Smike

Smike's Sheets

Fiddle

Name
Fidelity "Fiddle" Astor

Gender
Female

Age
22, January 10, 1997

Sexuality
Bisexual

Nationality
American

Appearance
Fidelity has long since accepted the fact that daily life is harder for than. Short and slender she has to use her dogs as buffers to keep from being crushed in crowds and knocks objects off high shelves with her cane instead of getting assistance from someone else. She carries herself with a straight back and steady gaze, greeting most people with the same easy smile and wave.

Her clothes run the gamut from light casual wear to black leather and old jeans, Fiddle choosing outfits more for variety than any particular style. Her preferred Shadow World outfit is purposely extravagant and flamboyant to the extreme, Fiddle believing that there's no point in hijacking people's conscious if you're not going to have fun while doing it.

Height
4'8"

Personality
Aimless, reckless, and obsessive Fidelity is caught in the curious position of being able to do whatever she wants and having nothing she wants to do. With no long term goals to reach for she tries to fill the hole inside her with with constant action. The urge to keep everything neat and tidy that had been ingrained in her as a child clashes with her urge to raise hell, her apartment caught in a constant cycle of being totally trashed and furiously scrubbed clean as conflicting compulsions battle against one another.

Fiddle is certainly friendly but there's an undertone to it that can be somewhat off-putting. She'll wave and smile brightly at an a acquaintance even as she peers around them at some non-existent phantom, eyes flitting about during conversations while she nods along. She's almost weirdly friendly, letting total strangers into her home every weekend to party and allowing people to take almost anything they want.

Her access to apparently limitless wealth has imbued her with a dismissive sense charity of charity, aware that she's much better off than most people but not feeling particularly guilty about it. Her family has money and others don't, that's just how life is. She leaves fifty pound tips on twenty pound meals and gives away jewelry to people who comment on it, waving off stammered thanks as she continues on with her day. Replacing it is just a minor inconvenience. She takes money for granted the same way most people do running water, oftentimes stuffing a wad of bills into friend's hands "to get something on your way home."

Arcana
The Emperor

Persona
The Mothman
First sighted by a group of gravediggers, the Mothman seems to be attracted to death and poor fortune. Spotted flying low over forests and haunting highways, one of it's regular haunts was an abandoned munitions factory from the Second World War. Despite its fearsome appearance the Mothman seemed content to stay out of people's way, restricting itself to frightening motorists and picking off the occasional dog.

Until the Silver Bridge collapsed. A single defective eye-bar led to the whole thing tumbling down into the Ohio river, killing 46 people. Two of the bodies were never found. To this day people claim that all sorts of supernatural happenings had occurred in the days leading up to the disaster, visions of it happening before it occurred and visits from ghosts and UFOs and men in black and the Mothman circling the area as if waiting. This is of course ridiculous. The Mothman was likely just a a sandhill crane or unusually large heron, something mundane and not at all a harbinger of bad luck.

Still the legend persists to this day. If you ever find yourself out on some backwoods road at night be careful when you watch the sky. You might find a pair of red searchlights watching you right back.

Skill
Curse. The Mothman uses it's bulk and ability to fly as a form of mobile cover, tanking damage for its user and more fragile allies. It can also curse enemies, making them vulnerable to damage or weakening their attacks.

Equipment
Sword-Cane: A much more ornate version of her real world cane. The hooked head can snag on limbs and bits of clothing to drag or trip people and the blade itself is weighted perfectly to Fiddle's liking.

Henry Rifle: The same rifle she Fiddle grew up shooting. Sixteen .44 bullets (if you load one in the chamber) sent downrange with speed and accuracy. Her preferred way to fight for obvious reasons.

Education
Business BA (Hons), 3rd Year

Biography
Fidelity was born into immense wealth, the scion of a old ranching family and a more recent chemical empire. Her early years were spent bouncing between her parent's properties in Texas and West Virginia, being taught almost exclusively by private tutors and learning to ride horses and handle livestock. It was established early on that she would be inheriting one or both businesses depending on how things went, the young girl accepting her fate without much enthusiasm. She had no interest in learning the finer points of shipping nylon and neoprene around the globe and was better suited to shooting bottles and riding horses than castrating steers. But it was never about what Fiddle wanted. Her existence was a calculated affair designed to ensure both parties involved had an heir.

