Maria stands at about 178 centimeters at full height, sporting a heavily built, strong body that readily shows her years of experience in the field. Much of her body has some sort of scar or nick to show, with some even showing ugly burns. Despite years of war she has seen throughought her life, she has snowy white hair of surprising softness, sharply contrasting the lava red eyes she has inexplicably had since birth.
Age: 29
Sex: Female
Personality: Will mostly be shown IC, but… Maria is intelligent, snarky, and decidedly irreverent behind the backs of authority figures. How she came from the strict world of Praetoria is a true mystery, as her complete indifference to things like uniformity and compliance (when she can get away with it) is completely uncharacteristic of the world. But by the same token, she shows an innate intelligence and awareness of her surroundings. Perhaps she can’t build a plasma gun from spare parts or debate complex arcane specifics with a seasoned scholar, but she can piece together seemingly unrelated pieces of information and find a pattern hidden within, or decipher the mad ravings of a guardsman stricken to lunacy by Chaotic sights.
Former Occupation: Personal bodyguard for a Commissar.
Psyker Powers: Maria boasts incredibly potent pyromantic abilities, having awakened them in the heat of battle. While not the stuff of legends, her skill at the offensive discipline is not to be underestimated, under pain of an excruciating and fiery demise.
Equipment: Custom Made Bolt Revolver: This potent weapon originally belonged to another - a Commissar. Specifically, the Commissar who she guarded for years on end. A powerful hand cannon of fearsome size, sound, and effect, the weapon was scratch built for the Commissar, firing full sized bolts out of a barrel considerably longer and heavier than a normal bolt pistol’s, mitigating the recoil significantly - despite this, it has a sophisticated system of sliding counterweights that fire at the same time as the gun, adding their own mass to counteract the recoil of the weapon. These, coupled with the muzzle break at the front, make it a surprisingly easy weapon to fire. Upon the Commissar’s death, ownership of the weapon passed to her by virtue of being the closest one to the man to grab it from him. She has continued to use it to this day. Due to being a revolver, the capacity is limited to six rounds, but by the same token the far less complicated mechanism makes the weapon almost preternaturally reliable when coupled with its superior worksmanship.
Customized Mordian Uniform: Beginning its life as her standard issue Mordian Iron Guard uniform, Maria received the set upon her joining of the Guard. It has since then seen many alterations, chiefly the removal of the surrounding fabric, stripping the uniform down to the resilient carapace armor contained within, which she continues to wear to this day, albeit with the occasional addition after a good find on the battlefield. While her alterations to it are primarily cosmetic - covering the edges to prevent anything snagging, she has managed to modify the hat suffiently to meet her personal aesthetic preferences, turning the headgear into a jaunty tricorn with a single white feather stuck in the top.
Coat and hat: Maria’s coat serves little practical purpose save some warmth and as a good covering to keep dust out. Her extended tenure as a Commissar’s personal bodyguard let her feather her nest a little with a few aesthetic frivolities - mainly in the form of the coat she wears at all time. Constructed of an unknown but incredibly sturdy fabric, the coat has lasted her for many years, and will surely last many more.
Notable Deeds: Hailing from the world of Mordian, Maria was raised amid the same wretched conditions as the other members of the world. The hardship of her early life tempered her against the horrors of the greater galaxy, like all of her fellows hailing from the world. At the age of seventeen she made her way into the Imperial Guard, reasoning that a quick death in service of the Emperor beat a slow and roughly as painful one within the hives. Over the years she saw many engagements, miraculously not dying, even if she’s had more than her share of close calls.
”You’re a Psyker, Maria.” Maria first awakened her psychic abilities in a routine operation against the gangs that infested every corner of Mordian. While truly keeping them in check or wiping them out was a dream that could only be born of huffing fermented grox manure for a few days, it was important that they keep them from completely overrunning certain parts of the world - such as one of the major military depots.
