Lunamaria Hawke
Dog
Fish of Oblivion
RBYDark
SleepyWrites
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Izurich
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JohnRoleplay
Name
Daiyu Li
Nationality
Chinese
Age
30
Sexuality
Bisexual
Birth
January 2, 2001, Hong Kong
Appearance
Daiyu prides herself on her looks when not in the field, taking great care to look presentable at all times. Her hair is kept in place by ornamental combs and pins to keep it from hiding her face, wearing designer blouses with necklines that could described as impractically low and sunglasses that cost more than some people's cars. Her sleeves are almost always short and her midriff is often exposed to show off the intricate tattoos running across her body. For special occasions where some quaint show of deference to her host country is needed she'll switch to the collection of elegant silk kimonos she has in her closet. She makes no effort to disguise her robotic arm, happy to recount the story of how a stubborn horse fell on it's side with her under it. What she does keep hidden is that her right pinky is a prosthetic as well, albeit a much higher quality one.
When on duty she opts for a lightweight version of the NSF uniform, preferring the increased mobility over armor.
Height
5 feet 9 inches
Personality
Daiyu tends to be quiet both in her professional and personal life, usually content to just fade into the background and listen. If one were to make conversation with her she'd be a good participant, if not a particularly vocal one. She listens intently, often facing away from the other person as she mulls over their words but asking question just to show she's paying attention. But she shares little about herself and even less of it is true. You can learn all sorts of things about people by paying attention and waiting for them reveal more than she should. What sort of watch their wife got them for their birthday, how long they're going to be away from home on vacation, how badly they're in need of quick cash. Why would she risk revealing her own liabilities when she can pick up on those of others? Li is a very good listener, a comforting shoulder to cry on as she carefully catalogs any weaknesses. At this point its more of a habit, years of casing places for burglary and sizing up desperate salarymen to determine just how exorbitant of an interest rate for a loan you can squeeze out of them will do that to a person. Daiyu doesn't raise her voice except under dire circumstances, keeping calm and thinking carefully when presented with challenging situations. Her problems are approached with a clear head and resolute demeanor, emotion isn't allowed to interfere with finding a solution. Whether that solution is briefcase full of cash, a knife in the dark or a hasty retreat, she's always sure that it was the most reasonable option available.
A con artist and thief before she was a hired blade Daiyu puts a premium on politeness, never forgetting a name, face or son's birthday. She has a Rolodex of minor underworld figures local and otherwise, businessmen, celebrities, all manner of people's she worked for, with and against. You never know when that cop who you slide a few thousand yen for a deposit on a home to can be convinced to report a suspect as having escaped, or when you can get an invite to a very exclusive fundraising party from a certain high rolling up and coming politician who really doesn't want some of his indiscretions coming to light. Daiyu excels at these sort of games, enjoying the give and take atmosphere of the web of lies and owed favors that connected high society with the low.
One of the only topics that gets her genuinely animated is art. She can talk for hours about the Renaissance masters or the sculptures of ancient Greece and the pop art movement of the mid 1950s or really any major era of artwork. She fancies herself a bit of collector, having a few minor pieces on display as well as quite a bit more that were never officially sold, or even sold at all.
Role
In the field she serves as an Assault unit, her speed making her a good candidate for smash and grab type operations. Out of common she serves as a sort of public face for the NSF, an immigrant who enmeshed herself completely into Japan and became a successful entrepreneur before signing up to protect her adopted home. She's used to shake donations out of her high society friends and can sometimes provide intel sourced from less savory contacts.
Equipment
Hewit Bullstoper-Chambered in .45 ACP this revolver is tough, sturdy, easy to use and easier to maintain.
Model 155 SMG-Lightweight enough to be wielded with one hand and with an integrated suppressor, it's perfect for quiet work.
Rope Dart-Useful for either rappelling up and down buildings or catching fleeing suspects, the dart can either dig into soft targets with it's bladed tip or latch onto buildings with it's prongs.
"Dàojiā" Pattern Jian- An elegant weapon for a more civilized age. This ancient designed has been updated for the modern age with a carbon steel vibroblade capable of dealing with modern armors. Eccentric yes, but no less dangerous.
Left Arm- A cybernetic replacement for the arm she lost in a horse riding accident, or so she claims. The arm isn't any stronger than a normal flesh and blood limb but can more of a beating .
Datapads- One is used simply for recording information that she'd rather keep private. Daiyu had it's ability to connect to networks removed to keep people from prying into her business. The other is a standard issue model where her more public data goes.