It was a somewhat lonely existence. What few friends she had she'd be separated from for months at a time as she bounced between states, being taken all over by one parent or another as they went about their mostly separate lives. With neither mom nor dad having much interest in her outside of her studies and general well-being she relied on her relatives for company, a private car dropping her off at all the birthdays and barbecues her parents didn't have time to take her to themselves.

Her favorite relative lived out of the country, working a meaningless upper management position for Astor Chemical Co. in London’s Canary Wharf district. Daniel was more of a parent to Fidelity than her biological ones, taking care of her for a couple months at a time when she needed to be out of the way. Fiddle sat for hours listening to him tell stories about aliens and cryptids haunting the backwoods, absorbing each tale of ghosts invading people’s heads or strange monsters that lurked in back alleys.

Daniel only fueled her interest in the supernatural, letting the girl dig through his collection of grainy UFO sightings and books on the occult. Just a bit of harmless fun, he told her. Strange stories that weren’t true but were good for a late night scare. She remained unconvinced, sure that there was more to the world than people accepted.

Those treasured days came to an end shortly after Fidelity’s twelfth birthday. Daniel had been heading home from work late one night when his elevator failed in a freak accident. He plummeted 15 stories before hitting the ground, reduced to paste almost instantly. A tragic case of bad luck, nothing could have been done. Fidelity took the loss hard, refusing to speak for nearly a month after the funeral. Less than a week after she started to talk Lady Luck spat on her again, a sudden thunderstorm turning the ground to mud while she was out riding. The horse tripped in the muck and toppled over, crushing her leg underneath it’s bulk.

It took more than five hours before she could be found and by the time she was taken to the hospital it was too late. Fidelity’s left leg had lost most of its function, forcing her to use a brace and cane to get around. After a long run of relative kindness Luck had decided to lash out and Fiddle took notice. Chance and probability became fixations for her, taking an interest in all sorts of gambling and numbers games. The randomness of it all intrigued her, watching with interest as people won and lost fortunes in moments.

From that point on she was stuck in a sort of functional dissociation. Her belief in the otherworldly only deepened with her newfound interest in chance, strange figures flitting about at the corner of her vision. She went to a private academy for high school and made up for all the stupid decisions she hadn’t been able to make, throwing herself into the drinking and drug scene with passion. More than one sports car ended up wrapped around a light pole or stuck in a ditch, substances doing nothing to temper her penchant for risk taking. It was a miracle she made it to graduation, her by now divorced parents gladly shipping her off back to London with the hope that she’d sort herself out there.

As long as she was educating herself both had pledged to support her, Fidelity’s self-destructive party lifestyle backed by seemingly limitless funds. She was now free to drift without any purpose save for hedonism.

Affiliations
-Daniel Astor:Fiddle's now deceased cousin and surrogate parent. She keeps a picture of him in her wallet and on her desk in her penthouse.
-Turner and Basker:Her service dogs and chaperones. Trained to help their mistress by serving as bulk to lean on and getting objects that would be otherwise out of reach, as well as defend her when needed. There are few people in the world capable of fighting off nearly four hundred pounds of attack dog and she has yet to one of them.
Relationships
TBD

Character Theme
TBD

Persona ~ The Beholder [Interest Time!]

Hey howdy I’m here

Smike's Sheets

My Hider

Name: "Lynx"
Appearance:

The Stranger

No matter how many times she edits her appearance some things remain forever nonhuman, but thankfully are easily hidden. Indigo eyes with a cat's vertical pupils are hidden by contacts, her flexible spine and floating collar bone only noticeable if one were to walk in on her squeezing into some tight space. Her ridiculously low heart rate (less than ten beats per minute) and ability to operate in low oxygen environments are essentially invisible under normal circumstances.

Age: She lost track of the exact number long before living memory but she's been kicking around since the creation of the universe.

Bio: Whatever name Lynx had gone by at the beginning of time, however she had carried herself, she had probably already been bored. Springing into existence at the dawn of the universe fully formed and ready to rumble she originally quite liked the powers that had been given to her. But when the novelty wore off it quickly became apparent just how unpleasant of a life she was going to have. The speed at which she processed information meant that the world was in a constant state of slow motion for her, every moment spent waiting an unbearable torment.

Any hobby or pastime would have all the enjoyment sucked out of it within weeks or days, the Custodian quickly dissembling the activity and piecing it back together thousands upon thousands of times. She bounced from job to job, serving as everything from professional chef to starship captain to doctor and leaving after a few years when it became unbearably mundane. She merely existed for millions of years, trapped in constant race for gratification and amusement.

When some of her brethren went rogue it blindingly obvious that it wouldn't go well for them. The majority of Custodians that had stayed loyal had literal God on their side, only an idiot would have taken those odds. But fighting a doomed war followed by bitter defeat sounded more interesting than curbstomping a few rebels so of course she picked the losing side. The war went about as well as expected, she took out a few loyalists before getting booted out with the surviving rebels.

Historia made a decent place for a crash landing. The Custodian found herself among humanity, a race that measured up to hers about as well as ants did to them. But how interesting they were! Fragile and short-lived creatures they still dedicated themselves to climbing mountains and crossing barren deserts, just as willing to create beautiful (by their standards anyway) works of art as they were to form armies and raze each others homes to the ground. Irrational and hot-blooded, driven to prove that their lives had meaning even though the universe would have forgotten about them in a million years or two, they were simultaneously kind of pathetic and sort of inspiring in their stubbornness.

The Custodian was fascinated by them and wanted to get a closer look, so she began to disguise herself as members of their race. She spent time in the guise of queens, knights, artist, beggars, murderers, thieves and every archetype under the sun, poking at society to watch how it squirmed. She helped establish codes of law and then proceeded to break them to get a look at the prisoners suffering in salt mines, commissioned great works of art for museums and then joined barbaric hordes and stole them. She spent time living on the streets, watching the faces of those who'd give her a few coins and those who acted as if she didn't exist.

It was essentially an undercover investigative report. She learned just as much about humans watching them drag Descendants out of their beds as she did seeing them band together to recover from natural disasters. Over the millennia she built up a strangely patronizing affinity for them, regarding them as amusing animals that could do tricks.

Eventually she ended up in Hermannreich in the form of a gunrunner turned revolutionary, working with a cell of freedom fighters that sabotaged military installations and assassinated high value targets until they were wiped out by a surprise raid. The alien made her exit as her comrades were being lined up for summary execution, escaping to Iliad under the guise of a gunslinger and mechanic turned insurgent fleeing political persecution. With her billions of years worth of technological experience both human and otherwise it was easy enough to set up shop as a mechanic and machinists, getting herself a job as the shop teacher at Marduk. She got herself another position as a history instructor, firsthand knowledge of the world's major events coming in handy.

And so Instructor Lynx became a upstanding citizen of Iliad, wiling away the time grading essays and dismantling engine blocks as she waited for the inevitable need to drop everything and run.

Mundane Skills: Quite frankly her skillset is immense to the point of being too long to list. But for the sake of getting into character the Custodian limits herself to whatever her current identity would be good at. In Lynx's case her skill with firearms and melee combat is quite literally superhuman, at a level obtainable only through her natural powers and millennia of practice. She is a talented alchemist and machinist, modifying her gear and crafting different types of ammo for different types of targets,and has a penchant for explosives. Her careers of planning and foiling assassinations and robberies give her a good sense of small-scale tactics, her specialty being ambushes and smash-and-grab type operations. Stealth is a given, the alien just as quiet as her current namesake when she wants to be.

Powers:
Supernatural Senses- Like her namesake Lynx relies on her senses to get an edge over her opponents. On a day to day basis her sense of smell is as good as a dog’s, counting individual threads on a person’s shirt from across the room and hearing each breathe they take. She’s capable of much more when she focuses but limits this to avoid sensory overload.

The real advantage is her ability to detect magic. If you’re paying attention there’s certain giveaways inherent to arcane energy. A low hum of some great machine, a minuscule hint of copper on the tongue, a faint shimmer in the air.Lynx can pick up on these clues that others miss and follow them, seeing through illusions and trailing mages by their traits specific to their spells.

