in my defense, you left me unsupervisedÂ
[ alice, 24, GMT, she/her ] â did you hear who just got out of quarantine? Itâs MACKENZIE RICHARDS? sheâs our IVANA BAQUERO lookalike from WABASHA MN. sheâs TWENTY-FIVE years old and a former FIREFIGHTER. people think sheâs BITTER and IMPULSIVE, but sheâs also BRAVE and INTELLIGENT.
Always Mack, never her full name Mackenzie or even Kenzie. Strong willed and free spirited since anyone could remember, Mack was a handful for anyone. With exception to her big brother. Tony and Mack had always been close, which Mack had always been thankful for. Especially during the times when their father went off the rails again. Her mother had died giving birth to her, leaving Mack with no proper female role model in the house.Â
She couldnât always complain though, when times were good, they were great. Her father did his best not to treat her any differently to Tony and included her in their camping and hunting trips. Until he would spiral back down the dark path again. But time after time, Mack would still hold out hope that her father would get better again. That he would stay sober this time. After all, he kept saying that he would.Â
Mack never had much fear, nor a lot of sense of danger. From young upwards she would be found in the middle of the large circle of kids chanting and egging her on to jump from that roof or climb higher in that tall tree. She loved the sensation of adrenaline that followed danger and especially being the centre of the attention. As she grew older, that barely changed. Instead she found a legal profession to throw her in the fire. Literally. Normal people run from the fire, Mack ran into it.Â
Starting her firefighting training at eighteen, barely out of school, her training calmed her down a little but Mack never outgrew her bite. She was barely halfway through her EMT course when she rode along with a medical callout. That was where she encountered her first infected. It was the first of many, and it didnât take long for Wabasha to be a lost cause. The final straw was when Mackâs father stumbled home, hurt but not bitten and not drunk as Mack at first presumed him to be. She barely gave him a chance to explain, channelling her terror in anger and taking it out on him.
Too wrapped up in herself, Mack didnât notice the infected runners until they were almost on top of her. Mack and her father defended themselves the best they could, but one slip up almost cost Mack her life. And it would have if her father hadnât thrust his own arm between Mack and the infected teeth. It was him that made her leave Wabasha with the promise that he would tell Tony where she went. Little did Mack know that the infection would have taken over by the time Tony got home.
Mack waited for Tony, but he never came, not having received the message from his sister and she set off for Vegas. Deciding that if she was going to die in the apocalypse, it sure as hell wouldnât be before she stepped foot in a casino, legal aged or not. There were no rules, it was the end of the world after all. She teamed up with a survivor there for a while, riddled with the guilt of now having killed both her parents and not knowing if her brother was alive.
A horde separated Mack and the other survivor, throwing her out into the even more infected world on her own again. She jumped from group to group, death always seeming to follow her. Of course death followed everyone in this world, but Mack took it personally. Then she came across a strong group, a group of self proclaimed militia. They werenât all nice people.Â
It was never said out loud that Mack was a prisoner there, but she also wasnât allowed to leave or go anywhere without a partner. Eventually she accepted her fate, remaining with the group even after she had won their trust, fitting in with her sharp tongue and quick wits. They were thieves and mercenaries, always on the move. Mack didnât believe that she could find anything better, resigned that this was it now. The world was filled with dead people and bad people.
It was when she joined a raid that Mack thought was the same kind of bad group of people that she realised she needed out, and fast. It wasnât a bad group of people. It was a group of survivors, families and children among them. The fighting attracted the infected, chaos ensuing. Amongst the chaos, Mack did the only thing she could think of. She ran.Â
Armed with barely any provisions, her bow and six arrows. Dehydrated and starving was how she stumbled on Fortuna, collapsing at the gates just as they opened.
