Salvage Hounds: Meet the Gunner ⋆ Twilight Tangents

Meet Mi-Cha Kwon, ex-military and the Mutt’s all round tactical bad-ass.

Character and costume design for Mi-Cha Kwon. Mi-Cha likes to be ready for action, and keeps her trusty side arms and combat gear in tip top shape.

Military brat. That’s how Mi-Cha grew up. Her whole family served – mother, father, older brothers, all making their lives in the Marines. And she liked it, the sisterhood and brotherhood, the regimen, the service. Oorah!

Character turn-around for Mi-Cha Kwon. Mi-Cha’s family roots were in the Korean peninsula before emigrating west to America in the early 21st century. Her hair usually sports a two-tone dye job.

But it turns out that good people don’t always get to fight the good fight. Mi-Cha found herself sent in to suppress unrest in the colonies, putting down worker strikes on distant stations and fighting against corp mercenaries in ground wars on Mars. And if that wasn’t bad enough, how many times was she put under the command of corp brass? Mi-Cha might have been military elite, but the corps were funding the colonies, and that meant it was usually civilian suits calling the shots.

And those shots were rarely good. In fact, most of them were bad, and led to unnecessary shots of their own—at civilians, at non-combatants, at people who were in no way shape or form enemies, just people protecting what little they eked out on the fragile frontier. That went doubly so in the mining stations of the asteroid belt, where Mi-Cha found herself refusing to follow orders, refusing to kill for some corporation’s bottom line.

Mi-Cha’s kit. Not the Marines gear she’s accustomed to, but a second-hand suit scavenged from the forces of the Jupiter Cyclops Corporation. Although it’s seen better days, she keeps it patched up and in working order as best she can.

So Mi-Cha found herself court martialed and dishonorably discharged, stranded in the belt colonies. But the belters obviously had a need for people who know their way around a rifle, decent folk fighting back against indecent corps and criminals, though sometimes it wasn’t possible to tell the two apart. Mi-Cha took the jobs, made some cash, and hoped that at the very least she could say she was making a difference.

A couple panels of Mi-Cha in action from Salvage Hounds, giving chase to a mysterious figure.

Another inked panel from Salvage Hounds. Mi-Cha prefers the added support of a gun-link camera, which uses a camera and other sensors to track and paint targeting information on the HUD of her helmet’s visor glass.

But there comes a time when every merc gets offered a job they should probably walk away from. The frontier ain’t cheap, and the bills pile up. Maybe Mi-Cha knew it was a bad job when she took it. Maybe she just convinced herself that the money was worth it.

It couldn’t be that bad, right?

It was bad.

Mi-cha got out of there, running from people she should never have made into enemies. She jumped a cheap ship heading out to the moons of Jupiter, helmed by one Olivia Signh. She never paid her fare, but her skills have surprisingly come in handy.

She hasn’t looked back.