Name: Born Ximena Huang, has used a variety of false identities over the years with the most notable being Amy Guo
Callsign/Nickname: When working as an undercover operative she was given the codename Catechist. After transferring to flight duties she was nicknamed Jefe, a play on how her name is pronounced.
Age: 41, born 1974
Gender: Female
Appearance: 
Nationality: Sinomexicana by birth, functionally stateless.
Personality: Ximena's overarching demeanor is one of excess. She appreciates indulgences of all sorts, known for her love of cigars, coffee, and cognac. Thus far she's managed to avoid any major health concerns resulting from such consumption, something she attributes to a family history of smoking and drinking. She's a flirt and philanderer, prone to casual relationships or simple flings, as well as a high-rolling gambler. Much of her paychecks go to feeding the above habits, with some carefully squirreled away. Suave and confident in all things, she is self-assured, bordering on cocky, but genuinely quite competent and very aware of it. She expects perfection from herself in her work, and she often achieves it. This in turn inflates her ego.
This fast lifestyle was developed during her work as a spy. Besides her state salary, Huang had access to generous expense accounts and was encouraged to earn money on the side in order to ingratiate herself with local criminal elements. She became adept at living as a buttoned-up, white-collar worker during the day and a big spender by night. Years of successful espionage and counter-espionage built up a sense of skill and a need to show it off. The conflict between her need for attention and the stealth required by her work is thought to be a major factor in her switching to piloting. Being a spy was, in her own words, 'sexy' but air combat allowed her to operate more openly. It's also worth noting that she joined a PMC only after she was taken out of the field and made a desk agent.
While there is little doubt that Jefe is an ego-driven perfectionist with a number of vices, psychoanalysis suggests that this is a subconscious defense mechanism. She served as a spy for a decade in some of the most active warzones post-Heavenfall, neutralizing a number of enemy agents and at times coming close to being neutralized herself. This lifestyle made her paranoid, and her anxiety is amplified due to her current status as a wanted traitor to the NPRC and the unknown status of her longtime partner. It is believed that by playing up her "James Bond shit", as she puts it, she's able to avoid confronting the simple fact that she's afraid.
Despite fleeing her home country, Huang is politically and emotionally loyal to China and its interests. She grew up in the late Cold War and came to disdain both the Soviet hegemony and NATO influence, seeing Russia and America as twin imperialists attempting to make the Third World their own. If she had her way, New China and the NCAA would break apart the N/UN and the megacorporations alike. That said, she is considered to be a reliable asset. Her self-preservation outweighs her political ideals, and she know that there is no reward for her if she were to try and defect again. She is stuck with Shattered Steel.
Note from Doctor Dixon, Psychiatric Evaluator: I felt I should make my observations here so that whoever 'Jefe's' squadron commander ends up being can see them. While she is cleared for flight duties by the standards of Shattered Steel, the fact of the matter is that she very well might not have had we been in a peacetime army, so to speak. She's likely suffering from some form of PTSD and is certainly a high-functioning addict. This is unsurprising, as you're unlikely to spend as long as she did undercover and then jump immediately into front-line combat without suffering some complications. What makes things trickier to decipher is her relationship with her former girlfriend. During my interview with her Huang expressed grief, guilt, bitterness and resentment in equal measure, blaming herself for abandoning her partner and blaming her partner for forcing her to give up her career and country. When she discovered that Zuhal was passing along state secrets she cut all ties and left her to her fate, assuming internal security would silence the leak, but regretted the decision almost immediately. This regret is exacerbated by the fact that Zuhal was, under unclear circumstances, kidnapped by the Sam Gor when fleeing. It's believed she's being forced to work for them, and it's only a matter of time before they kill her or she's reclaimed by the NPRC. Huang has expressed that she believes Zuhal 'has it coming,' but it's doubtful she means that.
Ximena's outward persona is at least partially a front to discourage people from looking too deeply into her. You would be well-served by knowing when not to buy her bullshit. There is minimal risk of her going rogue again or lashing out somehow, but with how central her being the "best" is to her emotional defenses, she could conceivably spiral and need to be pulled off flight duty.
