Serene Acantha Wilkinson was born to Peter and Nerissa Wilkinson soon into their marriage on April 12, 2010 AE. Peter was thrilled, having just survived the years of the First Cylon War as a raptor pilot out of CFAS Anadyomene with the Caravans, it had taken him a while to finally settle down only a year before with Nerissa, his much younger bride. Working his way up within the ranks had made him the captain of the raptor squadron, with almost as much pride for them as he had for his new family.
As Serene grew up, her father’s career in the military continued to be a huge part of their life. And when she was only a few years old, he was stationed on the Battlestar Nicia off of Picon. The move from the base was a great career opportunity and despite his concerns about being away from his young daughter and wife, it wasn’t something Peter was able to pass up. Not willing to be any less frequently able to see her husband than possible, Nerissa moved the family to Picon so that when Peter did get leave, they would be able to see him as often as possible.
When Serene was five, her brother Eryx was born, and while her father’s military salary was enough to provide for the family, as soon as he was toddling around Nerissa took a teaching position at one of the local primary schools to help provide more for her young children. With a doting father who was in constant communication, a string of “uncles” who would come home on leave with Peter to spend some time relaxing in a stable family environment and remind themselves of what it was they were fighting for. And, for years life at the Wilkinson household was a daily routine of schoolwork for all three regular household members punctuated with influxes of frequent visits from Peter and members of his command as he worked his way up from Captain to Rear Admiral through several posts on ships based out of multiple worlds, eventually taking command of his own Battlestar Forseti.
However, when Serene was 12, things started to change. Her mother, who had been the bedrock of everything in the Wilkinson family, started to need to spend more and more time resting. And before long, the military doctors at Fort Cetus determined that she had a long term degenerative bone cancer that was likely to cause her to become more and more dependent on other care, and certainly require that she leave her teaching career that she loved. For the next several years, life was darker. Serene spent much of the time she wasn’t attending school caring for her mother, and Peter spent much of his time on the fleet and off searching for any doctor that would be able to come help do something for his wife. But, when all was said and done, Nerissa Wilkinson passed 4 long years later.
Unable to stay in the home that he had built with his family, and unwilling to send his 16 year old daughter and 11 year old son off to distant relatives, Peter took an early retirement from the fleet after over 30 years of active service and moved the family back to Leonis. Still serving as a military advisor as a civilian contractor, Peter was active again with his original unit the Caravaners, but now in a instructional capacity when they needed specialized training. The rest of his time he spent doting on a daughter that adored him and a young son that blamed him for the abandonment of his mother.
Serene selected medicine as her profession as soon as she entered Nemean University, starting off with a biology undergraduate program and working through medical college. Not long after she graduated and joined as a partner in a small pediatrics office, her brother Eryx changed her life forever. Interning in the public defenders’ office as a clerk during his own study as a law student, he was involved in a case against a new attorney on Leonis named Derek Duncan. Eryx was staying with her as he went to school, and so for days she heard stories about how this Duncan guy was nothing more than a conceited, upstart, know-it-all, pretty boy. Since Eryx was regularly known to exaggerate everything based on his feelings about something, she listened and didn’t think much of it until he came home and invited her to come with him as his plus one to a dinner that he’d been asked to attend.
It turned out that while Eryx was busy criticizing Derek, the young attorney had been sizing up the clerk and seen a lot of potential. And after the case was finished, he’d offered him an internship at the prestigious law partnership of Stern, Struins, and Stefanos as his own clerk while he finished up school. Happy to go with her brother and support him, it was at that dinner that Serene met her future fiance Derek Duncan.
Hitting it off immediately, Serene and Derek started dating not long after that dinner. And over the course of their relationship, she also got to know his twin brother Wade very well as he would come home on leave as often as possible. Eryx graduated from law school and took on a position in Derek’s firm, and almost as soon as he moved out, the couple moved in together. Derek and Serene were together almost two years before he proposed, and their engagement was set to last a year to make sure and give them time for planning the large wedding that would be expected of the daughter of a Rear Admiral and an up-and-coming lawyer in such a large firm.
Just before their wedding was to take place, Serene was given the opportunity to present a paper on a new technique for teaching parents how to help do physical therapy with disabled children on Aerilon. So close to the wedding, she was planning on passing up the presentation, but Derek insisted that he could finish up the wedding and have everything ready for her when she got back. She would have almost a week off from the office after the conference anyway. And besides that, Wade was coming down for two weeks of leave and it would give them a chance to finish out his last days as a bachelor without her around to get in their way. And so, Serene found herself going off to Aerilon, where she was in the middle of her presentation to her profession when the Warday attacks began.
Stranded on an unfamiliar planet, hiding with a group of doctors and trying to round up survivors, Serene’s experience with her father and his military family became more than useful, it became a gift from the gods. Getting as many civilians as they could, the group fled the college town of Tarnock, hiding in a settlement they created in the cliffs outside the sight of the Cylon invaders. It was there tending the wounded that did and didn’t survive that Serene learned that she and Derek were about to have a child, and 8 months after beginning their refuge in the wild, she gave birth to the second Derek Duncan. With no communication with the outside world, the group has survived making do with what they can, relying on the skills of the rural men and women to help gather what they need and fish for the food they can use to help keep everyone safe and alive.
