Shine Cycle Character Profile: Esmeralda

This is the next in the series of profiles of characters who will appear in the Shine Cycle, my fantasy-series-in-preparation.

Esmeralda – Captain of a nation whose ancestors once traveled between universes but had lost that technology (and much else); under her leadership they regained it and joined the Alliance. She now represents her people in the Council of Worlds.

A short, slim, and wiry woman with closely cut bluish-blonde hair. After spending several years in space in ships without reliable artificial gravity, she prefers a fitted and padded athletic costume to robes, even for formal occasions.

Esmeralda is a strong leader, who has earned the trust of her people several times over, but had it from the beginning of her career. Her instinctive grasp of astrogation (and interuniversal navigation), which carried through several different universes where the relevant mathematics was completely different and incompatible, led her to resist, and then have some difficulty, learning the mathematics and other theory behind those disciplines.

Esmeralda came from a hereditary line of leaders of her people; the roots of their government in their interuniversal travels are visible in the fact that the title of each of these rulers has been “Captain.” Her grandfather was the first in his line to live to middle age for centuries, so even though her father died fairly young she did not have to take the position before she was fully trained.

As a child, she was taught, and then continued to study on her own, in the arts of statecraft, war, and politics and such sciences as her people retained the knowledge and tools to apply. She showed something of a gift for mathematics, but was not able to spend much time on it, because her teachers assumed that she would have to take over leadership sooner rather than later and so emphasized the most urgent and practical needs for that role.

In young adulthood, at the age many of her predecessors had been forced to take full command, Esmeralda served in her grandfather’s army and government, in a variety of roles under, alongside, and above most of her grandfather’s commanders. In between assignments, she studied the mathematics and theoretical science of what they called the “Lost Arts,” piecing together knowledge from what fragmentary records of the technology of transportation between universes survived. She began to develop her own ideas of what might fit into the large gaps in their knowledge, but with her grandfather focused tightly on his own priorities and his officers all much older than she was, she kept her thoughts to herself.

On her accession to the Captaincy, however, she gave orders to form two teams of scholars. She directed the first group to investigate her hunches as to the missing ideas that could allow them to regain their lost technology, and the second to consider how their nation could and should respond if either they succeeded or someone from another world initiated contact with them.

Five years after her accession, scholars discovered a library of texts exploring “alternative mathematics” in the depths of her family’s archives. These works described and developed models that were self-consistent within each text, but that did not accurately describe the world they lived in. Esmeralda found this idea fascinating, and in as much of her time as she could spare from the affairs of state, she began studying these new discoveries alongside her researchers.

About a decade after that, her scholars made the final breakthrough that allowed them to bring the moribund interuniversal transit technology back into working order. Actually doing so, applying the experimentally-verified theory to the engineering task of recommissioning equipment that had been left to rust, took about another five years.

The first expedition, other than “test flights,” using the newly-refurbished technology was a voyage of exploration. In the “nearby” world in which the travelers found themselves, they discovered a strong but friendly nation, which was willing to let them set up an embassy, begin trade with its people, and even use that world as a staging point for further expeditions.

After hearing this report, Esmeralda joined the next delegation visiting that world. While there, she met representatives of the Alliance, and began negotiations to trade with them and their allies. About three years later, she was invited to Capitol to address the Imperial Parliament.

While in Capitol, she learned of several star systems, far above the flat world of the two continents, that remained uninhabited by any sentient beings but that were far more hospitable than her people’s current home. On her return to her people, she reminded them of their former life as interuniversal nomads, and began plans to move to a new home. They assembled a fleet, which lifted off nine years to the day after she addressed the Imperial Parliament.

After her people had settled in their new home, Esmeralda again visited Capitol, and agreed to join the Alliance and accept a seat on the Council of Worlds.

Filed under: Character Profiles