Name: Abigail Harlow
Race: Human
Age: 24
Sex: Female
Allegiance: The Grays
Occupation: Mechanic
Personal Effects: Her dad’s old toolkit, several bags of sterile human blood (kept frozen, A-).
Other: Abigail suffers from some sort of defect that causes sporadic hemorrhages in her esophagus. Whilst the effects of this loss of blood are marginal at best, it means that she has to avoid strenuous activity, an excess of yelling, stress, and blows to her stomach or her neck. After a serious bout of bleeding she may require a blood transfusion, which takes 1-4hrs. Whilst the effects of this condition seem frightening, the more threatening condition that Abigail deals with on a day to day basis is the anaemia that comes with the blood loss - it barely affects her daily duties, she has found multiple ways to cope and has all of the relevant paperwork from her doctor allowing her to continue working.
Standing tall at five-foot nothing with a shit-eating grin, a mane of messy blonde hair and inquisitive periwinkle eyes is Abigail Harlow. She is scattered with little scars, nicks, scrapes and bruises that seem to shift about on a daily basis. She spends most of her time cooped up in ventilation shafts of squeezed in between bits of machinery, so she’s so pale not even a freckle she could boast about, making her look a bit like a shut-in when it couldn’t be further from the truth. Her physique is best described as ‘gangly’ - packs of muscle here and there but skinny as a twig regardless of whatever she eats. No piercings, no tattoos; she knows she’ll mess them up eventually and instead opts for smears of dirt, oil and rust on her clothes. A few of her toes are bent at a funny angle after she broke them and didn’t get them set properly.
Abigail bears the tell-tale signs of a woman forced to mature too quickly. She fluctuates between being self-sufficient and sensible to acting like any other cheeky teenage girl would. Her sharp tongue and witty comments are more than enough to get her in trouble; it doesn’t help matters that she’s as stubborn as a mule and doesn’t hold back when she gets mad. Often restless and always fidgety, Abigail has a boundless amount of energy that spills into her everyday life and fuels her moments of irrationality, those famous “fuck-it-let’s-give-this-a-shot” ideas that every young adult has been guilty of before.
Abigail’s stubborn determination is probably her most polarising feature. On the one hand she’ll literally work herself to exhaustion if left unchecked and sets herself nigh-impossible goals to attain. She follows authority well enough but when she knows she’s right or has to say something, she won’t hold back on saying it. Her sharp mind means that even if she couldn’t exactly avoid trouble, she was well equipped for getting herself out of whatever screw-up she inevitably lands herself in. Even if she acts like a smart-ass from time to time, no-one is more aware of their own fragility than Abigail. Almost everything she does is humbled by the constant reminder that she is younger, weaker and less experienced than most of the people around her. Yes, she is passionate and stubborn and will fight for her voice to be heard but there are some situations where Abigail can clearly see she is physically weaker than most. Abigail isn’t afraid of running away from fights she can’t handle and has a healthy amount of common sense that inhibits her impulsive behaviour from time to time.
Abigail’s story started off peacefully; she lived in a fairly wealthy household on Mercury, with her father often absent as a fairly famous mechanic on military duty in the Gray’s royal fleet. Because of the ample opportunities given to her at an early age she became a bright, sociable and curious child in private education. She loved her mother to pieces and idolised her father, treasuring their rare conversations online or through video calls. She made friends quite easily and didn’t make too much of a fuss as she fumbled her way through puberty. She wasn’t even bullied; Abigail’s hardest struggle at that time was the fear of what her girlier friends would think about her interest in mathematics, informatics and physics. Some of her happiest memories were the days that her father took on leave, where they spent weeks disassembling and reassembling chunks of old forgotten fighter ships in the scrapyard.
It was no wonder that she went into higher education to study an advanced course in spaceship engineering; by this point her fascination with machines had started to blend with the lingering gap that having a largely absent father would bring to the table, so this fascination bordered on the obsessive side as she worked herself to the bone attempting to achieve the highest marks possible. It became less of a career choice and more of a search for her own identity, which has hitherto been tangled up in her lifelong attempts to emulate her missing father. She began to deviate from the path and bring her own experiences to the table, often working with informatics systems and the repair of androids in her free time to make some (relatively unnecessary) cash on the side whilst trying to figure out what kind of mechanic Abigail
really wanted to become.
One day, Abigail came back to her dormitory to find her mother waiting on her - she had made the trip halfway across the planet to give her some some sobering news. Her father was dead. Her mother explained that the report came in no less than three days ago, that Mr Harlow was gripped by an aggressive parasitic illness during fieldwork and that he passed away fighting for his life. She emphasised how diligently the Captain and his crew worked to save her father, and how ultimately it was too late. Perhaps she had woven this story to placate Abigail and keep her mind focused on her studies, because the real reason for Mr Harlow’s death was a strategic error on the Captain’s behalf during a top secret mission that costed several people their lives and the Captain his rank. Mrs Harlow may have simply wanted Abigail to believe that her father did not become a mere statistic in the chaos, a loss of life practically unnoticed in the carnage until all of the dust had settled without a body to bring back for a burial. Maybe she was even trying to delude herself into thinking that, despite being part of an immeasurably huge royal fleet, her husband’s death meant something in the grand scheme of things. All it really did was leave a Captain disgraced, a mother alone and a child with a broken spirit.
