Name: Valen Calabrica Age: 22 (August 12, 3286) Gender: Female Height: 5'8"

Valen Calabrica was born to a cadet branch of a minor noble on the fringes of Imperial space. As Counts of Tarun, one of many titles created en-masse by the ambitious King Apollo Sitakapa, their sovereign domain consisted of a patch of scraggly bushland, an asteroid field full of slag bricks, and six orchards that bloom beautiful every spring but tend to skip bearing fruit every few harvest seasons. It seemed, in the year 3286, that the one thing the Calabrica family had to their name was their honor. Outside of the opulent population centers of Capital City and its peers within the Empire, even lesser nobility have little to their name. Thus, Valen and her extended family worked alongside their vassals and serfs in the fields, growing the produce that urban lords ate. Thus sets the scene for one young girl's upbringing, on the fair green surfaces of Sitakapa A8, affectionately called "Giossi" by the colonists. The client of a client, she tilled the ground alongside her mother and father, living the agricultural life as was common on earth-like frontier worlds.

Whether fortune was good or ill, Valen spent long hours transporting goods from one end of the system to the other. Perhaps, in the Federation, there might have been a law prohibiting the piloting of a ship by an early teen whose arms can barely reach the throttle when pressed back against the seat. Out in the Imperial backwaters, such a law would be irrelevant. The family kept an old Sidewinder, a bucket of rusty screws, which year after year continued to baffle the family by continuing to operate. Valen, it could be said, grew up in the cockpit of a ship. She showed an inherent knack for navigating the path that the stars led her in, the invisible tendrils of trade that stretched from planet to station to stations and planets in entire other systems. Not only that, but she had an eagle's eye for ship conflict, which would prove valuable in unsafe space. One of her proudest moments involved her fighting off a pirate, wearing down their hull with nothing but a pair of pulse lasers. During those years, the novel Frame Shift Drive was first being installed on the newest publicly available ships. Larger plantations on Sitakapa, seeing the path that this technology was leading towards, immediately invested in ships outfitted with this mechanism. The primitive Type 2b drives on many smaller farmers' ships proved incapable of competing, and her family was no exception. This, ultimately, would prove to be the straw that broke the roof of their livelihood.

During this time, Mario, a compassionate reformer at heart, was beginning to associate with circles some at the time might have regarded as dangerously radical. These circles called for the destruction of certain facets of imperial society, prime amongst them the practice of owning and trading in humans as slaves. These factions looked to the rising star in the Imperial political scene, Aisling Duval, as their leader in spirit. Mario, along with his son Quirinus, began extending his network of associates across the entirety of imperial space, including certain members of what would eventually become the leadership within Cubeo itself. Their ardent devotion to the cause resulted in the Calabrica family name slowly losing favor in Sitakapa, which would come to an unfortunate conclusion when the organization that tentatively supported them, the Sitakapa Empire League, began crumbling within due to the chaos. Reformers and conservatives tore the faction into bickering halves, creating a power vacuum wherein a reactionary voice, the Sitakapa Expeditionary Force could exploit. All this combined resulted in the planet becoming seized by the neck, whose hand belonged to a jingoist regime that saw fit to quickly discredit Mario Calabrica and all on Giossi who associated with him.

From there, it was a quick spiral downwards. Valen's parents, meanwhile, saw the future quickly creeping up on them. Their debts were beginning to catch up, and in an act of foresight they arranged for Valen to come under the custody of the main branch of the family, selling themselves into slavery to save their daughter from a lingering debt. The stress of their world coming down upon them killed Mario and devastated Quirinus. His will was a curious matter, but one that Quirinus was more than happy to arrange. The will split his duties into two portions. One, his county, was to be passed through by conventional succession to Quirinus. However, the honorary position of Senator in the Prismatic Imperium was to fall to the secondary branch, who "in inability to comply", would ultimately end up in Valen's hands. Furthermore, it called for the remains of his income, as well as various favors he has accrued, to be put into his passion for space travel. In short, he wanted to turn Valen not only into a senator in a far-off faction, but a CMDR as well. In his capacity as a count, it was manageable for Quirinus to arrange a notice of sponsorship in the Pilot's Federation, fast-tracking Valen into their registers. From there, it was a hop, skip, and a goodbye to all the life that she had ever known as she left Giossi in the back of a Type-6 for the last time.