Things about Festina in no particular order of importance
Jul 16, 2010 22:14
She collects eggs.
Her birthmark is what makes her 'ugly', but it's never explicit whether this is because most humans have degenerated since the League of Peoples uplifted humans four hundred years previous. It should be noted that despite her birthmark, more than one person has called her beautiful, though not to her face.
In her first few months of duty on the Jacaranda, a few of Festina's fellow crewmates approached her for sex, thinking she'd be desperate and an easy conquest. She took a couple of those calculating suitors to bed, feeling like she was fooling them, but after a while she wondered just who was fooling whom. After that, she remained celibate.
The High Council of Admirals resents Festina for being a troublemaker. When they promoted her they invented the rank of Lieutenant Admiral just for her, as a sign that she'd never be part of the inner circle.
A phrase that was part of Festina's Explorer conditioning: "My name is Festina Ramos, and I take great pride in my personal appearance." This programming is partly responsible for her absolute diligence in grooming. Festina will never leave her room unless she is perfectly presentable.
More information about Festina's Explorer programming. In the early days of the Corps it was noted that Explorers had a high suicide rate and engaged in self-destructive behaviors. Consequently, Explorers since then have been psychologically conditionned to be incapable of suicide or shun addictive behaviors such as alcoholism. They were also the subjects of an ongoing social experiment to see which fight-or-flight reaction offered the best chance of survival. When Festina is startled badly enough, she will automatically drop into a roll and come up in a fighting stance. Presumably, Festina put a stop to this sort of shameless tinkering when she became an admiral, along with ordering the Explorer Corps to be open to volunteers, but the tinkering is still present within her.
Festina was an orphan, left on a church step in a basket as an infant. Though there has been speculation as to her genetic heritage (specifically whether or not she was bio-engineered for physical perfection), I prefer to think of her as having been conceived the natural way.
More on Festina's origins: it has been speculated by Youn Suu, the narrator of Radiant (the fifth book in the series) that all members of the Explorer Corps are being used in some sort of experiment by the higher-ups in the League of Peoples, and to that end they are molding the Explorers into ideals of various human cultures. The goal of the experiment is to try and distill the quality that humanity has that the higher-up, more trancendant races of the League no longer possess. Festina, specifically, is being groomed to be the archetypal western hero, the god-defying, monster-slaying champion of western myth. (This is as opposed to Youn Suu herself, who seems to be on her way to becoming a buddha, a quintessential hero of Eastern lore.)