Super-Speed- Good luck getting the draw on her. Lynx can move at about the speed of sound when running and hit Mach 2 if she were to sprint all out. Incredibly fast but also incredibly exhausting. Moving that fast for any longer than a few hours necessitates her to eat about half her weight to fuel the boost in metabolism so she tends to cruise at four hundred or five hundred miles an hour (when she's not forced to crawl along out of discretion.)

Enhanced Endurance- Moving twice as fast as sound requires a tough body. Lyxn is mostly unaffected by extreme speed or temperatures and needs only a few hours of sleep a week. Her stomach is strong enough that she can taste poisons to evaluate their strength, her skin shattering mundane weapons and deflecting some spells. Walls are no trouble, able to be smashed through with no adverse reaction.

Equipment : Krait- One of the first things she made after being so rudely ejected from the One's favor. The glove houses a container for storing all manner of liquids and a nozzle designed to eject it as an aerosol up to 15 feet. Typically loaded with various irritating agents or toxins.

Wife and Mother- A pair of matched revolvers that she took off a dying loyalist in the war in Heaven. Prime examples of Custodian engineering they generate the energy required to fire and are "reloaded" by letting the excess heat drain. The hammers can be fanned for rapid fire but doing so runs the risk of overheating them.

Starstrike- The usage of advanced Custodian materials allow the bow to be as strong as steel while remaining flexible, able to loaded with arrows of varying types. It's most valuable trait is its ability to absorb and charge arrows with starlight, the energy channeled into the tip to punch through armor and unleash a corona of searing light inside them.

Savagry-A tribute given to her during her days as warlord, Savagery is designed to hold under the extreme stresses of her usage, staying solid under forces and temperatures that would reduce a normal dagger to slag.

Plasmids: Not actually part of a bacteria's cytoplasm but the combination of chemicals and computer input that let her change her face. A thoroughly unpleasant process that requires her to isolate for a week as her durable body slowly melts and reforms.

Tools- The selection of wrenches, hammers, drills, plasma cutters, and other tools she uses to fix machines and make bombs and arrowheads as well as the stockpile of materials for doing so. These range from sheets of metal waiting to be cut to old cars dumped out in her back yard and rusty weapons ready to be stripped for parts.

The Essentials- Cigars and her hip flask.

Currently Planned Builds or Repairs

MAGs- An upgraded version of the Krait. Made with components from a crashed Custodian ship the Mobility Assistance Gloves serve a dual purpose. The first is to form a seemingly unbreakable bond with a surface to allow Lynx to make sudden stops while running and hang from buildings.

The second is to gather the kinetic energy produced by her movement and store it to be released as needed. This allows for movement in mid-air as well as adding substantial force to her blows.

Matriarch and Patriarch- Wife and Mother after being spruced up and getting their inner workings tweaked. Heat build up is now less of a problem and a "choke" has been added to allow for different shot patterns: a wide shotgun style spray, the normal shot that splashes against a target and a focused beam to punch through cover.

Personality: "Blessed" with otherworldly speed and the required reaction time to manage it every moment of everyday in Lynx's life is more or less a living hell. Her natural impatience combined with the fact that time appears to move much slower for her than it would anyone else means that she bounces around from distraction to distraction, spending scarcely a few minutes on anyone thing before moving to the next. Her self-restriction of her speed causes her to twitch and fiddle with coins and other small objects, a nervous tic she passes off as shell-shock.

While she understands the difference between right and wrong it doesn't really factor much into her daily life. She does what the current persona she's inhabiting would do whether that's building orphanages and going on one woman crusades to rescue kidnapping victims or earning a reputation as fearsome raider pillages villages for sport. The morality of an act is much less important to her than if its in-character or interesting.

"Lynx" is more or less a good person, an exiled freedom fighter turned mechanic and teacher. She pays her taxes, shows up to work on time and gives students the extra attention they require and always has customer's repaired items returned to them promptly. She has a poker game every Thursday, plays golf on weekends with friends from work or just around the neighborhood and generally presents as a good-natured veteran that is sometimes a bit off.

