Topic: SD Shadowrun: Character Sheets and Backstories

Pretty self explanatory.

"ShadowDuelist is a god."
        -Teague Chrystie

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: SD Shadowrun: Character Sheets and Backstories

NAME: Whisper Wind
Alias’: Whisp, Flash, Speedy, Zipper, Lightning
Meta-Type: Human
Sex: Male
Age: 26 (estimated)

His childhood, what he could remember of it at any rate, was normal enough he supposed. Quiet and clean, suburban you could almost say. Although it was less white picket fence and trimmed green grass, and more thirty-seventh story on the outer ring of a Megacorp owned employee housing sector. It had a helluva view though. Both his parents worked for the local megacorp...he could never remember which one… mother as a nurse or something, he had vague memories of her talking about patients and wards. Father worked in some kind of cyberware testing...or research… or development… or something… area. Everything before age nine or so gets a little fuzzy you see. But they were a nice little family unit and things were good.

When he was about five or six, he started feeling...different… and no, not THAT kind of different. The kind of different where he could feel the air around him, alive, pulsing, brimming with energy, just barely out of reach. Mana, although he didn’t know the name at the time, he knew it was something special. As the years went on he started experimenting, playing with it, channeling it inwards. He remembered one night finding a bee, an actual real live bee, okay maybe an escapee from some genetics lab a block over, but still a real bee, almost dead on the balcony. He remembers taking it inside and focusing very hard, until he could feel the crackle of pure energy, the mana flowing through him, he channeled it through his hand. It felt like a torrent of warm water rushing through his veins, and suddenly the bee flickered and burst into life...stung the hell out of him… and then flew out the door. Bitter-sweet admittedly, but hey, he brought a living thing back from the brink of death. That’s pretty cool. He never did tell his parents why exactly he had a bee sting right in the middle of his forehead. As he continued to work with it, he could feel himself getting faster, quicker, more agile. He had always loved to run, usually at the local play parks scattered around the Corp grounds, but now he was getting seriously faster, jumping and leaping from the various bits of equipment...much to the chagrin of his parents… and with more than a few stern looks from the other parents.

One night,when he was about eight or nine or so, he remembered his father coming home, late, later than usual, and even more tired than usual. He remembered him sitting down on the couch and turning on the vidscreen to some sports game. Fifteen minutes later, his father was convulsing. Thing flickers of light illuminating veins and wires under his temple. He called to his mother and she came running. He remembered her trying to get him to talk, a bright flash, and his mother lying unconscious, maybe dead on floor. Shock paralyzed him. A thin aroma of burnt flesh hung in the air. Whisp tried the only thing he had, he focused inward and focused on his father, maybe there was something his mana could do. He concentrated, pulling in energy from around him and sent a stream of it into his father. This was a bad idea, a bright flash, and moments later Whisp was lying face up on the floor slowly regaining consciousness. his father had stopped shaking, now slumped, unmoving in his chair, a dull light still sparking near his temple. He was dead.

From what he’s managed to piece together over the years since, Whisper figures one of the neural implants the corp had installed shorted out, sending electrical current directly into his brain and turning his wired upgrades into a mesh of high energy cables wrapping around his entire body. Not pretty. Whether it was an experimental piece they were testing on his father, or just one of those one in a million mechanical flukes you hear about, he still isn’t sure. needless to say, the entire experience left Whisp with a distrust for cyberware and augmentations on the whole.

So, in shock, frightened, and now very very much alone, a young Whisp ran. Down the hallway, down the stairs, out of the building, and out. He kept running, he had no idea how far, or how long. When he finally stopped he was in a very dark, very run down, and extremely unfamiliar part of the city. Whisp did what he knew best and climbed, up to the nearest abandoned rooftop,  somewhere hidden, somewhere safe. And cried. Til the sun crested the jagged horizon of the city.

Over the years he’s tried to retrace his steps, find his way back to the apartment building where he used to live, but between the brain scramble, and the shock, it’s a lost cause. He can’t even remember his own name from back then, let alone a specific tower of glass and metal amongst a forest of glass and metal. He gave on that hope a long time ago.

