Miranda Collins, Lt. JG
¶ Overview
- Full Name: Miranda Nicole Collins
- Codename: Lysander
- Species: Human
- Ethnicity: ???
- Nationality: League
- Height: 152cm (5'0")
- Born: 2670
- Place of Birth: Neo-Athens, Calysto
- Gender: Female
- Sex: Female
- Sexual Identity: Bisexual (strong male preference)
- Faction: League
Miranda is a young officer in the League Navy who has gained the notice of Alastair McKenzie due to her talent for tactical analysis and her raw skill in leadership and ship handling. She impressed the Admiral when he ran a special simulator event at the Naval Academy and she helped her group even the odds after McKenzie's facalty group gutted the green officers in what was arguably and unfair fight.
Miranda is a classic over-achiever, very skilled at multiple disciplines and unable to focus on just one. It is clear from the different positions she's been put in so far McKenzie views her as a possible heir, once she gets enough training.
¶ Physical Description
Miranda is a short, muscular woman with a slight pear-shape to her body. She has amber eyes and short brown hair. When she is out of uniform she is almost always wearing something bright orange; orange is her favorite color, followed closely by grey, and then purple.
¶ Personality
Miranda is a genuinely kind, caring individual. She hasn't had the easiest of lives, but approaches adversity with a smile. She is socially anxious and sometimes awkward because of it, but overall is a very charming person. People just sort of like her and want to help her. She's what some might call a 'charmed' person; people actively want to be her friend and fight for her.
¶ Special Abilities
¶ Martial Arts Prowess
Miranda is exceptionally skilled at hand to hand combat, mastering several styles of martial arts. Despite her smaller size and weaker build, she uses these weaknesses as a strength, using her superior agility and her opponent's larger size against them. She isn't the best martial artist, but she's good enough to win smaller tournaments and generally be able to be one of the best on any ship she serves.
¶ Melee Weapons
Miranda also likes to train with more archaic weapons like swords. She has won a few tournaments, though most of the people who enter those are hobiests. While on leace, she's competed in a few more serious, underground tournaments in Freelance space, and finds those competitions much more to her skillset.
¶ Tactical Ability
Miranda has a gifted mind for strategy, able to far outperform with limited resources. She made a name with herself by nearly besting Admiral McKenzie in a training exercise, getting a devistating blow on him after her ship was considered disabled and defeated. She is often considered one of the best tacticians in the entire League.
¶ Engineering Ability
Given her upbringing in the Daughters of Hekate, Miranda was expected to put her intelligence to work building the cult's special brand of technology. She's more of a generalist and tinkerer rather than an engineer, but this gives her a more rounded approach then a lot of specialists.
¶ Musical Aptitude
Miranda has a good ear for music, a moderately fine singing voice, and average skill with a violin. She loves classical music (violin pieces specifically) and can play a piano enough to work through cords, or very simple pieces.
¶ History
¶ Early Life
Miranda was born as the only child of Heather Collins, the dynamic founder of the Daughters of Hekate. Styling herself as the mortal form of the actual Greek Goddess, Heather set Miranda up as her obvious heir, claiming that Miranda was a 'special child', and would 'change the galaxy'. All of this was before Miranda could even walk.
As she grew up, Miranda was forced to learn musical instruments (of which the only one she enjoyed was violin) as well as classic games of strategy such as shogi, go and chess. By the time she was 12, she had achieved the ranks of 7-dan in shogi, 9-dan (professional) in go, and a 2960 in chess, making her the second youngest person in League history to achieve such high ranks in all three 'classic' tactical games.
¶ Exhibition Matches
Miranda was often paired against some of the most talented and brilliant 'prodigies' or 'masters' in a given game or field and forced to compete in exhibition matches that her mother used to boost the Daughters reputation, as well as her own. Miranda often did well, though the existence of Dante meant Miranda was almost always 'second'; while Miranda is a genius in her own right, her entire existence didn't resolve around these accolades and she mainly only did them out of fear of displeasing her mother.
By the time she became a teenager, that fear has evaporated.
¶ Rebelious Years
From about age thirteen to eighteen, the friction between Miranda and her mother grew. Miranda had little interest in the Daughters and retreated from public life to pursue her own engineering interests in privacy, only using a few sympathetic members of the Daughters to help feed that particular interest.
¶ Emory Shipwrights
One particularly sympathetic person was Tahla Emory, who seemed to see some of herself in Miranda. It became clear that Miranda was never going to be a business mogal like her mother, but she was brilliant, charasmatic, and just pissed off at the world enough to try to take risks.
