Aurine Zec

[art]

Aurine Zec Full Name • Aurine Zec Race • Umbaran Birthplace • Umbara Age • 27 Gender • Female (DMAB) Sexuality • Bisexual Faction • Republic Concept • Owner and CEO of Zec Technologies Inc. Languages • Basic, Umbaran Assets •  - 100 billion credit net worth - Her company’s business and technology resources - Personal satellites and estates in a dozen worlds from The Core to The Expanse - A fleet of luxury starships and airspeeders - A private security detail of armed mercenaries Appearance Face Claim • Jaime Murray Height & Weight • 5’7, 139lbs Overall Looks • Aurine is a handsome woman by human standards, and even more so by the standards of her own species. Though she lacks her kin's usual gaunt visage, her umbaran heritage is evident in the pronounced bones of her cheeks and jawline, and in the stark white color of her hair and skin. However pale her face, the subtle splashes of color she applies to her eyes and lips do well to accentuate her best features. She is slight of build and shorter than most, giving her an illusion of frailty betrayed only by her immovable countenance. Tellingly, she eschews the fashion trends of her home-world in favor of those of the core systems: rather than shave her head, she grows her hair long and wears it loose like a veil. Her clothes also typically follow the fashions trends of the core's elite, though she always has them made in in the same materials as traditional shadow cloaks, so that they to appear plain white to all but those who can see in the ultraviolet spectrum. Personality Profile Aurine's personality might at first appear to be a confusing miasma of bluffs and contradictions. Her public persona is both charming and inscrutable, always acting with a thoughtful caution in every aspect of her life: from her diet, exercise and beauty regimes, to even her stride and posture. Those who presume themselves close to Aurine would describe her as discerning, gentle, and playfully wry. She spends extravagantly and charitably and one might expect of a woman for whom money is no object. She makes an effort give freely to those in need, and show her bleeding heart in the process. Of course, all of this is a meticulously cultivated mask worn to disarm those around her, and keep her true motivations out of plain view. In truth, Aurine is very much the antithesis of her persona: vain, amoral, and petty. Her duplicitous nature is excessive even for an Umbaran, and she finds herself driven solely by the desire to elevate herself to always being the most powerful person in the room. Too prideful to ever play the fool, she never makes a conscious effort to hide the extent of her intelligence. However, she is not nearly as rational in her decision-making as that intelligence might imply and she will often make rash decisions purely out of spite without thought to the consequences. She is quick to anger, prone to boredom, and easily insulted by the most innocent of remarks. In truth, much of her success is based on a combination of ruthlessness and intimidation and she has always leaned towards a brute force approach in her professional life. This is not to say that Aurine simply bullied her way to the top: she is a highly competent businesswoman and she knows exactly what's needed to maximize profit and efficiency from her workforce. For someone who believes so firmly that money is power, Aurine has truly made an art out of being powerful. Background Father • Argentu Zec, 56, Politician Mother • Aeris Zec, 52, Aristocrat Overall History • Aurine was born the sole child and heir of Umbara's Zec family: an old money name of middling importance, whose members often dabbled in politics and were known to hold traditional Umbaran values. Aurine’s father was no exception. Argentu Zec was a prominent figure in Umbara’s interior ministry and (like his father, and his father before him) sought to raise his child with the same firm hand and venomous ambition that had long defined their species. Aurine was conditioned from a young age to aim high, and to do whatever it took to achieve her goals. To Argentu’s delight, Aurine could not have been any better suited for the task of carrying the Zec family name. What surprised most was that whilst it was clear Aurine had an aptitude for navigating the murky waters of politics, she had very little patience for it. She never felt truly at ease when playing with bureaucracy, and fighting past the checks and balances designed ostensibly to flatten the naked ambition of would-be tyrant. Instead, she turned her attention to what she considered to be a more “practical” application of her Machiavellian intellect. She tried her hand at many crafts, but none captured her imagination quite like coding. She had a knack for making computers do what she wanted; hacking for fun and eventually using her talents for more constructive purposes. She pursued a formal education in software development to the astonishment of her peers, and upon graduating she was almost immediately employed as a lead programmer for a local business: Oryn Heavy Industries. Umbara was noted to be rich in a material known as doonium: a metal ore commonly used within the construction of starships. Many businesses had made their fortune mining the precious metal from within Umbara’s crust, but one company approached the market from a different angle. Noting the abundance of the ore on their home planet, Oryn Heavy industries established itself as a home-grown starship manufacturer who was able to cut costs on the supply and transportation costs of doonium by establishing their shipyard in the orbit of Umbara directly above the supply of their most precious resource. It was a solid financial plan for the production of budget starships, though the overall quality of ships themselves compared to others on the market left little to be desired. That was, of course, until Aurine arrived and revolutionized their software division. Though she had little control over the hardware her company manufactured, she poured her heart and soul in to building the best system management and navigational software possible. This culminated in the development of the company’s first proprietary operating system. The project was credited for revitalizing OHI’s product line, and her efforts in just those few short years enables her to rise to the position of CTO with minimal skulduggery. Now in a position of power, she used her influence on the board to direct as many resources as she could to improving on her own creation and stymieing the funding of other projects. Unfortunately, a business like OHI was ill-equipped to market and sell software by itself, having been firmly entrenched in the astronautics industry for its entire lifespan. This, combined with Aurine strategically bleeding the company dry of its resources, set the company up for long-term failure. With galactic stock value tumbling and their debts to investors growing, the company had little choice but to begin selling its assets (a move Aurine had made sure the board would vote unanimously in favor of). With everything on the table, Aurine immediately played her hand and used her family's own personal fortune to buy exclusive rights to the software she had spent the past few years crafting. With a powerful and established product now in her hands and the right to bring it to market the way she knew best, Aurine established Zec Technologies, with a newly re-branded ZecOS as its flagship product. With its creator at the helm, Umbaran investors flocked to Zec technologies in droves and provided Autine’s venture with a significant capital injection. She negotiated licensing the OS to other starship manufacturers across the galaxy: providing tailor-made software using her trademark for their products. It was an easy market: save them money on having an entire software department by selling it to them directly. It fit in with the core worlds’ modular design ethos, and Aurine sought to re-brand herself for mass appeal. She wasn’t content to sit on her laurels and code behind a desk all day. No, she wanted to be the face of a technological revolution. Soon enough Aurine Zec’s name was known through much of the expanse and the core as a business wunderkind. As the years rolled by, Zec the woman and Zec the company became synonymous. She crafted the alluring image of an auteur; a one-woman operation with her visions at the helm of every company decision. She was a regular on holonet broadcasts, espousing the virtues of technological progress and acting as a walking advertisement. Her company broke in to the civilian sector, porting its is to third party devices and even launching its own hardware: with sleek and design-focused ZecOS terminals and holocasters being all the rage among trendy adolescents in the core worlds. The slogan wrote itself “Where Substance meets Style”. The fools lapped it up. And all the while, Aurine slowly turned her focus to more lucrative markets. She began a number of clandestine takeovers of a number of small arms manufacturers through shell corporations, and with their resources in hand she signed off on the secret development of her latest product line: battle droids. With production taking place in black sights outside of republic space, the trappings of corporate law were in no position to restrict the inhumane methods Aurine would employ to develop vision. Dark things stir in her hidden factories, and Aurine knows that the market for dark things is growing by the day.

[Rugs]