Rickard A-127

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Armour Claim

## Physical Desciption

Standing at 6 feet and 10 inches and weighing 275 pounds, Rick is quite average by Spartan III’s standards. Like every other Spartans, he is in a peak physical condition, outclassing any humans at a terrific level. His body wears the scars of the augmentation process and he never tries to cover them. On the contrary, he shows them as a proof of the fact that he isn’t human.

His day to day clothing are the standard army fatigues with the Spartan III printed on his shirt. His clothes are always perfectly clean and ironed. While not being the most disciplined soldier, Rick keeps his hair and his beard under the maximum length allowed unless he spent too much time on the front line and didn’t had the opportunity to correct the hair length.

His suit of armor is still a Mjolnir Mark V Powered Armor that he customized for his own needs. He takes great care of it and it’s a major source of pride for him. Despite his extensive care, the armor is scarred with various battle marks, some souvenir from his years of fighting in the Covenant War. Thanks to his armor, Rick’s only scars are the one he got from the augmentations.

## Personality

Rick is a powerhouse fueled by pure hatred toward the Covenants and the Sangheilis. However, that doesn’t stop him from being an eccentric person. He is as obedient as he is undisciplined, leading him to even insult his superiors in front of them. He deeply disrespects every Spartans IV and ONI Operatives and will never cease to remind them about his disdain. He will, however, enjoy the company of Marines, ODSTs, Spartan III, and II, as much as he’ll enjoy the company of noncombatant personnel such as janitors or cooks. He considers every other Spartan III as his brothers and sisters. His brutal honesty should not be taken as a proof of stupidity since Rick is a clever soldier who is ready for anything to achieve his mission.

Rick considers himself like a machine, on the same level as a smart AI, both being built by humanity to serve them as weapons or tools. He thinks that his role as a Spartan is to do the impossible to prevent as many human loss as possible, military or civilian alike, and he will always take the death of a non-Spartan as a personal failure.

His entire life revolves around his military service, and it’s the only lifestyle he knows since he was a little child. He is not seeking for retirement, nor does he care about shore leaves. He’s almost always at his station, or at least in the living areas of the bases or ships he’s stationed on and will rarely be seen outside military facilities. He never used his pay despite his years of service and doesn’t plan to since he doesn’t care about civilian life. His retirement plan is simple, dying in a blaze of glory, taking as many foes as possible with him, a way to make his brothers and sisters of Alpha Company proud of him when he’ll finally join them in death.

The augmentations didn’t only affected his body, but also destroyed all sex drive and altered many other instincts. Losing almost all his SIII brothers and sisters from Alpha Company lead him to also lose empathy. Rick is perfectly aware of his sociopath tendencies and uses them to his advantage, giving him the ability to lie like it was nothing, or the ability to not feel remorse for some action he has done in his past. The only source of grief for him is being among the last survivors of Alpha Company and to not had the chance to fight alongside his brothers and sisters in the Operation Prometheus.

## Bio

Rick was born in Utgard on Harvest on June 6, 2522. He wasn’t even three years old when the Covenant attacked the peaceful colony and was some of the 250,000 civilians that had the chance to be evacuated from the glassing. However, his parents didn’t make it, sacrificing themselves so their child may survive. After that, Rick was put in an orphanage specifically built to house war orphans on New Carthage. There, despite being young, Rick developed a visceral hate of the Covenants for destroying his world.

At the age of six, a group of ONI operatives came at his orphanage. His compatibility with Spartan’s augmentations was discovered, and his psychological profile was a match for the Spartan III program. As for many other children, Rick ended up in Alpha Company and started to be trained for his future role in the military. He found a true sense of purpose in the program and saw in Franklin Mendez a fatherly figure. He found his place in the company and thought so highly of his comrade that he started to see them as brothers and sisters.

His augmentations went pretty well, only disrupting his sex drive. Rick never missed it and had a great time discovering his new potential. Due to a physical injury during training, he wasn’t deployed during the Operation: Prometheus, where almost all of his brothers and sisters died in combat. This only strengthened his hate toward the Covenants and his will to always strive toward total victory against the invaders, at any cost. But losing so many people he cared about also had another consequence.

