Anargyros Mitchell was an enterprising man. Through hard work, and the right choices, he’d built up a chain of four restaurants of higher standards, two in Caprica City, one in Delphi and one in his hometown Smyrna further south from Caprica City. Anagyros married a woman called Simone, and the pair had a son, Jason, who took over the business after his father. Jason’s wife was called Christina, and they had two sons, William and Zacharias. And this story is about the youngest of the two.
Zacharias Ulysses Mitchell, or Zack as he usually calls himself was born in Caprica City, in the autumn of 2015. From before his parents had a three years old son called William. The family was a bit distant, given how much time Jason and Christina spent on making sure that the restaurant business was running like it should.
It was early shown that William was the “good” of the kids, both in terms of behaviour and the fact that he was the one most interested in food, from the perspective of running restaurants. In contrast, Zack was one of those children that always ran around exploring, and all that stuff. Something that worried their mother very often.
All in all, Zack’s childhood and youth was rather uneventful. He showed skills in academical stuff, and when he was old enough, he went off to Caprica University, to try getting himself a degree in electrical engineering. It was here that he started taking up interest in so called extreme sports, with climbing and caving being the ones he devoted most of his spare time and effort on.
Zack also wanted to do something for the Colonies, so when he was at the University, he joined the ROTC at the school, intent to serve as a reserve officer after he graduated. During his time at the University, he was a student that was in the higher level at his field, able to come up with some rather unique solutions to the problems he had to solve, but also someone that was perhaps a bit too confident, bordering on arrogant, when it came to his abilities.
The summer before he turned 24, he graduated, and intended to find himself a good job, but then tragedy struck the Mitchell family. Jason and Christina were driving home from a short vacation, Jason lost control of the car, and drove straight off a cliff. Both persons in the car died in the accident.
His parents death hit Zack quite hard, and for the next few weeks, he was thinking really hard about what to do with his life. What he finally decided to do took his life in a whole new direction. He only got himself short term jobs, and used his remaining time and resources, doing it as his duty as a reserve officer permitted, to experience life. In addition to his two favourite extreme sports, he also took up BASE jumping, and a few other things.
When Warday struck, he had just arrived on Tauron for a three week trip. Having rented himself a motorcycle, he was intending on travelling through that colony and experiencing it in a different way than just the major sights. Travelling by the mountains in a remote part of the southeastern quadrant of the planet, he was visiting some caves there and doing a bit of caving when the bombs fell.
Having planned on being away from people for a few days, it took a while before Zack learned what had happened to the colonies. It was only three days later, when he was travelling to a small town not far away, that he encountered people and realized the world as they knew it had ended. Joining up with that group of people due to the realization that strength and safety would lie in numbers those days, his military training wound up giving him a position of power in that group of survivors.
The group spent their time raiding for supplies and attacking those few cylons they could safely attack, like many other resistance groups all over the place, until one day in December of year 2041, when they encountered a group from the Battlestar Cerberus and were rescued from the planet. Not long after, he joined the crew of the Cerberus, in the Engineering department.