Fixit

Fixit was a member of the Ghosts.

Curly red hair.¹Armageddon’s Children – p 35

An average, ordinary looking boy.

Inventive, a talented craftsman and mechanic – he could repair almost anything. Learned his skills from his father who was a metalworker.

Middle child of a family of five. They all lived on a farm in eastern Washington with their closest neighbours five miles away and the closest town twenty. They seldom saw anyone except for the Strayhorn family who lived up the road. The families would visit each other a couple of times each year. When he was four or five, that Strayhorns stopped coming – his mother told him they had moved away. Around that time his father started carrying a shotgun everywhere he went.

The two younger children were fourteen month old twins, too young to do anything. The elder two work with their father. Fixit had no identifiable place or purpose in the family and was just starting to show interest in how things worked. The younger two caught the plague and were dead within a week.

By age seven he was immersed in his love of mechanics. He would read through old repair manuals and books on various types of engines.

By age nine he had a reasonable understanding of solar power and had started working on a solar energy collector to power the remaining vehicle the family owned. While he was out testing the collector, a renegade militia operating as slavers overpowered and took away his family. It took him a few days to decide what to do. He had no way of going after his family or where to look. He ended staying long enough to finish his collector before setting off, aiming for the coast. He travelled with a small caravan of families as far as Seattle. Several weeks later he was discovered by Bear who took him to Hawk who then invited him into the family.

About the same age as Chalk, who came to be his best friend.

He was the butt of many jokes with the Ghosts.

Despite his skills, he was unreliable. Working under supervision he was OK, but when left alone would be prone to forget, procrastinate or even ignore his work. He could not be sent out on his own. Had a tendency for wandering off and forgetting what he should be doing.

He constructed the makeshift appliances in the kitchen of the Ghost’s lair and the generators and solar units that powered them. He rebuilt Owl‘s wheelchair to make it easier to manoeuvre, and laid down the ramps to enable her to reach all the rooms. He made the water catchment systems on the roof. Using scrap and ingenuity he constructed the heavy security doors and reinforced window shutters.

The Gypsy Morph

When Hawk and Angel Perez led everyone away from the bridge, he stayed behind to look for Chalk who had by this time disappeared. Logan Tom recruited him to help the men wiring the bridge to help take his mind of Chalk.

The men however, refused his help, believing a child would not know better than them. He had tried to point out where the explosives were likely to malfunction and suggested better alternatives but they refused to listen to him. When the bridge failed to blow up he thought he knew exactly what to do and, ignoring the danger to himself, ran out to the bridge to fix it. He found what prevented the bridge from exploding and cleared the blockage, but did not have time to return to safety and was killed in the explosion.