.

Danielle is a biologist, specializing in non-terrestrial arthropods.  If it has an exoskeleton and no relations to Earth life, she wants to know everything about it.  And, as one of dozens of biologists aboard the Concordat Grand Survey Ship Tyio-9, she is pretty much in her dream job.  The Grand Survey’s mission is to explore every star in the galaxy, spending about a year in each.   With close to 400 billion stars, that’s a lot of worlds… and a lot of bugs, crustaceans and other exoskeletal creatures that evolution can cook up.

Danielle herself is not Earth-born.  She’s from Sapphire, a beautiful world orbiting the star Epsilon Indi, and colonized by one of Earth’s slow-ships.  When humanity was inducted into the Concordat (a vast collective of over 70 races, some of them extremely advanced), they gained access to the FTL technology that allows other Concordat races to hop across the galaxy with the same ease modern commuters can jet around the world.  Still, Danielle and her fellow humans do face some issues, as many of the younger Concordat members feel threatened by each new arrival.  Prejudice and mistrust have caused more than their fair share of friction between humans and their new allies, and people like Danielle, working on the front line of the Concordat’s push into the galaxy, can sometimes be caught in the middle.

Category: 2013, Scifi