Hyacinth Knight

Born on an Indian reservation in New Mexico, Hyacinth has come a long way from her roots. She was something of an adventurer in her youth on Earth, traveling the world with her paramour, who ultimately left her. She was able to attend higher education, and found in herself a prodigal talent for learning and a devilish intelligence. Armed with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, she took a job with the Paradox Corporation, headquarted not too far from her old stomping grounds, in northwestern Arizona. There, she applied her great intellect to some of the most challenging and groundbreaking science being conducted in the late 1980s.

At Paradox, she learned something she wasn't supposed to. She saw things she wasn't meant to see. She soon became persona non grata, and was marked for death; however, she cheated her assassins of their kill, and instead purloined Paradox's most sensitive data and made a run for it. In her efforts to expose their lies, she found herself increasingly vexed by an ever-growing conspiracy, leading all the way to the top. She couldn't appeal to the mainstream--she had to go underground.

She infiltrated secure government and military compounds, as well as high-security corporate installations, sabotaging the efforts of the Paradox Conspiracy. She found herself able to navigate the complex web of politics woven by the corporate overlords, and was able to meet every physical, intellectual, and diplomatic challenge ahead of her. Ultimately, victory was in sight, until...

Cornered by the ringleaders of Paradox, inches from an uninvited, personal meeting with the President to expose the entire conspiracy, she found herself being wrenched from her reality by a device which did not officially exist. Separated from the confines of her known universe, uncoupled from the 3+1 dimensions she called home, she drifted through the multiverse, for who knows how long, until the strings of her material existence somehow latched onto the fabric of another world, another place and time.

She found herself in Faerun, in Thay of all places, and soon found herself on the auction block. When she finally gathered herself, and convinced herself she was still at least reasonably sane, she made good her escape, only to be countered by one Dorian Adricus. He had been hired to investigate her, on behalf of her new "master", and found himself between her and freedom. Rather than honor his employer's will, he decided to reinterpret the agreement, and did not stand in her way; later, he offered her asylum after she introduced a Red Wizard's head to the concept of a Desert Eagle.

From there, Hyacinth became swept up in the Nightmare Crisis, and began to learn inklings of why and how she had come to this place, and what connection it had to Earth back home. She still wishes to return, only now she is only willing to do so if she can convince Dorian to come with her.

Staff Sgt. Miguel Juarez was a veteran of World War II, elevated from the humble rank-and-file of the Pacific Theater to the crucial position of Codetalker. His grasp of the Navajo language was not perfect, as neither of his parents were well-versed in their own culture, but he was able to fill in the gaps through training with his fellow Codetalkers. Through this association, he became interested in his Navajo roots, and resolved to return to his native New Mexico after the war.

Upon his return from the pacific theater, Miguel moved into his grandfather's ranch, which languished under an inheritance by his own father, a resident of Pasadena, CA. He learned the trade of a rancher from his grandfather's long-time friend, Jorge Nentija, a half-Navajo himself. He took to visiting the reservation, eager to learn of his own heritage, and there he met Kai.

Kai was a nurse in a small hospital in Shiprock, NM, in the Navajo Nation. He first met her when he sought treatment for a scorpion sting (which later proved to be totally harmless). Theirs was love at first sight; though it would be a long time before he could convince her to move away from her home town, and they never did perform a wedding ceremony beyond a religious ceremony.

Hyacinth grew up in the United States, but frequented the reservation from which her mother had come. Her father raised sheep and cattle on a ranch near Taos, NM, and insisted she attend school there. Her mother, likewise, insisted she experience her native traditions and customs, frequently ferrying her to and from her tribal lands to the west. She got to know her extended family and clan quite well, and learned to speak Navajo in addition to Spanish and English.

Hyacinth was gifted in studies. When she exhausted the resources of her primary education, and the wits of her conservative 1960s schoolteachers, she took to the libraries, and finally to mail-order education programs funded by her father. With these programs, she learned about advanced mathematics and sciences, and showed particular promise in Physics.

At age 12, after her elder sister left home to elope to California with Moon Whitehorse, a fellow tribesman she met in high school, Hyacinth became increasingly insistent on attending school in "the big city", nearby Santa Fe. Her mother was very reluctant, having already lost one daughter, but ultimately relented.

In Santa Fe, she attended the Santa Fe Indian School, a cultural mecca for native americans in the region. There, she developed a great relationship with her science teachers, and excelled in every available field.

In 1975, with the help of her Physics Teacher, Mr. Alvarez, she published a paper on quantum mechanics, which showed a plausible explanation of a massless spin-two particle which obeyed the correct Ward identities to be a graviton. Although string theorists Schwarz, Scherk, and Yoneya had come to the same conclusion earlier, she had done so with very limited resources, and no knowledge of their discovery.

Soon after, she received an invitation to attend the California Institute of Technology, free of charge, despite having not yet earned a high school diploma.

