Portrait:



Name: Kiááyo Tatanka (Margareta De Luca)
"The Woman With Two Names"

Age / Date of Birth:
Was April 22nd, 1753, making her 28 years old.

Gender:
Female

Sexuality:
Bisexual

Class:
Musketeer



Skills:
-Tracking
-Healing
-Swimming/Diving
-Leadership

Equipment:
-Musket
-Knife
-2x Turnover Pistols
-Satchel of various medicinal herbs and bandages

Appearance:
Taller and more well-built than most of her female counterparts Kiááyo stands at roughly 5'9" and carries herself as she was even taller. When in a resting position her arms are folded behind her ramrod straight back, chest jutting out proudly. Black eyes shine out from a bronze colored, hawkish face, black hair kept in a neat bun. The powerful muscles of her arms and legs are almost always visible under her clothes, her toned core and back usually concealed unless she's swimming. The native woman hides her ears, the most obvious signs of her nonhuman heritage, by keeping the pointed tips tucked up into her hair or wearing a hat. While she's certainly not ashamed of her ancestry she finds it simpler to hide them from most people. Also kept hidden are the curse-deadened veins in her arms and legs, a few lines of blackened blood running up and down her body. The trails of curdled blood are positioned so that long sleeves can hide all of them, for now anyway...

When out on the high seas or trailing her quarry on land she wears an outfit of soft buckskin pants with hide boots and a simple coat to keep out the elements. A cloth scar wrapped around her mouth serves as a convenient mask to keep out dust or to use as a rag for cleaning her weapons. Leather belts wrapped around her waist and torso provide places to store her guns and powderbox as well a place to hang her satchel full of herbal remedies and bandages.
She has two sets of formal clothing, one from the Old World and one from the New. Her Old World outfit consists on a black suit jacket and pants embroidered with golden thread, silver buttons polished to a sheen. A beaver felt tricorn hat and ruffle of white linen complete the ensemble. The clothing from her tribal upbringing is much simpler, her standard coat covered by a heavy bearskin cape with designs of crows and elk painted on with a careful hand. Strands of beads wrap around her neck, a bonnet of eagle feathers on her head. Simply made dyes of black and red cover the upper portion of her face, her mouth and chin left bare.

Personality:
Kiááyo is always paying close attention to how other people are acting around her and adjusts her own mannerisms as needed. A social chameleon, the native-born Cotsch has two distinct personalities for dealing with certain types of people. When interacting with other natives or the rough gangs of bounty hunters and brigands she does business with her natural accent is allowed to roam free as she introduces herself as Kiááyo Tatanka, sometimes even it making it stronger than it naturally is. Curses and slurs slip easily from her mouth in between gulps of cheap ale and puffs of smoke, spitting the foul mixture to the floor every now and again.

In sharp contrast is the personality used when speaking with people of higher social status. If she were to meet a wealthy Arian merchant or a Caulish nobleman she would introduce herself as "Margareta De Luca sir, at your service." a well-mannered lady who speaks only in polite euphemisms and measured tones and eschews low quality swill for wine fine and gallows humor for gossip about this royal family or that trade empire.

No matter which name she uses, she's driven by her goals. Her people have been battered and pushed around by the fleets and armies of the Old World for far too long. Cochise's recognized borders aren't enough of a deterrent to keep the colonizers away, so she will carve out a new set. A country where pirates, bandits, outlaws and outlanders would fight side by side with the first nations of the New World and anyone who opposed the Old. A pirate nation that will scrape out it's own territory and bleed dry anyone who steps foot in it with the intent to steal it. One that will combine the stalking and harrying tactics of the tribes and bounty hunters with the arms of the foreign militaries they oppose.

She will achieve with flattery, bribery, threats and promises and back up her words with colt steel and hot lead. She will stop at nothing until her country is formed and her names immortalized!

And she'll do it before the curse kills her.

Biography:
Kiááyo's story begins before her birth with a Fioretzan pirate and his bride to be. Alonzo De Luca had met Margaret Arundel in a port town tavern, a gunman who had spent some ill gotten coins to see a few tricks from a talented mage. She didn't disappoint, impressing him enough with colored lights and clever illusions that he promised to come back after his next voyage. And he did, returning multiple times with gifts of jewelry stolen from all over the world. The pair struck up a friendship that blossomed into a genuine love affair that could have been a happy ending for both of them.

But some men just don't know a good thing when they see one and end up ruining it. Alonzo was one of those men. Not content with his little trysts with Margaret every few months or so the pirate convinced a Cochisic woman to follow him. Inayat was only sixteen years old to his thirty-four and was easily swayed by honeyed words and promises of adventure. But instead of swashbuckling action and tender romance she was treated to terrible food and brutal "lovemaking", learning very quickly that she was nothing more than a way for Alonzo to keep himself occupied. Unsurprisingly she ended up pregnant and unable to flee.

Pirates have always been known for their love of drink and Alonzo's crew mates were no exception. One night as he stayed on board the ship with his captive, his "beloved' learned from a drunken cabin boy just what Alonzo had been up to. When they next met she very nearly burnt him alive with conjured flames but couldn't bring herself to kill the man she once loved. Instead she cursed his unborn child. The girl would be afflicted with a magical malady that would worsen throughout her life, slowly killing her from the inside. Margaret coldly explained the effects of her spell before walking out of his life forever.

Alonzo wasn't especially broken up about it but needed a way to calm the frantic mother of his bastard child. So he returned with Inayat to her homeland so she could be with her family while he supported them with bounty hunting and robbery. When his daughter was born he looked to his old flame for naming inspiration, calling her Margareta. The girl's maternal family all called her Kiááyo and she grew up learning to speak Fioretzan and the various languages of the tribes in her area.

The effects of the curse started appearing early in her childhood. Kiááyo couldn't run as a long or play as hard as her peers, doubling over in coughing fits that would leave her sidelined. An inconvenience sure, but if this was all the curse did than she could live with it. But it revealed her true nature around the age of seven, the coughing fits lasting up to a minute at a time and forcing her to gasp desperately for air between spluttering and choking gurgles. Her spit would be tainted with reddened mucus that was sometimes tinged with black as her blood was poisoned, some of her veins looking as if they were filled with ink. While stronger than many of the other children she was left behind more and more, unable to keep with them at all.

But she refused to be made an invalid. She might have had limited time but she was going to make the most of it. She learned to wrestle and brawl, able to hold her old against bigger opponents by letting her thick arms bear the brunt of an assault before unleashing a powerful haymaker into their jaws. Like most of the people in her tribe she learned to hunt and make useful medicines out of various plant and animal matter, foul-tasting mixtures that she used to keep herself alive. She found out that she had a natural inclination for diving far beyond most people's, able to hold her breath for nearly ten minutes. And most importantly, after much pestering Alonzo taught her to shoot.

It was a life changer. She didn't have to watch her quarry disappear into the woods as she lagged behind, didn't have to live at fear that some bandit would tire her out and slaughter her while she was defenseless. With practice she would be able to take on anyone. And practice she did, blasting away at birds and crudely carved targets hung off trees. She kept practicing until she could hit a target with a bullet more than her fellows could with a boy, even joining her father on some of his manhunts when she turned fifteen. By the time she was twenty she was a fully fledged bounty hunter in her own right, making a name for herself by working with gangs of thugs to track escaped convicts and wanted assassins.

It was good money, but not enough to fuel her ambitions of forming a country. And the clock was ticking. As she got older Kiááyo became more and more aware of her occasional fits, tracing a finger over the black lines in her arm as she contemplated her own mortality. If she wanted to achieve her goals she needed three things: money, an army, and an heir. So when she received her letter of marque she leapt at the chance. Piracy would provide the money which would lead to the army, she could provide the heir herself. So the Woman With Two Names packed up her equipment and set out to follow her father's footsteps.

Name
Dr. Reti "Demoness" Kaatis

Species
Lorin

Age
64

Sexuality
Bisexual

Birth
She was born on the Homefleet freighter Alinus's Hope.

Appearance
Reti is red skinned (as are most Lorin) and proud of it, having picked the headscarf that keeps her oil black tresses decorated with silver charms out of her face because it matches her complexion. Six horns poke through and behind the locks, two diamond shaped ears laying flat against her head. They can serve as a general gauge of her mood, raising when she's excited and drooping when upset. The good doctor's face is decorated with a series of grey triangles, five dotting her brow and and one covering her chin. A final one takes up the space bewteen her eyes and runs down to just above her lips. Her left eye is a deeper shade of crimson than her skin, a catlike pupil flitting about from one point of interest to the other. The right eye is a startling contrast. Kaatis is afflicted with artificial heterochromia thanks to a violent accident that cost her an arm and half of her vision. The Replacement she was given was specially requested by her despite the fact it was made for a human. The same goes with her Cybernetic Arm, the appendage having an extra finger and is noticeably larger than the other but lacking the sharp one unique to Lorin.

When in the field Reti wears a privately purchased suit of Pathfinder Scout Armor instead of the standard issue suit, citing it's comfort, ease of movement and ample storage space. In normal environments she prefers a range of Traditional Clothes with an ornate Masked Outfit for ceremonies.

Underneath the clothing is a body sculpted by years of hunting, rough living on expeditions and exercise, her living arm and legs toned, the muscles of her back and abdomen well defined. Back when she was a younger woman with less artificial body parts a Ratian boyfriend told her she looked like "a little Demoness"and she kept the name.

Height
Five feet flat.

Personality
If someone holds two doctorates, has published multiple papers on subjects ranging from better ways to treat patients in need of critical care on inhospitable planets to the bone structure of species they discovered, they're allowed to have a little pride. Or at least that's what Reti says. Not coincidentally, she's done all that. Dr. Kaatis is more than a little proud of her accomplishments, hanging her degrees, copies of her published works and various awards and photos around her living quarters and explaining the story behind each and every one with a smile when asked. The fastest way to earn her approval is to ask questions and give compliments about her career history. The other side of the coin is that she's particularly susceptible to questions about the legitimacy of her credentials and claims. Those who insinuate that she stole work, slept her way into awards or otherwise didn't earn her position make her seethe with rage, all five feet of red skinned muscle trembling with righteous anger as she lays into them with firsthand data and stories she gained at the loss of free time, relationships, appendages and part of her sanity.

The reduction of that last one sometimes becomes very obvious if she's pushed, Reti reaching out with her cybernetic hand and lifting the naysayer by the throat. The artificial limb is more than strong enough to suspend a full grown human male in the air while she gesticulates wildly and gnashes her teeth, spitting vitriol filled arguments and curses until she gets an apology. This attitude extends into daily interactions. Reti is calm and welcoming until she feels slighted, and then responds with overwhelming force.

Even though she's a trauma surgeon and medic by training Dr. Kaatis's bedside manner is somewhat lacking. Likely a side affect of her own grievous injuries she had had to amputate, cauterize and bandage she regards all but the most life endangering of wounds as minor inconveniences at best, calmly coating them in disinfectant and setting removing pieces of shattered bone with the same amount of interest most people would show removing a splinter. Despite her nonchalant attitude she is still a talented doctor, having lost a total of ten patients during a decades long career spanning riots, crash landings, shootings, animal attacks and multi-vehicle collisions.

Even though she grew up hunting and still goes on expeditions Reti has a soft spot for animals of all kinds, treating them noticeably nicer than her humanoid patients. Her first concern is the safety of wildlife and keeping any suffering inflicted to a minimum, preferring to use corpse samples that were found dead whenever possible. When "premade" cadavers are unavailable the Lorin will prioritize shots to vital regions, even at the risk of specimen integrity being compromised.

Outside of animal and humanoid biology, Reti has a passion for movies and music from Earth before humanity really began to explore the stars, able to recall thousands of lines of dialogue and perform complicated riffs from memory. When not occupied with other work she can often be found in her quarters watching films and idly strumming away. Her favorite outdoor activities are trick shooting and racing all sorts of land vehicles. As a young girl Reti's father would set up targets in an empty storage unit on board their ship and have her blast away, forming an affection for firearms that has lasted her whole life.

The love for going as fast as possible in all manner of land-craft stems from her time with the Stargazer Cooperative, having to learn to operate all sorts of vehicles from little one seater "Blast" Bikes to full on armored half-tracks and walkers. Gunning down winding cliff side paths in old military surplus off-road vehicles and tearing across flat expanses of empty desert in dust coated ATVs instilled a craving for speed that has never wavered, not even after her near fatal accident.

At first glance it seems like there isn't enough available time in 64 years of life to gain so much knowledge and competence in so many fields. For most people that would be true, but Reti has a trick up her sleeve. Or rather, in her veins. Dr. Kaatis's tendency to indulge in stimulants of all kinds in order to maximize the amount of things she can do in a day is an open secret, consuming sugar, caffeine, legal narcotics (and illegal ones as well according to rumor) and even carefully processed gas from beam cartridges at a rate that would have killed a lesser person years ago in a mostly successful effort to stave off sleep. Her pupils are dilated more often than not, pulse so rapid it can be hard distinguish individual beats. When she's really overindulged symptoms include her skin being hot to the touch, sweat matting her hair, uncontrollable tapping of feet, running eye and nose, and extreme loss of appetite. If she refuses to eat or keep down food for more than four days, force feeding is recommended. Thanks to this incredible (some would say horrifying) regimen of keeping herself busy with work and ingesting a truly terrifying amount of stimulants Dr. Kaatis has managed to limit herself to an average of two or three hours of rest every two days, coming in the form of 5-20 minute power naps while sitting or standing.

Role
Kati is a woman of many talents, serving as a doctor, trauma surgeon, field medic, scout, designated marksmen, xeno-biologist and driver as needed.

Equipment
-Longview Trail Rifle: A modern update of a ancient human firearm the Longview fires super-heated beams of light at targets, capable of piercing through armor, cover and flesh. Its scope is capable of up to x25 magnification, controlled by a dial on the side.

-"Wandering Scholar" Plasma Pistol: This modified revolver a gift from Reti's father, custom made to be equal parts flashy and dependable. Patterned after the dependable Patterson Coil Revolver, the weapon was constructed of lightweight alloys designed for space craft and converted to fire much more powerful plasma slugs. It's lighter weight and slimmer profile means its much easier to quickdraw as well. Perfectly crafted to suit her preferences the Wandering Scholar is powerful enough to punch holes in stone and accurate enough to do so from 100 yards out. There is a trade off however. Firing the weapon causes excess gas to build up in the cylinder, eventually requiring a full drain. Under normal circumstances this isn't too much of a problem, enough gas being drained with each turn of the cylinder that the build up is manageable. But if the hammer is fanned too often, something Reti has been known to do in combat situations, the build up will reach critical levels. When this happens the guns will refuse to fire until it's been drained.

-Malus's Edge: Named after a Lorin folk hero this tomahawk is made of titanium with an edge coated in a thin layer of beam energy that can be be switched on and off. Useful for cutting through vegetation and people.

-Cybernetic Arm: A replacement limb capable of lifting 200 pounds with relative ease. It has a full range of motion and responds to it's owner's commands as if it were flesh and blood. Has a compartment for storing maintenance tools, writing utensils, and stims.

-Cybernetic Eye: A startling contrast from it angular biological sibling, this lab grown and circuitry enhanced implant is capable of x4 magnification and can switch between regular, night and thermal vision. It's also a recording device, storing up to 15 petabytes of video and audio information. The can be removed and used as a projector, displaying the data stored.

Pathfinder Scout Armor: Lightweight, durable and able to be sealed off from the outside world this armor is perfect for a scout traversing all manner of hostile terrain. Equipped with large pockets to hold all manner of equipment and compatible with extra armor plates, this set has been modfied to support an internal communications system, a covered data pad built into the arm, and grappling hook and 50 feet of steel cord.

-Mk.4 Seeker Drone: This drone is capable of serving as a lab assistant, spotter and an extra gun. Equipped with a variety of sensors and internal storage space the Seeker (nicknamed "Sekkie") can study and take samples in the field and is armed with twin coil submachine guns and reactive armor capable of surviving extended engagements. The most important feature is the steel cable attachment it can lower, able to be tied to a critically injured or endangered person to be taken back to the base camp. Using pulse propulsion technology Sekkie can reach top speeds of 70 miles an hour under optimal conditions.

-Hellspeed Drifter: A lightly armored all terrain bike capably of carrying two people, Dr. Kaatis uses this when scouting. The speed it gives her allows her to travel much father than she could on foot, having a powerful enough battery to travel for a week before needing to be recharged on the Monolith. In dire situations the bike can be fitted with a tri barreled heavy coilgun, but it rarely is.
Miscellaneous Equipment
-Electric Guitar
-Notepads and colored pencils
-Private stock of black coffee
-Private stock of Bushy Tail brand alertness patches
-Prescription narcolepsy medication
-Various brands of caffeine pills
-Male Kaatis Lizard-Cat named "Little Kat"
-Variety of tools for working on her bike and drone
-Antique Rolex watch

Previous Branch
-Homefleet Medical Officer (8 years)
-Kell University Research Team (10 years)
-Stargazer Cooperative (13 years)
-XEF Team Scout (10 years)

Biography
Reti Kaatis was born to Maleos and Targara Kaatis onboard the feighter Alinus's Hope, the youngest of three children. Her father Kaelos was a xeno-botanist and her mother Targara a doctor, the pair having meant while they were both working on a project to harness different forms of alien plant life for medical purposes. From an early age little Reti was taught the value of self-sufficiency, being left to make a new batch of food for herself after her older, faster siblings snatched the first meal. It was a habit that would stay with her even when she was old enough to keep up, avoiding the mad dash to the kitchen in favor of waiting for a quiet space to cook a meal all for her. Reti was homeschooled like the rest of her siblings, being given a solid grounding in mathematics, science, literature, Lorin history and basic mechanics, soaking information up like a sponge. She easily excelled on the tests the Homefleet Council required all home schooled take, finishing exams that should have taken three hours in less than half the time and receiving top marks.

