Smike

Relief, Houston - A High Tech Low Life Cyberpunk Story

apologies for the delay, irl sprung up. hopefully back to normal later this week

𝙽𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝙵𝚊𝚍𝚎 𝙰𝚠𝚊𝚢

@DeadDrop I apologize for the nagging but was the reposted sheet fine or are there still changes I need to make?

The Blood of Beasts Feeds The Cherry Blossom - Victorian Horror Fantasy RP Inspired by Bloodborne and Sekiro

tenative interest if this is still open, waiting to see what the next couple days are like before I say for sure.

𝚂𝚃𝙰𝙺𝙴𝙳 - 𝙸𝚍𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚏𝚢, 𝙸𝚗𝚟𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚐𝚊𝚝𝚎, 𝙴𝚕𝚒𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚝𝚎

Hey @Waylon, does Stone wear a cassock when he's out and about or does he opt for street clothes.

Relief, Houston - A High Tech Low Life Cyberpunk Story

finished off the bio save for grammar edits, will do the rest later. Looking forward to seeing what other characters there are

𝙽𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝙵𝚊𝚍𝚎 𝙰𝚠𝚊𝚢

Reposting this here cuz I think my edits got lost in the shuffle, removed some of the cyberware and the references to cyberpsychosis. Lemme know if I gotta make any other changes

One Scary Svoluch

_{Zhenya "Zen" Makarova
"The Beast From the East, that's me! Night City's number one Former Soviet Solo."
◄ 48 ▎ FEMALE ▎ 6'8" ►}

_{P R O F I L E
"I'm like a puppy really, a big, strong Rottweiler puppy that loves you until you bother it. Then it rips your face open. Till then, all love."}

Zhenya is a SINless, heavily augmented Solo with no shortage of experience, a thirty-year veteran of corporate conflicts and gang wars across the globe. Like most Solos, she's not quite right in the head after having spilled more blood than could be healthy for her psyche. Over her seven-odd years in Night City she's built a reputation of dependability: you can depend on her to go in guns blazing and leave a lot of bodies behind. She's unsuited for stealth or espionage and is thus relegated to low-tier hits, clearing out rival gangs from street corners or beating the shit out of an informant to send a message.

Physically she sticks out from the crowd, standing far above the vast majority of people without some sort of leg extension bodymod. While her height is somewhat impractical in day-to-day life it does wonders when she's getting paid to shake someone down. Physically she's in excellent shape, looking younger than her near fifty years thanks to some choice surgery before she moved to the Free States. While she's most definitely buff her build hides the augmented strength she can bring to bear. Zen dresses practically, eschewing the flashy neon getups favored by some Solos in favor of simple tank tops and cheap cargo pants.

While not as outright nuts as some of the people living in Night City Zen is most definitely 'off'. All the times she's been shot, stabbed, hit by cars or thrown from buildings has given her a very black sense of humor. She likes to claim that the only reason she's not in Hell is that the devil won't take her. She's long past the point of killing for anything other than money and the sense of power it gives, unbothered by the idea of hurting other people if it gets her what she wants.

However, she's not interested in performing random massacres. What she craves is the adrenaline rush from a proper shootout, the sense of danger when bullets start flying in her direction. Merc work is her outlet for this need to butcher and break people, leaving her in a rather friendly (if overly enthusiastic) state all other times. Zhenya speaks quickly and acts quicker, invading people's personal space as she drags them into rapid-fire chatter about anything and everything.

She's also perpetually broke. Riding the poverty line is far from uncommon in Night City of course but for a Solo with as much experience as she has Zen is embarrassingly low on creds. Her Fixer is so low on the totem pole that he can only offer her jobs that pay a couple thousand eddies a pop and she's in debt to a ripper doc for fixing up her dog after it caught some stray lead. Without a stable corpo paycheck and lacking the the resources she had in Eastern Europe she's forced to live off of cheap takeout while sleeping in her car.

Zhenya doesn't mind. She's free to do what she does best without having to put up with all the boring rank-and-file bullshit Life's a breeze really, except for the fact that she's in a foreign country where she has no friends or family. And that she's a (barely) functional addict with expensive habits.
Putting all of that aside, she's loving life.

