[OOC] Straits of Steel (A South East Asian Cyberpunk Thriller)

>://CURRENT PLOTLINES

[N/A]

[Bork Lazer]

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The land and the sea. Only fools believe them to be different and only bigger fools believe the sea to be more free than the land. Fools. They are both cages, with the bait of freedom, security and power in both of them.

And who has the key? People too powerful for you and I to imagine. The question is whether or not you have the guts to break your bars......

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It begins with a date.

2099. The eve of a new century rising from the ashes of the old.

It’s been 60 years after the Dark Crash. 50 years after the Nine Mile War. 45 years after the signing of the SEAEZO Treaty. 15 Years After the Pan Pacific Agreement. It’s a miracle we’ve managed to make it this far.

2099. The twilight of the 21st century.

It is the age of the Cyber. Machine has consumed flesh and code has subsumed thought. Man and machine have become intertwined as one. Bone is shed in favor of reinforced titanium, eyes are replaced with fibre-optic camlenses and limbs with multi-axial nanotube assemblies. Fashion catalogues have been replaced with designer aug catalogues. Spider legged mercenaries march into the Congo to wage war. The head striker of the Palladium Posse shows off his new Mark 5 mechano-thrusters. The meat is obsolete whilst metal has become the new human.

The body is no longer sacred.

It is the age of the Gene. To fight back against the metal, life must be altered beyond its natural boundaries. The GMO fear-mongering of the twenties lacked imagination and in spite of the constant protests of gene purist groups, genetic engineering is now as commonplace as dollar store candy. The human genome and all of its possibilities are now a playground for alleyway geneticists and laboratory eggheads to tinker with. New varieties of New Babylon’s halophytic seaweed soy grow in the hydroponic gardens of soccer moms. Adverts for children’s kera-mods surge as halloween comes around the corner. Crowds part as a person screams out, his features half-man half-turtle, clutching a syringe of bootleg transcription stabiliser. The definition of human is quickly becoming more and more blurrier.

Life is no longer sacred.

It is the age of the Corp. Transnationals, mobile enterprises and startups permeate every facet of our lives, a capitalistic ecosystem of shadow warfare and trade deals. Though government institutions hold strong, corporate greed will soon erode it away like tides against a cliff. Your blue-collar livelihoods are dictated by the rise and fall of Lee-Platine’s stock values. Offers for university scholarships offered by a number of fast food industries dot the e-papers. Your package deliveries are sent over by an Iridium Heavy Industrial sky-bird, bristling to the teeth with anti-personnel smart guns. For your protection, of course. To be an individual underneath the yoke of the Corp is a paradox and the only way out is to fight dirty.

Your personhood is no longer sacred.

It is the age of the Deep. Everything and everywhere is interconnected by an ocean of encrypted servers and data transmissions ranging in the gigabytes. The physical and virtual worlds have melded together in two, forming a symbiosis of abstract and concrete. AR addicts doze off in the streets, trapped in a constant cycle of chip abuse and sensory deprivation. Poachers surf the forbidden territories of the Deep, hunting down wild malware to capture and reuse for their own purposes. Hidden deep within, remnants of malfunctioning intelligences roam around like lost children, enslaved to their own subroutines. Those who desire can sink deeper to search for the truth but at what cost?

Reality is no longer sacred.

Let’s take a closer look at the situation.

The South China Sea. An ocean of red and riches. It has been fought and contested over by countries in South East Asia since the beginning of the First IndoChina Wars. It’s not hard to see why. It’s the hub of maritime trading in South East Asia, worth more than the Suez Canal in asyuan. Borders have been drawn up, agreed upon, re-negotiated and destroyed more times than history can count. It’s best not to ask too many questions about who started it since finger-pointing is the usual response. SEAEZO is the only thing keeping the region from becoming the battleground for World War 3.

Where are you now?

New Malacca.

If there’s one word to describe New Malacca, it’s maze. It is a haphazard ramshackle arcology of docking harbors, hollowed out ships and hydro tunnels shifting in size and shape. Along with the ever changing assembly of warships and merchant vessels that come in and out every second, no sight in New Malacca is ever the same.

It is a land of the lost. The Great Flood spared few and sunk many. Those who remained either succumbed over time to the Corps or went on a pilgrimage of their own. Splintered sects of Buddhist monasteries live out a meek existence on shanty boats. In the hustle of the wet markets, you hear Tagalog, Hokkien, a zoo of endangered languages forming a creole. On the docks, you see a crew of Burmese pipe spanners play a homebrew version of Poker on shipping containers. When all other options are off the table, New Malacca is what remains.

It is a utopia of the illicit and illegal. Crime, poverty and gangs wrack those who float above on water whilst the corps lurk underneath the offal, biding their time to pull strings and influence the state of power in the floating city. Trafficking routes for black ganja and Hype Out can be found all throughout the city. Gang wars are the city’s morning alarm clock. Just last week, an Armalance convoy was robbed and assaulted by full body cyber-loons. Violence and lawlessness are a constant within its rusting walls whilst duplicity and caution are as essential as oxygen.

To be a part of New Malacca is to navigate this slippery maze. Most give up trying.

You didn’t come here to surrender, though.

You came here to rise.

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//PREMISE AND PLOT

June 15th 2099. 7:00 PM. Dead of the night.

Suraiboshen. Best five star omakase this side of the Indian Ocean.

That’s not why you’re here, though. You aren’t here because you got lucky on the ten thousand reservation list, nor did you have some fat cat pull some strings for you.

You’re here because you got hired for a job. Top secret. A job that promised a 500,000 asyuan payout. Just the thing needed to propel you back up this world.

Whether you were a discharged lawkeeper, a wanted script hacker or a news anchor stretching the bounds of investigative journalism, your background doesn’t matter. Your desperation and needs mattered more than your skills and now, you’re here.

The two guards standing by the side of the door cough and nod towards you, the ancient hinoki oak door sliding open. You walk inside to take a seat...........

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Straits of Steel is a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk ® roleplay set within the region of SouthEast Asia. Players will be taking the role of a group of savory and unsavory individuals that find themselves wandering around in the floating aquapolis of New Malacca. Your adventure begins when an unknown power broker contacts you about a one-time job offer that promises high risk but high reward. With nothing to lose, you accept it and find yourself waiting at the entrance of a seedy sushi bar to meet your man. Too bad no one told you that this wasn’t going to be a solo operation…….

The roleplay will be a hybrid-sandbox linear group roleplay that revolves around a collaborative tight narrative centered around the personal interactions of the players with each other and the natural environment interspersed with sections that allow for limited open world exploration, albeit with certain caveats. This approach is meant to allow for a sustainable level of player freedom without compromising the cohesion of the RP. The actions of the player will determine their influence and position within the landscape of New Malacca along with their relationships to each and every faction. Every decision that you make will have consequences or repercussions further down the line if you do not think carefully.

//RULES

一 )If you’re seriously considering god-modding, powerplaying or metagaming within a play-by-post roleplay, don’t make me the target of wasting your time on the internet. It’s rare enough around these parts as it is. If an attempt at any of these aforementioned actions is made within the IC, then, repercussions will follow. Depending on the severity, this can range to a stern warning to permanent removal from the RP.

二 )The genre of cyberpunk and adult themes are inextricably linked together. Therefore, this will be considered an 18+ RP in which adult and mature topics can be discussed and explored within the confines of the setting. However, all CS applications, IC posts and OOC posts must fall within the guidelines of RPGO’s terms of service. If you are seriously considering to engage in explicit NSFW behaviour with another poster, take it to the PMs. If not, I’m going to force you to take it to Pornhub via banning you from my RP.

三 ) Start shit, get hit. Wheaton’s law applies here in this RP, both within the confines of the OOC and the IC. There will be absolutely no toleration for any bigotry, assholery, harassment or bullshit within this RP. When the GM tells you to stop, you stop. If you have problems with how this RP is being run, discuss it within PMs with me. If you have problems with another poster in this RP, discuss it with me in PMs. If there is any way to approach a situation without escalating conflict, do so.

四 )When creating your character sheet in Straits of Steel, overpowered is not optimal. You are expected to create dynamic and fleshed out character concepts that fully embrace the nature of this world. You are not a former wetworks supersoldier packed with miniaturised thermonuclear weaponry. You are not the CEO of a Triple-A corporation. You are essentially a schlub near the bottom of the rungs of the socio-economic totem pole, attempting to claw your way up the food chain.

五 )As Straits of Steel is an advanced level RP, posting quality and length are of the utmost priority. A minimum of three-four paragraphs is required for a post along with a reasonable level of descriptive writing. Quality over quantity is best but when quality goes hand in hand with quantity, it’s even better.

六 )The rules for posting frequency are undecided as of now but a minimum requirement that all players must follow is to inform the GM of any discrepancies or possible IRL events that may interfere with post writing. The RP will be a mixture of regular cyclic posting order, collaborative Google docs posting and an experimental ‘free period’ posting where fast posting is allowed and there is no set order.

七 )Discussion about storybuilding and worldbuilding is not only encouraged within this RP but to be promoted. Forging your own possibilities in this setting and writing out the backstories of new factions is always welcome.