Rick’s mind was shattered by not seeing his family coming back. He then understood what was his role. Spartans weren’t soldiers, nor humans and even less super-soldiers. They were tools. Expandable ones. The young Spartan embraced his role. He used it as a pretext to shield himself from pain and started to lose empathy. A tool doesn’t need empathy or feelings, a tool needs to fulfill his purpose. The only emotion Rick kept in his mind was his burning hatred toward the Covenants, hatred he channeled and harvested to achieve victory and survive throughout the difficult missions he faced.

Since Alpha Company was decimated, Rick was assigned to an ODST battalion as a Rogue. He operated admirably in the battalion and managed to fit in despite the usual distrust ODSTs had toward Spartans. He mainly earned his place thanks to his combat effectiveness and his habit of protecting his fellow soldiers. After several years of this life, Rick got assigned a Mjolnir Mark V Power Armor and got removed from the ODST battalion to work alongside a Marine Regiment.

The Spartan felt like the armor was a proof of his combat effectiveness and a way for him to be even more lethal. He dived into the fray using the new edge the armor gave him, more efficient and violent as ever, using it to its full potential to achieve the hardest mission alongside the Marines. Serving with them was his best experience, for they know they can’t compete against a Spartan and never tried to. On the contrary, they were happy to see him around, crawling in the mud alongside them.

His proudest achievement was his involvement in the battle of Ballast, one of the few ever won by the UNSC throughout the war. During the battle, Rick operated bravely, always taking point and dealing with Covenants troops with maximum prejudices for them, while making sure to keep his men alive. His actions in the battle pushed him to earn his first medal, the Bronze Star, for saving the entire platoon by holding off a superior enemy force all by himself until air support came in and wiped the enemies clean.

After the UNSC victory on Ballast, Rick was sent back to Earth. The threat of a Covenant invasion growing stronger each passing days, they needed as many Spartans and troops as possible to face the threat. Rick was stationed in a UNSC base three hundred kilometers south from New Mombasa when the Covenant attack began. He fought bravely and witnessed the death of countless troops, marines, ODSTs and army soldiers alike, all dying alongside to push off the alien attack. The Spartan managed to survive the invasion, but most of his battalion didn’t have that chance.

The battle seemed lost until the Flood arrived. Both sides suffered many losses, until humans, Sangheilis and Covenants stopped fighting each other, trying to survive against the new threat. Rick ended up cut out from UNSC’s troops and had to fight all by himself. Instead of only fighting the Flood, he managed to eliminate all the isolated Covenant and Sangheilis he met, coldly executing them. He also managed to rally as many human survivors as he could, only to witness their death caused by the Flood.

At the end of the battle of Earth, Rick had joined New Mombasa to avoid the glassing of the area. There, he regained his unit he lost before and he kept fighting the Flood infestation, only to witness the death of even more of his teammates. When the battle ended, his unit was reduced to 15% of the initial manpower.

When the war was over, Rick received the opportunity to have extended vacations, but the Spartan turned it down, wanting to eliminate all the remaining of the Covenants troops. It was for him the best way for him to celebrate the end of the war, hunting down Covenants extremists, being on the offense and not protecting humanity for once. Fighting for the pleasure of fighting, killing Covenants that weren’t threats to Humanity anymore, but just some rabid animals lurking around. It was the best months of his life, and he enjoyed every second of it.

Once the conflict was totally over, Rick was stationed back to Ballast, the planet he helped to save during the war. Instead of enjoying his veteran and war hero status, Rick kept training daily. He was later offered the opportunity to join the Spartan branch of the UNSC, or to be assigned to a non-combatant role. Rick’s lust for war made the choice easy for him. That’s how he met for the first time some of the newly created Spartan IVs. He immediately had issues with them, finding them cocky and nothing more than over-glorified ODSTs, thinking that they were better than the rest.

The old Spartan developed his disdain toward them because of that. He spent the next years trying as much as possible to spend as less time with them as possible and working primarily among more regular troops.