Lydia Patra
Black Widow
Lydia "Black Widow" Patra
WM-402-01
Good girls wear black.
NAME: Lydia 'Black Widow' Patra
FACTION: Fel Empire
RANK:
SPECIES: Human
AGE: 29
SEX: Female
HEIGHT: 5'1, 155cm"
WEIGHT: 46kg, 101lb
EYES: Brown
HAIR: Red
SKIN: Never sees sunlight...
FORCE SENSITIVE: No.
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES :Ace of Aces - The best there is, the best there was, the best there ever will be. Lydia is trained and experienced to the peak of perfection as a pilot, with the kills and the skills to match. There are few better pilots in any navy in the galaxy in a small craft. The Black Widow obtained 13 kills in a TIE/ln and 12 in a TIE/in before being promoted to piloting a TIE/Defender Elite.
Catlike Reflexes - Lydia's kinesthetic senses and reflexes score at the top of the the charts for a non-force sensistive human. The result is that in a spacecraft or out of one she is graceful, acrobatic and a dead eye shot who is almost impossible to pin down. She's not unhittable or unable to miss by any means, but some of the stunts she can pull have to be seen to be believed.
Test Pilot - Lydia spent a great deal of time following her injury with the Advanced Weapons Division, working to advance Imperial Technology. If it flies and has flown under the Imperial banner or been captured by the Imperial forces, she can probably fly it and has flown it once. She can make her craft do things they shouldn't and is as skilled as any flight crew mechanic in their workings - and how to erase gun-camera footage that looks bad. Also the eight crashes during this period also give testimony to the most important skill for a TIE or test pilot - somehow, she can survive nearly any spacecraft disaster in a fighter... of course, the craft normally doesn't...
Leader & Mentor - Some people just rub off on others well - and Lydia is one of them. Training scores for any unit she is assigned to and particularly in command of inevitably show in the highest decile. Her people will follow her into almost any situation and are often trained well enough to get back out of the situation she got them into...
War Wounds - One life-threatening crash and eight... well... lets call them close calls later, Lydia is as much machine as woman, with advanced cybernetic replacements holding together most of her bodily functions. She does not react well to Ion fire.
Trouble - Discipline is life in the Imperial Navy. But somehow, that message never quite got through to Lydia. If there's an illegal still, gambling ring or scam going on, chances are the commander knows about and is probably involved. Worse, from a superiors perspective, her laxity extends to policing her unit. She will obey every combat order given - and her unit will follow her into the gates of the Netherworld. But she's just a bit to... lax to ever gain full trust or rank.
Don't Tell Me the Odds - Lydia isn't what you'd call a calculated risk taker, she's what you'd call a risk taker. She doesn't care about the odds - and that gets people hurt or killed, not her (so far, anyway) but people loyal to her often take fire for her. It also (inevitably) puts her at the heart of any conflict if she can manage it, even when loss is likely.
Honourable - For most pilots, this isn't a flaw. But it is for an Imperial naval pilot. She won't shoot ejected enemies, even if ordered. If an enemy aircraft is crippled, she'll break off and not finish the kill. She will shoot at transports with civilians in them - but inevitably aiming to cripple rather than kill. She also expects every other pilot to obey the same rules, which leaves her open to ruses and other deceptions from less scrupulous individuals.
APPEARANCE:
Five feet of red-head fury, Lydia Patra is not among the tallest of women - she tends to literally look up to most people, but you'd never know it from her stance or manner. She radiates an aura that somehow makes her larger than life - perhaps its her stance, perhaps its something else. She's attractive, certainly - she's fit, as any TIE pilot has to be. She overly pale as she rarely sees unfiltered sunlight. But none of those things quite add up to the sense of presence she gives off.
BIOGRAPHY:
The first daughter of a long line of Imperial 'nobility' (in the form of Moff after Moff), it was expected that Lydia would one day enter Imperial Service. What no one in her family expected was that she would chose the Imperial Navy rather than a political arm, never mind scoring high enough for the suicide track that many considered the Imperial Starfighter Corps to be - even after hundreds of years and multiple different governments and rulers, the Imperial Remnant adopted swarm tactics over the individual fighters of the 'rebel' Alliance.
But some people just have a talent. Some people have more than one, and it soon turned out that Lydia had a talent for two things, one of which pleased her family, the other of which... did not. Lydia's scores on all entry and final exams blew the roof off the curve, her performance in simulators was unmatched in her class and remains rarely matched today. When put into an actual combat situation, she made a TIE/ln do things that it's designers still claim it cannot do, even having seen the footage. Unfortunately, her track record of minor disciplinary breaches nearly ended her career until someone in Imperial Naval Command took notice of her unique skills (and flaws) and quietly ensured she was assigned to more... forgiving ship captains and wing commanders. Many say that swift action would have quashed her talent for trouble, but others point out that Imperial aces tend, on the whole, to break the mould of even the elite TIE pilots somewhat.
Her penchant for taking risks earned her six weeks in bacta and a year in regeneration, cybernetics and rehab when a close range volley pass with proton torpdeos which crippled a pirate frigate before it could jump to hyperspace and resulted in the recovery of a years worth of tibanna gas went... awry. The value of the recovered tibanna and (perhaps more tellingly) the recovery of the planetary governors kidnapped family resulted in her promotion to an officer rank.
In order to keep the potential infestation of her attitude and (perhaps) calm her a little, she was transfered to the Starfighter branch of the Advanced Weapons Division - which resulted in her participation in several innovations in Imperial technology, exposure to the majority of the galaxies fighting spacefighters and proof to almost all she had at least nine lives... and may be on her ninth.
Her sponsor felt that time as a test pilot was perhaps... unfitting for such an asset, particularly one who seemed to have a talent for training others and ensured that she was redeployed to an elite TIE/Defender squadron as the XO. Unit scores climbed. Personal kill scores grew higher and when the unit CO was transferred out to a higher rank, even her detractors admitted she had earned her shot at command of the 402nd, nicknamed (in contravention of Imperial policy) 'the Widowmakers' after their new CO.
Unfortunately for all of them, it turned out that Lydia had a hidden sense of morality - perhaps not one in line with the perceptions of the Galactic Alliance, but her response to the appalling casualties generated by the Galactic Empire in its failed conquests and struggling defences of its territory, combined with first hand exposure to the... interests of the Inquisition lead this firebrand to decide that perhaps there were better places to use her talent.
Then the Fel Empire raised it's banner once again - Lydia was enough of a student of history to see a stand worth fighting for when she saw it. After a discussion with her fellow elite pilots, the Widowmakers did what they did best, and vanished without a trace.
Now with war coming to the galaxy, it's time for the Black Widow to live up to her reputation on the largest scale of all...
(Note: This character is clearly based on Starbuck - and on someone who doesn't quite fit in the organisation they're in, as much as they fight for it. However she is intended as loyal Imperial who supports the concepts of Peace, Order and Security. She's just not always very good at the trival bits of Order...)
SHIP:
WM-402-01 TIE/DE - TIE/Defender Elite
WM-402-13 TIE/ph - TIE Phantom
Squadron:
The Widowmakers
KILLS:
None.
ROLE-PLAYS:
Coming soon.
(Inspirations: Kara 'Starbuck' Trace, Countess Iran Ryad, Valentina Tereshkova, Alexa Bliss, Lydia Litvyak & Yekaterina Budanova, Franz Stigler, Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen)
