DEAD or ALIVE
C95,000,000,000 REWARD
Notify THE GRAND ADMIRAL of the TERRAN STAR NAVY
Fearsome scourge of the stars, Grim Shard June is the Venusian second-in-command of the Devil's Fang Pirates. Also in her 50s, June expected she'd get a lot more years out of her time in the Sol system but, at one point, feared they'd be a lot less exciting than they turned out to be. June is a very curious and approachable person- crew will often come to her with problems they're afraid to bring up with the more intimidating captain. Despite becoming a ruthless cutthroat outlaw June is afflicted with an unrelenting cutiepie aura, often choosing to keep her goggles down and her lips zipped when the captain is trying to strike fear into the hearts of an enemy crew. Even her Carapace form is cute, resembling a Terran hornet; it is really quite hard to escape. She's aged into a more confident person than her youth and the crew trust her unwaveringly, and she'll go above and beyond to ensure she doesn't let them down.
June takes a more tactical approach to her command than Anibelle. Where Anibelle stands out front and leads with her heart, June likes to analyze data and form a plan of attack to ensure an efficient use of resources and the best outcome for the men under her command. She is an engineer who specializes in crystal technology methods and her gear reflects this- when approaching a ship with intent to board she'll look out the window and scan the ship with her dynamic display goggles, identifying the general make and model of the ship and drawing up schematics of the hull structure, section placement and probable route coverage by enemy starfarers on the best path to her objective. She'll choose a good, safe location and hope her team's boarding round lands on-target, but has plans for the contingency that they land a deck too high or too low. A lot of this situational analysis can take time the crew doesn't have so sometimes June finds Anibelle yanking her along by the arm with a comment like, "we'll figure it out, let's go June-o!"
As the Grim Shard, June makes full use of her Venusian crystal technology to defend herself and her crewmates. The most legendary piece of her kit is Songblade, her vermillion crystal saber- Venusian gemcutter swords are built from all different kinds of crystals which all have different properties to them, and while a novice or even an expert swordsman can make use of their light weight and elegant balance, true mastery of Venusian sword art requires a swordsman to know how to draw out these properties from their sword and incorporate them into their form. Songblade's resonant property is piezoelectric, able to produce disruptive electric effects on command. When the Grim Shard is stepping down your ship's corridor she will often tap Songblade against the ship's walls or handrails, and Star Patrollers will find their electronic weapons and gear fizzle out for a moment with each crystalline tap echoing down the hall. High-tech weapons and shields are no obstacle for her, and it's been said that Grim Shard June is the reason all Terran Star Navy troops carry leadcaster sidearms alongside the rest of their electronic kit. Pairing with her saber, June carries a gemcaster "glintlock" pistol under her belt. Glintlocks are Venusian technology which use the cut of crystal lenses to focus or diffuse a burst of energy into different shapes, where some lenses can be cut for pinpoint accuracy, wide horizontal lines or other shapes of dispersal. June's Glintlock is cut to fire generous cones of energy, lighting up a crowded hallway without worrying too much about aiming. The real secret of the Grim Shard's glintlock is how she uses it with Songblade- by holding the lens to the broad side of the blade she can fire a blast through the sweet spot of Songblade, discharging a directed and concentrated cone of piezoelectric energy at a specific target to fry its electronics completely. After that she often leaves extremely clean cuts in her wake. This piezoelectric crystal mastery is a big reason the Dread Hunter carries extremely mechanical-only weapons herself, so the pair can fight in sync without stepping on each other's toes. A chainhalberd can keep working where a wavecutter would flicker out like a candlewick in the presence of the Grim Shard.
As their reputations grow and Terran commanders learn to fear the Devil's Fang, some few come to think an encounter with the Grim Shard in her big welly boots and her stripey pirate leggings is a gentler fate than meeting the Dread Hunter on your ship's bridge. During the height of the Inner World Terraforming Project years this was a deeply foolish assumption, as a Venusian pirate entering your ship's bridge to stop it from terraforming Venus is not going to be interested in a monologue about perfect worlds or just following orders or especially not the whole project being a gift to the Venusian people, not from a ship's captain. Where the Dread Hunter might make sport of a Terran commander, if the Grim Shard gets to you first then she and Songblade will close out your ability to perpetuate the Terraforming Project as cleanly as possible. There are old starfarers from those years, survivors of the Devil's Fang with cybernetics where their hands or arms used to be, and they say the cut is so clean you don't even really feel it, that if she can the Grim Shard would simply disarm an attacker rather than take their lives, never at the expense of her crew's safety but if she can spare the effort her cuts land more mercifully on lower-ranking Star Patrollers standing against her and her men. There aren't really any old commanders still around to confirm these reports.
June's story begins in the mountainside town of Paienne, on the Venusian highland continent of Aiyarrouh. It is an idyllic town, blessed with sizzling showers and breathtaking lightning and thunder shows, rural and self-sustaining. Baby June had two loves growing up- crystals and music. She was fascinated by the colorful ores that grew on her world and amassed a rich library of knowledge about them, which she would recite to anyone almost entirely unprompted. She really liked the resonant pings and hums they'd make under the right conditions, so to emulate that her young heart found music. Her favorite instrument is the Gridlyre, a cube-shaped instrument with rows of keys on its top facet, perfect for a four-fingered Venusian to dance her fingertips across. As she grew older she'd join an orchestral troupe and venture out into larger cities, performing music for holiday occasions- she loved the Cinderfall Festivals that took place near the lava runs, her and her orchestra playing stirring music in tandem with the percussive boom of lightning bolts. A sweet young woman with a gentle heart, she wanted only a peaceful life playing her songs for the crystals.