Faction (Marduk, Ishtar, or Cassandra Club when it's founded): Marduk for the time being, whatever seems interesting after that.
Are you a Descendant of the Illuminated Poet?: No
Important Relations:
-Duke, Diakonissa (Husband, Daughter, both dead)
-Kane, Micah and Rachel Helegast (Husband, Son, Daughter, all dead)
- ??? Makre, Jason Makre (Husband and Son, both dead)
-Kotori Flatcreek (Girlfriend, dead)
-Eyo-Zeki (Adopted son, dead)
-Marcus ???, ???, ??? (Husband and two children, dead)
- Mihek (Concubine/Bodyguard, dead)
-Vudir, Walthred, ??? (Husband, wife, husband or wife, all dead)
-??? (Boyfriend, dead)

Theme:

Theme

~ 1959: Into the Darkness ~ - Vietnam Dieselpunk [Open]

"Sure, likewise."

Morgan passed smoke through her nose as he sized up the pair, unsure just what to make of them. The blond was touchy it seemed, overprotective and looking for trouble. "Do you have a problem with my name, Linde?" The half-Viet put the same emphasis on the word, locking eyes with the riflewoman. "You made a mistake and I corrected you. Don't take it so fucking personally, you're going to have to listen to people who know what they're doing if you wanna make it two months. Jungle'll chew you up and shit out bleached bones if you don't."

She picked lazily at a speck of dirt under her nail, still not taking her eyes off the bitch. She wanted to mad-dog her? Fine. "You'd better not pull that shit out there either. The President himself could be standing right in front of you during patrol and you don't call him sir, you don't salute, you don't even look at him differently. VC snipers spot that and they'll know just who to shoot. We only do that to officers we don't like.

Oh joy, she was dealing with a fucking comedian. "That's not sexism you fantastically stupid cunt, I'm calling you a faggot. Get it right." Was she fucking dense? How much glue had she sniffed on the trip over? "Hell I was really being polite. Did you not hear what I was saying about the gooks? You only have a problem with me now cuz you're a thin-skinned little dyke that doesn't like when someone calls you mean names.

It was a skill to keep her voice so even while spewing such awful vitriol, Morgan's stomach twisting itself into knots as she went on.

"Oh you're real original. I'm still tall enough to feed you your teeth you inbred backwater white trash. I'll bet your mother is your sister and you were only a virgin as long as you were faster than your brother!

Theresa at least knew they were outmatched, trying her best to defuse the situation before her girlfriend ended up decommissioned. Morgan was fine taking the out, scratching under her chin and nodding carelessly at the apology. "'S no problem, don't worry about it. Just busting each other's balls a little.

She was going to die of a fucking heart attack long before Charlie got to her. Combat was simple, all you had to do was stick close to the ground and pray that the people in the trees were bad shots and try and avoid walking into landmines. The traps laid in every conversation were much more insidious and Miracle had to make sure she triggered them to keep her cover. Miracle Morgan, the hard ass and brusque bitch who took shit from nobody and doled it out to everybody, was the shield for Bian Nzuyen, the scared little girl who didn't understand herself and didn't really want to.

@Landaus Five-One

NCQuest: A Mecha RP - The Relief of Cape Town [Continuity Reboot - Defense of Darwin has been Retconned Out]

I’ll bite, seems interesting. I’ll probably go heavy but I’m not too picky about it.

Calradia: Brother Wars [A M&B RP]

Very tentative interest tag here but we’ll see how it goes

Intrigues of Venedig - Not Running This (Lore Storage)!

Just saw this, tag.

~ 1959: Into the Darkness ~ - Vietnam Dieselpunk [Open]

Hush-Puppy

Name
Natasza "Hush-Puppy" Zajac

Gender
Female

Age
30

Sexuality
Quietly Bisexual

Nationality
Polish by birth, nationalized American

Appearance
Tall and fit, beautiful in an athletic sort of way, Natasza could be described as statuesque or even stunning on a good day. When inside the wire she dresses more like a Hollywood starlet than a professional spy, wearing cotton button-ups or turtlenecks and jeans with fashionable boots and aviators. A bit of lipstick with some eyeliner and mascara brings attention to her face, the better to keep the focus away from whatever her hands may be doing. Depending on the occasion she may add to the look with jewelry "acquired" from the locals or with a few buttons of her shirt left undone to add a little extra persuasive power to her smile.

