profile

[organgrinder]

PLAYER
Player name: Fade
Contact: ejohnsonrivard@gmail.com, mirrorfaded at plurk

CHARACTER
Character Name: Miguel Zavala
Character Age: 41
Canon: Original (Sons of Plunder)
Canon Point: Directly after interfering with the attack on Echo Six.

History: Miguel grew up on a mining colony with zero ambitions to his name until the age of fourteen, where he got locked up for being on the periphery of a bar fight and was promptly conscripted into the Imperial Navy. Despite having no choice in the matter, Miguel decided to try and make the best of it. He signed up for medical training, started and then flunked out of said medical training, and somehow ended up assigned to the cooking staff on a warship called Janissary. And this is where things get interesting.

See, Miguel wasn't having a great time in the military. He didn't want to be there in the first place, didn't have a good assignment, and was hugely bored with the whole thing. He was also a tad too smart for his own good and attached the attention of a junior officer. This was the beginning of a life-long partnership.

That officer's name was Marisol Aro. She was a marine assigned to a black ops program and looking for new opportunities. She found one in Miguel, who would provide Aro and her squad mates with contraband and better food in exchange for protection and a swift promotion. From this, a partnership was formed. Ideas and favors were exchanged. At first it was small things. Then as Aro and her marines advanced in their training, they started to get ideas. Miguel was shuttled back into the medical tract and was assigned to Aro's unit. Around that time, another young sailor aboard the Janissary discovered a biological agent that was oh so good at killing rats and could quite possibly be manipulated into an airborne toxin.

What happened next is a long and complicated story about ideology, friendship, and the manipulations of a hidden psychopath, but the outcome is simple. Aro, Miguel, and several other sailors on the Janissary formed an organization to oppose the standing government. They called themselves the Sons of Plunder in recognition of all that had been taken from them, and they had an idea. They wanted to overthrow the king and end the dictatorship that had shaped their lives. And oh, wouldn't that little biological agent be helpful for that?

Miguel and another member of the group tinkered with the biological agent (which turned out to be less of a virus and more of an ancient, sentient being) and developed the weapon later called the Black Sun. And they released it into the air filtration systems onboard the Janissary.

People died. An empire fell. But in the aftermath, something else rose.

See, Marisol Aro (then a commander) decided that it would be wasteful to stop there. Why not use the power they'd taken? Why not do something with it?

The Sons of Plunder became not liberators as they'd first intended, but a group of marauding criminals armed with biological weapons. All of the dissenting voices were silenced.

Miguel did the pragmatic thing. He survived. He lied his ass off, convinced Aro he would always support her, and then fled as far as he could. He became an organ grinder, cleaning up the aftermath of battles and harvesting organic material to be smuggled across the galaxy. Occasionally he smuggles refugees as well, though only when they can pay and won't bring any undue attention down on him.

Unfortunately, a friend of his just died and left him with a traumatized teenager and one very angry dog - both of them with bounties on their head and a former friend oh so eager to collect.

Life just got complicated.

Personality: Quiet to a fault, Miguel rarely says what’s on his mind. This isn't the same as not talking. Miguel often does talk. Some might even say excessively. He just rarely says anything truly honest. At first glance he's a smartass with too much time on his hands and a nasty glare. On second glance he's a bastard with a superiority complex. Neither are exactly true, though he's quite happy for people to assume they are. Miguel likes his distance. He watches the world and makes his observations, often full of snark and just this side of mean. Other people confuse him, for the most part. He doesn’t like loud noises or crowds. It might seem odd, then, that he works as a smuggler. However, Miguel is a single person in a very chaotic universe, and he happens to be very good at what he does. Changing paths would involve changing himself, and he's unwilling to slow down long enough to do so.

In the end, Miguel embraces the chaos. He thrives in high-stress environments, has a tendency to fidget and tinker obsessively when he's bored, and dislikes standing still. He's always on the move, pacing or fussing with his latest project; anything to avoid getting stuck in the moment.

Though he'll pretend otherwise, Miguel doesn't usually take things personally - that would involve caring, after all. He doesn’t do anger so much as annoyance, though this can lead to grudges, which he often holds for a very long time. Gifted with an incredibly sharp memory, he doesn’t miss much. This isn’t always a good thing, as he also tends to remember everything. Though he dislikes being lied to, he’s very cagey about his own life, especially as it concerns his work. Part of this is his personality – he doesn’t like to talk about himself – but mostly it's because he was one of the founding members of the Sons of Plunder. You know. The group that's currently terrorizing the galaxy.

Everyone has a past and while Miguel isn't proud of what the Sons eventually became, he doesn't deny his involvement with them. He wears their symbol on his coat and there was a time when he subscribed to their philosophy. He still does believe in the Law of the Jungle - though this time around, he's content to stay out of the way and let things fall as they will.

At the beginning of his life, Miguel had almost zero people skills. He’s gotten better over time, but tends to come across as stilted and distant in conversation whenever circumstances force him to be honest. He talks extensively in order to cover this. Which is not to say that he dislikes people; far from it. Miguel just has trouble knowing how to act around people he doesn’t know well, or how to do small talk without putting on airs. He tries. It’s awkward.

Miguel tends to get into everything that interests him, whether he’s supposed to or not. He’s good with personal boundaries, but not when it concerns objects. He takes electronics apart and tinkers with them obsessively. If there’s a way for him to get his hands on it, chances are he will. Miguel is also extremely focused, and hard to rattle. Normally this is a good thing. The downside to his dedication is that it occasionally goes overboard. If he finds something interesting enough, he’ll focus on that at the expense of pretty much every other aspect of his life, including eating.

He's also a drug addict (with a truly impressive list of narcotics), an organ grinder, completely unafraid of blood, and once helped to topple an empire. He also created one of the galaxies worst criminals. Miguel doesn't like thinking about any of these things.

Inventory: Satchel with a medical kit, box of surgical knives, a pistol and extra ammunition as well as gun-belt, a bullet-resistant jacket with the Sons of Plunder symbol on the back, a machete, and a paperback copy of And Then There Were None. Also a couple doses of Ice (essentially space cocaine) and morphine in his medical kit.

Abilities: He has Level Two medical training, which gives him about the skill equivalent of a modern day EMT. Additionally, he was conscripted into the Imperial Naval Corps as a teenager and has the requisite training. He also survived serving alongside a career sociopath for over a decade and managed to leave on good terms with her. Of the two founding members of the Sons who left the group, Miguel is the only one without a bounty on his head. Above all, Miguel is a pragmatist. He'll survive however he can.

Miguel is also an accomplished pilot - though entirely self-taught - and makes a living handling a freighter that usually takes a crew of six to manage all on his lonesome. Granted, the Sister is on the verge of falling apart, but it's still flying.

On another note, he's currently infected with the Black Sun virus. This has its advantages, giving him an increased pain tolerance and healing factor (faster clotting, a tendency to eat infection alive, etc.), as well as regenerative abilities. Someone cut his arm off recently. It's....mostly in one piece.

Flaws:

A practiced lack of empathy and tendency to lie his ass off. He's also a semi-functional drug addict, but the functional part tends to drop off once he stops getting a regular dosage.