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Post by sky on Jul 18, 2018 9:09:50 GMT -6
Mariana Valdez shifter | female | 27 | november 13 | pansexual/homoromantic ☄ abilities Mari is a shifter whose soul animal is an American Mink. She cares little about shifting despite her extreme feelings about race and mage/shifter dynamics. While human, she is a gifted swimmer, able to hold her breath for long periods, has decent climbing skills, and posesses extremely soft hair. Mari usually only shifts in emergencies, using her small form and adept claws to escape from sticky situations. She is able to make full shifts slightly more regularly than most unpaired shifters at the cost of duration, mostly due to the fact she practiced shifting a lot as a child, regularly meeting up with friends under the noses of her parents to stir up trouble.
☄ role Both a mechanic and programmer, Mari has three main forms of income, all split fairly equally in dedication. Firstly, she is an industrial contractor who visits sites of industry, like factories and research facilities, to repair industrial equipment. She can't work on specialized equipment, but has a pretty broad set of knowledge and is fast, efficient, and fairly cheap.
Mari also has her own workshop, Manual Alter & Repair, where she claims proudly, "We can fix anything that has a User's Manual." Wedged between the harbor and market district, the garage is adorned with colorful graffiti displaying the name and motto both in the alley to the side of the building and around the entrance. It has a large rolling garage door alongside a small shop entrance, attached to a front desk and consulting room. Above the workshop, Mari has a small, generally unused apartment thats primary function is to house her office. Mari has two employees- a receptionist and a second mechanic.
Though she repairs plenty of modern equipment, Mari is one of the few mechanics in the city who can fix broken Old Earth paraphernalia, and as such has an unofficial specialty in ancient gear. The "alter" part of Alter & Repair comes from the fact that Mari is also willing to hack and re-program modern equipment using a number of scripts and tricks, enabling lots of new tech to do whatever the user needs it to, within limits. A lot of the time her dealings with modern tech involve both alteration AND repair, as some of the repairs she does can't be completed correctly without somehow altering the firmware. She is also the only person in the city authorized by her co-developers to apply a no-snoop hack to computers, phones, and n-discs, software that prevents the government and corporations from decrypting data signals produced by personal devices.
Her workshop also serves as a home for her second, secret business selling hacked information. Having procured an access keys to a number of government and research databases, she makes easy money to anyone wanting to buy information... as long as they have cash and identification. Oh, and excepting extraneous circumstances, she refuses to work with mages. Though she will refuse sales occasionally on moral grounds, she is generally willing to sell any information she has access to. She has also been commissioned to work larger jobs for more monetarily gifted individuals, cracking encrypted data and the like to sell access to whole databases.
It was this side business, alongside the growing notoriety of the hacker "group" FREWALKR, Mari's unpaid side project, that led the still-growing Earth's Defenders to seek her assistance. A political revolutionary and admitted mage hater, Mari fits perfectly into the ranks of The First Line, finding herself somewhere in the middle of leading and being led. While she is often used as a tool of the organization, providing external backup and information where needed, she has also co-headed plenty of extremely illegal operations, ranging from massive information leaks released by FREWALKR to highly coordinated kidnappings. Though her affiliation with Earth's Defenders has no real income, Mari considers it an intrinsic part of her life and goes through many precautions to ensure her regular business won't become jeopardized.
☄ appearance Mari is tall and strong, standing at a height that makes most men terrified and most women swoon. She has wide shoulders and hips, powerful arms and legs, and a medium bust. She is fairly thin and almost all muscle. She has a heart-shaped face, pronounced by plump lips and an incredible, dense dash of freckles, spread heavily over her nose and cheeks. She has a broad, slightly flat chin, high cheekbones, and deep chocolate eyes. She has extremely dark brown, collar-length, curly hair and swirling left-swooping bangs. Because of the nature of her work, she usually wears her hair pinned up or braided, inevitably out of the way. She has medium skin, shoulders and collar dotted with dark brown freckles. Mari has scattered hypertrophic scarring crawling up from her ankles due to childhood partial-thickness burns, which she generally attempts to conceal with her fashion choices.