The standard Mordian tactic of lining up in thick rows and concentrating fire on the enemies certainly had an effect, but the surrounding gangs had joined forces - after all, having military grade gear in their arsenal would dramatically boost their standing. Outnumbered by surprisingly well armed gangs, the Guard soon found their ammunition on hand running dry, their nimble adversaries frustrating their attempts to burn their skulls out by dodging and weaving their ways closer, tossing crude grenades and even some genuine ones into their ranks, even some Kraks landed under the few armored vehicles on hand, knocking them out of commission for the time being. Backup, in the form of the rest of their regiment with accompanying armor in tow, was inbound but would take some time to arrive - this had, after all, originally been a simple policing action.
A grenade had blown open the ranks of men and women right next to her, tearing a bloody hole in their lines that their assailants suddenly rushed for, intending to exploit the sudden breach before the Guard could plug it, leaving only Maria and a machine gunner running low on ammunition and sporting a shattered leg to hold them off.
Maria quickly emptied the power cell on her las rifle, finding the other one empty too. Beside her, perched behind his weapon, the gunner quickly ran out of ammunition as well, scrambling to hurl grenades at the enemy, scavenging as many off the shattered bodies that surrounded them as he could, hurling them into the mass of onrushing bodies - but it wasn’t enough.
She had felt only rage at that point. While normally not a clean and polished yes-woman who delighted at the very thought of obeying orders, indeed she chafed under them for the most part, she still respected them. And the fact that she wouldn’t be able to do her job, was going to die right here, because of something as stupid as running out of ammunition angered her to no end.
Something had risen up in her then, and without even understanding what she was doing, she conjured forth great torrents of flame, dousing the emboldened gangers in a fire fueled by a potent mixture of unchecked rage and primal survival instinct.
When she came to, she found that she had fallen unconscious from the exertion, but the line had held, in no small part due to her sudden ability to conjure flame from nothing.
Waaagh! ‘Urtfist After her sudden development of psychic abilities, Maria faced the prospect of potential execution, or transport to Terra as Emperor-food, but the Commissariat intervened, pulling her from the rank and file to serve as a bodyguard for the division’s Commissar. This roughly coincided with the decision of the brass to ship her and her division out to the frontline to replenish severely depleted and considerably poorer trained Guard formations defending against a recently emerged threat - a sizeable Ork Waaagh! bearing down on an agricultural system known as Effus. The Waaagh! struck first at the outer site of human inhabitation, a mostly barren world pockmarked by meteor impacts, the planet of Effus IV was soon to become a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions where almost the entire Waaagh! would be halted, at a great cost in lives and resources. One of two planets located within the habitable zone, there had been multiple attempts to convert it into an agricultural world like its sister planet, Effus III, but such efforts had stalled due to lack of resources and hostile local fauna.
The Waaagh! had its origins in the warboss of an originally small clan, who got it into his head to lead his forces against those of other nearby clans, managing to unite them despite his numerical inferiority. The scholars theorized he had an unusually large present in their bastard version of the Warp, drawing other Orks to his cause regardless of his actual physical capabilites - which were, admittedly, fearsome.
The initial forces sent to contain the Waaagh! were tragically underprepared, rapidly overrun by battle hungry Orks looking for a good fight. The Guard regiments had been sent in as more of a “trial by fire”, their commanders not fully comprehending the scale of the Waaagh! bearing down on the system. The forces of the 352nd Mordian Iron Guard were closest at hand and rapidly redeployed to counter the Waaagh!, sending out an urgent request for backup.
By the time they arrived, the Imperial forces were in utter rout, fleeing from the Orks in every which way, oftentimes abandoning their weapons and equipment to move faster.
The commander of the regiment was known as Nadia Parron, a woman stern and unrelenting even by Mordian standards, ordered her forces to deploy in the open in standard battle formation, issuing extra ammunition in anticipation of a protracted battle. To the fleeing Guardsmen she issued a general order: stand and fight, or be executed as traitors to the Imperium.
Most of them kept running right up until precise las fire drilled burning holes through their skulls.