So now lost, confused, in shock, with scrambled memories and lacking a name, young Whisp went out into the world. For a few years he got by on petty theft. He was light with his fingers and fast as hell if he ever got caught, so he got pretty good at it. Preferring to sleep on rooftops, he at least never went truly hungry. He always liked the stars, out in the dimmer lit areas of the city, he could almost make a few of them out. He remembered seeing a trideo, one of the few his parents ever let him watch, of the night sky, no lights, no cities, what the sky must have looked like before humans and meta-humans took over the place. It was magical, he could hardly believe that all of those little pinpricks could be out there, hiding in plain sight. Of course nights in the cities were scarcely different from the days when it came to the sky, but Whisp always liked to think that they were out there. Stars, planets, other worlds. All… just out of reach, but if you squinted and thought real hard, you could reach out and just barely touch one. As he grew up he began to see certain tactical advantages to sticking to the rooftops, but the wonders of the universe just out of reach above his head never left.

After a while pick-pocketing and generally surviving on the streets, Whisp started getting noticed by a local… well let’s just call them, underground business opportunists. Called themselves The Dulanga’s, Whisp never learned what it meant, figured it must have been Dwarvish or something, probably “Blood Brothers” or something cliche like that. They needed a runner, someone that could deliver packages discretely and quickly, someone that could blend into a crowd and disappear when he needed to. A young Whisp seemed to fit the bill perfectly. The group was headed up by a middle-aged dwarf by the name of Lugner. Thick built, and pure muscle, a not inconsiderable amount of implanted spikes around his shoulders and brow. Not a guy you’d want on your bad-side, but in the grand scheme of things, nothing too out of the ordinary for the shadows. He headed up a small team, half a dozen men or so moving goods and messages around the city. Whisp figured a bit of drugs, but mostly info, data-disks, cred-sticks, stuff like that. Nothing to hardcore… certainly not for Seattle. But Whisp was good at it, and that’s all that mattered. The group effectively adopted Whisp, and with such came the obligatory nicknames, speedy, flash, ghost, and so on they went. But none of them ever really seemed right, except for what Lagner called him. Whisper. “Soilent as a whisper on tha wind, an just as deadly! Ain’t aat right?” It had always felt right, so Whisper he became. Whisp, to his friends of course.

About five or six years past and Whisp was into his twenties, or as close as he could figure. An expert parkourist, deadly with his hands, even more so with a sniper rifle between em, he was a hawk in the sky. Moving steadily up the ranks of the The Dulanga’s, still serving under Lugner, but now his right hand man. In the years The Dulanga’s had progressed to some more high end corporate work, still moving cash around, just from larger accounts to smaller wallets. To put it politely. Whisp’s job was simple, get the job done and keep everyone alive.

Sometimes it’s not so simple.

On a routine: break, enter, hack, steal and get the frack outta there job, something went wrong. An alarm got tripped when it shouldn’t have, one of the newer hackers, just a kid really; he was talented, just unlucky. The place was swarmed with, well, a private army, to put it honestly. They wound up having to shoot their way out- look... the details don’t really matter, but 3 hours later Whisp was the only Dulanga left alive. The kid, dead, His backup, dead. Lugner. Last Whisp saw of Lugner he had a 59-mil automatic in each hand and about twenty armoured soldiers bearing down on him, shouting his head off for Whisp to get the fuck outta there. So either he’s dead, or went comm’s silent for some reason after blowing all those fuckers to hell and back. Either way, Whisp hasn’t heard from him since, and has dropped off every map Whisp knows of, which is most of em.

Once again alone in the city, his foster family slaughtered, although with significantly more resources than last time, Whisper headed out. He grabbed a cheap apartment on the other side of the city and started trying to work things out. Mostly getting by on simple hack and enter account jobs and the occasional corporate hire out for a man of his talents, he started putting things back together. Although with the only really clear path in his life now destroyed, he was lost. Depression seeped in, things got dark. He doesn’t like to talk about these years. What little people have been able to get out of him paint a very bleak picture. Reckless jobs, jobs verging on sheer insanity, assassinations. Mr. Johnson loved him. And if that doesn't paint a picture of the horror we’re talking about here, I don’t know what will.

A couple years into this, after a particularly unfortunate job, he still hasn't ever said what it was, he was injured pretty severely. He said they had to airlift him out of where ever it was he was. And apparently as the VTOL was flying up, it got high enough that it cleared the worst of the smog, and light pollution, and he saw the stars. Not the dull pinpricks visible from the ground, but the full true majesty of the universe. Now, how much of that was the excessive amount of drugs they were pumping him full of, and how much of that is real, we’ll never know. But either way it worked, after his recovery he turned things around, moving apartments into a slightly nicer place and shunning the worst of the jobs Mr. Johnson had to throw at him. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough. He seems happier.