Her issue with Night City is that while she's a pretty big fish she's swimming around a huge pond. The screamsheets are full of boostergang shootouts and high-tech hitjobs, so much blood and gore that she kind of fades into the background. Being a giant brawler might have been a good way to get famous back in Yekaterinburg but here she's got a competitor on each block.

Dying isn't what scares Zhenya, everyone gets flatlined sooner or later. What disturbs her is being forgotten after she goes. As loathe as she is to admit it being a lethal cyberjock isn't enough to make people remember her, not without doing something truly impressive. She's not sure what her mark will be, only that it needs to be big.

The other thing Zen fears is being hacked. The idea of losing control of her chrome upsets her to the point that any piece of cyberware with a connection to the Net is automatically turned down. Her gear can still be accessed by drilling into a hardpoint but if some netrunning asshole incapacitates her to the point that they can get under her skin she’s screwed either way.

She takes life as it comes and always with a dogged optimism born out of bravado. Whatever happens, whatever's thrown her way, she'll take care of it just like she did everything else.

_{D A Y S - G O N E
"My oh so very tragic past and triumphant rise to glory."}

"Ancient History, really"

Zhenya Makarova was born in Yekaterinburg, Russia on October 14, 2029, a scant four years after the end of the Fourth Corporate War. Her family was originally loyal to the Soviet Union but broke away in the face of it's increasing corporate control, both of her parents and her elder brother Red Army operatives before signing on with SovOil.

The family was solidly middle-class, living in a series of decent apartments across Russia and the other constituent republics and getting food that was adequate in both quantity and quality. Zhenya received a decent education and had the means to make something of herself, perhaps a middle manager for SovOil or crossing the border to become an accountant for Kang Tao. Hell, with her height she could have played basketball

However, she never took to the idea of a desk job. Zhenya grew up fighting with other children and running from local law enforcement when she and her friends were caught scrawling tags over public property. While not quite antisocial she was uninterested in playing it safe. It was obvious that she was an adrenaline junkie, fueled by excitement more than anything else.

By the time she was in her mid-teens she had a number of infractions on her record, mostly disorderly conduct for brawling and a couple cases of joyriding.

Had it not been for her parents track records of service to SovOil Zhenya would simply another been another gopnik, hanging out on street corners while trying to prove herself as the baddest motherfucker around. Instead she was signed up to serve like the rest of her family, given basic security training before being given a gun and told to defend corporate interests from the same riffraff she had been hanging out with.

While she was hardly thrilled at the prospect of wearing a uniform or taking orders the power that SovOil gave her was intoxicating. She had a license to kick ass, not just allowed but expected to bust the head of anyone who even looked at company property funny. Most of her paycheck was spent on down payments for black-market cyberwear and fueling her addiction to syn-coke with the occasional hospital visit for injuries sustained in back alley brawls. There was a learning curve for the first couple of years, a few citations for excessive force and reckless endangerment, but eventually some pencil pusher managing the personnel roster had a brilliant idea:

Why risk collateral damage and waste a perfectly good goon when she could be reassigned to the middle of nowhere?

With the USSR's old enemy America having splintered into NUSA and the rise of corporate power over the Politiboro most of the conflict in Russia was internal. Besides the usual gangland warfare the various nations of Neo-Sov often had border clashes, to say nothing of the more organized crews making a living off of attacking SovOil storage depots. Zhenya was sent to Siberia to deal with those vultures, the wide open wasteland the perfect sort of environment for someone like her.

That was her life for the next three decades. Trying to stay warm inside desolate SovOil outposts, serving as gunner on AV patrols to clear out bandit camps and laying waste to anything she was told to. In between the months on the job were the weeks-long stretches of downtime, most of which was spent partying or running her own rackets on the side. SovOil didn't care if its guards were selling confiscated contraband or shaking down villages for protection money, as long as they did their jobs.

By her forties Zen had straightened out, more or less. She had figured out how to toe the line when required but found herself growing bored. The hard-partying lifestyle fueled by synth had been replaced by painkillers and sedatives done in private, the running gun battles with would-be thieves in the shadow of the Urals all blurring into one. Siberia was growing old, a change was needed.

