Becky Traviss

“Beck, I wish I could get half as excited about anything as you get about rocks.”
~Mary Ketch

Becky’s fascination with the sciences gripped her from a young age. A precocious child, she made regular visitations (with or without her parents’ permission) to the expansion hubs at the peripheries of the New Belfast colony complex. There she would spend hours talking to the workers and watching the heavy excavation machines digging deep into the Martian soil to lay the foundations for new colony modules. Though fascinated by the ingenuity of the technology used to expand her home across the inhospitable Martian desert, what truly gripped her attention and inspired her imagination was something far simpler: rocks. 

Growing up as she did inside a fully-enclosed artificial habitat, Becky seldom had the opportunity to interact with anything from the natural world. Over time, she developed a fixation on the simple idea of what it would be like to touch the forbidden terrain she saw outside New Belfast’s protective hulls, to plant her feet on soil instead of metal flooring, to feel sand trickle between her fingers. 

As she grew, Becky channeled this fascination into academic pursuits. She obsessively researched geology and associated sciences, and quickly showed high aptitude in the subject in her academic life. Her enthusiasm for geology never waivered, and by the time she was in high school she had already been admitted into New Belfast’s geological survey mentorship program. 

Becky wanted more than Mars had to offer, though. She was eager to study the stone and soil of other worlds as well. Her strong academic record and extensive extracurricular activity managed to earn her the coveted privilege of admission into Crisium University on Luna; widely regarded as the most prestigious institute of higher education in the Home System. 

At Crisium, Becky found all the opportunities she had hoped for and more. Crisium’s exoplanetary geology program is second to none, and it allowed her opportunities to do field work all over the solar system. Every moon, asteroid, and planet Becky set foot on was a universe of discovery for her, only enriching her childhood fascinations even more. 

As she entered her PHD program, Becky’s curiosity could no longer be contained in one solar system. She took her studies abroad to every exoplanet she could reach. After spending a semester studying the fjords of Showalter, she completed her doctorate on the arid planet Samrat. There, she joined the Straad dig: an ambitious but setback-plagued research expedition to study an enormous unidentified mass buried deep beneath on of Samrat’s great sand oceans. Though the Straad expedition did not complete its mission by the time her program was completed, the ever-enthusiastic Becky still considered her time studying there well-spent. 

Unfortunately, Becky’s elite education and participation in numerous interplanetary programs racked up a tremendous amount of debt by the time she was done; debt that would be nigh unpayable on an academic salary. In an effort to cut into this debt after completion of her education, Becky took to doing freelance work for various mining companies as a geological surveyor. Though she had little passion for the majority of this work, it did allow her the freedom to visit new, unexplored worlds on someone else’s dime, and often presented her the opportunity to do her own independent research in her free time. 

When Exotech Industries offered her a higher-than-average paycheck to participate in a survey mission to Tantalus 13, a recently discovered planet at the very edge of explored space, it was an easy choice for her to make. To all appearances, Tantalus 13 was little more than a barren world with little to offer but rocks. But for Dr. Rebecca Traviss, rocks are all she needs.