Enzo Salt
Knight Airman Enzo Salt
Knight-Airman Enzo Salt is member of the Cobalt Knights' aerospace corps and decorated veteran of the Armoa Conflict. After experiencing trauma at the end of a long patrol assignment aboard the CKV Mercury Sable, Salt was assigned to a mission control role aboard the ESCI Revelation. While many would be reticent to taking such a far-flung assignment, Enzo is eager to spend the remainder of his life supporting the colonization efforts on Ibren in the Falconer's Eye system.
Mental characteristics
Personal history
Enzo was born posthumously to an unidentified Asteroid Colonist couple. The couple's SSTO shuttle splashed down on Evermorn near the icy Clan Jyorumunde territories, killing both on impact. Enzo, then a fetus, somewhat miraculously survived long enough to be extracted by emergency personnel and moved to an artificial womb to finish his development. With no records of his parents found in official databases, the unborn child was given the surname 'Salt' by his rescuers, who found the wreckage near a coastal desalinization plant.
Members of the Cobalt Knights often adopt such pre-natal orphans. Hideki Jyorumunde, up-and-coming scion of the Clan of the same name and instructor of the Cobalt Knights aerospace training program, and his wife Hayla Jyorumunde adopted Enzo alongside numerous others. Hideki raised Enzo as best he could in the tradition of Enzo's own spacer ancestry, enrolling the young boy at the Frost Mountain Academy where Hideki was one of the head instructors.
While Hideki was himself a stoic and authoritative figure, he also loved Enzo and the other adoptees as his own. Hayla was less present in Enzo's life, as the Academy is a boarding school and Hayla had other responsibilities, but she did provide a softening influence to the otherwise stoic child when she was around. Despite the oddity of his circumstances, Enzo Salt does not mourn the loss of his blood parents, instead regarding Hideki and Hayla with fondness despite the unusual nature of his and his sibling's family life.
Education
From shortly after his discovery, Enzo was looked at with interest by the Cobalt Knights aerospace traning program. A spacer by blood and with no ties to broader Evermornan culture, Enzo embodied the perfect combination of ease in microgravity, small stature, emotional detatchment, and predisposition for intelligence sought after in Knight-Airmen. As such, Hideki and the other instructors at the Academy started training him in the direction of space flight operations from a very young age, including courses in mathematics, physics, athletics, and military topics. It was also during this time that he recieved his first-generation intracranial BCI implants (see sidebar), allowing him to operate machinery through direct neural connections, and affirmed his desire to join the Cobalt Knights.
Employment
Aboard the Mercury Sable, Enzo and his crew were primarily involved with search & rescue and anti-raider operations. They patrolled the inner asteroid belt in their vessel, a 'Q-ship,' looking to ambush Aniki Labs vessels who, during sorties against other Cobalt Knight vessels and civilian resource extraction interests, mistook the Sable for just another civilian mining vessel.
Enzo's final assignment is aboard the Dewhollow as Director. Despite retaining vestiges of his old 'joystick cowboy' professional experience, here his discipline and restraint are more necessary than ever.
Later, aboard the Revelation, Enzo serves the Evermorn Strategic Colony Initiative in his Cobalt Knight capacity in the role of Department Leader for the vessel's Navigation & Flight Control Department. Because the crew of the Revelation trends young and green, as they are expected to learn and start families aboard in preparation for arrival at Ibren, a person like Enzo Salt is valued for his practical experience and education in the topics relevant to their respective department.
by BCGR_Wurth (background by Beat Schuler via Unsplash)
Accomplishments & Achievements
At age 18, Enzo graduated with an aerospace flight certification by successfully completing the Capsule Test, in which an applicant must pilot a small orbital pod back to the training space station to attend their own graduation ceremony using only archaic techniques (coleostat, slide rule, etc). While not the youngest to achieve this, he was still considered very young to have completed the Test. He then completed in-service training aboard the CKV Mercury Sable, then fresh off the assembly line, attaining the rank of Knight-Airman at the tender age of 20.
Mental Trauma
During routine patrol operations aboard the Sable, the ship was taken by surprise by a mining cruiser hijacked by Aniki agents. The pilot of this mining vessel, his judgement subverted by Aniki-implanted brain probes, lured in the Sable with a call for escort before attacking with shaped fission mining charges. This overloaded Enzo's brain implants, leaving him blind and in agony, while exposing the other crewmates to radiation which two rather gruesomely succumbed over the course of several days. It is only with the aid of Sara that Knight-Airman Salt and Squire Halverson managed to destroy the mining cruiser and make it to Espedrill Station for repairs, but the damage had already been done.