八 )Any questions or queries that have not been resolved after reading these rules can be followed up if you believe it to be necessary in the OOC or privately.

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//MECHANICS

• In Straits of Steel, an emphasis will be placed on creating a closed sandbox environment for players to interact in within the confines of the narrative. To help accentuate this, interactive objects and NPCs in the environment will be highlighted with specific colored text.

• The status of objects and health of NPCs will also be illustrated at the end of an GM post as such below.

Yikil Borosky: Minor concussion, perforated femur, dislocated shoulder joint, in severe distress

//CHARACTER SHEET

Keep in mind that the format and style of your character sheet can vary, but it must include all the essential details listed in this example character sheet.

CHARACTER SHEET FORMAT

//YOUR SELF

Name:

Age:

Gender:

Affiliation: (The faction you are affiliated with. A list of avaliable factions will be present within the OOC. Alternatively, you can make your own homebrew faction.)

Appearance:

//YOUR SOUL

PERSONAL GOAL: (What are you trying to achieve in New Malacca)

LIKES:

DISLIKES:

REPUTE: (We've been asking a lot about how your character looks at the world, so, let's reverse it around. How does the world view your character? What status does your character have in the world?)

HEEL:(Heels are basically an over-riding character flaw that exemplifies the type of person your character is. It's what other people know your character for being. Examples of Weak Spots can be: Hubris, Selfishness, Naivety, Easily Angered, Inferiority Complex, Napoleon Complexes, Vengeful, Sadistic, Paranoia. A Heel is different from just another normal character flaw because they are an essential part of your character that makes your character who they are. They can never escape from a Weak Spot.)

CODE: (Codes are a deep sentiment, passion or virtue that a character holds dearly to, well, as much as they can in New Malacca. It's a trait that someone would have if they lived in a sane world outside the Wal. Soft Spots can be: Valuing freedom, A Hero Complex, Social Justice, Friendship, Honesty, Being Protective of your Family, Protecting the Weak, A Pact that You Abide By, Veganism, Empathy.)

QUIRKS:(Unique traits that your character is known for doing such as collecting ears off their dead enemies, always ordering their drinks with a single cube of ice, whatever strange things that immedietely makes them distinct from everyone else.)

//YOUR PAST

(Can be a short biography or a writing sample detailing their past. I do not expect a didatic summary of each and every event in your characters lives but only the most important ones.)

//YOUR PERSON

ATTRIBUTES: (A list of the most prominent skills that your character has picked up over the years. You have a maximum of 3.)

BODY MODS: (Cyberware or Bioware that your character has integrated into their body. No limit.)

EQUIPMENT: (Self-Explanatory)

[Bork Lazer]

//THE SESE FTZ AND NEW MALACCA

After decades of border disputes, military standoffs and proxy wars between China and the ASEAN coalition of South-East Asian countries, the Dark Crash of 2035 was the death knell of the Chinese mainland power structure. Having transitioned most of its infrastructure to A.I firmware, the massive EMP effectively knocked out most of China’s economic and social capabilities. The civil war between the ROC and PROC, along with internal strife and corruption compounding the rot, only served to sink the knife deeper. With their position untenable and most of South East Asia’s infrastructure left unscathed by the global cataclysm, China’s political bargaining power was a pinprick of its former self. All other options exhausted, the only choice left was that of a diplomatic route with ASEAN. The negotiations almost failed when Taiwan and the Autonomous Region of Hong Kong were involved as parties but the Chinese government reluctantly agreed.

In the year that followed, negotiations followed more easily given that China’s political power was fractured and the economic prosperity of ASEAN's member countries outweighing that of China. Therefore, the SESE (South East Special Economic) Free Trade Zone was drawn up to allow a single exclusive economic trade zone which every country had the ability to use. When China dissolved its disingenuous territorial and historical claims, the SESE was signed almost immediately with countries bound to never once again engage in direct warfare with one another. Unfortunately, having been moderated by parties bought out by corporate interests, the SESE gave a huge leeway. Thus, the wars in the SESE shifted from international tensions to outright corporate warfare.

The effects were immediate. Corporations almost immediately made investments in the region in the form of natural gas mining, oil drilling and the building of aquaplexes - new habitable cities that were the new trend given the irradiated nature of most major cities after the Dark Crash and the lopsided battle against rising sea levels. Now, the SESE is a landscape of corporate wars, floating aqua plexes and piracy, a darwinistic terrarium of growth and greed.

Key Zones of New Malacca

1) West Bengal Port - The primary docking and processing bay for all arrivals from the East Indian Ocean and one of the densely populated areas in New Malacca outside of the Tradeplex. The section is dominated by a large number of Indians and Pakistanis who fled the region during the Kashmir Inferno along with the odd Bangladeshi. Most of New Malacca’s blue collar workers and laborers live here due to the low income rent.

2) Hibiscus Lane - Serving as both a place of cultural heritage and a tourist trap, Hibiscus Lane is a slice of Indo-Malaysia directly in the heart of New Malacca. Hover rickshaws stroll along the pavements whilst floating markets travel along the banks, selling both legal and illegal wares of all shapes and sizes.

3) Canton Canal - Considered a parallel to Hibiscus Lane, the Canton Canal is its opulent and clinically perfect counterpart. Luxury, gambling, sin and vice can be found within their famous mahjong casinos. An old trick to remember around these parts is to never gamble on a game of Go. Considered to be the territory of the Triads.

4) The Triangle-What was meant to be an public ecological terrarium project by the Corporate Council has now secretly become the headquarters of the new and improved Golden Triangle. The former drug trafficking highway was hit hard by Filipino PMCs and the rise of cyber warfare. However, instead of being destroyed, it underwent dormancy, feigning death and waiting for the right conditions to proliferate once again. Ruled by an eclectic collection of Thai, Burmese and Cambodian diasporas, the Triangle is New Malacca’s center of its thriving underground synthetic drug trade, using the integrated hydroponics infrastructure to grow, manufacture and distribute their products across most of South East Asia.

5) Shin Ryushu Dockings -Although the nations of Japan and Korea survived the Dark Collapse and the climate storms well, the lower lying islands didn’t fare better during Typhoon Otachi. If you want to know a place where you can hire the best razors or street samurais, Shin Ryushu Dockings has your back. Be careful of walking around the wrong street light, lest, you wake up in the hands of a posse of Yakuza.

6) East Sino Corporate Tradeplex - Everywhere, you see holo-ads blotting out the sky, blurting out brand names. Tzu. Verge. Saewung. Tenaga Ultra. Welcome to the big leagues. This is the megacorp capital of New Malacca. Sleek, brutalistic spires of plexi-alloy and reinforced syncrete dot the skyline here. Gleaming plazas, overcompensating company buildings and crowded stock exchanges are populated by corporate stooges and beleaguered office mice, scuttering around mindlessly.

7) The Undertow - Within here are the only entrance points to the Undertow, a deep complex of underwater corporate facilities located deep underneath the superstructure of the city via elevator. The New Malacca City Council says that it's strictly being used for municipal purposes but everyone really knows that those underwater tunnels hide more than they let on......

8) Braziltown-Ah, those westerners just want to get their hands on everything, don’t they? Braziltown is an architectural tumor on New Malacca’s landscape, a shambling grotesque stack of haphazardly built containers, a reminder of the massive refugee crisis that occurred during the aftermath of the Dark Collapse.

9) The Flot Slums -The Great Flood and Dark Collapse shattered the back of most high income countries in two. Out here is No Man’s Land. An eclectic collection of minorities from every part of the globe live out here in light of the increasing lack of residential space within New Malacca. Considered to be the main location of the Temple By the Sea.

Straits of Steel is set in the gigantic, burgeoning aquaplex of New Malacca, the self-proclaimed pearl of South East Asia that’s on the precipice of sinking yet always managing to just float above the waves.

Situated south of the Paracel Line and the Spratly Islands, New Malacca started as a simple ImperialChem refueling station built for tanker ships in 2000. Slowly over time though, it evolved into a self-sufficient environment as more and more of the corporation’s tasks would be outsourced to the station for greater efficiency, ImperialChem continual remodelling transforming it into a miniature city.

During the Nine Mile Dispute in 2010, the refueling station fell into disarray as ASEAN countries forced strict economic sanctions on Chinese exports. This effectively resulted in ImperialChem selling the remaining assets of its refueling station over to an ambitious startup company specialising in land development known as Baharu Developments. Its CEO, Kwan Chen, envisioned it as a corporate haven for ASEAN, where trade would flourish, free from governmental bureaucracy or urban rot.

Kwan set to work straight away, offering lucrative corporate welfare packages to ensure investment. Like a pack of moths, every rookie startup and corp in the Pacific and South East Asia flocked over towards Kwan’s. Putting their stock into Kwan’s ludicrous idea, New Malacca became more and more of a reality with each buoyant hull, syncrete panelling and high-fibre cable installed into the superstructure. By 2025, New Malacca was officially booming.

As economic growth ensued, growth of urban inequality and crime increased. Cyber gangs, yakuzas, drug traffickers and more lurked and grew in power as more and more ships illegally entered the borders of New Malacca. Finally deciding enough was enough, the Malacca Corporate Committee assembled their private security forces and began a war to stamp out gang influence within New Malacca. This resulted in the establishment of corporate owned public institutions in New Malacca such as a police force, firefighting force and social support services.