When she turned ten her father took her on a weak long hunting trip to the jungle planet of Arin's Folly, showing her how to construct a hide, how to maintain and clean firearms, how to strip and field dress a kill. She picked it all up with ease, as she always did, but the biggest lesson she learned was the inherent beauty of wildlife. The way that the herds of six legged Adam's Buffalo would circle protectively around their sick and weak, the rainbow colored light reflecting off the scales of a Kretch Serpent slithering through the undergrowth, the throaty warbling of Skrellcats in heat, all of these signs of a living, breathing universe would appear in her dreams for months after the trip.

Reti would beg her father to take her on more trips every chance she got, spending her time onboard the Hope poring through periodicals on Xeno-Biology and practicing her trick shooting in an empty corner of the ship. By the time she was sixteen she was had finished all the Homefleet required coursework and was planning to continue her education at Krell Spaceport's prestigious university, studying her parents fields. She was accepted on a full ride. Medicine was interesting but Xeno-Botany turned out to be incredibly boring, not stimulating her excitement or curiosity in the least. Less than a year in she switched to Xeno-Biology, a field that she found much more up her alley.

The average length of time to complete a doctorate program after the four years of undergraduate studies at Skell University was 6 years. Thanks to her stunning scores and the couple of papers she had already publishhed Reti was considered already capable to enter the doctor's program. She completed 2 PhDs in 4 years, becoming Dr. Kaatis at the age of 20, worn and haggard after the worst four years of her life. The difficulty of the course work hadn't been a problem, but the sheer amount of it. Working 14 hour days on research papers and dissertations the young woman quickly turned to stimulants and sacrificed free time and relationships in her drive to impress her parents and herself. She succeeded at the cost of her mental health, her psyche permanently cracked. She was going to prove herself to be the top scientist in the UGC no matter the cost!

And she set out to do just that, taking up a variety of positions that would allow her to gain as much knowledge as possible. 8 years as a medical officer in the Homefleet taught her how to reduce inefficiencies in patient intake and how to create a better system of storage for anesthetics and artificial organs. 10 years working for her alma mater as a member of a research team credited her with the discovery of multiple animal species, earning her a medal from the UGC council and and ceremony congratulating her in the Homefleet.

She began to slow down when the Stargazer Cooperative tapped her for a long term residency in their newly established commune on Farhome IV. The serene plains and laid back atmosphere seemed to have a calming affect on her, her drug intake tapering off and her constant need to do something mellowing out. She even found a boyfriend, one Heskal Pelfir. He taught her to handle the different vehicles the commune had on hand, the pair heading out on multiple day long drives. They would scream across salt lakes and down hills, pushing the engine of every vehicle to its limits.

Predictably it ended in disaster. During one of those brutal endurance runs their jeep hit a bump at 80 miles an hour and left the ground, dropping into a small ravine. Lars miraculously survived with only a few fractured ribs and a concussion. Reti's injuries were much more serious, having been thrown through the windshield and then dragged under the car. A shard of glass eviscerated her eye, more than a ton of hot metal crushing her arm and nearly tearing it off her body. Half blinded and with her limb hanging on by a few threads of bloody bone shards and stringy sinew Reti had to roll down into the ravine, drag herself to the smashed up jeep and dig around for her tomahawk before hacking through the tendons of her arm at the shoulder and removing her lacerated eye, cauterizing her stump and empty eye socket with the beam of her blade.

Needless to say, it was a painful experience. The accident didn't dissuade Reti from wanting to go fast but it did push her away from her fellow Stargazers. Within a months time she had broken up with Heskal and headed offworld for a job with the Xeno Expeditionary Force. In exchange for her medical and biological expertise she was given scout and marksmen training as a cybernetics to replace what she had lost. For reasons known only to hear Dr. Kaatis requested an eye and arm made for humans, round pupil and bulging synthetic muscles fibers contrasting with her remaining crimson cat eye and her toned frame.

Reti served in the XEF with distinction, attracting the attention of the Andromeda Program. When offered a position she jumped at it, citing a "need to move on already."

Affiliations
-Kaelos Kaatis (Father)
-Targara Kaatis (Mother)
-Min Kaatis (Brother)
-Xul Kaatis (Sister)
-Frank Kaatis (Brother, Adopted)
- Heskal Pelfir (Amicable Ex)

Relationships [Optional]
TBD

Character Theme
TBD

Name
Kazankova Dasha Bykov

Aliases
Casanova, Dasher, Kaz, Jack-Ov

Nationality
]American

Age
30

Sexuality
Bisexual

Birth
January 2nd, 2001, Guam

Appearance
There is no place in Neo-Tokyo where Kaz doesn't stand out. Taller than nearly every man she meets by a good few inches and towering over most women by nearly a foot, she has to duck to get through doorways. If her height wasn't enough of a give away there's also the matter of her pale skin and green eyes. She's very clearly not native to Japan or even Asia, a mercenary hired out to assist the NSF. She doesn't even bother trying conceal herself, standing with her back straight as she pushes her way through busy crowds with ease. She doesn't put any particular stock in her appearance, wearing the basic NSF uniform with it's armor removed in the field and the same set of jackets, shorts and t-shirt when not on duty.
Height
6 feet and 2 inches

Personality
Kaz is morose at the best of times and downright despondent at the worst. Ever since her Fangtech injector system malfunctioned levity has been a meaningless word to her, one she would never experience. On a normal day her face is permanently fixed into a near frown, usually only speaking when spoken to and not carrying conversations any longer than they have to go on. Her bad days are usually spent with her face screwed into a permanant sort of snarl, her brain unable to properly process her annoyance at being cut off in traffic or what have you so it turns into barely contained anger.

Role
Heavy Weapons and Support Specialist, can serve as a Breacher when needed.

Weaponry
-RIN-78 Minigun:A belt fed beast of a weapon. Weighing just under 100 pounds and capable of chewing through body armor, walls and light vehicles KAz is only able to handle this thanks to her cybernetically enhanced strength.
-Amaris EPDW:A lightweight grenade launcher marketed as an "explosive personal defense weapon,it can be loaded with up to six different grenades of varying types such as fragmentation, high explosive, breaching charges, chemical rounds and flashbangs.
-Pankration Gloves:Thick leather gloves reinforced with metal and circuitry that serve two purposes. The first is to simply allow Kaz to punch with her full strength without shattering the bones in her hand while ensuring she shatters someone else's. The second is to zap the person on the receiving end of the punch with twenty million volts of electricity.

Augments
Fangtech Injector System (Mk. Dasher): A modified version of the original injector system she was fitted with, this one has been specially insulated to make sure it can't be shocked into malfunctioning again. Besides that it functions the same as it used to, allowing her to release specially designed Berserker combat drugs into her system as needed. These drugs essentially keep her fight or flight instincts turned to Fight, increasing her reflexes and speed while also helping the body to stop bleeding faster. She will hit harder, faster and with no hesitation. The downside is that using them for too long a period will fatigue her organs, forcing her heart to beat faster and her kidneys to try and purge the toxins. Too long using them and she'll either suffer a catastrophic heart attack or simply turn into little more than an enraged beast.

The drugs are also based off her adrenaline levels. The more danger she's in the bigger an adrenaline rush she gets which in turns fuels the Beserker to push her harder.

Muscle Enhancement and Bone Strengthening: Dasher's muscles have been interwoven with synthetic threads to provide increased strength and protect them from tears. This allows her to carry her gear with little strain, as well as making her a formidable melee opponent with the ability to shatter concrete blocks. Her bones have been artificially subjected to repeated micro breaks and allowed to heal, grafts of thin metal coating her shins, elbows, ribs, spine and skull. The end result is a slight increase in physical durability, not enough by it itself to stop any but the lowest caliber of bullets can deflect glancing knife blows and shrapnel.

Eyes: Instead of relying on an external HUD Kaz has chosen to get it integrated directly into her eyes. She can choose to display all relevant information directly on her field of view as well as switching between normal, thermal and sonar vision. The third one in particular is very useful indoors, Dasher using it pick out targets behind walls and in cover before shooting through it.

Previous Careers
-United States Army
-Cardinal Command Security Consulting

Biography
Kazankova Dasha Bykov was born at Anderson Air Force Base Hopsital on the tiny island of Guam to Margaret Lyman, and American servicewoman, and Adrik Bykov, her Russian national husband. The marriage was already rocky and the birth of their daughter only seemed to worsen things between the couple. Before she was even one year old Kazankova's parents had separated. Margaret would have her during the school year, Adrik would take care of her during the summer months. And so her childhood was spent mostly on the move, traveling from base to base with her mother only to fly off to Moscow every June. It was hard to make friends this way, barely having enough time to settle into a school before being shuffled out and having to explain to every interested child that no she couldn't come over for pool parties and barbecues this summer, she had to go to Russia with her father.

Without any real friends available to hang out with young Kaz had to find ways to amuse herself, taking up an early interest in the fields of robotics, cybernetics and weapons technology. While waiting for her classmates to finish a test she would read magazine articles about improvements on prosthetic limbs, her room filled with various half completed mechanical devices she would tinker with before losing interest. Her life revolved around working out with her mother and dissembling and reassembling various household appliances to figure out how they worked, with very little in between. Whenever something went wrong she could bury herself in her hobbies. During the days after Tokyo was immolated in nuclear fire when her mom would pace the kitchen floor, on edge and preparing to be called up to go fight in some irradiated field, she almost never left her room.

Her interest in robotics flourished and by the time she was a senior in high school she had won multiple state and national level contests. These victories won her scholarships to a number of engineering schools and she was being heralded as the poster child for the next generation of robotics experts and cybernetics designers. But she decided against that, having had enough of formal schooling. Instead she became Private Bykov of the United States Army, much to the chagrin of both parents who had wanted more for her.

While in the Army Bykov volunteered for a number of programs that allowed her to field test cybernetic augments as they came off the production line, taking an interest in their inner workings. Most of them turned out to work fine, enhancing her capabilities in the field with little to no trade off. But the Fangtech injector system gave her pause. Kazankova had managed to get her hands on a copy of the blueprints and almost immediately spotted major flaws in the system. When she tried to raise the issue she was essentially ordered to shut up and get the implants. So she did, and for a year or so they did their job. She was faster, stronger, more dangerous and agressive, pushing through at any cost with almost no concern for her safety. It came at a cost of her humanity, Kaz feeling herself slip into the mindset of an angered bear every the drugs slipped into her system.

And it all went catastrophically wrong. When deployed to Afghanistan an IED set at a power substation she was guarding went off, the discharge of electricity overwhelming her injection system, triggering a massive overdose. Bykov dropped to the ground instantly, foaming at the mouth and bleeding from her eyes. She was left comatose for a week. There was a nurse on hand when she woke up which was how the alarm was raised. Kaz was still gripped by a murderous frenzy, snarling as she pummeled the nurse to death with her bare hands and blinded an orderly with a vicious headbutt before she could be subdued. It was another three months before she was able to go unrestrained, and a year after that before she was ruled as mentally stable.

There were no legal repercussions for her violent outburst. The courts found no fault with her, how could they? She had been ordered to use an unstable and untested set of combat drugs and it had unsurprisingly gone wrong. What she couldn't escape was guilt. Every time she closed her eyes she could see the look of shock and pain on the nurse's face, could hear a man's skull cracking and giving way as she drove her head into it. She was suffering from intense feelings of guilt and paranoia. More than that, she was no longer able to feel positive emotions. A side effect of her massive overdose was that her frontal lobe was permanently damaged, her emotional balance disturbed. Negative emotions such as anger and jealousy were magnified while any bit of happiness was so subdued it might as well as not been there.

Trapped in a sort of humorless nightmare and with nothing else to turn Kazankova became a mercenary, signing onto Cardinal Command Security Counseling as a heavy weapons expert and squad support, eventually getting loaned out to the NSF.

Affiliations
- Margaret Lyman (Mother)
- Adrik Bykov (Father)

Relationships [Optional]
TBD

Character Theme
TBD

Name
Daiyu Li

Nationality
Chinese

Age
30

Sexuality
Bisexual

Birth
January 2, 2001, Hong Kong

Appearance
Daiyu prides herself on her looks when not in the field, taking great care to look presentable at all times. Her hair is kept in place by ornamental combs and pins to keep it from hiding her face, wearing designer blouses with necklines that could described as impractically low and sunglasses that cost more than some people's cars. Her sleeves are almost always short and her midriff is often exposed to show off the intricate tattoos running across her body. For special occasions where some quaint show of deference to her host country is needed she'll switch to the collection of elegant silk kimonos she has in her closet. She makes no effort to disguise her robotic arm, happy to recount the story of how a stubborn horse fell on it's side with her under it. What she does keep hidden is that her right pinky is a prosthetic as well, albeit a much higher quality one.

When on duty she opts for a lightweight version of the NSF uniform, preferring the increased mobility over armor.

Height
5 feet 9 inches

Personality
Daiyu tends to be quiet both in her professional and personal life, usually content to just fade into the background and listen. If one were to make conversation with her she'd be a good participant, if not a particularly vocal one. She listens intently, often facing away from the other person as she mulls over their words but asking question just to show she's paying attention. But she shares little about herself and even less of it is true. You can learn all sorts of things about people by paying attention and waiting for them reveal more than she should. What sort of watch their wife got them for their birthday, how long they're going to be away from home on vacation, how badly they're in need of quick cash. Why would she risk revealing her own liabilities when she can pick up on those of others? Li is a very good listener, a comforting shoulder to cry on as she carefully catalogs any weaknesses. At this point its more of a habit, years of casing places for burglary and sizing up desperate salarymen to determine just how exorbitant of an interest rate for a loan you can squeeze out of them will do that to a person. Daiyu doesn't raise her voice except under dire circumstances, keeping calm and thinking carefully when presented with challenging situations. Her problems are approached with a clear head and resolute demeanor, emotion isn't allowed to interfere with finding a solution. Whether that solution is briefcase full of cash, a knife in the dark or a hasty retreat, she's always sure that it was the most reasonable option available.

A con artist and thief before she was a hired blade Daiyu puts a premium on politeness, never forgetting a name, face or son's birthday. She has a Rolodex of minor underworld figures local and otherwise, businessmen, celebrities, all manner of people's she worked for, with and against. You never know when that cop who you slide a few thousand yen for a deposit on a home to can be convinced to report a suspect as having escaped, or when you can get an invite to a very exclusive fundraising party from a certain high rolling up and coming politician who really doesn't want some of his indiscretions coming to light. Daiyu excels at these sort of games, enjoying the give and take atmosphere of the web of lies and owed favors that connected high society with the low.

One of the only topics that gets her genuinely animated is art. She can talk for hours about the Renaissance masters or the sculptures of ancient Greece and the pop art movement of the mid 1950s or really any major era of artwork. She fancies herself a bit of collector, having a few minor pieces on display as well as quite a bit more that were never officially sold, or even sold at all.

Role
In the field she serves as an Assault unit, her speed making her a good candidate for smash and grab type operations. Out of common she serves as a sort of public face for the NSF, an immigrant who enmeshed herself completely into Japan and became a successful entrepreneur before signing up to protect her adopted home. She's used to shake donations out of her high society friends and can sometimes provide intel sourced from less savory contacts.

Equipment
Hewit Bullstoper-Chambered in .45 ACP this revolver is tough, sturdy, easy to use and easier to maintain.

Model 155 SMG-Lightweight enough to be wielded with one hand and with an integrated suppressor, it's perfect for quiet work.

Rope Dart-Useful for either rappelling up and down buildings or catching fleeing suspects, the dart can either dig into soft targets with it's bladed tip or latch onto buildings with it's prongs.

"Dàojiā" Pattern Jian- An elegant weapon for a more civilized age. This ancient designed has been updated for the modern age with a carbon steel vibroblade capable of dealing with modern armors. Eccentric yes, but no less dangerous.

Left Arm- A cybernetic replacement for the arm she lost in a horse riding accident, or so she claims. The arm isn't any stronger than a normal flesh and blood limb but can more of a beating .

Datapads- One is used simply for recording information that she'd rather keep private. Daiyu had it's ability to connect to networks removed to keep people from prying into her business. The other is a standard issue model where her more public data goes.

Reflex Enhancements- Exactly what it sounds like. Thanks to a series of implants connected to her spine Daiyu can process information faster than an unaugmented human could. Useful for ducking behind cover when shots start flying, or just a fun party trick.

