Name: Sasha C. Mackenzie
Age: 23
Gender: Female
???: Y
Skills: In a way, Sasha’s skillset was bound to lead her to working with HFVs. She had an interest in robotics from an early age, and
excelled at video games. Specific ones, admittedly, but they played a key role. Both lead her to excel first as a pilot and later as a technician on the very machines she piloted. Put her next to an HFV and Sasha could tell you exactly what was wrong with it, and more likely than not, how to fix it. Those fields by far are her best, but Sasha is a passable academic in most STEM fields. Liberal arts tend to be a much weaker area, given that she never saw them as applicable in her life, but she has a passable grasp.
Given her line of work, she has a decent level of athleticism and excellent hand-eye coordination. She might not act it all the time, but Sasha is
very quick on her feet and swift to learn. Additionally she has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of mecha both real and fictional. Not everyone would call it a skill. Sasha
would.
Appearance: Fairly short, at 5’4”, Sasha nevertheless manages to a tiny little ball of energy. Whether it’s due to the caffeine intake that seems to be a familial trait or her own natural enthusiasm no one will ever know. Her blonde hair is usually kept pulled back into a pony-tail while she’s on duty, since hair getting caught in the machinery never goes well, and more often than not there are grease stains on her skin. Said skin, be it because of her heritage or living in a colony, tends to be paler than most people’s. Sasha is actually quite good-looking, if she bothers to dress up, but she usually prefers her uniform. If that, given how often she casts aside the uniform’s outerwear to avoid getting grease on it when working.
Personality: Enthusiastic, in a word. At least when it comes to her job. Sasha is friendly enough overall, but show her an HFV she has never seen and you won’t get her to shut up. At all. She doesn’t always seem like the brightest star in the sky but her first impression can be deceiving. The extent of her mecha fangirl status can be shocking at first, given the enthusiasm with which she talks about humanoid machines both fictional and nonfictional, but her knowledge of HFVs is invaluable when it comes to restoring, maintaining, or designing them.
What most people don’t see so much of is her ability to be shockingly hot-blooded. If she has chosen to take a task seriously she will persevere through anything to accomplish it, with evident intensity. This serves her well on the battlefield, even if her demeanor might seem a bit eccentric, but it can make her
very reluctant to flee and just as easy to anger if you harm someone she cares about. Despite her enthusiasm she takes every battlefield seriously, in her own way.
History: Gerspenritter, like most colonies on and around Mars, is almost entirely run by a private entity. A valid member of the UN like any other it is nonetheless the site of X (Pronounced “Cross”) Corp’s primary headquarters and R&D facilities. A significant portion of the population works, in some fashion, for the company while the rest of the community grew around these workers. Gerspenritter is something of a paradise for scientists and engineers, with its constant development and innovation. X Corp has been a leader in robotics since the dawn of the Solar Age, and Gerspenritter was one of the earlier colonies; the earliest have been in use for more than a hundred years, but Gerspenritter has been around for a modest eighty six years. The colony has always been on the cutting edge of modern technology, both in its publicly funded and available projects as well as X Corp’s developments. Though they (both the colony and the corporation) have stumbled a few times they have always recovered.
This is the colony where Sasha C. Mackenzie, daughter of a X Corp roboticist and an independent computer scientist, was born. There Mackenzie family home was something of a mess most of the time, with components, computers, and blueprints scattered across any available surface and a coffee maker constantly providing a steady flow of caffeine. Both parents were happy to share their skills with their daughter, and Sasha as a result had a knowledge of technology from a very young age. As interesting as she found it all, it was her father’s work on HFVs that truly fascinated her. The young girl had been
raised on mecha, and been surrounded with the evidence of their reality from the day she was born. X Corp manufactured high-end HFVs, fulfilling contracts both for government armed forces and Gerspenritter’s own security forces and the entire colony reflected the theme.
So it wasn’t really a surprise when
Solar Age”, an exceedingly popular HFV-simulator franchise, caught like wild-fire. The original, the eponymous Solar Age, was a sleeper hit famous for being developed from real military HFV simulators. The game required a specialized controller, but it was renowned for its accuracy. The third installment, “Solar Age: Last Judgement”, was the most dedicated. It could only be played using a full sized simulator, and was most commonly played at local arcades or in tournaments that might encompass players from dozens of colonies. Sasha had no way of knowing that it would lead to her future career, but she played Last Judgement as often as she could. And she was
good. When competitive play of the game began in earnest, Sasha was at just the right age to get in on the ground floor. Just barely, actually. The very first official tournament that she entered required her to lie about her age (fourteen, a week and a half shy of fifteen) on the official registration form. To try and make sure that no one caught the deception she attended in a full costume reminiscent of those from her favorite TV shows, complete with a full face mask. She didn’t expect to make it past the first round, let alone place, but little Sasha Mackenzie took second place in the tournament.
She built something of a reputation, too. The mask had stood out, and so she kept wearing it at tournaments even though she had no need to hide her identity. It was a gimmick, now, something that set her apart. As though her rankings in Last Judgement didn’t do that already. Without anything to call her, given her intentional anonymity, the Last Judgement competitive circles took to calling her what she was; a Rising Star. And others had taken notice, too. Due to its accuracy some organizations had taken to using the Last Judgement competitive scene to try and find pilot candidates, a way to supplement those they found through traditional armed forces recruitment. And X Corp wanted to offer Sasha a job.
At the age of seventeen Sasha began working as a test pilot for X Corp, putting the very machines her father helped work on through their paces. X Corp, in addition to her salary, paid for her to take the courses necessary to be licensed as an HFV technician. Within a few years she was helping to maintain, modify, and engineer the machines she piloted. This set of skills was why she was eventually let in on X Corp’s next generation Project Paper Tiger. It was well known that the Ozzies were failing, but X Corp still needed to sell HFVs. And in order to sell the most HFVs, it needed to make the best presentation.
And that was where Paper Tiger came in. But the project needed combat data.
Real combat data. So after some discussion, the completed prototypes were loaned to the Ozzies with the pilots and technicians to use them. The Ozzies got a bump to their waning fighting force, and X Corp got a way to gather combat data. But of course, X Corp still needed to protect its interests. Only its own technicians would work on the HFVs, and only its own pilots would fly them. In order to guard against industrial espionage, the pilots couldn’t make themselves well known…
Which is why Sasha C. Mackenzie is on board as the XC|PT-001’s technician, and the champion Rising Star is out of retirement with a vocal modulator to help the masquerade.