Tahla set Miranda up with a used/outdated lab that was otherwise unoccupied, and under the condition that Emory would get first-purchase rights on anything useful she came up with. Miranda didn't care; she just wanted to be left alone for days tinkering with whatever had caught her fancy. She did enough moonlight engineering work for Emory to pay for her own room and board, being self sufficient before she could legally be emancipated from her mother, which she did (with Tahla's help) at 16.
Unknown to Miranda, Tahla and Heather had an understanding. Tahla would keep an eye on Miranda, and keep her out of any scandals, away from any of Heather's growing list of enemies, and keep her from doing anything too dangerous. In return, Tahla became a member of Heather's inner circle, her power and influence growing inside the Daughters.
Unfortunately for both women, Miranda had plans of her own, and used her time at Emory to build contacts inside the League Military, getting all her ducks in a row to apply the to League Naval Academy by the time she turned 18, regardless of what anyone else said.
Plans in hand, Miranda showed up unannounced to one of Coven meetings of her mother's inner circle, and anounced her intention to apply. She requested Tahla sponsor her; if she did, Miranda would be able to use her time at Emory as an internship and qualify for a full scholarship. If not, she'd just sold Emory all of her current and past designs, for a hefty 1.8 million credits, enabling her to pay her own way and live rather comfortably. Since the sale was finalized and had not involved Tahla, there was nothing she could do to stop it.
With a sigh and poorly hidden look of pride, Heather told the rest of the Coven that her daughter would gain useful insight into the mechanics of war from this journey, and wished Miranda luck.
¶ Naval Academy
Miranda thrived at the Naval Academy. She loved the classes, she loved learning, but most of all, she loved competing with people who had no idea who she was. Because her mother's moniker never included her last name, 'Cadet Collins', was just one of dozens of bright students, all trying to outdo each other. She quickly learned that she coudl play the role of the 'quiet smart girl', only getting noticed when she wanted, and be left alone to just do her thing most of the time. Her first few years were heaven, compared to the constant shadow of her mother that had hung over her.
¶ Academic Excellence
Miranda was always a top marks student, but she hadn't ever had to apply herself. That changed once her professors noticed just how smart she was; she was placed in advanced classes and forced to study to keep her grades. It was a struggle for the first semester, but after that, she seemed to find her groove.
¶ Combat Training
It was in the Academy's combat training that she found one of her true passions: martial arts. It was something she wasn't naturally good at, but enjoyed, so she worked incredibly hard. For once in her life, she felt like her progress was her own, not something that came from born talent, or the careful grooming of her mother. It was a defining moment for her, and something she feels changed the course of her life.
Miranda excelled in hand to
hand combat in the academy
¶ Catching McKenzie's Attention
During her third year at the academy, Mirand signed up for a special lecture by Admiral McKenzie. Because of her time at Emory, she'd studdied a lot about modern ship design, and the curious stort of the brilliant ship designer turned Head of League Intelligence had come up. She was curious about what such an interesting individual might have to say. The topic was "Fleet Tactical Theory: Strategic Considerations and Practical Applications", which had the word 'tactics' in it, so she thought she might enjoy it.
Little did she know it was actually a mock battle in disguise. The students were paired up in groups of six, and escorted to the academy's simulators with no warning. They were given the instructions of deciding who would man what station, and their orders were to defend the theoretical colony world in the system, nothing more.
Miranda's group had barely even figured out who would man what stations before all hell broke loose. McKenzie and a fleet run by academy instructors and off-duty officers jumped into the system and with a coordinated attack started carving up the student fleet. Over fifty percent of the simulated ships were disabled or destroyed in the first minute.
Miranda, too annoyed by the bait-and-switch to think, started barking orders to her group, despite being at the engineering station. Silently the rest of the students opted to make her captain, and she got her ship out of the fray, and immediately started coordinating with the survivors. She got enough distance between her ships and those of the instructors, became the defacto fleet commander, and immediately started punching back, taking a few of the intstuctor ships in the confusion of their sudden turn around.
Seeing the suddent coordination, McKenzie figured out which ship was now giving orders and immediately set about disabling it. He hunted her down and pummled her ship with volleys of missiles. Knowing there was no way she could survive a drag out fight, she had her ship play dead after the first salvo, simulating damage. She then came up with a clever way to take advantage of the fact that both fleets were League ships, and crafted a ECM program to load onto the simulator computers so that, briefly, she could convince an incoming flight of missies that her ship was McKenzie's, and McKenzie's was hers.
