Xandra Murray
Call Sign: MorayAge: 32 (born 19 May 1998, Houston, TX)
Languages: English (native), Spanish (bar dialogue)
Key Skills: Civil Engineer, Combat Engineer, Scuba, Small Watercraft
Key Gear: applied mathematics, mechanical advantage, commercial explosives
Profile:
Alexandra Chastity Murray was not supposed to turn out like this. The youngest of three daughters, she was discouraged from taking an interest in her father's demolition business. Possessed of a strong contrarian streak, though, Xandra found much more entertainment in her father's workshop than in any of the ladylike (or even acceptably-tomboyish) pursuits toward which her long-suffering parents tried to direct her. When she started dating his employees, her father compromised enough to send her to Texas A&M for a dual major in business administration and civil engineering, figuring he'd prep her to take over the office side of the company.
That might have worked had Xandra not gone on a diving excursion in Mazatlan during spring break of her junior year. The world under the waves was her anti-drug. For the first time in her life, she found relative peace. A month after graduation, she was in Seattle for commercial dive school at the Divers Institute of Technology. A year after that, she was one of a handful of women working underwater construction and demolition in the Gulf. She and her father even reached an agreement: if she stopped ruining or poaching his staff, he wouldn't tell her mother just how dangerous her work was.
Xandra was working a salvage contract in Memphis, raising a string of sunken grain barges, when the bombs fell. She and the other survivors of her crew made it across the Mississippi before things got really bad - and then they made the mistake of telling an Arkansas State Guard unit what their skills were. The guys weren't exactly conscripted but they got offers they couldn't refuse. Xandra escaped official scrutiny, mainly because none of the Guardsmen could believe her claimed resume. She drifted for a bit, surviving by doing odd fix-it work, until she linked up with an Arkansas Department of Transportation repair crew.
For the last year, Xandra's been working out of Little Rock, propping up various bits of failing infrastructure. It's kept her fed but she's been going insane from the monotony. No one was surprised when she volunteered for the Governor's Recovery Task Force the day the initiative was announced. Truth be told, a few people were relived.
Appearance:
At a stocky and broad-shouldered 5'3", Xandra doesn't look like anyone's idea of a commercial dive tech. With her short black-dyed punk hairstyle (she recently ran out of dye for the acid-green tips) and voluminous collection of ink and piercings, she doesn't look like anyone's idea of an engineer, either. That's okay. She's used to people underestimating her. When they bend down to sneer at her, that makes it easier for her to kick them in the balls. Or to break into their lockers and fill them with Japanese octopus porn.
Xandra is as thick-skinned as one might expect from a woman who's spent a decade succeeding in an industry that suffers from a terminal case of testosterone poisoning. Her style - adopted from her father, though she'd never admit it - is to accept no bullshit, demonstrate her competence early and silently, and never cut corners on safety. Not at work, at least. In her personal life, she had what one might charitably call a high-risk lifestyle before the war. She's since cut back on the drinking and dropped smoking as too expensive, and she hasn't gotten any more body modifications for fear of a nasty infection, but the consequent lack of stress relief is starting to make her twitchy.
Her usual post-apocalyptic wardrobe is distinctly blue-collar: Levis or Carhartts, T-shirts with various offensive logos or pop culture references, steel-toed work boots, and a pair of shrapnel-resistant sunglasses forgotten and pushed up on her head while she squints into the sun. Her one appearance indulgence, when such things were possible, was paying the premium for American-made apparel. For the Task Force mission, she's picked up a set of ASDF combat gear - which she promptly de-patched with a dive knife and started decorating in Sharpie.