Redeploying her armored units and support troops, Commander Parron advanced slowly, cautiously scouting ahead with aerial units and ground forces, keeping their lone cruiser within bombarding distance, knowing full well her lone force would be insufficient to hold off an entire Ork Waaagh! Her primary goal was to find a fortifiable position to hold off the Orks until reinforcements could arrive.
Eventually they found an ancient asteroid crater, miraculously still fairly intact, and immediately set about digging in. Normal doctrine would have had the Guard face the Orks in the open, but Commander Parron, while stern and unrelenting, was no fool.
The engagement began when a vanguard of greenskins advanced over the horizon, driving their primitive vehicles pell-mell for the Imperial line. Disciplined las fire lanced out from the Mordian troops, heavy armor adding its part too and inflicting grievous casualties on the approaching xenos.
Recon craft had estimated the strength of the advance force at about three thousand strong - no xenos made contact with the Guard’s line, though their crude weaponry had brought down a few comrades.
The real assault began at the planet’s version of high noon - a vertiable tidal wave of greenskins surged over the horizon and almost immediately, the Imperial artillery began to open up, plunging devastating shellfire into the hordes of xenos - but even as they inflicted grievous slaughter, as did the Ork weaponry begin to take its toll. Men and women began dropping left and right.
The enemy force broke upon the raised walls of the meteor crater and Imperial fortifications, greenskins attempting to climb towards the Guard forces only to be beaten back by disciplined las fire, or, in Maria’s case, furious blasts of warpfire. She honed her skill upon the throngs of bloodthirsty xenos, gleefully incinerating them en masse as they threw themselves even more energetically into the fray.
However, the position was untenable in the face of the sheer numbers and ferocity of the attack, and by the third day of the defense their numbers had dwindled severely.
Help came unexpectedly in the form of a strike cruiser bearing a full company of Astartes - Angels Encarmine, to be specific. The arrival of the Space Marines turned the tide momentarily in favor of the Imperial forces, allowing them to beat back the Ork assault long enough to fortify once more and await reinforcements.
Damn the torpedoes! And the Orks! When reinforcements finally arrived in the form of several hastily assembled formations of Guardsmen from any nearby worlds, and of all walks of life, Commander Parron decided to gamble her forces on a single decisive assault to crush the momentarily stalled Waaagh! to prevent it gaining any further traction from greenskins elsewhere.
The operation was a bloodbath on both sides - the Mordian 352nd and the company of Astartes, as the only remotely experienced or even truly competent forces available, were chosen to form the speartip of this operation. Leading one of the assault companies was Commissar Basir and his bodyguard, Maria Maria Selkirk.
The Commissar was a rather aggressive one, even by their standards, and decided to lead his company, along with several others of the hastily formed recruit formations, in a headlong charge against a mid sized gargant. Maria, not wishing to be shot, said nothing but did her best to keep herself (and the Commissar) alive. She was doomed to failure on the latter however when, miraculously reaching the Gargant, with severely depleted numbers, the man charged headlong at it. At this point, her sense of self preservation overrode her devotion to her duty and she held back, eventually taking shelter behind a massive mound of bodies - greenskin and human alike - to hurl warpfire every which way.
What seemed like days later, but was likely only a couple hours, she came to coated in blood from head to toe and completely exhausted. All around her was utter devastation, the Gargant lay in smoldering ruins, telltale signs of a Leman Russ Annihilator having been in the vicinity, if the recently cooled molten metal was anything to go by.
She had staggered to her feet, incapable of generating another warp bolt if her life depended on it. Scavenging through the field of corpses, taking extra power packs and looking for a lasgun in reasonable condition, she came across the body of the commissar, and by extension, his custom made bolt revolver, which she quickly appropriated for her own personal use before staggering back to friendly lines where she collapsed almost immediately,
Natalia stands at about 178 centimeters at full height, sporting a heavily built, strong body that readily shows her years of experience in the field. Much of her body has some sort of scar or nick to show, with some even showing ugly burns. Despite years of war she has seen throughought her life, she has snowy white hair of surprising softness, sharply contrasting the lava red eyes she has inexplicably had since birth.
