ENID RILEY
Enid Riley is a survivor.
Over six decades of life, she's witnessed the transformation of Mars from the harsh red planet of her youth to the idyllic, domed nation of the present. She has seen political powers rise and fall, embraced multiple generations of new technologies, and endured profound personal losses.
Her hands are rough, thin-skinned and boney with age. Her fingernails, jagged and black with grease, speak to a lifetime of coaxing life into stubborn machines. Her voice, a slow and laconic drawl, is hoarse from decades of shouting over the ear--thumping roar of engines and the mind-numbing buzz of drones.
Her grey eyes carry a wealth of stories: of wisdom hard-won; of cherished moments of joy; and of sorrow giving way to steely resolve.
"Time doesn't heal all wounds. It leaves scars to remind you to not repeat your mistakes."
System: The Expanse
Campaign: TBD
Drive
Profession
Class & Background
Origin
Survivor
Technician
Lower-Class Laborer
Martian
Enid grew up in the shadow of the great terraforming engines, nurtured on tales of the day they would make Mars a paradise. Her parents were working class. "Salt of the earth," people would say. But in truth, they were nothing special; just another pair of low-class workers, fodder for the labor mill that swallowed people up in the name of generations to come.
She had an innate talent for understanding systems: how things worked, how things were built, and how to coax life from fading machines made from aging parts. It got her noticed. She was fixing air scrubbers and welding patches on dome walls by the time she was a teenager, and by the time she hit her adulthood, she was riding herd on swarms of terraforming drones that tilled the Martian soil, repaired external structures, and monitored the atmosphere. It was a life that suited her just fine. The years rolled by and maidenhood gave way to motherhood. "I do my best for my brood," she would say, "And that's all anyone can ask of me."
She had just welcomed her fifth grandchild into the world and was overseeing drone operations on a small terraforming outpost, when she ran afoul of an eco-terrorist group. They hacked the drone software, causing them to break formation and turn destructively on the dome.
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​​She had a choice: With one push of a button, she could initiate a clever inversion of a power coupling that would trip the safety, resulting in an influx of power down the line, leading to cascading failures and culminating in an explosion that would take out the central power matrix and ultimately destroy the mechanism that drove the drones. Then she could turn her focus to sealing the breach in the habitat, saving lives. But such a choice would have disastrous impact on the local terraforming project, setting it back decades.
She knew her Martian duty. Turning her back on the breach, she took valuable minutes and implemented a protocol to over-ride the drones instructions. With that done, she returned to the habitat to address the damage on the dome, but in those few moments, a dozen workers were lost, sucked out into the cold Martian air.
Her bosses called her a hero of Mars. Her peers called her a murderer. They whispered that she'd turned her back on her fellow workers to save her drones. "It's a good thing you love them drones so much. No one else will have anything to do with you."