Since then, corruption, economic growth and crime have bloomed within the confines of New Malacca. It’s survived all the way through the Dark Collapse, the Nine Mile Dispute and the South China corporate scuffles while still remaining what it is. A beacon to all those looking for an unattainable dream.

Regions of the SESE FTZ

The People’s Republic of China

There is often a massive confusion of what the PRC exactly is. Some view it as an authoritarian regime looking to extend its hegemonic influence on the rest of the world. Some say it is a mire of corruption and instability, a bomb waiting to go off.

The truth, as always, is far more complicated than usual. The PRC is a region that is defined by war: war with itself and war with others. As of 2099, the PRC still remains the autocracy wearing the trappings of communism. that it is, although with a higher degree of capitalistic influence within its economic framework, more than the higher ups of the PRC would be comfortable with. Increasing privatization of China’s industrial and manufacturing services along with politicians lining their coffers with corporate bribery led to these incr

In the mid 2020s, China unveiled progress on the One Citizen Network publicly: an attempt to fully integrate government economic and social services together under a revolutionary A.I wireframe network that would span from the Gobi Desert to Shanghai. By the 2030s, the project was undergoing regional testing when the Dark Crash hit, sinking hundreds of billions of government funds into incomprehensible bytes of glitchy data. It had effectively put a stop gap in China’s plans of economic expansion through the southern hemisphere, their Neo-Silk Road project being put on halt as the world fell into chaos.

Following a decade of internal party purges, civil disputes and rooting out of corruption, the Chinese Imperial Government rose out of the muck and mire and plunged themselves yet into another bloody conflict for control of the South China Sea in 2049 during the Nine Mile War. Unfortunately, for them, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the rest of South East Asia had prospered during the Dark Crash. When it was clear that control of the South China Sea would be unattainable, the government settled for a detente instead and thus, SEAZO was born.

In 2099, China is the biggest and wields the most geopolitical influence with its sizable military. As such, most military and war-tech corporations nest comfortably by primarily selling to chinese buyers. A heavy rural-urban divide still remains in China’s society today, with most of the population making up a sizable labor force. Everyone knows that social engineering and Orwellian policies are China’s bread and butter but as long as you know who to bribe and where, you can live comfortably as long as you don’t end up in one of their ‘reeducation’ camps.

The Pacific Orient
In 2099, Japan and Korea are the economic powerhouses of the Pacific and have become a near corporatocracy, dominated by family owned zaibatsus and chaebol in the aftermath of the Dark Crash. The Pacific Orient is the birthplace of cybernetics and the modern mega-corporation as we know it, with a census estimating that over 90% of its citizens from young to old are implanted with cybernetics.

Japan still maintains its constitutional monarchy, even near the advent of the 22nd century, but Korea’s politics have been a mixup ever since the Dark Crash. Pyongyang’s slow technological advancement had spared its population most of the ensuing chaos, although their forays into nuclear power resulted in an incident not seen since Chernobyl. Some historians theorised that sabotage by foreign powers occurred but no one seemed to care about pointing fingers enough. Reunification of the North and South happened but at a heavy humanitarian cost.

New ASEAN

It’d only taken 30 years for a new power bloc to rise up in South East Asia. The youngest contender and perhaps the most diverse, New ASEAN is a coalition of over 10 countries within South East Asia. The climate storms and the Dark Crash only strengthened the diplomatic ties of the coalition as they began to shift from becoming an intergovernmental organisation to a political and economic union similar to that of the EuroZone. This path towards a multigovernmental union accelerated further when Taiwan and Hong Kong, now fully autonomous from China’s influence after the Nine Mile Dispute, joined as members.

New ASEAN, in comparison to the South Orient and China, is wracked with corruption, infighting and diplomatic issues. Unlike the relatively mono-ethnic societies of the PRC and the South Orient, ASEAN society is extremely diverse with over hundreds of different and distinct subcultures, religions and ethnic groups within its borders. However, racial tensions are often a common occurrence within its territories.

//GROUPS OF INTEREST

Political Groups

Whilst New Malacca is essentially a de facto corporatocracy, the initial riots and the uncontrolled wave of crime that plagued New Malacca in its infancy made it clear to the NMCC that whilst public institutions were undesirable, a puppet was still needed. Thus, the New Malaccan Mayoral Democracy was born. The current mayor of New Malacca is Azman Yokgan, a member of the South Orient Party.

South Orient Party - Having been around since the inception of New Malacca in its early stages, the South Orient Party holds the most political power and are strictly allied to the interests of New ASEAN and the preservation of New Malacca’s sovereignty. Strictly speaking, the South Orient are the remnants of the original parties that founded New Malacca and have shifted heavily from their neoliberal policies in the inception of New Malacca’s government. The South Orient nowadays primarily operates on a platform of staunch protectionism alongside favoring pro-ASEAN relations and corporate regulation - or what counts as regulation in this day and age. Wary of the growing influence of the megacorps in New Malacca along with the fact that they are part of its foundations, the South Orient have attempted to reverse privatization of public assets, to limited success. Many have accused them of rigging the supposedly democratic elections in their favor, despite what their PR officials say.

United People’s Party - Still licking their wounds after the Dark Crash, the Chinese Imperial Government is still contesting their claims to the South China Sea through piecemeal treaties over scraps of land and oil reservoirs. Their latest dispute is New Malacca which they believe to have historical claim to. The United People’s Party advocates for close diplomatic ties with the Chinese government along with the possibility of making New Malacca a Special Administrative Region. However, the United People’s Party is distinctly fractured

Young Frontier Party - Contesting the South Orient Party for the most seats within the corporate council, the Young Frontier Party advocates for full deregulation of all illegal technologies and reexamination of all bioware and cyberware legislation to bring humanity to the next stage of their evolution. By far, their most dangerous goals are to explore the far reaches of the Deep and communicate with the rogue artificial intelligences still trapped beneath its depths which could have far reaching consequences not only for New Malacca but for the world itself.

Fisherman Party - Give a man a fish and he’ll be full for one day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll never be hungry again. The Fisherman Party is a anarchocommunist party that has gained ground thanks to the staggering socioeconomic inequality that plagues most residents of New Malacca. In spite of the secular laws in New Malacca, they have close ties with major religious groups ranging from Islam, Taoism, Christianity and Hinduism. The Fisherman Party have been suspected of corporate sabotage and organising the massive public demonstrations and protests that have risen in New Malacca in the last two decades, although they deny all accusations.

The Board of Seven

The NMCC or the Board of Seven, as they are known colloquially, are the eight governing mega corporations that are essentially the biggest fish in the pond, easily worth trillions in value and are Triple A rated. Representatives from each mega-corporation are chosen and occupy a chosen number of seats on a bi-annual basis. These eight corporations out of the dozens that occupy New Malacca’s trade zone have set the precedent for nearly 50 years.

Platine-Takahashi Cooperative - The conglomerate of an Italian fashion corporation and a Japanese zaibatsu, the media moguls of the Platine-Takahashi Cooperative owns the radio waves, TV programmes and VR sims. Platine Takahashi’s has its hands in the service industry, entertainment, social media, news, whatever it can use to drive the souls and minds of the masses. Whenever you tune in to listen to your favorite K-Pop, watch your Bollywood dramas or dive into a custom made VR film, the Platine-Takahashi Cooperative is responsible for it. Unlike most corporations, Platine-Takahashi has marketed themselves to the public as consumer friendly, using grandiose acts of philanthropy as their main method of calming the masses. In recent years,Platine-Takahashi has expanded towards fashion cybernetics, luxury automobiles, biotech and many other fields.

Hongyang Expansions - Soy cereal. Rust displacement sprays. Electromagnetic lifting weights. Almost every consumer good on the market is a product of one of Hongyang’s various subsidiaries. Although their products aren’t considered to be as high quality versus other megacorporations, the amount of startups, sub-corporations and assets that they have dwarfs every other megacorporation. It’s said that Hongyang Expansions isn’t a nation unto itself, it owns several nations. However, its size is its own weakness as corporate bureaucracy and scheming keeps itself from rising to the top.

Tenaga Ultra - Renewables. Nuclear. Fossil. Tenaga keeps the lights on in New Malacca and for a good portion of most countries within the ASEAN bloc, being one of the oldest corporations that has managed to survive to this day. Once a producer of palm oil, Tenaga Ultra has expanded into other energy industries as fossil fuels were shunned in favour of synthetic biofuels and renewables, particularly hydroelectricity and solar which powers New Malacca’s electric grid.

Saewung - Computers. Personal modems. Holo-displays. If it’s something high-tech and electronic, Saewung has your back. Although they lack the giant PMCs that other megacorporations wield like a blunt cudgel, their fearsome army of Deep Net security specialists, encryption software and combat droids are nothing to scoff at. Numerous famous hackers have met their end attempting to crack into their servers.