Abigail’s grades plummeted. Her interest in engineering soured for several months and she whittled away what little allowance remained after all of the funeral costs until, finally, she was removed from the degree program and sent back home. Remember that she not only lost a dad, but a significant chunk of her identity - she had breezed through life as ‘Harlow’s Daughter’, a shiny little badge of honour that she used to boast about in class. During these harrowing months of recovery, Abigail was at her lowest. She desperately clung to memorabilia, she hoarded and treasured everything from his half-finished repairs on an old TVII class fighter to the wrench that was still covered in his oily fingerprints. She neglected her mother, who was idling aimlessly in the house for weeks on end, barely eating or speaking, in favour of spending a large chunk of her day knee-deep in spaceship scrap at the yard. Abigail was trying to rekindle an uncertain love for machines that blossomed out of her love for a dead man and none of it was working.
So Abigail moved on to more desperate measures. She used materialism to try and fill the void and became an impulse buyer of some pretty impressive personalisation of her father’s old toolkit, having each of the pieces modified to become the most efficient tools on the market, having each component personally engraved, the box enamelled. It cost a lot and Abigail undertook this long and incredibly specific task with absolute self-absorption. Whatever her mother was also doing with the family funds had culminated in another jarring shock; no less than a year or so after Mr Harlow’s death they were forced to sell their planetside property on Mercury and move into one of the sleazy air domes on Venus into a run-down two man apartment to stretch out the rapidly dwindling funds that they had left.
It was the change in air quality or the aftereffects of their combined recklessness that caused Mrs Harlow to ironically develop a chronic and quite serious illness not long after they settled into their significantly humbled abode. It was the shock of not only ignoring her only other living relative but also allowing her to wither away that caused Abigail to snap out of her reveries. She may be a failed student and a lost soul but compared to Mrs Harlow she was assuredly not a stay-at-home mother in the making. She had a wealth of information at her fingertips and an incentive to use it.
Abigail initially took work on one of the ports as a ship mechanic. She was hired immediately into an agency that worked via commission fees to repair significant structural and computer damage on any ship that required it, no questions asked. This job was giving Abigail some solid experience but the uncertainty of her paycheck coupled with her mother’s rapidly declining health caused Abigail to eventually quit after a few years, moving down to a local robotics shop called ‘Bob’s Chop Shop’ in order to receive a smaller yet regular pay and all the benefits that came from her living close to her sickened mother. She worked long hours and did her own side commissions on hovercraft. She was being held back by her newfound responsibilities, but applied herself mindlessly to her job without thinking much on any ‘wasted time’ or ‘wasted potential’ - she had to keep her family safe.
And then the Captain came back.
He visited Abigail at work, tactfully avoiding a rendezvous with Mrs Harlow to try and dodge out of her influence and reach the young woman directly. He explained about how he had recently received a new mission, one of the utmost importance for his career and for the Gray family themselves. But a fallen Captain alone could not hope to compete with the other parties at play and he needed some reliable (and most importantly affordable) back-up. It came to light that the Captain had never truly lost contact with her mother, that they kept in touch because Mr Harlow’s death was not merely a statistic for the Captain but the loss of a very gifted individual. He offered Abigail over twice as much than her current employment was paying her and gave her a few days to mull it over.
Understandably, Mrs Harlow was quite distressed. The Captain took away her husband on a secret mission and now he wished to do the same to her daughter. She steadfastly opposed the idea, they argued for hours on end whilst Abigail sought out alternatives and found nothing except opportunity for more refined healthcare for her mother - especially if bed and board was provided for Abigail as she worked. Mrs Harlow’s story came back to haunt her - instead of keeping Abigail focused on maturing and separating from her father, she was suddenly faced with the grim reality that she had a woman on her hands who just met the man she believed to have loyally attended to her dying father. Abigail’s obsession was rekindled in seconds and her devotion to this journey was almost entirely based on learning more about her family’s past. Her mother knew this and resigned herself to the fact that there truly was no stopping Abigail now that she had set her mind on this endeavour. Bitterly, painfully, she let her daughter leave with her husband’s killer - but not before she had a few words with him in private, laying down a few ground rules before their departure.
Abigail unknowingly sacrificed her time with her family for a glorified treasure hunt under the orders of a murderer. The only compensation she received for this was the opportunity to pay for more advanced and nuanced healthcare for Mrs Harlow in her absence.
Mixtape Ghost N