Okay, so this goes all the way back to my time spent living in the Puget Sound - primarily the Olympia-Lacey-Tumwater tricity area.

I hated living there because I am literally a born and bred Texas boy. My family history in the San Antonio area goes all the way back to the very foundations of the city (I'm a direct descendant of the first captain of the Presidio that become the very core of the city), and beyond by way of the Native Americans that live in the area.

I missed the heat, the sun, and the sudden torrential downpours some would call frog stranglers. (No joke, some of our streets have design characteristics shared with slueceways, we have two 10 meter diameter tunnels that run under the metro area to keep it from flooding out, as well as a dam which is only there to hold back the creek when it suddenly turns into a river.)

In Lacey, forget about even seeing the sun outside of summer time. You will go weeks at a time not even seeing BLUE SKY. And it will literally drizzle for a whole week straight just because it can. Ask anyone who has lived in the Puget Sound area and they will confirm - these are not exaggerations in any way, shape, or form.

Thus, I don't really have many fond memories of our visits to Pacific Beach. This place is pretty much the epicenter at which the North Pacific Current splits into the Alaskan Current and the Californian Current. This water was FRIGID, and the shore was strewn with nothing but rocks and pebbles. It was as much of a polar opposite of the beaches of South Padre Island as you could get without glaciers being involved.

Except... the one and only time my Maternal Grandmother visited. She was an adventurous soul, very much like my mother, and was willing to brave the colder climate. As a part of her visit, we went to places like the Olympic Rain Forrest in the eastern foothills of the Olympic Mountains.

As well as Pacific Beach.

Now, the thing is that Pacific Beach borders right on the very southern tip of the Quinalt Reservation. And Reservation life among the Quinalt at this time was pretty stereotypical for the youth - dull and boring with utterly nothing to do.

So it was that during this particular visit to the State Park, a trio of boys from the Reservation had taken to coming to the beach in the middle of the night and raiding the ice chests of campers in search of booze.

We were regular visitors by this time, and my mom had come to be on a first-name basis with the park rangers there. So of course, they warned my mom about this.

But I bet they never, ever expected what came next.

See, the thing about my mom? She's a very sweet and caring person. The pagan I had for a girlfriend remarked that she was like one of these sweet little old white witches that putter around in their garden, making herbal medicines for the local villagers. And really, she isn't far off the mark. Mom loves holistic medicine - the kind that actually works - and has been eager for the legalization of marijuana so she can try making cannabis-based poultices.

HOWEVER...

What few people ever suspect is the wild, fiery, and utterly vindictive mean streak she possesses. But once you really look at our family history, it's no small wonder - we are absolutely chock full of fiery personalities.

So. Along comes these kids from the reservation, never EVER suspecting that there was a hot-blooded Mestiza on the premises. And the very instant mom saw them?

She wastes no time at all and goes straight for her trusty old hatchet.

These kids fucking FREAK OUT, because suddenly here comes this stout woman, who looks very much Native American herself, and carrying in-hand what, in the middle of the night, could only look like a goddamn tomahawk.

Two of them take off running like Beelzebub's very own hounds are nipping at their heels. The third one tries to play it all cool and makes for the phone booth at the ranger's office (it's not a very large camping area, with all the campgrounds being in direct line-of-sight of the office) and pretends like he's a passerby making a phone call.

Mom isn't fooled in the slightest. She goes right up to the phone booth and warns the kid that if she ever sees him around again, she's gonna have a scalp to put on her trophy wall.

Pretty sure the kid had a brown pants moment right then and there.

And so, that was that. Or at least it would have been. There was just one thing Mom didn't happen to notice, and it was that one of the park rangers was on an overnight shift to keep an eye on things. And boy, did they ever get an eyeful!

Next morning that park ranger is gleefully telling the other campers about what mom did the previous night, and afterwards her title was secured: she was Hatchet Lady.

Mom took it all in good humor, though, and even swore that she would find someone to teach her how to make and throw a tomahawk properly.

It really comes as no surprise in retrospect. Her father was a tiny little Cajun man who ran a popular bar in the city, was well known for his own temper, as well as the ability back it up by completely laying-out men more than twice his size because he was a Boatswain's Mate in the US Navy in the Pacific during WWII.

-----------------------------

So, with that in mind, let's continue with the other parts...

>>Hah. If it were me... it'd probably happen by accident, and probably
>>because I piqued their interest by utterly ghosting whatever sixth
>>sense they might use.*
>
>"Waaaait a minute, I thought you said you were models."
>
>"We are models! Digital cameras are a miracle of science."