Outside the wire Hush-Puppy is an entirely different creature. The German imported Doc Martens and casual shirts are replaced with heavy combat boots and tigerstripe camouflage fatigues, naturally flawless face covered by a thick layer of paint and mud. The fanciest accessory she carries into the field is a Rolex, chosen for its ability to withstand the rivers she swims through and kept in a pocket to keep the sun from glinting off it. A patrol cap and piece of twine keeps her short hair out of her face so she can use her rifle's scope without worry. The smile she wears in the safety of the villages and cities is nowhere to be found in the jungle, Hush-Puppy keeping up an unreadable mask when working.

Image

Height
5'8"

Personality

Natasza Zajac, otherwise known as Hush-Puppy, is in many ways the personification of this brutal new age of warfare. Combining college-educated negotiation and reasoning skills with modern era intelligence gathering and ancient savagery she's a professional spook, capable of performing all sorts of unsavory acts without flinching. Her education, her looks, her easy-going personality, all are used to get information out of sources with and without their knowledge. And then when it's time to act on it she strikes swiftly and without hesitation, swimming up out of the delta or coming down from the mountains to burn, kidnap and kill as needed. Everyone in Vietnam, is either an asset, a possible asset or a problem to be removed. A firm believer in the concept of carrot and stick HP is willing to use persuasion, seduction, bargaining and violence in equal measure to achieve her objectives.

Her intelligence and knack for languages has been put to good use throughout her career, Hush-Puppy making a point to become fluent or at least conversant in the main language of each country she's assigned to. Besides English Polish and Latin she's managed to master French, Spanish, Farsi, Italian, Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese besides being conversant in multiple Hmong, Montagnard and Tibetan dialects.

HP's relation with such concepts as religion, patriotism and morality can be murky to distinguish even for her, balancing biblical rules such as "Thou shall not kill" and women not supposed to be lying with other women with the brutal realities of her job and her sometimes "unorthodox" attractions. She struggles with her work, the absolute necessity of it making it no more enjoyable. And with each passing day she worries more for her soul. An afterlife on streets of gold and no pain seeming more and more distant as her need to serve a country and ideas she believes in makes a devil out of her. So far she's managed to walk the line, refusing to entertain thoughts of conversion or retirement while there's work to be done. After all, the Communists aren't exactly clean themselves. Hush-Puppy is content to pay penance by making them pay theirs.

Rank
Agent

Branch
CIA Directorate of Plans, on loan to MACV-SOG

Role
Long range patrols and reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, intelligence and counter-intelligence

Equipment

City Carry Kit

Walther PPK
Penal Rosary
Switchblade
Multiple Fake IDs and changes of clothes

LRRP Kit (to pick and choose from as needed)

-Mk.22 Mod 0 "Hush-Puppy"
-Mac-10
Suppressed Remington 700
-Recurve Bow
Fairburne-Sykes Fighting Knife
-Zippo
-"Łowca"
-Rolex Submariner
Various survival equipment (compass, matches, Halazone tablets etc.)
Zip-Ties

Biography
Natasza's earliest memories were of luxury and decadence. Born in Warsaw in 1924 to a family of landed gentry turned industrialists the youngest child of four was the most recent addition to a line of minor nobility who could trace it's roots back through to the legendary winged hussars. And as was fitting for one of her station she was tended to by a small army of doctors and servants, the horde of staff making sure she wanted for nothing. Except attention from her parents of course. Her father Jan and mother Karina were away from their estate on business trips more often than not, the near constant checking up on their steel mills and coal mines living them little time to spend with any of their children. With three other competitors seeking to claim that precious resource Natasza quickly adjusted to being alone.

in 1929 just after the new year Jan and Karina left their Polish holdings in the hands of capable underlings and moved to the American territory of Alaska, settling down in Anchorage in hopes of capitalizing on the gold, timber and fish to be found. But before final preparations could be made Black Tuesday hit. The Great Depression had hit with full force and the new business was put on indefinite hold. The Zajacs managed to avoid the worst of it and poured money into their adopted home in it's time of need.