Paradigm Organics - Did you know that over 60% of New Malacca’s locally imported food is produced by Paradigm Organics? Of course, you didn’t know that. You’re too busy eating your algae udon to tell the difference. Paradigm Organics made headlines in the 2030s with its halophytic seaweed and algae crops that were perfectly made to survive their new saltwater inundated environments and they’re still making headlines today. Unlike most other corporations, Paradigm spends most of its budget on RnD projects, pushing the boundaries of genetics and biotechnology one crime against humanity at a time. The recent clone crisis has pushed Paradigm Organics into scrutiny by the media and other biotechnology competitors who are eager to push down their most biggest competitor in any way possible.

Verge - Considered to be a direct competitor towards Paradigm Organics, Verge offers an annual line of cutting edge next-generation cyberware, cybernetic implants and personal exo-skeletons that’s always the number one priority on every punk and paddler’s shopping list. In spite of their popularity, Verge has suffered its fair share of storms that have plummeted their stocks. Numerous lawsuits have been lobbied against Verge and their products based on allegations of integrating spyware into their cybernetics which Verge always denies. I mean, it’s not like there’s a reason that all of their employees are required to integrate mandatory neuralware as part of their application process. Right?

Tzu Peace Solutions - Tzu’s trademark of death has seen action across numerous wars and civil conflicts that have erupted in the 21st century. Operating on a nationalistic slogan of jingoism and appealing to the public’s sense of insecurity, Tzu Peace Solutions has more defense contracts in Asia than any other defense corporation on the market. Now, they’re currently occupied with making in-roads into the western market which is dominated by their competitors. Primarily specialising in defense, Tzu has branched out into law enforcement, security, automotive, aerospace and robotics.

Startups

New Malacca’s corporate tradeplex has been a lucrative location for many venture businesses and startups to start running on their two legs, before they’re bought by a corporation. These startups are the hottest and most promising players on the market.

Kaleidoscope - Before Kaleidoscope, AR was virtually non-existent in New Malacca. After Kaleidoscope entered the market, AR emerged from its hibernation in small, underwater followings of AR graffiti artists and spread across its districts. In the 2040s, Kaleidoscope’s AR network blossomed with multiple corporations buying patents for AR adverts and chips to integrate within their technologies. However, many AR users argue that Kaleidoscope’s monopoly over the local AR market in New Malacca has driven all other competitors and stifled innovation. Kaleidoscope is known for showcasing public AR projects as publicity stunts to boost sales.

Poly-Fab Solutions - In an age where manufacturing has shifted from manual to automation, Poly-Fab’s proprietary 3-D fabricators take the once laughable concept of applying mass scale 3-D printing and pushes it to the next level. Headed by former Verge think tank member, Han Lewis, Poly-Fab’s 3-D fabricators allow a higher degree of efficiency and faster speed than most models with the ability to manufacture highly complex industrial parts in just a matter of minutes. The key issue preventing Poly-Fab Solutions is their lack of open source blueprints which 3-D enthusiasts say is preventing them from making landmark sales.

Chimera - Chimera is just another one of the many ‘splicing’ startups to have emerged in the 2080s after the discovery of base pair stabilisation. Chimera’s gene splicing and enhancement programmes are touted to be able to cure hereditary diseases, remove cancer cells and mutations along with the usual fare of body modifications that everyone is interested in. Chimera is currently undergoing a PR battle with alleged footage showing splicing users seemingly dying on the sidewalk mere hours after undergoing gene therapy.

Gangs and Criminals

The Poppy - The unofficial lords of the Golden Triangle district, The Poppy have a stranglehold over the illicit drug trade within New Malacca, holding a monopoly on production and trafficking of synthesised opiates, amphetamines and concentrated narcotics. All inbound drug flow from Japan, South Africa, Russia and China goes directly straight to them. Members of their gang are outfitted with cybernetic implants that directly inject stimulants and combat drugs intravenously. With the lack of automobile roadways in New Malacca, trafficking is mainly done through airborne delivery drones rather than in person exchange.

404 - In the aftermath of the Dark Crash, numerous hacker groups sought to take advantage of the chaos, pilfering through old government files and backdoors within encrypted corporate files. The most notorious of these groups is 404, styling themselves after the term used to describe dead servers in the pre-Deep days. 404’s main objectives are to reveal the truth of the megacorps and peel back away layers of corruption for the public by stealing and publishing top secret files online along with deliberately destroying and hacking corporate servers. Most mega-corps would have laughed them off as a minor nuisance if it wasn’t for the fact they were responsible for Armalance’s declaration of bankruptcy in 2060. Now, every megacorporation is out for their blood.

The Heralds - Whilst most gangs in New Malacca embrace transhumanism, only one actively goes against the grain. The Heralds are an outspoken group of militant vigilantes that are against the spread of cyberware and bioware, believing them to be a violation of the natural order. They are the criminals that all other gangs in New Malacca despise as they regularly declare war on gangs that they deem impure. The group has suffered a recent splintering with the more moderate elements excising themselves from the more extremist sects who believe that public campaigns and seeding distrust in cyberware products is the key to victory rather than just blowing a hole in any layman with a cybernetic implant.

The Ambassadors - Mercenaries. Wetworks. Assasination. Bounty hunting. When you need something done discreetly,The Ambassador’s network of spies and assassins will have you covered. Composed of ex-corporate security officers and retired soldiers from Cambodia, Ambassadors, as they are called, are willing to do any job for any price, as long as the client does not betray them and that payment is always provided after the job. Their main base of operations is in a luxuriant hotel known as Le Chateau De Ambassador, where their assassins are able to rest, relax and recuperate after every job. It is considered sacred ground in the criminal world.

Black Yangtze - Tracing their origins from Tokyo yakuzas and Chinese triads that initially populated New Malacca in the 2020s, the Black Yangtze operate multiple criminal fronts in New Malacca in the form of night clubs, casinos, cock fighting, prostitution rings and bars. The Black Yangtze operate on a strict honor system in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the rest of the rabble. Government and corporate officials alike are within their pockets and they occupy a considerable amount of territory in both the Canton Canal and Hibiscus Lane.

Religious Groups

The Consecration of Salt - When the climate floods plagued the world, religious extremists and doomsday cults rose up in its wake to take advantage of the population’s gullibility. The Consecration is an example of just one of these groups. Universally condemned by the majority of Christian groups in 2099, the Consecration of Salt have found a new home in New Malacca, believing the next great flood to arrive soon and wash away the unworthy of this world, which is everyone except those who are part of their flock. Although their relentless hogging of AR ads and daily preachings of predictions about the next flood are little more than a nuisance, their recruitment methods leave a lot to be desired.

Precipice - As technology advanced into the realm of transhumanism, superstition adapted to the present in the form of technopaganism or technoshamanism. Though their ideology varies from group to group, their core tenets involve believing technology is inhabited by spirits and that one must equilibrate themselves with technology in order to ascend to a higher plane of existence. Most tend to view technopagans as fringe groups and chem-crazed lunatics that got hopped up on one too many hallucinogens. However, in New Malacca, technopaganism has gained ground here in the form of a group known only as Precipice.

The followers of Precipice believe in shedding their physical bodies for ones made of ones and zeros: code in order to pass into the Deep and into a haven whereby all of their minds will be united in a single intelligence. Thus, most of Precipice’s followers are AR and VR addicts, slaving their minds away 24/7 to modems and AR goggles in an attempt to experience nirvana. However, their devotion to worship of the Deep has led to them developing a third eye or sixth sense for manipulating Deep code better than most hackers ever could. In spite of the seemingly unsettling nature of their ideology, Precipice followers are deeply pacifistic in nature and only harass the public in the form of AR grafitti murals that they spread across property.

//TECHNOLOGY

Cyberware

The melding of machines with man. Cyberware was first commercially available in the 2030s as a means of addressing the physical ailments of countries with severely ageing populations such as Italy and Japan, with the effort being mainly spearheaded by Vinci Dynamics. Due to this, the largest cyberware conglomerates are based in the Euro-Zone and Asia Pacific.

Cyberware can be used to augment the users physical capabilities, bestow them with technological weaponry, allow them to interface with the Deep and accomplish feats beyond the scope of human physiology. Unfortunately, the proliferation of illegal, cheap cyberware on the black market and spread of improper implantation practice has led to the surge of neural instability and psychosis among users who are unable to pay for top-shelf cyberware. Phantom pains, dementia and neural degradation are just some of the more common syndromes that these users face.

The new trend on the markets today are full-body conversions, otherwise, known as borging up. This involves the near complete conversion of a user’s body into a cybernetic equivalent, becoming the machine instead of interfacing with the machine. Only a few select corporations offer this process, though, and god knows what else they put inside you that you’re not aware of yet.

Bioware

In the 2010s, CRISPR was the first brick in the golden road towards the dream of flawless genetic engineering. As pollution poisoned the environment and the world plunged into climatic chaos in the 40s, the agriculture industry was soon forced to resort to buying gene patents on genetically modified crops that could survive and thrive in this new world. Eventually, the multiple gene editing systems and techniques were categorised in one singular word: bioware.

Unlike cyberware, bioware isn’t just only found within organ transplants and splicing modifications. Algae vat farms are dotted throughout the landscape, supplying cheap and easy food for the growing populous. Muscle bound guard dogs, armed with the ability to detect a man’s blood type, guard entrances to pristine casinos. Gangers use aerosol-delivered viruses to assassinate specific targets. The use of self-enhancing bioware does come with a drawback however. The instability of most gene mods coupled with the high chance of cellular rejection means that users must consume a cocktail of hormones, nucleotide stabilisers and modified microorganisms to maintain themselves lest they die a slow and agonising death.

