Teresa “Tea” Shaaban is Ashlee’s eyes and ears at the helm of Windsong. She is often playing the equivalent role of a Flight Intercept Officer: comms, sensors, and electronic warfare duty. It’s Tea who filters reams of data looking out for environmental or traffic hazards and searching for target vessels to intercept. Hers is a job whereby parsing data and discarding the noise is important. Though she lacks the patience to follow up or double-check her work, her intuition is rarely wrong in the first place. Highly attuned to the world around her (so long as it holds her interest), Tea frequently brings life-saving insight to the team. That is apropos, as on this multirole vessel, she is also the combat medic.
Tea was raised in the tropical hamlet of Ystoria, a farming village on the Novani world of Celadon. A playful and carefree child, her survival instincts were honed from an early age by the dangerous fauna and flora surrounding her community. While she never sustained any severe injury, her childhood best friend died of a painful wound caused by slayflower, a particularly poisonous jungle thistle. Feeling responsible, Tea curtailed her juvenile antics at home, returned to her studies, and lifted her curiosity to the stars that littered the rural skies, determined not to become a sedentary farmer.
By enlisting in the Republican Fleet as soon as she came of age, Tea believed she could satiate her desire for adventure and explore the Nova system and beyond. But after the initial excitement of exploring the capital world Maridea with her own feet, Tea began to question her station. Life as an enlist was dull and full of regular and ceremonial duties that lacked the spontaneity Tea was looking for in life. Not particularly attentive or engaged on duty and prone to anxious quirks, she never made junior petty officer. After her minimum five cycles of service, Tea quit the Republican Fleet.
Riding on her pension, Tea moved to Demeter Station. It was here she experienced a racially motivated assault on her person. Barely escaping with her sense of self intact, Tea took the next flight out of the Nova system. Her flight led her to emigrate and seek refuge in the Sibylean Commonwealth.
Shaken and struggling as an outlier and immigrant, Tea had to reinvent herself in a new world where she knew no one. She found some peace of mind both in the rugged otherworldliness of Sibyl and the matriarchy of the Commonwealth. With trade expanding rapidly between the Novani and Astrilish societies, Tea found work as a mediator for international business transactions (although she was fully aware she was as much a cosmopolitan showpiece for executives). It wasn’t until Tea met Ashlee during a transactional dispute between two corporations that she became aware of interdiction as a career choice. After hounding Ashlee with questions, the exasperated freelancer got the hint, and Ash welcomed her aboard Windsong.
Ever since joining Ashlee, Tea has felt right at home, her need for adventure and thrill-seeking satiated. She continues to bear the scars of her past. But rather than bringing her unmitigated sorrow, those scars serve to inform her present. Her competitive streak is on display when she aggressively attempts to stay one step ahead of other interdictors, making her unpredictable. Tea can get stressed out when things go wrong, as they often do in interdiction. But she’s also always alert and in the moment, and Ashlee hasn’t regretted befriending and employing her.
