[ private to elena, backdated to beginning of port ]

Willing to listen to a proposition?

Not that kind.

[ video ; a few hours before the end of port ; open ]

[ Red eyes and messed-up hair, guess who just woke up. ]

Elena! Where the frak - are you in the city. Are you dead. Don't be dead.

[ added soon after, also open: ]

Dean! What did you do with Elena's pants?

[ spam ; last few hours of port ]

[ Racetrack is buying out every single astrological sign thing from a kitschy little shop. All of it. Pillows. Jewelry. Notebooks. Hairbands.

This is probably near a beach somewhere. ]

[ video ; after port ]

Nothing like seeing a real live planet...

I'm awake, if anyone was worried.

Anyone want to go run a few miles?

So.

What do you guys do when you're really mad at someone?

Productive and unproductive tactics welcome. I also enjoy colorful stories.

[ Private to Felix Gaeta, later ]

[ Okay, it's time to confront this. She's calm. She's good. She's going to say something elegant, and Felix is going to respect her, and they will be friends.

Here goes! ]

You're stupid.

[ wow not as planned ]

[ Here, Barge, have Racetrack who has just woken up from being a Navy sailor and fighting pirates and seriously what the frak. ]

I am so confused.

[ Help. :c ]

User Name/Nick: Ryann
User DW: cornichaun / character is landfall
AIM/IM: cornichaun
E-mail: cornichaun@gmail.com
Other Characters: Zane Venture @ godsays

Character Name: Racetrack/Margaret Edmondson
Series: Battlestar Galactica
Age: late 20s
From When?: After her death.

Inmate/Warden: Warden. Racetrack is a soldier, a pilot who dedicated her life to service (though it was not a terrible thing that service involved a cool ship, a uniform, and being a stupendous badass on a regular basis). She knew that she would die eventually at the hands of Cylons - not in a prescient way, but in an accepting-the-inevitable way - and what she did was to resolve to take out as many of them as she could. To give the people she was protecting as much of a chance as she could. That is exactly what she would do with an inmate: figure out how to give them a chance.
Item: Her dog tags, worn on a chain around her neck.

Abilities/Powers: Racetrack is a trained pilot and soldier, and as such is good with various sorts of combat, weaponry and technology. She keeps her head in a crisis. But she has no supernatural abilities of any kind.

Personality: Racetrack's main role in the series is to be a typical Raptor pilot. She's one of a handful of windows, into the thoughts and preferences of the pilots and soldiers that stay unnamed on the Galactica. She tends to follow their general attitudes and their outlooks. First, and most basic: humans? Worth protecting. And Cylons? Are around to be killed. She risks her life on a daily basis to make sure that the fleet stays safe. She doesn't falter. She doesn't give in, even when she's lost hope for herself.

That is the key to Racetrack. In an interview for a documentary on the Galactica, early on in the show, she acknowledges that she does not expect to survive. She fully believes that there is no hope for her life, that the Cylons will kill her, and her one wish is that she takes out a hell of a lot of them when she goes. The crushing loss suffered when the Cylons attack humans and nearly wipe them out gives her something of a clean slate. It severs her from all of her connections except that to her companions, her fellow pilots and soldiers. She has no reason to stay and live, except to fight. Except to give as many people a chance to go on. That is Racetrack, at heart: giving her life for something bigger.

For a while, in the series, it looks like her efforts will pay off. Racetrack is the one who stumbles across a habitable planet, suddenly, where humanity could settle. This sets off a chain of events involving a failed colonization attempt and a Cylon invasion. It's a complete disaster. She doesn't advertise it, doesn't blame herself explicitly, but can't help but feel some measure of responsibility for the consequences of her discovery. All this does is spur her on, make her more determined to make up for it.

Finding the planet that became New Caprica wasn't a choice, but joining the rebellion started by Felix Gaeta certainly was. It is, once again, a way for Racetrack to try and preserve the future, to make her life mean something better. She will always hate the Cylons, and she has a high regard for humanity and human life, and the culture of freedom that the military protects. When Adama welcomes new Cylons into his ranks, when he restricts those freedoms in favor of the Cylons, when he steps beyond military authority, she can't help but fight against that. Because that freedom is what she wanted to protect. It's worth noting that Racetrack did not like going against people she considered friends and allies. When Starbuck interrupted her in the middle of hostage-taking, she backed down, did not do anything stupid, and acted foremost with concern for her partner, Skulls. She did not respond to taunts, did not feel the need to justify herself. And later, in CIC conference, she stayed mostly silent, unsure about the turn the rebellion was taking. She liked it in theory, but in practice, the thought of turning against her allies froze her.

Racetrack's other role in the series is to be right there whenever the show needs a pilot to minorly fuck up in a way that creates plot points. The number of mistakes Racetrack makes during the series is very high, and the number of times she survives near-death accidents is absurd, to the point where it can't be a coincidence. Racetrack plays a little fast and loose with the rules. She'll play a game of cards when she's in a ship left behind on boring Cylon-watching duty. She won't check under her ship for bombs every time she launches. She skimps on the rules that she finds unnecessary, or at least not crucial, and will delay right up to the point that it becomes actually careless. Because she does survive all of this: she spots the Cylon fleet in time to toss down the cards, spool up the FTL drive and get out of there. She crashes ships twice, once into Colonial One and once into Galactica's hangar deck (both from equipment failure) and survives safely both times. Her attitude is similar to that of a procrastinator who waits until the last possible second to start on a research paper. She bends the rules; she doesn't break them. And when it comes down to the wire, though she might scream a line of obscenities right into the radio, she will get herself and the people in her ship out of that emergency alive and kicking.

