Srilana "Sri" Nutmoon



Description

Srilana (or "Sri", as she likes to be called) is a 34-yo Aurin of average height/build with blue skin and blue-gray eyes. She wears her blue-black hair in a kind of fluffy ponytail, sometimes with her favorite trucker hat or adventuring goggles. Somewhat superstitious, Sri likes to wear symbols that are evocative of the random nature of the universe. For example, she wears a pair of dice as ear ornaments, and has an enormous appetite for lucky hats.

Sri is nearly always smiling, as if she's enjoying a private joke, her eyes fixated on some distant spot as she imagines one of a dozen possibilities. From this and the way she talks, people around her may get the impression she's in her own strange world where words mean something different than normal. She is either in one of two modes: very still and serene, or very fast and spazzy.



Typically, Sri wears contemporary hard-wear synthetics fabricated from local materials, favoring a short jacket paired with long pants. Sri loves pockets, which can contain almost anything. When she is working on-planet (see Business below), she will be wearing her a short jacket with some kind of hat (photo, left side). When socializing or shopping, she likes to wear clothing with red or red accents in dressed-down, semi-casual attire (photo, center). She likes shoes that let her toes feel the ground when she's feeling relaxed and casual.

Sri busies herself with the responsibilities of maintaining [ Hayboria ], an autonomous collective ruled by a benevolent co-monarchy consisting of herself and a close cohort of like-minded friends.

Personality

At 34, Sri is a slightly older-than-average compared to the settlers typically found on Nexus. Her sense of happiness is generally self-contained and not dependent on others. However, she intensely dislikes conflict and mean comments, brooding quietly until she senses an opportunity to make a positive contribution to the conversation.

Sri has quite an active mind that is given to flights of crazy optimism, and sees evidence of goodness in everyone around her. She is drawn to people who she thinks are grumpy but show signs of being actually nice, giving them many opportunities to prove that her hunch was correct. Sri gets particularly excited when she encounters someone who is about to embark on a big dream or challenge.

Sri is often painfully positive, contorting her interpretation of the facts before her into a semblance more of her liking, which tends to annoy the grumpier denizens of Nexus. She will not usually engage first in conversation when around strangers, but her curiosity eventually gets the better of her and she she will start to pepper them with questions in rapid succession. She's aware that she sometimes goes TOO far with this, and will abruptly stop talking when she finds herself in that situation, abruptly self-conscious.

At times, Sri will also bombard people with advice, based on her own experiences and beliefs, particularly when the subject is that of relationships, being true to yourself, and being positive about the future. Sri has a LOT to say on this, having done quite a bit of thinking on these matters. At times, her comments may be perceived as unnecessarily blunt, but they are not meant unkindly.

Sri is quite immune to advances and other romantic gestures, either not noticing them at all or pretending she doesn't when it finally dawns on her what is going on. While an engaging and conversational soul, there is an intensely private side to her. She can be uncharacteristically snappish when pushed on it, though she is getting better at catching herself and redirecting her displeasure into more constructive expression.

Like many Aurin, Sri is a hugger, though she's aware that other races don't always react well to it all the time and has tempered her inclination to hug everything around her. She has practiced the "fist bump" as the universal way to express enthusiasm with the more stand-offish races, after which she will cheer loudly. She finds it extremely funny for some reason, and she's still getting the hang of it, sometimes offering them at inappropriate moments.

Biography



Sri was just 15 when the Exile Fleet landed on the Aurin Homeworld to resupply. Cheerful and innately curious, she was quickly befriended by a group of Exiles who happened to specialize in agricultural planting/harvesting technology.

Sri gained a working knowledge of simple tractors and related harvesting equipment from her human friend Mitch Hutchinson, a blond-haired settler who conveyed to Sri his philosophy of the "life and desires of machines". A talented mechanic, Mitch performed arcane feats of repair using little more than his intuitive and masterful grasp of mechanical engineering, which left quite an impression on an awestruck Sri. It is from this early exposure that Sri developed her own belief in the "machine version" of the Aurin Weave, the energy that binds and guides all nature. "The Machine Weave", as she sometimes calls it, is based on a story that Mitch told her about "the lives of machines", which became apparently if you "knew how to listen to their voices". Sri's exposure to the wonders of Nexus and its many mechanical inhabitants give her no reason to believe that this is not the case.

By the time the Dominion's Planet Reapers invaded Arboria 16 years later, Srilana had become a fairly competent technologist (by Aurin standards) and ran a small business fixing various gadgets left over from the Exiles' visit. This did not prepare her for the horror of giant Chua-driven death-dealing machines; Sri suffered a kind of identity crisis with regard to her previously-unconditional love of machinery. Sri found her grasp of the "Machine Weave" no help in the battle against the heavily-armored Reapers, and was forced to flee aboard the Gambler's Ruin with the other survivors of her race. Having lost her tribe and feeling overwhelmed and useless, Sri withdrew into a deep funk, not speaking for weeks, even as she was put into cryosleep for the journey to newly-discovered Nexus.

Emerging from cryosleep with memories of despair still fresh, Sri nevertheless found herself energized by the excitement of new possibilities on Nexus, and by being among races of all kinds once more. She finds it difficult to hate, despite everything she's experienced, and this is a source of conflict within her...is it something she should feel, particularly toward the Dominion? She desperately wants to see harmony restored, retaining some of the simple innocence from her youthful beliefs, but is slowing starting to grasp that the world will never be, for her, that way again. 

Past Business Activities

WANDERING AGROTECH - Sri has traveled around Nexus as a contract agrotech, fixing domestic machinery and buildings as she comes across them. She also started a correspondence course in the fabrication of light armor as a means to supplement her income while between contracts, but has not gotten very far in it.

GRINDSHARE LLRP - Sri found herself wishing that she was not always doing her contract work by herself, and has looked for a suitable organization to join. She realized one day that there was nothing stopping her from trying an experiment of her own: offering a "grind share" service where other Exiles on a mission could team-up for a time with no permanent contract. Nearly every task, Sri reasoned, would be much more enjoyable, and so she formed a cooperative that helps connect adventurers with other adventurers for their grouping needs. GrindShare LLC operated briefly before being absorbed into a larger company offering a similar service. See the [ GrindShare LLRP ] datachron entry for more information.

HAYBORIA - With the modest proceeds from the sale of GrindShare LLRP, Sri had the means to lease a skyplot from Protostar. After dabbling in a few crafts and building projects that didn't go anywhere, Sri was struck by a powerful vision: a world made of hay piles for as far as the eye could see. Sri started with a small mound of hay to test the suspected awesomeness of the concept, and upon validation created the Nexus Hay Emporium. After her good friends PEPPERCORN and OUTO came to visit, it became obvious that a grander name was needed to capture the sheer amount of awesomeness that piles of hay bring, and thus THE GOLDEN FIELDS OF HAYBORIA were established. See the [ Hayboria ] datacron entry for more information.

THE BUG CRACKERY - Sri has perfected her mother's original bug cracker recipe, and has been encouraged to start selling crackers in pre-packaged form out of Hayboria. There are currently three flavors. See [ The Bug Crackery ] datachron entry for more information.