Player: Nick
Role: Engineer
Appearance
Twenty-two and looks it — short and softly built, with more figure than her coveralls admit to, with the soft round face and full cheeks of someone the crew keeps forgetting isn’t a passenger. Pale blonde hair cropped short and hacked into a choppy fringe, clear skin under the grease, and a flat unimpressed stare she has clearly been practising, which holds about a second longer than she means it to. A pair of heavy round work goggles rides on her forehead more often than over her eyes — she pushes them up with both hands the moment a job is done, thumbs hooked in the strap.
Her working clothes are a dirty white ribbed tank and a coverall stripped to the waist, its sleeves knotted across her hips with the buckle plate hanging at one side. Fingerless work gloves, worn through at the palms. Grease is a permanent feature: streaked up both forearms, dotted across her cheekbones and nose like a second set of freckles, ground into the creases of her knuckles. A single dog tag on a ball chain sits at her collarbone.
She is nearly always photographed the same way — standing in the low half-light of the engine bay with cables underfoot, a portable power unit humming beside her, a mug of screwdrivers and a tray of loose fittings within arm’s reach, and the reactor gantry going dark above her head.
Origins
Has an engineering degree but is young, with little actual experience being out in space — that said, she knows an engine like the back of her hand.
The Price of Air
Dixie fills the engineer’s post aboard The Second Chance — a role the crew badly needed filled.
Dixie has short-cropped blonde hair, goggles pushed up over her glasses, and about a year of engineering school between her and her first berth. The Second Chance is her first ship, and she isn’t disillusioned yet.
She was alone aboard when the Iron Cross boarded, and the pirates put a gun to her neck and made her welcome the crew home over the radio as though nothing were wrong. She held it together and gave nothing away, then apologized to them anyway once the guns came out — she just didn’t want to die. In the fight that followed she broke a vial of acid over Jax Vanko on her way past, sprinted to the reactor to fight the sixty-second self-destruct, and made a grab for the fleeing pirate dropship with the salvage arm that came up just short.
Dixie was taken out of the reactor room in the middle of the emergency — her goggles left on the deck, blood on the floor beside them, and a vent cover pulled off the wall. Tanya had dragged her through the ducting into Arnold’s workshop, welded the door shut from the inside and booby-trapped the lock, and kept a cybernetic hand clamped on the back of her neck while she was made to repair the cyborg’s damaged arm. When Dax blew the compartment out into the open cargo bay, Dixie went out with the air, unsuited, still locked in Tanya’s grip. She had been trained for it: she kept her mouth open so her lungs wouldn’t tear, and the capillaries burst across her face while the crew watched. Jon matched her tumble in the salvage pod and tore her free with a claw around her leg, and she lost consciousness as the bay doors closed. She is alive, sedated in the med bay, and in poor shape. The last thing she programmed before she was taken — an order for the salvage arm to pull the captured dropship in — executed itself hours later, exactly as she’d written it.
Still bloodshot from her minute in vacuum and in no hurry to go back outside, Dixie went out onto the hull anyway with Weaver steadying her, to fix the bent sensor array above the cockpit. Tangled through the dish they found a cut length of cable ending in a grapple spear-tip — the line Tanya had fired at Jon’s pod as she tumbled away. It hadn’t missed; it had caught the ship. With Weaver beside her Dixie made the repair cleanly, and the array would be whole again by the time she was done. Later that day, on the station’s factory floor, the rest of the crew killed Tanya for good.
Attendance Log
- Session 3: The Night of the Prophet August 29, 2026
- Session 5: Welcome, Traveler October 4, 2026