On the surface, Racetrack is brash, loud, bold. She survived in a unit of pilots, hotshots and big egos. She can hold her own in a drinking contest, play a good hand of Triad, and match insults with the best of them. She's strong, able to take and give orders, conforming to military culture because of survival. Intelligent, because pilots must understand and be able to make repairs on their equipment, even when they act like dumb jocks. She is a product of a culture where men and women are regarded as functionally equal. There are more or less even numbers of men and women in the military. As such, her attitude isn't compensation for femininity or an attempt to fit in with the guys; the masculine, boasting attitude of the pilots is just a part of their culture, along with loyalty and bravery, and she fits in with it very well.

She does not believe in the inherent goodness of the universe, and her faith is deep-buried; her attitude is one of humanity vs. everything else, 'everything' being the emptiness of space, the vagaries of fate, the Cylons, bad frakking luck, and everything in between. She doesn't root for humanity because she believes in some virtue of the human soul. It's just that these are her people, and no one's going to decide that they don't deserve to survive.

Barge Reactions: Racetrack will come already prepared to face some seriously weird shit. She will be stunned at some demonstrations of superhuman powers, but she'll deal with it, and move on. She knows this is something bigger than her, outside her experience, and just acknowledging that the unexpected will happen is enough for her to cope with it when it comes.

As far as being a warden goes: Racetrack is used to responsibility. Whenever she does anything in a Raptor it has consequences in terms of people's lives. On top of that, she has been in charge of training young pilots before, when Starbuck and Kat weren't available. She knows what it is to be responsible for someone, and she will take to it with the same matter-of-fact somewhat-abrasive frankness as she takes to anything else.

Racetrack won't be particularly intimidated or feel lesser because she doesn't have powers. She's used to be one of the less badass people in a room full of stupendous badasses, and among the barge, there will be a pretty similar proportion of people who are more badass than her to people who are less badass than her. There's a much wider range of badassery than on the Galactica, but she'll find a place that's very similar to what she's used to.

Most important about taking her to the barge is that she gets a second chance at life. Her last act, her death, was taking out as many Cylons as possible. She fulfilled what she saw as her purpose in life. Now she wants a chance to live as herself. (That is her bargain with the Admiral: a chance for her to live.) There will be a complex relationship, in her attitudes, between having to fight for someone else again and trying to live her own way on a place like the Barge. She'll be very willing, and she'll want to graduate someone for their own sake as well as for hers, but there's some resentment in her that her life has belonged to other people for so long.

Path to Redemption: n/a

History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Edmondson

This link covers all of her appearances in the show. Her backstory is not established, but I headcanon that she grew up in a large family, mostly boys, probably a rural setting like a farm where she had to work hard even as a child. This explains her easy fit with being a member of a military unit, treating the rest of them like loud and boisterous family. She also gives the impression of being something of a small town girl, with a fairly simple and steady kind of morality. She came into the military with a strong work ethic, a sense of duty and a desire to be bigger than herself, to change things.

Sample Journal Entry: [ Well, this might be the worst possible way to introduce herself to the barge, but. Here, everyone, have Margaret Edmondson, aka Racetrack, brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and broad smile. ]

Hey, this sure is better than being in a cell on the Astral Queen, isn't it? Gosh, it's nice not to be a frakking prisoner.

[ Oh, yeah, she knows how un-classy that was. ]

What I mean to say is, hi, I'm your new warden - a new warden, not your new warden, sorry, forgot about the whole one-on-one thing - and I'm ready to get to work. Name's Racetrack.

And I have a completely unimportant question for all of you out there.

Do any of you really hate your room?

[ She's not actually looking for people to fill in the empty space of the pilot's barracks she was given. Nah. She just... doesn't like the quiet. ]

Sample RP: It's so.

Frakking.

Quiet.

The barge has, quite considerately, framed Margaret's rooms into a simulacrum of a pilot's barracks. A full one, too - there are twelve racks, a central table, and even a private bathroom. And it was comforting, for all of twenty minutes.

Until the silence sunk in.

It rings in her ears, it's so quiet in here. She looks around, and she sees the ghosts of pilots playing Triad, wandering in and out. She sees drawn curtains concealing quick and haphazard sex, and loud idiots arguing with one another about the relative virtues of different styles of weapons. She sees a full and bustling barracks.

Not this.

Her reflex is to pick the rack she usually takes - to the left, and high up. But then she realizes that all of the racks here are hers. There's no one else allowed in here, unless she wants it.

She is totally alone.

The thought shakes her to the core, and finally, the reality of the situation sinks in. She is on her own, and that's that.

Oh, she needs to get an inmate as soon as possible.

Special Notes: