BingTheWing

Panau : Superheroes in a South American Warzone

@BangoSkank …Huh. That does change things, was expecting it to be at the height of Operation Condor or Iran-Contra.

Panau : Superheroes in a South American Warzone

@BangoSkank Is there a specific decade/year you had in mind for the setting? Might affect my planned character to an extent

♠ Showdowns & Saddles ♠

@Eviledd1984 @Landain

Taylor obliged, he figured that the native could probably handle himself. "You, uh, Sergio! That's your name, right? We gotta catch up with Bobby!" He also turned to Finney and Billy. "Uh, you two.. yeah, that sounds good. Try head them off from the back!"

He pointed upwards, at the roof of the express car under which Misti and Sparrow were fighting. "We can climb over this car to get to the front!" He started to climb the railings, intending to fight Bobby from the roof of the car.

Straits of Steel (A South East Asian Cyberpunk Thriller)

@Bork Lazer You can just call my character Nicolas haha. He'll probably also stay quiet until the briefing is over

♠ Showdowns & Saddles ♠

Taylor saw Bobby cock his hammer and immediately dived as he pulled the trigger on his rifle, still aimed at his adversary. "Go fuck yourself, Bobby!" he yelled as he hit the floor.

Shit. He had used his real name.

♠ Showdowns & Saddles ♠

"Git moving, you lumpheads!" Taylor yelled as the three of them advanced further up the train. He then noticed Sparrow leap onto the platform in front of them as Bobby provided cover. No time for nonsense. If he didn't shoot at Bobby now, he and Misti would both be Swiss cheese.

"Hey Indian, we gotta move!" In one swift movement, Taylor quite rudely shoved Misti onto the platform where Sparrow is as he turned to fire directly at Bobby.

Straits of Steel (A South East Asian Cyberpunk Thriller)

Nicolas dela Rosa

//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)

“Forgive me father, for I have sinned.”

The Catholic chapel in Hibiscus Lane could hardly be called a chapel: it was barely the size of an old college dorm room, with nothing to its name except a sole neon bulb, two short pews and a cramped confessional chamber that almost necessitated a foetal position to get into. But for Nicolas and the few remaining old-fashioned people like him, it was home, a welcome refuge from his worldly business.

“What are your sins, my son?” Nicolas could sense the old father behind the screen lean back in his creaking wicker seat.

Nicolas took a deep sigh before continuing. “I beat a man to death.”

There was a palpable, disapproving silence that hung over the room. Evidently the father found it amusing to let his flock stew in the guilt of their own transgressions beforehand. Nicolas did not.

After a long moment, the father spoke. “Did he die quickly, at least?”

“I suppose so.” Nicolas fiddled with the beads of his rosary in the dark chamber. He remembered how he and the other enforcers had kicked and punched the hogtied banker’s head until all of his front teeth fell out, and how they had taken turns to break both his arms and both his legs.

“We dropped him off at the harbor with weighted stones,” he added.

The father thought for a while, then responded. “Say ten Hail Marys and one Act of Contrition. Go forth and sin no more.”

It was Nicolas’s turn to be silent. He had not expected his penance to be so light this time. “Thank you, father.” He got up to leave.

“And don’t let me catch you frequenting those befuddled electronic dancers again!” the old father cried out as Nicolas stooped through the door.

“They’re not even that sexy anyway, father!” he replied as he exited into the sickly warm air of Hibiscus Lane.

Even as his status in the Black Yangtze essentially permitted him to go anywhere he wanted, Nicolas was painfully aware that in the nicer parts of New Malacca, he was still an outsider. To most of the wealthy that resided here and the visitors stupid enough to call this place a tourist attraction, he was supposed to just be a rumor, a killer who did what other people could not be seen doing. The few people that were unlucky enough to bump into him on the sidewalk quickly distanced themselves soon afterwards, some of them looking back in bewilderment at a tattooed Yangtze thug quietly murmuring the Rosary. A tourist couple soliciting photos let out a quiet, yet audible gasp as he passed by.