Previous Careers

-Founder, CEO and President of Yùnqì Hé Zhīshì Brokerage (Public Knowledge)

-Affiliate of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime family (Not Public Knowledge)

Biography
Daiyu was born in Hong Kong to Wei and Chen Li, a new addition to a household that was barely making ends meet as it was. Her father Wei was a night security guard and her mother Li worked as a janitor for the cramped tenement they lived in. Two minimum wages jobs had hardly been enough to feed them and Wei's aging father, the introduction of another people was nearly catastrophic. Daiyu's earliest years were spent listening to her parents argue about money while Grandpa Min held her. By the time she was five the situation had gotten so dire that the family emigrated to Japan, settling into the Adachi district of Tokyo. The daughter managed to pick up Japanese pretty quickly but had a heavy accent for much of her childhood, marking her as a foreigner. She got into fights often, throwing punches at any kid who mocked her accent or place of birth no matter how much bigger or older they where. After the third black eye before her seventh birthday her Grandfather made her an offer: if she kept her grades up he'd teach her the arts of Taijin sword-fighting and Heihuquan, better known as Black Tiger kung fu.

Daiyu of course agreed but found that she had actually enrolled herself in an extended lesson on remaining calm. Both arts are incredibly aggressive by nature but any time she lost control or put more focus on brute force than technique the lessons would stop and she'd be sent to her room to read in silence. As her skill increased so did her patience, Daiyu internalizing the importance of staying level-headed in any situation. She also began to branch out, making more friends at school and taking an interest in other martial arts, especially western boxing and jiu-jitsu. Whenever she was in class she was paying closer attention to other students than the lesson, picking up on any important gossip she could.

It was sheer luck that the Li family wan't reduced to ash by the nuclear fire that consumed half of Tokyo. They had returned back to Hong Kong to visit with family for Daiyu's twelfth the day before the bomb was dropped, crowded around a tiny TV set in an aunt's living room as the reports came in. Their home was one of the many that were completely destroyed. It took months for them to be allowed back in, Daiyu staring wide eyed at ruin. Although she would never admit it, she would also feel that after centuries of imperialism and refusing to answer for the atrocities they had committed, the Japanese deserved a good hit every now and again.

The slums that bordered the bombed out districts where the perfect place to go exploring, Daiyu picking through abandoned homes for valuables and putting on impromptu demonstrations of her skills for the others kids that were hanging around. Her standing challenge to any kid that wanted to test themselves against what she had learned was taken up by the leader of a small group of street toughs who sent his biggest friend to knock her down a peg. It cost her a few nasty cuts but Daiyu prevailed and was brought in as one of the "boys", so to speak. She quickly got used to it, learning to pick pockets and serving as a lookout while her gang raided unattended cars and slipped through open windows. One of her favorite jobs was when she got to play the lost little girl or the desperate hitchhiker, getting people to open their hearts and their wallets with a few tears. As they got older the gang moved into smuggling cigarettes and bootleg electronics, even occasionally dealing in narcotics. For a bunch of sixteen year olds the money was great, but they were also way in over their heads. The gang was found out by a local underboss of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate and told to join up or die.

Understandably they decided to join up. Daiyu's talent for creeping around the slums translated into a natural affinity for cat burglary,climbing up to second and third story fire escapes and slipping in in search of jewelry or loose cash. One of her gangs duties was to work at a mechanic's garage that served as a money laundering front, mostly there to look busy and keep people from asking too many questions. Daiyu would hang around the back when she could, listening with interest as smugglers and enforcers talked about business. Every time she turned up she was shooed away until the man running the store, Aito, took an interest in her. The young Chinese immigrant was taken under his wing, Aito showing her how to handle money and deal in the world of legitimate business. From the office overlooking the garage Daiyu began to work longer and more profitable cons, squeezing desperate people with exorbitant loans and defrauding clueless tourists with bogus theft insurance. All the while she was continuing to steal, gradually becoming more respected in the eyes of the Yakuza. As a foreigner she could never inducted in properly but she was appreciated for the steady income she brought in from her cons and heists, as well as her kowtowing to local customs. As a show of respect she had gotten tattoos across her back and arms that evoked the infamous markings of the Yakuza and would often dress in traditional Japanese attire, learning customs and showing deference to her superiors.

And that would have been enough for her to stay in a stable position as a tolerated and maybe even accepted outsider if everything had gone right. But it was not to be. As her heists got more elaborate and her reputation grew more people wanted in on the action, her already small cut being encroached on by the sons of proper members of the family. She was forced to scramble and try and cope with untrained and unskilled brutes on jobs that required a light touch. Predictably one of them screwed up. A routine burglary of a high end apartment went wrong and her partner was killed and her left arm shattered into uselessness when their get-away vehicle was hit by a van. She was carried out of the wreck and sent to a private doctor who had experience with patients who needed extra discretion.

As soon as she woke up Daiyu was on trial. The money invested in planning had all gone to waste and the son of a mid level Yakuza soldier was dead on her watch. She had been allowed to stick around as long as she had been making money but their patience had run out. Daiyu was surrounded by eight hard faced men who were ready to kill her and dump her corpse into the harbor without a second thought, with no way out. So she did the only thing she could.

She began to talk.

The botched heist had been the exception, not the rule. For years now she had been a faithful source of income, regular payments from her various scams supplemented by healthy bonuses from heists. Surely it would be a waste to throw that all away. Why not let her live so she could keep working for them? She be giving them a much larger cut of course, as penance. It was a long shot and she knew it, but luckily they agreed. She was under the thumb of the Yakuza now. They would be taking most of any money she made, as well as something else. Daiyu managed to convince herself to be grateful that their was disinfectant on hand when they made her amputate her own remaining pinky finger.

She was twenty one years old and needed to start earning money. She managed to plead with Aito for a loan and opened up a brokerage firm, learning the ins and outs of the stock market as she went. With a competent team of investors hired the firm was turning a decent profit by itself, but more than that it was an opportunity. It provided a way for her to launder the money coming in from the odd jobs and crimes of opportunity she was doing, and she could charge a fee to keep other people's money safe as well. The dirty money she brought in allowed her to hire more experts and move to a nicer building in recently built Neo-Tokyo, attracting more clients with more clean cash so she could wash more dirty money and use those fees to attract more...

It was a tenuous potion sustained by spending dangerous men's money on risky gambles to keep the Yakuza off her back while hoping the whole cyclical system didn't collapse like a house of cards. It was stressful, nerve-wracking, infuriating to see millions of yen that should have been hers go into someone else's pockets. And she loved every moment of it. There was a thrill to having to keep up a presentable exterior for the outside world while fielding inquiries and demands from the scum of society, a certain knack needed to keeping the whole ship from sinking. By the time she was twenty four she had managed to get it to a point where it could stand on its own. More than that, she was part of high society. Wealthy celebrities and industry leaders had shown up to her for help managing their portfolios on the recommendation of their bookies and dealers and the properties of their favorite brothels. Using her talent for saying just what people wanted to hear Daiyu got herself invited to dinners and parties and private screenings where she was introduced to more socialites and members of high society in need of a very polite, very intelligent and very discrete investment expert who was also willing to help make your financial records look a bit cleaner. It was another circle and soon Yùnqì Hé Zhīshì Brokerage and its charismatic young founder were front page of magazines and websites throughout Japan and the world.

No matter how much money she handled, no matter how many rich snobs she was invited to play golf with, Daiyu would always belong to the Yamaguchi family. So when they told her to sign up with the NSF to keep an eye on them, she did without complaint. Privately she knew that someone of her caliber was wasted on spy work. She also knew that it was probably an order from the father who's son she had apparently gotten killed in hopes of her catching a bullet. But what could she do? She was still a foreigner and always would be, even after two decades of trying to integrate herself. And so one of the biggest success stories in Neo-Tokyo signed up and smiled for pictures and made a statement about how she loved her adopted home so dearly she couldn't stand by and let it be torn apart, she was already starting to form a new plan.

Affiliations
-Wei Li (Father)
-Chen Li (Mother)
-Min Li (Grandfather)
-Wei Li (Father)
Relationships [Optional]
TBD

Extras
-Speaks Chinese, English and Japanese fluently
-Has a penthouse in downtown Neo-Tokyo for entertaining her high society friends, but spends most of her time in a rundown studio apartment on the outskirts of Old Tokyo.
-Has a private plane and personal driver.
-The art in her penthouse is all either recreations of great works or more contemporary pieces. The real ones are kept in the tenement building whose top floor she owns under a different name.
-Drops and picks up languages and accents as needed.

---

---_{P E R S O N A L I T Y}


---_{B I O G R A P H Y}

In her infantile years, Liz was essentially raised by the late Grandma Liz, from whomst she earned her name. It was difficult being raised by one so advanced in age, but at the very least, there was food on the table thanks to Mama Vicky's paychecks. When Vicky returned from the war, she moved out with her. Vicky treated her...distantly, affirming her love for her, but then soon lashing out for being the cause of her life getting ruined. Liz was fed, kept warm and given clean clothes, but none of this provided shelter to Victoria's vicious drunken rants, where she would often lament the unexpected birth of a child turning an already difficult life into one of unbridled torment.

Nothing she did was satisfactory, no matter the endeavor or scale. Victoria constantly pushed her to do something more impressive or worthwhile to avoid repeating the same life she had. Paired with a mother still in the military, Liz had to bounce around from base to base with her mom, eventually winding up in boarding school. Soon after, however, a most unexpected appearance turned to the fold; Her biological father had came back into her life. Victoria was furious. Immediately, she scathed him viciously with vernacular no child should be witness to bear, but after her intense pleas, Victoria was eventually convinced by her grandmother to allow Liz to know her dad.

Charles and Liz got along well enough, never to the relationship of a true father and daughter, his role more like that of a distant bum-cousin who lets her crash at his place and keep his other kids out of his hair for a while when her mom was, "being a cunt." When she got away, Liz discovered a love for the arts, picking up painting and drawing as a way to kill time with her half-siblings and later photography when she got a cheap camera as a gift. Book-writing came from her mom's, Diana's, and Luke's stories about the war, Liz turning them into adventure stories and selling them under pseudonym.
For what seemed like the first time in her life, Liz's mom appeared thoroughly impressed with her work. No longer were her compliments peppered with notions of missing potential nor mediocrity, instead, Victoria was rather proud that her little mouse of a daughter could muster up the courage to put herself out in the world, and strongly encouraged her to continue to refine her skills. For a while, she did just that.

But, Liz knew the cycle was bound to continue, and if she had just gotten better, then her mom was going to take that for granted, too.

And in a perhaps misguided attempt to solidify her mother's praise, she enlisted in the military and specifically aimed for placement in the Ranger Corps, putting herself in a position Victoria tried so hard to divert her from.

---_{P O T E N T I A L S}

Renaissance Woman: Liz devotes much of her free time to her crafts, scribbling down notes for stories and sketches or blocking out shots when not on duty. While not open about her double life it wouldn't be impossible for someone with "Captain Harris West's" work to notice some similarities...
Morbid: Growing up listening to vivid descriptions of carnage will affect a kid. Liz has an interest with death and decay than can be more than a little disturbing to passer-by. Some of her favorite subjects for her art are corpses and she may or may not have a necklace of bird bones stashed in her kit.
Friend of Nature: Animals of all kinds are very dear to Liz's heart. She saves parts of her meals to leave out for wildlife and can spend hours just observing the birds. She has affection for other animal lovers and one of the only things that makes her angry is cruelty to critters.

---_{E Q U I P M E N T}

- LF-ASR No. 1
- Camo-Cloak
- Ragnaid
- BD-3 Light Armor
- Feedback Screecher (Gizmo)
- Personal Camera (Requisitioned)

---_{A F F I L I A T I O N S}

- Charles Blake (Father)
- Victoria White (Mother)
- Luther Godfrey ("Cousin")
- Emma Godfrey (“Cousin”)
- Mary Blake (Half-Sister)
- Mark Blake (Half-Brother)

---_{R E L A T I O N S}

- Luke Godfrey (Her "uncle" that she spent summers with)
- Diana Godfrey (Her "aunt" and the origin of her middle name)
- Soot (Her friend and closest confidant)

-

---

-A Template by Load Wraith

Name
Miracle Morgan (Formerly Bian Nzuyen)

Gender
Female

Age
23, born April 1st 1936

Sexuality
Closeted Gay

Nationality
American, from Little Rock, Arkansas

Appearance
Miracle takes much more after her father than her, his dark hair, pale skin and freckles all being passed down to her. Most people assume that she's purely Caucasian, a mistake she never corrects. The only real trait she inherited from her mom was her height. Standing under five feet tall it's very easy to dismiss her as not much of a threat, an assessment she's always very happy to prove wrong. Underneath her clothing is rangy body made lean by her early years of hunger and toned by working out with her dad. Her strength is shown whenever she;s on patrol, carrying her anti-tank rocket and machine gun as easily as some men do their rifles.

When in the field Miracle wears the typical olive drab fatigues and webbing, decorating her helmet with slogans and patches picked up from various places. When at the FOB or preparing to go into the cramped rat tunnels she forgoes the jacket and helmet, choosing to wear just a tank top, pants and her holsters.

Height
4'9"

Personality
Overall, Miracle is best described as angry. Angry at the US government for sending her into some stupid war, angry at the VC bastards hiding in the trees and laying traps along the jungle floor, angry at her superior officers making her crawl around the rat tunnels with some CS gas and a pistol, angry at her parents for bringing her into this world and herself for not taking the easy way out. She handles all this anger by self-medicating and keeping her issues to herself, letting them build and build until she inevitably explodes. Her default expression is a bitter scowl, softening to a grim smirk or a cold snarl as needed.

Her complicated relationship with her parents and her ancestry has left Miracle with a intense dislike boiling on hatred of the locals she has to deal with. ARVN regulars are seen as nothing more than disposable shields, civilians are informants to be bullied for information and loot. Her knowledge of the language is used to sling insults and shake people down, all in an attempt to conceal her heritage from other members of her squad. Her sexual identity is hidden just as well, locked up out of fear over how others would see her.

The only time she can reach a state resembling relation is when she's high. A fascination with weed and prescription medication as a teen morphed into a full blown addiction. Six months of combat forced her to branch into other narcotics, picking up cocaine, heroin and LSD from the many unscrupulous servicemen with stateside connections.

Rank
Private First Class

Role
Switches between Heavy Gunner, Tunnel Rat and Translator as needed.

Equipment







Biography
Miracle Morgan was originally named Bian Nzuyen, the daughter of two immigrants. Her father Gael was a naturalized citizen of the U.S. and Marine with a fondness for drinking, gambling and women. Her mother Hau was a frightened new arrival from French Indochina who worked as a washerwoman and errand-runner. How they met was never explained but the result was a half Vietnamese, half-Welsh bastard whose father wanted nothing to do with her. Before she was even born he was gone, leaving behind some money and instructions for Hau to never contact him.

Bian spent the first decade of her life in poverty, wearing second and third hand clothes until they fell apart and eating only what could be bought in bulk or for pennies. There was no money for anything but the bare essentials, nothing was wasted. Nearly every meal consisted of rice, bread and whatever meat was left over at the butcher's shop. The rationing of World War 2 actually improved their diet, the Emergency Price Control Act allowing Hau to buy things like coffee and sugar for the first time.

Despite taking more after her father in terms of looks, Bian was still very distinct from her peers. Her mother's thick accent stuck with her for her early years, something she was mocked for in school. There was often little difference between the Japanese and other Asians in her classmate's eyes, and she quickly became known as "Jap" and "Zipperhead". The teachers did little if anything to stop it so she took it upon herself, scrapping with any and everyone that had a problem with her. It was a tendency that would follow her throughout her life.

By late 1944 Gael had returned to the States, sent home by one of the coveted million dollar wounds. To the surpise of both Bian and her mother he wanted to take custody of her after years of little more than letters and postcards. Hau refused at first, desperate to hold onto her little girl. But Bian was a child who couldn't help but feel like her mother had failed her, dressing her in too big clothes and being unable to protect her from the abuse she suffered at school. She choose the man who had done nothing to help her, following Gael and leaving Hau broken hearted.

Gael was certainly able to provide a better home and a better standard of living, but he was certainly a worse parent. Within the first month of her arrival it became clear that his personal biases and trauma were not going to make it easy to raise his half-breed bastard. She had a habit of singing to herself in Vietnamese before it was beaten out of her, Gael letting her know that he "hadn't gotten myself shot by some slant-eyed fuck only for my daughter to refuse to speak properly." And she didn't just stop speaking Vietnamese around him. She worked hard to lose her accent and present herself as something more familiar, asking him to give her a new name. Miracle was chosen out of a phone book.

Gael had wanted a boy and her set about raising Miracle as he would his son, pushing her into sports and shooting and other traditionally male pastimes. She was short but vicious, able to hold her own on the scrimmage line and in the boxing ring. When Gael opened a moving company she would come along to assist, building her strength with every couch and fridge she helped load into the truck. The better food and emphasis placed on physical activities like hiking or wrestling made Miracle much healthier than she had been before.

