Here we have Tabitha Marseilles, Lieutenant in the Nekokuni Republic Colonial Security Force . She lives in a small nation composed of three and a half million square kilometers of tropical islands on Numenor (largest moon of Manwe in the Arda system) with about ten million people living on farmsteads, villages and fifteen small frontier cities. Like her fellows she has been genetically modified to include some feline features, albeit less extensive than some. Over the last sixty years the colony has grown to be the most successful and largest of the six nations of the Arda system with an armed orbital docking station, city shields and four frigates which is enough to fend off lone raider ships and make it too costly a prize for many of the smaller armadas as several wrecks in eccentric orbits have proven this fact. Admittedly an amount of bribery and cooperation with the less unpleasant raiders is also a significant factor. Like her fellow countrycats she longs for the day in which Nekokuni has the strength to secure their system in it's entirety, but even with a high birth rate and freighters bringing in thousands of new cat people (or at least people willing to undergo the metamorphosis that nationalization requires) every month that's still decades off. She cares about said issues more emphatically, since while the issues in space tend to spill over.





Since she was a kitten Colonial Security had been gradually giving way to Police and the Marine Corps, and she'd spent two years in the latter before taking up a career in the older institution since it suited her better as she was away from the family less. Now basically a militia, Colonial Security handles most of the boots on the ground defense in the less developed Provinces. Unfortunately, one of the other countries on Numenor was founded by ex-pirates as a sort of retirement home. Ferrigno's Freehold was a rather shabby lawless place of a few hundred thousand ruffians and their broods run by a trio of crime syndicates about a thousand clicks from Nekokuni's current borders. Unfortunately (among other things) it was in the habit of exiling it's criminals with basic survival gear into the wilds to fend for themselves and occasionally some of them would launch raids on Nekokunese villages. Mind you, when you had rail carbines and armored rovers while the enemy has hunting rifles and the occasional stolen technical fending them off is not too difficult to those who know what they're doing and don't take stupid risks, but she has still lost people in those attacks.

