Kaylee

PLAYER

NAME: Del
PERSONAL LJ: zenzaan
OOC COMM? YES /o/

EMAIL/MESSENGER(S): deliriouskitty@gmail.com * AIM: rockartistkitty * Skype: alittledelirious

TIMEZONE: GMT + 9 (Tokyo time)


CHARACTER

NAME(S): Kaywinnit Lee (Kaylee) Frye
FANDOM: Firefly
BACKGROUND HISTORY:
Kaylee didn’t start off with money or soldierin’ or schoolin’ like most of the others on Serenity. She had a fair decent life, mind, on a nice little out-of-the-way planet (the colloquial term might be something more like “backwater moon”) with decent, hard-working settlers. Her papa was a mechanic, and she probably spent more time on the floor of his shop than anywhere else, except maybe out runnin’ around the place.

Time passed, little girl grew into a young woman, and one day a beautiful, glittery transport ship came winging on down through the atmosphere. Okay, she was actually kinda maybe on fire, just a bit, and could use some fixin’ up sure, but she only found that out after she joined the crew.

Now as to how that happened, she met one crewman before all the rest, and that was Bester. He was the ship’s mechanic and a smooth-talker, or at least he fancied himself so, but what really got her engine running was, well, the engine room. Kaylee had never seen a Firefly-class ship like Serenity before, but she could tell from the start the lady had quite a personality. And an engine problem, what she noticed from her convenient position on her back, although Bester’s head sorta got in the way a lot.

At that particular time the captain walked in and started hollering about getting the ship fixed, and seemed that Bester didn’t have much more going on in his head than in his pants, so Kaylee pointed out the problem and fixed it lickity-split. She got hired on the spot, and she’s run with the ship and her people ever since. She did feel a pinch of regret about Captain Reynolds giving the old mechanic the boot, but she figured it was a good exchange of labor, her takin’ care of Serenity while Bester got the tractor engines and farm girls more suited to his talents.

Earlier during the year they picked up a few passengers on Persephone, a sorta base-camp planet for the under-the-radar work that earns the crew their bread ’n butter. Two of those joined up permanent-like; a preacherman who knows an awful lot about fightin’ for someone who’s supposed to be saving people’s souls, and a city-bred doctor used to be a big-time surgeon on a central Alliance planet, but now… Simon gave all that up to look after his sister, River, who ain’t really right in the head and he thinks it’s maybe the Alliance did it to her, and they’re both fugitives now. Kaylee’s took a shine to him, but sometimes his fancy sensibilities are downright frustrating and she feels like he looks down on the crew just ‘cause their criminal records involve a lot more stealing.

As for that crime business, it’s amazingly hard to make an honest living as a smuggling crew. Last time they actually had a job go through with no hitches or great moral dilemmatry tripping it up was...okay that pretty much never happens. But they DID come out ahead on the last job, even though Simon and River and Jayne almost got caught breaking into an Alliance medical complex so they could take pictures of River’s brain and get a good haul of meds to sell along to those as need ‘em on the border planets the Alliance don’t do much good for. Kaylee got to re-build a scrapped ambulance plane for that one.

TIMELINE SUMMARY:
She’s comin’ in after episode 9, “Ariel” – the whole crew pulled together like nothin’ else to pull a big caper on a central Alliance planet. For once, everything worked out and nobody got shot or left behind or dropped the pay or nothing! Kaylee has recently had to deal with the possibility of losing her home in the previous episode, “Out of Gas,” so she may be a mite less shaken under these circumstances. After all, she ain’t in the black of space with hours of oxygen left and a split-up family and a dying Captain left behind on a dying ship. Last she remembered, Serenity and her crew were all safe and sound, and they’re prob’ly lookin’ for her right now.

PERSONALITY:
Kaylee is someone who prefers to look at the bright side of things, but she knows how to take the dark in stride. As long as it isn’t too dark – Reavers, for example, the inhuman people who roam the edges of Alliance space raping and maiming and eating their victims raw and wearing their skins, well, those sorts of things do shake up her deeply-held belief in the inherent goodness of people. She gets very upset when faced with a situation where someone has no qualms about maliciously hurting another person or sabotaging her ship, Serenity being just as much a person to her as her other shipmates.

“Simple” is exactly the wrong word for her, though it is how many others would describe her. Those people just don’t know her, though. She simply operates with an easy acceptance of complicated situations that more lettered persons might insist require serious and deep and profound consideration. The way machines work, for example, or the really convoluted ways relationships play out. Kaylee just doesn’t give over much to speculation; she observes things and reacts to them as they are right now. Can’t do nothin’ about the past, and the future’s always just a heartbeat away.

One big side-effect of her almost zen-like sunny outlook, though, is that she doesn’t do especially well with nasty surprises. Unfortunately, being on Serenity puts a person in a position of attracting that kinda thing. Gunfights, kidnappings, hostage situations, just about every unpleasant set of relations you could imagine playing out between a smuggling crew and their clientele / the law / random passers-by, Kaylee has seen it unfold in uncomfortably close quarters.

