Jasmine Geddes

Jazz

Full name	Jasmine Miranda 'Jazz' Geddes
Date of Birth	(add later)
Parents	Cpl John Christian 'Jack' Geddes and (Mother unknown)
Siblings	none
Spouse	Unmarried
Specialization	Pilot
Gender	Female
Status	active
Education Information
Londinium PS #34
Military Service
No military service

This page is still under construction. Please be patient.

In Brief

Jasmine Geddes is a troubled soul, who has travelled a rough and rocky road. From her uncertain origins and difficult childhood on Londinium, through her search for her true mother on Santo, to her lengthy enslavement on Regina, she has rarely been able to find peace. Only after rising to the rank of Captain of the Bonaventure has she been able to achieve some measure of happiness, and that is continually fraught with pitfalls of grief, uncertainty and fear.

However, Jazz's story begins the way all great stories begin: with someone else.

History, Part 1 (OOC Background)

Her Father’s Love

It was what she had been told, and she had believed it, for she was a romantic like her father. Some of it she knew to be true, like that Cpl. Jack Geddes was an Alliance soldier, who returned AWOL to his family in Londinium with a woman from the rim planets that he had gotten pregnant. He had wanted to do the right thing by her, but tragically, she died giving birth to Jasmine.

What Jazz had been told was that he had returned to Alliance service with a blemish on his previously good record, and was demoted and given the worst assignments along the Rim as punishment. She was told that he died when she was four, in the line of duty, and she had had no reason to believe otherwise... His visits were hazy memories of time spent cuddling and playing, the rest of the family strangely absent, until those tense moments when he had to suddenly depart.

A Troubled Child

Jasmine was raised by her aunt Nera and her husband Mark, who raised the child with a mixture of apathy and ill-disguised resentment. She knew they weren't her true parents, and rebelled a lot. Londinium may be a core world, but a youth can still find trouble to get into. From casual theft and pickpocketry to random acts of vandalism, she didn't give her step-parents many reasons to be proud. By the time she was ten, they were getting frustrated with her, and it placed a strain on their marriage. Mark had an affair and left Nera, and she resented the child even more for it.

When she was 14, after being caught stealing an aerocar, she and Nera argued, and Nera revealed a truth that Jazz immediately realized was more accurate, even while rejecting it out of hand. The Alliance hadn't let her father back into service after going AWOL... the Alliance isn't known for their sympathy toward deserters. Nera told Jazz that he had become a smuggler. His visits were rare and short because he had trouble passing through checkpoints to visit Londinium. He hadn't died in the line of duty... he had been killed by Reavers. Jazz didn't believe it, couldn't. Reavers were only stories, she thought. She resented Nera's controlling attitude even more, after hearing this 'lie', and resolved to run away as soon as she could.

The Search for the Truth

It took another fight, an argument after Jasmine deliberately failed to be admitted to a boarding school/style college when she was 16, before she finally left home, stolen funds in her pocket and a desire to find her father burning in her heart. She headed for the border worlds, looking for Alliance soldiers who had served with Cpl. Geddes, trying to track him down. She learned that at least part of it was true: according to the official records, Jack had gone AWOL the year of her birth. There was no record of his having been killed in battle, or taken prisoner - nothing after the date of his absence. The only remaining clue that Jazz could pursue was to try and find her mother, who supposedly was from Santo. Jazz's money was running low, so she hired a guide to aid her in her search. Unfortunately, she was too quick to trust. He betrayed Jasmine, stole her ident card and sold her to a brothel.

The Gilded Lily

Jasmine convinced the manager that she had an STD (it's easy to make a false positive on the poor-quality kit he tried to test her with) and so he put her to work as a clean-up girl instead. There was a Companion who had lost her Guild status who tried to protect Jazz, taught her a thing or two. A year into her servitude she confided in a waiting client that she was looking for her father. He told Jazz he had known the man. According to the client, her father had not become a smuggler, he had joined the Browncoats, and he had been executed as a deserter and traitor. Jasmine went wild. This was against everything she had known about her father. The manager's bouncer had to knock Jazz unconscious. When she awoke, she found herself on a transport bound for Regina.

