Zara Ibeji (D18)

Zara Ibeji (born 35 years before the Cylon War) is an experienced Raptor Pilot at the rank of Captain assigned to the Battlestar Pacifica.

She is from Saggitaron, growing up in a single parent household in the Tawa slums. Her mother had at one point been a small-time healer who prepared herbal remedies and natural medicines, but had then turned to supplying 'soft drugs' to soldiers stationed in the Capital; be they local or foreign 'peacekeepers' from Leonis and Virgon.

Zara can't remember her 'home' exactly because she was kept at a 'cafe' on the edge of her poor neighbourhood, where she'd clean dishes and serve out 'pot-luck' food to customers while her mother dealed out other things.

There were long stretches where Zara was left unsupervised; her mother would head out into the mountains to source what she needed to continue scrounging a living. The young Ibeji was expected to look after herself while her mother slipped into dirtier dealings.

When Zara's mother fell pregnant she was expected to look after the little shopfront cafe and the 'lean-to' they owned. Zara's mother died during childbirth and this immediately changed everything. Unsure how to cope, she took her newly born twin sisters with her to a Virgon run health clinic. From there they were taken from her and she never saw them again. All three Ibeji children were placed in a Virgon administered care program and while the bureacracy of the organisation had the little twins were taken offworld, Zara was schooled in a Tawa orphanage. Devastated and alone, it was Zara's determination to make something off herself that had her voraciously devour tattered and donated learning material-with a kind of hunger for knowledge that Saggitarons were naturally weary off. She enlisted in Saggitaron's security forces at sixteen and worked on hand-me-down Phoenix's until tapped on the shoulder, by chance more than anything, to train to fly them (it meant becoming an Officer, which lowered life expectancy within the Security service; mostly due to fragging and terrorist targetting).

She trained on Leonis on newer Pheonix marks and noticed worlds beyond her own. Again with an atypical attitude towards engaging with the worlds, Zara did what she could to stall returning to Tawa. Firstly by 'exchanging' with Leonan formations that were funding elements of Saggitaron's security forces or directly training them and then attaching herself to the piloting team of Saggitaron's embassy on Libran. She married a human rights lawyer from Picon while living on Themis.

At the time of the formation of the Colonial Fleet, Zara was fighting off fever (Libran's insects being somehow especially attracted to the Saggitaron) with prayer and by chewing sprigs of something green, when she was picked for Raptor training. The embassy had volunteered most of their pilots to the United Colonies Military and her extensive hours made Raptor training a possibility. Zara was qualified on the Raptor quickly and assigned to independent anti-Cylon patrols of spacelanes before being taken aboard the Pacifica for a tour.

Traits
Older but small made and still of youthful features, Zara is pretty and keeps her dark hair long, though in uniform it is tied up rather tightly. She is light-eyed, with a wicked, distinctive smile. The pilot is professional but quiet and doesn't really say much to her ECO; she is still very much haunted by her childhood and though she has found happiness on Libran wonders about her sisters whom she doesn't know off and has started to search for with the help of her husband (who had been investigating human rights violations on Saggitaron before the War began). She is concerned about long tours aboard a Battlestar because it means stretches of time without her partner. The two hope to have a child.