Bio

Born in the later portion of the 19^th Century—it is not polite to ask a woman’s age —Vibia Mystiere was born of an affluent British merchant family in the East Indies city of Bombay.  She was raised to become a good wife of an aristocrat, hopefully one of a higher station.  She spent her younger years learning the finer arts of high society from her nanny and her private tutors behind the high walls of her family’s estate.  Only later did she venture out into the quagmire that British ruled India had become, seeing for the first time the poor and exploited workers locked eternally in the bonds of the caste system strictly imposed under the Crown.  She became as involved as she could, trying to improve the plight of the Indian people, but her position kept her socially occupied after her coming out party, and the hum of civilized life caused her to forget her “childish” idealism, as other people saw it.

Over time, she fell deeply in love with a handsome man of good standing, with aspirations in the government.  Being somewhat naive to the ways of men, she feasted upon every complement, every flattery and every kind gesture without the slightest thought.  He said he cared so deeply for her that it didn’t matter that her family wasn’t of the right background.  However, the flower petals of his words wilted as the warm spring of young love gave way to the sweltering heat of the Subcontinental summer.

As his affection chilled, her wounded heart drew away from the courtly life and into a dark despair, striking her quite ill.  Out of concern for her continued health, Vibia’s loving father decided to have her sent back to his old homeland, England.  In a near feverish stupor that only worsened with distance from India, she found her way quite accidentally on a train destined for strange and distant lands.  The train, having been incidentally switched to an unused side track, did not arrive at her rural England destination, but instead pulled into the outlying fringes of the Independent State of Caledon, which quickly became her new home. 

At the right old spinster age of 26, she had given up hope of finding any suitable suitors and instead embarked upon an education that she had long since neglected in the halls of the Oxbridge colleges.  Upon graduation with a Bachelors in Theoretical Etheric Manipulations and a certification of Airship Operations (small, armed), she set out in search of a good location to ply her new trade. 

 A short course later in this new fangled “heavier-than-air” flight, and she was off on a promising career in the extermination of air krakens, which swarmed around the skies below Iron Cloud.  As thrilling as that was, she eventually returned to her love of adventure, exploration, and airship travel.  She set sail for various destinations about the world, including some field study of two groups of humanoid-cat people; one a primitive forest-dwelling tribe with the notable exception of a highly advanced prison in a place ominously called Howling Valley, and the other that occupy the Orwell castle, full of mythological and technological oddities and wonders.  She doubted they built the structure themselves, as they have an amazing preoccupation with the continuance of their species. She later embarked on a wonderful excursion where she documented the native habits of a people that time utterly forgot, immersing herself in the culture of Roma for some time.

As fascinating as it was to observe a group of honest-to-Zeus living and breathing Romans, complete with legionnaires, senators and their own Imperator, wanderlust drove Vibia ever onward.  That is until one fateful day when a storm over Fishers Island blew her beloved airship off course.  The strong southerly winds dragged her helplessly deeper into tropical waters.

Hours of fighting the wind finally took its toll and she lost her footing and her white-knuckled grip on the wheel.  The resulting fall threw her backwards and her head struck one of her cannons, leaving her unawares as her ship drifted closer to a strange phenomenon.  She awoke on a beach on an unknown desert island, painfully aware that her ship was in no condition to ascend to the skies until repaired.

Marooned now on the island of Glint, she has begun repairs to her ship, while also making the necessary contacts within the local community, which seems oddly enough like a ragamuffin collection of living driftwood, washed ashore by some similar tempest that dragged her to the sandy beach.  A wide array of oddities from the depths of imagination itself seem to intermix freely on Glint, and has given rise to a proto-government, called The People’s Republic of Glint.  Such an odd thought, seeing as many only loosely resemble right, proper people.  Still, with an open mind and a keen eye for research, Vibia presses on -- for SCIENCE!