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User:

mercury_atlas (584504)

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Name:

Lizzy McCandless

Bio:

Mostly Harmless

Name: Elizabeth “Lizzy” McCandless
Age: 31
D.O.B.: June 22, 1978
Hometown: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Sexuality: Heterosexual
Career/Job: scientific researcher at NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Currently working within the Lunar Precursor Robotic Program.
Physical Description: Lizzy is of average height and slender build at five-foot-eight and roughly one hundred and twenty pounds. Her skin is very fair – honed, she says, through years of laboratories and only straying outdoors on clear, cloudless nights to look up. Her dark brown hair grows very long before she can be bothered to get a cut, and is generally kept up in messy buns and ponytails – anything to keep it out of her way. Her light brown eyes are her favorite physical attribute, dominating the otherwise delicate features of her face. She’ll say she prefers to wear contact lenses over glasses just to keep from perpetuating the girly nerd stereotype, but it’s really her one major vanity. Otherwise she throws appearance to the wind, wearing minimal if any makeup on a daily basis and wearing clothing that do nothing to flatter her figure.

So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish

Lizzy is quiet and usually has her head in the clouds – or on the moon, or the in void between the two. Her head usually remains stuck at work, and because of this she is usually a bit scatterbrained in her personal life. She is very contemplative and her mind is always running in one direction or the other, puzzling over anything she can puzzle.

Though quiet, Lizzy is generally quite friendly with a sunny disposition. She is very open to other people, almost to a fault. This cheerfulness is often translated into naïveté, and others often underestimate her intellectually. This aspect of her personality has had unfortunate side effects in her past, and she has found herself being taken advantage of on a number of occasions.

A few bad personal and professional experiences in Lizzy’s past have lead her to a tendency to keep others at arm’s length emotionally. Though she is optimistic and likes to believe the best in people, she very consciously works to keep herself from getting hurt.

Personal Weaknesses:

A lack of self-assertiveness has cost Lizzy quite a bit both personally and professionally. She’s all too ready to allow others to take the lead, even if she doesn’t really believe it’s right.

Tendency to over-think. A side effect of living in her head, she often over-thinks and over-complicates problems for herself, taking a longer route around to fix a problem than a simpler, easier fix. Though she is technically on her toes intellectually at all times, she’s not terribly great in a crisis.

She holds everyone at arm’s length. While cheerful and friendly with others, it’s a real job of work to dig beneath the surface level to her deeper emotional being.

She tends to be scatterbrained. She finds it hard to focus on personal matters and generally chooses to just ignore them.

Personal Strengths:

A remarkable ability to roll with the punches and at least try to make lemonade out of the crappiest lemons life hands her. Lizzy’s outlook is most often optimistic and she’ll always try to make the best of whatever situation she’s in.

She thinks very logically, in facts, figures and data rather than emotions and gut feelings. She takes her time in making decisions, always weighing the pros and cons of a situation to come to the best logical conclusion.

Special Skills/Abilities: Deep understanding of local celestial events – astronomical formations and patterns, night sky, planetary, solar and lunar activity. Lizzy has a great understanding of engineering and technical matters, though her knowledge is thoroughly impractical due to her over-thinking – she can describe to you how to build a rocket to the moon, but she couldn’t tell you how your toaster oven works. She also possesses some geological knowledge, though mostly through osmosis.

Life, The Universe and Everything

Elizabeth was granted a natural love for learning at an early age. Her mother, Barbara, was a librarian for the Carnegie Public Library in Pittsburgh. Thomas, her father, was a construction foreman. He held a love of astronomy he passed on to his daughter very early on, often taking his family out on clear nights – brief trips away from the lights of the city to look at the stars.

