Character Profile - Katrina Dumet

Age: Mid 40’s Height: About 5'8" Body: Average looking body frame. Attractive, elegant, proper posture, somewhat curvaceous. Hair: Medium Brown – Short and moderately curly. Personality: Katrina is of British decent, and has a very proper presence and etiquette.

Basic attributes: Katrina’s strengths are as an organizer, advisor, and peace keeper of the GGI operations personnel. Though she is usually very formal, somewhat timid and shy, she has several times shown a suggestion of being a very sensual, seductive aggressor to some of the male crew members.

Relevant history: Katrina Dumet was four years old when the Cosmos1 reached Procyon, and crashed on Procyon 1. She has no memory of space. Her first memories are of the crash itself, the loss of her family, and the mass despair of the following weeks and months, which to her child’s mind seemed like years.

A true orphan of the GGI, Katrina was raised in academical sections where she proved to be highly focused and fiercely intelligent. No doubt her early experiences drove her to succeed and she had little else in her life to divert her attention. She was recruited at thirteen into the intelligence division, and matured with few associations.

For the brief time she spent in the field as an officer she showed herself to be an authoritative organizer and commander, and she never took to any notion of being an able combatant. She would help operations and save many lives through simple good planning, functioning as an advisor in all sections of GGI operations. In her early twenties she assisted in the development and refinement of GGI laws to improve the efficiency of communications and duty-rosters, as well as settling disputes between the needs of various sectors and individuals.

Katrina had hoped to aspire to the position of Intelligence officer, for which she seemed ideally suited, but of course, the General had his Intelligence officer in Samuel Blake, and was not likely to alter that arrangement. For a long time Katrina resented the General’s loyalty to Blake Senior, but both the General and Samuel had a great deal of sympathy, knowing how difficult it must have been for her as a child. As had often been the case in the past, Samuel would offer up a solution in the years to come. The acting Admiral of the time was removed from his duties, leaving the position unoccupied. When Samuel was offered a promotion into the position of Admiral, he refused, on the basis that he could better serve the General as his Intelligence officer. He recommended in his place a relatively young Katrina Dumet, who was somewhat taken aback by the selfless act. She accepted the position and matured to the role. As Admiral she would wield as much authority as Derrick Waquer, but remained focused on her duties as an executive advisor and peacekeeper of operations.

For a long time Katrina could not quite understand Samuel’s attitude to the arrangement, as she had worked her entire life to achieve ranks which seemed of no consequence to him. The simple truth, she realized, was that Samuel always considered the “big picture” and in that picture no one individual duty was truly more significant than another. This changed Katrina’s perspective on things – for she had never put herself in true context amongst the other crew members – that is, perhaps because of her tragic childhood, she applied herself so fully to being an officer that she little thought of the ultimate fate of humanity. She began to consider this, and came to her own frightful conclusions.

As with everything else in her life, she would keep it to herself, and no one would notice subtle changes to her behavior in the following years. A natural timidity and etiquette had long served her well as peacekeeper, as she tended to have a disarming effect on people in disputes, but this was soon underlined by a sensual, suggestive, grace, which she used to get closer to many crewmen.

She deliberately avoided pregnancy through the use of contraception as she serially “seduced” men in her spare time. Despite GGI laws concerning the proliferation of the species, her position as organizer, advisor, and peacekeeper of operations, as well as being an executive member of the PSA committee, excluded her entirely from the necessity of the doctrine, and she never chose to bear children. Superficially, her intimacies with crewmen may have seemed to mark her out as dangerously promiscuous and subtly predatory, leaving behind her very many jealous lovers, which was quite at odds with her duties. The truth was that she had opened her eyes to discover a profound sensitivity to the plight of the human race. She never permitted the fact to outwardly influence her duties, but Katrina was one of a growing number of people who could not trust to blind positivistic attitudes promoted amidst the majority of the Cosmos1. It was not that she couldn’t believe in the essence of the mission, but rather because, at some stage soon after her irregular promotion, she deduced that humanity’s extinction could not be prevented. To put it simply Katrina secretly lost hope, and was terrified of what the future would bring – an ironic character flaw given her position amongst the ship’s hierarchy, but forgivable when one considered that her earliest memories were of great tragedy and destruction. In her eyes, she did not seduce the men under her – she consoled them, and herself. She desired companionship only to help break the terrible lethargy of believing that they would all eventually perish, and unpleasantly so.

So it was that the men in her life often saw there was no innate hostility, malice, or desire to disrupt, in her sexual advances, and in fact, on some level of consciousness, they perhaps shared her deep-rooted fears. For this reason, few of the crew that had spent intimate time with the Admiral spoke ill of it, or at all of it, knowing she might be discredited, and marked as licentious. When one put the whole thing into context, that just wouldn’t be fair, and the last thing humanity needed was the kind of ridiculous scandal that clustered around history’s leaders and politicians. All that truly mattered was that everyone should do what they were required to do and caused no actual harm to others in their precious hours of personal time.

As for bearing children, the Admiral truly felt that bringing more life into a doomed race would be, in a manner of speaking, unspeakably cruel, and used her position to justify abstaining from pregnancy. She simply could not bear the idea of having to witness the certain demise of her own children, as she had witnessed around her. Nor, of course, would she ever consider taking a husband. The terrible suffering of Kara Smythe in the years of Trevor’s stasis was existential proof of everything she feared.

In the final years leading up to the present day, as the wide-spread effects of Procyon’s influence began to tell on the crew, Katrina would find herself becoming more of an aggressor than ever before. She would seduce men only to put them coldly aside, and even made so bold to approach the General after the loss of his good friend. In a climate of growing desperation, many crewmen resented their treatment, and showed many signs of discontent, both toward her and General Waquer, who for the most part was completely unaware of this.

The day would come when one crewman, by the name of Quentin Barnett – apparently a long-time associate of the Admiral’s – appeared at the Admiral’s quarters in quite a threatening manner, and worked himself into such a rage that he attempted to rape her. Failing that, he threatened, and attempted, to kill her. Luckily he was quickly accosted by nearby guards. Admiral Dumet insisted that the time for a trial and judgement was unnecessary, and falsely propagated the facts so that he would end up in stasis before he could give his own point of view. Katrina was not especially proud of this, but the fact that he had tried to kill her was more than a justification of an unstable mind, and she believed it was the best course of action. It would not, however, be the only time that previous lovers would seem to lose self-control and demand her affections, and in the last two years it has become necessary for her to be escorted by a personal guard while off duty – just to be safe.

Her relationship with General Waquer, however, continues, and it is not yet fully known if she holds some genuine feelings toward him, or if she merely seeks to spite those she has left behind. Perhaps without realizing, Katrina Dumet, peacekeeper of the Cosmos1, has sown the seed of a minor mutiny – an indication perhaps that the influence of Procyon 1 has once more had long-term effects on personal attitudes, seemingly turning innocent intentions inside-out, so that the reverse has ultimately come true.

The Admiral has never believed in the Genesis initiative, and sees the venture as the last desperate throw of the dice for humanity.

Character Quote:

“Imagine an entire world experiencing that one microsecond before the truth hits home, and takes absolute control of every life. The kind of news that, in retrospect, must have seemed impossible to the people of Earth; the kind which no one ever thought, or hoped, would be part of their lifetime. Now I’m sitting here trying to imagine a world full of people… and I just can’t do it.”

Many thanks to Mike Pantazi for his work on this.