Full Name: Jamie Altham
D.O.B: August 17th, 2167
Age: 19
Sex: Female
Rank: Private First Class (not currently "canon", but occasionally squad medic)
Primary Squad: Delta
Race: Caucasian
Height: 5' 6"
Weight: 120lbs
Blood Type: A+
Eye color: Blue
Hair Color: Blonde
Physical Description
(I'll actually finish the full body at some point I swear)
Jamie is fairly unremarkable in appearance, and were it not for an unusual hair color and timid deportment she would likely never catch the eye at all. She is neither particularly sturdy nor frail, with the athletic toning and light muscle standard of an active marine that performs the minimum of physical strain. Standing at five-foot-six she tends to look taller than she actually is from a distance due to a sleek, willowy build, but often shrinks in on herself when under stress - which is practically her default state. She is quite skinny - not what one would call curvy by any stretch of the imagination, flat chested. Perhaps she could be considered cute by the standards of hypermasculinized soldiers that have been in cryosleep too long, but in general there's nothing really notable about her and she is utterly overshadowed by most of her fellow female marines in terms of both attractiveness and physical intimidation. This is something that causes her visible amounts of angst and does not help her self confidence in the slightest. Her eyes are a pleasant shade of sky blue and tend to be quite expressive, with thick eyelashes. Her skin is a light beige, with a smattering of freckles across her face and paler ones speckling the rest of her body. A short, but deep scar bisects her left eyebrow - she makes efforts to cover this with her hair whenever possible and is clearly quite self conscious about it. Her facial features are youthful, rounded and soft, with a small nose, large eyes and full lips.
Jamie's hair is one of her more striking features, mostly because it is more than a bit of a mess. It is an unusual shade of strawberry blonde, somewhere between pink and ginger. While she was known to rather ironically smuggle in ginger hair dye to make it look more natural, it would appear her supply has run out. Her hair has been chopped shaggy and short with what would appear to be a knife, judging from the uneven cuts and tufts - popular gossip confirms this as a spur of the moment haircut in the bathrooms resulting from an altercation with a CO over the impracticality of her original style.
She keeps her uniform and kit clean and tidy, no personal embellishments on her armor, though the straps show signs of having been treated with a great deal of frustration. Her fatigues appear poorly sized, with an awkward compromise being struck between the length of her legs and the width of her hips - a little too tight around the latter, and rather baggy on the former. Whenever possible, Jamie has a tendancy to eschew a helmet in favor of a cap, apparently oblivious to how high visibility her head is as a target.
Personality Jamie's perhaps most defining feature, ironically, is perhaps how much she does not remind one of a marine. She is timid and submissive, and we have not quite managed to suppress her instinct to relocate from danger instead of shooting at it. At least charging off against orders to engage the enemy is never a thing that must be worried about with her. She seems most comfortable - not that she is ever comfortable - when working in a small group, where she is generally good natured and is happy to engage in somewhat awkward interaction with her squad. Unfortunately, being something of a doormat she is prone to bullying and makes no attempts to stand up for herself. This makes integrating her into the bonds of a unit quite difficult, as there is no time on deployment to cater to her particular brand of neurosis and she tends to subconsciously isolate herself from those she feels dislike her, which her self esteem dictates is almost everyone. She is most often the quiet tag-along, desperate to prove to her peers she isn't worthless but without the confidence or skill to match that desire. We have only observed her interacting confidently with one other marine, though even then she seems conflicted.
She seems to attempt to cope with deployment through attempts at humor and playful ribbing, though her guilelessness and innocence generally sees this turned around on her. She enjoys feeling as if she is part of a functioning team, and takes great efforts to complete any tasks given to her - trying her hardest and taking even the smallest assignment as seriously as she can. She is well aware of her shortcomings as a soldier and is eager to try and win the approval of her peers, however unsuccessful those attempts may be. There does not appear to be any real meanness in her, even her active attempts to be insulting being entirely unenthusiastic and impotent.
She has expressed a great deal of fear and discontent with her position as a marine, but appears to have resigned herself to, in her own words, "Dying alone and unknown in some distant hole without anyone ever knowing or caring". It is worth noting that being resigned to it has in no way dampened her dread and despair of it. The concept that her boring life has been taken from her forever so that her blood - and that of the enemy - can be spilled in conflicts she does not understand or support makes her absolutely miserable, and there is little trace of the shy but lively, upbeat young woman she once was. Psychological evaluations post conscription have had worrying results, indicating high amounts of emotional distress and possible suicidal ideations. Therapy has yet to be assigned but is extremely highly recommended if any attempt is to be made at preserving the marine's ability to function as such.
In as few words as possible, Jamie could be described unkindly but realistically as timid, fearful, submissive, altruistic and emotional.
It would however, be advised to remember that fearful is the choice wording here and not cowardly - occasionally, she has surprised us with bursts of reckless bravado that tend to appear under duress and she has never been known to actually desert her post or flee combat, even when injured. Despite her fear, she will still wade through bullets to secure an objective or rescue a fellow marine. There is a strong spirit buried under the layers of doubt and fear, somewhere in the girl, and we believe it can slowly, but surely be brought to the surface and turned into a formidable weapon.
Eventually. The girl has a long road ahead of her and the outlook on her surviving it is rather grim.
Background Information Prior to her conscription at the age of nineteen due to a recruitment crisis in the sector, Jamie Altham displays a clean medical and criminal record. She is the only child of Caitlynn Altham and Joseph Altham, and lived with her parents on a largely subterranean ice colony, where she had freshly completed standard education and was helping her parents maintain their store as she pondered what to do next. Her family was not particularly wealthy but they were comfortable and had disposable income to spare - this lead to a fairly idyllic lifestyle where she never had to confront many serious issues in life, and as a result well into her teens she maintained an almost childlike naivety. While she was never wildly popular with her peers, she had a few close friends and enjoyed various mundane hobbies such as baking, mechanical engineering and geology. There is very little to remark on her past, everything we could confirm paints a picture of a stable, happy, and utterly boring individual.
While she was known to express a desire to travel and a reasonable adventurous streak, if Jamie ever had plans outside of what her parents suggested she never made them public knowledge beyond vague hints. There almost certainly were plans - she did not seem entirely sold on the idea of spending her entire life where she was born and taking up the family business - but probing on the manner only caused her to clam up. It would appear that her parents were quite forceful on what their child's future was to be, and she either simply had not dared entertain a solid plan or was uncomfortable admitting that she disagreed. It would appear that the amount of involvement that her parents had in her life are a root cause of her submissive nature - though genuinely loving, they were controlling to a fault. Even early in life she showed great distress when she could not meet the standards of others, and this mentality predictably causes her no lack of despair in the USCM due to her lackluster performance.
Personal relations (WIP - If I've met you and you want in, just ask!)
(tl;dr - canonically bald xeno bait)