When Barbara was killed suddenly in a car accident when Lizzy was 8 years old, Thomas retreated into himself, devoting more time to work than to his daughter to make enough money to get by raising her on his own. Lizzy incidentally followed her father’s lead and threw herself into her studies. She didn’t have to push herself too hard to pass by her piers and was able to skip the 4th grade. As the schism between her and her father grew, he made himself physically scarce and emotionally unavailable and she turned to books to find the stars on her own. In her teenage years she also grew fascinated with computers and engineering, and often entertained ideas of being an astronaut - something she knew her father would be proud of.

Graduating from high school at the top of her class, she enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University as a physics major. After her first year of school, however, after several semesters of talking herself down from an ‘astronaut’ goal – something she figured after time and time of thinking on it she probably would never be good enough for – she switched lanes and changed majors to computer science, eventually focusing in robotics. Her reasoning – her sound, detached and unemotional reasoning – was that computer technology was very much on the edge of space exploration, and if she could never be an astronaut, this would at least provide her with a way to do her part.

She worked hard in school, but she was easily intimidated by her classmates and often lagged behind on projects – never taking the lead and rarely asserting herself or her knowledge to her fullest abilities. Luckily for her several of her professors recognized her potential, and rather than allowing her to talk herself down and out of the space exploration game altogether, pushed her to work harder to achieve her goal. After several tumultuous years she graduated with a Master’s degree and took a big step in the right direction – a lowly research assistant at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

It wasn’t until after her graduation from college that Lizzy and her father were able to begin working on their relationship. With more of a physical distance between them, it somehow became easier for them to begin closing the emotional gap and after a lot of time the two of them finally bonded again.

After a little over a year at Glenn, Lizzy was given her biggest break – a transfer to NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, briefly working with the Chandra X-ray Observatory before being quickly relegated to the Lunar Precursor Robotic Program where her abilities would be put to much better use. Though initially still a lower-tier research assistant, she remained passionate and enthusiastic about her work.

After several years of slowly working her way up the ladder – and often being kicked down a few notches in a competitive atmosphere she never learned to thrive in – she is now satisfied with and engrossed in her work. She is very proud of what the projects she has worked on has accomplished, and her small part in helping those things happen. Her passion for this work, however, is often all-consuming, and as a result her social life is basically non-existent. Besides her long-distance father/daughter relationship and a few choice coworkers she may claim as friends, she really hasn’t got much to show as interpersonal relationships. And as long as she keeps her nose to the grindstone and working hard, as far as she figures she will never need to acknowledge this.

Family:
Father, Thomas McCandless
Mother, Barbara McCandless (deceased)

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Passenger or Staff: Passenger
Traveling With: Alone
Contest Entry: Lizzy was entered into the contest by co-workers as a joke, who found the idea of her taking a vacation particularly laughable.
Room:G Deck - 8203 - The Sun

This room is modeled after the sun. The floor is covered in cheery yellow carpets and the walls are painted in stripes, going from a reddish-orrange at the bottom to a pale yellow at the top in a sort of gradient. The ceiling is painted in the same pale yellow, with a bit of shimmer and sparkle to it to represent the sun's rays. As you enter the room, there is a door on the left and right. The door on the left leads to the bathroom. The bathroom is tiled in shades of yellow glass tile, giving the room a sparkle. The sink is a clear bowl that sits on top of the counter. There is a large white tub and a glassed-in shower stall. The door on the right leads into her twin brother's connecting room. Deeper in the the room is a small sitting area with a sofa in a soft yellow cotton and two matching chairs. The TV hangs on the wall with a mirrored cabinet below that holds a small white refrigerator and the DVD/VCR components for the TV. On top of the mirrored cabinet is a golden bust of Apollo. Hanging down over a small coffee table is a golden chandelier.

Moving into the bedroom, the carpet and wall scheme continues. The ceiling is painted as if you were looking up at the sunrise over the ocean. The queen-size headboard is upholstered in yellow cotton and the bed linens are varying shades of yellow and orange. There are two mirrored chests on either side of the bed to store clothes in. The room also features a balcony with soft white cotton curtains.

And Another Thing...

PB: Amy Acker
Player: Courtknee

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