Kira Maresch

"'I want to walk to the other side.'" "- The only words of English that Kira can remember in 1989."

Overview
Kira Koller Maresch (Mittageisen Project Candidate #6, X-Ray Echo/XE by the US Armed Forces) was the primary combatant under the control of the CIA during the 1989 Mittageisen Incursion. Prior to the events of Mittageisen, she was a citizen of the German Democratic Republic and a devout believer in Nazi ideology, despite (unknowingly) being an Ashkenazi Jew and Polish in origin.

Early Life
Maresch was born in the early 1970’s in Soviet-occupied western Poland, near Gorzów Wielkopolski, though it wouldn’t appear that she has a clear recollection of this, as she frequently described herself as being native to Germany before her memories were obfuscated. Her father spent part of his childhood in the Majdanek concentration camp, a detail that he never related to his daughter and which was lost entirely when he died after the family relocated to East Berlin at some point in the early-mid 1980’s. Her mother passed shortly afterwards, prompting Maresch to stop attending school and to start associating with a loosely-connected set of Nazi-sympathizing street gangs that covertly operated outside the gaze of the GDR. During this time, she was implicated in the deaths of multiple Romani people, but never convicted or sentenced. STASI intelligence reports about these gangs were intercepted by CIA surveillance during the summer of 1988, leading to several Mittageisen project candidacy dossiers to be written about Maresch and her comrades. By November, with no consistent home, Maresch had come down with tuberculosis. Her worsening health condition was noted by Merrick, who considered the illness to be a plausible explanation for her disappearance among her peers. On Christmas Eve of 1988, she received a letter from somebody purporting to be a member of the West German neo-Nazi NPD who were offering medical treatment and housing for her in the American sector of West Berlin. Unbeknownst to Maresch, it was a letter forged by employees of the CIA as a ruse to lure her into a secluded location for capture.

Before the Incursion
After the CIA had secured Maresch, she was transported to a medical center in Virginia for conversion and observation, which lasted around two months. A significant portion of her internal organs were retrofitted with modifications or removed entirely, and she was psychologically conditioned to be unable to remember any memories from before her surgeries. She also was made temporarily incredibly resistant to physical pain, making extended combat encounters much easier for her. In the process, she experienced several linguistic setbacks that severely limited her ability to process verbal information, though she was still able to understand German and English in a functional capacity. A side-effect of these operations was that speaking in any articulate way became immensely exhausting and difficult for her, which led to her refraining from speaking at all during the Incursion.

Mittageisen Incursion
On February 13th, 1989, Merrick Harrington and Huey Carswell arrived back in East Berlin’s Site Foxtrot Delta with Maresch’s unconscious body. Aware that the United States Marine Corps was planning on smoking the facility to silence both CIA and BND civilian employees working there, they sent out a facility-wide written warning of the imminent danger. Having dressed Maresch back in her old civilian clothes, they left her in a maintenance-room on the night of the 14th, with her waking up late the following morning. This concealment left her hidden from the Marines looking for her and any other targets, though she was made aware of their handiwork from the numerous dead bodies scattered throughout the facility. Merrick and SIGINT left many cassette tapes to explain the geopolitical and internal situation behind the scenes of her mission, as well as instructions detailing how to operate weapons and equipment. She was also issued a Mittageisen Operation Manual that fit in her pocket.

Throughout the course of her mission, she fought against both the Volkspolizei and the Marines, and escaped the DDR on a USCGC ice-breaker ship, evading capture as it was docked in Hong Kong. She was delivered to the Mittageisen Project Site in Fort Worth, Texas, where her last battle saw her fighting against the last detachment of Marines trying to destroy any evidence of the project. She collapsed shortly after due to complications from her surgeries and conversion, as well as blood-loss from extended combat, being carried by Huey and Merrick into emergency medical care. While her fate is left ambiguous in-game, it's understood that she was able to survive the normally fatal circumstances surrounding her medical conversion.