History: Ximena Huang was born in 1971 in Mexico City, during the height of the Sino-Soviet split. Her father was Chen Huang, an economist and businessman attached to the Chinese embassy to study Mexican trade and industry as part of early economic reforms predating the wider opening up. Her mother, Renata Torres, was a local college student working in the embassy as an attache. Despite the difference in age (Renata was 25 at the time while Chen was approximately 45) the pair began a romantic relationship and quickly eloped, potentially due to Renata becoming pregnant.
The family moved back to China while Ximena was a toddler but she would end up splitting her time between there and Mexico, due to her father's work and the presence of family. She grew up intensely patriotic and very pro-Third World, seeing Chinese opposition to both the Soviets and the Americans as an attitude other nonaligned nations should copy. With the implementation of Dengist reforms came an increase in the private sector of the Chinese economy, and Chen, with his business background and overseas contacts, was well-placed to benefit. Dealing mainly in real estate and stocks, he taught his daughter that the only way to survive and thrive was to be adaptable, getting onto and bailing from trends before anyone else. Ximena took to this lesson, which likely impacted her outlook on life.
Despite her intense patriotism Huang was something of a problem child. While very intelligent she did merely okay in school and had a record of disciplinary issues, mainly disorderly conduct and underage drinking. Records suggest that she was suspected of affiliating with minor street gangs, but it appears as if she was never formally charged with such. Her father kept her out of any serious trouble, and despite her mediocre grades, she got into university, where she began to shine.
Ximena studied both in-country at Peking University, with an emphasis on finance and economics, as well as overseas at the National Autonomous University of Mexico where she was educated in Latin American studies. Her master's thesis was on the interplay of Chinese and LatAm economies and was well-received enough that an excerpt was published in the Journal of Latin American Studies. After graduating she went to work for her father, serving as his representative in Mexico and the southwestern United States.
With the advent of the Heavenfall and the destruction of the old way of doing things, China expanded its espionage and counterintelligence activities greatly. The Ministry of State Security was given an increased budget and a free hand to organize itself as required, and its International Intelligence Burea, in particular, expanded and reorganized itself to face new challenges. The "Second Burea" began to recruit unorthodox agents with valuable skill sets, and Ximena was headhunted shortly after the impact. She was an analyst scrutinizing the activities of foreign companies for any impropriety, passing along her observations to investigators.
That role was just what she did on paper. In actuality, Huang was herself a spy. Her business background and ability to ingratiate herself with criminals made her well-suited to undercover work, and she was provided a series of cover identities and employees as part of Pacific Enterprises [see attached file]. While her job title changed regularly she was responsible for ensuring transport and the protection of inventory, ostensibly for second-hand civilian equipment and heavy industry goods. In actuality, Huang was involved in the covert movement of people, money, and weapons to various forces around the globe. She spent 3 years in this role, before the MSS decided to better utilize her particular background by inserting her into Mexico.
Her new papers identified her as Amy Guo, a business executive out of work due to the rampant destruction in Los Angeles. “Guo” was originally a corporate spy but due to the economic crisis of the disaster was now a lone actor willing to sell out her old bosses.
Through a contact in the Chinese embassy in Mexico City (an old friend of her fathers, although for operational secrecy said friend was not informed of who she was) she was inserted into Fabricante Diaz, a subsidiary of NeoDyne.
FD was a largely unknown entity with a history of projects that never went anywhere, and it was long thought by Mexican authorities to have remained solvent through laundering dirty money invested by corrupt officials and simple criminals, but it did have promising experiments in the miniaturization of chemical and electrical lasers. Such technology was something China wanted to keep an eye on, and “Guo” was in a perfect position to watch it.
Her job was multifaceted. She kept the MSS informed of Diaz’s work on lasers while feeding NeoDyne supposed industry secrets, information that the megacorp would already have known or was largely inconsequential but established her bona fides. She also liaised with the cartels as well as elements of Mexico’s remnant law enforcement and government that were happy to pick up some extra pay, establishing a network of safe houses and listening posts to keep an eye on the region. Finally, if there were elements that needed to be dealt with through force it fell to her to arrange their rendition or killing.
She seems to have enjoyed this period immensely. Living double lives suited her ego and the combination of her expense account, two salaries and kickbacks from Fabricante Diaz and her new friends in the underworld allowed her to indulge in base desires. Typically lavish spending is not something a spy should do, but Huang had arranged her cover so that it would be odd if she wasn’t. NeoDyne and local officials were well aware that Amy Guo was selling secrets from her old company to the highest bidder to fund her extravagant lifestyle, but they had no idea she was on the MSS payroll.