The current crisis with bioware is the clone crisis. Whilst corporate legislations have outlawed it entirely outside of research labs, there have been many reports of rogue clones managing to break out and assimilate into nearby cities.

The Deep

In the 2020s, the World Wide Web as we know it began the step forward towards integration into city-wide infrastructure and the development of public A.Is that would supervise control of these networks. In 2030 to 2031, a series of coordinated virus attacks completely disabled these networks, splintering them into malformed chunks and scattering it behind a maze of unstable servers and broken computer systems. The virtual intelligences that once patrolled the net became berserk and insane.

In the aftermath of the Collapse, countries began to reorganise and reinvest the remnants of the Highway, forming large segregated Data-Zones. Countries took their own methods of building their own servers, most going the traditional route, some via underwater submersible servers, others via airborne hover servers. Most of the Deep is still locked off from the public via a series of layered encryption firewalls by megacorporations and various countries.

Analogous to the ascension of the Deep was the rise of Augmented Reality or AR. Cities began adopting AR like a second skin to disguise the decaying and rotting buildings of old. Broken remnants of old AR can be found moldering inside abandoned alleyways. The combination of AR and the Deep led to the rise of a new subculture of hackers, tech warriors , code shamans, digital cartographers and more individuals attempting to forge their own way in this broken world.

---

[Rapid Reader]

Amazing work! Glad to see the OOC up!

Related, I'm almost done with a diver/rigger (to steal from Shadowrun). So expect lots of Russian, some drones, and an atmospheric diving suit.

[Opposition]

Might go full high seas CPAF Burmese pirate on this one, not gonna lie.

[Humble1]

Working on a street rat turned cat burglar. Where do you want us to submit character sheets? Here, or PMed to you?

[Habibi359]

Interested. As of late I've wanted to have a corporate businessman that wants to hit it big. So a guy with social and business skills, possibly extreme poker face in a startup company.

[Shiva]

I'm considering a nice hacker type character. Computer in the brain, built in screen into the arm to type code into, all that jazz. Spends all her time exploring the Deep as much as she can.

[WaywardK]

Going for an Ambassador by the code name “Gemini.” In control of various incomplete copies of his own mind running around in the deep as well as AIs referred to as “thought forms” who are basically customized digital “familiars.” Gemini himself is a clone and is on the verge of physically dying due to an issue in the cloning process.

[Bork Lazer]

Working on a street rat turned cat burglar. Where do you want us to submit character sheets? Here, or PMed to you?

@Humble1

In the thread, of course. If you feel uncomfortable, then, PM it to me. If you PM it to me first, then, you’ll just post it in the CS section if I’ve approved it.

Loving all these ideas so far, guys!

[Rapid Reader]

Although I promise I will pick this apart in the next couple of hours, here is what I have right now:

Toma The Diver / Rigger

//YOUR SELF

Name: Born Tamara Anatolyevna Malikova, called Toma by her friends, and known as Scrapper in a professional capacity.

Age: 25

Gender: Female

Affiliation: A consummate professional, Toma has carefully cultivated working relationships with various criminal gangs, corporations, and hacker enclaves.

Appearance:

True to her professional name, Toma appears as a figure dressed in repurposed pieces of cloth and recycled material. She is scrappy in spirit, body, and soul.

On land, she wears tank tops, short-cut jeans, and plenty of mesh. Her boots are ragged and lined with rubber to afford her purchase on water-lined decks. Enamored with all things machine, she is covered in a constant layer of oil and mechanical grime. Toma smells of salt with a subtle hint of industrial chemicals and synthetic lubricants. The polluted waters of the South China Sea keep her hair black hair dyed a shade of dirty brown. Cut in jagged self-styled lines her hair never reaches past her shoulders. Toma's eyes are a shade of metallic gray, recalling discarded metal, and pass for biological only at a quick glance. Her pale skin is colored by the sun and pollutants, darkening to a shade of light brown. Toma has a number of scars that mark physical labor and close calls scattered across her body, but none are particularly noteworthy. She has an elaborate tattoo of a sea serpent that begins on her right hand, snakes up her arm, and travels across her shoulder before wrapping around her left side.

In the water, Toma wraps herself in neoprene diving suits or encases herself in atmospheric diving suit of her own design.

//YOUR SOUL

PERSONAL GOAL: Toma is just trying to make a buck. She has gear to keep in working order. She has ammunition to restock. She has booze to buy. And she has fancy sushi to eat. Deep down, Toma has childish dreams of buying her own nuclear attack submarine and creating her own underwater empire, free from the corruption of the surface, but she knows that dreams drown first in New Malacca.

LIKES:

• The South China Sea
• Diving
• Loud and Fast Music
• Booze
• Old Western Movies

DISLIKES:

• Being stuck on dry land for too long
• Liars
• Slow boats
• Anyone that tells her what to do without paying first
• Pineapples

REPUTE: Stories of the Scrapper travel across the waves of the South China Sea. Whispers tell of a figure emerging from the dark waters of New Malacca. A being without a name, faceless, and nameless. A diver. A creature of the Deep.

Toma is a nobody in New Malacca. She keeps her head down and deals with trouble efficiently. She pays her debts on time. She prefers bribes and conversation to violence. She avoids associating openly with any dissident elements and keeps her opinions to herself. Her friends are few and carefully chosen.

The Scrapper is storied figure among those that ply their trade beneath the waves. Divers have heard of the Scrapper. Divers know of the Scrapper. Some of them have even met the Scrapper. Working with a small number of trusted fixers, the Scrapper has worked without regard to factional affiliation and raised a modest reputation as a problem solver of the depths. The most reliable way to hire the Scrapper is to contact Mr. Chang, a well-known fixer rumored to have ties with the Black Yangtze.

HEEL: Toma is an adrenaline junkie. She lives to push the envelope on land and in water. She wants to go faster. She wants to dive deeper. She wants to feel alive, which requires feeling like there's a good chance she's going to die. She is enraptured by the risky connections her direct neural interface creates and she's constantly chasing the euphoria of communing with the machine. Toma prefers to operate right at the edge of her crush depth, where pressure threatens to crush her at any moment.

CODE: Toma follows a simple code based on the idea that someone pays her and she completes the job without asking unnecessary questions. Any moral compulsions Toma had against carefully measured violence or crime were drowned in her youth. Another bloated corpse fed to the crabs. Toma counts political parties, fresh religions, startups, mega-corporations, gangs, and even pirates as valued customers. Credit chips don't care much about good or bad intentions.

However, if she were asked, and Toma generally isn't, she'd admit to harboring strong sympathies for the Fisherman Party. She knows what it's like to be hungry. She knows what it's like to dream of freedom. Real freedom. Freedom from the corporations and government technocrats. Freedom from the gangs. Freedom from the ghosts of the past.

Afraid of sinking, Toma keeps what little idealism that she retains carefully contained beneath the surface.

QUIRKS: Toma is inordinately fond of sleeping in odd places and it isn't uncommon to find her curled up in some corner of her scrapyard workshop. She prefers to sleep near the water and close to her gear, putting little trust in the gangsters she pays for the privilege of not being robbed blind while she sleeps.

//YOUR PAST

20,000 Leagues Under New Malacca

She feels Chang watching her. She's not sure how he does it with his eyes closed. But she knows he's watching. The beer in her hand is cold, a Chinese knock-off of a Bavarian wheat beer.

"Scrapper," he finally says, his eyes open. "Someone's asked for you."

"Who?"

"Don't know," he replies as he tosses her a pack of cigarettes. Japanese. Seven Stars. He had to have paid top dollar for them. His answer is a warning. Chang knows everyone. He knows all players. He knows all the players that matter and some that don't. She suspects he might know everything that happens in New Malacca. Sooner or later.

"What's the job?" She asks, fishing a cigarette out of the packet.

"Don't know," Chang replies with a frown. "The contact expressed a desire to reveal that at a later time."

"What's it pay?"

Chang pauses,"500,000 asyuan."

She doesn't manage to catch the cigarette as it falls out of her mouth.

"Is it a trap?"

Chang thoughtfully strokes his beard. She doesn't know how old he is, not really, but Chang is a fixture in Hibiscus Lane and Canton Canal. Black Yangtze, some say, but she doesn't know, not for sure. The tobacco stained grin he flashes is far from reassuring, "Hard to say. When this sort of money is involved, there's always several games being played in parallel."

"As bad as Undertow Junction #793?" she asks, managing to light her cigarette. Her hands are still shaking.

Chang laughs, "I don't think so. That was a remarkable situation"

"Reassuring. You want me to accept, no?"

The fixer shrugs, "I get 5% of your payout."

"You're a real bastard, you know that right, Chang?" She fumes.

"Good men don't last long here, Scrapper, you know that yourself."

"Mmm, they sink faster."

---

A child of the Flot Slums. Toma was born into an enclave of Russian refugees that had fled the civil strife and economic collapse. Her home was a leaking fiberglass that sank deeper into the South China Sea with each passing month. She could swim before she could walk.

