Heya, I absolutely adore the setting you built up for this! Even drew a sketch of my gal! Note: I tried to keep the details of the NCR and its fate vague enough and coated in enough hearsay. If its not enough though, feel free to tell me so I can just scrub it all. [hider=Helene Liu] [img]https://i.ibb.co/frG58vr/Helene-Liu-Fallout-Aloha.png[/img] [b]Name[/b]: Helene Liu [b]Race[/b]: Human [b]Gender[/b]: Female [b]Age[/b]: 26 [u][b]What Makes You Special?[/b][/u] [b]Strength[/b]: 4 [b]Perception[/b]: 6 [b]Endurance[/b]: 3 [b]Charisma[/b]: 6 [b]Intelligence[/b]: 9 [b]Agility[/b]: 7 [b]Luck[/b]: 5 [u][b]Skills[/b][/u] Guts - 1 Athletics - 1 Guns - 1 [b]Energy Weapons (Tagged) [/b] - 3 Explosives - 1 Medicine - 3 Piloting - 3 [b]Science (Tagged) [/b] - 3 [b]Repair (Tagged) [/b] - 3 Speech - 2 Barter - 2 Survival - 1 [u][b]Personality[/b][/u] Inquisitive, spirited and hands-on; Helene is a a woman described by her peers as, either endearingly or with disdain, a nerd. Helene loves to drown herself in dusty books and to lose herself in impassioned rants about the nature of the world around her. Maybe a few musings about both pre and post-war media, to boot. That's how she spent a lot of her early life, after all. That is, before Hoover Dam. Something sparked in her. A simmering desire to get out there. farther than the volunteer repair work she used to do for Shady Sands. A desire to not just learn from the wonders of people past and present...but a subconscious desire to make her own mark. To make a difference. And the NCR after 2282? It needed people like her, desperately. Despite her wanderlust and desire to go out to experience the wider world, she still finds herself either frightened or overwhelmed by the horrors of the wastes outside of the heartlands of the NCR. Furthermore, she finds it difficult to connect to people unless they share at least a few of her core passions. Nonetheless, after her departure from the NCR, she found herself picking through ruined complexes for interesting old tech, having warm chats with Followers she meets along the road, and voraciously absorbing newly-uncovered issues of [i]¡La Fantoma![/i]. [u][b]Background [/b][/u] Shady Sands. Home. Helene Liu remembers her childhood in vivid, dreamlike colours. How, despite days of sorrow and pain, she never truly suffered. The delicious fresh food, clean water, and her school with lovely Ms. Delgado. She remembered how, as a kid, she would jump up and down the public trams that passed by the streets that were constantly bustling with trade , or with new buildings being raised or restored. As she grew older, she wowed her peers with her knack for repair-work, and her technical acumen. She beamed with joy whenever her teachers or superiors would compliment her smarts. This was her life. Her life in the New Californian Republic. Who could ask for more? Helene would turn 16. As she came of age, she began to have her eyes opened. As she read and talked and actually ventured out beyond Shady, she learnt how her comforts were even possible. A periphery of settlements that supported the comfortable lifestyles of the heartland, settlements that struggled with basic needs. That's not to say of the settlements outside the NCR; Hell. It could be Hell on Earth. It was wrong. It was unfair. Helene would continue to read her decaying science books and her dusty, torn superhero comics with increasing sadness. Was she in a bubble? Was her country, that she would still assert in the present day that she still loves, being fair? Not really, no. Then she turned 18. The dream ended. If her sight was initially opened, now it was shattered. The second battle of Hoover Dam, New Vegas, the Mojave; a quagmire. A disaster. The less said of the details, her peers said, the better. The details don't matter anymore, not after so many young lives were thrown west, and for what? For the Corpse carts limping back over the I15? Helene signed up to the NCR military sometime afterwards. It was certainly a time to join; morale was at an all-time low. Rumours of desertions and resignations abound, not that she could decipher how true or deep they were. Yet it was better late than never. She was too young to have served in the Mojave anyways. Her technical skill saw her climb up the ranks as a combat engineer, and she found herself dealing with maintenance and field work. Her personal favourite time was the repair work of the remaining NCR suits of salvaged power armour. While she eventually became familiar with their inner workings, she would never wear a suit, nor receive the training. Not that she even cared to; she just admired the wonderous pre-war tech behind them! She would spend a few more years on tour, as the NCR reoriented and reassessed. Life on the frontiers of the NCR was tough, and she gained her first taste of true violence and conflict. It was a taste she would never truly grow comfortable with. Was she even making a difference? In this case, sure. Maybe. Perhaps? It never seemed truly revolutionary to her. She finished her tour of duty