Reflex Enhancements- Exactly what it sounds like. Thanks to a series of implants connected to her spine Daiyu can process information faster than an unaugmented human could. Useful for ducking behind cover when shots start flying, or just a fun party trick.
Previous Careers
-Founder, CEO and President of Yùnqì Hé Zhīshì Brokerage (Public Knowledge)
-Affiliate of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime family (Not Public Knowledge)
Biography
Daiyu was born in Hong Kong to Wei and Chen Li, a new addition to a household that was barely making ends meet as it was. Her father Wei was a night security guard and her mother Li worked as a janitor for the cramped tenement they lived in. Two minimum wages jobs had hardly been enough to feed them and Wei's aging father, the introduction of another people was nearly catastrophic. Daiyu's earliest years were spent listening to her parents argue about money while Grandpa Min held her. By the time she was five the situation had gotten so dire that the family emigrated to Japan, settling into the Adachi district of Tokyo. The daughter managed to pick up Japanese pretty quickly but had a heavy accent for much of her childhood, marking her as a foreigner. She got into fights often, throwing punches at any kid who mocked her accent or place of birth no matter how much bigger or older they where. After the third black eye before her seventh birthday her Grandfather made her an offer: if she kept her grades up he'd teach her the arts of Taijin sword-fighting and Heihuquan, better known as Black Tiger kung fu.
Daiyu of course agreed but found that she had actually enrolled herself in an extended lesson on remaining calm. Both arts are incredibly aggressive by nature but any time she lost control or put more focus on brute force than technique the lessons would stop and she'd be sent to her room to read in silence. As her skill increased so did her patience, Daiyu internalizing the importance of staying level-headed in any situation. She also began to branch out, making more friends at school and taking an interest in other martial arts, especially western boxing and jiu-jitsu. Whenever she was in class she was paying closer attention to other students than the lesson, picking up on any important gossip she could.
It was sheer luck that the Li family wan't reduced to ash by the nuclear fire that consumed half of Tokyo. They had returned back to Hong Kong to visit with family for Daiyu's twelfth the day before the bomb was dropped, crowded around a tiny TV set in an aunt's living room as the reports came in. Their home was one of the many that were completely destroyed. It took months for them to be allowed back in, Daiyu staring wide eyed at ruin. Although she would never admit it, she would also feel that after centuries of imperialism and refusing to answer for the atrocities they had committed, the Japanese deserved a good hit every now and again.
The slums that bordered the bombed out districts where the perfect place to go exploring, Daiyu picking through abandoned homes for valuables and putting on impromptu demonstrations of her skills for the others kids that were hanging around. Her standing challenge to any kid that wanted to test themselves against what she had learned was taken up by the leader of a small group of street toughs who sent his biggest friend to knock her down a peg. It cost her a few nasty cuts but Daiyu prevailed and was brought in as one of the "boys", so to speak. She quickly got used to it, learning to pick pockets and serving as a lookout while her gang raided unattended cars and slipped through open windows. One of her favorite jobs was when she got to play the lost little girl or the desperate hitchhiker, getting people to open their hearts and their wallets with a few tears. As they got older the gang moved into smuggling cigarettes and bootleg electronics, even occasionally dealing in narcotics. For a bunch of sixteen year olds the money was great, but they were also way in over their heads. The gang was found out by a local underboss of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate and told to join up or die.
Understandably they decided to join up. Daiyu's talent for creeping around the slums translated into a natural affinity for cat burglary,climbing up to second and third story fire escapes and slipping in in search of jewelry or loose cash. One of her gangs duties was to work at a mechanic's garage that served as a money laundering front, mostly there to look busy and keep people from asking too many questions. Daiyu would hang around the back when she could, listening with interest as smugglers and enforcers talked about business. Every time she turned up she was shooed away until the man running the store, Aito, took an interest in her. The young Chinese immigrant was taken under his wing, Aito showing her how to handle money and deal in the world of legitimate business. From the office overlooking the garage Daiyu began to work longer and more profitable cons, squeezing desperate people with exorbitant loans and defrauding clueless tourists with bogus theft insurance. All the while she was continuing to steal, gradually becoming more respected in the eyes of the Yakuza. As a foreigner she could never inducted in properly but she was appreciated for the steady income she brought in from her cons and heists, as well as her kowtowing to local customs. As a show of respect she had gotten tattoos across her back and arms that evoked the infamous markings of the Yakuza and would often dress in traditional Japanese attire, learning customs and showing deference to her superiors.
