About me

Hi, you can call me Bagpipes. That’s not my real name, it’s my call sign here in the Service. It’s a kind of joke. The Service was looking for people who could fit in, sneak around, go unnoticed. I have a real talent for it.

I tend to wear a loose fitting ship suit, and standing at 1.72 m it’s hard to tell if I’m a slightly tall gravity-born woman or a slightly short gravity-born man. The only place I really can't fit in without notice is among the Voidborn. My features don’t really make it any clearer, they’re angular and masculine for a woman, soft and feminine for a man. My voice, with a bit of training, is low-pitched for a woman, high pitched for man, but within range for either. Like a lot of spacers I keep my hair shaved short, and for my job I have a range of wigs, just in case. When I'm being myself I use they/them but professionally I use whatever pronouns are required by my cover

My skin is sort of honey tones. I don’t really quite fit in anywhere, but I don’t stand out either. Even in the Okon clan lands, while they tend to darker skins, I’m not remarkable enough to really stand out.

I was trained, at length, to move quietly, to hid, to use my natural assets to blend in and pass unnoticed. Lots of people the Service trained were probably as good at it as me. But I have an edge. I’m psychic, and my particular form of psychic ability manifests as a relatively strong, but equally specific compulsion. They call is darkness but if you hold a light meter near me, it doesn’t flicker. It’s your brain that paints it dark in your memory as my brain tells yours not to notice me. I have, apparently, tested latently positive for other psychic powers as well, but so far none have manifested for me.

I’m such a good spook, so hard to notice, that they named me after a legendary instrument from before the Cataclysm. One that was so loud and so raucous that it was, allegedly, used as a weapon of war.

The Service equipped me with a ship, Skirl, fitted with stealth tech. Of course, it’s not obvious she’s got stealth tech, she looks like a free trader, and I carry plans for having her refitted with an expanded hold. I’ve just never made it big enough to pay for them yet… I do actually run small cargoes and courier runs to keep up the cover. The interior spaces are busier than normal, with conduits and cables. That’s what happens when you retrofit a small trader with stealth tech! There are removable plate decks to keep customs happy too, they have somewhere to poke into, but I very carefully never smuggle anything. Well, not anything that will go under a plate deck anyway.

Alongside my flight suit, environment suit, tool kit, medkit, flashlights and communicator are a small collection of wigs and makeup, what looks like a second medkit but actually contains a hacking deck and a multitool that functions as an emergency knife and contains an interesting array of tools for dealing with mechanical locks, traps, fences and the like designed to keep me out of places. Oh, and my communicator is Service issue. Lets just say that it has access to channels and decryption tools that would make a military comms operator cry with jealosy but only if you really know where to look.

Callsign Conductor is my handler. Everyone in my training group has a callsign that's a musical instrument. Apparently they assign these cutesy themes at random, to each new batch of trainees, then when we graduate, we each get a handler with a related callsign. I don't know how it works, and I've never actually met Conductor in the flesh. Deaddrops and comm exchanges only so far. Operational security and all that.