Mari has three tattoos, all of flowers. Her first tattoo is of snaking ferns and blossoms crawling up her right ankle and calf, her second a bundle of wildflowers nestled between her left shoulder and collarbone, and the last an underbust of two small crossed arrangements. She has her ear cartilage pierced once on the left and double on the right, filled with thin silver hoops. While doing mechanic work, she wears sturdy, concealed clothing, like overalls and jumpsuits, but otherwise prefers to wear loose tops (often showing off her chest tattoo and cleavage), short denim, and high boots and socks. Mari's style, much like the woman herself, tends to float precariously between elegant, sexy, and intimidating.
☄ personality Mari is witty, honest, and brash. She has a very strong sense of self and an extreme moral code that she adheres to. She works very hard to eliminate her weaknesses and build up her strengths and is confident and knowledgeable. She is generally jovial, sarcastic, and flirty with those she is comfortable around, and brief and firm with those she is not. She enjoys confusing people by putting off a "mixed" vibe- juxtaposing her strong country accent with her vocabulary and intelligence, countering her intimidating stature with cheer and flirtiness, and mixing deprecation with compliments. She is as manipulative towards her acquaintances as she can manage considering her code of honesty, using others' perceptions of her and any weaknesses or information she is aware of to craft a persona for each individual that allows her to get what she wants. She can switch fairly easily between cheery and aggressive and has little control over her moods, although she is able to moderate just how much of her mood she expresses to a fair degree.
Mari has three modes- friendly, firm, and silent. She has very little filter when talking and generally makes her thoughts and feelings known, but when she feels compromised or uncomfortable, she can switch to silence quickly. This tendency is of great benefit to her as it allows her to quickly sense and shut down behavior that might get her in trouble. Because of her illegal activities, she is wary and cautious of strangers. Mari absolutely hates mages, especially fire mages, and generally offers them little but contempt and silence.
☄ strengths
01.) Mari has a very strong moral code guided by honesty and equality. Although some of her dealings could be considered dishonest, she sees her jobs as helping the disadvantaged and leveraging power against her oppressors. She desperately wants to build a future where mages and shifters are equal. She is a very passionate person in general and puts her full effort into all of her interests.
02.) Mari is extremely quick-witted and intelligent. Though she wouldn't admit it to most, her strength as a mechanic lies not in her ability to swing a hammer and wrench, but in her ability to find and parse dense technical documents. She would likely be more well-suited as a researcher, but her farmhand upbringing lent her a skillset in manual labor that she feels necessary to take full advantage of- plus, posing as an uneducated blue collar worker serves as a great cover.
03.) Mari is excellent at covering up and making up for her weaknesses with her strengths. She strives to make herself an indespensable asset rather than a liability and works hard to build her skills. With that said, it's difficult to conceal her more intrinsic personality flaws compared to a lacking skillset.
☄ weaknesses
01.) Mari can be very scathing and volatile, a consequence of her passion. She can poke and prod at the parts that hurt- and, in fact, will if given the time and information.
02.) A natural information-gatherer and obsessive revolutionary, Mari is not afraid to blackmail, threaten, and do very illegal things for "the greater good". In fact, she can justify almost all of her unsavory actions as working towards a greater good. In her mind, she wouldn't have done or said something in the first place if it went against her sense of morality, and therefore wasn't for the greater benefit of humanity.
03.) Despite her overarching political goal of equality, Mari really, really hates mages and has to be very heavily convinced to work with them in her less legal and personal endeavors. She refuses to work with fire mages in any circumstances. She does have a weakness for cute girls, however, and is more likely to waver in her hatred when faced with women. ☄ history The oldest of four farmers' children, hailing from the farthest reaches of New Rome's influence, Mariana grew up delicately balancing manual labor as a farmhand, woods-wanderer as a troublesome adolescent, and voracious knowledge-seeker as an intellectual. As a teen, every waking moment was filled with something, boredom a foreign concept. Her childhood was marked by the last war, her father serving while young Mari and her mother watched after her young siblings and the farm.
