Amelia Keeler Whittaker

Amelia Keeler Whittaker

Ship : Airship Isabella

Title : Chief Navigator

Age : Yeah, after all of this crazy jumping it's impossible to tell anymore...38 if years were linear. 120 or somesuch since it's not....occasionally negative whatever....I quit trying to count.

Race : Human

Homeworld : Tetra

Date of Birth : January 1, 1882

Personality
Amelia is a quiet person with a quirky sense of humor. In her interpersonal dealings, she is gentle but firm and is brutally honest even if she knows someone just wants reassurance. That is not in her nature. It's her honest opinion or nothing. Most often she opts for nothing. She's hard to get to know and keeps to herself making her sometime seem like a stranger even within a group. She's not given to rambling and generally has little if any time to waste on superfluous conversation. To her, words are worse than worthless. Actions are all that matters. She is easily irritated by bolstering, exaggerating and empty promises though she won't say anything. It's not worth her time. She has an uncanny sense of a person's truthfulness and motivations though it is by no means infallible. Because of the realization that most people aren't interested in honesty, but in false pretenses and empty words, Amelia prefers to keep to herself and to her books and navigational tables. They won't ask for her opinion and then be offended when she gives it.

Once she has dedicated herself to someone or something, she is fiercely loyal and violently protective. Though her preferred method of fighting is intellectual, she has no qualms about physical violence and will possess no regret if forced to act. Every action is evaluated based on its need and risk, and deserves no rethinking once it is done. Amelia is a very present tense person, mission oriented and focused. She doesn't allow for distractions willingly.

Amelia has a quiet understanding and compassion for genuine insanity and genuine ingenuity. When dealing with these types of people, she is extremely patient and attempts to be helpful though not always succeeding due to her inability to be anything other than brutally honest. In all things. Amelia is stoic, quiet and no nonsense though she isn't cold.

Biography
I was born in outside of Reno, Nevada on New Years Day. As a kid with older brothers, I never really gave much thought about what life was going to be like for a girl in a western town. I played at the river and in the mountains. I rode horses and built tree forts to fend of the imaginary and occasionally not so imaginary Indians. My dad was a prospector, and as his only girl out of 6 children, he really didn’t treat me any different from my brothers. My mother had her hands full with all of us and while she babied me and did her best to turn me into a proper girl, it just wasn’t in my cards. I thrived digging in the dirt and scouting the terrain and helping my dad find new veins and prospects. By the time I was 15, I was an experienced cartographer, scout and navigator. What I didn’t realize was that society was about to turn my world upside down. Reno was in a depression and the mines and prospects weren’t as good as they had been. People were talking about forcing Nevada to go back to being a territory, and my parents thought that it was time I got married. Dad refused to let me go out in the field with him. Mom started forcing me to go to church so I could meet some “respectable” young men. I had no intention of marrying anyone or of settling down. I had spent many an enjoyable afternoon on the river watching the steamboats and airships make port. I determined that I was going to see what was past the mountains and the desert. So one day, I did. I walked up to the nearest airship and asked if they needed a navigator…..and they laughed. But they did give me a job as a cook, and off I went. Being a cook is dirty and boring work, but I was able to pass my time drawing maps of the places we had been and writing short descriptions of all the places we had seen. After a few years, I had amassed quite a collection of papers. And so it went, until one day in September of 1900, we were trying to make port in Galveston when a terrible storm was about to blow through. We were forced to anchor at an Aerodrome in Austin, where we waited out the storm. When we eventually made port, the devastation was unimaginable. Members of the crew, most of whom were from Galveston, rushed out into the devastated city, searching for loved ones and places that were all to obviously no longer there. Most of them came back empty handed and broken….some never came back at all. As we were preparing to leave port, the navigator was no where to be found. Never being one to let an opportunity pass me by even in the worst of situations, I stepped forward and volunteered.

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© Airship Isabella 2012