Bureau noir: Alejandra:Notes
Alejandra Peixoto was born on Veruna (PanOceania). Her parents were military officers and involved in Helot "peacekeeping" actions, a euphemistic term for counter-terrorism and the occasional suppression. Both her parents were violently killed when she was still fairly young. She bounced around between various family members the next few years, neither quite wanted nor quite hated. On one day when she was 17, the transport ship she was on was attacked by pirates. The mercenary outfit tasked with defending the transport was outnumbered and outgunned, but not outmatched. Somehow they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, saving everybody (except for the pirates).
Alejandra was star struck. She saw ingenuity, heroism, and displays of great skill. The past years had been a dim haze of new places and disappointments. But this... this! It was like waking up.
She looked into the mercenary life but unfortunately drew all the wrong conclusions. As just a lone young woman with a second rate gun, what chance did she have on the war market? For a few years, Alejandra worked as a Freebooter. The most common, bottom of the barrel mercenary. No loyalty but to the next payday.
She realized in time that this wasn't the kind of mercenary life she had been looking for. She wanted something greater. So she worked her way up on the war market, standing out from the crowd of cutthroats and half-pirates, until she managed to get recruited in a more reputable company. For the next five years she would work as a Special Forces merc, doing the kind of high-risk-high-reward jobs that she wanted to.
But the good days wouldn't last. Her entire company got bought up by a Yu Jing company and converted into corporate "security". It gnawed on her. Things came to a head when she discovered a fellow merc and good friend was actually a mole working for a rival faction. In the truest sense of the word "mercenary" she sold him out. This earned her some precious Yuan as well as the gratitude of her employer. So much so that they offered special training and equipment, making her part of a more elite unit. She became a modern samurai, of sorts. Until she went off-script. The job was to take out a defecting research scientist. During the wetwork, the transport vessel took serious damage and wouldn't make it. Instead of retreating, Alejandra recognized that this was the exact opposite of what she had wanted out of life. She delayed the exfiltration to make emergency repairs and give the civilians on board a chance. It didn't earn her any favors with her employers, but it was the kind of spirit that Bureau Noir was looking for.