"Ah, right. Now I feel sheepish."

>>And then me utterly failing to bail
>>out because I got a thing for dangerous women.
>
>Next thing you know, you're all three out there robbing blood banks to
>support their habit...
>
>Actually, this could make a pretty amusing movie premise. They don't
>make screwball caper comedies any more...

"Oh good grief, that was ONE TIME. They swore off the smack* afterwards."

"What about you?"

"I might be dumb sometimes, but I'm not dumb enough to say 'No' to a couple of ladies who might decide to suck me dry in a fit of pique. Besides, someone had to be the sane one to make sure no one got killed."

* (The Smack, in this case, being whatever designer narcotic used by vampires who like to live a little more on the wild side than other vampires. These two would probably claim that it was the inherent "Crazy" in his blood combined with the drugs that made them go around the bend.)

>>* (No joke, when I lived with a bunch of pagans, they swore up and
>>down that I had the magical equivalent of ECM - even looking at me
>>straight on made their perception go fuzzy.
>
>Pfff. When I was at WPI, a couple of the local crystal gazers sat me
>down one afternoon and solemnly told me that they were Very Concerned
>because I had no aura, which meant I had been born without a soul(???)
>and, unless drastic measures were taken, could be used as a conduit to
>the physical world by Dark Entities.

Hah. In my case, it wasn't so much they couldn't tell I had an aura - they knew it was there because while I did indeed have a "Silent Running" mode, I also had an "Active Jamming" mode that kicked in whenever I knew I was On The Spot. And my girlfriend at the time claimed to have seen it in the few times I was relaxed enough that the "ECM" went down, so there was no real concern on that front.

>>"Well, a few generations back on my Dad's side, a Hoffmanite and a
>>Kryptonian fell hopelessly in love with each other... don't even get
>>me started on my mom's side - the family reunions there make the
>>shenanigans in Banned From Argo look tame."
>
>"You know the "Metropolis is destroyed" scene in Man of Steel?
>That's actually based on my high school graduation."

It probably wouldn't help much if his Grammy-Gramma - the Matriarch of his mom's side of the family - would be an actual expatriate of Svartalfheim. Complete with all that implies.

>>The UF-verse just makes everything more awesome. If my Mom has a
>>well-earned title "Hatchet Lady" IRL, then what does that make her in
>>the UF-verse?
>
>https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Nyeun_Chun_Ti_(Pre-Zero_Hour)

Hmmm... Actually, you know what? Mom would have been the batshit-crazy kinda girl who'd have somehow captured a Zaku using just a power loader (IRL: she freakin' loves Zakus, and she always loved that last fight scene at the end of Aliens), managed to keep the dang thing running all these years by her wits and absurd mechanical aptitude, and learned how to use a Heat Hawk like it was nobody's business.

Say, that'd explain a LOT of things about his family! One of these family-operated Mech Warrior privateer groups that have a reputation for both getting the job done no matter what and being magnets for trouble.

Let's call them The Mad Lads, because everything they do is more than a little on the insane side of things.

Pretty much everything they have are war prizes, including the jump ship - probably some ancient thing that belongs in a museum, except somewhere along the line someone pretty much welded on the warp drive off an old Starfleet automated fuel transport.

Literally.

As modifications go, this isn't the craziest thing they've ever done. That honor goes to the Mad Lad that added a spinal-mounted mass driver to the jump ship.... all while somehow keeping the old K-F Drive in place and operational.

(K-F drives in UF-verse, I'd imagine, would be regarded as quaint things that only the most desperate or most eccentric would bother with. Severely limited in range compared to hyperdrive, they'd be a poor-man's substitute for a Fold Drive. Though easy to cobble together, they are also nearly as inefficient as a Fold Drive for their limited range, and need a very powerful Navicomp in order to nail the safe jump points in planetary systems - and that's to say nothing of trying to nail a "Pirate Point".)

And his mom scoring a Zaku? She'd just been a mechanic and was being held back from the action because, at the age of fourteen, she was too young for that kind of thing. Except they were on a contract to protect a small outpost near the Xeon Principality's borders, and a unit somehow wound up flanking their lines...

...Only to be taken out by a cheesed-off teenage girl with a chip on her shoulder and a power loader meant to wrangle mecha.

After that, it was a lost cause trying to keep her out of the action. Even the idea of trying to deny her the rightful war prize of her Zaku left a bad taste in their mouths.

Just to make the picture complete, have them be citizens of the Confederate Freespacers.