The Death Sentence

Jasmine had been sold once again, to work in the mines. Since everyone on Regina contracts Bowden's Malady eventually, this was a death sentence. When Jazz realized this, she began plotting her escape, along with several other slaves. But one of the plotters grew frightened, and turned informant instead. Jasmine was brought in front of a man named Danbury, who was responsible for worker discipline. He was surprised that the ringleader of the escape plan was a girl, and one so young, but Jasmine refused to be cowed by him. She raged and screamed, threatening that she would never stop her escape attempts. Danbury decided to make an example of her, and had her whipped publicly before the rest of the slaves - so badly that she nearly died. From that day on her spirit was broken and she endured the life of a slave, along with the callous abuses that her captors occasionally dealt out. As the years passed, it was forgotten that she had ever been an escape risk.

Rebirth

After many years on Regina, she earned the trust of the managers, and they allowed the girl to pilot shuttles to transport the ore. Jazz learned how to fly, and that she was good at it. One day, someone briefly hijacked one of the Alliance's medicine shipments, creating some confusion, and Jazz was sent to haul ore without her usual two-guard escort. Seeing her chance when the one guard was offloading the ore, Jazz simply left with the shuttle. She made it off-world, but ended up adrift, as the shuttle was short-range. A salvage ship picked up her beacon before she ran out of atmo, and she bartered passage aboard their ship in exchange for the shuttle. They brought Jasmine to Ezra, where she lived a hand-to-mouth existence for a while. Men from Regina eventually figured out where she had gone after the stripped remains of the shuttle turned up, and she spent her time dodging them and other slavers, who seemed to keep an eye out for young women without obvious homes. It took her six months to obtain shuttle passage to Persephone, and once she had it, she used it.

History, Part 2 (IC Events)

Gateway to Possibilities

On Persephone, at first, life was not much better than on Ezra. Jasmine couldn't afford a motel, or three squares. She found a cargo container that was up on blocks, with space beneath that she could hollow out and make bigger, and for a time that was her home. She kept her belongings in a styrene carton, so that floodwaters wouldn't destroy them, and she tied it underneath the container so that it wouldn't float away. Her pickpocketing skills once again were invaluable to her, and she managed to scavenge meals from dumpsters behind some of the bars and restaurants in the area, until warned off by one of the proprietors.

Then, everything changed, when she met Cloe Trea.

What Love Can Do

Cloe Trea, a Companion with an altruistic streak, found Jasmine in the Captain's Retreat and took her under her wing. Finding her a job as a pilot aboard the White Rose, Cloe helped Jasmine to believe in herself. Jasmine began to make connections with successful businesspeople, taking courier jobs and piloting assignments when the White Rose was in its berth. While some of the jobs Jasmine took during this time were less than legal, she managed to never find herself on the wrong side of the Alliance, and gained a measure of dignity and self-respect.

A Noble's Favour

A chance encounter with the Lady Emeisa Hilton (catching her as she fell out of a pirate's vessel) earned her the noblewoman's gratitude, and as a favour, Emeisa assisted Jasmine in getting a new Ident card. Finally, Jasmine felt whole again.

Tragedy Strikes!

Then, Cloe found herself being targeted by bounty hunters. When the Companion fled to the Phoenix in hopes of outwitting her hunters, Jasmine followed... only to lose Cloe to an assassin's bullet soon after. Not knowing what else to do, Jasmine returned to the White Rose, inconsolable, until she met a woman named Katja Patroval.

A New Direction

During a routine shuttle between worlds, Jasmine discovered a derelict vessel drifting about the Core, and filed permits for legal salvage. Her friend Katja Patroval helped her to form a crew, and they went to determine if the vessel was salvageable.