The South China Sea claimed her mother, lost with the rest of her fishing vessel in a typhoon. Her father taught her all the he knew. He taught her how to repair ancient rusted out machines. He taught her how to study the latest technologies stolen from the corporations. He taught her much, but he could not prepare her for New Malacca.

Her first real job was working for the corporations, risking her life beneath the waves. She was one of the hundreds of commercial divers responsible for maintaining the Undertow. Protecting the secrets of the corporations and the New Malacca City Council. She watched her first friend die from an air embolism, nitrogen bubbles in his blood killing him in an instant. More of her friends died to accidents. The depths of the South China Sea were merciless and mistakes were fatal.

She branched out, diversified her skill set. Worked salvage, pillaging the skeletal remains, shipwrecks that littered the South China Sea. Feeding on the dead, she grew stronger. She cannibalized implants from corpses, from soldiers of the forgotten corporate wars. She slotted software looted off of research vessels reclaimed by the sea. She paid a small fortune to the ripper docs to commune with the machine, to feel metal as her own skin, to see through mechanical eyes, and to move as if it were her own body.

Mr. Chang found her after a job gone bad. The great raid on Undertow Junction #793. A generation of divers drowned in the waters surrounding Undertow Junction #793. They bled out, torn to pieces by steel darts. They imploded, as they sank beneath crush depth, vanishing forever into the great underwater canyons.

The old man gave her new purpose. He provided her with jobs. He was fair. He only took 5% cut from her payouts. He taught her the true nature of New Malacca, he taught her to hate the surface, the land of the corrupt and weak. Others dreamed of rising to the tops of New Malacca, but Toma dreamed only of sinking deeper. To the only free place that remained.

---

"What do you say, Scrapper? Ready to head beneath the waves again?" Chang says, interrupting her thoughts, driving the memories away. She curses Undertow Junction #793 as she has every day since she sank it. Burying it beneath the yellow sands.

"I'll do it," she answers. The last job had been a real Пиздец. A real clusterfuck. Her drone had been fried by state-of-the-fucking-art corporate ICE. Her suit was banged up. She was broke. She was fucked. And she'd only survive so long floating on old debts.

Chang smiles,"Suraiboshen, 7.00 PM. They'll know to expect you."

He knew what her answer would be all along.

//YOUR PERSON

ATTRIBUTES:

Underwater Specialist - Toma is an expert in all things underwater. She can construct, demolish, find, and salvage things underwater as easily as she can breathe.

Scrap Rigger - Toma has a gift when it comes to corralling drones and automated vehicles. She knows how they are designed. She knows how they are manufactured. She knows how they are maintained. And she knows how to use them to deadly effect. Few mercenaries in the South China Seas could compete with her particular knack for piloting a machine as if it was her own body.

BODY MODS:

Saewung Advanced Piloting System (SAPS) - An advanced targeting and piloting system that allows direct neural control of vehicles and drones. The culmination of decades of research aimed at perfecting SAPS doesn't just provide the user with greater speed and precision but quite literally links the user at a neural level with a machine. While offering considerable advantages in terms of performance, prolonged use of the system can inflict severe side effects on the user. Furthermore, dangerous levels of biofeedback can be experienced by the user as a result of damage to an interfaced machine.

Tzu Peace Solutions Nyx Combat Cyberoptics - Early in her career as a diver Toma replaced her eyes with a cyberoptics combat package from Tzu Peace Solutions. Containing a suite of vision enhancements, Nyx implants come standard with image enhancement, infrared sensors, and low light vision. Toma has had her implants further modified with an additional layer of reinforced glass to provide anti-dazzle and environmental protection. Even pitch blackness is no problem for Toma.

Custom Titanium Bone Lacing - Toma has had her bones laced with lattice chains of a reinforced titanium alloy she looted from a sunken Russian nuclear submarine. Beyond increasing her weight, the bone lacing has made her body able to handle greater weights. Additional benefits are that she punches much harder and that her body resists physical damage thanks to the plates of titanium that are now spread out across her body.

EQUIPMENT:

Tzu Peace Solutions Barracuda Amphibious Rifle - Toma favors an advanced amphibious assault rifle intended for use by combat divers. Designed by Tzu Peace Solutions in 2085, the Barracuda allows both underwater and above-water ammunition to be fired from the same chamber and barrel. The rifle sports a compact, bullpup layout and can load and fire standard 5.45x39mm ammunition as well a proprietary cartridge design for underwater by TPS engineers. Sporting a firing rate of 700 rounds per minute with a range on land of 500 meters, the Barracuda is a fearsome weapon. Underwater effective or lethal range is about 55 meters at a depth of 5 meters. The effective range of the Barracuda decreases in parallel with increased depth as the increased pressure reduces the amount of time fired rounds supercavitate which leads to a rapid increase in hydrodynamic drag. A military grade weapon, the Barracuda allows for the use of a suppressor, optical sights, and comes standard with a 40mm grenade launcher.

Freeport Metalworks Minnow Underwater Pistol - Toma's sidearm on land and in water is an electronic pistol with four barrels. An early answer to the problem of firing conventional bullets underwater, the Minnow instead silently fires 4.5 mm by 155mm steel darts. Each pull of the trigger fires a barrel sequentially and the pistol can rapidly run dry under sustained use. Ammunition comes in convenient clips of triple stacked cartridges.

Dive Knife - A serrated knife that Toma insists on calling a Diving Tool and only rarely uses as a weapon.

Malakhit Central Design Bureau Atmospheric Diving Suit (SEAWOLF) - The Seawolf is a heavily modified atmospheric diving suit that Toma owns and lovingly cares for. Designed by the Malakhit Central Design Bureau, the Seawolf was constructed for use by the Russian navy in rescue and combat operations. Manufactured from forged T7075 steel alloy it uses an advanced articulating joint design that Toma based on later scrapped American variants. Capable of operating in up to 850 meters of seawater for a normal mission of up to six hours the has a self-contained, automatic life support system. Additionally, the integrated dual thruster system allows the pilot to navigate easily underwater. Toma has applied black anechoic tiles to reduce the visibility and sound signature of the suit.

DAMAGED EQUIPMENT:

Boeing Echo Guardian (SEADOG) - The Echo Guardian is a small marine autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) designed and built by Boeing in the late 2080s. Composed of state-of-the-art alloys, the submersible weighs a mere 1.5 metric tons, is 5 meters long and is able to descend to 7,500 meters. The drone is useful for a variety of underwater inspection tasks such as explosive ordnance disposal (EOD), meteorology, port security, mine countermeasures (MCM), and maritime intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR). Toma treats the drone like a very large dog and it is her frequent companion on missions. The Seadog is tragically in a state of recent disrepair, having suffered an unfortunate encounter with some premium grade corporate ICE.

Not strictly part of my character sheet, but I wrote some related if random stuff in present tense (please forgive me):

Deep Dive

0 meters

She glides into the water, letting her atmospheric diving suit sink slowly.

The waters of New Malacca are filthy. They always are. She's used to it. The industrial chemicals and pollutants burn with faded intensity. She prefers the darkness of the waters. The darkness suits her. She longs for it. She dreams of the warm caress of the sea. The sailors know only the surface. They're afraid of the depths. They're blind to an entire world. The real world. The only true free world that still exists. The sea beneath the surface.

She knows better. The darkness hides her presence. It protects her. The corporate sec outfit isn't monitoring for something as small as her suit. Their lights can't illuminate the vast sea. They can't hear her. They're worried about a rival corporate submarine loaded to the brim with quantum torpedoes.

She knows they've been down their for months. They're reaching the end of their endurance. She has been testing them. Slowly frying their nerves with planned intrusions. Mapping out their security system. A faint ghost vanishing on their sensors, inching closer only to melt away into the sea. Another false signal. Another error of their high-powered sensors. Another artifact looming in their AR display.

50 meters

She listens to the first ping of their active sonar.

The return signal will never reach them. It has already been distorted by the anechoic tiles that line her atmospheric diving suit. She suspects that they are sleeping. The automated defense system will not notice her. She feels the AI reaching out, seeking with its binary tendrils. She's just background noise to the enslaved AI. It doesn't even notice her. It's queries dissolving into nothing.

150 meters

She slows her descent.

The fixer told her about the close range motion sensors. He didn't need to tell her about the turrets. They were esoteric, but she knew they were there. A product of the Nine Mile War. Automated harpoon launchers meant to skewer enemy combat divers. A rarity in the current age. Deadly mementos to mad men and a mad war.

She knows she has to move slowly. She is patient. She rigs her suit for silent running. Electronic equipment going dark as the airless engine dies down to a mere hum. She knows they can't hear her. They can't ID her. She sounds like the water. She sounds like a biological creature slowly swimming through the darkness. She sounds like nothing.

She is nothing, a creature of metal coated with pitch black rubber tiles drifting downwards.

Sinking.

Sinking into the deep.

300 meters

She stabilizes her atmospheric diving suit, the propulsion system now no more than a whisper as she silently glides towards the research facility. She is a predator in these waters. They are in her environment. Clumsy creatures hiding within their underwater habitat woven from reinforced steel. The change in pressure will kill most of them.