After the Incursion
While Kira survived the initial round of medical procedures performed in an attempt to prevent her from succumbing to her programmed date of expiration, she wasn't left unscathed. After the Incursion, she was placed into assisted living under CIA surveillance, going by a fake name and being documented as a mentally-challenged French teenager with family in the United States. She never physically recovered from the trauma she sustained during the events of the Incursion and throughout combat, being unable to walk or stand for long periods of time unassisted, and never recovering her ability to speak coherently for any significant amount of time. Medical technicians documented that she expressed her regret for the people she killed throughout the Incursion by painting water-color portraits of them and lining the walls of her room with them, having since recovered her memories that were previously obfuscated. Merrick frequently came to visit her on his time off, as she would communicate her desire to see him again by dialing his phone number and tapping morse-code onto the phone receiver with a pen.

Personality
During Mittageisen, as the player-controlled character, her behavior is largely dependent on how the player personally decides to go about their progress in the game. In-universe, this can be explained as her conversion rendering her unable to verbally express concerns or emotions, or to recall her past memories, as her will for survival and mission completion are the only things directly guiding her. Before the events of the game, it's likely that her personality played a large part of her being selected for the role, as she was deemed fundamentally irrelevant to the society that she lived in and a person who few people would express regret or sorrow over losing, being described as 'anti-social'. While playing as her, she seems to have no difficulty operating weapons and equipment that would otherwise be unlikely from a civilian with no prior military or combat experience. In reality, a Mittageisen Operational Manual was one of the few things issued with her, along with a cassette player that she utilizes to play instructions recorded by Merrick, ensuring that she's able to use the numerous military/law-enforcement armaments she acquires throughout the story.

After the events of the game, while she was still unable to verbally communicate information, it would appear that she's not entirely without emotion, as she seemed to display a large amount of affection towards Merrick and his future wife, expressing through written and coded messages that she wished to see them. It would also seem that she shows a great deal of remorse for the amount of people she killed during the Incursion, as she paints portraits of the identities she could retrieve while she lies in bed.

Gameplay
As Mittageisen is a game built on-top of the code already written for Half-Life 2, she controls fairly similarly to the player-characters in other Source Engine titles, with some differences. Firstly, as an unarmored civilian, she's less damage-resistant than Gordon Freeman is in Half-Life 2, although her weapons do more damage. She carries numerous weapons that vary somewhat in function from the original weapons-code written for Half-Life 2. She also never uses a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. She is able to pick up health and resistance items throughout the game that keep her alive. If she dies throughout the course of the game, she can be heard yelping as she collapses.

Appearance
In Mittageisen, the only part of Maresch's appearance that the player can perceive is her arms, which feature black leather gloves and a black-and-red plaid shirt. These meshes were reused from Counter Strike: Global Offensive. In renders and promotional material, she is depicted as a somewhat gaunt, somewhat severe young woman with prominent facial features, brown hair, and bloodshot blue eyes.

She's seen in her red-and-black plaid shirt and a leather vest with the Mittageisen logo on the back of it, along with, 'DAS REICH' and '31G' printed on the back, 31G being a reference to Rudolf Hess's POW number, which made frequent feature in the Joy Division song 'Warsaw'. Das Reich is in reference to the 2nd SS Panzer Division, of whose Wolfsangel logo was the basis for the design of Mittageisen's logo.

Development
Kira Maresch was originally conceived as being the literal transcription of a video game character and the characteristics they typically posses without explanation, such as an inability to speak during gameplay and an extreme resistance to physical punishment where no explanation is given. Several designs for her character were pitched before the decision to keep her in her civilian clothes, including one design that featured her in surplus Navy Seals equipment and wearing tiger-stripe camouflage.

The name Kira Maresch is a portmanteau of Kira Roessler, a bassist of the Hardcore Punk band Black Flag, and Christine Maresch, a character from a 1983 movie named Hostage.