And that would have been enough for her to stay in a stable position as a tolerated and maybe even accepted outsider if everything had gone right. But it was not to be. As her heists got more elaborate and her reputation grew more people wanted in on the action, her already small cut being encroached on by the sons of proper members of the family. She was forced to scramble and try and cope with untrained and unskilled brutes on jobs that required a light touch. Predictably one of them screwed up. A routine burglary of a high end apartment went wrong and her partner was killed and her left arm shattered into uselessness when their get-away vehicle was hit by a van. She was carried out of the wreck and sent to a private doctor who had experience with patients who needed extra discretion.
As soon as she woke up Daiyu was on trial. The money invested in planning had all gone to waste and the son of a mid level Yakuza soldier was dead on her watch. She had been allowed to stick around as long as she had been making money but their patience had run out. Daiyu was surrounded by eight hard faced men who were ready to kill her and dump her corpse into the harbor without a second thought, with no way out. So she did the only thing she could.
She began to talk.
The botched heist had been the exception, not the rule. For years now she had been a faithful source of income, regular payments from her various scams supplemented by healthy bonuses from heists. Surely it would be a waste to throw that all away. Why not let her live so she could keep working for them? She be giving them a much larger cut of course, as penance. It was a long shot and she knew it, but luckily they agreed. She was under the thumb of the Yakuza now. They would be taking most of any money she made, as well as something else. Daiyu managed to convince herself to be grateful that their was disinfectant on hand when they made her amputate her own remaining pinky finger.
She was twenty one years old and needed to start earning money. She managed to plead with Aito for a loan and opened up a brokerage firm, learning the ins and outs of the stock market as she went. With a competent team of investors hired the firm was turning a decent profit by itself, but more than that it was an opportunity. It provided a way for her to launder the money coming in from the odd jobs and crimes of opportunity she was doing, and she could charge a fee to keep other people's money safe as well. The dirty money she brought in allowed her to hire more experts and move to a nicer building in recently built Neo-Tokyo, attracting more clients with more clean cash so she could wash more dirty money and use those fees to attract more...
It was a tenuous potion sustained by spending dangerous men's money on risky gambles to keep the Yakuza off her back while hoping the whole cyclical system didn't collapse like a house of cards. It was stressful, nerve-wracking, infuriating to see millions of yen that should have been hers go into someone else's pockets. And she loved every moment of it. There was a thrill to having to keep up a presentable exterior for the outside world while fielding inquiries and demands from the scum of society, a certain knack needed to keeping the whole ship from sinking. By the time she was twenty four she had managed to get it to a point where it could stand on its own. More than that, she was part of high society. Wealthy celebrities and industry leaders had shown up to her for help managing their portfolios on the recommendation of their bookies and dealers and the properties of their favorite brothels. Using her talent for saying just what people wanted to hear Daiyu got herself invited to dinners and parties and private screenings where she was introduced to more socialites and members of high society in need of a very polite, very intelligent and very discrete investment expert who was also willing to help make your financial records look a bit cleaner. It was another circle and soon Yùnqì Hé Zhīshì Brokerage and its charismatic young founder were front page of magazines and websites throughout Japan and the world.
No matter how much money she handled, no matter how many rich snobs she was invited to play golf with, Daiyu would always belong to the Yamaguchi family. So when they told her to sign up with the NSF to keep an eye on them, she did without complaint. Privately she knew that someone of her caliber was wasted on spy work. She also knew that it was probably an order from the father who's son she had apparently gotten killed in hopes of her catching a bullet. But what could she do? She was still a foreigner and always would be, even after two decades of trying to integrate herself. And so one of the biggest success stories in Neo-Tokyo signed up and smiled for pictures and made a statement about how she loved her adopted home so dearly she couldn't stand by and let it be torn apart, she was already starting to form a new plan.
Affiliations
-Wei Li (Father)
-Chen Li (Mother)
-Min Li (Grandfather)
-Wei Li (Father)
Relationships [Optional]
TBD
Extras
-Speaks Chinese, English and Japanese fluently
-Has a penthouse in downtown Neo-Tokyo for entertaining her high society friends, but spends most of her time in a rundown studio apartment on the outskirts of Old Tokyo.
-Has a private plane and personal driver.
-The art in her penthouse is all either recreations of great works or more contemporary pieces. The real ones are kept in the tenement building whose top floor she owns under a different name.
-Drops and picks up languages and accents as needed.