She feels a tinge of remorse. Killing brings no pleasure. But it will be painless. And it will be quick, faster than even their enhanced nerves can react. It's better than what any corporate sec soldier can expect. It's better than what they deserve.

New Malacca offers no mercy. The South China Sea permits no hesitation. The Straits are full of bodies. What's a couple more?

She feels at peace as she begins to deploy the explosive charges.

The Georgian

The Georgian looks over the diver. He's seen her kind before.

Eyes dulled with vodka, a cigarette loosely dangling between her lips. He imagines she's thinking of the sea. He can almost hear the siren call that has ensnared her. Given time, he knows it will drag her to the ocean floor. Another drowned soul lost to the endless waters of the South China Sea.

But now, right now, she's an asset. He's never hired her before. He doesn't even know her name. Chang recommended her. Sent her to him. The Georgian smiles, showing a mouth full of gold and silver teeth. He remembers his old teeth shattered and broken. A parting gift from some unnamed American intelligence agency. The unspoken price for his integrity and silence. They had made him a legend. They had made him a man of great standing. They had made him an honest thief. The precious metals that lined his mouth were shipwreck salvage, one of the many bounties of the South China Sea.

"It's simple enough job," he begins, drawing in the air with his hands, a little showman's flair.

"Chang told me the details," she says with a dismissive wave of a hand.

He nods. He prefers it this way. He hates having to tell a story to sell a job. Time is money. And money...money is everything in New Malacca.

"Can you do it?" he asks, wrapping his hands around his still cold drink.

"No problem," she replies, the ghost of accent playing across her voice. "The crew will cost you extra, though."

"Of course," the Georgian answers. He slides a credit chip across the table. "Just make sure to recover the files. The situation is unique. Mistakes would be problematic."

The diver takes his credit chip without comment and nods at his instructions. He tries to place the accent. Russian he thinks with a flash of anger. He hasn't forgotten. Generations later and he remembers. He remembers the stories of the Dark Crash. He remembers his grandfather, a broken man full of steel parts and shrapnel. He swallows the bitterness with whiskey. He is a fixer. He is a professional. He has no time for personal grudges. He is not concerned with national enmities. Not unless it means a profit.

He holds out his hand and the diver shakes it. He wipes the oil off of his hand after, but she doesn't seem to be offended. He registers a faint smile.

"What do I call you?"

She pulls her legs close against her chest and looks at him with hungry eyes. Like a cat, he muses as he watches her carefully. Demanding and full of threat.

"Scrapper," she drawls lazily, taking a drag from her cigarette. The Georgian smiles again. He's heard of her. He's heard of the Scrapper. He's heard of her reputation. Of course Chang sent him a professional.

[vietmyke]

Gonna go with a classic noir-esque investigator type, former lawman, with a big gun on his hip and a bigger chip on his shoulder- or maybe a former military man down and out, and looking for work.

[Mao Mao]

I'm going with your standard anarchist, fuck authority character.

[Mixtape Ghost N]

I wanna run a loud mouthed mechanic chick

[WaywardK]

I wanna run a loud mouthed mechanic chick

@The Ghost Note

Bonus points if she’s a raging lesbian... but that’s just me being queer 🥺👉🏻👈🏻

[Mixtape Ghost N]

<Snipped quote by The Ghost Note>

Bonus points if she’s a raging lesbian... but that’s just me being queer 🥺👉🏻👈🏻

@WaywardK

does being sexually attracted to automotive engines count?

[BingTheWing]

How many hackers are we having? Our roles might overlap a lot...

[Bork Lazer]

How many hackers are we having? Our roles might overlap a lot...

@BingTheWing

You actually bring up a valid point. This roleplay does not have any predesignated roles that players fill. My message to everyone is not to focus on competing for a singular archetype and just focus on making your own character. My hope is that every character sheet posted will be distinct enough from one another.

On a side note, I've decided that the maximum number of players I will be accepting for this RP is approximately 6. The final due date for posting character sheets hasn't been decided as of yet.

[Humble1]

Well, here's a start.

Paithoon

//YOUR SELF

Name: Paithoon

Age: 21

Gender: Biologically female, outwardly null

Affiliation: The Ambassadors

Appearance: Short person of Thai descent. Close cropped dark brown hair, cafe latte complexion, flat features. Wears baggy, coarse-woven jacket over loose denim pants and battered trainers. Perpetually wary expression.

//YOUR SOUL

PERSONAL GOAL: Financial stability. Enough to help her family find someplace to settle.

LIKES: Thai roti; High-speed J-pop; rock climbing

DISLIKES: Spicy foods; alcohol; being called 'kid' or being treated like a child

REPUTE: People who don't know Paithoon will glance at her and see her as a street rat, probably a small-time thief or swindler. She looks younger than she is, her gender is deliberately vague and her clothing is modest and low-key. No one would immediately place her as a member of the Ambassadors.

People who know her reputation respect her as a cat burglar and infiltrator. While she is a (very) junior member of the Ambassadors, she has a number of important heists to her credit already. She is viewed as green but ultimately a reliable thief and spy. Members of the Black Yangtze see her as a colleague who made good. They may be proud or jealous.

HEEL: Young (Judgement is still lacking. She'll grow, but probably not fast enough for this game.)
Suspicious: (Does not trust easily.)
Hatred of RalSanto Corporation (Company that destroyed her home.)

CODE: Protective of Family (Parents and siblings; boat people, dock at New Malacca every few weeks.)

QUIRKS: Does not reveal her gender, even to people who already know she's female. Always tries to leave something of value behind after a theft: a coin, a figurine, etc.

//YOUR PAST

No one in the small farming community on the Thai/Cambodian border thought anything of the big bag of rice seed. Maybe it fell off the back of a truck, maybe someone bought it off the black market, no one remembers. They germinated it and planted it like always. The fact that it was more disease resistant and higher in vitamins went unnoticed. The idea that they were committing intellectual theft by growing gene-tailored crops without a proper license would have baffled them.

Ten years on, and the rice from that one bag had been harvested, dried to seed, and replanted through two harvest seasons every year. The product made it onto the local markets. Someone at the RalSanto Corporation must have found some for sale, tested its DNA and discovered that it had the genetic markers of one of their patented crops. The Corporation was not pleased.

RalSanto could have sued, but it would have been awkward, costly, and publicly embarrassing. Instead, they released a tailored virus designed to kill all of their proprietary rice in the area. Of course, the rice had interbred with other rice plants, and so the genetic markers had spread throughout the rice paddies. Almost overnight, the entire harvest rotted in the fields. A farming village that had existed for centuries withered and died.

As the age of six, the girl who is now known as Paithoon became a boat person, along with her family. For ten years, they would drift from port to port, buying, selling, fishing, stealing and scrapping by as best they could. At the age of 16, Paithoon left her family behind and tried to make her way in the streets of New Malacca. She was quickly picked up by a dockside gang and became a petty thief.

Her path was set a year later when the dockside gang was forcibly absorbed by a gang affiliated with the Black Yangtze. A member of the Yangtze had come across a stealth-suit that had been created for the child of a VIP. The suit was intended to protect the child from kidnapping attempts by masking their presence from most technological detecting methods. The suit worked but it was eventually outgrown and made its way onto the black market. It's too small to be worn by an adult -- with the exception of a small, undernourished woman from the sticks.

With the suit, Pashitoon became a cat burglar and a spy. First for the Black Yangtze, and then - after a particularly audacious heist of a solid-state memory stick full of underworld secrets - she was recruited by the Ambassadors. Right now she's a very new member, expendable and lightly supported. But on a recent run she was able to provide intel on an executive complex and sabotage the security system, creating an easy path for a more senior team to engage in some wetwork.

The Ambassadors have started to provide the kind of financial stability that Pashitoon has been looking for. She now goes down to the docks when her family's boat passes through and passes them a modest amount of cash. She's hoping for more now; a big payday could buy her some better equipment - maybe even a mod or two - and pay for some repairs to her family's boat.

//YOUR PERSON

ATTRIBUTES: Stealth (Small, agile, wearing high-tech stealth gear, Paithoon can become close to invisible in the shadowy back-alleys and hallways of Malacca.)
Infiltration (Deft at slipping into crawlspaces and into HVAC systems. Equipped with several bits of tech that spoof locks and security systems.)
Theft (Light fingered. Capable of sliding materials out of cubbies slowly enough to fool motion sensors. Also skilled at pickpocketing.)

BODY MODS: Basic Ambassadors (The kind of immunizations they give to junior members to keep them from spreading diseases to the rest of the crew. A chip implant that allows her to enter Le Chateau.)

EQUIPMENT: * "Cat Suit" - A dark grey skinsuit w/ mask that prevents detection from IR and bio scans. Evolving matte-and-gloss pattern confuses visual recognition software. Also contains shedding of skin cells and hair to prevent leaving DNA evidence.
* Light gathering contacts: allow sight in low-light areas.
* Infiltration tools - Cloth roll containing various small devices for hacking locks, spoofing security systems, disarming alarms, etc.

[WaywardK]

How many hackers are we having? Our roles might overlap a lot...

@BingTheWing

It’s cyberpunk, hackers aren’t rare lol

[Shiva]

I still need to do her backstory and equipment, but this is my current WIP.

