Born on the 30th of August '07 in Silver Strand, a coastal resort town on Canceron, Charis is the child of slave-labour heritage parents. Working as menials in the resort, they were exposed to influences and ideas barely known in the labour-camps and mines. Pushed hard by her parents to 'be someone' and to succeed academically (especially after the Quorum's intervention in 2017), Charis acquired the intended work ethic if not necessarily their specifically desired goals. During her childhood and adolescence she became a conformist rebel - rather than surfing or sailing like the fashionable elites at the resort, she played rough-and-tumble Pyramid (and for a few years was set on becoming a Cyclone); rather than learning to gamble with fashionable Triad, she studied chess; rather than resenting the government and wanting money and luxury in personal recompense for her people's suffering, she chose to serve the greater good in the hope of sparing others from such things in future.
She won a scholarship (for students of disadvantaged backgrounds) to the Kobol Colleges on Gemenon, studying law, conflict theory, and criminology. Signing up for the ROTC, she completed their course of training while there (from '25-29), but wound up pursuing a career in the CIB rather than going into the military.
Her career focused upon organised crime and counter-terrorism, with specific roles in analysing patterns of violence, systems of recruitment, and connections between cells and groups; and also in providing advice on non-confrontational methods of reducing the influence and support of illegal organisations - leaving them vulnerable to either tactical strikes or negotiated surrenders. She frequently collaborated with the Fleet Reserve on anti-narcotics operations, especially in crack-downs on activities supplying insurgent groups and major criminal networks: crime, after all, very often finances terror, and organised criminals are often the source of terrorist weaponry.
As might be expected, she spent more than a little time on Sagittaron, and played a role in negotiating the surrender of the splinter of the Liberation Front in the latter part of '39. In the course of her service, she often butted heads with commanders wanting to treat the Insurgency as a purely military situation, with Charis seeing the political and social elements as the true source of the problem – to fail to deal with those issues was simply to guarantee that violence would continue. Of course, that view also put her at odds with contractors and others who saw Southern Sagittaron as nothing more than an economic opportunity.
After three straight years on Sagittaron, Charis was transferred to Tauron in January '41 to take on a senior role in a continent-wide crackdown on an inter-colony smuggling network (in which the ICTC was suspected of involvement) and its local affiliates. Promoted to Supervisory Special Agent immediately prior to the start of the grand effort (giving her the authority to bypass some of the chain-of-command issues found in inter-agency operations), she barely had time to enjoy her new rank.
Rather than playing a significant role in furthering the greater good, Charis had just enough time to get out into the wilds (in search of concealed landing-sites) before the Cylon attacks hit. Spending the better part of a year struggling to survive, she found her skills in analysing cells and clandestine systems of supply to be rather helpful in avoiding the occupying powers now that she was one of those being hunted – though her comparative lack of 'real' field experience often left her dependent on more talented survival and evasion experts for the implementation of her ideas.
By the time she was picked up by a rescue party in early January, she'd been separated from the last group with which she'd been associated. Having sustained significant injuries (including a fractured femur) the previous month when a ruined building fell in, she had been left behind as a liability, remaining in hiding in the faint hope of recovering sufficiently to be able to move again. By the time that she was picked up by a rescue party, she was both ill and suffering badly from lack of supplies, and duly spent the next seven weeks in the care of the fleet's medics, being patched back together and regaining her strength and mental equilibrium alike.
