User Profile

Character Name: Duo Maxwell
Series: Gundam Wing
Gender: Male
Age: 17
Species: Human
Sexuality: Canon: Straight (ambiguous, at best), Non-Canon: Gay

Appearance: Young man of American (mixed European) descent. He is of a compact but muscled build, standing at 156cm (approximately 5'-11") and 120 pounds. Duo has an expressive, heart-shaped face with wide, dark blue eyes. He wears his long, brown hair in a braid that extends to the middle of his back. To the great relief of the Gundam Fashion Police, he has finally abandoned the priest's collar and the riding pants in favor of a good pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and a leather jacket. And every so often, he dons Preventer uniform. Only every so often.

Personality: Duo is generally pretty cheerful. Cheerful in the way that veterans from the Second World War will tell you they were cheerful during, say, the downtime following the D-Day counter-offensive, or the lull between the Battles of Coral Sea and Midway Island. It is a cheerfulness grounded in the knowledge that, at any moment, things could go south faster than a New York retiree in December, so you might as well make the best of what you have. Duo's cheerfulness is both a worldview and a coping mechanism. Tip: don't get Duo drunk.

Over the course of his brief life, Duo has lived through very difficult circumstances and suffered the loss of many people who were close to him, and this has affected him deeply. When he was a child, he declared that he didn't believe in God, but instead in the God of Death, because, in his words, he had "never seen any miracles, but [he] sure saw lots of dead people." This is likely one of the reasons he is so committed to ending conflict in the world; so that there need be no more children like himself.

Upon introduction, Duo would often quip that he "might run and hide, but never tells a lie." He is, however, very good at half truths and selective disclosure.

Abilities: Needless to say, Duo is most of all a skilled pilot. He can fly anything meant to fly and even a few things not intended for that purpose. Duo is also something of a mechanical genius, with an inborn love of gadgets. Had he a normal childhood, he would have been one to disassemble the family television just to see how it works. He has not had any formal training in hand-to-hand combat, but this is not to say he can't defend himself. Life as an orphan made him a good street fighter; he is also a highly trained marksman and a munitions expert. This can be a deadly combination. If he perceives you are a threat, he will not hesitate to shoot out your kneecaps and put the heel of his boot through your face. His computer hacking abilities are decent, but not quite equal to others such as Heero.

Weaknesses: Physically, Duo has no superhuman abilities, only carefully honed skills. Emotionally, he can be quick to fly off the handle and often takes unnecessary risks. Psychologically, he is fragile. He interacts with others easily but superficially, holding them at a distance, though his gregarious charm and talkativeness may obscure this. He is slow to trust.

Manhattanite or outsider? Outsider, transported from Earth of approximately 200 years in the future (After Colony 196-7).

History: Duo's history is somewhat complicated. A survivor of a plague that swept the underclasses of his L-2 colony station, he has no memory of his parents, and for the early years of his life lived as part of a gang of street urchins, led by a boy named Solo whom Duo looked up to. Sadly, Solo also succumbed to the epidemic around or just before AC 187, and it was then that Duo chose his first name. When the gang was corralled by the authorities and sent to the Catholic orphanage of one Father Maxwell, Duo was for a brief period raised by Father Maxwell and the head nun, Sister Helen, whom he came to care for deeply. It was Sister Helen who taught Duo to braid his hair, after he vehemently refused to have it cut. He received some limited schooling at this time.

In the year AC 188, the church was occupied by a group of rebels leading an uprising within the colony. Desperate to keep the pacifist Father Maxwell and Sister Helen safe, he promised to steal a mobile suit from the station's Alliance base on the condition that the rebels would leave the church. While successful in his stealing the armor, he returned too late: an alliance attack on the rebels utterly annihilated the church, causing a total of 245 casualties. He could only sit, helpless, as Sister Helen died in his arms. The attack was later called the Maxwell Church Tragedy, and it was at this time that Duo took on the surname "Maxwell".

For a number of years afterward, Duo lived as a drifter, until he decided to stow away aboard a spaceship of the Sweeper Group, a space salvage company, in AC 192. Here he was introduced to the poorly-coiffed, and unfortunately-nosed Professor G, who, impressed with Duo's ability to evade the ship's security systems, invited him to train for Operation Meteor as pilot of the Gundam Deathscythe. Opposed to the premise of Operation Meteor (i.e., dropping enormous space habitats on Earth and using the Gundams to take advantage of the chaos and assert the military superiority of the Colonies), he attempted to sabotage his own Gundam, and then stole it at the behest of Professor G, that he and the other pilots might carry out their own form of Operation Meteor.

During the course of the One Year War of AC 195, Duo became close with his fellow Gundam pilots and several others, such as the pacifist, Princess, one-time Queen of the World, and future Vice Foreign Minister Relena Darlian (née Peacecraft), Earth-based Sweeper agent and apparent surfer dude Howard, former OZ pilots Lucrezia Noin and Hilde Schbeiker, and former Alliance Medical Officer turned rebel Sally Po. As part of the independent force aboard the Sweeper ship Peacemillion, Duo was instrumental in bringing an end to the war, defeating both OZ and White Fang in a climactic battle around Earth.

In the fragile peace following the resolution of the One Year War that saw the rise of the Earth Sphere Unified Nation, Duo voluntarily gave Deathscythe to Quatre Winner, who planned to send the Gundams into the sun. He did, infact, begin this procedure, but it was at this inopportune juncture that the Mariemeia Coup occurred. Following a daring and mathematically complex mission to intercept the disposal ship by Quatre, Duo was once again piloting Deathscythe. With the other Gundam pilots and their several friends in high places, they manage to save Humanity from itself one more time.

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