In 1981, she earned her Ph.D. in theoretical physics; her thesis disproving the existence of tachyons was cited by John Schwarz and Michael Green in their revision of string theory the same year.

As exciting as her academic life was, her social life proved even more intriguing. The city of Pasadena, CA, was the largest she'd ever seen, and neighboring Los Angeles was an unknown mass, as seemingly vast as the cosmos she studied.

At Caltech, she fell in with one Eric Knight, an average student with an active night life. He neglected his studies in favor of his band, which entertained students in the nightclubs near campus. He was taken by her beauty, and taught her to play the guitar, a skill she'd begun in her youth but had never mastered. For a time, she even joined the band, and he found she had a beautiful and powerful singing voice.

The worldly Eric taught her things about a side of society she'd never seen. He would break into liquor stores to fuel their nightly parties, or hack into ATMs for free cash. He taught her the wonders of cocaine and LSD, and, when they couldn't afford those, they just got high on his endless supply of Humboldt weed.

In turn, he learned much from her, and was finally able to complete his Electrical Engineering degree in 1983. She even managed to tame him to the extent that they married in 1984, and she soon after became pregnant.

Things became stressful in the Knight household. The pregnant Hyacinth paid all the bills with her professor's salary, due to Eric's inability to hold down a steady job. He was increasingly obsessed with the difficulties of child-rearing, and insisted upon an abortion.

Hyacinth, already balancing work, social life, and pregnancy, felt quite capable of raising a child, and wondered aloud what right a layabout like him had to claim child-rearing was too much of a burden.

Things took a nasty turn when he used a potent mix of drugs--effectively poison--slipped into her meal to force an abortion. Hours later, in the ER, she was informed that the baby had miscarried, and that she had been rendered barren.

Though she could not prove it, she suspected her husband's hand in the dirty deed. She kicked him out of her household, and would not see him again for years.

Following her miscarriage, against the advice of her colleagues, Hyacinth sunk deeper into her work. She began postulating on properties of string theory that might give rise to more effective weapons--a subject that earned her many grim stares amongst her academic peers.

Meanwhile, she took to a habit of physical training. She began a rigorous exercise regimen, and purchased a handgun, with which she practiced often at a nearby shooting range.

In the summer of 1985, she took a 3-month hiatus from work, and traveled to her father's ranch. Her parents had undergone a separation of their own, as her mother wanted to be closer to what family she had left. She bade her father not inform her mother of her presence...she wanted something else.

Over the summer, after great reluctance, Hyacinth's father trained her as he had been trained, with the aid of the restricted military weapons he'd hung onto. She mastered marksmanship, and learned to use assault weapons, grenades, and explosives. He taught her how to fight with knives, chains, bare knuckles, and even swords. To his horror, she took to these skills with as much talent and zeal as she'd taken to her studies.

Finally, he confronted her on her motives, demanding to know why she wanted to be forged into a killer. She revealed to him her pain, her deep distrust of the world around her, the fear she lived in every day. She was terrified of betrayal, and could not trust anyone anymore...she had to be completely independent.

As therapeutic as it was simply to pour her heart out, he recommended something a little more traditional. She should seek the elders of the tribe, and ask their guidance to perform a vision quest. At first, she balked, but he insisted; he, too, had done so, and it had changed his life.

In the military, he had been a fierce warrior. His squadmates named him "Dragon", for it seemed he breathed fire, and could not be slain by mere mortals. He bagged hundreds of confirmed kills in the pacific theater, known for his wild, reckless raids against fortified positions, his shoot-from-the-hip machine gun charges, and his reliance on an unorthodox combat style: dual pistols.

His experience as a Windtalker was almost torture to him; rather than fight on the front lines, he had to communicate with squad commanders, serving as their only secure radio link to headquarters. He wanted to kill Japs as heartlessly as they had done to his countrymen, but he had to stay behind. That experience, more so than his many violent battles, almost led him to madness.

When he returned to the Navajo, he was not seeking a peaceful, tribal existence, but some imagined, romanticized view of a tribal warrior. In his heart, he wanted to ride through the desert, scalping his foes and terrifying man and beast alike. The elders, disgusted by the plague within his soul, sent him on a long and torturous vision quest. Under the desert heat, with only himself to rely upon, he learned the nature of his own soul. He learned how he disguise his fear as hate, his weakness as strength. He learned the foolishness of war, and felt true remorse for his deeds. When he returned, he was a changed man.

Also, he got stung by a scorpion.

Traveling to the Navajo nation on her new ride, a 1985 Harley Davidson FXWG 1340 Wide Glide, Hyacinth skipped the tribal elders at first, and sought out her mother. There, she told of her plight, and her pain.

