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Crew Manifest
Specs/History

Crew Manifest
Specs/History

Harper, Leda



Family and Personal History

Leda Harper hails from the fringes of frontier space. Her home system, Shadra, hosts a world called Selvine which has been the focus of terraforming efforts for much of a century. The project has become somewhat infamous for ill luck over the years. The space station overseeing the process, NV-12, was inevitably nicknamed ‘Twelfth of Never’ after a first few disastrous decades of setbacks. Despite endless challenges, the Federation staff on NV-12 has painstakingly pulled the planet through to habitability. Selvine itself is a slightly-larger-than-Earth, 63%-water planet with two serviceable moons (one mass-boosted in from an outer-system gas giant), mildly saline oceans and well-established Earth-baseline simple plant and animal life – a success built the slow way. With the final colonization push imminent, a flurry of activity has blown into the local system as potential colonists, industrialists and the occasional pirate seek to establish toeholds in what may become the gateway to an entire new sector for the Federation.

Child of scientist parents and born on NV-12, Leda spent much of her youth skimming through the system on projects designed to redirect local resources to Selvine. She grew up on ships and stations, learning the business of planetary reformation from hands-on experience. A sturdy, determined girl, she excelled in geological sciences and enjoyed an eccentric education patched together from her
parents’ personal experience and the knowledge shared by the entirety of the terraforming team. As the first local-born child, she enjoyed something like mascot status. Unflappable, quietly stoic and possessed of a doggedly diplomatic streak, Harper proved a useful stabilizing agent in the increasingly volatile mix of incoming sapients at NV-12.

An assignment at the station tavern – ‘The Eleventh Hour’, naturally – as a server and greeter became a semi-formal post as a constable with the station’s population steadily growing; the local sheriff, a retired Federation Marine, taught her to shoot and fight hand-to-hand. She would probably never have been given a sidearm if anyone at NV-12 had thought any serious threat would ever materialize. Unfortunately, in 2387, a splinter group of exiled Romulans made an attempt at taking the station – with no major Federation presence anywhere nearby, they might have had a shot at occupying NV-12 and fortifying Selvine. With much of the terraforming staff out on a far-system run, a motley assortment of station crew, security and assorted visitors of varying legal status mounted a resistance. Fighting was fierce for four days, with both sides trying desperately not to damage the station itself too badly – running battles through corridors and maintenance tunnels with hand weapons were the order of the day. NV-12’s resistance finally managed to kill most of the invaders through a plan which involved crippling the Romulan vessel with a repurposed, point-blank torpedo and a simultaneous venting of the atmosphere on the section of station onto which they’d latched their ship.

Leda, one of the saboteurs, was caught in the vented residential area when a section of the hull was blown out by a Romulan phaser strike. While she was able to scramble to an airtight compartment, subsequent explosions crushed her safe space down to nearly nothing. Her legs were pinned by a chunk of the station, her pelvis and many of her other bones shattered. Barely breathing and chilled to near the point of death, she was plucked from the wreckage by the returning terraforming crew. Heroic efforts by the station’s medical staff saved her life, but not her legs. With few options available on the fringe of civilized space and Federation support on the way but still weeks out, the entire Shadra population threw themselves into saving their injured. By the time the Feds finally made it in, the station had been patched, the Romulan ship half skeletonized for parts, and the engineers had built Leda a set of inelegant but functional prosthetics.

The Harpers succeeded in calling in some favors with old colleagues within the command structure. Leda was shipped back to Earth and Starfleet Academy, with promises of healing, therapy and education. She did not thrive at first in the Academy environment; her unorthodox upbringing and a by-now ingrained mistrust of authority, not to mention raw irritation at being stuck planetside, made her a difficult first-year student. While she found ways to excel in some of the sciences, her experiences at NV-12 had left her determined to follow a different path. She eventually opted for Marine training and has secondary expertise as a field medic.

Her prosthetics have been the object of constant tinkering. Leda has persistently refused cosmetic upgrades, and the injuries she suffered have required extensive skeletal reconstruction. Notably, her pelvis has been completely replaced by metal and ceramics. The spine, ribs and shoulders have all been extensively reinforced. Several lower abdominal organs were too badly damaged to salvage, and have been replaced or removed. Both legs are now sophisticated prostheses; some of the Starfleet engineers and medical staff were eager to put cutting-edge tech to use in the field. Synthetic muscle and military-grade metallurgy have provided Leda with fully functioning,
surprisingly powerful limbs.

Leda Harper is roughly five foot ten, a woman of sturdy build and narrow waist, strong and flexible thanks to military training. She weighs far more than she looks to thanks to the prosthetic legs she wears. These legs are permanently built into her frame, synthetic fiber-weave muscle blending up over hips and back to anchor them. Their surface is a subtly metallic woven bronze color, nearly matching her skin tone. She wears her thick black hair cut to just more than shoulder length, long enough to pull up into a regulation bun when necessary. Her profile is a little hawkish, her jawline strong, brows emphatic, mouth quick to smile or to scowl.

Medical History

Leda has sensation in her legs, though not a lot – pressure, temperature. The armored surface is a sort of fiber weave, and as such has some give. A stylus’ tip dragged across the surface will bring a dimple with it, as with an overstuffed vinyl-coated cushion. Limb structure looks pretty conventional, but there are a few oddities. Knees are double jointed; hips are flexible to match any professional acrobat’s, perhaps a little more. Foot structure is designed to pack down into a conventional uniform boot and latches together to look fairly unremarkable, but can separate into three long toes, the ‘big’ one hinged to act as a thumb. She can extend heel spurs and stubby, but sharp, claws on each toe. There are a few other modifications beyond the skeletal, notably the brain interface that integrates her prostheses.

Additional Information

She loves running and climbing, and has become something of a master at both. Much of her holodeck time is spent on Selvine’s young, rough surface, exploring coastlines and cliffs. The toe claws and a set of wrist-braced gloves allow her to scramble up and over precarious surfaces. Her parents update her with regular satellite and ground-based data so that holographic reconstructions will be mostly up to date.

Her scientific education is rough-edged, and she tends to work on instinct more than anything, with an intuitive understanding of the evolution of planetary systems and the management of large masses in near-zero gravity. Give her an asteroid belt and she’ll plot ways to slingshot every last pebble into a chosen orbit.

The physical changes she’s been through have given her a taste for acrobatics and hand-to-hand combat. From the waist up she’s all wiry muscle to match the legs.

Leda’s relationship with the doctor who developed and installed her legs, Charles Fenton, is tense. They are civil enough, which is just as well as he’s still monitoring performance and expecting to make remote tweaks as she performs in the field. Fenton is something of a closet transhumanist, not a particularly popular philosophy, and has a different emotional investment in Harper’s long-term development than she does. The term ‘Galatea’ came up as her graduation from Starfleet Academy neared; their argument didn’t quite get to shouting and throwing things but veered dangerously close.