[ reverie app ]

PLAYER
» HANDLE: Ana
» CONTACT: cuddlebug or Ana#1461 on discord
» AGE: 30
» CHARACTER(S) IN-GAME: Raleigh Becket

CHARACTER
» NAME: Naomi Nagata
» CANON: The Expanse
» CANON POINT: post-Caliban's War, end of s2
» AGE: early 30s ish

» SETTING: wikia, Naomi's page

» SHORT DESCRIPTION: kind-hearted, intelligent, strong-willed, resourceful, private, determined

» INFLUENTIAL EVENTS:

The Destruction of the Augustin Gamarra

(Note: This event is currently book canon only, but the show has confirmed the existence and loss of Filip and in general closely follows the books. Although I am taking Naomi from the show, the fallout of the destruction of the Augustin Gamarra is influential to her characterization and behavior in several show-canon events, thus my inclusion of it in her app.)

Prior to serving on the Canterbury, Naomi lived on Ceres station and was in a relationship with a man named Marcos Inaros, with whom she had a son named Filip. Marcos, however, was radicalized OPA (the Outer Planets Alliance, an unorganized group of Belters that resent the oppression of the Belt by the Inner Planets Earth and Mars). The OPA is highly controversial -- most will claim it's a sociopolitical group or labor union, but actions by radical members have branded it a terrorist organization. Marcos definitely falls into the terrorist branch. After the forced shutdown of Terryon Lock, a free society for Belters, his faction wanted revenge. They took it by sabotaging the Augustin Gamarra, a transport ship leaving Ceres. There were no survivors, and after the OPA claimed responsibility for the attack it was revealed to Naomi that Marcos was the mastermind behind it... and that she was an unwitting accomplice. A skilled engineer, she'd provided Marcos with all the information and coding he needed to be able to destroy the ship so thoroughly there was nothing left to salvage. This knowledge destroyed her. She felt responsible for killing everyone on that ship, and fell into a deep depression. Concerned she would confess, Marcos manipulated Naomi into silence by keeping her from Filip, whom she loved dearly. Unable to cope with the the loss of both Belter lives and her only child, Naomi half-heartedly attempted suicide, only to realize she couldn't just roll over and die. But she couldn't remain on Ceres either, she had to get away from Marcos. Although it meant losing her son for good, Naomi got a job as chief engineer on an ice hauler, the Canterbury, and began a new life as a long-haul freighter. She is an extremely private person and no one on the ship ever knew of her past or her son, but she eventually began to bond with members of the crew, particularly a mechanic named Amos Burton that she took under her wing. The Cant became her new family, but the hole in her heart left by Filip will always be there. As a result Naomi has a massive soft spot for children and loving parents, going to great lengths to help them when she can although it's painful for her to be around them.

Remember the Cant, The Destruction of the Donnager, The Aquisition of the Rocinante (sorry for length, this all happens back-to-back)

Air and water are desperate resources for the Belt and the latter is provided exclusively by ice haulers, long haul freight ships that travel back and forth harvesting ice from the outer planets. The Canterbury, a repurposed transport vessel, was one of these haulers, operated by Pur and Kleen, an Earth Corporation. A crew of 55 people lived and worked on it, including Naomi as chief engineer. Life was simple and the ship was old and falling apart, so Naomi was always busy with repairs. The main story of the Expanse begins here, on this unassuming freighter, which had just picked up a full cargo load of ice from the rings of Saturn and was heading back to Ceres station... when they receive a distress signal. Protocol states that any ship that logs a distress signal must investigate, but the beacon was unknown and so far out of shipping lanes that the Captain suspects pirates and orders the signal to be scrubbed rather than reported. Unfortunately for everyone, that doesn't sit right with acting XO Jim Holden, who restores the message and hears someone desperately calling for help. He reports it, obligating the Canterbury to change course and investigate. Most people are very unhappy about this, as they want to get back to Ceres for a break and this is going to lose them their on-time bonus. Once in range of the beacon, a team of five is sent out in the Canterbury's lone shuttle, a "leaky lifeboat" called the Knight. Alex is sent to pilot, Holden to command, Naomi and Amos as the best engineers on the Cant, and Shed as a medic for any survivors they might find. Holden admits to Naomi he's the one who logged the distress signal, and although she isn't particularly pleased with him she understands that he just wants to help and just advises him to keep quiet to the others because everyone is cranky. The ship they find is the Scopuli, and there's no one on it. It's bait. It's a Belter ship but the beacon sending the distress signal is Mars tech, as the ship itself is completely depowered. While the crew of the Knight is investigating what happened to the Scopuli, the Canterbury picks up another ship in range. A stealth ship, as there hadn't been anything else on the sensors when they first arrived, later revealed to be the Anubis. The Anubis fires upon the Canterbury, destroying it, but leaving the shuttle crew as eyewitnesses to what appears to be a Mars attack upon an Earth ship.