barely three years ago. She proved to be a decent enough soldier, although a far better engineer. Walking across California, she would become a drifter who sold her skills and her service in the NCR as a way to garner cash, caps and shelter. It was these years that proved to be Helene's most formative. It was in the digging, the scavenging, the amateur research, that she became obsessed with the old world. Helene would have mixed fortunes. Some weeks and months would be nothingburgers. Wastes of time. Very occasionally, she would find something worthwhile; a pre-war book with useful information. Some intact conductors or fission batteries that could be solid for a cup full of caps. Yet one day, while exploring a Robco facility beyond the edges of NCR territory, she would come across a barely functioning Eyebot. It was not anything fancy; seemed to have been a service Eyebot, a humble worker of menial tasks and basic information gathering/dispersal. The plucky wanderer spent nearly a week, maybe longer, that old facility, digging through scraps and other now destroyed robots to nurse the Eyebot back to working condition. She finds it utterly [i]adorable[/i]. While it lacks a true personality, Helene would end up talking to it on occasion, sometimes in endearing ways. It only beeps back. On starry nights, she would lay by a campfire and have the Eyebot pipe old, crusty songs from holotapes. Serenades of midnight-bound rangers. She wonders what those old, history-bound cowboys would think of her world. Of her Eyebot. Of everything that has happened since. She would do a lot of thinking in her moments of rest. Reflection. The NCR, a nation she still felt feelings for, felt like it had become increasingly lost. It needed direction. A purpose. Like her! And as she dug through old Repconn facilities and dived into scrapyards, she wondered if the Old World had the answers to questions that had gripped her. A way to make things fair, safe, colourful, to breath the same life she had in her childhood back into her world. Wanderers like her would accuse her of having Old World Blues. Helene would always spin it as a positive; that she merely wanted to look into the technological marvels of the past to help save the future. The fact that she nonetheless felt increasingly sad did not escape her. She suppressed those blues as hard as she could. Maybe she'll vent to her Eyebot, but never to a real person. Answers were out there. Answers to a colourful, right life for all. Out there in the dusty sands and farms of Californi- Or maybe beyond. No, not the Mojave. Maybe it lies West. Further. Much, much further. Across that mysterious vast ocean... [u][b]Equipment [/b][/u] [list] [*] A jury-rigged AER9 laser rifle. Helene's prized possession, and the only reason she hasn't had her legs gnawed off by a radscorpion during her wandering days. Brought as a broken model she got from a scrapyard, she managed to cobble a surprisingly working model together after months of constant scavenging work. Of course she did; the lens were still intact! It would have been a waste otherwise. Helene spends hours of her free time every week maintaining and caring for it, in a manner that might be viewed by some as disturbingly possessive. She almost wanted to nickname it, but the laughter or raised eyebrows she got when she experimented with that shut that idea down...for now. [*] An old, worn set of recon armour. Actually a barely-armoured, glorified jumpsuit from the pre-war, meant to be an underclothing for armoured American soldiers. Many people in the current wasteland use it standalone though; some like the basic protection it brings from the elements, while others think its stylish. For Helene? It's both. Even if it makes her look a bit fat. Shame about the rust and the wear-and-tear. Many a night has been spent polishing and cleaning this thing. [*] A used 9mm Pistol. Helene carries no ammo for this thing. She has not shot it in years. It's kept as memorabilia, a living memory of her time in the NCR military. [*] Goggles. Used to shield her eyes from storms, or to protect her eyes during welding or soldering work. She also thinks it looks cute on her forehead. Helene is almost never seen without them, unless she's sleeping. [*] Water Canteen. She would be dead without this. [*] A Backpack. It's her backpack; there are many like it, but this is hers. Used to partially carry interesting scrap for eventual sale, but mostly to carry her survival gear. And a book. Several. It gets boring out there, ok? [*] Several old pre-war books. As said above. Dusty, old, crumbling and unsurprising when you consider it's been 200 years. She cherishes every one of them. [*] A book and pen. Used to record observations. A journal, of sorts. Occasionally insightful, mostly rambly. [*] A good number of microfusion cells. The bread and butter of her trusty rifle. She swears she has like..100? 120? Maybe less? She needs to start keeping track. [*] 3x Stimpack [*] 1x Radaway [*] 1x Rad-x [*] 3x Mentats [*] 4 days of dried foodstuffs. [/list] [/hider]