Character Outline: Oneida Amadlozi

Name: Oneida Amadlozi

Alias/Codenamed: Impi (named after the unique and powerful Zulu spearman formation used by King Shaka in the early 1800’s) – although easily mistaken for “EMP”, as in “electromagnetic pulse”, an immobilizing form of ‘techno-bomb’ that incapacitates any electronic equipment in its blast radius

Age: 24

Gender: female

Ethnicity: DNA extracted from the descendants of British colonists living in the Republic of South Africa

Appearance: Standing at 5’9” and 125 lbs, this woman has the look of one who would be more at home shopping on Melrose Avenue than kicking ass at an APEX facility – but you know what they say about looks being deceiving. Her oval-shaped face is often set in a rather vacuous expression; her straight brown hair is slicked back, parted on one side to make a sharp white line of scalp. A large, round forehead is softened by a gentle brow line, and her nonthreatening brown eyes have an almost matriarchal 50’s retro quality in the sweep of the lashes and the sweet curve of her lower lid. A good, strong, British nose defines the two hemispheres of her face, her cheeks sucking in slightly to further elongate her face. Her mouth is a perfect Cupid’s bow, only the faintest bit pinker than the rest of her pale complexion. She has the build of one who was gangly in her youth, but has grown into her height, becoming all smooth lines and subtle curves – very European. All in all, her physical appearance is hardly exceptional; she is just as mildly attractive as any downtown Johannesburg businesswoman, and as forgettable as well. She likes to wear military-inspired clothing, as a sort of private joke; right now she’s wearing a long white jacket inspired by naval uniforms, with epaulets, gold ribbon on the cuffs, and gold buttons down the front, matched with a white skirt that ends just below the knee, where loose pink leather boots take over.

Personality: Oneida is a bit of a live wire. A product of earlier days of APEX, they hadn’t quite honed their personality-forming techniques, so Oneida just grew to become the human parallel of her expertise. The results were, as you can imagine, rather explosive. Unpredictable and vicious, Oneida is a random cycle of suppressing resentment and hatred to the breaking point, then lashing out in pure destructive force in an indiscriminate killing spree. With awful precision, she exterminates those who angered her and pushed her over the brink, and some of their family members for good measure. In a larger moral context, her targets are generally pretty bad people, and she was usually genuinely wronged by them – but her methods are catastrophic. It takes real delicacy to defuse this one. Most of the time, though, she lies dormant and utterly unreadable. In her seemingly passive state, she mainly interacts normally, naturally, words slipping easily from her lips in a disarmingly casual way. Nothing about her opinions or her mannerisms stands out especially – she behaves in a way that is as close to ‘normal’ as society can conclude by any form of consensus. Occasionally, though, something slips out – a glint in her eye, the white of a canine in her smile, that crawls up your spine and triggers the part of your mind held over from the great ape to tell you, stay away from this one. She struggles against the eugenic indoctrination implanted in her by APEX.

Excels At: Oneida is an explosives expert. APEX’s obvious failure with her caused them to throw out the munitions expert design for version beta of Project Evolution, choosing to focus more on smaller-scale undercover spies and assassins. Oneida’s purpose is at serious odds with subtlety; her role in an op would be to make the biggest conceivable boom — to bust the team into or out of any facility, to create an immense diversion, or just to induce mass panic and/or death in the other side. Of course, she was well-trained for any kind of smaller explosions for purposes like blowing off the door to a safe, or EMPs to disable the target’s tech. She can build bombs on demand from a vast array of materials, some of which she keeps with her, and some that she can easily scavenge from discarded guns and other equipment. She has intermediate training in computer sciences so that she can construct the timers and triggers and booby traps on her explosives, to make them rather tricky to disarm. She was genetically designed to be tremendously quick-thinking and creative, improvising traps, mines, and timed bombs from any resources she can get her hands on. She is also very talented with really, really big guns, like bazookas and rocket launchers – it’s quite a sight to watch this skinny girl heft a gigantic flamethrower and wield it like it was an extra limb. She can also target larger equipment like land-to-air missile launchers. She has intermediate-to-high level flight training, mainly with American bomber jets. She has moderate experience building larger-scale and cluster bombs that are more useful in full-out war than on an undercover op. She is educated in the specifications and design of thermonuclear bomb designs, as well as those of the “dirty bomb” and chemical/biological weapons, although she has no direct experience building them; she knows how to handle radioactive material and chemical/biological weapons, but she doesn’t know how to manufacture or engineer them, or the details of their biological effects. In close combat, Oneida is quite disadvantaged; she left APEX without completing her training, so she is entirely untrained in hand-to-hand combat or the use of small hand weapons. In most circumstances, though, she can hold her own by use of her tremendous improvisitory skills – she is more than lethal without recourse to close-quarters combat. She is also in excellent physical shape, capable of sprinting for long distances. Her size and build also lend themselves well to hiding. She speaks English, Afrikaans, Zulu, and Funigalore.