"Pretty Recent Stuff"

The opportunity came when her EV was shot down by some booster with a stolen rocket launcher. The low power of the degraded warhead hadn't been enough to blow the vehicle apart and Zen survived the crash thanks to the aggressive amount of cyberware she had installed. With the rest of the crew dead she simply trekked back to base, grabbed her stuff and slipped free.

Her father had passed a decade ago and she hadn't spoken to her mother or brother in years. Zen found it easy to leave her old life behind, crossing the border into Poland and then onto Germany. The no longer United States was chosen as her final destination purely on basis of distance. She wanted to get as far away as possible as quickly as possible and with the help of smugglers she managed to do just that.

Eurodollars were not officially exchanged in the Neo Soviet Union and much of what Zen had earned from her side hustles was spent on making it to NUSA. She needed a job, and what with having spent her whole life as a professional gunslinger, had little in the way of marketable skills. But she had arrived in the early stages of the Unification Wars, NUSA moving to finally bring the Free States back under its thumb. Militech, the real power behind NUS of A, needed more bodies and was willing to bring on a foreigner who wanted to be thrown into the meat grinder.

Zhenya fought at Ridgecrest in what would be the bloodiest battle of the Unification War before marching north for the coming assault on Night City (noting the irony of her home country sending support to the soon-to-be-besieged city), only to be sorely disappointed when the arrival of an Arasaka supercarrier forced the Militech/NUSA army to retreat.

After the Arvin Accords Zhenya was unceremoniously booted from Militech, her maverick attitude and no longer tolerated without a conflict to let her get killed in.

The remainder of her Sov cash was long gone and her salary from Militech had been blown on drugs and picking up new gear. Zen was dead broke with no friends or family to rely on, lacking even a superior officer willing to vouch for her. What she did have was an arsenal of heavy weaponry, some military-grade chrome and the directions to a town she had intended on painting red anyway.

"Here and now"

Night City didn't judge. It took her in like it did every other lunatic merc, a neon playground for her to ply her trade. With her connections far and few between Zen was at the bottom of the pile, an overqualified hired gun for those unbothered by things getting loud. Any decent-paying job she found required more discretion than she was capable or cared to give and there were always expenses. Food, meds to patch herself up with after jobs, new cyberware, various sedatives to numb the aches and pains picked up after a life of combat, so many things to buy and not enough eddies to buy them with.

But Zhenya didn't mind being homeless. She had a car to sleep in and a dog to hang out with, which was about as much as she needed. More importantly, she was free. No bosses yelling orders, no parents to try and impress with her service, she worked when she wanted for who she wanted.

She could be whoever she wanted, even if the person she wanted to be was just a more infamous version of who she already was. She found people willing to work with her, a crew with varied skillsets to complement her expertise in destruction, and with them came better paying gigs.

_{M E M O R I E S}

A Useful Idiot Fixer

Jake Tao- A low-tier fixer, perfect for a low-tier solo. Johnny likes to spin himself as being bigger than he is and Zen nods politely despite knowing full well he's not going to find her a job different than the usual "burn rival stash spot here, shoot a too-curious bennie there." He's useful not because he offers good gigs, he's useful because he offers lots of them. It's the one advantage of working with bottom-of-the-bin clients, plenty of poor people want other poor people dead.

A Useful Competent Fixer

3D- An actually competent fixer, even if he has poor taste. Zen likes to work for 3D because he offers her gigs that actually paid well...or at least he did before he was ran out of his mansion. She tries to throw him a bone now and again in the aftermath of the bordello raid but there's only such much she can do when she's already skipping meals to afford more ammo. He's a a good buddy and a great driver but a very bad source for fashion advice.

A Furry Son

Uncle Sam- Zen's pet, personal therapist, diary and pillow. He's named after the patron saint of her adopted country and he's just the bestest boy in the whole world, yes he is! A stray blast of buckshot took out an eye and a leg but Zen managed to rush him over to a ripperdoc in time to save his life.

