Updated general info and history!

Kestrel was born in 2172, with the full name of Nasurn Uaru Aegohr Vesst Otori Sorin. His childhood and upbringing were mostly unremarkable, until he entered the final stages of his schooling. While he'd shown a remarkable aptitude for engineering and mechanical skill, his other interests turned to xenoanthropology. He became fascinated with the differences between the Salarian Union and the other races of the galaxy on a fundamental level, and in particular human cultural heritage. This fascination, unfortunately for him, involved a desire to reenact certain aspects of this history, in a perhaps misguided attempt to better understand it. He, in essence, played the part of several aspects of human history, drawn from its extensive history. This eccentricity was tolerated, at first, but with increasingly less grace as it became clear this was not a temporary situation. It ultimately ended, two weeks before final graduation, with expulsion; Sorin had finally taken one era of human culture too far with his discovery of "the Disco age".

Unemployed, and unemployable locally, Sorin fell back upon other tricks and older dabbles. His skills were still impressive, even if he didn't have credentials to prove it, and he managed to buy passage off world utilizing those skills in lieu of actual pay. He hopped ships over the course of six months, building a reputation and covering distance, and amassing a starting base of funds. However the largest aspect of his studying to stick was a fascination with piloting. Fighters specifically, but any craft would satisfy in a pinch. He had taken the basic piloting courses in his academy years, and he used the money he had picked up in travel to buy some more advanced courses. In time, he managed to secure a small loan, and bought his first fighter.

The ship was an old Turian design, known as a Sliverfish. It was unique for the Hierarchy, having been a joint project with the Salarian Union to design a space superiority fighter some years before the First Contact War in 2157, and had been phased out just before then. The Sliverfish was fast and agile, but sported only light inbuilt weaponry, a modest payload capacity, and was only lightly armored to boot. The original design also proved to be tempermental, and the controls required a very good pilot to get the most use out of it's over-sized Element Zero core and super-charged engines. It was for these reasons it was retired from Hierarchy service, and by then the Union had designed new fighters already, so the Sliverfish became available to less restricted markets. By the time Sorin took his loan, the craft were almost museum pieces, and not very valuable ones at that so far as space craft were concerned. But the challenge of restoring and learning to fly what was arguably the most agile fighter ever produced was too tempting to the young salarian, and he set about the task gleefully.

By 2180, Sorin had "vanished", subsuming his assets under his new alias "Kestrel". While Kestrel himself did not have much in the way of espionage skills, he purchased the services of other freelance operators to make a clean break between Sorin and Kestrel, which allowed him to occupy this new persona without easily being linked to his past. Not a hindrance, really, but Kestrel felt it best to distance the extended family from whatever he might do. For several reasons, the family in question aided the process, although they retained contact information of Kestrel should the need for a pilot ever arise.

Also by this time, Kestrel had established a small but impressive reputation on his own as a small-time freelance combat pilot. The funds he accumulated were almost entirely consumed by his constant upgrade projects to his Sliverfish fighter. Upgrades which ranged from more modern UV lasers, to external ordinance hard points, to one month long undertaking that had Kestrel tear out the entire wiring network of the fighter and replace it, in some cases rerouting it. Kestrel undertook these projects himself, using the credits to simply buy the parts he needed and rent the dock space to perform the mechanical surgeries.

By 2183, Kestrel had firmly established his credentials as a top-rate fighter pilot, freelance and independent. His ship at this point had very little in common with the base pattern Sliverfish he had started with, only the frame itself remaining unaltered. While he would also fly other ships, ranging from shuttles to corvettes to gunships, these were done so on a per-contract basis and usually were supplied by the employer. His passion for his own ship, the Blue Bolt, never wavered, and he took any excuse to fly it on his employers dime. He was not in Citadel space for the events surrounding the assignment of the first human Specter, or the Battle of the Citadel; he tends to operate in the Traverse and the Terminus Systems.

Kestrel is, as might be expected from a fighter jock, every bit as arrogant and cocky as the stereotype. Mostly because his formative moment, the point at which he knew he wanted to be a pilot, came from his human cultural studies, and the old human film known as "Top Gun". He seeks adrenaline highs like an addict pursues Red Sand, always looking for ways to test his abilities. He tends to take risks, although being a salarian they're always calculated risks. So far, he's managed to avoid any outright disasters, despite a few incidents that really should have. Cocky as he is, Kestrel also has the skills to back it up.

His study of xenoanthropology has also instilled in him at least an academic understanding of sex and sexuality. And, of course, a curiosity in it. Fortunately for Kestrel, he's far from the only salarian interested in the topic, and certainly far from the first. By salarian standards, Kestrel's quite the deviant xenophile. By galactic standards, however, he's only mildly sexually active.

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