#kit mackenzie

[half-a-tiger]

ORLA GARTLAND - “Did It To Myself”

Director and Producer: Zoe Alker

Director of Photography: Kit Mackenzie

Art Director: Heather Colbert

[casino-lights]

16, 29, 47 for Kit Mackenzie, 4, 41, 49 for Cherry Cheng, and 33 for both of them?

Thank you for these! They’re super fun to do and they actually gave me some headcanons. Bonus!

Kit:

16. Your SS crawls out of the cryopod! Where do they go first and what do they do?

Kit falls on her knees and cries. A lot. Nate was her hero in a lot of ways and she didn’t know what she could possibly do without him. But she also knew she had to be alive for some reason, and that reason, currently, seemed to be getting her son back. So she made for Concord, and after that, Diamond City.

29. Someone does something against their morals in front of your SS. How do they handle it?

Would this be against the person’s morals or against Kit’s morals? If it’s the former, she would gently pull them aside and give them a kind, yet firm talking-to. Especially if it’s someone she cares deeply for—like all of her companions. If it’s the latter, it depends on how badly it crosses her moral lines (things like sexism or assault will not be tolerated, but alcohol/drug abuse can be worked with and discussed), but she’s always more forgiving with her companions. She will still have a long conversation about it, though. Others may just get cut out of her life completely.

33. A song that reminds you of your SS?

The Flowers by Regina Spektor, or Run Cried the Crawling by Agnes Obel. Both have a feeling of loss and uncertainty, which are heavy themes in Kit’s life. She feels lost without Nate because she’s never thought of herself as a strong, independent person, and these songs both sound desperate, reaching for something or someone who’s always out of reach. 

47. Does your SS keep good care of their weapons? Clean them everyday or just replace ’em with a shiner version every once in a while?

Kit used whatever she could get her hands on—whether or not she knew how to use it—until Danse pressed his own laser rifle into her hands and said, “May it serve you as well as it’s served me.” Danse could just see how lost she looked when she held it, so he gave her a quick lesson on how to use it and she’s never let it go since. She cleans it every single night and makes sure it’s still working well. If the trigger gets even the slightest bit sticky, she gives it to Danse for a look-over. She still likes having someone to rely on, even if it’s just for little things.

Cherry:

4. Is your SS good at keeping secrets?

Cherry is exceptionally good at it. She’s a member of the Railroad, in good standing, so she has to keep secrets well. That’s why it hit her so hard when she found out Deacon lied about being a synth. She was fully prepared to take that to her grave. They worked through that, but he decided not to take advantage of her trust like that again. 

33. A song that reminds you of your SS?

Boston by Augustana. Ironically, she moved to Massachusetts because her family didn’t approve of Nate and she was trying to rebel against them. A few years into her marriage—and more relevantly, once the government started rounding up Chinese-born citizens and putting them into internment camps—she realized she wasn’t too thrilled with Nate either, and she felt like she wanted to run away from her new life, too. Boston, to me, is more about the overwhelming feeling of wanting to run rather than just the city of Boston, so it reminds me of Cherry whenever I hear it.

41. Does your SS like/make puns?

She can appreciate them (and she has to, living with Deacon, the Supreme Pun Master) but she isn’t very good at making them. She can make jokes and puns in Chinese, but even though her English is near-perfect, she doesn’t understand the humor in English puns.

49. Your SS’s most prized possession? Pre-War and Post-War!

Pre-War, Cherry’s most prized possession was a box of trinkets and doodads she’d amassed over the years, things that meant something special to her. Some of them—the ticket stub from the movie she saw on her first date with Nate, and a scrap of her mother’s wedding dress they found the day it had been eaten by moths, and a page from her diary she’d written in Chinese the day her family moved to America—didn’t survive, but some of the more solid things did. Still, they pained her, so she burned them when she burned down her house in Sanctuary Hills. If I can’t live in it, nobody will.

Her most treasured belongings Post-War are the things her companions have given her. Deacon’s recall code, scrawled on a piece of napkin he tore off one day in Goodneighbor. MacCready’s wooden soldier, given to her after disbelief on her part, yet accepted with a chaste kiss to the cheek and a tight embrace. Piper’s trio of articles written about Cherry—the handwritten copies she’d made before Nat typed them up so they could be copied in the printing press. She keeps them all on her person, in a leather satchel she grabbed off a dead raider outside Sanctuary Hills when she first left the Vault.

[casino-lights]

3, 15, & 39 for Kit Mackenzie?

Thank you for sending this in! I love my aggressive soccer mom.

3: What are other people likely to notice about them first?Pre-War, everyone who spoke to her (or more likely, her husband) commented on how polite and quiet Mrs. Nate Carolina was. Post-War, she kicked that subtlety into the dust with her married name and the first thing people notice about her now is her set of scraped-together power armor. The Brotherhood of Steel logo is painted boldly on the front, but the Railroad lantern is traced in black at the base of her neck.

15: Describe their morality. Is it black & white or are there grey areas?She shares Danse’s “there’s Brotherhood, then there’s everything else” viewpoint for a while, but that gets tossed out the window when it’s revealed he’s a synth. A great deal of her open-mindedness comes from that event. Even still, she views the world in terms of good people and bad people, something that gets her trust broken a lot when she sees the wrong people as “good.” A few of her companions are slowly proving to her that people can’t be judged like that, though.

39: When the going gets tough, your Sole Survivor… steps into a suit of power armor and mows over anything in her way. At their best, she and Danse make a nearly unstoppable force, and even at their worst they still pose a tangible threat. Very little in the Commonwealth is too tough for them.