Sumire Meyer

"I know that "Pomme De Terre" means "potato." My ancestors came from the planet Potato. It took some time for me to accept that, but hey, here we are."

Sumire Meyer is an impoverished noble and your crew's chief navigator.

Background
A scion of a minor noble family, House Meyer, Sumire comes from a background of old money and political flight. After her family made a fortune on Rasalhague, then forced to flee to the Taurian Concordat, Sumire wound up growing up on New Vandenberg: A lovely planet where a good two thirds of native fauna has feathers. Surrounded by a culture obsessed with birds and suffering constant predations by hungry gulls and finches with irritable bowels, Sumire developed a healthy hatred of all things bird.

Unfortunately, she had to live for years under the shadow of the winged creatures until she escaped it for training on the Taurian Naval Institute on Lompoc Station orbiting New Vandenberg. She earned her DropShip and JumpShip operation certificates in four years. Her peers generally kept her at arms length, as she was both a civilian permitted to attend TNI thanks to her parents' political connections and a noble. She subsequently earned her stripes working for commercial jump crews, but then switched to mercenary flights with the Marauders after realizing that the job was mostly jump sickness with little flying.

She's had little choice in the matter. After her family was pauperized by the flight from House Kurita to the Concordat, she lost her brother David to the Third Succession War and her parents to blood cancer and heart disease. Either was treatable, but House Meyer's bank accounts were depleted at that point and they couldn't afford treatment. As such, Sumire is like many nobles in the war-torn galaxy: Impoverished, determined, and with naught but a family name to remind her of a glorious past.

She never really knew her past. Her parents said they were landowners on Pomme De Terre, an agricultural world and the breadbasket of the Draconic Combine. The Potato planet was good to the family: House Meyer's holdings were meager, but the value of that land was astronomical. For minor nobility, they were really very wealthy, but when the Third Succession War took place and the rhetoric got ugly, her parents fled the Combine - and if House Calderon denied them asylum in the Concordat, likely would have ended up in the dirt.