_{G E A R & C Y B E R N E T I C S
"All my worldly possessions. It's uh, it's not much."}

Weapons

Mark. 31 Heavy Machinegun- Eighty-two pounds of high-powered weaponry, firing .50 BMG from a backpack-mounted feed system. The Mk. 31 is unwieldy even for those all borg'ed up but its ability to chew through cover, light vehicles and most definitely people make it worth keeping around. Fires a variety of rounds, all of which will absolutely ruin someone's day.

Militech Crusher- The Crusher's small size makes it convenient for use indoors while its eight-gauge payload and twelve-round magazine make it deadly. It's Zhenya's go-to when the situation warrants some semblance of subtlety.

RT-46 Burya- Zhenya's sidearm from her SovOil days and one of the few tech-weapons she cares for. Low-capacity and most certainly not low profile but makes up for these deficits with its sheer power. If it doesn't drop dead after getting shot by a railgun Zen probably shouldn't have shot at it in the first place.

"Rezat" Officer's Sword- Her father's official parade sidearm from his days as an officer in the greatly diminished Red Army, it was given a very unofficial nickname when she inherited it. The titanium blade is sharp, durable, and lightweight while the decorative grip contains pressure sensitive circuitry. A squeeze of her hand sends a current of around eight thousand volts up the blade.

Even if she can't pierce their skin that much juice can inhibit a chromed up opponent just fine.

Cyberware

Nervous System

Kerenzikov- Gives a boost to Zen's reflexes for a brief moment, allowing her to dive out of the way of that grenade or intercept that punch at the last minute.

Sensory

DefnDum Protection System- Zen regularly fires off huge guns inside enclosed spaces, a recipe for disaster if proper precautions aren't taken. The DDPS is wired to Zen's eyes and ears, automatically dampening extremes in decibels and lumens to manageable levels.

Integumentary

Subdermal Amor- SovOil equips its security forces in the Siberian wastes with beneath-the-skin armor plate as an added defense against small arms fire.

Grounding Plating- Bounce Back and MaxDoc can help with bleeding, burns and blunt force trauma but electricity will still happily cripple a chromed-up killer. The dispersal systems through Zhenya's body ensure that any nasty electromagnetism she encounters will simply be brushed off.

Circulatory

Syn-Lungs- Being a muscular giant with metal bones will only get you so far. Zen has to lug around a lot of heavy shit at speed and doing so requires more air than a normal fleshy set of lungs can provide.

Frontal Cortex

Babble-On Translator: Zhenya's English is rudimentary, consisting of enough short phrases and street slang to get by but any conversation more complex than that is beyond her. The Babble-On lets her cheat by automatically filtering words in English into her native Russian and vice versa.

The standard Babble came with the option of Cool, Polite Female and Cool, Polite Male, making Zen sound entirely different than she does when using her actual speaking voice.

Skeleton

Titanium Skeleton- A reinforced skeletal structure to let Zhenya carry extreme weight and protect her knuckles in a fight.

Ocular

Röntgeneyes- A set of ocular implants from the International Electric Corporation. Despite the name they're not actually powered by X-rays but by sonar, the cyberware allowing Zen to see people through walls and track their movement using radio waves. The blurry shapes are sharpened into proper outlines by microcameras so that she knows what's on the other side of the wall. Useful when combined with high caliber weaponry that can shoot through cover.

Immune System

Pain Editor- A good quality Pain Editor numbs the sensation of injury, helping to manage shock and to keep the recipient in the fight, provided the wound isn't lethal of course. Zhenya got hers for cheap from a third-hand dealer which means that it totally blocks out the pain.

This is an extremely dangerous effect because it means that Zen runs the risk of bleeding to death if she's not careful. She won't be able to feel when her outer gear and subdermal armor are breached so she has to constantly check herself to know if she's on death's door or not. As with some natural cases of Congenital Analgesia the effect can be somewhat lessened by being treated with naloxone but this is an expensive and temporary fix.