In the aftermath, Enzo's injuries left him with agnosia and 'phantom ship' sensations on top of cortical blindness. At Espedrill, Enzo's implants were replaced with better shielded ones. Small portions of his temporal, medial occipital, and medial parietal lobes had to be replaced with cybernetic prostheses to restore his visual accuity and recognition. This gruelling affair leaft Enzo traumatized, and he blames himself for failing to react in time to save his friends.
Unfortunately, Sara's platform is later one of the ones which the hostile artificial intelligence infecting the Revelation's node network ultimately siezes control of, forcing Sara to fight and kill many members of the Revelation's command staff. Sara's platform corners Enzo in a supply room, throwing him against the wall and choking him, before being isolated from the hostile AI by a fieldproof door's closing. This allows Sara to temporarily regain control of her body. Heartbroken at seeing her friends and coworkers cut down by her own hands, she begs Enzo to grant her the mercy of a shot from his pulse pistol, hoping that her sacrifice will save his life and buy him time to leave the room and save the rest of the ship from the other marauding HLAI platforms. Grief-stricken, Enzo acedes to her request. Over the next six months, Enzo is so traumatized by this turn of events that he drops 20 pounds, stops eating anything other than algae straight from the CELSS tubes in his room, and starts drinking himself to sleep. Ultimately, the moral support of Midori, Howard, and Fox is what saves Enzo from this depressive spiral.
Personality Characteristics
Motivation
Though many would consider assignment on a one-way colony mission a disappointment, Enzo looks forward to building a new life instead of ending others. His position as head of a department aboard the Revelation inspires other aspects of his life, from his desire to resist the tempting 'temporary solace' of alcohol to his constant pursuit of knowlege and training, because losing this position would pull him away from this highest goal: helping to create a better world instead of destroying things. He is also heavily motivated by his sense of guilt and desire for atonement, seeking to live up to the memory of his lost fellows at all times. These two motives are sometimes at cross-purposes with one another, as he and the crew of the Sable were warriors among other roles in the honorable service of the Cobalt Knights.
Savvies & Ineptitudes
Enzo is deeply knowledgeable about piloting and astrogation, though this is by design rather than innate talent. Rather, Enzo's true savvy is his ability to absorb information and investigate sutations from all angles, coupled with a willingness to make snap judgement calls to preserve lives and ensure the completion of a mission.
Likes & Dislikes
Enzo's favorite drinks are coffee and the mixed drink spacer's delight. His favorite foods are steak, salmon, and eggs, though he's grateful for anything fresh (i.e. anything other than spirulina) when he's between spaceborne assignments. He regards spicy foods, especially Lepidosian curry, as treats.
Virtues & Personality perks
Enzo exhibits a high degree of professional competence, dedication, reliability, and the high Evermornan virtue of honor. Later, after overcoming his trauma and becoming a father, his leadership qualities also mature; while he was already a Department Head as of 1987, he is ultimately tapped to become Director of the Dewhollow on the basis of these qualities.
Enzo's empathetic quality manifests most clearly in the events surrounding the siege of the Dewhollow. In the hours and days leading up to the siege, Enzo resists suggestions to approach the Dewhollow engine-first - sterilizing the other colony vessel with particle radiation from the fusion drive - as this has the potential to kill the colony's children and any innocents who chose not to participate in the revolution. After the siege, his friend, Knight-Espatier Howard Mackinnon, is prepared to execute the whole crew of the Dewhollow and repopulate the hull with members of the Revelation. Enzo instead opts to press the mutineers into service - hanging the threat of execution over their heads while hoping to never have need of such punishment - because he believes that many aboard were merely acting out of social pressures and can be 'brought back into the fold' without the need for violence. He does this with the understanding that it will require constant vigilance on his part as Acting Director, effectively sacrificing his carreer as a free-flying spacer in an effort to finally put an end to the loss of lives over Ibren.