In an effort to ease the transition into a new country the importance of national pride was impressed upon Natasza and her siblings, her parents making sure their English was immaculate and their accents non-existent. The whole family went through the lengthy process of naturalization before Natasza's ninth birthday, an event she announced excitedly to her class. She and her family had bought into the American Dream wholeheartedly, proud of both their birth country and their new one. Two flags hung from their window and expeditions into the wilderness of Alaska were regular occurrences. Natasza was especially devout in her belief, never missing a Mass or Saints Day at church. It looked like she would have the perfect all-American experience. It was an idyllic period in her life.

And then the world exploded. The family listened on the radio as Nazi Germany and Communist Russia split their homeland in two, an event that would haunt Natasza for the rest of her life. All of her siblings signed up to fight within a week of the US joining the war. None of them would make it home. Józef was shot in North Africa during Operation Torch and Leon drowned in the waters of Normandy. Teodora managed to fight her way across Europe before being killed by Soviet grenades during the Prague incident. As each telegram came home more and more burden was placed upon Natasza to succeed, the young girl not wanting her siblings deaths to be in vain.

She threw herself into her studies under the best tutors money could buy and managed to get accepted into Princeton university at only 17, earning bachelor's degrees in International Relations and Linguistics by the age twenty-three. Her plan was to join the Army but her parents wouldn't hear it, terrified at the possibility of their only remaining child meeting the same fate. It was a point of contention that nearly ripped the family apart. Her parents kept pushing her to go into politics, to use their money and connections to become somebody important just like it had been down in their homeland. But Natasza refused again and again, determined to make it all by herself. Eventually they reached a compromise: she would join the CIA. She could have a safe, quiet job as a data analyst or station head somewhere out of the way where she wouldn't get hurt.

She took the deal and signed up. Her background checks came up clean and with her outstanding academic record and background she had her pick of any of the four directorates. To the horror of her parents she picked the Directorate of Plans, getting shipped off to Camp Peary to learn how to be a spy. By 1951 she had been taught how to assemble and defuse explosives, how to hotwire cars and pick locks, the best ways to conceal items on her person and all the other various tricks someone in her field would need and was ready for her first assignment. Under the codename Odysseus she was sent to Paris to Europe to root out Soviet and Chinese operatives.

Her direct superior was a legend in his own right. Luke Dixon, better known as the Jackal, was a veteran of the OSS and an incredibly talented spy who had worked for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and spent the second World War rooting out collaborators in occupied French. He took Natasza under his wing, the young woman becoming an informal protege as she learned from a master at the craft. It was under his tutelage that her own reputation began to form, Odysseus becoming feared and respected throughout Europe's intelligence communities. For two years she rarely spent more than a week in one place before moving, crossing the continent in search of KGB assassins and Stasi assets. One particularly memorable Saturday she killed five agents in Oslo and escaped via a commandeered fishing boat.

The event that would really make her (in)famous in her field would come in 1953. Unbeknownst to her Jackal had been converted to a Russian asset a year after she started working with him, giving up state secrets and disrupting NATO operations. When this was discovered it fell to Natasza to deal with him. Jackal had been tipped off and managed to secure a car and bodyguard to make it to East Germany. With hours to spare she tracked him down and ran him off the road and into a train. Jackal was killed instantly and his heir took up the codename "Hush-Puppy" as a sort of trophy.

After that she was temporarily reassigned to Iran and Guatemala in order to assist with the American backed coups and build up the intelligence organizations of the new governments before being recalled back to Europe. She expected to stay there for the rest of her career and maybe even get that station head job her parents had talked about but instead ended up being shifted to Asian operations. His first job was in Tibet, trekking through the hazardous mountain terrain to build up a network of anti-Chinese agitators and dissident. There she learned to how to train and equip a paramilitary force. It was a skill-set that would prove invaluable in her next assignment: turning the often incompetent ARVN and the local farmers and tribespeople into proper fighting forces.