Miscellaneous

Agent- Zhenya's cell phone, computer, personal assistant and main source of entertainment outside of murder, all in one convenient package.
Galena GA32t- A used model of an already cheap sports car, given to Zen as payment for a gig. Since she has no permanent home it pulls double duty as her bedroom and transportation.
Heavy Armorjack- In the form of an armorweave trench coat with metal plates inserted at strategic points and a laminate armor vest underneath. It won't help much if she gets shot in the legs or the head but its far better than nothing.
Everything Else- Spare ammo, spare magazines, the few hundred eddies Zhenya has left, changes of clothes, a couple blankets and the various drugs she takes. Generally strewn about the floor and trunk of her car.

Relief, Houston - A High Tech Low Life Cyberpunk Story

@Smike
No worries :) Good base so far, I look forward to seeing the final product.

@Krash

will be finished tmw or over the weekend, but I'd appreciate if you took another look at what I added just now. I made up some lore stuff and would like to know sooner rather than later if it doesn't fly

Relief, Houston - A High Tech Low Life Cyberpunk Story

Not even close to done, just here so i can save it

WIPed Up

Image here
_{Nicky "Cuts" Lee
◄ AGE 44 ▎HEIGHT 5'6" ►}

_{F A C E}

---

This section is for appearance description, notes on personality and behavior, or anything else you might think of that is related. A note on character images: I prefer 'realistic' images of people. I know that everyone has their preference and some are uncomfortable with one or the other. I ask that you try, at least, and then we can speak if there is an issue. I can help you with finding an image, if that makes it easier.

_{R E C}

---

Nicky Lee was born to Mike and Trinity, a couple low-level employees for one of the local construction corps that made money off renovating the neon-and-glass structures that the super super-rich to live in. They weren't roofers or electricians but desk jockeys, given the privilege of air-conditioned cubicles with vending machine access in exchange for long hours spent staring at screens. It was Mike's job to figure out how many pennies had been wasted each month on injury-based absences and other frivolities while Trinity had the honor of firing the perpetually unenthusiastic and replacing them with scabs.

It was soul-crushing work. Nicky grew up watching the life drain from her parents and knew that she wanted no part of what they did. She was set on helping people and making the world a better place, driven by that delightfully naïve optimism that children had. She'd work hard in school and get real smart so she could go to college and become a veterinarian, giving her a wonderful future filled with grateful owners and puppy kisses.

Reality put that dream in check pretty quickly. Recessions, market crashes, ecological disasters and migrant crises at home and abroad put more strain on the working man than it did the rich. The Lees had already been closer to the gutter than away from it and the poverty line just kept rising and rising throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s. The stream of migrants from California brought people willing to work longer hours for less, forcing Mr. and Mrs. Lee to burn themselves out just to put food on the table.

College was not happening, not without some serious support from a benefactor. Even in the face of technological progress, societal decay and a changing climate one thing stayed the same: the Unite States Army would cover college costs for those willing to sign up.

Nicky joined to the delight of no one, saying goodbye to parents that had grown distant and a few friends. She had hoped to work as an army vet but Uncle Sam had more need for emergency caregivers than he did doggy doctors. After boot camp she was put through sixteen weeks of combat medic training, given instructions on morphine shots, intraosseous infusions and plugging up bullet wounds while still under fire.

After training came active service. Nicky's first active tour was in Yemen where she was deployed in peacekeeping operations as well as active hunts for sectarian extremists. The rising temperatures threw oil on an already roaring fire, the decades-long civil war now over dwindling water supplies as much as it was politics. Nicky treated more civilians caught in the crossfire than she did wounded soldiers, those lacking arms or armor always suffering more than those with.

After Yemen and a too-short stint stateside she was shifted southwards into Mexico as part of the expansion of the Mérida Initiative, one of the few thousand American troops assigned to assist Mexican military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies in combating the various drug gangs running rampant in an attempt to stop the flow of narcotics across the border.

This went nowhere, as was to be expected. Nicky was attached to a unit of the Mexican National Guard in Michoacán, performing triage after fights with cartel gunmen.

