Please critique if you feel inclined! Also, the bio got kinda long; sorry about that.
-Name: Mackenzie Sherman
-Age: 34
-Appearance: She is 6'3", her skin tanned brown and showing signs of early aging from working outdoors for nearly 15 years. Her medium brown hair is cut short, and her eyes are brown. She is muscular and very broad in the shoulders, weighing in at 223 lbs. She wears heavy-denim jeans, a tee-shirt, a black flight jacket, and steel-toed work boots.
Reference, although not exact.-Convenient previous occupation/hobby: Welder, with some very brief training in machining and electrical work
-Starting equipment: Lathe-sharpened steel bar with leather-wrapped handle, for use as a primitive spear; key-card which grants access to the machine shop and stockrooms of her former workplace (although it may be overrun by zombies by now)
-Bio: Mackenzie is an Icarus City native; her parents ran a mechanic's shop at which she began to help at a young age. Mechanically inclined but an average student at very best, she left high school to begin vocational training at 17, and became a certified welder after two years of training. She was hired by the city's premier fortification design and construction firm, beginning as a welder and eventually working her way into a shift-management job, until she had been offered the surprise promotion to full (albeit probationary) field engineer. As part of the company's "bottom-up" design philosophy, this meant spending two months in training at each of the company's foundational trades, electrical work and machining (she was permitted to skip the customary welding stint, for obvious reasons), as well as taking community college courses to make up for her defecits in math.
She wasn't even halfway through the machining pseudo-apprenticeship when the city fell. She, her mentor, and some of the professional machinists were working in one of the company's myriad metal shops when the notice went out company-wide: infected in the city, shelter in place, God help us all. They raided the cafeteria a floor below for whatever supplies they could find, and then the machinists' stockroom for whatever metal stock looked like it might hold an edge or a point. Being sheltered in a basement and thus unlikely to attract hostile attention, the group survived reasonably well for a week or so while the initial chaos died down, but supplies soon ran low. It became clear that the group would have to seek refuge elsewhere, if they wished to avoid cannibalism and lethal infighting. Mackenzie managed to locate a cannery with a stock of unshipped product sufficient to sustain a single person indefinitely. She lived undetected in the cannery for almost two years, but a gang of raiders recently discovered the facility; she barely escaped with two days' worth of food, and her life.
