I'm an Earther, at least I used to be. Born in an agricultural commune in the Alpine region of Europe, the place my mother was from. It still prides itself of being one of the last non-commercial & paleo-communist holdouts in –and I quote the old folks there– the "Capitalist Federation of Greed and Money". For me, it was a fantastic place to grow up – but a hard place to actually be grown-up, especially when you wanted more from life than your home-made cheese and wine (which is not a bad thing in itself). I always wanted to fly and tried to enter the Federal Navy but didn't qualify, in part because my father was a political dissident (yes, those still exist in the Federation), but also because I have a very rare neurological condition that distorts my field of view in hyperspace. In other words, I see weird stuff that isn't there and get slightly panicky.

Anyway, I then tried my luck with the Merchant Navy, which is not a governmental thing (it's the Federation after all...) but a private conglomerate of large trading companies. The one that took me in was Zurich Helvetica, still wondering how I got passed the test. Guess I can hide my inner emotional turmoil well enough, which isn't always a good thing, especially when it comes to building lasting relationships. But that is another story. With ZH I spent quite some time out in Alliance space, where my late father was from. Being a true Leesti person, I was raised on his stories of Evil Juice, Azure Milk, and sticking it to the man. Whatever you might say about the Alliance and it's often perceived byzantine decision processes, it doesn't suck like the Federation, where everything is reduced to a cost-benefit ratio, or the Empire, where you can become a frakkin slave.

Once we were docked planet-side, small outpost station in the dirt but with lots of mineral trading, and a pirate crew attacked. Beam lasers, projectiles, and grenades everywhere, an utter chaos – until an Alliance special-ops team came to the rescue: the "Screaming Firehawks", a band of misfits like no other I've seen, but with hearts of gold (and some of their projectile weapons were using actual gold btw). As fate had it, their pilot was injured during the attack, I actually saved her skin, and so they asked me to aid them in getting to the pirate base. This was my ticket to some other life, or so I thought, and I took it. Well, turns out I was rather good at "that stuff" and was offered the opportunity to join them permanently.

But my mother fell sick back home and so I returned. What are we without family anyway, right? To care for her, I took up a desk job with ZH, which I could mainly do from home. Two years later she was gone, on a wonderful warm and mild late spring morning, the mountain tops blazing in sunlight. I left everything behind after that. Well, there was nothing to sell anyway in our commune, but I knew that this wasn't the life I wanted. Leaving the commune was hard, leaving Earth and the Federation on the other hand... I went back to Alliance space and joined the Firehawks for real. For the next five years or so, I was doing all sorts of missions with them: piloting, spying, search and rescue. They became another family for me. In the end, however, it was clear to me that I need to find my own way independently. It's a big galaxy after all and the rest, as the say, is my history as a freelance Commander.