Nathan McNeill

Nathan McNeill was a P-Sec detective on the Aegis VII Colony, a veteran of the Resource Wars, and one of the few who lived through the Necromorph outbreak both on Aegis VII and aboard the USG Ishimura. Alongside the security officer Gabe Weller and the survivor Lexine Murdoch, he led a small group from the dying colony onto the mining ship in search of escape, only to find the Ishimura already overrun by Necromorphs.

Resource Wars and Aegis VII#

McNeill was a veteran of the Resource Wars. During a campaign on Scorpio 6 he saved Gabe Weller from a firefight after Weller was wounded, and the two carried a cordial history forward from that service. When his service ended, McNeill became a detective and was assigned to the Aegis VII Colony. He and Weller reconnected on the colony, though their temperaments clashed and they often argued over the right course of action.

As the colony began to fall into the violence and paranoia of Marker Dementia, McNeill was forced to fatally shoot a crazed miner named Sam Caldwell, the boyfriend of Lexine Murdoch, to stop Caldwell from killing others in the Megavents. McNeill then became the lead detective on the Caldwell case.

The Second Aegis VII Incident#

A week later, with the investigation still open, McNeill was reacquainted with Weller, now an officer aboard the Ishimura, whose team had been sent down to retrieve bodies from the colony morgue. They found the morgue empty, and the colony around them dissolving into the same madness that had taken Caldwell. When Private Karklins went mad and attacked them, McNeill was forced to kill him, and he and Weller barricaded themselves in the P-Sec headquarters.

Pushing toward the control room, the two met the Necromorphs for the first time, and McNeill found Lexine Murdoch hiding from the creatures. Despite Weller's objections, he let her join them. They unearthed Warren Eckhardt, the CEC executive in charge of the mining operation, from the wreckage of a crashed shuttle, and Eckhardt led them to a personal shuttle on the far side of the colony. The group lifted off, narrowly escaping the Hive Mind as the colony came apart behind them.

Aboard the Ishimura#

The shuttle barely crash-landed on the Ishimura, and the four had to cut their way in through a maintenance door. As they entered, Lexine was nearly lost when a damaged airlock blew her toward space, and McNeill pulled her back with his Kinesis Module. Inside, they found the entire vessel already infested. They were detained by the ship's security forces, and McNeill was knocked unconscious by a stun gun.

They woke in the Medical Bay under Chief Medical Officer Nicole Brennan, who was checking them for infection. After she accidentally triggered a quarantine lockdown, McNeill crawled through the air vents to override it by hand. From there the group worked across the ship, losing Lexine to a pack of Swarmers in the sewers before recovering her near the Hydroponics Deck, where Doctor Karen Howell helped them until she too was lost. As the survivors pressed on, McNeill, Weller, and Eckhardt began to suffer hallucinations, the early sign of the Marker's influence.

The Bridge and death#

After Eckhardt was revealed as a Unitologist who had gone mad and fatally wounded Weller, the survivors learned that escape meant shutting down the ship's ADS cannon. McNeill took the task himself, fighting through worsening hallucinations to reach the Captain's Nest on the Bridge and shut the cannons down. As he prepared to leave, a Necromorph called the Spider pinned his right arm to the floor with a spike, tearing his suit and bleeding his oxygen into space. McNeill amputated his own arm to free himself and make it back to the others.

He reached the shuttle carrying a Contact Beam and, despite heavy blood loss, helped pilot it clear of the Ishimura, telling Lexine to set course for the Sprawl and declaring that he was retiring from the fight. As they departed they overheard the incoming repair crew of the USG Kellion but could not get their warning through. Shortly after the escape, McNeill succumbed to his wounds. In the presence of a Marker signal he reanimated as a Slasher and attacked Lexine, who was forced to kill him with a P-Sec pistol.

Character#

McNeill was a P-Sec detective who, unlike Weller, showed genuine concern for the people around him and wanted the best for the group as a whole. He showed leadership on Aegis VII and, with Weller, became the effective leader of the survivors once they boarded the Ishimura. He tried to stay optimistic through the outbreak, and he appeared to have feelings for Lexine Murdoch, whom Weller teasingly counted alongside him as one of a pair of "lovebirds."