BingTheWing

Straits of Steel (A South East Asian Cyberpunk Thriller)

@Bork Lazer If we have more than 6 sheets are you gonna have to bump some people off?

Straits of Steel (A South East Asian Cyberpunk Thriller)

Ahh sike I made it. A bit rushed but ready for review

Nicolas

//YOUR SELF

Name: Nicolas Edgardo Tuaño dela Rosa

Age: 31

Gender: Male

Affiliation: Black Yangtze (enforcer)

Appearance: Stocky, broad-shouldered visibly healthy male of Malayan descent. 5’9, 170 lbs, brown eyes and black crew-cut hair. Elaborate black-colored dragon tattoos on his neck, back and arms, a clear sign of his allegiance to the Black Yangtze. Square, muscled face with minimal facial hair and a very stark, soldier-like jawline. Prefers plain T-shirts, cargo pants, and military boots.

//YOUR SOUL

PERSONAL GOAL: To make enough money to leave New Malacca and find his family in the United States.

LIKES: Pork dishes, science magazines, target shooting

DISLIKES: Kimchi, gambling, hangovers

REPUTE: To his bosses in the Black Yangtze, Nicolas is a reliable enforcer: imposing and intimidating, yet professional and discreet. The average person on the street would recognize the tattoos on his arms and wisely back away on the assumption that he is on “official” business. To his colleagues on the job, Nicolas is a bit of a square - doesn’t do women, doesn’t do drugs, and less alcohol than most. Most of the time they just attribute it to his religiosity and have a good chuckle.

HEEL: Nicolas likes to consider himself a generally “principled” person, but he very well knows his single biggest weakness is the desire to see his Family again. He is willing to take any job, kill anyone who needs killing, and betray anyone if only to get a chance to be reunited with his wife and child.

CODE: The traditional churches of old are barely more than museum relics in New Malacca, but Nicolas tries to follow what is left of the tenets of his Catholic faith. He takes communion and confession at a small hole-in-the-wall chapel nestled within an alleyway in Hibiscus Lane.

QUIRKS: Nicolas generally has very specific and exacting preferences for food and drink. He insists on certain combinations of beer and squid chips, soy sauce and fish, wine and cheese, etc. The most reliable bar chow combo for him though, is roasted pig skin with Handakoro apple cider.

//YOUR PAST

Nicolas was born in an age between ages, when the dying political dynasties that ruled the Philippines raged against the rising influence of the megacorporations. His father, a taxi driver, was shot in the streets of Manila in a shootout between a real estate corporation and squatters defending their shanty towns against demolition. Nicolas’s mother worked as a casino receptionist by day and a wares merchant by night to make ends meet. Growing up in the neon-lit reclaimed slums by Manila Bay, Nicolas was surrounded by severe wealth inequality, all sorts of vices in virtual reality, and the looming threat of random violence hanging like a dark cloud over everyone he met.

Nicolas hated school and spent most of his time playing esports in the virtual reality cafes nearby, much to the chagrin of his mother. At one point he seriously considered going pro, until one fateful day when the internet cafe he was in was being robbed at gunpoint. Nicolas also witnessed the subsequent shootout between the robbers and police, and wondered if the warriors he played as in his virtual video games could also exist in real life. Lacking the actual ambition to make it to university, Nicolas instead opted to enlist in his local police academy after high school.

The Philippine National Police in the 2080s was a corrupt, underfunded, poorly regulated excuse for a national law enforcement body. But for Nicolas, it was home, and sooner or later he began to almost enjoy the place. By being willing to put himself in danger in the many raids the force conducted against Chinese drug runners, Muslim pirates, and the occasional anarchist cell, he rose up through the ranks to become a respected senior corporal. He even managed to find a woman and raise a son. Though the pay could have been somewhat better, things were going well until the boy caught the wasting disease.

His condition needed a steady supply of medicine so consistent Nicolas had to resort to stealing from the department’s infirmary. His meager salary wasn’t enough to cover the hospital bills. He had to stop taking on dangerous cases for fear he would die and leave his family without a father. He could only be promoted so much until his salary hit a ceiling. From then on, he was on his own.

Out of desperation, he turned to the colleagues he hated the most. They were the “bad” apples in the ranks: they took bribes, ran drugs, and did the occasional hit, but they made way more money than anyone else in the force. And for a while, he was part of them, his typical responsibilities being raiding a warehouse with a certain amount of amphetamines while the next one over was shipping ten times the amount. But he could keep the medicine flowing and the child happy, so he didn’t think much of it - and neither did his wife. Until the day that someone snitched, and they needed a fall guy.
It happened all so fast. The sirens in the dead of night, his own brothers threatening to break down his condominium door, and one panicked, final decision made in a dark, quiet room: they would split up, temporarily, and find each other again.

