Mackie

Name: Mackie Smith
Gender: Female
Height: 6'
Weight: ~240lbs
Apparent Age:36
Actual Age: ???
Occupation:Gunsmith/Armourer, Dealer
Skills: Marksmanship, Weapons Tech, Guitar, Music History, Meditation, Informal Counseling, Making Amazing Snacks, Remembering Names/Faces
Likes: Guns, The Herb™, Foooooood, Music, Pretty Much Everybody
Dislikes: Violence, Needles, Irresponsible Weapon Handling, Total Silence, Isolation

One look at the too-tall, almost lanky thirty-something woman with a mop of blonde dreadlocs, softly freckled complexion, faint, semi-permanent reddish flush about the nose and cheekbones and near perpetual contented grin would be all it took to convince the onlooker that they knew exactly what kind of person she was. A soft, gentle face, youthful, even girlish, as emphasized by the freckles bridging her cheeks and nose. Startling seafoam-green eyes that seem to change color with the light peer candidly over a pair of narrow-lens sunglasses which, given their permanent position perched at the very tip of her nose, serve no apparent purpose, as she simply never looks through them.

Her signature article of clothing is a ridiculous, faded tie-dyed hoodie, several sizes too large for her, sporting a five pointed star and the word ’FONK’. Similarly faded jeans hang almost as loosely as the sweatshirt, flaring slightly at the ankles where constant scuffing from the overlong cut has frayed the hems. A contrasting, modern pair of relatively high-end combat boots are worn loosely tied - when she isn't padding about barefoot with anklets and toe rings, like a proper tree-hugging hippie. All of her clothing follows the theme of being colorful, comfortable, and loose-fitting.

Surprisingly, the scent about her person is not the skunky odor of dank Devil's lettuce - but fragrant incense, sage, and the musky, underlying tang of gun oil. Her personal hygiene is excellent, blonde locs clean despite being naturally formed and matted.

If her appearance somehow didn’t get the point across, everything else would. Her voice - low tones, throaty, husky - is subject to an improbable ‘Southern-California-Valley-Girl’ drawl(Like, you totally know the one.) with vocabulary to match. At very least she has a way of not sounding completely totally ridiculous when she needs to, by omitting the host of accompanying slang she typically uses - featuring such eloquence as the gratuitous usage of the words ‘like' and 'totally', as well as comically outdated expressions along the lines of 'far out', 'groovy', the ubiquitous 'bruh' and variants thereof; including, but not limited to words she just made up on the spot.

As her appearance suggests, Mackie is possibly the most laid back, contented, totally chillax person in like, the whole galaxy. Maybe the whole universe. She’s always down to hang. There is almost always a crookedly rolled joint dangling loose, half-forgotten from her lips, softly burning with the herbal aroma of ’The Good Stuff™’, and she’s not stingy about sharing. (Also she can drink like a monster.) Her quarters, living and workspaces are perpetually clambaked - though curiously her eyes never become bloodshot with it. Indeed, she seems to be barely affected by the stuff at all. Then again, given her default attitude is the state of mind most people would need to double down on the ganja to achieve, it can be difficult to tell. She is as open-minded and non-judgmental as they come. She loves everyone. It is almost impossible to offend her - though she does have feelings too y'know. Just because she can take and shrug off a considerable battering abuse doesn't means she relishes the experience. Mackie is gentle, and kind and understanding; a person that anyone can go to for support or advice, or to vent their problems and talk about their lives. She never forgets a face, never misplaces a name, and while she doesn’t always know the right thing to say, her intuition and sense of empathy are powerful indeed. She seems to always know about the local goings-on and, some say she often knows things other people don’t. Despite her aloof demeanor, she is highly perceptive, and might be just a bit more clever than she lets on.

Also, she is 40% machine and has an intense passion for any and all varieties of weaponry; from small arms, to lasers, to high explosives. Because, duh.

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*Bang Bang*

Mysterious and aloof as she is, Mackie tends to avoid the subject of herself and her past - despite having a seemingly endless library of stories to tell, most of which are almost certainly more myth than fact. Wherever she happens to be, she more or less materialized out of nowhere. The kind of person who has just ‘always been around’, to the point where her presence is rarely questioned at all. If there are things she wishes to hide, they are hidden well - few tend to pry for information when the individual in question is as pure a force of goodness as Mackie is.

She does not, however, make any effort to conceal her greatest passion in life; Guns.

Mackie is a gun nut to her very core. She knows them all. She is a wizard in the workshop, delighting both in maintaining firearms in peak condition and tinkering with custom designs and new ideas. Always looking to improve existing designs and conjure up inventions that border on mad science. The more powerful - the more deadly - the better.

Her accuracy is virtually flawless - in Mackie’s hands, any weapon will handle as though it was a part of her - an extension of herself, as familiar and deft as her own talented fingers. She would be an absolute terror on the battlefield...If she ever chose to step foot upon it.

Thoughtful and philosophical, Mackie is the epitome of the ‘peaceful warrior’. At peace with the nature of the universe, she cherishes life above all else as the most precious thing there is - and simultaneously understands the inevitability of death as a part of that cycle - as well as the truth of the necessity of killing in order to achieve and preserve peace. Mackie abhors violence. She will not hesitate to raise her rifle at an enemy - but to pull the trigger would require the utmost certainty in the righteousness of her cause.