“Virtual girls! Virtual girls! Get the newest models here!” A hawker selling piles of data chips for VR sex partners in holo-containers was bothering everyone within two metres’ distance. “Virtual gi-”

He turned and choked on his words when he saw Nicolas staring at him with an emotion somewhere between boredom and disgust.

“Which way to Suraiboshen?” Nicolas wasn’t normally a big fan of Japanese cuisine (raw fish wasn’t really his thing), and his retinal geomap wasn’t displaying the route correctly.

“T-take a right and then a left at t-the second juncture.” The hawker extended a shaky bionic finger to a street off the main lane.

“Thank you.” Nicolas turned towards the route as his geomap recalibrated. The hawker scampered off farther down the street, hopefully to sell his wares somewhere less reputable.

His implants alerted him to an incoming video call. When he answered, it was Chang Kow, an underboss of the Black Yangtze and Nicolas’s immediate superior. The man lay in a plush red sofa in equally decadently red robes, but there was no hiding his round and somewhat pig-like physique.

“Nicolas, are you there?” For all his luxury, Chang Kow’s harsh Hokkien accent betrayed the peasant land of his birth.

“Yes, boss.” Nicolas acted professional, if not slightly bored in front of the old pig.

“You’re on the way to the job?”

“Yes, boss,” Nicolas replied in a monotone voice. “I can see it already.” The faux-ancient spires of Suraiboshen were coming into view.

“Good.” Chang Kow leant back in his red cushioned chair through the screen. “That 500,000 asyuan will be a big boon to the Black Yangtze. Don’t fail us.”

“I won’t, boss,” Nicolas replied as he ended the call, fully intending not to take that 500,000 asyuan to the Black Yangtze. It would become the last transaction to an offshore savings account he had kept hidden from his employers for months. It would become the last part of the money he needed to find Linda and Sean in Los Angeles.

Linda. Sean. The thought of them distracted him for a while, until the security team at the restaurant entrance brought him back to his senses.

“Make sure both of those weapons are set to stun, please,” one of the guards robotically intoned, noting Nicolas’s pistol and the long rifle template slung across his back as the other searched him with the scanner.

“Already are,” Nicolas muttered as he raised up his arms.

After a while, the search was complete. “Please wait in the hallway. You will be called by our employer when everyone is here.”

Nicolas was surprised. “This isn’t a solo job?”

“No, sir, it is not. Now get in so that you don’t block the entrance.”

Nicolas was somewhat unceremoniously ushered into the inside of the restaurant. He automatically swiveled his head to get a full view of the room, a remnant of his police days. He noted a couple of odd faces - at least odd enough for New Malacca - and an old man who he vaguely recognized.

“Marcus? Is that you?”

Good Ol' Boys

@Polyphemus Something came up and I think I'll have to bow out of this one. Good luck with the RP though!

♠ Showdowns & Saddles ♠

When Taylor looked up again to assess the situation, he counted the riders on his side and caught One-Eyed Bobby making a break for it. It was him, all right, and Taylor could have sworn he caught a chuckle and an sinister grin of recognition coming from him. He heard another horse whinnying from behind him and also noticed the other riders and Sparrow Hawk, Bobby’s perennial right-hand Indian, moving forward with him. Is it just me or did that bastard get a lot more popular down west?

Taylor then noticed why Bobby and Sparrow were spurring their horses into a faster gallop: they were going for the front of the car, where the cargo they were all supposed to protect was located. No way in hell would Taylor lose those sweet, sweet dollars he was promised.

“Stay back here and shoot at the rest! I’ll make a break to the front where the cargo is,” Taylor yells to the others. Clutching his rifle tightly, he starts crouch walking through the aisle towards the express car in front as broken glass and bullets fly all around him. Bobby was one dangerously accurate gunslinger for someone with no depth perception, and Taylor only trusted himself to take him on.