Physically. Mentally she was suffering under the weight of desperately trying to change what she could about herself and hide what she couldn't. Gael's casual usage of slurs was picked up by Miracle and intensified, spewing all sorts of harsh language at people who gained her ire. When she was fourteen she cautiously broached the topic of her burgeoning attraction towards other girls only to be quickly and resolutely shot down by her father. So she did her best to write it off, going through a string of boyfriends through her teen years to try and prove it was just curiosity. She had no luck. By the end of high school she was smoking weed and abusing prescription medication, and it only got worse when she entered college.

When she visited her mother Hau could see that she was falling apart at the seems and pleaded with her to get help. But every warning was brushed off with a dismissive non-answer or flat out ignored. Miracle had decided she was going to be what her father wanted her to be or die trying, and to that end choose to leave college for the Marine Corps in hopes of finding pride in herself there.
Affiliations
-Gael Morgan (Father)t
-Hau Nzuyen (Mother)

Relationships
An optional segment that can be updated as it goes along, though most of the time this can just be merged into the affiliations tab.

Character Theme
Not necessary, but can be used if wished.

Name: "Coyote"

Appearance:


Age: She lost track of the exact number long before living memory but rounds to 1.5 or 2 million years.

Bio: Back before mankind was doing anything as complicated as living in caves and struggling to make tools out of sharp rocks and sticks the woman who would come to be known as Coyote was already old. She had a family, a home friends, was a Custodian and proud of it, why wouldn't she be? Her kind was brought into existence as the embodiment of perfection, already at the height of their abilities unlike lesser creatures who had to dig themselves out of the primordial soup with their newly grown legs. But she didn't complain, kept her opinions on lesser beings to herself. And when some of her brethren rose up in open rebellion she stayed out of it, staying home to care for her daughter while her husband fought against the traitors. Her husband and daughter were killed within days of each other and she was left alone, mourning her loss and their sacrifice.

When the rebellion ended she was cut off, exiled with the rest of her race despite her having been neutral. The One didn't see fit to distinguish between the loyalists and rebels and threw out the whole batch. The woman known as Coyote was completely blindsided by this turn of events, barely haven gotten any time to mourn the loss of family before being told she was guilty by association. She and the rest of her kind had been rejected in favor of their creator's new plaything: humanity. Driven to the brink of madness by rage and grief she decided to lash out at them, joining the Collective and hunting Descendants.

And she was damn good at it. After a few years of practice she could move into an area under an assumed name and get to work, rooting out Descendants and their Repentant allies and hunting them down with ruthless efficiency before moving onto the next region. Each time she upped sticks she reinvented herself, adopting a new name and aesthetic and changing her fighting style. At one point she was an armored knight on horseback, another a wandering fortune teller and thief. Each time she renewed herself she'd pick up new tricks and gadgets to use next time. Some of the trophies she scavenged were usable with only a little refurbishment and others needed a complete disassembly and repair. Tinkering and creating mechanical devices were skills she gained through countless hours of practice.

At some point a Descendant managed to catch her off guard with their magic, a nasty head wound permanently damaging her memory. Random gaps just disappeared with no explanation and she could never be sure which of her experiences would simply fade away without warning. This was around the time (roughly anyway, within three hundred years or so) that she began to settle down. Hundreds of bodies and thousands of years later the wayward Custodian's rage finally began to wear off, finding a new place to finally settle down and raise a family

And another. And another. And more and more, each dead spouse and child that moved away burning another hole in her already injured heart. For millennia she had considered humans to be beneath her and now that she was growing allowing herself to grow attached to them she was finding that old wounds were reopening.

And so she started to wander again. She was Margaret the seamstress for a time, then Nokasis the archer, Alexander the swordsman for a bit. At some point it occurred to her that she couldn't remember her true name, lost to time with those of friends, loved ones and mortal enemies. She continued on, working as a mercenary, bandit, bodyguard and hunting all sorts of mundane and magical beasts before moving on in search of the next contract.

Her stint as a resistance fighter in Hermannreich began entirely by accident. She had established herself as an armed robber and gun-for-hire under the name Liberty and accepted a job to cause a distraction to draw police attention. The same group later had her track down an informant and then deliver a weapons shipment to a safe house. After ten years she had inadvertently become a core member of a group of radicals and revolutionaries, leading raids because she had nothing better to do. Liberty had never been one for politics but the irony of her now fighting against a Descendant-genocidal regime was not lost on her. It was the closest she had to a purpose in lifetimes. And just like everything else it came to a violent end. The troops of the Reich eventually closed in on them, killing most and capturing a few for show trials. The Custodian fought her way out and split from her remaining allies to make her own way in the world.

Another few decades passed and she was now Coyote, a gunslinger and mechanic from Hermannreich seeking refuge in Iliad. With no real plan for the future she enrolled in Marduk and set up shop, repairing everything from computers to watches to stoves.

Mundane Skills: Thousands upon thousands of years of relying on no one but herself has made Coyote very self-sufficient. Her skill with firearms with firearms and melee combat, at levels obtainable only through eons of practice. She is a skilled alchemist and machinist, modifying her gear and crafting different types of ammo for different types of targets,and has a penchant for explosives. Her careers of planning and foiling assassinations and robberies give her a good sense of small-scale tactics, her specialty being ambushes and smash-and-grab type operations.

Of course like any good gunslinger she plays the guitar and harmonica, filling lonely nights on the range with haunting music.

Powers:
Super-Strength- Guns have the advantage of range and specialized ammo sure but sometimes there's just no substitute for brute strength. Coyote can pick up cars and throw them at people or smash her way through walls, capable of driving railroad stakes into concrete with her hands. Useful in a brawl or just when something needs to be moved.

Super-Speed- Good luck getting the draw on her. Coyote can move at about the speed of sound when running and hit Mach 2 if she were to all out sprint. Incredibly fast but also incredibly exhausting. Moving that fast for any longer than a few hours necessitates her to eat about half her weight to fuel the boost in metabolism so she tends to cruise at four hundred or five hundred miles an hour (when she's not forced to crawl along out of discretion.)

Enhanced Endurance- If she can't dodge the hit she can probably take it. Her body's incredible resilience allows her to warm her hands in open flames and evaluate the strength of her poisons by taste. Mundane weapons shatter against her body and some spells just bounce off entirely.

Equipment : Krait- One of the first things she made after being so rudely ejected from the One's favor. The glove houses a container for storing all manner of liquids and a nozzle designed to eject it as an aerosol up to 15 feet. Typically loaded with various irritating agents or toxins.

Wife and Mother- A pair of matched revolvers that were a gift from someone she can no longer really remember. Prime examples of Custodian engineering (she assumes) they generate the energy required to fire and are "reloaded" by letting the excess heat drain. It has three firing modes: a standard blast, a highly focused beam designed to punch through things and people and a shorter range scatter-shot.

Apostasy- Named back when Coyote was using it to actively fight against the One's interests, this rifle is equally good at killing Custodians and Descendants. Of course it hasn't been used for the latter in a very long time. A much less advanced weapon than her pistols it still sees a good deal of use. It's range, various ammo types, suppressor full auto capability makes it a very versatile weapon.

Savagry-A trophy taken from a particularly tough opponent and then named for what it does best. Sharp enough to a cut hair draped over, durable enough to not shatter under the strains of her usage. Also serves as a good can opener, woodcutter and mirror when properly polished.

Memory Bank: Once she started losing chunks of her memories Coyote looked for a way to preserve moments she considered important. The Memory Bank can save centuries upon centuries worth of notes, images, videos and audio recordings and display them on its face or as a holographic projection. Also shows the time.

Tools- Kept in her home for when she needs to make repairs and tinker on some new project or recipe.

The Essentials- Harmonica, guitar, hip flask, cigars and a lighter. The only things worth living for.

Personality:

Faction (Marduk, Ishtar, or Cassandra Club when it's founded): Marduk
Are you a Descendant of the Illuminated Poet?: No
Important Relations:
-Duke, Diakonissa (Husband, Daughter, both dead)
-Kane, Micah and Rachel Helegast (Husband, Son, Daughter, all dead)
- ??? Makre, Jason Makre (Husband and Son, both dead)
-Kotori Flatcreek (Girlfriend, dead)
-Eyo-Zeki (Adopted son, dead)
-Marcus ???, ???, ??? (Husband and two children, dead)
- Mihek (Concubine/Bodyguard, dead)
-Vudir, Walthred, ??? (Husband, wife, husband or wife, all dead)
-??? (Boyfriend, dead)

Theme:

Name
Natasza "Hush-Puppy" Zajac

Gender
Female

Age
30

Sexuality
Quietly Bisexual

Nationality
Polish by birth, nationalized American

Appearance
Tall and fit, beautiful in an athletic sort of way, Natasza could be described as statuesque or even stunning on a good day. When inside the wire she dresses more like a Hollywood starlet than a professional spy, wearing cotton button-ups or turtlenecks and jeans with fashionable boots and aviators. A bit of lipstick with some eyeliner and mascara brings attention to her face, the better to keep the focus away from whatever her hands may be doing. Depending on the occasion she may add to the look with jewelry "acquired" from the locals or with a few buttons of her shirt left undone to add a little extra persuasive power to her smile.

Outside the wire Hush-Puppy is an entirely different creature. The German imported Doc Martens and casual shirts are replaced with heavy combat boots and tigerstripe camouflage fatigues, naturally flawless face covered by a thick layer of paint and mud. The fanciest accessory she carries into the field is a Rolex, chosen for its ability to withstand the rivers she swims through and kept in a pocket to keep the sun from glinting off it. A patrol cap and piece of twine keeps her short hair out of her face so she can use her rifle's scope without worry. The smile she wears in the safety of the villages and cities is nowhere to be found in the jungle, Hush-Puppy keeping up an unreadable mask when working.



Height
5'8"

Personality

Natasza Zajac, otherwise known as Hush-Puppy, is in many ways the personification of this brutal new age of warfare. Combining college-educated negotiation and reasoning skills with modern era intelligence gathering and ancient savagery she's a professional spook, capable of performing all sorts of unsavory acts without flinching. Her education, her looks, her easy-going personality, all are used to get information of sources with and without their knowledge. And then when it's time to act on it she strikes swiftly and without hesitation, swimming up out of the delta or coming down from the mountains to burn, kidnap and kill as needed. Everyone in Vietnam, is either an asset, a possible asset or a problem to be removed. A firm believer in the concept of carrot and stick HP is willing to use persuasion, seduction, bargaining and violence in equal measure to achieve her objectives.

HP's relation with such concepts as religion, patriotism and morality can be murky to distinguish even for her, balancing biblical rules such as "Thou shall not kill" and women not supposed to be lying with other women with the brutal realities of her job and her sometimes "unorthodox" attractions. She struggles with her work, the absolute necessity of it making it no more enjoyable. And with each passing day she worries more for her soul. An afterlife on streets of gold and no pain seeming more and more distant as her need to serve a country and ideas she believes in makes a devil out of her. So far she's managed to walk the line, refusing to entertain thoughts of conversion or retirement while there's work to be done. After all, the Communists aren't exactly clean themselves. Hush-Puppy is content to pay penance by making them pay theirs.

Rank
Agent

Branch
CIA Directorate of Plans, on loan to MACV-SOG

Role
Long range patrols and reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, intelligence and counter-intelligence

Equipment





Biography
Natasza's earliest memories were of luxury and decadence. Born in Warsaw in 1924 to a family of landed gentry turned industrialists the youngest child of four was the most recent addition to a line of minor nobility who could trace it's roots back through to the legendary winged hussars. And as was fitting for one of her station she was tended to by a small army of doctors and servants, the horde of staff making sure she wanted for nothing. Except attention from her parents of course. Her father Jan and mother Karina were away from their estate on business trips more often than not, the near constant checking up on their steel mills and coal mines living them little time to spend with any of their children. With three other competitors seeking to claim that precious resource Natasza quickly adjusted to being alone.

in 1929 just after the new year Jan and Karina left their Polish holdings in the hands of capable underlings and moved to the American territory of Alaska, settling down in Anchorage in hopes of capitalizing on the gold, timber and fish to be found. But before final preparations could be made Black Tuesday hit. The Great Depression had hit with full force and the new business was put on indefinite hold. The Zajacs managed to avoid the worst of it and poured money into their adopted home in it's time of need.

In an effort to ease the transition into a new country the importance of national pride was impressed upon Natasza and her siblings, her parents making sure their English was immaculate and their accents non-existent. The whole family went through the lengthy process of naturalization before Natasza's ninth birthday, an event she announced excitedly to her class. She and her family had bought into the American Dream wholeheartedly, proud of both their birth country and their new one. Two flags hung from their window and expeditions into the wilderness of Alaska were regular occurrences. Natasza was especially devout in her belief, never missing a Mass or Saints Day at church. It looked like she would have the perfect all-American experience. It was an idyllic period in her life.

And then the world exploded. The family listened on the radio as Nazi Germany and Communist Russia split their homeland in two, an event that would haunt Natasza for the rest of her life. All of her siblings signed up to fight within a week of the US joining the war. None of them would make it home. Józef was shot in North Africa during Operation Torch and Leon drowned in the waters of Normandy. Teodora managed to fight her way across Europe before being killed by Soviet grenades during the Prague incident. As each telegram came home more and more burden was placed upon Natasza to succeed, the young girl not wanting her siblings deaths to be in vain.

She threw herself into her studies under the best tutors money could buy and managed to get accepted into Princeton university at only 17, earning bachelor's degrees in International Relations and Linguistics by the age twenty-three. Her plan was to join the Army but her parents wouldn't hear it, terrified at the possibility of their only remaining child meeting the same fate. It was a point of contention that nearly ripped the family apart. Her parents kept pushing her to go into politics, to use their money and connections to become somebody important just like it had been down in their homeland. But Natasza refused again and again, determined to make it all by herself. Eventually they reached a compromise: she would join the CIA. She could have a safe, quiet job as a data analyst or station head somewhere out of the way where she wouldn't get hurt.

She took the deal and signed up. Her background checks came up clean and with her outstanding academic record and background she had her pick of any of the four directorates. To the horror of her parents she picked the Directorate of Plans, getting shipped off to Camp Peary to learn how to be a spy. By 1951 she had been taught how to assemble and defuse explosives, how to hotwire cars and pick locks, the best ways to conceal items on her person and all the other various tricks someone in her field would need and was ready for her first assignment. Under the codename Odysseus she was sent to Paris to Europe to root out Soviet and Chinese operatives.

Her direct superior was a legend in his own right. Luke Dixon, better known as the Jackal, was a veteran of the OSS and an incredibly talented spy who had worked for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and spent the second World War rooting out collaborators in occupied French. He took Natasza under his wing, the young woman becoming an informal protege as she learned from a master at the craft. It was under his tutelage that her own reputation began to form, Odysseus becoming feared and respected throughout Europe's intelligence communities. For two years she rarely spent more than a week in one place before moving, crossing the continent in search of KGB assassins and Stasi assets. One particularly memorable Saturday she killed five agents in Oslo and escaped via a commandeered fishing boat.

The event that would really make her (in)famous in her field would come in 1953. Unbeknownst to her Jackal had been converted to a Russian asset a year after she started working with him, giving up state secrets and disrupting NATO operations. When this was discovered it fell to Natasza to deal with him. Jackal had been tipped off and managed to secure a car and bodyguard to make it to East Germany. With hours to spare she tracked him down and ran him off the road and into a train. Jackal was killed instantly and his heir took up the codename "Hush-Puppy" as a sort of trophy.

After that she was temporarily reassigned to Iran and Guatemala in order to assist with the American backed coups and build up the intelligence organizations of the new governments before being recalled back to Europe. She expected to stay there for the rest of her career and maybe even get that station head job her parents had talked about but instead ended up being shifted to Asian operations. His first job was in Tibet, trekking through the hazardous mountain terrain to build up a network of anti-Chinese agitators and dissident. There she learned to how to train and equip a paramilitary force. It was a skill-set that would prove invaluable in her next assignment: turning the often incompetent ARVN and the local farmers and tribespeople into proper fighting forces.

When the United States officially entered the war she gained new responsibilities, working with the newly formed MACV-SOG on Operation Phoenix and Project Eldest Son. Hunting down VIPs and sabotaging enemy efforts, she was back in her element.

Affiliations
-Jan Zajac (Father)
-Karina Zajac (Mother)
-Józef Zajac (Older Brother, Deceased)
-Leon Zajac (Older Brother, Deceased)
-Teodora Zajac (Older Sister, Deceased)
-Emily Zajac (Adoptive Younger Sister)
-Luke Dixon (Mentor, Deceased)

Relationships





Character Theme

Name: Teremity
Age: 25
Gender: Female
Race: Tiefling

Appearance: Temerity is taller than many of the people she comes across, standing at about 6'2" or even more if you count her horns. Her species is made obvious by the aforementioned horns, red eyes and blue skin marking her out as one of the half-demons. Her hair is left to run freely down to her back, bangs sometimes obscuring part of her face. Well-built and broad-shouldered her powerful arms are usually left bare to show off her muscles.