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Like, Totally Metal

Mackie’s implants were cutting-edge, years ago - to such an extent that they can easily compete with or even surpass the performance of modern technology. Prototypes, dependent on excessive, bulky hardware that would eventually be improved and compacted for production.

Her eyes are a bright, seafoam green, almost phosphorescent but without giving off any light of their own. It could well have been a cosmetic choice - only a cybernetics expert would be likely to recognize it as the long outmoded method of achieving augmented vision through use of an artificial, refractive plasma-analog. Both eyeballs are cyberoptic implants, housed in subdermal sockets bone-welded into the skull, providing a secure physical link to the optic nerves, but permanently denying any possibility of replacement by organic transplants. (This is an extreme approach at cyberoptic augmentation, even by the standards of most career modders. Such measures are rarely taken outside of absolute necessity.)

Ordinarily, the curious eyes are the only readily visible augmentations to Mackie’s body, save for a glimpse of gunmetal cuffs on wrist and ankle, or the symmetrical suggestion of a kind of torc wrapping symmetrically around each side of her neck. Self-conscious about her body and its extensive, even grotesque degree of modification, Mackie tends to wear baggy clothing in order to hide as much of the protruding, embedded metal as possible - though that is the extent of her efforts at concealment. She is more shy about her appearance than ashamed.

The most intrusive of all Mackie’s implants is the strip which runs down her spine in perfectly interlocking, incremental scales that conform perfectly to the curves and contours of her back. A fully integrated prosthetic ‘second spine’, inextricably laced and welded to the original. It terminates in an improbably excessive nexus implanted in the back of her skull, flush with the cranium due to actually replacing the bone. This, too, is directly, inextricably linked, interwoven and integrated with her brain. (This is arguably an even more extreme modification than the eyes. The risks associated with installment of such a rig are akin to doing brain surgery with a needle and thread. Most cybernetic engineers agree that the risks far outweigh the potential benefits, and finding someone willing to install such extensive and dangerous hardware is very difficult.)

The rest of Mackie’s body is a veritable patchwork of technology and flesh. Interlocking metal plates and protrusions are embedded in the flesh of her back, her hip, and her limbs. Great care was taken in their installment to allow for maximum maneuverability, but the sheer weight of it all is only barely compensated for by the complex system of braces and supports built into her bones and musculature. Her right deltoid bears a pauldron-like shoulder piece that gives the impression of being ‘strapped’ directly into the skin. Much of the right side of her solar plexus is encased within a metal shell which, in part, serves as a brace to compensate for the recoil and pushback of an extremely powerful rifle. The interlocking shell further encompasses much of the right side of her ribcage. On her back, the protruding metal forms a sort of diagonal slope of integral pieces from right shoulder to left hip, wrapping back around to the front of the pelvis.

Her right arm and left leg are grafted with a series of protruding metal strips running respectively down to where wrist and ankle are permanently locked into seamless cuffs. The singular, dangling ring welded to each gives them the appearance of shackles. These limbs are further distorted by a cryptic network of subdermal, fiberoptic wires visible like bulging veins just below the skin, running in arcane patterns between the various metal pieces. They are the only visible aspect of the complex artificial nervous system of identical wires interwoven throughout most of her body.

Mackie’s right leg is the only fully artificial prosthetic replacement on her body. It is obviously of different make and model than the rest of her implants, though sporting a similarly outdated appearance alongside its olive-green tint. Incompatibilities and conflicts with the extensive, preexisting cybernetic network made the implementation of a more modernized prosthetic impossible - however, the bulky external housing of the limb does allow for the extensive, retrofitted hardware necessary to compensate for its limitations. For this reason, the right foot from ankle down is a perfect recreation of the original, complete with full sensory input and articulation. (This was a later modification to the original prosthetic, allowing for Mackie to more easily conceal the limb’s artificiality and achieve a greater degree of normalcy. However, sensory input on the leg itself is severely muted to nonexistent.) Extensive scarring is visible where the prosthetic rig meets her hip, suggesting a catastrophic injury rather than surgical amputation.

Ordinarily, cyber-prosthetics tend to be isolated and modular, to enable swapping of models, easy access for maintenance and repair, and a minimum of invasiveness on the body’s existing organic systems. Most cybernetics are to Mackie as the parts of a desktop computer tower are to the electrical infrastructure of a city. So deeply integrated, interwoven, interlocked and interconnected is the convoluted network rooted and entangled throughout her body that any attempt to modify the systems would be virtually impossible. Furthermore, the powerful, but eclectic technology is incompatible with most outside systems.

Therein lies the most baffling aspect of Mackie’s half-robotic body - the fact that other than her prosthetic leg, the actual function of the majority of her implants is impossible to determine. The network is veritably inexplicable; and while many aspects such as the optics and spinal integration could be assumed to function in certain ways, the system as a whole is entirely beyond comprehension. Most scans of Mackie’s body will fail to recognize the implants as anything other than inert pieces of polycarbide-steel and fiberoptic nerve-cable. The power required to operate the individual pieces is clearly acquired from the body’s usual consumption and production of energy - but the majority of those operations are simply mystifying.

Some kind of identification or serial code is printed on the shoulderpiece. Someone appears to have made a fervent attempt at scratching it off, then given up on its nullification entirely. It reads simply; Mk. 31-E.

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