Background
As a girl, Andrea Demarcos was everything that popular magazines made out farmer's daughter from Aerilon to be… warm, vivacious, more than a little attractive and generally eager to please. Born into a fairly well off family, her time was often spread equally between helping her pa out on the farm and participating in the various beauty contests her mother entered her in, and generally she enjoyed both, usually using the folk songs she sang with her pa on the tractor as her talent for the competitions. As she grew older, she learned how to turn her looks to an advantage, and knew how to get a sailor or two to pick up her tabs when she hit the bars around town.
Things got jacked up into another gear, however, the first time she was playing barfly in a pub where colonial viper pilots were on the prowl. Quickly targeted due to her looks and wholesome demeanor, some poor pilot took it upon himself to explain what exactly flying a Viper was like, and soon realized that she was paying far more attention to his stories than to the drinks he kept plying her with. She was hooked… the very next day she talked to her parents about applying to join the fleet and get her wings. They tried to dissuade her, her father even allowing her to take pilot lessons to dust crops with, but it only saved a year or so before she was of age, and applying to the academy. There were many ideas about where a bright eyed cadet like her would serve, but her dedication to the Vipers meant she could only be headed one way.
After putting in her time, Andrea finally earned her wish… a shot at her wings, and she didn't disappoint. Though it was perhaps not what they'd wanted for their little girl, her parents were proud as peacocks on the day she graduated from academy, and soon enough she was assigned her first wing. In the quiet pre war days, she did her time as an ensign and JiG before being given her Eltee wings, and she celebrated by returning home for a bit of R and R before her next assignment. She was on a transport headed for the orbital fleet when the world suddenly ended.
One moment, she was strapped into her seat, the next, she was struggling to take the controls of the craft as after the pilot and co-pilot were blinded by an atomic flash. The system fried by the EM pulse, it was all she could do to bring the craft down safely enough that a few of those aboard survived. Those who lived scattered, and she herself made her way home, staying there alone for weeks until she was finally forced to face the truth… her family had been at the spaceport to see her off, and had probably not survived the initial attack. Alone on the family farm, Andrea did what she could to survive, keeping her profile as low as possible as she lived off of the reserves and made a meager harvest from what was growing without care in the fields. Cylons that came by were destroyed and disposed of by an elaborate series of booby traps she concocted (her father's militia field manual serving as a guide) while she tended to herself as well as her mothers numerous medical books could inform her. Her laugh, once loud and inviting, vanished all together as she watched the road for any sign of any survivors, or alternately the geiger counter, wondering when the slowly mounting ambient radiation would get beyond her ability to treat.
Finally, after holding a small one-woman ceremony to mourn the loss of her family, Andrea abandoned the farm to return to the craft she had crashlanded months before. Aerilon held little for her now, and she held to hope that if she could get the ship moving, she might escape to find some trace of human resistance somewhere. Using what she could glean from mechanics manuals discovered in the sack of a diseased colonial engineer, she worked for a solid month on the ship before managing to fire up the engines again… and in so doing creating a tylium reaction visible to any halfway decent DRADIS. Resigned to being captured or killed by Cylons, no one was more surprised than her when a Raptor landed nearby, bearing the insignia of the Battlestar Cerberus.