That was the last time Nicolas ever saw his wife and child.

He wandered on the streets for several months, until being recognized by one of the rivals of the gangs he used to do “business” with. They knew who he was and the grudges he held, and so they recruited him for a similar line of work - with no pretenses this time.

It has been five years since Nicolas saw his family. While rising up in the ranks of the Black Yangtze, being shipped from place to place, he’s thrown thousands of asyuan at private investigators who have failed to find a single lead except one: there were reports of two persons matching the descriptions of his family sighted somewhere in Los Angeles. Coincidentally, the job also came up. Nicolas requested from his superiors that he be deployed on this specific contract for official Black Yangtze purposes, knowing full well this would be his last. All he needed was one more score to escape New Malacca, wipe himself from the grid, and make his way across the Pacific one last time.

//YOUR PERSON

ATTRIBUTES:
- Sharpshooter: Nicolas is a very reliable shot with almost any sort of firearm, honed from years of combat experience in a variety of environments.
- Drug sniffer: Nicolas knows how to identify all sorts of illegal narcotics from black ganja to synthetic opium, and has a rudimentary knowledge of how they’re manufactured.
- Bad cop/good cop: Nicolas kinda knows how to deal with people in general. Wine and dine them, or cut them up, or somewhere in between - he has a way with extracting information and “compelling” people to do what needs to be done.

BODY MODS:
- Verge Battletech Orion-model Biosystem: composite neural network and muscle bioweave in his limbs to make Nicolas more responsive and reflexive to stimuli while enhancing his overall physical ability.
- Paradigm Plus BioID Network: neural implant embedded in Nicolas’ eyes to identify a person’s physical and psychological states, and from that determine the possibilities of them doing certain actions e.g. drawing a weapon, fleeing an altercation, etc.

EQUIPMENT:
- Nandago TC-39 Tactical Rifle System: base assault weapon template with a plethora of customizations to adapt it to sniper fire, CQC, explosive rounds, non-lethal rounds, etc. Favorite amongst elite Malaysian PMCs and well suited for unpredictable combat situations.
- Zeiger A-45 Semiautomatic Pistol: reliable sidearm and staple of New Malaccan gang violence. Is almost impossible to jam due to its simplicity of design. Has two main ammo options: stun and kill.
Combat knife: never runs out of ammunition.

Straits of Steel (A South East Asian Cyberpunk Thriller)

People are getting their CSes done so fast that I don’t think I’ll have time to put mine up... 😅

♠ Showdowns & Saddles ♠

Taylor didn't even have to think. As smoothly as a flowing river, his hand immediately swept down to his holster, drew out his six-shooter, and fired all six shots at the bandits straight through the train windows. As he ducked down again he briefly made out one of the riders drop his rifle and clutch his shoulder.

"Everybody get down!" He forced Ms. Krump down by his seat as he reached into the bag compartment at the top of the car, and yanked back down his Winchester rifle.

Shit. One-eyed Bobby. The bastard probably heard about the botched robbery at Jorgensen's and was out for the Black Mask's catch. Did he know he was here?!

He chambered the first round in his rifle and took aim. "How many of them are out there?!" he yelled to the guards and the rest of the party at the opposite side of the train.

Straits of Steel (A South East Asian Cyberpunk Thriller)

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

Good Ol' Boys

A bit rushed but this is the general concept. Switched it yet again haha

Lance McMahon

Cpl. Lance McMahon of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines - Da Nang 1968

Name: Lance "Big Grit" McMahon (but most people just call him Lance.)

Age: 31

Occupation/Cover: Owner of McMahon Transportation, transportation business providing truckers from O'Connor to Mobile

Racket: Like everyone else in the county actually worth a damn, Lance runs moonshine: he stores it underneath the floorboards of his old house, and he ships it interstate through the trucks he uses in his business. But besides that, Lance acts as an “enforcer” of sorts for the county mafia: whenever there’s a “problem” that needs fixing, Lance is your man. Whether it’s thugs stealing from your supply, an uncooperative politician, or (God forbid) a snitch, Lance can take care of it. With a rudimentary knowledge of many other skills learned in Vietnam such as explosives, gun modification, poison, and body disposal, Lance is a more than likely candidate for the single most physically dangerous man in O’Connor.

