Gina "Toasty" Velasquez

Note: Full character sheet found in discussion thread. Picture used as inspiration for her appearance (credit to the artist): http://postimg.org/image/wzqu46xrd/

For all the great contributions to the Alliance and their history of resilience that humanity in this era can rightly brag of, sometimes the greatest of advancements are used to enable old forms of villainy. Cycles of spite are perpetuated, distant corners of inhabited space come under the control of petty tyrants who rule through corruption and naked intimidation. On distant worlds in the far future, such as Wen's Landing, the secrets of interstellar travel have just spread an ancient fact of life - poor, primitive lands riven by conflict between thugs and strongmen trying to control the export of pharmacological substances - to a thousand new places. Now, robotics, particle weaponry, and psychic miracles join the machete and the rifle as a means to wealth and power, over the bodies of as many as it takes.

The loose cannon-ball of a psion by the name Gina Velasquez, combat alias "Toasty", hails from this particular world. Having not been formally accepted into the Alliance yet, her world of Wen's Landing - though well-populated with millions of colonists due to the ample natural resources of its tropical forests - is a lawless frontier with only a few strategically important towns kept safe and orderly by Alliance peacekeepers, everything else being left to the 'law of the jungle', as it were. Originally colonized by humans and soon after opening its borders to goz settlers, the endless wandering of the zasarians led to a small fleet of them making planetfall and stubbornly trying to seize enough land and slaves to build their own little empire. A local group of small time criminals went big time, organizing around the symbol of the Black Rose and starting to cultivate rare medicinal and psychoactive plants for export in order to fund the low-level conflict with the zasarian intruders.

Their operations proved more successful than they'd thought, and soon, they gained close connections with other interplanetary cartels and mafias. Looking for a niche away from the well-policed core of human space, enterprising organizations of "merchants" from the recently contacted interplanetary civilization based on Yomi came to Wen's Landing. Consisting mostly of kitsunes with a sizable minority of tengu, these 'Bakuto' as they called themselves got along well with the human locals at first, but inevitably, the wealth of Wen's Landing proved to be both too much and too little for them to share. What's worse, the zasarians discovered how much they could trade certain commodities from the planet for on the interstellar market, and ramped up their slavery operations and expanded into neighboring star systems as a result. Deciding it couldn't be fouled much worse, many human colonies used it as a location for building private prisons to house the worst interstellar criminals - when these rough characters were released or escaped, they stuck around, contributing to the exploding population. Now, large portions of Wen's Landing are covered with sprawling ramshackle cities known as favelas. Profits are so high that powerful interests stop the Alliance from moving in and establishing martial law. And so, the contagion of Wen's Landing spreads to every star-lane it touches. All but the most exotic vices are sold there, and cheaply at that.

Wen's Landing is now a savage world ruled by gangs and pirates, particularly these three syndicates. Gina remembers seeing one village after another overrun by these ruthless beings, her parents and four siblings always one step ahead, trying to maintain their freedom but unwilling and unable to fight back, always running. Five years ago their luck finally ran out, and she is now the only one not yet dead or enslaved. This long, sad story warped her psychic development (in both senses of the word 'psychic') but was never able to totally crush an appreciation for justice and fairness out of her. It's just that from her perspective, the only way to make progress towards either of those ideals involved an awful lot of killing.

Like many psionic reavers, Gina cultivates a reckless, devil-may-care appearance. A tan-skinned, dark haired woman in her mid-twenties with near ideal 35-29-37 measurements, her body is toned and athletic without compromising her lush curves. Like most colonists on her homeworld she was genetically modified, sharpening important senses on a world full of toxic plant and animal life and helping sculpt and hone her physique as well. With a deceptively innocent, wide-eyed face and a little button of a nose, she can be charming even when carrying a vicious weapon or two. She keeps her unkempt black hair trimmed very short in a masculine haircut (a pragmatic consideration considering her affinity for solving problems with fire) and her typical choices of dress are provocative to say the least. Her favorite choice is a dark green one-piece bathing suit, a short-sleeve babydoll tee shirt, thigh-high stockings with purple and white stripes, and a simple pair of old-fashioned lace-up sneakers. The way the stretched fabric of her one-piece wedges in the tight space between her ample ass cheeks and rides high enough against her crotch to give a clear view of her pubic mound has helped prove a vital distraction more than once, and always makes her popular in the seedier establishments.

