Mercenary Mayhem App

[voiceinthedark]

OOC INFO
Name: Zalia
Contact: zaliachimera
Other characters played here: N/A
Age: 30

IC INFO
Name: Sam Yao
Native, OU, or AU: Native
Canon (if applicable): Zombies, Run!
Character journal used: voiceinthedark
Reference (if applicable): Previous canon app (there is no good wiki entry for Sam unfortunately)
Canon point (if applicable): N/A
Personality:
First things first, Sam is generally rather cheerful, friendly and outgoing. He is generally ready with some kind of joke (not necessarily a good joke) or anecdote, even in the most dire of situations. He likes to keep people's spirits up. Still, there is an edge to his cheer that seems to be more a defence mechanism than anything else, a kind of 'if I don't laugh I'll cry and never stop'.

He is incredibly loyal and devoted to the people who show him loyalty, pushing himself to the limit to help them, even to his own detriment. While he might not be good at standing up for himself, his loyalty definitely makes him fierce and in some ways merciless when it comes to protecting the people he cares about.

The flip side of this is that his loyalty can blind him to certain things and he does tend to blindly trust people who have helped him. It can also push him to make unhealthy decisions and push himself too far. He also takes any deaths of his people hard, fully blaming himself for each and every one.

While Sam definitely would love to cling to the easy morality of his own life, he has still developed a certain amount of pragmatism that might seem insensitive to anyone he knew before, or he has at least become desensitised to some of the darker aspects of life.

Due to his father's treatment of him, Sam is quite insecure and eager to please, often underestimating his own abilities. While he sometimes fumbles when under massive pressure, he is quite capable of working through it. Still, while a professional soldier or mercenary might be able to view deaths as sad but necessary, or even just as a paycheque, Sam still innocently views every death as a tragedy and a failing of his own, rather than a part of the world they inhabit.

He's fairly intelligent though, and has taken to his new life with surprising ease, in some ways even flourishing, able to develop his skills without the constraints his family put on him. Running operations seems to come naturally to him, and he's picked up tactics and strategy rather quickly.

Sam also displays many of the psychological quirks of people who have been through trauma, such as paranoia and hyper-vigilance, fight-or-flight reflexes brought to the fore and a tendency to dwell on the past and things that have been lost.

Back story:
A newcomer to Adaptive, Sam was born on a much older established colony planet to a comfortably middle-class family, the eldest child with a younger sister who he adored. Although his family were generally loving and took good care of him, his relationship with his father was never the best. He was pushed to excel in academics from a young age, with his father making his disappointment known whenever Sam didn't live up to expectations.

It's during high school that he developed an interest in the radio, expressing an interest in becoming a DJ to his parents. This met with fierce disapproval from his father who insisted on a more academic career and so Sam ended up applying for an engineering degree. He managed to get good enough grades to get into university and when the time came, went off to college.

It turned out that he was awful at engineering. He had no interest in the subject, and while he tried very hard, he just could not deal with the subject, barely scraping by each year. While he mostly managed to hide his poor grades from his father, it was obvious that he wasn't doing very well and certainly wasn't enthusiastic about the subject, leading to rather intense disappointment and upset from his family. Despite this, he kept on at it doggedly, even with his lecturers advising him to switch courses, just because he knew his dad would never forgive him if he did switch.

The bright spot at university was the radio station and his computer, and he became a proficient programmer and hacker, as well as developing a deep love for the radio, spending most of his free time learning how to use the equipment.

It was during his last year of university that everything fell apart. His father came home from work one day sick. They brushed it off as a cold, a normal strain of flu, until the sickness worsened and his father seemed to lose his mind. He went berserk, almost rabid and attacked Sam and his mother, even going so far as to bite Sam's mother. Whatever 'disease' he had, it quickly infected Sam's mother, until he was faced with two berserk people, relentless and unstopping, impossible to be reasoned with. The only thing that Sam was able to do was defend himself, and in the process, he killed them both.

While he attempted to explain to the authorities, no-one believed him and he was accused of their murder. That might have been the end of it, had he not been approached by representatives of a mysterious group who offered to get him out. of course he agreed, and he was taken in by a secretive group called ABEL. They explained that his father had worked for a company called Pandora Haze-Comansys. The company had been developing new technology and drugs and illegally testing them on its staff. Sam's father had been a victim, and now Sam was in danger because he'd seen the results and the company wanted to keep what had happened quiet.

ABEL put him in touch with various agents of their own who were investigating the company, and arranged for him to flee his home planet. He stayed with various ABEL agents for a while, who taught him about keeping under the radar, about how to survive on the run and away from the law, as well as how to shoot if he had to defend himself. During his time with them, he was also taught how to run some operations for them, guiding ABEL's operatives to their goals, and getting them out again. During the course of his time with them, he lost a few operatives, including a young woman named Alive who he'd become close to.

Eventually it was decided that Adaptive would be a good place for him to settle down for a while. While it was dangerous because of the mercenaries, the lawlessness of the place more than made up for it, with people less willing to poke into other people's business. The helmets didn't hurt with keeping his identity secret either.

He settled in the city of Gulch, starting to take odd jobs, some of them even legal, while he waited for ABEL to try to clear his name and get revenge for what had happened.


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