The traditional robes of her old order have been modified to suit her wants and needs, quilted padding added to the inner lining to give extra protection from attacks and a hood with holes for her horns sewn on to ward off inclement weather. Bronze vambraces and greaves allow her to deflect blows without weighing her down too much. As a final rejection of her vow of poverty Temerity adorns herself with gold and silver jewelry, piercings in her nose, ears and the spade of her tail and thin chains connecting her horns. They draw the eye to her and what she is, forcing people to be aware of her presence. New pieces are added as she picks up trophies from fights.

Favored Alignment Major and Minor Focuses: Major Focus: Chaotic
Minor Focus: Neutral

Favored Class Archetype Major and Minor Focuses: Major Archetype: Skirmisher
Minor Archetype: Divine Magic

Equipment:
-Steel tonfa
-Kusarigama
-Meditation mat
-Robes and armor
-Cestus with silver plates over the knuckles
-Pack with tinderbox, oil, hooded lamp, rope, a waterskin and a whet stone
-Gaming sets with cards and dice
-Woolen greatcoat
-Stiletto hidden in sleeve


Signature Techniques: -Styles: While familiar with others Teremity usually uses two. Viper's Fang focuses on precise strikes to vital areas to cripple foes, while Tiger's Fury focuses on overwhelming their defense with an unrelenting furry of brutal blows. Teremity switches between them as needed, flowing from one to the next and back again to keep the enemy guessing.
-Breakpoint: Channeling her ki into a single strike Temerity can damage or disable equipment by letting energy overwhelm minute imperfections, snapping swords shattering armor and breaking through doors.
-Ki Strike: Lashing out at the enemy with the very universe as her weapon. A blast of solid light leaps from her palm and slams into the target, crushing bones and burning flesh.
-Preternatural Speed: Temerity doesn't rely on the heavy plate mail of a knight but the agility and reflexes of a seasoned martial artist Temerity is capable of dodging attacks and closing distances almost faster than the eye can see. Bounding off walls and sliding between legs the tiefling uses the battlefield to her advantage.
-Dragon's Balance: Her favorite and the newest of all the forms she knows, this style is Temerity's own creation. Allowing her ki to diffuse through her body and spirit Temerity nearly becomes one with universe. Much faster and more powerful than she already is she appears as a whirlwind of limbs and energy blasts moving fluidly from enemy to the next, eyes and horns glowing a pale green. Using this style allows her to perceive “rips” in the universe, teleporting up to fifty feet away. This style takes an extreme toll on her, leaving her drained and vulnerable once it's finished.

History: You'd have to be pretty unlucky to be born a tiefling, or to be abandoned at birth. Some particularly ill-fated children end up being both. Temerity was one of those cursed few, a red-eyed demon child left on the steps of a monastery with nothing more than a blanket and a piece of paper with her name on it. She was brought in the monks and cared for, another lost lamb to raise as part of their flock. This order placed a premium on achieving enlightenment through simplicity in living and mastering their own bodies, eating only plain meals and living in spartan cells. Instead of any one deity they dedicated themselves to studying the natural world and learning to understand the energies that made it work and Temerity would be raised to seek the same understanding.

In theory anyway. In actuality, Temerity was not at all equipped for a life of austere study. Meditation and book learning were so boring they were almost painful, the tiefling constantly sneaking out windows and through side doors to play outside or sneak down to the nearby village instead of doing her studies. By the time she was nine the older monks realized that she would never be a wise scholar or inquisitive researcher. But there was still some hope for her. One of the few daily activities she didn't shirk in favor of mischief-making was her psychical training. The child threw herself into daily runs and sparring matches, practicing the same move hundreds of times over with a dedication that had been unseen before. It wasn't that she was lazy, she simply didn't dedicate time to things that seemed pointless. With martial arts she could watch herself improve and find new goals to meet.

So when she was about ten years old the monks decided to let her immerse herself body and mind in the study of combat to get her to focus on more than idle pleasures. Temerity was able to redirect all that wasted energy into her studies, watching intently as the older monks practiced their forms and working to replicate them as best she could. The young tiefling had a natural aptitude for fighting that was honed to a razor's edge with instruction, building mastery over years of sparring with the other monks and testing herself in bar brawls and prize fights in the town nearby. The daily teachings she had ignored for so long were given begrudging attention, the hot-headed youth learning to calm down and reflect on her inner self find some semblance of inner peace and even subsist without food and water. At seventeen she was an instructor of the young members of the order, teaching them how to harness their energy as she had learned.

But it wasn't meant to last. Temerity was restless withing the confines of the temple, only paying lip service to its structure and tradition because they let her hone her skills. Once she realized they were quickly running out of things to teach her it was only a matter of time before she left to make her own way in the world. The catalyst was when a group of bandits attacked the temple, a foolhardy attempt that was warded off with little loss of life on either side. Temerity begged to be allowed to hunt them down to make sure they wouldn't return but her elders denied her request. The youth was reminded that forgiveness was one of the Heavenly Virtues and vengeance would only weigh her spirit down. It was the the push she needed to leave. Temerity bowed and thanked her masters for taking care of her all these years and giving her purpose and packed up her things, setting out to forge her own path. Out of respect for them the bandits would go unhounded. They were small game anyway. Temerity had rejected the teachings of humility and quiet service to others. She was going to become the best fighter the world had seen, a living legend renowned for her skill or she would die trying.

But before she could do that she would have to finish her training. The next five years were busy, traveling from place to place and taking bounties and winning exhibition bouts for practice by day and meditating to rest and reflect by night. She was working to come up with her own style of martial arts, one that combined physical and spiritual combat better than any of the ones she had been taught. It was slow going, months and months passing without any sort of progress, but her work would eventually pay off. At twenty-four she had it. Her life's work, Dragon's Balance was finally a complete system, rough and contained only in her head but a complete system nonetheless.

Its first few trials by combat were promising illuminated a need for improvement. While undeniably deadly to face the raw strength of body and spirit required was immense. If used for too long she was left completely drained and on the verge of collapse. Most people were completely unable to stand against it for more than a few seconds but particularly dangerous beasts or large groups of well-trained opponents could last long enough that the toll on her body would become unbearable. For the time being she would have to rely on her old teachings while she continued to work on her magnum opus. Her quest led her out of familiar lands and into the dark valley of Barovia to pit herself against whatever challenges she could find.

Name: "Lynx"
Appearance:

No matter how many times she edits her appearance some things remain forever nonhuman, but thankfully are easily hidden. Indigo eyes with a cat's vertical pupils are hidden by contacts, her flexible spine and floating collar bone only noticeable if one were to walk in on her squeezing into some tight space. Her ridiculously low heart rate (less than ten beats per minute) and ability to operate in low oxygen environments are essentially invisible under normal circumstances.

Age: She lost track of the exact number long before living memory but she's been kicking around since the creation of the universe.

Bio: Whatever name Lynx had gone by at the beginning of time, however she had carried herself, she had probably already been bored. Springing into existence at the dawn of the universe fully formed and ready to rumble she originally quite liked the powers that had been given to her. But when the novelty wore off it quickly became apparent just how unpleasant of a life she was going to have. The speed at which she processed information meant that the world was in a constant state of slow motion for her, every moment spent waiting an unbearable torment.

Any hobby or pastime would have all the enjoyment sucked out of it within weeks or days, the Custodian quickly dissembling the activity and piecing it back together thousands upon thousands of times. She bounced from job to job, serving as everything from professional chef to starship captain to doctor and leaving after a few years when it became unbearably mundane. She merely existed for millions of years, trapped in constant race for gratification and amusement.

When some of her brethren went rogue it blindingly obvious that it wouldn't go well for them. The majority of Custodians that had stayed loyal had literal God on their side, only an idiot would have taken those odds. But fighting a doomed war followed by bitter defeat sounded more interesting than curbstomping a few rebels so of course she picked the losing side. The war went about as well as expected, she took out a few loyalists before getting booted out with the surviving rebels.

Historia made a decent place for a crash landing. The Custodian found herself among humanity, a race that measured up to hers about as well as ants did to them. But how interesting they were! Fragile and short-lived creatures they still dedicated themselves to climbing mountains and crossing barren deserts, just as willing to create beautiful (by their standards anyway) works of art as they were to form armies and raze each others homes to the ground. Irrational and hot-blooded, driven to prove that their lives had meaning even though the universe would have forgotten about them in a million years or two, they were simultaneously kind of pathetic and sort of inspiring in their stubbornness.

The Custodian was fascinated by them and wanted to get a closer look, so she began to disguise herself as members of their race. She spent time in the guise of queens, knights, artist, beggars, murderers, thieves and every archetype under the sun, poking at society to watch how it squirmed. She helped establish codes of law and then proceeded to break them to get a look at the prisoners suffering in salt mines, commissioned great works of art for museums and then joined barbaric hordes and stole them. She spent time living on the streets, watching the faces of those who'd give her a few coins and those who acted as if she didn't exist.

It was essentially an undercover investigative report. She learned just as much about humans watching them drag Descendants out of their beds as she did seeing them band together to recover from natural disasters. Over the millennia she built up a strangely patronizing affinity for them, regarding them as amusing animals that could do tricks.

Eventually she ended up in Hermannreich in the form of a gunrunner turned revolutionary, working with a cell of freedom fighters that sabotaged military installations and assassinated high value targets until they were wiped out by a surprise raid. The alien made her exit as her comrades were being lined up for summary execution, escaping to Iliad under the guise of a gunslinger and mechanic turned insurgent fleeing political persecution. With her billions of years worth of technological experience both human and otherwise it was easy enough to set up shop as a mechanic and machinists, getting herself a job as the shop teacher at Marduk. She got herself another position as a history instructor, firsthand knowledge of the world's major events coming in handy.

And so Instructor Lynx became a upstanding citizen of Iliad, wiling away the time grading essays and dismantling engine blocks as she waited for the inevitable need to drop everything and run.

Mundane Skills: Quite frankly her skillset is immense to the point of being too long to list. But for the sake of getting into character the Custodian limits herself to whatever her current identity would be good at. In Lynx's case her skill with firearms and melee combat is quite literally superhuman, at a level obtainable only through her natural powers and millennia of practice. She is a talented alchemist and machinist, modifying her gear and crafting different types of ammo for different types of targets,and has a penchant for explosives. Her careers of planning and foiling assassinations and robberies give her a good sense of small-scale tactics, her specialty being ambushes and smash-and-grab type operations. Stealth is a given, the alien just as quiet as her current namesake when she wants to be.

Powers:
Supernatural Senses- Like her namesake Lynx relies on her senses to get an edge over her opponents. On a day to day basis her sense of smell is as good as a dog’s, counting individual threads on a person’s shirt from across the room and hearing each breathe they take. She’s capable of much more when she focuses but limits this to avoid sensory overload.

The real advantage is her ability to detect magic. If you’re paying attention there’s certain giveaways inherent to arcane energy. A low hum of some great machine, a minuscule hint of copper on the tongue, a faint shimmer in the air.Lynx can pick up on these clues that others miss and follow them, seeing through illusions and trailing mages by their traits specific to their spells.

Super-Speed- Good luck getting the draw on her. Lynx can move at about the speed of sound when running and hit Mach 2 if she were to sprint all out. Incredibly fast but also incredibly exhausting. Moving that fast for any longer than a few hours necessitates her to eat about half her weight to fuel the boost in metabolism so she tends to cruise at four hundred or five hundred miles an hour (when she's not forced to crawl along out of discretion.)

Enhanced Endurance- Moving twice as fast as sound requires a tough body. Lyxn is mostly unaffected by extreme speed or temperatures and needs only a few hours of sleep a week. Her stomach is strong enough that she can taste poisons to evaluate their strength, her skin shattering mundane weapons and deflecting some spells. Walls are no trouble, able to be smashed through with no adverse reaction.

Equipment : Krait- One of the first things she made after being so rudely ejected from the One's favor. The glove houses a container for storing all manner of liquids and a nozzle designed to eject it as an aerosol up to 15 feet. Typically loaded with various irritating agents or toxins.

Wife and Mother- A pair of matched revolvers that she took off a dying loyalist in the war in Heaven. Prime examples of Custodian engineering they generate the energy required to fire and are "reloaded" by letting the excess heat drain. The hammers can be fanned for rapid fire but doing so runs the risk of overheating them.

Starstrike- The usage of advanced Custodian materials allow the bow to be as strong as steel while remaining flexible, able to loaded with arrows of varying types. It's most valuable trait is its ability to absorb and charge arrows with starlight, the energy channeled into the tip to punch through armor and unleash a corona of searing light inside them.

Savagry-A tribute given to her during her days as warlord, Savagery is designed to hold under the extreme stresses of her usage, staying solid under forces and temperatures that would reduce a normal dagger to slag.

Plasmids: Not actually part of a bacteria's cytoplasm but the combination of chemicals and computer input that let her change her face. A thoroughly unpleasant process that requires her to isolate for a week as her durable body slowly melts and reforms.

Tools- The selection of wrenches, hammers, drills, plasma cutters, and other tools she uses to fix machines and make bombs and arrowheads as well as the stockpile of materials for doing so. These range from sheets of metal waiting to be cut to old cars dumped out in her back yard and rusty weapons ready to be stripped for parts.

The Essentials- Cigars and her hip flask.



Personality: "Blessed" with otherworldly speed and the required reaction time to manage it every moment of everyday in Lynx's life is more or less a living hell. Her natural impatience combined with the fact that time appears to move much slower for her than it would anyone else means that she bounces around from distraction to distraction, spending scarcely a few minutes on anyone thing before moving to the next. Her self-restriction of her speed causes her to twitch and fiddle with coins and other small objects, a nervous tic she passes off as shell-shock.

While she understands the difference between right and wrong it doesn't really factor much into her daily life. She does what the current persona she's inhabiting would do whether that's building orphanages and going on one woman crusades to rescue kidnapping victims or earning a reputation as fearsome raider pillages villages for sport. The morality of an act is much less important to her than if its in-character or interesting.

"Lynx" is more or less a good person, an exiled freedom fighter turned mechanic and teacher. She pays her taxes, shows up to work on time and gives students the extra attention they require and always has customer's repaired items returned to them promptly. She has a poker game every Thursday, plays golf on weekends with friends from work or just around the neighborhood and generally presents as a good-natured veteran that is sometimes a bit off.

Faction (Marduk, Ishtar, or Cassandra Club when it's founded): Marduk for the time being, whatever seems interesting after that.
Are you a Descendant of the Illuminated Poet?: No
Important Relations:
-Duke, Diakonissa (Husband, Daughter, both dead)
-Kane, Micah and Rachel Helegast (Husband, Son, Daughter, all dead)
- ??? Makre, Jason Makre (Husband and Son, both dead)
-Kotori Flatcreek (Girlfriend, dead)
-Eyo-Zeki (Adopted son, dead)
-Marcus ???, ???, ??? (Husband and two children, dead)
- Mihek (Concubine/Bodyguard, dead)
-Vudir, Walthred, ??? (Husband, wife, husband or wife, all dead)
-??? (Boyfriend, dead)

Theme:

Name
Fidelity "Fiddle" Astor

Gender
Female

Age
22, January 10, 1997

Sexuality
Bisexual

Nationality
American

Appearance
Fidelity has long since accepted the fact that daily life is harder for than. Short and slender she has to use her dogs as buffers to keep from being crushed in crowds and knocks objects off high shelves with her cane instead of getting assistance from someone else. She carries herself with a straight back and steady gaze, greeting most people with the same easy smile and wave.

Her clothes run the gamut from light casual wear to black leather and old jeans, Fiddle choosing outfits more for variety than any particular style. Her preferred Shadow World outfit is purposely extravagant and flamboyant to the extreme, Fiddle believing that there's no point in hijacking people's conscious if you're not going to have fun while doing it.

Height
4'8"

Personality
Aimless, reckless, and obsessive Fidelity is caught in the curious position of being able to do whatever she wants and having nothing she wants to do. With no long term goals to reach for she tries to fill the hole inside her with with constant action. The urge to keep everything neat and tidy that had been ingrained in her as a child clashes with her urge to raise hell, her apartment caught in a constant cycle of being totally trashed and furiously scrubbed clean as conflicting compulsions battle against one another.

Fiddle is certainly friendly but there's an undertone to it that can be somewhat off-putting. She'll wave and smile brightly at an a acquaintance even as she peers around them at some non-existent phantom, eyes flitting about during conversations while she nods along. She's almost weirdly friendly, letting total strangers into her home every weekend to party and allowing people to take almost anything they want.

Her access to apparently limitless wealth has imbued her with a dismissive sense charity of charity, aware that she's much better off than most people but not feeling particularly guilty about it. Her family has money and others don't, that's just how life is. She leaves fifty pound tips on twenty pound meals and gives away jewelry to people who comment on it, waving off stammered thanks as she continues on with her day. Replacing it is just a minor inconvenience. She takes money for granted the same way most people do running water, oftentimes stuffing a wad of bills into friend's hands "to get something on your way home."