The Knight is badly damaged by the debris of the Canterbury, but Naomi's resourceful engineering saves them and they manage to send their own distress signal. At this point they're convinced that Mars is responsible, so when the ship that responds to their distress is the MCRN flagship the Donnager, the crew panics. Against everyone's wishes, Holden (believing they're about to be finished off and others need to know what's happening) sends a message to the entire system claiming that Mars destroyed the Canterbury. He is of course unaware that the whole thing is a ruse, designed to further destabilize relations between Earth and Mars and ignite a war. He's playing right into it. The crew is picked up by the Donnager, who interrogates them one at a time. Naomi is accused of being behind everything, as a suspected member of the OPA who conveniently happened to survive the attack. They question how someone of her underpriviledged background managed to complete several advanced engineering degrees, and what an engineer of her caliber was doing on a piece of crap rust bucket like the Canterbury. She tells them nothing and is returned to holding while they try to convince Holden to send another message recanting his claims. Before anything can be done, however, the Donnager is attacked by the Anubis as well. Despite being the pride of the Martian Navy and extremely well-armed, the Donnager is outclassed and breached, quickly swarmed by boarders. Shed is killed in the attack and the remaining four survivors of the Canterbury are hustled onto a small gunship called the Tachi by Martian intelligence officer Lopez. He is mortally wounded helping them escape, but once the Tachi is clear the captain of the Donnager self-destructs, to keep the attackers from gaining control of the ship. This puts our plucky heroes in a dangerous predicament. They've escaped, but there are no other witnesses to the Donnager and by all appearances they're flying a stolen Martian gunship with a dead Martian commander in the hold. Uh oh.

Despite the fact that no one should know where they are, the crew is contacted by Fred Johnson of the OPA. Although he now advocates for Belters, he is also known as the Butcher of Anderson Station, a Belter colony that was taken by Insurgents while Johnson was a UN Marine. He was responsible for the death of over 1,000 Belters and Naomi is outspoken against trusting him. Considering her history with the OPA and how much she despises violence, this is unsurprising. But now over 2,000 people have died in this little kerfluffle and they have nowhere else to go -- they expect to be held accountable themselves and Fred Johnson seems to believe their story. So on his instruction she changes the ship's transponder code and Holden renames the Tachi the Rocinante, and they go to Tycho station for safe harbor, hoping their current track record doesn't mean it gets blown to bits as well.

The Eros Incident

Eros is where things really start to go to hell. The Roci crew is sent there by Fred Johnson to find a missing OPA operative, Julie Mao, who was aboard the Scopuli and is at the heart of this entire mess. She is, however, infected with the protomolecule, an extrasolar alien life form that no one understands and thus everyone wants to experiment with. Namely Protogen, the group behind the Anubis and the political destabilization, which is revealed to be a distraction from the experiment they're about to perform on Eros, a Belter space station. The Roci crew do find Julie (and meet Miller, a detective who has been searching for her independently the whole series) but she's apparently dead. Shortly after the station locks down, supposedly due to a radiation breach, and people are hustled to shelters and given injections to protect them from exposure. Our heroes are suspicious of this coincidence, particularly when Miller recognizes that the "authorities" organizing this are actually known gang members. This is not legit. Holden orders the rest of the crew back to the Roci, telling Naomi that if he and Miller aren't on the ship in three hours she should assume they're dead and take off without them. Reluctantly, she goes, as her knowledge of OPA smuggling routes means she's the only one who can lead the others through the secret tunnels back to the docks. The group initially has a number of civilians tagging along, but as they get repeatedly turned around during the trip a few lose trust in Naomi and decide to go back and make for the shelters instead, much to her dismay as they take their children with them. Naomi, Amos, Alex, and a friend of Miller's named Sematimba make it back to the Roci with a few survivors, and wait. The three hours run out and Sematimba begins pushing Naomi to leave but she refuses, unwilling to abandon Holden and Miller especially after they've saved so few. If possible she would have packed the hold with Ceres residents. He pulls his gun on her and is killed by Amos, who is treating her as the leader now. She's shocked by both actions but grateful, and when Holden and Miller do show up everyone's worst suspicions were confirmed. Everyone in the shelters was actually blasted with radiation, not protected from it, and the injections were meant to infect them with the protomolecule. The Roci escapes but Eros station is lost and over 100,000 Belters are sacrificed for the experiment, and Naomi struggles to deal with the widespread violence and death that's been occurring. Eros is ultimately her personal tipping point, the massive loss of Belter lives that informs her later betrayal. (See event 5 below.)