Public Goals: Anyone in O’Connor County can clearly see what Lance wants: money, plain and simple, and the Dixie Mob gets him a lot of it.

Private Goals: Honestly? He… really doesn’t know. He does know he needs to keep the ranch going for the sake of his pa, and he does like making a lot of money. But what he is really afraid of is not being able to move on from the war and what he saw there. While what he earns from his racket is proving a worthwhile distraction, he’s not sure how long it can last.

Supporting Cast:

- Janus “Calico” Marsen, 57: resident pimp and unofficial “mentor” to Lance in the Dixie Mafia.
- Billy Landers, 17: Calico’s nephew and Lance’s new hired muscle around the business.

Personal History:

On Lance’s first birthday, his father’s unit awoke to Japanese bombers roaring over Pearl Harbor. He spent the first few years of his childhood being raised by only his mother, who frequently saw other men while her husband was away fighting in the Pacific. The happy year of reunion that was 1945 for other couples was a year of anxiety and separation for Lance. Tarwin was a shell-shocked and occasionally physically violent alcoholic, but he tried his best to keep the peace in the house and raise Lance to be a real man, which the latter came to respect.

With no other siblings at home, Lance yearned for attention in other places. He became known as a troublemaker in school, and while his father often beat him for truancy and failing grades, Lance kind of liked the rush of adrenaline that fighting gave him. He was a part of his high school’s football team and had dreams of going pro, until he got to college and realized that chasing after a sack of leather for some clout wasn’t really what he liked. He dropped out and enlisted in 1963, to the indifference of his father. The first couple years of his service he spent whoring around in Japan and the Philippines, but 1965 was when he, in his own words, “really started to shine”.

For being one of the most momentous times of his life, Lance likes to think he doesn’t remember a whole lot of what happened in Vietnam. It doesn’t come back to him that way, mentally speaking. But his body remembers the mosquito stings earned from trekking through the jungle for weeks, the cramped spaces of the tunnels he crawled through hunting for VC, and finally, the fists and the rifle buttstocks of the Vietnamese soldiers that captured him.

His ears remembered the harsh sting of Vietnamese curses they screamed at him, day in, day out. His wrists remembered the burns of the rope which they used to lash him to a pole, giving him nothing but urine to drink for days on end. His stomach remembered the slow, deep cuts his torturers used to carve on his skin, leaving the wounds to be infected by god knows what manner of jungle bacteria. And he remembered the crisp, cool air rushing past his skin as he stumbled blindly into the jungle yet again, as flashlights and bullets followed him into the dark.

He came back in 1969 to a father six feet under from drink and a message scrawled on a notepad on the mantel: make something of yourself. Alongside it was a couple thousand dollars enough to start a small business.

Naturally, the first thing he went and did with it was to spend it at the nearest bar.

And that was where he met Calico. He was an older man who described himself as a friend of his mother’s from way back. He approached a clearly drunken Lance and asked him if he knew anything about body disposal.

They both came out the back and in it was the body of a woman. Calico swore he didn’t touch her and was doing it for a friend who had booked it a couple minutes earlier. Half-drunk, Lance and Calico heaved the body onto the back of the former’s pickup truck and drove it to the creeks at his backyard, where Lance showed the old man how to chop up a body and bury it in different places for the worms to get at. He got paid a nice sum for his troubles, the first of many more to come.

As the years went by, Lance did manage to start a trucking and delivery business with the money his father left him. What his customers did not know was that in his trucks was moonshine, and anyone who happened to notice got paid a “visit” by Mr. McMahon and his “associates”. He also began to frequently trade in explosives, chemicals, and other “substances” from his old friends in the Marines. Such was the way he managed to reingratiate himself in the good graces of O’Connor County.

Straits of Steel (A South East Asian Cyberpunk RP)

@Bork Lazer Okay, but where is its real world location? (I can't find anything in the OP 😅)

Will there also be opportunities for collaborative worldbuilding? The setting/timeline is still a bit vague to me...

Warhammer 40k: Enigmas of the Warp

@Andromedai Apologies, I think I'm gonna have to pull out of this RP for the moment. Best of luck though!

Straits of Steel (A South East Asian Cyberpunk RP)

Interesting, by New Malacca do you mean the actual Malaysian province?

Good Ol' Boys

I think I'll change my character idea to a journalist investigating the criminal activity here. Also will there be a Discord?