It was during this period that she reconnected with Zuhal al-Saqqaf, a Saudi national she had shared a college dorm with. While they had been close during their shared time at Peking University and slept with each other in a couple of instances, al-Saqqaf went on to finish her studies in England while Huang went to Mexico, and they exchanged only a few messages as they started their respective careers. al-Saqqaf, having gotten a job in the Chinese energy industry with the collapse of the Middle East and not sure which of her old acquaintances had survived the Heavenfall, reached out to Huang via New China's London embassy, and they met for drinks.
Huang was unwilling to discuss the circumstances of her and al-Saqqaf becoming a semi-permanent couple, but it was likely due to their similar backgrounds and outlooks. Zuhal's father and uncle both made their fortune during the 70s and 80s off of natural gas reserves and other resources, meaning that she was thrust into high society at around the same time as Ximena. Zuhal was also known to flaunt social mores, running into trouble with the morality police several times.
An obvious tie between them was their orientation and related struggles. According to interviews with family and friends now outside the country, al-Saqqaf's attraction to women was discovered by her father shortly after she went abroad for school and she was entirely cut off, potentially on pain of death if she returned. Ximena's circumstances were not nearly that dire, but by her own admittance she was always cautious about keeping her relationships with women to herself and only came out to her family when ordered by the MSS to ensure she couldn't be blackmailed.
Besides their shared past Huang and al-Saqqaf's relationship benefited in that both of them had neither the time nor the inclination for something permanent or monogamous. Ximena was preoccupied with her spy work while Zuhal was often traveling due to her chemical engineering career, setting up ethanol and hydrogen production for New China and its allies. Additionally, Huang was a serial libertine and al-Saqqaf was still recovering from a previous relationship, leaving both parties uninterested in becoming a 'couple' by traditional standards.
That said, they met whenever they could, catching red-eye flights to make it to dinner and spending nights in each other's apartments whenever they were in the same area. Huang refused to elaborate on these meetings, but she did make it clear that neither of them knew about the others work outside of vague generalities. al-Saqqaf was aware that Huang did analysis work for the MSS and Huang knew that Zuhal was working for the National Energy Administration, but evidently neither of them pried. Analysis suggests Zuhal was “safe” in a way other people were not, allowing Huang to let her guard down and be vulnerable, or at least emotionally intimate.
Eventually Fabricante Diaz went insolvent, the chaotic state of Mexico not conducive to the production required to keep it afloat. Huang wrapped up operations and passed along contact information to those assets deemed worth keeping, ensuring that China would still have eyes and ears in Mexico. Ximena herself was transferred back to Beijing for desk duty, and her case officer operation was shelved. Fabricante Diaz had made some notable advances in miniaturizing and venting heat from laser weapons technology, but they were ultimately minor and not anything that hadn’t been theorized before. Huang’s mission was a success in that she had infiltrated NeoDyne undetected and laid the groundwork for a lucrative network in the region, but with the company she was embedded in no longer existing it was deemed prudent to extract her. Friendlies in the American justice system and Interpol arranged for a warrant to be put out on Amy Guo for corporate espionage and wire fraud, leading to her arrest and deportation. The private contractors who picked her up were not actually hired by the United States of course, and she was shuttled back to China clean.
Her good work had earned her a promotion but her inability to turn off her maverick tendencies once back in official service gained the mistrust of her superiors. It was decided to simultaneously reward and punish her by making her a Case Manager, essentially a handler for case officers who were transitory in some way as opposed to being permanently planted. It was a step up in her career but it was a step away from the action, as her superiors wanted to make use of her skills but were concerned that she would become a liability.
Moving away from the field was not what Ximena wanted, and since this was not an optional reassignment she couldn’t just turn it down in favor of staying a case officer. She instead sought out alternate opportunities to serve her country. At the time the MSS was collaborating with military intelligence to create a PMC for deniable operations, allowing force projection without risking open warfare. This PMC, Lucky Dog Defense, is ostensibly a publicly traded company taking on jobs for various parties, but it was very much an arm of the Chinese state.