Arcana
The Emperor

Persona
The Mothman
First sighted by a group of gravediggers, the Mothman seems to be attracted to death and poor fortune. Spotted flying low over forests and haunting highways, one of it's regular haunts was an abandoned munitions factory from the Second World War. Despite its fearsome appearance the Mothman seemed content to stay out of people's way, restricting itself to frightening motorists and picking off the occasional dog.

Until the Silver Bridge collapsed. A single defective eye-bar led to the whole thing tumbling down into the Ohio river, killing 46 people. Two of the bodies were never found. To this day people claim that all sorts of supernatural happenings had occurred in the days leading up to the disaster, visions of it happening before it occurred and visits from ghosts and UFOs and men in black and the Mothman circling the area as if waiting. This is of course ridiculous. The Mothman was likely just a a sandhill crane or unusually large heron, something mundane and not at all a harbinger of bad luck.

Still the legend persists to this day. If you ever find yourself out on some backwoods road at night be careful when you watch the sky. You might find a pair of red searchlights watching you right back.

Skill
Curse. The Mothman uses it's bulk and ability to fly as a form of mobile cover, tanking damage for its user and more fragile allies. It can also curse enemies, making them vulnerable to damage or weakening their attacks.

Equipment
Sword-Cane: A much more ornate version of her real world cane. The hooked head can snag on limbs and bits of clothing to drag or trip people and the blade itself is weighted perfectly to Fiddle's liking.

Henry Rifle: The same rifle she Fiddle grew up shooting. Sixteen .44 bullets (if you load one in the chamber) sent downrange with speed and accuracy. Her preferred way to fight for obvious reasons.

Education
Business BA (Hons), 3rd Year

Biography
Fidelity was born into immense wealth, the scion of a old ranching family and a more recent chemical empire. Her early years were spent bouncing between her parent's properties in Texas and West Virginia, being taught almost exclusively by private tutors and learning to ride horses and handle livestock. It was established early on that she would be inheriting one or both businesses depending on how things went, the young girl accepting her fate without much enthusiasm. She had no interest in learning the finer points of shipping nylon and neoprene around the globe and was better suited to shooting bottles and riding horses than castrating steers. But it was never about what Fiddle wanted. Her existence was a calculated affair designed to ensure both parties involved had an heir.

It was a somewhat lonely existence. What few friends she had she'd be separated from for months at a time as she bounced between states, being taken all over by one parent or another as they went about their mostly separate lives. With neither mom nor dad having much interest in her outside of her studies and general well-being she relied on her relatives for company, a private car dropping her off at all the birthdays and barbecues her parents didn't have time to take her to themselves.

Her favorite relative lived out of the country, working a meaningless upper management position for Astor Chemical Co. in London’s Canary Wharf district. Daniel was more of a parent to Fidelity than her biological ones, taking care of her for a couple months at a time when she needed to be out of the way. Fiddle sat for hours listening to him tell stories about aliens and cryptids haunting the backwoods, absorbing each tale of ghosts invading people’s heads or strange monsters that lurked in back alleys.

Daniel only fueled her interest in the supernatural, letting the girl dig through his collection of grainy UFO sightings and books on the occult. Just a bit of harmless fun, he told her. Strange stories that weren’t true but were good for a late night scare. She remained unconvinced, sure that there was more to the world than people accepted.

Those treasured days came to an end shortly after Fidelity’s twelfth birthday. Daniel had been heading home from work late one night when his elevator failed in a freak accident. He plummeted 15 stories before hitting the ground, reduced to paste almost instantly. A tragic case of bad luck, nothing could have been done. Fidelity took the loss hard, refusing to speak for nearly a month after the funeral. Less than a week after she started to talk Lady Luck spat on her again, a sudden thunderstorm turning the ground to mud while she was out riding. The horse tripped in the muck and toppled over, crushing her leg underneath it’s bulk.

It took more than five hours before she could be found and by the time she was taken to the hospital it was too late. Fidelity’s left leg had lost most of its function, forcing her to use a brace and cane to get around. After a long run of relative kindness Luck had decided to lash out and Fiddle took notice. Chance and probability became fixations for her, taking an interest in all sorts of gambling and numbers games. The randomness of it all intrigued her, watching with interest as people won and lost fortunes in moments.

From that point on she was stuck in a sort of functional dissociation. Her belief in the otherworldly only deepened with her newfound interest in chance, strange figures flitting about at the corner of her vision. She went to a private academy for high school and made up for all the stupid decisions she hadn’t been able to make, throwing herself into the drinking and drug scene with passion. More than one sports car ended up wrapped around a light pole or stuck in a ditch, substances doing nothing to temper her penchant for risk taking. It was a miracle she made it to graduation, her by now divorced parents gladly shipping her off back to London with the hope that she’d sort herself out there.

As long as she was educating herself both had pledged to support her, Fidelity’s self-destructive party lifestyle backed by seemingly limitless funds. She was now free to drift without any purpose save for hedonism.

Affiliations
-Daniel Astor:Fiddle's now deceased cousin and surrogate parent. She keeps a picture of him in her wallet and on her desk in her penthouse.
-Turner and Basker:Her service dogs and chaperones. Trained to help their mistress by serving as bulk to lean on and getting objects that would be otherwise out of reach, as well as defend her when needed. There are few people in the world capable of fighting off nearly four hundred pounds of attack dog and she has yet to one of them.
Relationships
TBD

Character Theme
TBD

An image of the character could go here. Ensure this is heavily detailed as well in the appearance segment too.

Name
Ikei Timoti

Gender
Male

Age
25, January 27th, 1934

Sexuality
Heterosexual

Nationality
Kiwi

Appearance
Description of how they look, physically as well as in their uniform. There are differentiation in the army's clothing when it comes to both their role and personality, meaning that some are easily identifiable based upon their additional adjustments to their uniform. Mention these as well.

Height
6'4"

Personality
Ikei had planned to follow his grandfather's footsteps and become a doctor, probably getting a job at a large hospital in the city somewhere and becoming a respected surgeon. Instead he dropped out of medical school his second year and signed up to fight in Vietnam for the adventure. He hasn't looked back since. Military life is just as much a series of efforts to relive boredom as it strict discipline and combat and its there that he excels.

Rank
Sargent

Role
Combat Medic

Equipment
-L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle: The standard issue rifle for New Zealand's troops in Vietnam. Preferred over the M16 for its increased stopping power and lack of mechanical issues.
"Sweetheart" M1911: Bought off a GI for about fifteen dollars and a six pack. Ikei switched out his own L9 for it's stopping power, the grips didn't at all influence the decision. Honest.
Medic's Kit: Carries bandages, sutures, antimalarials, bug spray morphine, splints and anything else a medic would conceivably need in some godforsaken jungle.
Surgeon's Vibroknife: Designed to assist in both retrieval of wounded and in-field medical operations. The hypersonic vibrations allow the user to hack through vegetation and into downed vehicles before cracking open the patient's sternum or amputating their limbs.

Biography

Affiliations
Who are they families, major friends or life-impacting individuals with prior to the war's beginning?

Relationships
An optional segment that can be updated as it goes along, though most of the time this can just be merged into the affiliations tab.

Character Theme
Not necessary, but can be used if wished.

Faction Name: Tempestus Scions
Force Name: Strike Force Lambda of the 11th Yunnalin Raptors
Leader Name: Isadora Ingran
Leader Bio: Ingran hadn't been lucky enough to join the Progenium when she was an infant. She was nearly ten when she learned about the death of her parents from the same man who was dragging her off to the Schola. The specifics of their deaths and any last words were superfluous details no one saw fit to provide. All that mattered was that they had been veterans of the Guard who had served with distinction on a number of worlds, and she was going to continue their legacy of obedience. The Schola Progenium was a sharp contrast from the home she had once known, her room more of a cell than living quarters and the staff more prison guards than caretakers.

It was in the Schola that the whelp learned that there was little difference between education and physical punishment. The Drill Abbots made sure she learned High Gothic as they barked orders, knocking her about with each misunderstood direction. It was the same way they taught her the tenets of the Imperial Creed and proper weapon maintenance and the seemingly thousands of little things that had to be done perfectly if she wanted to eat that night. A nasty existence for a child, but one so stritcly regimented that there was almost no time to think about it.

By the end of her first year she had more or less adjusted. The body and mind could only be broken so many times before it became routine, cracked ribs and crushed spirit a better outcome than what some of her peers experienced. Isadora was learning to duck when others froze up and got hit by stray Autogun rounds, to field strip and put back together all manner of weapons before the Abbot on duty kicked her in the ribs for being too slow. Without realizing it she was adapting to her surroundings, becoming used to both intense violence and study in equal measure. No day was ever easy but neither did she wake up each morning expecting not to come back to bed alive.

By fifteen Isadora was ready for almost challenge that could have been thrown her way. But the one thing she would never have been able to was the Correction Throne. The feeling of the needle jutting through her skull was one that would stay with her for the rest of her life as was the sensation of the dirus chemical coursing through her brain. Nearly every memory of her previous life was erased, scraped from her mind and replaced with unflinching loyalty to the Imperium.

As time passed it became clear that Ingran's talent were more in the field than in the Administratum or a convent somewhere, the student transferred into the Ordo Tempestus's advanced training. It was there that she learned the skills that would set her apart from the rank and file Militarum that her mostly forgotten parents had been part of. Orbital insertion, sabotage, long-range reconnaissance, and more were drilled to the point of perfection, Ingran and her fellow Scions being honed into knives designed to pierce the weak spots of any enemy.

Upon graduation she was inducted into the 11th Yunnalin Raptors, her first battlefield operation against a force of orks that had sprouted up on an agri-world. After a decade of some of the most intense training mankind had conceived the heat of battle felt just like home. Each mission she undertook was a chance to do what she was best at, purging xeno and heretic alike across dozens of planets.

As her unit lost troops and her service record grew Isadora naturally progressed through the ranks. The bloody fight against Dark Eldar raiders on a frozen death world that had cost her a finger was the same one that saw her reach the rank of Tempestor, and the raid against a den of heretics on a supposedly compliant Imperial world earned her that of Tempestor Prime.

Now just past thirty Ingran dedicates herself to the eradication of the enemies of humanity, hunting down high-value targets and eliminating nests of corruption. The call of an Inquisitor was not one to be ignored, the Tempestor Prime answering the summons with fourteen of her best troops.

Direct Superior:
Troop Count: 15
Extraordinary Troops:

• Tempestor Prime Isadora Ingran: If an Inquisitor is calling for help the situation requires the best of the best. The Tempestor Prime brings a level of skill and leadership unmatched by the troops under her command.
• Field Chirurgeon Hadrian Julo: Carries the team's medical supplies at the expense of heavier weapons. Able to fight just as fiercely as any of his comrades his efforts are usually focused on getting the team and its allies back into the fight.
• Tempestor Maren Calgar: Ingran's second in command, she typically serves as leader of a squad when the force is split.
• Scion Nathaniel Legel: A veteran of the Tempestus Scions, Legel specializes in laying down suppressing fire. Carries the force's volley gun.
• Scion Solon Thresas: While each Stormtrooper is able to strip, repair and replace every part of their personal equipment Solon works on the team's vehicles and any other machinery found in the field. Also carries the Vox-Caster used to coordinate with allied forces.
• Scion Sym Latoria: One of the newer members of the team. Eager to prove herself she carries the plasma strike force's plasma gun.

Basic Equipment:

• Tempestus Scions Carapace Armour
• Omnishield Helm
• Slate Monitron
• Micro-Bead
• Hotshot Lasgun
• Combat Knife
• Monoscope
• Frag and Krak grenades

Extraordinary Equipment:

• Martyr's Gift Field Service Medi-Kit: Carried by
• x1 Power Sword and Bolt Pistol carried by the Tempestor Prime
• x1 Melta Digi-Weapon built into the bionic knuckle of Ingran's right middle finger
• x1 Hotshot Volley Gun carried by Scion Legel
• x1 Plasma Gun carried by Scion Latoria
• x1 Martyr's Gift Field Service Medi-Kit carried by Chirurgeon Julo
• x1 Clarion Vox Array carried Scion Thresas
• x2 Hotshot Laspistols carried by Julo and Thresas
• x2 Taurox Primes equipped with battle cannons, twin autocannons and heavy stubbers.

Why Were They Selected: An Inquisitorial summons can't be brushed off with merely token support. Tempestor Prime Ingran trusts herself to handpick and lead troops worthy of the Inquisition.

Relationships:

- With Inquisitor Hera: "She's the one in charge. Do what she says when she says it and don't make her mad. For the duration of this operation we work for her."
- With the Adeptus Arbites: "This kind of thing is their whole deal so pay attention. Watch what they do and how they do it, they know the hives better than us."
- With the Adepta Sororitas: "Our sisters can be a bit overenthusiastic in the heat of things but it's always an honor to serve alongside the Daughters of the Emperor."
- With the Adeptus Tempestus: "We're the best at what we do, that's why we're here. Make me proud."
- With the Assassins: "I know almost nothing about them and what I do know I don't like. Keep an eye on them, assuming that's possible."
- With the Astra Militarum: "Nowhere near as well equipped or trained as we are but still a very necessary component. They'll hold the line and soak up enemy fire so we have to space to do our job."
- With the Skitarii: "They're more machine than they are people but they'll back us up just the same. Don't expect them to make much conversation with them."

It was 12:28 AM when Lynx leaned up against the wall of her home to take a nap. 182 seconds passed before she actually fell asleep and according to the watch on her wrist it she had been out for just about another 200 before waking up again at 12:03. 3.33 minutes of sleep at once, that was just under her average of 3.4. Today had been especially noisy, the horrid scratching of Lilith's pencil against paper scraping the inside the legs of some oversized spider. The noise dragged on tortuously, each moment stretching on and on into ad infinitum. The girl was almost certainly not doing the homework she had been assigned by her adoptive guardian unless she had undergone some drastic change in personality while Lynx had been asleep. She was either practicing her drawing or working on a new short story or perhaps taking notes on one of the gadgets Lynx allowed her to think she had successfully stolen as they laid on her workbench in various states of disassembly. Honestly all three were good uses of her time, she had the chops to go professional in whichever she ended up preferring.

The Custodian pushed herself off the wall, hipping bumping a lamp off a low table as she walked over the kitchen. The rush of cold air from the freezer drowned out the cacophony from Lilith's room for a blessed fraction of a second before Lynx grabbed her frozen lunch and slammed it shut again. The plastic wrap crinkled and fell to the wayside, microwave activating with its trademark hum. 4 more minutes of peace, 240 more seconds of drawn out annoyance as opposed to more awful scratching.

The lamp was maybe a tenth of a second from making contact with the ground before she remembered to grab it, fingers wrapping around its body as porcelain barely kissed the floor. She could see the slight disturbance in the pattern of dust and crumbs as she lifted it back up, casting an eye over to the microwave. 3 minutes and 58 seconds until done. Plenty of time to spy on her neighbors.

The alien cast aside her mental blockers, wincing as the wall of sound crushed her. It was always like this, a droning roar that inched along, unstoppable and all-consuming. She was smothered by it for a few nightmarish milliseconds, struck dumb and deaf as her brain fought to process it all.

"Hey are you..." "no I said she... "Shut up! You always..." "C'mon baby it'll be... "Go to your room before..." Every syllable was backed by the electrical hum of the microwave even as the pencil continued to gnaw at her sanity, her senses driving her mad with all that she could hear and smell and see...

Until it clicked. Her brain managed to put the pieces together, analyzing the conversations to pick up on how the Tennersons next door couldn't remember when they were supposed to meet their friends and how little Leo across the street was still trying to convince his mom that his teacher had been lying about his bad behavior in class. His sister Ariadne was up in arms at their father because he wasn't letting her borrow the car while their neighbor Titus tried to convince his girlfriend to blow off studying and spend the weekend at his place. Humans were always so interesting, making snap decisions based off their emotions and what would feel good in the now as opposed to considering the long term effects. Lynx listened as they lied and fought and tried to get each other sabotage their own success, wondering how long it would take for it all to blow up in their faces.

She could handle the extreme discomfort when they presented her daily with such entertainment. Besides, they didn't complain too much about the noise from her mechanic's shop so she had no room to grumble about the sounds generated by their very existence.

"Lynx, c'mere!"

The pencil had been put down, a small mercy that Lilith would never understand the importance of. Lynx crossed the living room and was at her charge's door before the second word even finished, peeking inside to see what was going on. "What's going on?"

It was a courtesy question. The Custodian knew what happened the instant she had touched down outside the door, the low stream of clicks that just registered on her senses a dead giveaway. And sure enough the pale faced teen was staring at one of Lynx's recent projects. The light embedded in the obsidian cylinder was blinking at the speed of a hummingbird's wings, the alien watching it shut on and off in time with the clicks. "Okay so I was working on those engines you told me to fix and when I cleaned up I accidentally swept this into my bag."

The bold-faced lie was less annoying than how long it took her to say, Lynx's patience nearly unbreakable after lifteimes of being trapped in slow motion hell. "Right. And you touched it didn't you."

"Only a little! I wanted to see how you put it together and then it just started blinking."

