Ensign Mercy Mourne
Name Mercy Anne Mourne
Position Science Officer
Rank Ensign
Character Information
| Gender | Female | |
| Species | Human | |
| Age | 30 |
Physical Appearance
| Height | 185cm | |
| Weight | 95kg | |
| Hair Color | Ash-brown | |
| Eye Color | Grey/Blue | |
| Physical Description | Mercy is tall for a woman, and often sits hunched over desks which aren’t quite made for people of her stature. A career spent mostly behind a desk and in research labs means she carries more weight than most of her Starfleet colleagues. She is inherently clumsy, she can often be found with stains on her cuffs, or small tears in her uniform where she has had some minor collision or accident. She has an open, chubby face, and it is often very easy to tell how she is feeling based on her expressions. Another indicator for how her day is going is the state of her wavy brown hair. The messier it is, the more likely she has been running her hands through it out of frustration. Mercy speaks with a clipped English accent that she inherited from her grandmother Gale, who insisted all her grandchildren learn to speak “properly”. |
Family
| Spouse | None | |
| Children | None | |
| Father | William Mourne (divorced and remarried) | |
| Mother | Renee Mourne ne. Brown | |
| Brother(s) | Simon (younger) Wulf (younger) |
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| Sister(s) | Vicki (younger) |
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| Other Family | Gale Mourne (grandmother) Janet Mourne (step-mother) Mumma (the family cat) |
Personality & Traits
| General Overview | Mercy is Generally quiet and happy to keep her head down and go unnoticed by the senior staff. The one exception to this is her loud laugh. When Mercy is surprised or genuinely amused her chuckle is infectious. Mercy’s response to most situations is to use humour and cheerful positivity to mask how she is really feeling. You will know you have grown close enough to be considered a friend when Mercy draws you into gentle teasing and mockery. Mercy believes you should only be mean to those you really love. Everyone else receives polite friendliness. She is fiercely stubborn, once she has an idea in her head she can follow it to it’s end with dogged focus. If there is a job that needs doing Mercy will be quick to offer her help, and if she has a problem she needs help with she would rather suffer in silence. Having counselled three young siblings through many teenage drama she is not afraid of bearing witness to strong emotions. This makes her the perfect person to share a cup of tea with in a moment of doubt or uncertainty. Her easy smile, kind nature and chubby friend shape give her an air of motherly concern, especially with young crew who might be missing home. Following her first post, Mercy developed a wary approach to dealing with Senior Staff. Anyone more than two ranks higher than her tends to make her sweaty and anxious. She trips over her words, and even occasionally her own feet when she has to make a direct report or interact with any of the bridge crew. |
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| Strengths & Weaknesses | Strengths: Kind Considerate Polite Eager to help and not afraid to do the jobs others might see as beneath them Organised Marked skill with a ranged weapon. Weaknesses: Stubborn People pleaser to the point she can sometimes become resentful and neglect her own wellbeing Has no sense of her own needs Risk averse: she will often hesitate to try something unless success can be guaranteed. Poor level of fitness and the judicial dexterity Low confidence around authority figures |
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| Ambitions | Mercy struggles with being able to identify her own ambitions and goals. She has spent most of her life doing what she thinks she ‘should’ do rather than what she wants to do. While she doesn’t regret her decision to help her family she sometimes feels lost and frustrated as a result, especially when she is forced to think about where she might be in 10 years time. |
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| Hobbies & Interests | Reading cheesy romance novels. Doodling with old fashioned pencil and paper. She likes to keep sketches of the different species, flora and fauna she has encountered in her postings. Mercy keeps a personal diary in which she writes her reflections along with letters to her family members. |
| Personal History | Mercy was born in Tycho City, on the Lunar colony, the oldest of four her parents divorced shortly after the birth of her youngest sister Vicki. As the oldest Mercy was often expected to assist her mother in supporting her siblings. This gave Mercy a caring nature, often the person people come to with problems, and rarely one to reach out to others and ask for help. She has a friendly but distant relationship with her father. For much of her childhood he was absent. Her mother always encouraged a relationship between all her children and their father, but as they grew older, Mercy learned how painfully human her Dad was. Their relationship is now marked with jokes that aim to keep conversation at a surface level and uncomfortable silences. Mercy always excelled at, and enjoyed school. She never had to work particularly hard to get good grades in her more academic subjects, and helping her siblings with homework proved the age-old adage to be true; the best way to learn is to teach. As she got older she quickly realised that with four children to send through school, her mother might struggle with finding money for all of them to actress higher education. It was at this point she decided she would join Starfleet. There she had access to work as a researcher, which she enjoyed, as well as a guaranteed income which she could set aside for her siblings should they one day decide to attend University. Her time at Starfleet Academy was mixed. While Mercy excelled at her academic tracks, her physical ones were far more challenged. At one point it almost looked like she might fail entirely, however a surprising aptitude with range weapons meant she was able to just scrape a passing grade. Her talent with a phaser rifle and a pistol have largely gone unnoticed since she graduated, in part because Mercy doesn’t want to be placed in a situation where she has to shoot someone. This, plus her natural aptitude for plugging away at boring research and paperwork, led her into an unremarkable career as a Science Technician. After graduating Mercy stayed with the academy for an additional two years, working as a lab assistant to one of her exo-botany professors. She enjoyed this work a great deal, however the pay was not very good. Following the pressure she placed upon herself to help support her siblings, Mercy left a job she loved in order to go and work for more lucrative expedition analysis. Her first posting upon leaving the academy was for a lab who were responsible for processing data upon a vessel's return to Earth. It was during this posting Mercy learnt the hard way that the best way to live an easy life was to keep your head down and avoid being noticed by the senior staff. The commanding officer in charge of Mercy’s department took great glee in ‘breaking in’ new recruits. Their method for this was to hound them with unreasonable expectations, long hours and exaggerated pressure. Mercy put up with the terrible working conditions for 6 years. Eventually it became too much to tolerate and Mercy requested transfer to any ship or outpost that would take her off planet. When she was offered a position aboard the Atlantis she jumped at the chance. Even with the increased risk that she might be sent on an away mission, it had to be easier than working for a boss who enjoyed psychologically torturing their underlings, right? |
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| Service Record | Mercy’s service record is remarkable in that after years of service, it is entirely unremarkable. There are no commendations, no recommendations for promotion and no incidents of misdemeanour. She keeps good time, has no unusual or repeated incidents of sickness. Should one go far enough back to her Academy days her record would speak of a young and eager recruit with plenty of potential. There are a couple citations requesting that Mercy repeat a number of physical training modules as well as a brief investigation into an unexpectedly near perfect score on the shooting range. Mercy was cleared of all allegations of cheating and there is a recommendation she elect to take an additional sniper training module. This was declined in favour of extra credit in two additional science tracks: Exo-Botany and Vulcan Anthropology. |