Age: 29
Sex: Female
Personality: Will mostly be shown IC, but… Natalia is intelligent, snarky, and decidedly irreverent behind the backs of authority figures. How she came from the strict world of Praetoria is a true mystery, as her complete indifference to things like uniformity and compliance (when she can get away with it) is completely uncharacteristic of the world. But by the same token, she shows an innate intelligence and awareness of her surroundings. Perhaps she can’t build a plasma gun from spare parts or debate complex arcane specifics with a seasoned scholar, but she can piece together seemingly unrelated pieces of information and find a pattern hidden within, or decipher the mad ravings of a guardsman stricken to lunacy by Chaotic sights.
Former Occupation: Personal bodyguard for a Commissar.
Psyker Powers: Natalia boasts incredibly potent pyromantic abilities, having awakened them in the heat of battle. While not the stuff of legends, her skill at the offensive discipline is not to be underestimated, under pain of an excruciating and fiery demise.
Equipment: Custom Made Bolt Revolver: This potent weapon originally belonged to another - a Commissar. Specifically, the Commissar who she guarded for years on end. A powerful hand cannon of fearsome size, sound, and effect, the weapon was scratch built for the Commissar, firing full sized bolts out of a barrel considerably longer and heavier than a normal bolt pistol’s, mitigating the recoil significantly - despite this, it has a sophisticated system of sliding counterweights that fire at the same time as the gun, adding their own mass to counteract the recoil of the weapon. These, coupled with the muzzle break at the front, make it a surprisingly easy weapon to fire. Upon the Commissar’s death, ownership of the weapon passed to her by virtue of being the closest one to the man to grab it from him. She has continued to use it to this day. Due to being a revolver, the capacity is limited to six rounds, but by the same token the far less complicated mechanism makes the weapon almost preternaturally reliable when coupled with its superior worksmanship.
Customized Mordian Uniform: Beginning its life as her standard issue Mordian Iron Guard uniform, Natalia received the set upon her joining of the Guard. It has since then seen many alterations, chiefly the removal of the surrounding fabric, stripping the uniform down to the resilient carapace armor contained within, which she continues to wear to this day, albeit with the occasional addition after a good find on the battlefield. While her alterations to it are primarily cosmetic - covering the edges to prevent anything snagging, she has managed to modify the hat suffiently to meet her personal aesthetic preferences, turning the headgear into a jaunty tricorn with a single white feather stuck in the top.
Coat and hat: Natalia’s coat serves little practical purpose save some warmth and as a good covering to keep dust out. Her extended tenure as a Commissar’s personal bodyguard let her feather her nest a little with a few aesthetic frivolities - mainly in the form of the coat she wears at all time. Constructed of an unknown but incredibly sturdy fabric, the coat has lasted her for many years, and will surely last many more.
Notable Deeds: Hailing from the world of Mordian, Natalia was raised amid the same wretched conditions as the other members of the world. The hardship of her early life tempered her against the horrors of the greater galaxy, like all of her fellows hailing from the world. At the age of seventeen she made her way into the Imperial Guard, reasoning that a quick death in service of the Emperor beat a slow and roughly as painful one within the hives. Over the years she saw many engagements, miraculously not dying, even if she’s had more than her share of close calls.
”You’re a Psyker, Natalia.” Natalia first awakened her psychic abilities in a routine operation against the gangs that infested every corner of Mordian. While truly keeping them in check or wiping them out was a dream that could only be born of huffing fermented grox manure for a few days, it was important that they keep them from completely overrunning certain parts of the world - such as one of the major military depots.
The standard Mordian tactic of lining up in thick rows and concentrating fire on the enemies certainly had an effect, but the surrounding gangs had joined forces - after all, having military grade gear in their arsenal would dramatically boost their standing. Outnumbered by surprisingly well armed gangs, the Guard soon found their ammunition on hand running dry, their nimble adversaries frustrating their attempts to burn their skulls out by dodging and weaving their ways closer, tossing crude grenades and even some genuine ones into their ranks, even some Kraks landed under the few armored vehicles on hand, knocking them out of commission for the time being. Backup, in the form of the rest of their regiment with accompanying armor in tow, was inbound but would take some time to arrive - this had, after all, originally been a simple policing action.
