El Taco TacoName: Trent, Thomas T.
Age: 34
Gender: Male
Callsign/Codename: Wizard
Kills: 72
Psychological Analysis:
Thomas T. Trent is the nicest sociopath you've ever met.
A tremendous fan of understatement, there is very little of the typical grandstanding mech-jockey about him. Something of a wallflower, he much prefers to listen than to talk and is usually content to let much louder men take the spotlight. In smaller groups he is a bit more lively, his self-deprecating sense of gallows humor coming to the fore in quiet quips and occasional snipes, but even then there is something slightly distant about him. Laid-back and easygoing, it's hard to picture him as the same man who logged more hours in the training simulators as a recruit than any individual pilot to have come along before or after him--largely because he isn't.
At attention he's mechanical, following orders without question or complaint. In public he's boneless, relaxed and at ease even when he shouldn't be. It's only in private, when one on one or among a small group of very specific individuals that Trent shows his true colors. The truth is that most things don't bother him because they just don't matter. Ninety percent of Trent's life is going through the motions, keeping up appearances--he's very, very good at it, but he doesn't feel things the same way other people do. Maybe he never did. He eats because he has to, fraternizes because it's expected. It costs him nothing to be nice, so he is. He knows what the psyche evaluations he undergoes look for, so he gives it to them. He's the most psychotically stable man in the service, almost literally. It's only in private that his war stories become wistful, his dedication to the pursuit of the adrenaline high evident.
As time goes on, the probability of all events occurring approaches one. Trent, ever the perfectionist, just fucking loves seeing how many nines he can put behind that period, never knowing if the next moment will turn probable disaster into real destruction. Someday it will click over, but until then it's the only thing that gets him out of bed in the morning.
Military Record:
Thomas T. Trent was not born a brilliant pilot.
He was not born much of anything other than the scrawny fourth son of a hard-drinking jarhead and his highschool sweetheart who got married and started a family when he got back from his tour. Terrorized by his older brothers and consistently disappointing to his father who thought welterweight boxing to be a girl's sport, most people would assume this to be the cause of his somewhat stunted emotional development. Trent would argue otherwise, pointing out that the only thing he ever really cared about was perfection of whatever it was he did. It wasn't that he was brilliant so much as absurdly focused, willing and happy to dedicate hours on end until he'd mastered something completely and in its entirety. School frustrated him because of its surface level, segmented approach to learning, so he went through his lessons bored to tears and learned everything else online. His excellent memory meant high retention and, if it didn't make him many friends at school or among his family, he didn't much care. And then, on a particularly fateful career day, Maj. Arnold Anderson came in and discussed his time as a pilot with a truly awkward amount of nostalgia and completely hooked the young Trent, who wanted nothing more than to be less bored with his life.
He was obsessed with the idea of speed and reaction, the thought that a wrong twitch at Mach 1 could turn him into a smear inside wreckage. Then and there he knew he wanted to be a pilot, and he knew he wanted to be one for the military--they got the fastest toys, after all, and he wasn't about to shoot for less. As with anything Trent did, he approached it with nigh unstoppable focus--he learned what the flight academies were looking for and became it, to the letter. The transformation was impressive, impressive enough to earn him a place at the Mars academy and a shot at piloting a MAS.
Which was everything Trent could have asked for.
He might not have been a natural pilot but he loved what he did. Always in favor of high-maneuverability, high-speed models, he quickly proved his reflexes were up to the task by brute force--to this day, not a student at the academy has surpassed the hours he logged on the simulators. Isolated by simple cause and effect, he performed well in team exercises but missed out on much of the bonding and camaraderie that went hand in hand with struggling together. Further alienated by his exceedingly high test scores (that he studied like a demon didn't seem to matter), it wasn't until one of his professors pointed out the many factors that went into selecting pilots that he wizened up and began to insinuate himself into conversations. He was smart, after all, and relatively funny, and he found that the less he cared and the more relaxed he appeared about the whole thing the better a response he got from his peers. If he wasn't exactly Mr. Popular, he at least managed a working relationship with the important members of his team, and with his exceptional performance no one doubted that he earned his place at the top of his class.
It was, then, somewhat surprising when he wasn't assigned to a proper unit. When he requested an explanation, he was instead assigned to a research and development unit as a test pilot, a job where his excellent paper performance would come in handy as he put machine after machine through its paces. For a time this was exactly what he wanted--hurtling around in the fastest tin-cans the army could provide and seeing if he could break them--but after a year of it he found it growing stale. Like any junkie, it took more and more product to get him that same high and test runs through obstacle courses just didn't cut it. It didn't matter how fast he went, there just wasn't enough...
Well. He couldn't exactly come out and say that he didn't have fun if he didn't feel like he was about to die, so instead he bit his tongue until the right MAS came along. He found it in the Mosquito Mk. I, the highest performance light mech he'd yet seen--when he'd put it through its paces and found himself having to adapt to the machine's handling rather than the other way around, he requested a transfer field operations proper as soon as it was cleared for live testing.
Thus began his initiation into the 101st and his joining of the 7th MAS Team.
Of things Trent was born for, it was live combat. Every movement had the potential to be his last, every high-speed turn had real unknown potential around the corner. No more test tracks, no more safety limiters, just him and his reflexes and a machine that could keep up, and he lived for it. The only thing left to study was his machine, and so he did--he got in with the mechanics and tinkers using his R&D cred and started tinkering like the Ace he wasn't. He'd learned his lesson back on Mars, however, and was quick to insinuate himself in the unit proper; it was easier as low man on the totem pole, and just by rolling with the punches 'the new kid' turned into 'Triple T'.
And, over time, Triple T turned into Mr. Wizard.
Tackling missions and live piloting with the same obsessive perfectionism he always had, he didn't race for kills or try to prove how macho he was like some of the other rookies he'd seen. He did his job and he did it well, and--funny thing!--that was enough. Out of blood, sweat and tears he built a reputation for being absolutely stone-cold reliable--if you wanted something to happen, you called in Trent. If you needed a distraction, or a target removed, or this particular hole punched just right, you called Trent. When you needed magic you called the Wizard, and he delivered.
He still does. One of the most senior Aces in the 101st and one of the only ones to have accomplished it running as many missions as he has in his 'fancy tin can' of a MAS, Trent's record speaks for itself. Known for accomplishing suicide missions, speed runs and precision work that no one else can, Wizardry has become synonymous with high-performance precision work under pressure.
Thomas T. Trent wouldn't have it any other way.
Equipment: A trench knife, a machine pistol with a clip of back-up ammunition, several requisite holodiscs of contraband-grade pornography (for trading among the men), cigarettes. Lots of cigarettes.
