Mazun "Lucky" Lamond

Character Card

Human/M/50 Glisten/Glisten A68B84 Senior Scout

Admin 1, Broker 0, Comms 0, Computer 1, Diplomat 1, Drive 0, Engineer 1 (Life Support), Gun Combat 3 (Slug Rifle), Gunner 1 (Turrets), Mechanic 3, Medic 2, Melee 1 (Bludgeon), Navigation 1, Persuade 0, Pilot 4 (Small Craft), Pilot 2 (Starship), Recon 1, Steward 0, Streetwise 0, Trade 0, Vacc Suit 2, Zero-Gravity 1

An absurdly large human male, scarred, all colored brownish-grey, and clad in a bright blue Hawaiian shirt.

Equipment Load-Out

I didn't stat out his possessions in credit-to-credit detail, although of course I could if need be. He had Cr45,000 and the Widowmaker in mustering-out cash; figure about Cr1,000 in other arms, Cr30,000+ for the suit, Cr7,000 for the skill-kits, a couple k in survival gear, and plenty of petty cash left over for travel and emergencies.

Weaponry

His most distinctive weapon is "the Widowmaker", a customized hunting/sniper rifle with engraved stock. The heavy-duty carrying case holds, among other necessities, a small assortment of scopes for the weapon. He usually uses a conventional optical scope or a modern self-powered nightsight, but he also has an ultra-tech combat sniper scope for "bad days".

He also owns the usual small arsenal of the well-travelled free trader: a snub pistol, a shotgun, a light survival rifle that can also fire tranq loads, a heavy revolver, a large hunting knife (more a tool than a weapon), and a pair of iridium-steel knuckles (a gift from an old friend, kept mainly for intimidation factor).

But on planet, he wouldn't normally carry more than a pistol and knife on his belt (if legal), unless going into the bush. The Widowmaker is intended more for dinosaur hunting than human targets, though one never knows.

Protection

His most expensive individual possession is his starsuit, a custom TL12 HEV suit, with extended life support, basic computer weave (loaded with up-to-date survival references and years' worth of media) and integral maneuver unit. It's painted with red stripes for visibility, and on the back has an illustration of a large stalking carnivore amid mist-shrouded plantlife.

His usual outfit is the "traditional uniform of the Interstellar Scout Service": a Hawaiian shirt, blue jeans, a straw hat, and combat boots. He jokes that he never feels claustrophobic, because he has a whole ocean on his shirt. He adds a "flak" vest and massive equipment belt in the field, to hold all his adventurer stuff.

Other Equipment

Above and beyond the ship's own stocks, he owns a full TL12 medkit, his own mechanic's tools, and a surveyor's kit (newly acquired for this mission). He has small, belt-clip versions of all of these, as well.

An experienced outdoorssophant, he's accumulated over the years the usual well-worn motley of outdoor equipment, including a battered set of macrobinoculars, an almost-good-as-used stilltent, plenty of rope, and so on.

And, of course, he has his own handcomp and backup cube.

Background

[Pending re-write to incorporate timeline data.]

At the tender age of 18, Lamond was sick of the warren-like interiors of the Glisten habitat he'd grown up in, so he parlayed his experience in the Youth Hull Maintenance Brigades into a berth on a BorderLines merchant ship as EVA specialist. After ten years, he looked to be well on route to a proper ship's engineer qualification when the region was struck hard by the Baron's Circus, a particular vicious band of pirates out of the Trojan Reach. We'll cut an unpleasant story short and say that only Lamond got out alive, and spent a year in recovery. Fortunately the company, despite being on the ropes themselves, footed the bill, and Lamond took his lay-off with no pension but no debts. He's still good friends with one of their Division Heads.

Uninterested in a "normal" job, understandably angry at the Circus, and unsure where to go, Lamond took a tip from a friend of a friend and went back to school, concurrent with an application to the Scout Service. He turned out to be exactly what their cross-border service was looking for at the time, and went on to participate in several "Exploration" missions—a number of which helped suppress pirate activity in that sector.

His first mission as team leader went south with horrible swiftness, but he got bumped up a paygrade anyway: the board of inquiry figured that under the circumstances there was no way they could have expected there to be an entire top-secret Darrian research facility in their intended drop zone, and Lamond did a superb job of evacuating his teammates from the whole debacle. He lost an arm on that one, but the replacement has been almost as good, and the story bought an ocean of drinks.

Over the next few years, Lamond developed a rep for being trustworthy on the occasional intel-related jobs that came along. A few of these turned out to be "exciting", and that's how he acquired his moniker "Lucky". Even he isn't sure if it's a good name or a bad one, because at the time, under fire, they sure didn't feel lucky… Maybe it was that which inspired him, at his last psych eval, to tell the debriefing officers exactly what he thought of that last "detached duty" mission. He got a downgrade and a suggestion that he take a long vacation.

He's been a Scout now for twenty-one standard years, as Senior as they come, and that wasn't funny at all. But what the hell, suits are always like that, living at home all the time. Best place for a Scout is over the border, talking to strangers.