Many female combatants appear at first to be going into battle almost-naked, but in the majority of cases these women are actually wearing translucent skin-tight bodysuits that can be seen at close range from the reflective sheen it acquires in direct light. "Toasty" Velasquez, on the other hand, is wearing just as little as she first appears to be. Of course, being a psychic, she can easily surround herself with formidable telekinetic armor. Her nickname is partly derived from her love of excessively destructive weapons to go along with her violent powers, and partly because her genetic enhancements make her comfortable even in very hot or cold temperatures.

After a few early solo strikes on her declared enemies, Gina has fled into the depths of one of Wen's Landing's overgrown urban sprawls and is temporarily laying low. Her supply of credits has dwindled to nonexistent, and though the higher ups of the crime syndicates still don't know her specific identity (on account of a lack of survivors from her preliminary excursions), if she confronts them directly they'll be ready to descend on her. Therefore Gina has changed tactics from straightforward to trying to gather information and favors so she can go after the leadership of her three targets: the Yomi Bakuto, the Black Rose syndicate, and the Zoxx swarm zasarians. To that end, she's been working as a freelance enforcer - and when that doesn't pay the bills, she's discovered a useful backup vocation of working as a call-girl (and sometimes also bodyguard) for wealthy off-world visitors. Her current hangout is the 'Down Quark Motel', a huge blocky building full of tiny rooms, ship hangars, garages and gambling dens. Her main friend and partner in crime is Rodi Sheesh, a female grey who runs the karaoke bar which Gina sleeps in the loft above.

Gina's personality is smooth, sarcastic, and cynical - in many ways she is the prototypical anti-heroine taking care of dirty business in the dark side of the galaxy, and she seldom hesitates to call things the way she sees them. She's not the most loyal or reliable woman, but so far she's managed to thread the needle of being reckless enough to get things done but not quite so headstrong that she self-immolates. Her current plan of action is to swallow her pride, do as many dirty jobs as she needs to earn a pile of credits, and then bribe her way into seeing the upper echelons of the scum who ruined her life and her planet. She knows she'll have to go on the run if she survives, and that's quite an "if". But some part of her wonders why she shouldn't just try to take over for herself instead, and what the real point of her seedy crusade is. Having telekinetic abilities literally powered by spite and arrogance, Gina sometimes cannot help but be a little self-aware, and whether she sticks to her current methodology.

Personality profile: Like any psionic reaver, Velasquez is an angry woman, but in her case it is a constant low-level smoldering that produces proverbial smoke but rarely burns bright enough to see. Shrieking berserk rages aren't her style at all, and when she's in the thick of combat, her facial expression is more often one of smirking contempt. She's partial to making snide comments before and/or after she kills someone who she thinks has it coming (and that's a very broad category). Gina is painfully aware of how close she comes to being as bad as the people she fights, and occasionally gives a token effort at being a good person to make up for it. At the very least, she goes out of her way not to harm innocent bystanders, and has developed a skill to make her telekinetic bursts selectively lethal. Having lost her family and her sisters to enslavement, Gina often fixates on victimized persons who catch her eye, particularly younger females, and shows her warmer, more protective side to them.

Sexual skills and profile: In game terms, Velasquez has a relatively average spread of stats with an above-average libido:

• Sexual Endurance:7
• Sexual Prowess: 5
• Sexual Resistance: 6
• Libido: 7

Aside from dressing provocatively, Velasquez isn't the type who is constantly flirty regardless of the situation. She is relatively passive about such matters except when she wants something. Although Velasquez has a nice body that happens to be very sensitive, her abilities as a lover are merely average, as she's used to partners with unrefined tastes and tends to focus on making herself feel good more than her partner. Part of her genetic enhancements (which were marketed to humans by the greys, so go figure) increases her arousal reactions but only enough to compensate for her naturally reserved personality - she'll start feeling good no matter what you do to her but you'll need to do whatever it is pretty hard to get a reaction out of her.

Sexual orientation and kinks: Bisexual with a lean towards straight sex for all the wrong reasons. When she was growing up, her parents always kept her carefully isolated from the seedier side of human(oid) interaction on Wen's Landing, but all that did was create a forbidden-fruit effect in Gina, especially when her psychic abilities awakened. She has a dark sexuality and frequently seeks out situations where power and play a role; Gina secretly enjoys both being degraded or bossed around, and seeing it happen to others. Having been feared or hated for her power much of her life, Gina can seldom resist the opportunity to be someone else's plaything, and she thrives on fooling around in risky venues like public places.