On the other hand, none of these things have left lasting wounds in her. Um, figuratively; she’ll always have a little dimple from that one time she got shot in the stomach. But that wasn’t anybody’s fault, not really. She firmly believes that most of these terrible things are just a matter of circumstances. If things were different, people wouldn’t go hurtin’ on each other, but then if wishes were fishes Serenity’d be an aquarium.

SPECIAL ABILITIES:
Things of a mechanical nature confuse and frustrate lots of folks, but not Kaylee. Fixin’ stuff’s as natural to her as tying shoes. She’s best with engines and the like, but she’s never met a piece of machinery she didn’t like – well, except them real nasty Alliance guns, but it’s mostly the hurting people she doesn’t like about ‘em, and she could still probably take one apart and put it back together again. With a trigger mechanism that’ll stay good an’ jammed forever >:\


SAMPLES

THIRD PERSON:
Her first thought was that she’d had waaaaay too much of Jayne’s moonshine in the messhall last night. She’d been trying to teach Simon a drinking game, only the good doctor just couldn’t get through his pretty head the idea that folks like to get drunk, and so the game bit of it really wasn’t working out, and then she was laughing really hard at something Wash said and then she was in her bunk with the whole ship spinning.

And the whole ship had still been spinning when she woke up. Only, it wasn’t her ship, and it had a serious problem with its stabilizing conduit ‘cause the thing was buckin’ like an unbroke horse.

Kaylee attempted to stand up, tripped on the cuffs of her own overalls and went reeling into a wooden dresser. She clutched onto it for several long seconds until the urge to throw up was finally gone. That would be from the moonshine, then. But what in the ‘verse could be the cause of her waking up in a place other than her own bunk? Well, she wasn’t tied up, or hurtin’ in any way besides what the hangover’d do to her, so that like as not meant it was okay to explore and find out. She tried a few halting steps towards the door, getting a feel for the ship’s reeling back and forth. Almost had a rhythm to it.

“Captaaaain? Simoooon?” She eased open the door and had a peek out into an empty hallway, lit only by a shaft of light coming in from somewhere above. Kaylee sighted a ladder up to a real shoddily-made hatch of some kind. All wood. That was…weird. Who’d use that kinda material in a pressurized cabin?

“’Naraaa? Anybody…” She’d even be okay with seeing Jayne’s smirking, gristly face on the other side of this hatch, just for a hint of familiar- “Oh my—whah?...” This…was not a space-faring ship. She was on-planet. Somewhere. In one of them rickety pirate-boat things like from the stories of Earth-That-Was she’d heard at her daddy’s knee.

A wide smile broke out across the young woman’s face and instantly brightened away the traces of hangover and confusion. She rushed to the nearest person on deck, an older gentleman who happened to look official-like in his snappy uniform and funny hat. “Hey mister! Where’s the boat goin’? What planet we on anyway? Oh, and have you seen a—”

“We are due to make port in Rivelata within the hour,” the man stiffly interjected. He gave her grease-stained, ratty overalls a disparaging look and added, “You may wish to inquire about employment once we arrive. I hear the workhouses are always in need of more hands.” He then handed over a small bundle containing what looked like some useless bits of metal, like them fancy ladies’ pins only there was no fastener on ‘em, and a very pretty book.

“Well thank y—” But the official, whoever he was, had whisked himself away before she had a chance to ask about paying for the book and the trinkets, or why she was getting them in the first place.

Oh well. There were plenty of other people about who looked less busy than the stuffy old goat anyway. And wow what a view! Kaylee was drawn to the side of the ship by the evening – or was it morning? – sun casting a red-golden trail of light onto the sea. She leaned against the railing to take in the smell of the water, the wood of the ship, the people on board, all mixed into the air of their pretty planet. Didn’t smell nothing like home, but it wasn’t too bad a place to wake up in, either.


FIRST PERSON:
[A few clicks and rustling noises sound off intermittently, followed by a young woman’s clear, perky voice]

Hello? Well I’ll be – it works! [delighted giggling, after which comes a brief pause, then another click]

[Words begin to appear in a softly curled script]
I dunno how this even all works. It’s like magic! I’d take apart the book to see, only it’s a real book, near as I can tell, and there ain’t no way there’s a touchscreen interface fits inside a thing made outta paper and cowhide, I don’t even think the Alliance c

[writing pauses, then picks up again]
am I on one of the central planets? Can’t be, we passed the last check-point [another, longer pause] WEEKS ago. No, months. Definitely months. Ain’t been near Alliance central for ages at any rate.

So, how’d I get here? Where’s here, and where’s my friends and my ship? Captain, if you’re reading this, I mean they say other people can see it in their talking picture writey book things, too, so if you can, please please lemme know where you and Serenity are.