By the time her service was up in 2030 she was jaded, exhausted, and very much a disbeliever in the idea of human kindness. She had seen corruption firsthand, watched corporate interests get rich in the poorest parts of the world with their execs guarded by private militaries making four times her salary. She had seen the lines of refugees signing up for visas in exchange for indentured servitude and had to treat uncountable cases of sepsis caused by third-rate cybernetics built for the lowest cost possible. The Nicky that returned to Houston was a hollow wreck who hadn't gotten enough sleep in years.

But she still wanted to help people. The veterinarian dream was long dead, too far removed from her experiences and training but the army was willing to pay for her to become a proper surgeon. Within a month of returning to Houston Nicky applied to university, throwing herself into the process of becoming an emergency surgeon. While she would never claim that her studies were easy she was undeniably more prepared than most of her fellow students, taking to the coursework well.

In addition to her studies she was working as an EMT, putting herself through college by performing emergency medical care in unpleasant conditions just as she had been ever since she left home. She had just gotten her bachelors of surgery when Hurricane Whitney hit, the masses of qualities pushing her to her limits.

She weathered the storm but found herself stretched thin by her continued studies and lack of support, the already fragile public health system rapidly being abandoned in Whitney's aftermath. The ambulances were aging without upkeep, the equipment given to her outdated. Medication refills were often late or expired, the good stuff usually rerouted to private companies looking to protect their staff over everyone else. Nicky's salary stayed stagnant as the cost of living climbed, her expenses only increasing as she tried to make up for shortages with her own money.

She had never wanted to become a criminal but made the choice all the same. It was slow at first, filling "prescriptions" for junkies looking for low-strength pain meds to try and wean themselves off the stronger stuff, making off-the-clock house calls to illegal immigrants scared of being listed in hospital records. She built a reputation as someone that could be trusted to keep her mouth shut, and that was when the bigger fish came knocking.

As Nicky finished her bachelors and entered med school she began working with stick-up crews and professional mercenaries, putting the medical and martial training she had received to work ripping off corpos. It was easy to justify to herself. Her patients needed treatment and the corps had what she needed to treat them. While she tried to avoid harming desk jockeys like her parents execs and security were fair game.

She was a professional crook right up until she finished her residency, putting away the guns and mask when she signed on with the Houston Medical Center at the age of 35. Her life had not gone the way she had expected it to but she had succeeded in her goal! 'Cuts' (as her criminal contacts called her) was a doctor, the poster child for helping her fellow man.

And she hated it. Working in a hospital met dealing with staffroom politics, unfair practices and distraught families blaming her when their loved ones died. She made a go of it, too stubborn to quit after sinking so much time and effort into the profession but everyone has their limits. She lasted five years before she gave up, falling once more into back alley operations to pay the bills. At least she only had to deal with clients who sought her out specifically.

The idea came to her one night as she tossed out her bloody gloves. If she wanted to tend to the poor, the desperate, the downtrodden, why wasn't she living with them? She sold her what few possessions she had moved to Relief, setting up her private practice in the same parking lot she had performed triage care at nearly fifteen years ago.

As one of the few medical professionals in the slum Nicky does a little bit of everything and always treats civilians for as cheap as she can. Get mugged and she'll treat your concussion in exchange for dinner, if you overdose she'll jab you with Narcan and make sure you don't choke on your vomit. But if you catch a bullet from a Blue while playing gangbanger or get some corporate samurai's steel lodged in your chest you can expect to pay a premium. It's more than what a trip to the hospital will cost but you won't be leaving her operating theatre in handcuffs.

Or you could always cut her in on a job. Her supplies aren't cheap.

𝙽𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝙵𝚊𝚍𝚎 𝙰𝚠𝚊𝚢

Did we have a Discord to discuss things?
I was just wondering what everyone had planned for shared background as part of the crew.
With Steven Bates being one of the older members, I was flirting with the idea that he helped found the crew for a job a while back. I’m not committed to the idea of anyone had an alternative.

@Sanity43217

I wouldn't be opposed to a discord group or something, it's easy to coordinate stuff like that there (in my experience.) In any case I don't mind Steve being the one to have started it, I figure Zen's joined through 3D or was put pushed in the group's direction by her other fixer

~Hello Friends~ New Person Alert :)

howdy there, welcome to the show