In the home town of her mother, and her mother's mother, she found a profound love and acceptance. There was infinite sympathy for her loss, and and outpouring of compassion. Still, her mother felt she had to face the darkness alone, and she, too, counseled her daughter to seek her true self.

The elders of her clan told her the way. She rode far into the desert, putting herself perilously out of reach of any who might help, and wandered into the sun until her body gave out.

When she awoke, she was tended by a strange woman. The crone seemed to be mad, talking to herself as she added ingredients to a pungent stew. The night air was terribly cold, but the woman wore barely rags, and seemed merry as a satyr.

She fed Hyacinth the strange brew, and it was awful; however, it was the only nourishment she'd had in days, and her body welcomed it, if only for nutritional value. The woman then spoke in rhymes of her future, a bizarre prophecy of strange travels and other worlds. She remembered very little of it, for the chemicals she had consumed muddled her perception. It was unclear just how long the encounter lasted, or what else might have occurred, but eventually she awakened, alone, far from where she had collapsed.

She awoke in cave, etched with ancient drawings, messages from her ancient forebears. They seemed to tell a story, a tale of a strange visitor from a far-off world, whose magicks were vile and whose intentions were cruel. Incredibly, it seems, the tribal warriors overcame him, and in this cave, they put him to rest, setting their fallen warriors to guard it evermore as spirits.

Of the supposed visitor, there was no trace, but she did find something interesting: a dagger, buried in the clay, in seemingly poor condition. Normally, she would figure it for a few hundred, maybe a thousand years old, made of flint, but its outer edge flaked away when disturbed, revealing a pristine core of black stone.

The bizarre stone was clearly intended as a weapon, and it was all she had; the survival gear with which she'd set out had been lost. In the cave, she waited until dusk, then set out to find her bearings. The markings on the cave gave hints to her location, and she was able to determine that she was merely 30 miles or so from the rock cliffs where she had left her bike.

Determined to reach the salvation of her motorcycle before daybreak, she ran. Her motion, and her thick leather jacket, kept her warm against the desert chill. Coyotes sounded alarm as she passed, afraid to confront the warrior directly. The night itself seemed to yield to her urgency. In her marathon, she had a religious experience; she felt a profound oneness with a thousand generations of tribal warriors, she felt the spirit of the land, its heart pounding in time with hers. She felt the earth tremble as she plunged into the night.

Upon reaching the tumble of cliffs were her bike was cleverly hidden, she encountered something unexpected. In the near-light of the early morning, she encountered a pack of starving wolves. It seems they were attracted by the unusual smell of rubber and petroleum, and she had arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The wolves showed no fear; their eyes glowed madly, and their jaws gnashed hungrily in her direction. Heedless of caution, the wolves surrounded her, certain of their superiority in numbers.

Her initial fears were soothed by the quiet. She felt in herself a dance, an ancient memory, as natural as walking or breathing. Her limbs moved like the wind, her dagger danced like a flame. With her tiny weapon, she overcame six wolves.

Despite the torture of desert heat and cold, the trusty cycle was ready to roll, almost eager to serve as her mount. The roaring sound of the engine echoed across the plains, her victory cry over the dark forces of nature.

In subsequent years, Hyacinth dismissed her vision quest as mostly a drug trip. Her only concrete memories were of her departure and arrival back in Shiprock. Though she remembered a brutal fight, and the pain of many wounds, she was in pristine condition when she returned home. She remembered three days, but she returned only on the second day, and the cycle showed no signs of the torture it would have suffered exposed during an entire day in the desert, let alone two.

However, she still had in her possession the strange, black dagger, though it showed no signs of blood.

In any case, she resumed her life, returning to more ethical research into subatomic particles. However, her previous foray into possible weapons of mass destruction had not gone unnoticed.

In January of 1986, she was invited to lunch to discuss a lucrative job opportunity. Paradox, Inc, a high-tech research firm, was conducting some incredible cutting-edge research in the Sierra Vista facility, in the southern Arizona town of the same name. The facility was far underground, due to the nature of the experiments being conducted there. The recruiter couldn't go into much detail without some form of commitment, but mentioned that they needed more people like her, willing to explore the fringe of scientific possibility.

At first, she was disinclined to accept, despite a handsome six-figure salary, a company jet she could charter to take her to Pasadena, Taos, or wherever at least once per quarter, and of course, preferential motorcycle parking. However, her colleagues insisted she take the offer--she'd be a fool not to. After all, while she would be bound by nondisclosure agreements, that didn't mean she could draw upon her knowledge gained there to further advance the field of theoretical physics.

And so, in March of 1986, she accepted the position, and relocated to Sierra Vista, AZ. There, she bought a beautiful house on a mountain peak for $79,000, only five miles from her office. The small mountain town was a verdant beauty, and, besides the nearby Huachuca military base, it was quite sparse and rural, a far cry from the Los Angeles suburbs. She found it quite pleasant, and was glad she had made the move.