The Weeping Somnambulist and Escaping Ganymede

The Weeping Somnambulist was a food freighter that ran between Ganymede agricultural station and Ceres, and after Ganymede was mostly destroyed became a relief ship carrying supplies to the remaining survivors. Life support on the station is failing and everyone must be evacuated, but thanks to politics and disagreement about exactly what happened on Ganymede, things have become a logistical mess and ships trying to reach the station are closely monitored. The Roci crew needs a more discreet method of arrival than a gunship, and so board the Weeping Somnambulist under the guise of MCRN inspection to do so. When the couple operating the ship (Melissa and Santichai) recognize Holden there is a tense standoff, but they reluctantly agree to ferry the Roci crew down to the station. Upon arrival, however, several pirates confront the couple and inform them they'll be taking not only the supplies, but the ship itself to escape Ganymede. Holden and Amos take action. They kill the pirates but Santichai is also killed in the battle, and the ship controls themselves are badly damaged. Melissa, overcome with grief, orders the Roci crew off the ship and attempts repairs on her own.

Conditions on the Ganymede are quickly deteriorating, and Melissa tells a group of refugees desperate to escape that she'll let them onboard when she's completed repairs. Naomi, who feels guilty both for Santichai and not doing enough to save people on Eros, convinces Melissa to let her assist and stays behind to help. They enlist a burly man named Champa to handle crowd control and close the doors while they work. It's revealed soon enough that Melissa does not intend to open the doors again -- the Weeping Somnambulist can hold 300 people but due to the dock shutdown on Ganymede they can't refill the ship's oxygen tanks, so they will only have enough air for 52 people. There are over 100 refugees clamoring to get on the ship. Melissa and Amos believe if they open the doors again, everyone will force their way in and they'll all die. This is unacceptable to Naomi, who needs to save as many as they can. She especially lingers over the faces of children in surveillance footage of the crowd and so defies the others, going to open the doors. When Amos tries to stop her she knocks him out with a double dose of painkillers and leaves to explain the situation to the refugees. As expected people begin to riot at the news and swarm the ship, but Naomi and Champa are able to convince them to cooperate and save those they can. All the children board, then the youngest belters, until there are 51 people on the ship. Naomi offers Champa her place, saying he's earned it, but moved by her courage he gently pushes her into the airlock instead.

The Protomolecule Sample and Naomi's Betrayal

At this point, the Roci crew has a salvaged protomolecule sample of their own. Worried about it falling into the wrong hands, Holden convinces the crew the best course of action is to send it into the sun and destroy it. Naomi, however, believes it could be valuable to the Belt -- the only group that doesn't have a sample. She hides it and lies to the others, saying it was destroyed. Really, she gave the coordinates of its location to Fred Johnson, thereby ensuring the Belt has a sample of its own.

Naomi and Holden, now in a relationship, have promised each other no more secrets. Earlier, when he was convinced he was going to die in the cargo hold with the Hybrid, he tells her not to go looking for revenge like he did after the Cant was destroyed. To take the ship and crew and find somewhere safe to ride out the inevitable war. She cuts off his emotional speech by saying they're "not right" and after he's saved she sits with him to reveal her one last secret. To her, the protomolecule is being used as a weapon in a war that has been going on forever. The sides change, but people will always fight for dominance and control and Earth and Mars have had the advantage for generations, crushing the Belt under their boots. And no weapon ever brings peace. She doesn't believe the protomolecule will ever be fully destroyed, it's just part of their world from now on, and so the Belt needed to have it as well. Even having seen firsthand what horrors the protomolecule is capable of, her loyalty to her people won out over all else. Over both her hatred of violence and love for her crew. War is happening no matter what and she wanted to even the playing field so she went against the others, and they are utterly betrayed by her actions. Naomi knows it's possible they'll never understand or forgive her, they may even cast her out, but she couldn't lie to them any longer. She'll face the consequences of her decision, truly sorry that she hurt them but unrepentant of her actions. It wouldn't be the first time she lost her family because of what she believed in.

At her canon point she's only told Holden so far, but plans to come clean to the entire crew.

» FIT: As a Belter, Naomi has spent her entire life either on space stations or various ships -- transport vessels, mining ships, and freighters. She knows this drill inside and out and will be familiar with pretty much all aspects of life in space even if the tech on Reverie Terminal is unfamiliar. She's also an extremely skilled engineer capable of repairing pretty much anything, and is known for cobbling essential equipment out of spare parts. If something breaks, she'll be there to fix it. In addition, she's generally cool under pressure and can give orders and take charge of situations when necessary, though she doesn't seek out leadership roles.

» POWERS: n/a, Naomi is only human
» NOTES: n/a

» SAMPLES: log & network, network & log