When they boarded the derelict, they discovered the grisly evidence left onboard - the previous crew had been killed in the most horrific of ways. But they managed to get the ship functioning enough to limp to Persephone, where the vessel was set down, and a refit began.

The bodies were laid to rest and funerals given to each. The repairs to the ship were completed within the next few days, and the vessel, newly christened Bonaventure, became the flagship of their new shipping company, Meretrix Industries.

A Backwards Step

With Jasmine as owner and Katja as ship captain, the Bonaventure initially found great success; her high speed allowing her to expedite valuable cargos. But soon, the friendship between Jasmine and Katja was shaken, and as Jasmine tried to manage the business aspects of Meretrix, Katja began mishandling public relations aspects of the company, overbooking passengers and creating scandals. When Jasmine suffered an acute attack of Bowden's Malady during the 'Miners for Freedom' incident, the fragmentation of their longtime partnership became clear to Jazz, when some of the passengers stayed by Jasmine's bedside to nurse her to health, yet Katja stayed away. During this time, Nataliya Obukov, then a doctor aboard the Guan Yin, donated her services to help Jasmine back to health. Soon after this, Katja decided to leave the company of her own volition, disappearing without a word to pursue other interests - leaving Jasmine, an ex-slave with barely a highschool education, in charge of the entire company.

Starting Over

Since most of the crew had been hired by Katja, and left when Katja left, Jasmine was forced to hire more crew. As the home she had found was collapsing around her, Jazz turned to her therapist with her difficulties. Reese, somewhat inspired by Jasmine's story, encouraged her to take control of her life and move on, and to that end she joined Jasmine's crew, bringing with her a young vagrant known only as Jessi. Encouraged by this, Jasmine turned to Nataliya and convinced her to join the crew as well. Soon they attracted and hired a young pilot named Holly Tyler, and together with Patrice 'Patty' Pike, the only remaining crewperson from the Katja days, the Bonaventure rose from its own ashes and began running cargo once more.

Assets

Jasmine's greatest asset is her ship, the Bonaventure, a Harpoon Class Quick Transport, which she discovered floating adrift while working for the White Rose. She and Katja Patroval put together a crew and salvaged the vessel, and then used it as the basis of their expedite shipping company, Meretrix Industries, which Jasmine is now chief executive officer of. With few luxuries and little room aboard, the ship has still become a home to Jasmine and her crew, and she will defend it and their lives with her own.

Associates

Jasmine remains good friends with Lady Emeisa Hilton, sending her a +wave every year on her birthday, even though the Lady has not ventured out in public for some time.

In part due to her association with Lady Emeisa, and with the Obukov family, Jasmine has been known to consort with nobles such as Lord Winchester, and high-ranking Alliance officials, such as Michiba.

Though their friendship has been strained, Jasmine also is known to visit with Katja Patroval, who currently works as the DA for Persephone.

Jasmine has a close personal relationship with Bei Aimu, the proprietor of The Captain's Retreat on Persephone. This relationship is due in part to their mutual friendship with the late Cloe Trea. Jasmine's crew are regulars at the Retreat when the Bonaventure is at Persephone, and the bar staff knows Jasmine and her crew by name.

Thanks to her brief stay aboard the Phoenix, Jasmine has become on good terms with Elunara, who was captain of that ship. Though the organization has gone through several restructurings, Jazz still occasionally visits Elunara aboard their new vessel, the White Star, and remains friendly with several of the other crew.

Jasmine has been known to associate with Mantissa Avaria, who also works with the Phoenix organization. For a time, she and Tissa used to meet on a monthly basis, spending the weekend together. Jazz trusts Tissa with her life... and more.

Personal Quirks

After being told her father had been murdered, Jazz swore not to cut her hair until she learned the truth. That was ten years ago. A genetic quirk keeps her hair from shedding, enabling her to keep her oath. She tightly braids it once a week, into a single long braid that hangs behind her, extending as low as the backs of her knees.