Crew Officer Marcus "Marc" Hale

Character Information

Gender		Male
Species		Human
Age		23
Quarters Assignment (assigned by Command)		Crew Quarters, Deck 5

Physical Appearance

Height		5'9"
Weight		155 lbs
Hair Color		Dark blond / light brown
Eye Color		Pale blue-grey
Physical Description		He is lean and wiry, the kind of build that does not announce itself but tends to surprise people who make assumptions based on first impressions. His hair runs somewhere between dark blond and light brown depending on the light, kept short in the loosest sense of the word, with pieces sticking up in ways that suggest grooming is something that happens to other people. His eyes are pale blue-grey and they do not sit still, moving across a room the way someone does when knowing where everything is before you need to know it has become the default setting rather than a conscious choice. There is a watchful intensity to them that makes him read older than he probably is. His skin is fair with a slightly worn quality that comes from the kind of living that does not include enough sleep or much else that would help. Light stubble sits along his jaw and upper lip without any particular intention behind it. His face is narrow and sharp at the cheekbones, with a mouth that tends to stay tight and shadows under his eyes that look permanent. He does not look physically imposing and he knows it. What he has instead is the particular posture of someone who has had trouble find him often enough that his whole body has quietly arranged itself around the expectation that it is coming again.

Personality & Traits

General Overview		Marc can handle himself in a fight, not because anyone taught him how but because frontier ports and bad situations have a way of providing the education whether you want it or not. Two years of that kind of living has made him practical and fast and unsentimental about it, the kind of fighter who does not hesitate and does not overthink, which tends to matter more than technique when things actually go sideways. He also picked up enough about small craft systems during his freighter years to be useful when something breaks and a real engineer is not available. He is not going to redesign anything or explain why it works, but he can keep something running that probably should not be, which is its own kind of skill and one that has gotten him out of more than one situation that required it.
Strengths & Weaknesses		He is physically capable and moves fast under pressure without needing to think about it first. He has a warmth to him that tends to catch people off guard, the kind that makes them underestimate what is underneath it, and once he decides someone has earned his loyalty he does not revisit that decision easily. He is harder to break than he looks and he has been tested on that enough times to know it is true. The other side of it is that he is a genuinely terrible judge of character when he wants someone to be trustworthy. He extends trust faster than he should to people who give him a reason to want to believe in them and he has paid for that more than once without fully adjusting the behavior that caused it. Underneath that is something quieter and harder to name, the awareness that he had a real shot at something and walked away from it, which shows up mostly as self deprecation but has a sharper edge on bad days that takes longer to shake than he tends to let on.

Personal History

Marc grew up on Volan III, a Federation colony close enough to Cardassian space that knowing the universe could turn dangerous without much warning was just part of growing up there. His family farmed. Stable, unremarkable, not particularly ambitious. Marc was always going to leave and everyone could see it. The only real question was how badly it would go. He was accepted to Starfleet Academy at eighteen which surprised him more than anyone. Decent scores, a natural aptitude that showed up on the tests before he had done anything to earn it, and a letter from a colony administrator who saw something worth backing. His family were proud in the quiet way of people who did not expect good news. He deferred his place for a year, told everyone he needed time, and spent that year making a series of decisions he has never fully explained to anyone including himself. By the time the deferral expired he had burned the relationship with the administrator, used up most of his family's patience, and talked his way onto a civilian freighter heading through the wormhole instead. He does not talk about the Academy. If it comes up he changes the subject and if pressed he goes briefly and uncharacteristically cold before reverting to deflection. It is the one thing he will not make a joke about. The freighter years mostly worked for a while. He was useful enough to keep around and charming enough to avoid serious trouble and young enough to treat the whole thing as an adventure. At twenty one the freighter was impounded at a Karemman trade station over a contract dispute that had nothing to do with him. The crew scattered and Marc was left with forty three credits, no ship, no contacts, and no straightforward way back through the wormhole without paying for passage he could not afford. He has been making it work since then through stubbornness and street sense and a willingness to handle himself physically when the situation calls for it. He is currently running independent salvage contracts solo which everyone with more experience would tell him is a bad idea and which he is aware of and doing anyway.