Paola Rinaldo

Paola Rinaldo is the daughter of the ship owner. She lives in the constant hope of leading an adventure which will shake up her life. To denounce the Federation's post-colonial system, she starts a pirate radio station on campus with her boyfriend (who she is mutually exclusive with on Standard ships #starcrossedlovers). During one of their shows, she accidentally intercepts disturbing communications informing her of an impending invasion. Fleeing for her life, she meets up with her father who permits her to board the Daedalus, abandoning the man of her life on Earth.

How to play
Paola's main task is to work on Communications. This takes a lot of and can only be performed by her alone (once the connection is up), which means that the crew will expect her to focus almost exclusively on it. In turn, they will usually work to help her gain by building the  on the Bridge for her to sleep on, and she is encouraged to eat as many  as she needs, ideally sharing the  with the Laboratory crew to avoid getting dirty.

With some support on the connection, a good Paola can then do 2-3 NERON upgrades, get the day 3 base and go through all of Xyloph before the day 5 base comes up.

However, she is not detached from what is going on, as her General Announcement ability leaves her with a responsibility to inform and organize the crew - if not by herself, then at least helping out the acting by relaying their messages over the ship's speakers.

Core skills

 * Paola's most valuable skill. And people will love to hang around with you! It is most often used to give (or any other ) additional  for their Astrophysics job. Alternatively  with Logistics Expert and the sofa on the Bridge will help you gain 3  per cycle for communications.

Secondary skills

 * This ability saves the crew a few when (re-)establishing the signal, and lets you do this yourself more easily, but that is basically it.
 * Allows you to help shooting Hunters by using your free [[image:Pa shoot.png]] Shooter Points in the Front Turrets, in particular when combined with or fight a  Mush.
 * With this skill you can help out the research team once all Comms tasks are finished or if there is a break between Rebel Bases. Can come in clutch when the main researchers are inactive or dead, in particular for difficult late game research like the Retro-Fungal Serum. But due to how demanding comms is it can also easily end up never seeing use so don't pick it before you actually start researching.
 * Paola's unique skill. Its (mediocre) value comes from saving on decoding Rebel Bases, similar to the Kivanç bonus. Should only be taken if you plan to decode many of those.
 * Very good when it comes to finding an occupation after Comms are done, especially on very long ships, and in combination with the free points from it allows you to help the pilots without delaying comms.


 * With no excuse to get except eating without the  (which is not hard for her to get) and a narrowly defined task that is also easy to check, a Mush Paola usually has little choice but to mimic a human for the longest time.
 * She has good reason to wait for her moment, however: If the crew is not aware and cautious, trading an inactive (or even active!) character for PILGRED and then doing a into the acting  can instantly end the game in a win with little effort, making a Mush Paola a more dangerous "rusher" than !

Useful tips

 * If you don't have a, there is a good solution: You can sleep in the Medlab bed while / can stand next to you and benefit from instead. If there are inactives on the bridge, then let Frieda take the sofa and do the same!


 * Since Paola is the default, she does not need her to talk and can drop it to free up an inventory slot. However, be careful when sending confidential information to  or anyone else as anybody who picks up your  can go through your chat logs.


 * In the later game when all Comms work is done, you should pick between, or , depending on the state of research and whether you have a  Magebook.


 * Picking in the early game is a mistake. You do not have a lot of AP - and you should use them to update NERON, decode signals and access Xyloph. In the late game, it might be pointless as well, if you have a working team of researchers and the Mush are dead.

Biography

 * 3131 : Born on Earth, in Italy.
 * 3146 : First expedition off-Earth: At the age of 15, Paola ran away with a troop of space mercenaries. She meets an alter-universalist commune of neo-hippies on Mars IV which heightens her sensitivity to the plight of the miners on Tau-Ceti. Her father finally takes Paula back to Earth at the end of the year.
 * 3148 : Paola is sent to Rome to the University of San Lorenzo to study structural biology. Despite her poor attendance, she got good results. At this time, Paola set up her first pirate radio station where she denounced the expansionist policies of the federation. The war on Sol and the ever-reducing education budgets were two of her favourite topics. She definitively cut all ties with her father who as a director of a company using prisoners to mine mineral deposits is directly involved in the shifting colonialist policies of the President GL Maubrick.
 * 3149 : Paola meets, a Turkish student who helps her set up her antennae. After losing two transmitters which were wrecked by local police, they pooled their collective knowledge to come up with a revolutionary olfactory method of communication. By projecting synthetic pheromones over short distances, they managed to transmit information without transmitting detectable waves. They could then start broadcasting again and the campus police couldn't do a thing.
 * 3150 : Following the uprising on Ross248, the government ignore the protests and make Mush the scapegoat for any and all injustices. Paola is outraged by this false incrimination and resolves to prove that the people of Tau-Ceti and Ross248 had nothing to do with the bloodthirsty man-shrooms described in the federal announcements. That same year, Kivanç detected unusual interference on the olfactory broadcast channel, but didn't pay it any attention.
 * 3151 : When the interference increased, and Paola identified exchanges in an unknown language. Kinvanç started trying to decrypt the language and managed to decipher the most commonly recurring messages. They talk about the "purification of the Sol system", "the transfer of violent subjects", and even "the spore bank". He is finally arrested the following month during an anti-spongic check by the FDS.
 * 3152 : contacts his daughter to warn her of imminent danger. The Mush invasion described by the government 3 years ago is real. The entire Sol system is under threat. He offers her a place aboard his Ark-World project ship, the Daedalus, which must save the human race from certain demise. Paola accepts but she wants to save Kivanç first. he is being held in a detention centre in France. She asks her father to transfer him to Titan and into one of his mining colonies.
 * 3154 : 48h before the operation to help Kivanç escape, a tragic accident obliges the crew of the Daedalus to move their departure forward. Paola must decide to leave Sol without Kivanç but she vows to get back in touch with him no matter the distance between them.