And so, now we meet up with the present. Whisper is a fairly successful runner, a decent apartment, not that he uses it much, a nice selection of weapons, a great roof to star watch from, and the entirety of Seattle as his playground.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


CONTACTS:

Synap (Loyalty:2/Connection:4):

Synap was a fixer for the Dalunga’s. They needed something, he could probably get it. Guns, cars, contacts, he even knew a couple of nice troll girls that were of a more open minded disposition regarding the trade of money for, ahem, personal favours, for the couple of troll guys that passed through the Dalunga’s. Charming in his own way, a tongue that could slice steel, and in the few times that Whisp had met him in person, eyes that could pierce your soul. None of the Dalunga’s had ever known what else Synap did, although a few had guessed, but somehow Whisp doubted he was a gun runner and master hacker for a ring of underground life on mars conspiracy nuts that believed Dragons were actually martians. Unbeknowst to Whisp, most of what Synap was involved in was actually very banal. It was not that Synap had anything in particular to hide about it, most of his dealings were with Shadow groups leaning on the more benevolent side, but nothing wrong with keeping a certain amount of professional mystique about one’s self. In the years leading up to the slaughter of the Dalunga’s, Synap had worked closely with the Dalunga’s second in command, a young man calling himself Whisper. He’d always had a certain respect, some might even call admiration for the young man, a street urchin turned professional operative and leader. You had to like that. After the slaughter, Synap had kept in touch with Whisp, he did what he could to get him back on his feet, and the touch with people who could pay and the kept him equipped the tools to do the job, for a cut of course, but never anything particularly egregious. As Whisp began to slide downhill Synap was… well, concerned, is probably a bit strong, but cautiously watchful. Synap fed him the jobs and kept him in touch, but never giving him anything particularly harmful. It never seemed to matter of course, Whisp had other finders, other people looking for whatever it was he was looking for. One night Synap got a call from a particularly rough sounding Whisp. Something had gone wrong. very wrong. When the call went dead Synap quickly pulled together an extraction team and got him out of there. Whisp was never the same after that, he seemed clearer headed. A couple months later Synap tried to ask him about this, but got shrugged off with something about stars and a girl, he didn’t press the issue. In the year or so since, Whisp has mostly fallen out of touch, occasionally chiming in every once in a while for a rare something or other that needed procuring, but otherwise falling mostly silent.


Dr. Kathryn Marcy (Loyalty 4/Connection 2)
Kathryn is street doc. She runs a small clinic in a rundown section of a rundown neighbourhood, just like the thousand other clinics across the city operated by rundown doctors hoping to make a difference. What most other clinic doc’s don’t have though is an ex-military background and and more than a handful of connections to the shadows. Whisp first met Kath when he was spectacularly drugged up and out of his mind a couple hundred meters over Seattle in a twin vtol medi-vac heli, getting emergency surgery from whatever the frack he just went through. Needless to say, it was not a great first impression. But, for whatever reason, Kath took a liking to Whisp, in that totally platonic, I’m 12 years older than you, sisterly sort of way. I suppose I should also mention this extraction team was put together by Synap personally, Kath has never exactly revealed how she knows Synap, not that Whisp hasn't tried of course, best guess is something going back to her military days. Anyways, after that fateful heli trip Whisp started trying to put his life back together, he moved into an apartment near Kath’s clinic and over the months began helping her. Granted, this isn’t exactly a pair of scrubs and a mop sort of work we’re talking about here; Whisp may have been back on the straight and narrow, but he’s still a runner, so even the straight and narrow tends to veer towards violence. Whisp helped with the worst of it at the request of Kath, taking out a few especially troublesome gang leaders, some of the more violent drug dealers, and routing with a few contacts to get in some much needed meds and tools. It’s not exactly work that pays, but Whisp figures he probably owes Kath more than a few life depts so he’s just happy to help.

ZangrethorDigital.ca

Re: SD Shadowrun: Character Sheets and Backstories

FORMER LEGAL NAME: Felix Mulwray
CURRENT NAME: Burnout
METATYPE: Elf
SEX: Male
AGE: 48

Born August 7th, 2016, Felix Mulwray was an elf born to a human, first in his extended family. Despite obvious distaste from his aunts and uncles, his parents kept him and raised him, providing for him anything he could have possibly needed.

For a long time, Felix was a productive member of society. Graduated with honors, worked at a corporate skunkworks for the revived Saturn brand - mostly civilian cars but some other projects besides. The designing was fun, but the test tracks with prototypes were better. When that grew stale, sometime around his early 30s, he started working at a repair garage on the side. Not for money; between his parents and his own well-paid job, he didn’t want for it. But just for something different.