As she grew older June hopped a commercial flight and left her gentle home for Terra, hoping to expand on her creative passions in a land of infinite splendor. It was soon evident that this dream was not to be, that there was no gentle hand for a musician to find, so the calculating young Venusian determined that if she wanted to survive she'd have to put aside her passion and take up a more practical career. Drawing from her love of crystals she took up study in engineering, learning how to build the mundane from her beautiful gems and soon found a job with the United Robotics Corporation. Here June was brought on by the allure of building technologies that might make the world a better place, using her crystal engineering skills to build memory systems for industrial technologies- it turns out there are crystalline structures which can be exposed to precision beams of light to put qubits into superpositions of 1, 0 or both at once, making it an excellent medium for computer memory. Despite her deep Venusian understanding of these crystalline properties June would often run afoul of senior Terran engineers who simply knew better about how to do things, and she'd have to fight to prove her theories were correct. It wasn't really fun to work with these crystals, not like this.
June had made a few friends in the small town outside her United Robotics facility but she found the workday to be a fairly lonely place. That was soon to change when a tall Mercurian woman with a glint in her eye came over to sit next to her- she was from the maintenance technician department, repairing and maintaining United hardware for heavy industry. The woman ate some of June's food and introduced herself as Anibelle, and then inquired as to what the little Terran creatures June was feeding her french fries to were. It turns out they don't really have birds in the underground of Mercury; June had been taken by the little creatures since coming to Terra, so she got to talking about them and pointing out her favorites, sharing the names she'd given to some of the regulars around the United Robotics campus. This taller confident woman didn't seem worried about anything at all, something about her seemed unshackled and free, like the birds carrying their french fries wherever they please. She'd come back to sit with June day after day, clearly taking a shine to the Venusian, and June in turn felt comfortable around Anibelle. The two would become lifelong friends.
After a time working at United June was offered an opportunity to work on a lucrative long-term project- the Terran Star Navy wanted to use the crystal technologies June had been developing as part of an industrial-scale air purification project. She'd have to leave Terra and work on Venus, so for June it was an opportunity to see home again. She agreed and took the job. When she told Anibelle at their lunch meeting the Mercurian mentioned that she'd also been offered a job on Venus maintaining heavy construction equipment. It was a new adventure and a new opportunity for the pair, and after saying their goodbyes to the friends they'd made in the town around campus they'd load up into a residential starship and head out for Venus, and into fate's hands.
A United residential starship is a large craft designed to land planetside and function as both a housing center and work facility for large-scale construction jobs. Anibelle had managed to secure a larger family-size suite on the ship for herself and offered to share it with June. These were slow-moving ships and Venus was on the other side of Sol so it would be a bit of a journey to get there, the crew had some time to prepare. June wanted to learn more about the systems her air purification technology would be involved in, since the specs seemed overkill for the stardocks she imagined them being installed in, so she started pestering her project manager for details. The engineering team had been given an outline on what their technology had to do but broader applications were said to require Star Navy clearance, so just build them to spec and we'll troubleshoot problems as they emerge. June started to have her doubts.
The residential ship was passing behind Mercury's orbit on its route around Sol and the climate controllers were working overtime. A shouting argument had broken out in the family suite bloc's hallway. June was furious. Planet-scale atmospheric reconfiguration? Terraforming?! She came to United with the promise of making the world a better place. June's project manager insisted Terra was a better place, and that Venusians would thank them for the gift of a perfect climate. June was shaking, furious and scared. Her resignation echoed up and down the halls, she quit the project immediately in disgust. She would never have a hand in terraforming her beloved home planet, she'd never give up the thunder and rain. Those were beautiful parts of her world, they inspired countless songs and helped Venus's crystal resources grow. Venus was beautiful because it was Venus. The United project manager reminded June this was a military project, she knew that when she signed on. The ship isn't turning around and if she's not on the team she was a security risk. He grabbed June by the arm, as a non-worker there was no place on this ship but the airlock for her. The manager paused at this moment, glancing over at the blue hand that had come to rest firmly on his shoulder. Someone was behind him.
Some of the older crewmembers, silver streaks in their hair, gather around the starboard windows of the Coelacanth's observation deck. A broadside cannon fired, sending a resonant bassline through the decks beneath their feet. A spy had been found amongst the Devil's Fang, a little too eager to join on with the pirates after their last raid, enough to make ripples in the captain's waves. The crew watch the trail of a boarding round streak off into the distance, into the vast nothing of space. "Just like ol' whats-his-name, right?" one of the older crewmembers reminisced. June tapped her fingertips across a crystal panel in her hand, a guided missile firing from the Coelacanth's forward array, streaking off behind the boarding round receding into the distance. "Nah, this one's a lot more beautiful", she replied in her usual chipper tone. The starboard windows lit up in a dazzling display of fireworks, blossoming in every shape and color. The crew raised their drinks and cheered.