Similar to Shattered Steel in scope, Lucky Dog had an eclectic mix of personnel and equipment from different countries and eras, combining its varied inventory to perform operations on land, air, and sea. Ximena pushed to become a fighter pilot, a departure from her previous role. She managed to convince her superiors to allow the transfer on the basis that her work with Fabricante Diaz, a firm that dealt with aerospace technology, and her intelligence background made her suited to semi-covert aerial operations. That and her tendency to play fast and loose in office politics made someone above her happy to make her someone else’s problem.
She transferred out of her analyst role to Lucky Dog's fighter wing, doing well in training and allowed to serve as a fighter pilot. Lucky Dog had bases around the world but much of its manpower was fleet-based, giving it a reason to invest in carrier-born craft. That explains why they had access to the Navy Advanced Tactical Fighter (better known as the F22 'Sea Raptor') but now how. The best guess is that in the aftermath of the Heavenfall, rogue naval officers sold off their stocks to the highest bidder, but it's unclear. Regardless, Huang ended up flying a purpose-built air supremacy craft and found she had both the talent and inclination for dogfighting.
It was during her tenure with Lucky Dog that Ximena would become the full-time partner of Zuhal, the pair sharing a high-end apartment in Macau when not working in the field. This life suited Huang rather nicely, as Macau's status as the "Las Vegas of the East" meant that she could indulge herself as she pleased with the money she made from each mission.
Unbeknowst to her however, Zuhal was not as comfortable. Her government paycheck allowed for comfortable living but not outlandishly so, and she had developed a taste for the finer things in life just like Huang had. al-Saqqaf had taken to extralegal activities to fund herself, while Ximena had been performing industrial espionage for China Zuhal had been doing it for herself. Using her expertise in the field of fuel production and her access to state resources, she had been involved in the smuggling of black market energy for years without Ximena knowing about it, and she only revealed this secret once authorities began to close in.
Three years into Ximena's time with Lucky Dog Zuhal took her to a secluded place and revealed her secret, and that she was sure she was being tailed. Not sure what to do she looked to Ximena for help. Ximena knew that law enforcement had her dead to rights and had refrained from arresting her to see if she would reveal her co-conspirators. Once they had her, she would face trial and, in all likelihood, execution for treason. More to the point, Ximena was also at risk. While she hadn't even known that al-Saqqaf had been making money on the side, the fact that she herself had been a spy meant that ignorance would not be accepted as an excuse. Regardless of her lack of involvement, she would be scooped up and shot alongside her partner to clean house.
Ximena kept this realization to herself and told Zuhal to sit tight for the moment, and that soon she'd have arranged safe haven for them. In actuality she moved what cash she could to offshore accounts and dropped everything, including Zuhal. The week after the conversation she reported to work as usual and requested time in-air for maneuver training. Once airborne she simply veered off, using the Raptor's high speed and stealth capabilities to flee.
She defected to Shattered Steel after three years in Lucky Dog, and after the mandatory debriefing and background checks to ensure she wasn't a double agent, allowed to keep flying the same plane she stole.
Personal Gear:
- MGA SAW K in .300 Blackout, with attached laser, flashlight and suppressor. An unorthodox weapon for a Chinese agent or indeed a pilot, Huang got acquired this in Mexico and has managed to ship or smuggle it around the world.
- Smith and Wesson Model 629 in .44 Magnum snubnosed, capable of being concealed in a specially enlarged jacket pocket. Ximena states that she preferred to carry low-caliber pocket pistols when working for the MSS due to their utility as assassination weapons, but since defecting has switched to magnums in order to guarantee she can kill an attacker in one shot.
- Buck 102 Hunting Knife
- Ximena is a heavy drinker and smoker and so keeps a stash in her personal locker, both her preferred cognac and cigars, as well as cheap rotgut and cigarettes. Dice and cards are stored in the same place, if not on her person.
Personal Aircraft: Lockheed Martin F-22N "Sea Raptor"- Carrier-capable variant of the F-22 Raptor, largely the same as its progenitor save for the addition of variable-sweep wings and strengthened landing gear.
Aircraft modifications: A short, bulleted list of what has been altered or modified on your characters' plane
Anything Else: Completely optional, but if there's any other information you deem relevant to your character or wish to include, such as a particular song, quotes, additional art, or so on; please feel free to add it under the relevant headings.
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