Sometimes Lynx forgot that most of what she heard went unnoticed by everyone else. No doubt if poor Lilith had been aware of the tick-tick-tickety she would have been more than nonplussed. The mechanic snatched up the device and tapped against it, fingers a blur that disguised the specific spits touched and gestures made. The clicks stopped, the machine soothed back to sleep.

"What is that anyway?"

"A small scale perputual motion engine. I"m trying to take the garage off the main grid without need bulky panels or generators."

Lilith took the reveal in stride, no longer surprised by her mentor's extremely cause treatment of the laws of physics.

"I didn't break it did I?"

"No, but you probably will if you mess with it again."

"Is it dangerous if it breaks?"

"Hmmm... fifty-fifty on whether nothing happens or if you trigger a small scale heat death." Things always got finicking when she tinkered with realithy and this was the first time she had worked with perpetual motion on this small a scale. A meltdown could be catastrophic or merely annoying. In either case she didn't want her project being ruined. "I'm heading out. Do you work before you call friends, meatloaf's in the microwave."

She had an obligation to go the games, it was her students on stage after all. Lilith was left to her devices as Coyote walked to her own room, tugging on duster, hat and holsters before tossing the engine at the bed. She was out the door before it hit her pillow, leaving a dust trail in her wake.

It was 12:32 when she dropped into her seat in the back row, watching Nika's display with curiosity. It was always nice to see a student who had practical knowledge of physical matter instead of relying on cheap magic tricks. She'd take magnesium over arcane energy any time.

That was most likely going to be her favorite part of the show. All music was pretty awful when your perception of time dragged out each note unbearably but the kids didn't need to know that. Lynx was going sit there and act proud like the good teacher she was.

The smell of magic hit her before the effects did, the scent fittingly sharp for the jolt she received. The girl with the axe-guitar thing that caused it, Lilith was a fan of hers right? The one with the horns was definitely a musician, one of the Sangrey brats they paraded around.

"Well that's round one lost then." Gilgamesha was going to be pissed.

Now thoroughly uninterested in the oncoming blowout Lyxn tried to tune into something else besides the music. Nothing of note was going on in the audience but there was conversation still going on in other places.

"Wait for the Bishop's signal. Bishop, commence on my mark."

Well that sounded odd for a security guard to say.

Lynx slipped out of her seat and into the belly of the colosseum, tapping out a message to dear old Rin.

"Something up at the Games, I hear multiple intruders.

The response came 13 seconds later, Lynx checking her phone as she was forced to drag herself along at a normal human's walking speed. "Fuck stay safe I got people on the way. No hero play, ur not in Reich now."

Of course the cop was telling her not to get involved. And Lynx had no intention to! But if she stumbled upon some terrorist cell while she was looking for a quiet place to smoke then she couldn't exactly be blamed for defending herself.

Finally she managed to reach the hallways, nose twitching as she caught a familiar scent. Her eyes narrowed, course changing as she stalked towards the bathroom. It was diluted somehow but still undeniably there, different from the thousands of humans crowded into the arena and much too similiar to Lynx's own for her to be happy.

Another Custodian had stumbled in looking to manipulate humans for their own gain, some misguided Repentant or scheming Collectivist and it didn't matter which. Neither were welcome on her planet.

"My name is Alto Ganze, I’m actually 53, and I’ve studied under both Marduk and Ishtar back when it was allowed decades ago."

Yep. Fucking Custodians, always trying to ruin her favorite species and take away what made them so interesting. The cops could handle whatever the guard had been talking about, this was personal.

Lynx checked her weapons as she walked, feeling much more prepared with her knife and pistols tucked at her belt. The door was nudged open with her boot, alien-hunter making her presence known with the clack of her heels against tile. Before the door shut behind her she had already verified her target. The black haired one was human but the blond? Oh he REEKED of alien now that she was up close and personal and the smell was only pissing her off. The trash can was shoved under the door handle, ensuring no sunrise guests could make it in without her say-so.

"I'm going to ask you this once and once only Custodian: Collective or Repentance?" A hand had already drifted to rest on one of the guns hidden under her coat, Lynx knowing her kind well enough to expect trouble.

The gunslinger made sure to keep an eye on the pawn or rival or whoever the other was, motioning with her head for him to step away. "Whatever he told you kid, it's bullshit."

Name
Kazankova Bykov

Aliases
Kaz

Nationality
American

Age
30

Sexuality
Bisexual

Birth
January 2nd, 1997, Guam

Appearance
There is no place in Neo-Tokyo where Kaz doesn't stand out. Taller than nearly every man she meets by a good few inches and towering over most women by nearly a foot, she has to duck to get through doorways. If her height wasn't enough of a give away there's also the matter of her pale skin and green eyes. She's very clearly not native to Japan or even Asia, a mercenary hired out to assist the NSF. She doesn't even bother trying conceal herself, standing with her back straight as she pushes her way through busy crowds with ease. She doesn't put any particular stock in her appearance, wearing the basic NSF uniform when at work and the same set of jackets, shorts and t-shirt when not on duty.

Height
6 feet and 2 inches

Personality
Thanks to a good bit of her limbic system being doused in experimental combat drugs and deep fried by electricity vital connections to humanity were severed. All negative emotions Kaz feels are amplified with anger seeing the most drastic increase. Meanwhile any positive emotions are nullified so that they're almost not even there, a drop in the ocean. When she smiles it's nothing more than a dry smirk or a forced grin, her eyes lacking any genuine warmth. Bykov certainly understands the concept of humor and isn't above cracking jokes herself but they lean towards the off-color or outright black.

Kaz has two modes: on and off. Usually she's operating in the off position, moving through life listlessly. She handles traffic, paperwork, taxes and firefights with the same tired frown. She stares straight through people when talking, focusing more on their mouth than their eyes and often paying more attention to the ever present cigarette in her mouth or between her fingers. The only conversation topic guaranteed to hold her undivided attention is that of cybernetics, an interest in the workings and development of mechanical augments a wistful holdover from her younger days.

Switching to on requires her to rotate her left wrist nearly 180 degrees so that the metal hinges allowing her to perform the contortionist feat send a signal to her injector system. Upon receiving electrical impulse the other half of her Fangtech augments kicks. The sedatives are drowned out by stimulants that numb dull pain and flood the mind with hate to be directed outwards at anything and anyone considered a threat. Bykov becomes more bear than woman, using maximum force to blast, batter or bludgeon down problems as they pop up. Turning on requires Kaz to set aside such useless concepts like fear, mercy, and concern for the well-being of others and as such is only done in dire circumstances. If the combat cocktail is pumping through her blood she is not likely to make conversation outside of threats and orders.

Role
Heavy Weapons and Support Specialist



Previous Careers
-United States Army
-Cardinal Command Security Consulting

Biography
Kazankova Bykov was born at Anderson Air Force Base Hospital on the tiny island of Guam to Margaret Lyman, and American servicewoman, and Adrik Bykov, her Russian national husband. The marriage was already rocky and the birth of their daughter only seemed to worsen things between the couple, starting with her name. (Margaret wanted to name her daughter Kazankova despite it being a surname while Adrik thought it was stupid to do so.) Before she was even one year old Kazankova's parents had separated. Margaret would have her during the school year, Adrik would take care of her during the summer months. And so her childhood was spent mostly on the move, traveling from base to base with her mother only to fly off to Moscow every June. It was hard to make friends this way, barely having enough time to settle into a school before being shuffled out and having to explain to every interested child that no she couldn't come over for pool parties and barbecues this summer, she had to go to Russia with her father.

Without any real friends available to hang out with young Kaz had to find ways to amuse herself, taking up an early interest in the fields of robotics, cybernetics and weapons technology. While waiting for her classmates to finish a test she would read magazine articles about improvements on prosthetic limbs, her room filled with various half completed mechanical devices she would tinker with before losing interest. Her life revolved around working out with her mother and dissembling and reassembling various household appliances to figure out how they worked, with very little in between. Whenever something went wrong she could bury herself in her hobbies. During the days after Tokyo was immolated in nuclear fire when her mom would pace the kitchen floor, on edge and preparing to be called up to go fight in some irradiated field, she almost never left her room.

Her interest in robotics flourished and by the time she was a senior in high school she had won multiple state and national level contests. These victories won her scholarships to a number of engineering schools and she was being heralded as the poster child for the next generation of robotics experts and cybernetics designers. But she decided against that, having had enough of formal schooling. Instead she became Private Bykov of the United States Army, much to the chagrin of both parents who had wanted more for her.

While in the Army Bykov volunteered for a number of programs that allowed her to field test cybernetic augments as they came off the production line, taking an interest in their inner workings. Most of them turned out to work fine, enhancing her capabilities in the field with little to no trade off. But the Fangtech injector system gave her pause. Kazankova had managed to get her hands on a copy of the blueprints and almost immediately spotted major flaws in the system. When she tried to raise the issue she was essentially ordered to shut up and get the implants. So she did, and for a year or so they did their job. She was faster, stronger, more dangerous and aggressive, pushing through at any cost with almost no concern for her safety. It came at a cost of her humanity, Kaz feeling herself slip into the mindset of an angered bear every the drugs slipped into her system.

And it all went catastrophically wrong. When deployed to Afghanistan an IED set at a power substation she was guarding went off, the discharge of electricity overwhelming her injection system, triggering a massive overdose. Bykov dropped to the ground instantly, foaming at the mouth and bleeding from her eyes. She was left comatose for a week. There was a nurse on hand when she woke up which was how the alarm was raised. Kaz was still gripped by a murderous frenzy, snarling as she pummeled the nurse to death with her bare hands and blinded an orderly with a vicious headbutt before she could be subdued. It was another three months before she was able to go unrestrained, and a year after that before she was ruled as mentally stable.

There were no legal repercussions for her violent outburst. The courts found no fault with her, how could they? She had been ordered to use an unstable and untested set of combat drugs and it had unsurprisingly gone wrong. What she couldn't escape was guilt. Every time she closed her eyes she could see the look of shock and pain on the nurse's face, could hear a man's skull cracking and giving way as she drove her head into it. She was suffering from intense feelings of guilt and paranoia. More than that, she was no longer able to feel positive emotions. A side effect of her massive overdose was that her frontal lobe was permanently damaged, her emotional balance disturbed. Negative emotions such as anger and jealousy were magnified while any bit of happiness was so subdued it might as well as not been there.

Trapped in a sort of humorless nightmare and with nothing else to turn Kazankova became a mercenary, signing onto Cardinal Command Security Counseling as a heavy weapons expert and squad support. She spent time fighting separatists in Donbass, raiding narco drug stashes throughout Latin America and quelling riots in the United States for the better part of four years. It was this career revival that got her noticed by the newly formed Jinrai.

Evidently the destruction of Article 9 gave them right to recruit foreign mercenaries, a turn of events that probably made the Allied High Command roll in their graves. But Kaz wasn't one to consider the geopolitical ramifications of her employers. As long as the checks cleared and working for them wouldn't get her marked by Interpol then the Jinrai were just as legitimate a military organization as any other. The work wasn't much different and her comrades were much the same as they had always been: dangerous, determined men and women with military records stretching back a decade or more. The main difference was that now her cutthroat comrades fought for a cause even if Kaz didn't.

One of the more tolerable Jinrai operatives was Iwata Honomi, a capable combatant and decent human being. She was quiet, efficient, and good at keeping her mouth shut when it came to some of the more questionable raids they took part in. Most importantly Honomi seemed to under Kaz's condition and would go out of her way to try and calm her down she seemed at risk of exploding. Iwata was one of the good ones and Kaz was about as glad as she could be when her fellow operative bugged out of the Jinrai with her.

Them starting a coup would mean that staying onside would make Kaz an international fugitive which was one of her only two breaking points when it came to jobs. With no other prospects for the time being Kaz became a bouncer for the Vertex, a foreign friendly nightclub in need of dumb muscle. The position lasted six months before she was called in for a better job at the NSF thanks to Special Agent Honomi.

Once again she was doing what she was best at but without the risk of being disavowed if captured. She stuck around even after her patron left, doing as instructed even when that included taking Honomi down after she went rogue.

Affiliations
- Margaret Lyman (Mother)
- Adrik Bykov (Father)
-Iwata Honomi (Friend from her Jinrai days, now dead)

Relationships [Optional]
Takai Shunsen: The only person in the NSF Kaz can really relate to. They met through her friend and his mentor Iwata Honomi before she washed out of the NSF and kept up a cordial relationship, eventually becoming as close to friends as Kaz could really be with anyone. She had been at his side when they went to investigate their old contact and had gotten knocked onto her back by the explosion that took Taki's leg off. Kaz hangs out with him because she can rely on him not to piss her off.

Chris Bell:Another American and more importantly another American who fought in the Sandbox. Kaz would hang out with him for that reason alone but he also happens to be a pretty alright guy. They get beers (a formality for her, alcohol intoxication being a thing of the past) and chat about bullshit in English, a welcome change from stumbling through Japanese. He's solid, dependable and probably a little stupid but that's because he's a Marine so she can't hold it against him.

Character Theme
TBD

Pistols
Halifax Model 7:
New Nambu Model 22
Hewitt Bullstopper

Submachine Guns
Minebea PM10
H&K MP8
Sterling 2026

Shotguns
Beneli M5
DX-12 PDW
Sun Corp Sentinel

Assault Rifles
Behring P8-AR
Howa Type 20
Ak 6

Sniper/Designated Marksmen Rifles
Voere VEC-21
M40 EMR
CheyTac Arbitration

Light Machine Guns
H&K MG6
Sumitomo M3
M304 LMG

Rocket/Grenade Launchers
Arc Underbarrel Attachment
Odysseus SMDS
Milkor Super MGL

Name
Li Dàiyù (Goes by Dai to make it easier on people)

Nationality
Cantonese by birth, Nationalized Japanese

Age
38

Sexuality

Birth
February 15, 1993 Kowloon, British Hong Kong

Appearance
Dàiyù prides herself on her looks when not in the field, taking great care to look presentable at all times. Her hair is kept in place by ornamental combs and pins to keep it from hiding her face, wearing designer dresses and sunglasses that cost more than some people's cars. Her sleeves are almost always short and her legs are often exposed to show off the intricate bioluminescent tattoos running across her body. For special occasions where some quaint show of deference to her host country is needed she'll switch to the collection of elegant silk kimonos she has in her closet. She makes no effort to disguise her robotic arm, happy to recount the story of how a stubborn horse fell on it's side with her under it.

Her guise as the Fox is equally striking albeit a little dramatic. The lights on her mask can be switched on and off so that she can make dramatic entrances and her armor just as flamboyant as it is practical. The overcomplicated look suits her flair for dramatic in a way that her other careers simply can't.

While Dai's bionic arm and glowing tattoos are well known deviations from the norm they aren't her only body modifications. Her right pinky is a cybernetic replica of her old one and her back is decorated with traditional irezumi. For purposes of confidentiality these are kept hidden from the world.

Height
5'8"

Personality
Dai wears many masks, some figurative and some literal. In public she's a model immigrant who assimilated into society and became a success story, appearing at charity galas and high profile events throw by her friends in the upper echelon of society. She loves her adopted country dearly and has dedicated her life to defending it, donating millions of yen, four years of her life in the JSDF and now time in the NSF. Kind to her friends and diplomatic with her enemies Daiyu is hardworking and dependable.

To her Yakuza associates she's a solid earner and professional fixer who speaks plainly and does as ordered with cold efficiency. Taking part in a number of the Yamaguchi-gumi's illicit activities Dai can be relied on to fix problems with bribery, blackmail or bullets as the situation dictates. Certain certain superiors can call upon her services as the Fox when something needs to be handled. Calculating and ruthless in the extreme Dàiyù is considered useful to the organization as a whole thanks to the money she brings in and the work she performs.

The truth lies somewhere between the two identities she's concocted for herself. "Little" Li as her parents call her in their infrequent conversations is more or less glad to be in Japan but not particularly hawkish about it and while she's certainly willing to do bad things she isn't devoid of compassion. Dai is driven by not by patriotism or obligation to a group but by a constant need for excitement. Mingling with the ultra wealthy, climbing into penthouses or slinking through NeoTokyo's underbelly in search of a target and shooting bad guys as part of a secret elite task force all get her heart racing in that way that makes life worth living. Dàiyù lives a triple life because if she didn't she'd be bored. No grand vendetta or anything dramatic, just a need to feel her heart pumping.

Which it does irregularly thanks to the amount of drugs she's on. Amphetamines to keep her awake for days on end, benzodiazepines to finally put her to sleep, prescription painkillers to fight off the constant aches she suffers from her nighttime activities, Li is the definition of a functional addict.

A lifetime of 70 hour workweeks and nights spent prowling around in search of easy marks has given her a lopsided skillset. She can climb buildings and negotiate high powered financial deals but can't cook anything more complicated than boiled eggs and is much more at home with a rifle in her hand than a paintbrush. Her basic life skills have lapsed to the point that if she didn't set reminders she would forget to eat.

None of this makes it to the outside world. The juggling of three disparate and often contradictory careers requires her to be in total control of what she presents to the world at any given time and there's no advantage in letting any of her coworkers see her as anything less than unbreakable.