A grenade had blown open the ranks of men and women right next to her, tearing a bloody hole in their lines that their assailants suddenly rushed for, intending to exploit the sudden breach before the Guard could plug it, leaving only Natalia and a machine gunner running low on ammunition and sporting a shattered leg to hold them off.
Natalia quickly emptied the power cell on her las rifle, finding the other one empty too. Beside her, perched behind his weapon, the gunner quickly ran out of ammunition as well, scrambling to hurl grenades at the enemy, scavenging as many off the shattered bodies that surrounded them as he could, hurling them into the mass of onrushing bodies - but it wasn’t enough.
She had felt only rage at that point. While normally not a clean and polished yes-woman who delighted at the very thought of obeying orders, indeed she chafed under them for the most part, she still respected them. And the fact that she wouldn’t be able to do her job, was going to die right here, because of something as stupid as running out of ammunition angered her to no end.
Something had risen up in her then, and without even understanding what she was doing, she conjured forth great torrents of flame, dousing the emboldened gangers in a fire fueled by a potent mixture of unchecked rage and primal survival instinct.
When she came to, she found that she had fallen unconscious from the exertion, but the line had held, in no small part due to her sudden ability to conjure flame from nothing.
Waaagh! ‘Urtfist After her sudden development of psychic abilities, Natalia faced the prospect of potential execution, or transport to Terra as Emperor-food, but the Commissariat intervened, pulling her from the rank and file to serve as a bodyguard for the division’s Commissar. This roughly coincided with the decision of the brass to ship her and her division out to the frontline to replenish severely depleted and considerably poorer trained Guard formations defending against a recently emerged threat - a sizeable Ork Waaagh! bearing down on an agricultural system known as Effus. The Waaagh! struck first at the outer site of human inhabitation, a mostly barren world pockmarked by meteor impacts, the planet of Effus IV was soon to become a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions where almost the entire Waaagh! would be halted, at a great cost in lives and resources. One of two planets located within the habitable zone, there had been multiple attempts to convert it into an agricultural world like its sister planet, Effus III, but such efforts had stalled due to lack of resources and hostile local fauna.
The Waaagh! had its origins in the warboss of an originally small clan, who got it into his head to lead his forces against those of other nearby clans, managing to unite them despite his numerical inferiority. The scholars theorized he had an unusually large present in their bastard version of the Warp, drawing other Orks to his cause regardless of his actual physical capabilites - which were, admittedly, fearsome.
The initial forces sent to contain the Waaagh! were tragically underprepared, rapidly overrun by battle hungry Orks looking for a good fight. The Guard regiments had been sent in as more of a “trial by fire”, their commanders not fully comprehending the scale of the Waaagh! bearing down on the system. The forces of the 352nd Mordian Iron Guard were closest at hand and rapidly redeployed to counter the Waaagh!, sending out an urgent request for backup.
By the time they arrived, the Imperial forces were in utter rout, fleeing from the Orks in every which way, oftentimes abandoning their weapons and equipment to move faster.
The commander of the regiment was known as Nadia Parron, a woman stern and unrelenting even by Mordian standards, ordered her forces to deploy in the open in standard battle formation, issuing extra ammunition in anticipation of a protracted battle. To the fleeing Guardsmen she issued a general order: stand and fight, or be executed as traitors to the Imperium.
Most of them kept running right up until precise las fire drilled burning holes through their skulls.
Redeploying her armored units and support troops, Commander Parron advanced slowly, cautiously scouting ahead with aerial units and ground forces, keeping their lone cruiser within bombarding distance, knowing full well her lone force would be insufficient to hold off an entire Ork Waaagh! Her primary goal was to find a fortifiable position to hold off the Orks until reinforcements could arrive.
