Username: rokudara
Character: Lucy Belle Sonn
Character Race: Human
Lucy Belle Sonn is from a far away planet, having wanted to escape her life and memories. Start fresh, so to speak. She has an engineering degree which was the main reason why NT hired her, saying that she was fit to be an atmospherics technician.
My username is rokudara (Haven’t seen the option where I had to state it.)
Guess, since I am already waiting, I type here my entire backstory since it is a bit longer than just 1000 characters:
Lucy Belle Sonn never meant to end up lightyears from Luna-7. Then again, she never meant for a lot of things.
The station’s atmos hum soothes her. Pipes don’t ask questions. Scrubbers don’t care about the tremor in her hands when someone shouts too loud. She knows the grid better than the lines of Clara’s face—used to know Clara’s face. Three years, and she still tastes iron when she remembers finding her in the hydroponic garden, wrist slit beside half-pruned lavender stalks. The wedding dress hung in the next room. Unworn.
NT didn’t ask why a Luna-7 engineering prodigy would take a grunt job hauling canisters. They saw the degree, not the way she flinched at the clink of glasses during her interview. (Clara drank amaretto that morning. Said it’d “steady her nerves.” The bottle was still in her hand when—)
Cowardice clings to Lucy like O2 to a plasma fire. She ducks brawls in the hallway, hides in maintenance shafts during revolver-grey shifts. Let the sec officers sneer. Let the engineers call her a one-trick pony. Atmos is all she’s got. All she’s ever had.
Until her new friend from botany gets pinned under a ruptured coolant line. Until she’s ripping open panels with bare hands, ignoring the hiss of freezing air chewing her fingertips. It’s not bravery. It’s the math: Someone should make it out. Might as well be them.
They find her afterwards, curled in a supply closet, gloves fused to bleeding skin. “Why’d you do it?” they ask.
She doesn’t say it’s because they laugh like Clara did—sharp, sudden, like a star igniting. Doesn’t say she’s already dead. Just mumbles something about pressure gradients.
The lavender plant in her quarters never blooms. She waters it anyway.
The medics keep a file on her now. “High-risk altruism,” the report says, like it’s some syndrome instead of common sense. Lucy tears the copy they give her into confetti. Lets the pieces float into the disposals chute. She’s no hero—heroes don’t piss themselves during electrical storms when the lights flicker like Clara’s stupid fairy string lights she hung above their bed.
But the station’s full of ghosts who don’t play fair.
Like when the new hire in cargo offers her synthwhiskey after shift. Just a sip, he insists, all grinning teeth and oblivious eyes. The smell alone knots her stomach. She stammers an excuse, trips over a loose floor panel fleeing to atmos. Spends six hours realigning the turbine flow, scrubbing until her nostrils burn with filtered air instead of phantom amaretto.
They call her reliable. Dependable. Predictable. Lucy clocks the whispers. Lets them think she’s just another gear in NT’s machine. Better than them knowing the truth: the only reason she remembers every valve rotation, every thermal threshold, is because if she stops focusing, the memories leak in.
Clara’s hands, calloused from gardening, tracing the freckles on Lucy’s shoulder. “You’re my atmosphere,” she’d joked. “Life support.”
The first time Lucy jams a crowbar into a malfunctioning supermatter valve to save a clueless intern, she almost laughs. This is what NT thinks competent looks like? Screaming into a headset while radiation warnings blare? She gets a commendation. A sticker shaped like a star.
She sticks it to the wall above her cot. Pokes the peeling edges when the nightmares come.
It’s not that she wants to die. Dying’s too clean. Too easy. But when Cargo Officer Riggs gets his boot magnetized to a live reactor coil during a blackout, Lucy’s already halfway across the sector, wrenches clattering from her toolbelt. Her hands move before her brain catches up—cutting power grids, overriding safeties, all while Riggs babbles about his kids back on Mars.
Later, they’ll ask why her teeth were chattering. She’ll blame the coolant leak. Not the way Riggs’ daughter’s name—Lila—rhymes with Clara.
Her quarters smell like static and wilted lavender. The plant’s down to one stubborn leaf. Sometimes she talks to it. Tells it about pressure differentials. Never about the wedding playlist still rotting in her PDA.
Lucy Belle Sonn survives.
She’s good at that.
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