A con artist and thief before she was a hired blade Daiyu puts a premium on politeness, never forgetting a name, face or son's birthday. She has a Rolodex of minor underworld figures local and otherwise, businessmen, celebrities, all manner of people's she worked for, with and against. You never know when that cop who you slide a few thousand yen for a deposit on a home to can be convinced to report a suspect as having escaped, or when you can get an invite to a very exclusive fundraising party from a certain high rolling up and coming politician who really doesn't want some of his indiscretions coming to light. Daiyu excels at these sort of games, enjoying the give and take atmosphere of the web of lies and owed favors that connected high society with the low.

One of the only topics that gets her genuinely animated is art. She can talk for hours about the Renaissance masters or the sculptures of ancient Greece and the pop art movement of the mid 1950s or really any major era of artwork. She fancies herself a bit of collector, having a few minor pieces on display as well as quite a bit more that were never officially sold, or even sold at all.

Role
Sniper/Designated Marksman

Equipment









Previous Careers
-JDSF 1st Division
-Founder, President and CEO of NeoTokyo Brokerage (Technically still in charge but does little of the day to day management)
-Member of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate (Still very active in this role. still very secretive about it)

Biography
Dàiyù was born in Kowloon City to Wei and Chen Li, a new addition to a household that was barely making ends meet as it was. Her father Wei was a night security guard and her mother Li worked as a janitor for the cramped tenement they lived in. Two minimum wages jobs had hardly been enough to feed them and Wei's aging father, the introduction of another people was nearly catastrophic. Dàiyù earliest years were spent listening to her parents argue about money while Grandpa Min held her. By the time she was five the situation had gotten so dire that the family emigrated to Japan, settling into the Adachi district of Tokyo. The daughter managed to pick up Japanese pretty quickly but had a heavy accent for much of her childhood, marking her as a foreigner. She got into fights often, throwing punches at any kid who mocked her accent or place of birth no matter how much bigger or older they where. After the third black eye before her seventh birthday her Grandfather made her an offer: if she kept her grades up he'd teach her the arts of Taijin sword-fighting and Wing Chun kung fu.

Dàiyù of course agreed but found that she had actually enrolled herself in an extended lesson on remaining calm. Any time she lost control or put more focus on brute force than technique the lessons would stop and she'd be sent to her room to read in silence. As her skill increased so did her patience, Daiyu internalizing the importance of staying level-headed in any situation. She also began to branch out, making more friends at school and taking an interest in other martial arts, especially western boxing and jiu-jitsu. Whenever she was in class she was paying closer attention to other students than the lesson, picking up on any important gossip she could.

It was sheer luck that the Li family wan't reduced to ash by the nuclear fire that consumed half of Tokyo. They had returned back to Hong Kong to visit with family for Daiyu's twelfth birthday the day before the bomb was dropped, crowded around a tiny TV set in an aunt's living room as the reports came in. Their home was one of the many that were completely destroyed. It took months for them to be allowed back in, Daiyu staring wide eyed at ruin.

The slums that bordered the bombed out districts were the perfect place to go exploring, Dàiyù picking through abandoned homes for valuables and putting on impromptu demonstrations of her skills for the others kids that were hanging around. Her standing challenge to any kid that wanted to test themselves against what she had learned was taken up by the leader of a small group of street toughs who sent his biggest friend to knock her down a peg. It cost her a few nasty cuts but Daiyu prevailed and was brought in as one of the "boys", so to speak. She quickly got used to it, learning to pick pockets and serving as a lookout while her gang raided unattended cars and slipped through open windows. One of her favorite jobs was when she got to play the lost little girl or the desperate hitchhiker, getting people to open their hearts and their wallets with a few tears. As they got older the gang moved into smuggling cigarettes and bootleg electronics, even occasionally dealing in narcotics. For a bunch of sixteen year olds the money was great, but they were also way in over their heads. The gang was found out by a local underboss of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate and told to join up or die.

Understandably they decided to join up. Dàiyù talent for creeping around the slums translated into a natural affinity for cat burglary,climbing up to second and third story fire escapes and slipping in in search of jewelry or loose cash. One of her gangs duties was to work at a mechanic's garage that served as a money laundering front, mostly there to look busy and keep people from asking too many questions. Daiyu would hang around the back when she could, listening with interest as smugglers and enforcers talked about business. Every time she turned up she was shooed away until the man running the store, Aito, took an interest in her. The young Chinese immigrant was taken under his wing, Aito showing her how to handle money and deal in the world of legitimate business. From the office overlooking the garage Dàiyù began to work longer and more profitable cons, squeezing desperate people with exorbitant loans and defrauding clueless tourists with bogus theft insurance. All the while she was continuing to steal, gradually becoming more respected in the eyes of the Yakuza. She had yet to be inducted in properly but she was appreciated for the steady income she brought in from her cons and heists, as well as her kowtowing to local customs.

And that would have been enough for her to stay in a stable position as a tolerated and maybe even accepted outsider if everything had gone right. But it was not to be. As her heists got more elaborate and her reputation grew more people wanted in on the action, her already small cut being encroached on by the sons of proper members of the family. She was forced to scramble and try and cope with untrained and unskilled brutes on jobs that required a light touch. Predictably one of them screwed up. A routine burglary of a high end apartment went wrong and her partner was killed and her left arm shattered into uselessness when their get-away vehicle was hit by a van. She was carried out of the wreck and sent to a private doctor who had experience with patients who needed extra discretion.

As soon as she woke up Dàiyù was on trial. The money invested in planning had all gone to waste and the son of a mid level Yakuza soldier was dead on her watch. She had been allowed to stick around as long as she had been making money but their patience had run out. Dàiyù was surrounded by eight hard faced men who were ready to kill her and dump her corpse into the harbor without a second thought, with no way out. So she did the only thing she could.

She began to talk.

The botched heist had been the exception, not the rule. For years now she had been a faithful source of income, regular payments from her various scams supplemented by healthy bonuses from heists. Surely it would be a waste to throw that all away. Why not let her live so she could keep working for them? She be giving them a much larger cut of course, as penance. It was a long shot and she knew it, but luckily they agreed. She was under the thumb of the Yakuza now. They would be taking most of any money she made, as well as something else. Daiyu managed to convince herself to be grateful that their was disinfectant on hand when they made her amputate her own remaining pinky finger.

She was twenty one years old and needed to start earning money. She managed to plead with Aito for a loan and opened up a brokerage firm, learning the ins and outs of the stock market as she went. With a competent team of investors hired the firm was turning a decent profit by itself, but more than that it was an opportunity. It provided a way for her to launder the money coming in from the odd jobs and crimes of opportunity she was doing, and she could charge a fee to keep other people's money safe as well. The dirty money she brought in allowed her to hire more experts and move to a nicer building in recently built Neo-Tokyo, attracting more clients with more clean cash so she could wash more dirty money and use those fees to attract more...

It was a tenuous potion sustained by spending dangerous men's money on risky gambles to keep the Yakuza off her back while hoping the whole cyclical system didn't collapse like a house of cards. It was stressful, nerve-wracking, infuriating to see millions of yen that should have been hers go into someone else's pockets. And she loved every moment of it. There was a thrill to having to keep up a presentable exterior for the outside world while fielding inquiries and demands from the scum of society, a certain knack needed to keeping the whole ship from sinking. By the time she was 24 she had managed to get it to a point where it could stand on its own. More than that, she was part of high society. Wealthy celebrities and industry leaders had shown up to her for help managing their portfolios on the recommendation of their bookies and dealers and the properties of their favorite brothels. Using her talent for saying just what people wanted to hear Daiyu got herself invited to dinners and parties and private screenings where she was introduced to more socialites and members of high society in need of a very polite, very intelligent and very discrete investment expert who was also willing to help make your financial records look a bit cleaner. It was another circle and soon NeoTokyo Brokerage and its charismatic young founder were front page of magazines and websites throughout Japan and the world.

At the age of 26 Dàiyù entrusted her company to "an old friend" (really another Yakuza associate) and signed up with the JSDF, ostensibly out of a sense of patriotic duty. In actuality she had just gotten bored of the businesswoman gimmick and wanted to try something else. The actual day to day of soldiering was hard to stomach but was worth it just for the weapons training, the chance to play around with long range rifles and hand grenades very exciting for someone as adrenaline driven as her. She spent two years in the 1st Division and then three in the elite Special Forces Group as a sniper before returning to her old position as a financial magnate, enlisted in the reserves but mostly free to go about her business.

No matter how much money she handled, no matter how many rich snobs she was invited to play golf with, Dàiyù had never been brought into the Yamaguchi. There were plenty of people with deep pockets and extensive Rolodexes, Dai was not special. But when she veered back into more expressly illegal ventures she became to get the higher ups attention. Using the training she had picked up in the military and her penchant for climbing tall buildings Dai began to work as a fixer, stealing information and assassinating people who had made enemies of NeoTokyo's underworld for whatever reason. Under her guise as the Fox she made a name for herself as a dependable agent and was finally brought into the ranks by 33. It was this acceptance into the fold that caused her to get her tattoos, turning her back into a canvas honoring her organization.

It came as a surprise when the NSF contacted her but not an unwelcome one. Black ops operations on domestic soil, fighting elite terrorists looking to overthrow the government in off the books missions? It was the exact sort of job that Dai found exciting and she accepted it without a moments hesitation.

The fact that letting her bosses know about the mere existence of the NSF would be a boon to her career was just a bonus.

Affiliations
-Japanese Self-Defense Forces (Formerly)
- NeoTokyo Brokerage (Her company)
- National Security Force (Her current employers)
- Yamaguchi-gumi (Her other current employers)

Relationships [Optional]
TBD

Character Theme [Optional]
TBD

---

---_{P E R S O N A L I T Y}

---_{B I O G R A P H Y}

Victoria was born into a family of poor ranchers on the outskirts of Prairie, Oceania. It was a cattle town originally and its people used to be able to make a decent living selling their livestock. But roughly ten years before her birth the fields had turned fallow and the land was caught in a drought. Once successful ranches soon struggled to feed their own children and more and more beggars began to fill the street. It wasn't very long until people actually began to die of starvation. That was the world Jack and Margret White brought their daughter into, and they regretted it.

She was an accident born ten years after her siblings, an unintended existence her parents were not prepared to contend with. With both her mother and father working near constantly either trying to scrape some manner of living out of the dust or performing odd jobs for a bit of extra cash she was largely cared for by her grandmother and three siblings, each ten years her senior. Her two brothers and one sister taught her how to mix a bit of sawdust into flour to stretch it, the best ways to break into abandoned farmsteads to strip away bits of copper to be sold to scrapyards. At night her grandmother made her learn the alphabet and basic math so "some crooked bastard doesn't cheat you."

It was a strange education but it was the one she needed to survive. By the time she was ten all of her siblings had left for the cities of Melville, Bridgeton and Devil’s Cairn in search of work, joining an exodus that had been steadily lowering the population of Prairie. By now the famine was mostly over but the damage was done. Prairie was dying, the people that remained only stayed because they had nowhere else to turn. Without her siblings to guide her Victoria fell in with one of the packs of jobless and ambition-less youths roaming the streets. They spent their days throwing bricks through windows and fighting over turf with makeshift clubs constructed of fence-posts and bottles.

Her career in crime started off small scale, pickpocketing and committing minor vandalism mostly. Scrawling defamatory slogans across the territory of rival gangs came after, followed by fights both unarmed and armed. By the time she was fourteen her family would have nothing to do with her so she began sleeping on the streets or on a grimy mattress in the shack of some fellow hoodlum. She started drinking and never stopped, getting blackout drunk at parties and late night meet ups. Sometimes she was flirty, other times violent. Once she earned herself a permanent scar when a member of another street gang smashed a bottle against her head. In a drunken rage Victoria stabbed the girl to death.

That was when she really started to spiral. Graduating from simple theft to armed robbery, Vicky made her living sticking up travelers on the road and knocking over filling stations. Most of what she earned went right back into cards or liquor, money disappearing as fast as it came in. By fifteen she had ended up in the arms of Charles, a handsome young man four years her senior.

He was a smooth talking con-artist that could make money appear as if from nowhere with any number of scam and they ran wild together both outside and in the bedroom. Eventually the inevitable happened: Victoria was pregnant at the age of sixteen. Charles assured her that it would be all right, he would make enough money for them to move deep into the Federation but it never happened. The money they gained was spent on alcohol for her and gambling for him. Three months into her pregnancy and he was gone, disappearing from her life.

With nowhere else to turn Victoria begged forgiveness from her family. They brought her back into the fold, not wanting to abandon their daughter (or at least not her child).. Grandma Liz helped her through it, having gotten pregnant herself when she was only twenty years old. Time passed by and after a difficult Elizabeth White was born, named for her great-grandmother. Victoria fell in love with her daughter immediately, but was trapped in the same situation as her own parents. How was she supposed to feed her baby?

Her siblings had left to search for work in the cities but that was no guaranteed thing. Ranching was out, she had seen the results of relying on the land. She had no skills except sewing, knitting and street-fighting. The first two could maybe earn her a bit of extra cash here and there but nowhere near enough for her needs. Luckily for her, war was brewing. She signed up the Oceania Expeditionary Force and Victoria the low-rent hood abandoned her tattered pants and shirt for the blue uniform and slouch hat of Private White. She entered boot camp and quickly became friends with the young men and women she would spend her service fighting alongside.

The first year of her service was relatively unremarkable until an encounter with an armored car during the siege of Amone wiped out her whole unit. The few survivors were hastily reassigned, Victoria finding herself in the 15th Atlantic Rifles where she survived a gas attack and took part in the final push to take Amone. It was during that push where she earned her lance corporal stripe, finding a copy of the Imperial defense plans and turning them over to her superiors. Bestowed with a modicum of responsibility and a miniscule increase in pay to match Victoria settled in for a long winter.

---_{P O T E N T I A L S}

Waste Not, Want Not: A childhood spent scrounging instilled in Victoria a need to reuse as much as she can. This manifests itself in the form of knitting, sewing and scavenging. If something can be repaired or refurbished it will be. Socks get darned, pants get patched, empty bottles and a bit of lamp oil turned into makeshift explosives. She also has a habit of looting, checking the pockets of the dead for trinkets or curios.

Hidden Depths: Despite little formal schooling and a rough upbringing Vicky has more facets than one might expect. She's a cartoonist in her spare time, filling a journal and the margins of her letters home with doodles or caricatures. She does her best to stay abreast of the news and considers herself well-informed politically. What a shame that people tend to see no more than a violent alcoholic.

Oceanics Before Others: While the Imperials might have started the war in desperate search for more ragnite the Federation is little better, a conglomerate alliance dominated by the largest nations to the detriment of the smallest. In Vicky's eyes, the only way for Oceania to prosper is to cut itself loose from the lumbering beast that is the Federation. Her love for her country and its identity does not extend to the Federation or the major players within it. This disdain for various governments does not extend to the people under them. Mostly.

Rodent of Unusual Size: An affection for rats in her childhood progressed to seeing similarities between her and them to what is now a full blown alter ego. The Rat is what Victoria sees herself as when she's digging through pockets or caught in a brawl, a creature that claws and bites and thrashes to get the smallest of scraps. Part stress coping mechanism, infantile need to pass off responsibility, all delusion.

---_{E Q U I P M E N T}

- Model 1903 Interloper: The pistol Victoria used during her days as an armed robber, now getting a new lease on life as a sidearm in the trenches.
- E-Tool: Sharpened so that it can serve as both an axe and a shovel the E-Tool is handy both for building fortifications and attack them
- Longfield Carbine: Standard issue for shocktroopers. Shorter than the standard rifle with a faster firing rate and a bayonet attached for spearing things.
- Shrapnel-Ragnite Bombs: Clear trenches and buildings with the pull of a pin.
- Pack Rat's Backpack: A collection of her needles, thread, handsaw, trinkets, tobacco, alcohol, ammo and all the other bits and pieces she picks up.
- Stormtrooper Armor:The standard stormtrooper armor with a bit of extra padding added by Victoria herself.
- Slouch Hat: Once belonged to Thomas Carter, worn in place of a helmet and kept pinned up in the traditional style.

[color=4F97A3][/color]_{A F F I L I A T I O N S}

- Jack White (Father)
- Margaret White (Mother)
- Liz Dawson (Grandmother)
- Elizabeth White (Daughter)
- John, Edward, and Mary White (Siblings, all 28)
- Charles Blake (Worthless Bastard)

---_{R E L A T I O N S}

-Jean-Robin Charpentiar: Either a coward or a fool, Jean is certainly not cut out for leadership. Victoria doesn't blame him for being unable to treat the now deceased Thomas Carter, she blames him for his failure to take action under fire.
-Alexander-John Middleton: He's an bastard but so are most officers. What little interaction she's had with him confirmed that he's just like any other Federation bigwig: high off his own fumes and ready to throw people into the meatgrinder.
-Diana: A drunken fling from Amone before the place was gassed to hell. She's cute, short, a lightweight and easily embarrassed, all things that Victoria is not. Perhaps that was the reason they were drawn together. In all honesty the specifics where pretty much forgotten during the chaos of the battle but they did have a nice talk about Elizabeth so there's that.