Player Name: Dblade26Character Name: Lance Lawrence
Character Age: 28
Character Gender: Male
Appearance: his general appearanceProfession: Ark Security Patrol Captain and Hand-to-Hand Combat instructor
Nationality: Martian
Strengths: Highly Skilled Hand-to-Hand Combatant-Above and beyond his training as an MIA Operative and Ark Security Agent, armed and unarmed martial arts of various types are a central passion of his life, partly due to the notion instilled in him from an early age that his body is the weapon that it's hardest to take away from him. He's skilled enough to qualify for the position of Ark Security's primary Hand-to-Hand Instructor.
Trained M.I.A. Operative- Lance Lawrence was groomed from a young age for intelligence work and given the best training available to the Martian Intelligence Agency. This gives him a repertoire of combat skills beyond his personal close quarters abilities with a variety of weapons from pistols to sniper rifles to improvised explosives but it also gives him a different focus in terms of fieldcraft and his general mindset and approach to work than what's typically taught to Ark Security or many branches of the military.
Analytical Mind- A combination of natural aptitude, childhood training by his mother and further refining by the M.I.A. has given Lance a rare degree of skill when it comes to observing, retaining and interpreting information from the world around him.
Weaknesses:Hands-On Leader- While he's willing to defer things to his subordinates when it comes to tasks they're better equipped or trained for than himself (or doing paperwork) Lance hates the idea of just sitting at a desk when he might be of use out in the field. This is especially true if he thinks he's the best person for a job or that those under his command might need his help even if it technically goes against his duties as a Patrol Captain at times or even unecessarily strains or endangers him. This may also frustrate those under his command even as it inspires loyalty, because although Lance would never ask them to do something he wouldn't do himself, the list of things he's willing to do himself is extensive and occasionally worrying.
In His Mother's Shadow- Lance Lawrence's mother being the Director of Mars' Military Intelligence was a massive influence on his life, especially since she both hand-reared him for intelligence work and never gave him a single milimeter of slack once he entered the service.. Their relationship was complicated to say the least and had left him with more than his share of hangups and emotional baggage even before she stayed behind in order to protect Mars from the oncoming invasion.
Prejudice-Lance is generally more than willing to make his assessments based on merit and personal experience and is of the firm belief that once you're under his command and accepted by him you're a trusted subordinate above anything else you may be. That said his main exception is that he's mistrustful of cyborgs, augmented humans and artificial intelligences of all types unless they've already proven their worth and trustworthiness, which is hardly an easy task given his high standards.
Analytical weaknesses- Lance's analysis ability is hardly perfect and he can still miss important details or not grasp the significance of events or clues if not enough context is present. Because of his intensive training and an allegedly 'healthy' sense of low-grade paranoia instilled in him by his mother, he also has an unfortunate habit of planning out how to fight his way through every person in a room when he enters it or begins conversations.
Personal Effects: A pair of gloves designed to rapidly harden in response to incoming impacts, A rather nice silent knife taken off of the leader of the pirate fleet he brought down, a data storage mostly containing kung fu films and a journal/PDA/tablet secured with the most top-of-the-line methods at the M.I.A.'s disposal.
Bio: At times seems to Lance Lawrence that his mother Vanessa had shaped the entire course of his life without his input and that may very well be true. It was her will alone that brought him into the world, a product of in-vitro fertilization and incredibly careful screening for a genetic donor. Not only that, from the very start she was determined that her son would follow in her footsteps and work for Military Intelligence, of which she was a rising star at the time of his birth. Vanessa's assignments often meant she had to be away working on covert actions for extended periods and even when she wasn't her increasingly high position in Mars intelligence services over the years made it difficult for him to make friends. Even with all of that aside they were mostly isolated from the rest of Vanessa's family as they'd become largely estranged some years back.
The main exception to this loneliness was the family of one William Locke, a rising star in the Martian Navy's Special Forces. He and Vanessa first met when they were working on the issue of the infamous pirate Tiberius Wallace, originally from seperate angles. It wasn't until later that the bond between their families deepened when Vanessa was attached to the prototype stealth ship
Nightfury as the official liason from the M.I.A., then under William Locke's command. Lance only being a toddler at this point, it was to Vanessa's mind reasonable enough to suggest that Locke's wife Doctor Amanda Locke look after her son while her assignment forced her to spend long stretches in space, even- allegedly though it was never confirmed- using her pull with the M.I.A to temporarily lighten the doctor's workload during the initial adjustment period. This was how Lance spent his early years, in the care of an occasionally absent doctor married to the commanding officer of the spy ship his mother oversaw when she wasn't doing even more secretive things to keep the interplanetary cold war interesting. All things considered it was a surprisingly decent early childhood.
Of course all of that changed with the Three Day War and not too long thereafter, Amanda Locke's death. Still reeling from the terminal illness and subsequent passage of the woman who had handled many of the day-to-day tasks of raising him, Lance was reclaimed full-time by his mother, now working a desk job having been promoted to a fairly high position within the M.I.A. following the chaos within the intelligence community that was alien invasion. To say it was an adjustment was an understatement. From that point on, she began grooming him for intelligence work. From the age of eight she made him undertake physical and mental exercises meant to teach him to excel as a field agent that she disguised as 'games' for them to play. In terms of a bright spot, she also introduced him to martial arts, something that became both his most well-trained area and a lifelong passion, but for the most part their relationship often seemed to him to be distant and complicated. Though they stayed in close contact with the Lockes, something made easier by Vanessa convincing William to take a job in intelligence himself, Lance had few other sources of support that weren't on his mother's payroll. Lance always assumed that their relationship would change when he turned 18 and was formally able to join the M.I.A.
Unfortunately for him the only way that was true was that she was even harder on him than before. In fact at least as far as he could tell there was no one else in the entire agency she came down on quite as hard as him. This pushed him to excel, to achieve things so momentous she would have to acknowledge him if only on a professional level. Well, it would have, if the alien invasion hadn't more or less invalidated all of the cold war tensions and international difficulties that would have given his career substance. As things actually happened, he was mostly limited to occasional handshake-with-one-hand dagger-in-the-back with the other style sub-surface probing operations and back and forth metaphorical sniping between Earth and Mars and dealing with issues brought up by the remains of the Armani. Still, he did his best to serve and actually gained a reputation for effectiveness after taking down a minor pirate fleet that had sprung up in the wake of the Three Day War.
His career continued in mostly distinguished but low-key service, until the day he learned that he'd been selected as a Patrol Captain aboard the
Vitae as well as the hand-to-hand and martial arts instructor for its Security Corps. It was only a few weeks before the return of the Devestators, but it left Lance incredibly conflicted. He wasn't sure how to be a cop, let alone captain a whole section of a ship full of them, and more than that it'd mean leaving everything he'd ever known behind. Still, he resolved to do his best for the sake of humanity. A real Martian and a Lawrence could do nothing less, after all. He started spending large amounts of time aboard the
Vitae, learning its quirks and the layout of the area under his command, memorizing it and learning what he could about what it meant to be Ark Security.
It was only on the day they were actually to set off that he learned his mother hadn't secured a place for herself aboard. He had assumed without asking that she would be on the journey with him, not sacrificing her life for the remains of humanity. Since then he's distracted himself by throwing himself into his work with singleminded intensity, personally overseeing as much of it as he could.
Code Word: Spaghetti