[quote=@HereComesTheSnow]
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[b][color=8dc73f]Name:[/color][/b] Liam Haggerty

[b][color=8dc73f]Age:[/color][/b] 20

[b][color=8dc73f]Gender:[/color][/b] Male

[b][color=8dc73f]Job:[/color][/b] Chief Gunnery Operator

[b][color=8dc73f]Country of Origin:[/color][/b] England

[b][color=8dc73f]Appearance:[/color][/b] Wiry, brisk, and brimming with furious purpose. Liam is a young and frankly small man, standing only 170 cm or so even in ramrod naval posture, and he carries little in the way of extraneous bulk on his person, having neither need nor wish of living lavishly at altitude. Whatever blubber a fuller diet might have given him to insulate his frame from the outside world is burned away by the heat of constant motion on the gun decks of the mighty airship, as he loads, aims, and fires heavy comets of lead unto his hated foe a man possessed. In so doing, he often looks more the part of a engine worker than a uniformed soldier, topcoat stripped to hang around the waist as both his pale skin and white undershirts are constantly stained black by gunpowder. It too carries in the short head of mahogany hair he's topped with, never quite getting the odor out free from his follicles or pores. His eyes are a dark, stormy gray, as though cast from the same iron as his holy airship's namesake— and the vessel that saved his life, five years ago.

[b][color=8dc73f]Personality:[/color][/b] A stern, focused gunner, Operator Haggerty is a brash, outspoken individual on the floors of the cannonade decks, a man singularly focused: If there are Martians to rain down God's Judgement upon, he will see to it that they are tried. He is fiery in his passion for the craft of artillery, stating simply that [color=8dc73f]"It's no coincidence that the [i]Thunderchild[/i]—the [i]First[/i] One— was the best weapon we had against those damned squids! The shells put them down! [i]I was there![/i]"[/color] when questioned. His anger at the demons from Mars, as a young man who survived the initial invasion of the British Isles, runs deep enough to touch his core. He was a boy who lost family, lost friends, lost his home, lost his nation— and watched many of them burn, screaming, beneath the devilish rays of heat. He hates none of his fellow men and women, and would call himself a friend to all mankind, regardless of their heritage— and on the other side of that coin, would gladly do whatever necessary to wipe the Martians that took his world away off the face of the planet— and theirs, too.

In the rare moments that he allows himself to be away from the mighty guns (and the thankfully less rare moments where he's forced away by outranking officers), he retreats into a quiet shell, keeping his words tight and controlled and close to his chest. At times, one wonders if part of him might realize that he was twisted irreparably from the joyous young man that lived in Hull up to the Summer of 1897, and that he needs to keep himself tightly wound and locked in place when he has no demons there to Hate so fervently. In these cases, socialization seems almost an unfamiliar chore, if not necessarily unwelcome. A few beers (or if you manage to steer a conversation somewhere he knows how to get going within) can sometimes change this— bringing out a ghost of the boy who died on the steamer's deck, in time with the valiant heart of the Ironclad.

[b][color=8dc73f]History:[/color][/b] A coastal lad hailing from the port town of Hull, Liam's origins are by necessity humble, the Haggerty family settling on the lower end of the newly birthed middle class post-Industrialization. His father was a hardy steel mill worker who moonlit as a fisherman and enjoyed jellied eels and meat pies with his daily pint at the local pub. His mother kept the house and routinely enlisted her boys— Liam and his older brother James— with the more labor-intensive work in the years of his adolescence, slotting cleaning and repair between their studies and ventures into the forests a few miles north. It was by all accounts a simple life— one that the Martians dispassionately tore from him at the age of 15, mere months after his brother had enlisted in the Army. The demons, in their impossible and deadly engines of destruction, cut a swath through the Isles mercilessly, with no warning to speak of. It was all he could do to take his ailing mother, feverish at the time, and hurry her through the streets of Hull onto the nearest ship they could— a small steamer, filled to the brim with similar refugees, that barely puffed out of port as the three-legged monsters loomed high above what was once his home. His father is to this day unaccounted for, and he presumes him dead, likely within the steel mill he was employed by.

The steamer limped southward, only making one daring stop— skirting along the Essex coast for supplies and fuel, its load unfortunately lighter. Those injured in the attacks could often not be adequately treated, and were grimly tossed overboard after they passed by the crew and whatever family could muster the courage. It was on this fateful stop that young Liam saw the shadows of those demons again. This time, his boat wasn't so lucky— small, slow, and surrounded by a trio of the striders, they were to be easy pickings.

And then, one of them fell to a crack of thunder, as a furious horn sounded from an ironclad bravely surging into the fray. He watched, awestruck, captivated, as the roaring ship bore down at full steam, heedless of the heat rays or warbling cries of the war machines. Their only answer came in the form of her mighty guns, her bellowing engine, the scream of metal tearing into metal, and the warrior calls of the men aboard as she rammed the second, defiant to the last as the final walker's heat ray melted her valiant heart. It was here that the shellshocked boy's soul changed forever, casting all his hope, all his hate, and all his sorrow into the single chant the refugees aboard the little steamer repeated, slinking away as the voice of legion.

[i][b][color=8dc73f]"Come on, Thunder Child!"[/color][/b][/i]

As the ship made port in France, the boy's heart was set upon the one thing he saw that had made those demons bleed.

Five years later, his naval career has lead him aboard a new child of the storm, one that sits in the same leaden skies its sacred namesake fought beneath, each an indomitable testament to human will, in the face of a truly existential threat.

[b][color=8dc73f]Equipment:[/color][/b] A Webley Model 1887 revolver sidearm, opposed by a long, front-curved knife that hangs from his opposite hip to round out his personal protection should things ever become that disastrous— a kukri obtained from a Gurkha, reportedly as some form of trade bargained at some point prior to his stationing aboard the airship. That this is nonstandard seems to be overlooked, given his proficiency with the mapbook, wind charts, protractor, rangefinder, and texts on various artillerist's concerns such as the Coriolis effect, geometry, and gun maintenance. Always seems to have a stout on hand, especially when working.

[b][color=8dc73f]Fighting Machine:[/color][/b] [i]HMS Thunderchild[/i]. Knows her inside and out, knows the Gun Decks every which way one can short of "biblically".
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get him in there, he's got tripods to shoot