Unfortunately, their location in the outermost influence of New Rome proved to be of some strategic advantage to the Fire Mages, the primarily shifter farmlands a ripe target for an attack. At the age of six, Mari was exploring one of her family's cornfields before the stalks were set ablaze around her. She managed to escape into a short, recently cut field where she was visible to her rescuers, though the flames managed to cut deep into the tissue of her ankles and calves before she was pulled from cinders. She was unable to walk for nearly a year, a time spent both terrified and hungry for something to do. Though too young to accomplish anything too complex, Mari became an advanced reader for her age in her bed rest, consuming every children's book that could be provided for her.
Mari's preteens were marked by exceptional confusion and despair, fear of mages and fire compounding into hatred, the changes spurred on by growth resulting in exacerbated body dysphoria. This led to rebellion, Mari's nights spent shifting to sneak off with friends and kiss girls as she grew older. The less than legal actions of her older, inner-city cousin Lesley Hart's were no good influence either in her late teens, resulting in a woman whose primary determination was spite. Her interest in old earth artifacts hit its maximum velocity as she took on multiple pet projects fixing the gas cars that were littered across the rural landscape, filling empty plots of land with trucks and muscle cars as she ravaged the dilapidated ones for parts and fuel. After hitting her twenties, still no closer to going to college than she had promised three years before, Mari moved into the city, leaving her younger siblings to the farm work and mischief, bringing her old earth treasures and books along with her.
She began her time in downtown New Rome as a manual laborer, working for scattered vehicle and industrial mechanics, spending her free time digging through books in downtown's many libraries. Mari taught herself to fix some of her favorite old earth toys, learning some light programming in the process, then taught herself to code, filling her free time with hours spent in public places, digging for more information. She couch-surfed for most of her early stay, and when she had saved up enough money she rented out an old auto shop, transforming it first into a personal workshop and later into a business. She made countless friends with old earth experts of all kinds, programmers and hackers and researchers, and eventually seedy revolutionaries, whispers of equality and revolution sparking a flame, Mari desperate to do something about the issues she saw compounding around her, twenty years after fire had scarred her permanently.
So she kept up with her scattered contacts, piecing together her resources into one larger puzzle. She gained access keys to larger and larger corporations and government industries through both trust and espionage, finding her need to help build a new world more and more pressing with age, and at 25 found a particularly terrifying and incriminating bit of information on one of her dives through secret documents. This document was incriminating to a series of manufacturers, explicitly stating just how and why they were violating the rights of their workers and withholding benefits and pay, and Mari felt an immense need to share it with the world, to make an actual difference in something. It was then that she created her hacking persona, pretending to be a collective called FREWALKR, a reference both to the particulars of her childhood trauma and her self-imposed duty to bring freedom to the opressed.
As Mariana uncovered more and more conspiracies against the good of the general public, mostly from corporations headquartered in New Rome, she bludgeoned news outlets and online feeds with her discoveries, putting a number of businesses in the red, only a few fizzling out after half-hearted apologies and rushed attempts to liquidate funds. After a particularly terrifying discovery and subsequent release, she was found out by Earth's Defenders, having figured out her identity due to an old contact who was a member of its ranks. They offered to hide her identity in return for working for their benefit, to which Mari emphatically agreed, seeing her goals and that of Earth's Defenders as one, despite the whole working with mages thing.
Blessed with new, more knowledgeable contacts and a larger variety of espionage prospects, Mari has found newfound joy in dismantling society from the bottom up, though slightly dissatisfied that most of The First Line's targets are wealthy mages and businesses rather than the Imperium itself. Currently, Mari is looking for her big break and spends her free time digging through documents and encrypted messages between government agencies. FREWALKR's next target is Meteora- and she has some big prospects.
I'm working on a drawng dont judge me ok
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