When the United States officially entered the war she gained new responsibilities, working with the newly formed MACV-SOG on Operation Phoenix and Project Eldest Son. Hunting down VIPs and sabotaging enemy efforts, she was back in her element.

Affiliations
-Jan Zajac (Father)
-Karina Zajac (Mother)
-Józef Zajac (Older Brother, Deceased)
-Leon Zajac (Older Brother, Deceased)
-Teodora Zajac (Older Sister, Deceased)
-Emily Zajac (Adoptive Younger Sister)
-Luke Dixon (Mentor, Deceased)

Relationships

Lucas Whittaker

Worked with him back in '57 to train and advise the ARVN. Upon her being transferred to field duties she looked him up and sent herself to his FOB so she could have a grunt unit to attach herself to when not going solo. Lucas seems solid enough for her purposes.

Cynthia Ward

A cub reporter out of her element. HP was only aware of Cynthia through her pieces about New York politics and scandals before one of her contacts at the Times mentioned offhandedly that she'd be coming. Now HP is keeping an eye on her and doing some digging as to just how she managed to get assigned to Vietnam.

Character Theme

The Curse of Strahd Von Zarovich

-snip-

@ReedeThe23rd

No worries my friend. If and when this happens in the future I'd love to re-apply.

~ 1959: Into the Darkness ~ - Vietnam Dieselpunk [Open]

She had managed to guess correctly. Really it had been simple. There was a grand total of jack shit to do here besides get high and figure out new ways to waste time. Counting the cannons going off was one she had used before. "Those things will take your whole finger off if you don't watch it and run out of ammo just when some fuck gets right up in your face with a bayonet. Switched mine out as soon as possible." Morgan gave the pistol holstered at her side a pat, unwilling to go unarmed even behind lines. "My Hi-Powered is just as deadly and carries more bullets, plus it won't snap my wrist in half when I fire it. And I have a Python for I really need to fuck shit up." Just soldier's talk, a simultaneous dick measuring contest and a way to kill time. "It's Morgan. Miracle Morgan, cuz it's a miracle I'm still alive." She let out a harsh bark of a life, like a rabid dog warning others not to get to close. "And you're Sergeant Whittaker. I'm a leatherneck but they have me just filling in for whoever needs it right now."

That's all she was, the one who did jobs too dirty for others and took the place of people who got themselves shot or blown to pieces or hit with a Section 8. back at boot camp she had gotten saddled with handling the M60 and now there was always some dick was always calling for her to translate what some ditch-digger was babbling about or telling her to get on her belly and crawl into snake infested holes to blow up ammo caches. "That's what they're telling me. If you need a dink to get shot to shit, detonated or spoken to I'm the one who does the shooting, detonating and talking." The angry little bitch rolled her eyes at the warning and took another long drag on her cigarette. "What else is new? If they have a problem we'll work it out." By which she meant she'd feed them their fucking teeth.

And the FNGs opened their mouths. There was a misconception among civilians that Marines were all just rough and tumble ready to roll killing machines. Clearly that wasn't the case, some of them were apparently brain dead bimbos who just narrowly avoided blowing their stupid heads off when they held their first rifle. "Don't call him sir, he actually works for a living."Her rebuke was quick but Lucas was quicker, telling them off immediately. Better he than her honestly. Her reprimand likely would have come as a slap to the face. The Negro mechanic was still there opening and closing her mouth like a fish out of water. Couldn't keep up with the conversation huh? Oh well, it wasn't Miracle's job to sit there and wait for her like a kindergarten teacher.

The Sargent's under breath comment hadn't gone unnoticed, Miracle ruminating on it as the fresh meat apologized and he fucked off somewhere. She was adept at hiding her uglier feelings, keeping her face stony as she dealt with her stomach tying itself in knots. "Can you two knock it off with the faggot shit?." There was something especially heart-rending about that kind of language. Her casual racism was easier to explain away, the people here weren’t her mother. Mà was a hard worker who tried her best to make a better life unlike the rest of these coolies. But seeing these two was different. Looking at them meant confronting something she wanted desperately but would never be able to find. "I mean for Crissakes go find a broom closet or something."

Piece by piece and day by day she was growing to hate herself more and more.