Waiting until he was in a fight with some of the remaining studen forces, she had her ship thottle up to full emergency power, and started firing continuously. Ever misssile left was flying towards him. She even had the ammo for damaged tubes dumped into space and activated those missiles. Before he could react, he had nearly twelve hundred missiles all flying directly for him. He countered with a slavo of her own, but she used her ECM trick and his own missiled joined the assault on his ship.
McKenzie's ship was declared destroyed, taking him out of the fight. One of the other instructor ships took her out, but the confusion of losing their flagship cost the instructors momentum. By the time the simulation was over, the fleet losses were roughly equal on both sides. A few other talented students had picked up on what Miranda was doing and continued to use the same tactics even after she was taken out of the fight.
¶ Aftermath
McKenzie was very impressed by her performance. She was given special praise and from this point forward, there was an unspoken assumption that she was now one of 'McKenzie's people', and it was clear her carreer was going to be watched and guided by the head of Naval Intelligence.
¶ Naval Career
¶ Intelligence Analyst
Miranda's first assignment, to no one's surprise, was as an analyst for Naval Intelligence. Typically this is the first stepping stone to a career as an Operative, and everyone assumed McKenzie had tapped her for exactly that. However, only 18 months in, she was transfered again.
¶ Shakedown Cruise
Miranda was tapped to help with a new cruiser's shakedown cruise, as an Engineer's Assistant. Such high-profile assignments are rarely given to people with such little experience, especially those not on an engineering track. However, she excelled, loving her time helping to troubleshoot a new ship.
¶ Bureau of Ships
Just as she was starting to settle in, Miranda was transfered, again, to the Bureau of Ships, as a junior designer. She spent six months there, mainly trying to leverage her time at Emory to some good use, but getting shut down a lot by the older designers. After what felt like a waste of everyone's time, she was transfered after only six months.
¶ Ops Officer, LXS Archigos
Her most recent transfer has been to the Archigos, as an operations officer. Yet another coveted position, but there's now rumors about why she's being bounced around so fast. Miranda worries this will ultimately hurt her career, though, it's hard to say how even a short tour on the Archigos could ever hurt someone's career.
¶ Ships
- LXS Archigos - Took over as Captain during the battle of Tel'Erani.
- LXS Rekonin - Given captency after the events of Tel'Erani.
¶ Major Associations
¶ Heather Collins
- Relation: Mother
Miranda and her mother almost never see eye to eye. Her mother loves her, but is mostly focused on Miranda's 'potential' and her 'future', not who Mirand is, or what Miranda wants. Her mother loves her, and says so freely, but also rarely shows it. Miranda has come to accept the fact that her mother is... a complicated, frustrating, manipulative person, and it is what it is.
From Miranda's side, there's no complication. She wants her mother to love her for who she is, she doesn't seem insterest in that, so Miranda avoids her. She loves her mother, but loving someone doesn't mean you need contact with them. She knows her mother has enough spies, she doesn't feel the need to call home, or talk to anyone about it.
¶ Tahla Emory
- Relation: Benefactor, Rolemodel
Miranda views Tahla as both a rolemodel in a lot of ways, and the mother she wished she had. She knows that Tahla isn't perfect; she knows the woman can be overly strict and has seen enough of the strained relationship she has with her own son, but for Miranda, Tahla was exactly what she needed at exactly the right time, so she will always feel grateful to the woman.
Even now she has regular contact with her, always remembering to send her a message or call on important dates. They have a friendly relationship, though it's perhaps a bit cooler than Miranda would prefer, and she's always looking for Tahla to be proud of her.
¶ Alastair McKenzie
- Relation: Sponsor / Benefactor
Miranda has had very few interactions with Admiral McKenzie directly. She talked to him after her first time meeting him at that special lecture where she kicked his ass, but since then they've exchanged maybe a dozen words, most of which were welcoming her to his team when she got her assignment as an analyst. Everyone says she's clearly 'one of McKenzie's people', but she doesn't know what that means, or why.
Her opinion of the man is based on the things he's done, not who he is personally, and she'd rather not speculate on someone she doesn't really know. But she's greatful for whatever help he may or maynot have given her, but for the most part, she doesn't really think of him.
¶ Camilla Sonya
- Relation: Friend, Crush
After arriving on the LXS Archgos, Miranda met Camilla, who seemed to take the new Junior Grade Lieutenant under her wing. The two have become friends, and Mirand has developed a bit of a crush on the Marine, though she has no idea if it's reciprocated or not. She's content not to push things, but she's already begun to rely on Camilla both emotionally and also with the woman always being around, her presence just helps Miranda be a bit more confiden and less socially awkward.