Nadia Kumara

Age: 25

Gender: Female

Affiliation: Her loyalties are to the 404. Two members of the group cared for her after the death of her father and then proceeded to teach her everything she knew until she was ready to become and offical member of the group.

Appearance: Being of Ukrainian and Sri-Lankan descent, Nadia has a somewhat ambiguous appearance as far as ethnicity goes. Her hair (usually tied back into a pony-tail) is about to her waist and black. Her almond-shaped eyes are naturally a very dark brown, but thanks to her optical implants now bounce between a bright blue and neon green that glows in the dark- Playing hide and seek was somewhat difficult as a child. She stands at 5'6'' in height, and while she's not exactly what one would call toned, she has a strong and sturdy build that helps her when she decides to play with bigger guns in between working on coding.

//YOUR SOUL

PERSONAL GOAL: Vengeance and anarchy, or at least the money to make both possible. New Malacca is a place teeming with opportunities for jobs, contacts, and overall advancement to her end goal of ruining whatever corporate giant caused the death of her father. In the process she hopes to find dirt on whatever other corrupt organizations are out there as well and plunge them into chaos. Oh she doesn't want good people to suffer, but the idea of watching those who would take advantage of the poor burn brings a smile to her face.

LIKES:

• Playing games
• Modding the software in her body mods
• Hacking into government databases and screwing with them (she has a particular fondness for changing the names of their files)
• Looking for new guns to buy
• Baking
• Drinking
• Drawing in her datapad

DISLIKES:

• Corruption (go figure)
• Injustice
• Pears
• Being told she's crazy

REPUTE: To the old lady who lives across from her, Nadia is the sweet girl next door who always helps her with taking the trash out. Perhaps she's a little odd, but definitely driven and is bound for great things... whenever she gets out of this dump. The people she always has over though seem a bit sketchy.

To the assholes whose AR consoles have suddenly crashed in the midst of them harassing some kid, she's the echo in the white static of their displays telling them that they might want to check their bank accounts, right before a virtual cream pie with the words "You've been sliced(an archaic term that she started using ironically as a joke, but it eventually just became a part of her online persona)" gets hurled at them. As the cool sensation of the dessert drips down their tactile body suits, in real life all of their hardware begins to fry and die.

But to those who know her best, Nadia is someone with unending potential and drive, and perhaps just a tiny bit of mental instability. She's sweet, speaks softly, doesn't seem to ever intentionally get on anyone's bad side, always shows up with a smile on her face and baked goods in hand to share, and absolutely revels in the chaos that her mind can reign down on unsuspecting targets of the 404. It's whispered that sometimes she gets in over her head, that one day it's going to catch up to her, and that it's a shame such talent will die so young. But no one has the heart to say it to her face.

There are also whispers that if one were to try and follow her (though such a task is certainly not an easy one) they could find her playing in the deep. The whispers say that when she was younger, she found a way into this forbidden world and used to play with the ancient AIs whose subroutines had degraded to the point of madness, and that they were the ones that taught her how to dance through the virtual world- not her 404 associates.

Such rumors are surely just that though... right?

HEEL: Nadia is convinced that she cannot be stopped. She's too clever, too good for the self-righteous nobodies that the big organizations would hire to track her down, and there's no way she'll ever get caught. Of course she is quite skilled at her job but she forgets that there is always someone better. There is always someone who can catch her. To anyone else this reality is undeniable, but Nadia has convinced herself that there is no way in this or any world that she will be stopped before she's brought down whoever it was that made her father disappear.

CODE: Nadia believes in standing up for those who can't stand up for themselves, and generally helping the helpless. She helps her old neighbor clean the ratty apartment, she attacks the jackasses who pick on kids who just want to play a game, and she crushes the organizations that take advantage of those who rely on them. Nadia knows what it feels like to be totally helpless and she'll do whatever it takes to make sure no one else has to feel that way.

QUIRKS: She always has a baked good of some kind on her. Always. Nadia adores baking as it's the only thing she remembers really doing with her mother, and anyone who knows her is aware that if they come within ten feet of her they will be offered a cookie, cupcake, bagel, tart, or whatever else she might have made that particular day. It's so far past the point of just being a hobby. Thanks to this little quirk, Nadia always seems to smell faintly of vanilla or cinnamon- her favorite spice. She also has the habit of speaking in a sing-song voice whenever she's panicked (i.e. We're all gonna die~~~)

//YOUR PAST

Nadia grew up in West Bengal Port. Her mom kept up a job as a warehouse worker and provided for their family while her father worked from home doing odd jobs as a hacker. When Nadia was older she learned that not only was her father a hacker, but that he worked with the notorious 404. Her parents had done their best to keep this information from her. Unfortunately for them Nadia was a rather bright child that was too observant for her own good, and the random bits of coding and hacking that her father taught had been enough for her to figure out what he was doing when she was about seven years old. It might have helped that her father had been a little bit careless that day, but Nadia would never admit to that.

Her mother died in a freak accident when working in the lower levels of a warehouse. It flooded and she, along with fifteen other workers, drowned before help could get to them. This all could have been avoided if the people in charge had paid any attention to the multiple complaints from the workers, but they didn't, and the families of the deceased paid dearly for it. The corporation didn't pay a god damn thing. This was the first thing that jump-started Nadia's hatred of large corporations.

With one parent gone Nadia's father decided that she needed to learn how to protect herself should anything happen to him, and so he started taking her to a friend's house to train the young girl how to shoot. She was about ten or eleven at the time. She grew rather fond of their weekly visits to the man and his wife (who she later found out were also members of the 404) and soon began to refer to them as "uncle" and "auntie." Life continued in this little rhythm until Nadia was thirteen.

One day she came home from spending the day with her friends to find their apartment completely empty. Her fathers equipment, their furniture, her toys, clothes, even the dishes were gone. All that was left was what was in a small compartment hidden in the wall, which contained a few of the guns her father had owned. Other than that it had been wiped clean and Nadia's father was no where to be seen. She stayed their for a bit, waiting for her father to come home. Hoping and praying with every fiber of her being that he'd come home. But he never did, and eventually she contacted auntie and uncle.

Nothing was ever found out about the location of her father. Some said that he had simply abandoned her, finding it too difficult to care for the teenager without her mother around, but Nadia knew that was impossible. He was the man who taught her to draw, who took care of her before himself after the woman they both loved dearly vanished from their lives. The man that never forgot any birthday, holiday, or important date. Who listened when she ranted about the stupidest things that no adult would rightly care about. He loved her, and he never would have left her. The only thing that made sense to Nadia was that he must have been tracked down, and that one of the corporations he'd been working on exposing had killed him. That had to be what happened.

When she recovered enough from her grief Nadia immediately started training with the adults that had now adopted her and began the process of becoming a member of the 404, determined to one day find out what had happened to her father and to exact revenge on the guilty party.

After developing a bit of a reputation in the deep ocean that is the web, she caught wind of a job going down that would be paying a generous sum of money and figured she could use that money to help fund her cause. She immediately jumped on it.

//YOUR PERSON

ATTRIBUTES:

• Hacking
• Decent shot with a blaster
• Baking

BODY MODS:

Augmented cybernetic armware with integrated computer paneling:
Both of her arms are completely made of cybernetic material. They enhance her upper body strength and also double as a portable computer, as she has personalized the data panels in her arms to connect with her personal gear. With it she can always access all of her files at any time and work anywhere- and if she gets caught she can quickly wipe all of the drives remotely.

Intergrated Brain Chip:
In her head there is a tiny, pea sized chip that acts as a communication, search engine, and entertainment device. When she's on the go and doesn't have time to manually mess with the data panels on her arms, she can simply interface with her brain chip and continue her work from there while she's on the go.

Cybernetic optical implants:
These are mostly for the aesthetic. Nadia has two cybernetic eyes that phase from a bright blue to bright neon green, and while they do allow her to visually see what's on her data panels without actually looking at them, their main function is just to be cool.

EQUIPMENT:
SAR 9 Semi Auto Pistols: Aries and Eris
A matching pair of pistols that are small enough to be concealed fairly easily but still pack a punch. She always keeps them on her for self defense purposes, and generally doesn't use them unless she has to. While Nadia is very much willing to shoot someone she prefers to hack into their personal files and ruin their lives as opposed to just outright shooting them. Unfortunately that isn't always an option, so she keeps Aries and Eris on her for that purpose (as well as a couple extra rounds of ammo). She also has a collection of guns at home (including a non-functional ancient old fashioned rifle that her dad kept around as a family heirloom) that she keeps hidden in the wall beside her bed. She doesn't necessarily intend on shooting someone, but they're there if she needs them and its also just a hobby of hers to collect them.

C3GD Encrypted Storage Chip:
In case she should ever have to delete her files on the fly, Nadia took the precaution of having backups stored in an external hard drive of her own design that cannot be accessed unless actually inserted into a database. It is hidden in her left boot so that should she ever be captured, it can easily be kicked off and (hopefully) only found by the very few people that know it exist. On the other hand if she should simply be on the run and have to delete her files she'll still have all of her research without having to worry about someone accessing what she was working on.

Food Preservative Container:
It's what she carries her usual plethora of baked goods in.