Enzo is genuinely empathetic to most living things. Even though Aniki agents have personally threatened himself and his crew in combat, he still regards them as fellow human beings and would much rather live in a world where he wasn't forced to kill them. Observing the dead crew of the Pyre Dawn in-person during recovery operations was an important moment in his burgeoning disaffection with the military aspect of Cobalt Knight life, as it was one of the few times he as a pilot had to see the aftermath of micro-gravity combat up close.
by BCGR_Wurth (background by Beat Schuler via Unsplash)
Vices & Personality flaws
While Enzo's stoic and mild attitude is usually a virtue in his position as a leader, it makes it all the more shocking for others when something finally does get through his toughened countenance. Long conversations and intense situations linked to the catastrophe aboard the Sable - especially radiation warnings and the smell of cooking pork - can cause him to lose composure, as he suffers from a degree of PTSD in relation to these events. In truth, Enzo regards himself as the cause of his fellows' deaths, despite evidence that there was nothing he could have done, reasoning that he heaped revenge upon himself by destroying the Pyre Dawn and other Aniki vessels. He suffers this guilt in silence, being reticent to share this sensitive past with others - including those who might want to help.
Though he is merciful to the crew of the Dewhollow, he quickly realizes that he has to keep them on tight leash. What he sees during the siege also causes him to see that there are terrible aspects of human nature that resist the influence of either technology or higher virtues, rendering him a much more stern and authoritative person by the time of his death in service in 2016.
Hygiene
Enzo starts off clean-cut, becomes increasingly grizzled over the course of his career, and eventually grows a short beard. He regards personal hygeine as a professional obligation in more ways than one, as appearance is both a part of personal bearing (a leadership quality) and working efficiently in micro-gravity environments (stray hairs can interfere with sight or get lodged in suit seals).
Social
Family Ties
by Hero Forge
by Artbreeder
Religious Views
Enzo is religious, but not spiritual. He respects what the spirits represent in Evermornan culture and upholds many of their virtues, but doesn't feel any real spiritual connection to them. Enzo had never given much credence to the influence of the Ancestral Spirits of Patronism in day-to-day life, and the terrible experiences of him and the rest of the Sable's crew at the hands of Aniki Labs commerce raiders only served to cement this attitude in his mind.
The birth of his son, Hideki, in 1993, coupled with his near-death experience aboard the Dewhollow in 2001, prompts a spiritual awakening in Enzo. After these events, he starts to revere Izetsu for that divine's connections with knowledge, the sea, and growth through pain - all relevant to Enzo's own personal experiences.
Social Aptitude
Enzo is extremely shy arond new people because he doesn't feel he has much to offer in conversation with people he doesn't know; his education as an orphan was deep and narrow in nature, leaving him with few connections to pop culture. Still, once he does get to know someone, he is a good listener and an exceptionally reliable friend.
Mannerisms
Enzo sometimes absent-mindedly rubs a half-moon scar on his left arm. This was where he was bitten by a Lepidosian asteroid miner suffering from Igeshenk during a rescue operation.
Hobbies & Pets
While they aren't pets in the traditional sense, Enzo's cybernetic augmentations allow him to directly commune with the augmented magpies which serve as scouts and damage control adjuncts aboard the Revelation. As a pilot, he feels a kinship with these flying creatures, and he and the flock members share a mutual respect. This personal association comes in handy later when, during the siege of the Dewhollow, he is able to convince the local flocks to turn against the mutinous enemy pilot trying to prevent the Cobalt Knights' advance into the administrative ring elevator gantry.
Relationships
Enzo at age 26, at or around the time of his commission aboard the ESCI Revelation.
CK Crest, ESCI Honors by BCGR_Wurth
Alignment
Lawful Neutral
Currently Boarded Vehicle
Species
Conditions
Ethnicity
Other Ethnicities/Cultures
Honorary & Occupational Titles
While all members of the Cobalt Knights bear the title of Knight, Airman is appended to Enzo's title to indicate his specialization in aerospace operations. Later, after conquering the Dewhollow, his official title changes to Acting Director, then (by appointment) simply Director. Enzo is a recipient of the Scale of Paulus for the injuries he sustained during the incident aboard the Sable, though his survivor's guilt will not permit him to show this decoration as a point of pride.
Currently Held Titles
Life
1961 CE
2016 CE
55 years old
Circumstances of Birth
Gestated in an artificial womb after parents died in an SSTO crash near a desalinization plant (hence the name 'Salt')
Circumstances of Death
Killed in the second rebellion of the Dewhollow while buying time for fellow Cobalt Knights and loyalists to escape
Spouses
Midori Milan
(Wife)
Siblings
Children
Current Residence
Gender
Male
Hair
Short black hair
Height
5'8"
Weight
150 lbs
Owned Vehicles
Aligned Organization
Other Affiliations
Appears in...
Aboard the Mercury Sable
by Hero Forge
Implants
by Hero Forge
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