WDTAE - Space Cat

Instructions

Name: Realta Andar Age: 23 Gender: Female Orientation: Panromantic/Asexual Species: Felis cosmosus stellae (space-cat) Career: Astrophysicist Personality: Realta is constantly worried. She is jumpy and in a perpetual state of apprehension, always looking toward the future with an anxious eye. She tries to hide her uneasiness behind a smile, but her glaring pessimism is enough of an indicator. All of this is for good reason, when you consider the state of her universe and civilization. Realta is rather intelligent, hence her career path. She possesses incredible drive and resolve, but has a tendency to greatly overwork herself. She believes her last purpose in life is to save her civilization... somehow, and thus works day and night (being an insomniac) on complicated algorithms. She's more or less certain she'll die with everyone else in a cold, dark, impossibly vast universe, but she still harbors a faint glimmer of hope that perhaps, perhaps... that won't be the case. Goals: - Solve the Andar Conjecture, a mathematical theorem developed by her parents that, if proven, could allow spacecrafts to travel faster than the speed of light. - Design a spacecraft that could harbor life for centuries. - Launch a fifth and successful Project Phoenix mission--to Realta Major. Other: - Named for a very, very, VERY (emphasis on VERY) distant black hole, actually a "local" body in Realta's universe, Realta Major. It was officially discovered on her birthday. - She has three close friends: Hawking Ormei, a quantum physicist with a knife-sharp tongue; Krittika Messier, a supportive astrochemist; and Cepheiis Swann, a very critical astrophysicist who thinks string theory is a lie. They call themselves the Nerd Squad. - She definitely has some sort of anxiety disorder. Lore: Realta's universe is dying. It's beginning to progress into heat death, a demise that will see it expand for all eternity into an unrecognizable void. The distant ancestors of her kind still lived in a time when stars, albeit not very many, shone in the night sky; when a few resilient galaxies still held together; when there were still a couple of nebulae painting the faraway cosmos radiant hues. Not so anymore. Realta and her civilization live on a Dyson sphere that encapsulates a tiny white dwarf, Algira. Algira has slowly burned away its heat over trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years, and it's due to die within the next century or so. Fearfully noticing the diminishing heat output of Algira about five millennia ago, the government began funding Project Phoenix, a mission intended to shuttle the populace to an unfathomably distant white dwarf known as 4763 Octantis. There were four attempts, all of which failed miserably. The first attempt combusted before it even left the Dyson sphere; the second attempt ran out of resources; the third attempt was consumed by an "astronomical anomaly", actually a yet-undiscovered Realta Major; and the fourth attempt got just far enough to realize that the time/distance/fuel calculations were way off and lost contact with Algiran mission control 100 billion light-years from their destination. Realta is suspecting that the black hole that devoured the third Phoenix mission could ironically serve as her people's last hope in a universe that's preparing to turn off the lights for good--but she's still trying to figure out exactly how.