Eventually they found an ancient asteroid crater, miraculously still fairly intact, and immediately set about digging in. Normal doctrine would have had the Guard face the Orks in the open, but Commander Parron, while stern and unrelenting, was no fool.
The engagement began when a vanguard of greenskins advanced over the horizon, driving their primitive vehicles pell-mell for the Imperial line. Disciplined las fire lanced out from the Mordian troops, heavy armor adding its part too and inflicting grievous casualties on the approaching xenos.
Recon craft had estimated the strength of the advance force at about three thousand strong - no xenos made contact with the Guard’s line, though their crude weaponry had brought down a few comrades.
The real assault began at the planet’s version of high noon - a vertiable tidal wave of greenskins surged over the horizon and almost immediately, the Imperial artillery began to open up, plunging devastating shellfire into the hordes of xenos - but even as they inflicted grievous slaughter, as did the Ork weaponry begin to take its toll. Men and women began dropping left and right.
The enemy force broke upon the raised walls of the meteor crater and Imperial fortifications, greenskins attempting to climb towards the Guard forces only to be beaten back by disciplined las fire, or, in Natalia’s case, furious blasts of warpfire. She honed her skill upon the throngs of bloodthirsty xenos, gleefully incinerating them en masse as they threw themselves even more energetically into the fray.
However, the position was untenable in the face of the sheer numbers and ferocity of the attack, and by the third day of the defense their numbers had dwindled severely.
Help came unexpectedly in the form of a strike cruiser bearing a full company of Astartes - Angels Encarmine, to be specific. The arrival of the Space Marines turned the tide momentarily in favor of the Imperial forces, allowing them to beat back the Ork assault long enough to fortify once more and await reinforcements.
Damn the torpedoes! And the Orks! When reinforcements finally arrived in the form of several hastily assembled formations of Guardsmen from any nearby worlds, and of all walks of life, Commander Parron decided to gamble her forces on a single decisive assault to crush the momentarily stalled Waaagh! to prevent it gaining any further traction from greenskins elsewhere.
The operation was a bloodbath on both sides - the Mordian 352nd and the company of Astartes, as the only remotely experienced or even truly competent forces available, were chosen to form the speartip of this operation. Leading one of the assault companies was Commissar Basir and his bodyguard, Natalia Maria Selkirk.
The Commissar was a rather aggressive one, even by their standards, and decided to lead his company, along with several others of the hastily formed recruit formations, in a headlong charge against a mid sized gargant. Natalia, not wishing to be shot, said nothing but did her best to keep herself (and the Commissar) alive. She was doomed to failure on the latter however when, miraculously reaching the Gargant, with severely depleted numbers, the man charged headlong at it. At this point, her sense of self preservation overrode her devotion to her duty and she held back, eventually taking shelter behind a massive mound of bodies - greenskin and human alike - to hurl warpfire every which way.
What seemed like days later, but was likely only a couple hours, she came to coated in blood from head to toe and completely exhausted. All around her was utter devastation, the Gargant lay in smoldering ruins, telltale signs of a Leman Russ Annihilator having been in the vicinity, if the recently cooled molten metal was anything to go by.
She had staggered to her feet, incapable of generating another warp bolt if her life depended on it. Scavenging through the field of corpses, taking extra power packs and looking for a lasgun in reasonable condition, she came across the body of the commissar, and by extension, his custom made bolt revolver, which she quickly appropriated for her own personal use before staggering back to friendly lines where she collapsed almost immediately,
Some random internet fuck with a keyboard and too much free time.
[center][img]http://orig01.deviantart.net/e4bd/f/2012/174/9/8/i_have_done_nothing_productive_today_by_hewhoerasesmost-d54iygf.gif[/img][/center]
<div style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Some random internet fuck with a keyboard and too much free time.<br><br> <br><br> <br> <br><br><div class="bb-center"><img src="http://orig01.deviantart.net/e4bd/f/2012/174/9/8/i_have_done_nothing_productive_today_by_hewhoerasesmost-d54iygf.gif" /></div></div>
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