Cars would come into the shop that he’d designed, and he’d fix them up good as new. Sometimes better; at least once a customer came back and demanded that the garage disable whatever modifications “that keeb tech” had installed.

After a few such instances, old man Nescio called him in. Felix was ready for a dressing-down, maybe getting fired, but that’s alright. Plenty of garages might want his help, and there was plenty of other work out there if they didn’t.

But no. Nescio offered him a job. Designing better vehicles and driving them like they were designed to be driven. Felix jumped at the opportunity and it quickly became apparent that work for Nescio was work done outside of the corporate system. His nights became longer, and when his day job suffered, he just quit. Most people that led two lives tried to keep that original life, that first life, that “normal” life. Felix had no such attachment. He designed his final car - the Tethys -  and signed off on it. When his fellow designers at Saturn wondered why he didn’t show up for work the next day, they tried to contact him, but he’d already disappeared. Months later they found that his quitting note had been imprinted inside a piece of sheet metal in the designs for the car, and the 2057 Saturn Tethys was already on the streets. Some salesman was very happy to have sold the first production model to a young-looking elf in red and black who paid all cash.

After disappearing, Felix, now going by the handle Burnout, worked closely with one of Nescio’s hackers, a dwarf named Jackstand, and erased himself from the system. He stayed off the grid, not even visiting his parents - the only ones who might’ve remembered Felix Mulwray, or missed him. He’d regularly leave credsticks in places they’d find them, with notes. He made sure when they were injured in a car accident they were put into a good care facility; and when they passed away in 2062 that they were taken care of.

They left an inheritance for him, but because Felix Mulwray didn’t exist, it went to his last known employer - the Saturn Corporation. Somehow, the Corporation ended up paying out that exact amount to a startup ridesharing company called Burnout Enterprises. Later attempts to follow that digital paper trail would all end at a supposed failed tech startup.

With the variety of funds available to him - honestly earned, ill-gotten, and the inheritance as a mix of both - Burnout stepped up his game. He trained hard on driving various vehicles and heavily modified his own. When he realized that he was hitting his limit before they hit theirs, Jackstand convinced him to take the plunge and get a control rig implanted in his head. Before, he could drive; now he could make cars dance.

Burnout continued doing work with Nescio, for a time. He learned how to handle a gun and learned that like most things he was better with guns behind the wheel. He designed one-off vehicles and drove people and things from place to place. Occasionally for old times’ sake he’d design a civilian car and have Jackstand slip the plans onto a Saturn designer’s desktop. One of those designs even got put into production, after some committee work. Burnout and Jackstand were proud of that one; they’d manipulated another designer on the team into adding one of Felix’s signature elements to the vehicle. It was the closest Burnout could do to doing it himself; security was paramount.

Eventually the rate at which work came in began to slow down; Nescio was only human, after all, and couldn’t keep pace with the world anymore. Burnout, meanwhile, was an elf - in his prime and likely to stay that way for some time. The shop guys he’d started working with were aging and getting distrustful of their co-workers who weren’t. And then, one day, Burnout and Jackstand didn’t come in. Again, no notice - until Nescio got a large shipment of tires into the shop. The inside sidewalls of each and every tire were inscribed with the notes (Burnout’s with overly corporate-sounding language, Jackstand’s with the kind of language that made a couple techs blush).

When Burnout last saw Jackstand, it was the first thing he saw with a new set of cybereyes. He dropped off his friend at some nondescript alley of some nondescript street in some nondescript neighborhood with a promise to keep in contact if either one needed the other. After nearly twenty years of working for Nescio, Burnout was on his own, looking out for his own interests. But he got to tinker with cars, and he got to drive fast. What else do you need, really?

Boter, formerly of TF.N as Boter and DarthArjuna. I like making movies and playing games, in one order or another.

Re: SD Shadowrun: Character Sheets and Backstories

Man, I always forget how old Burnout is.

ZangrethorDigital.ca

Re: SD Shadowrun: Character Sheets and Backstories

Elf. He basically looks early/mid 20s and will for another century or so, I guess.

Boter, formerly of TF.N as Boter and DarthArjuna. I like making movies and playing games, in one order or another.

Re: SD Shadowrun: Character Sheets and Backstories

Runner Name: Shadowhawk
Alias: Kal Spiro, IT consultant for multiple businesses around Forsaken Territory.  Known to be in a fairly serious relationship with a shop owner selling magical supplies and equipment.

Alias: Kiro Rhu'khan, freelance programmer and cyber investigations.

Meta-type: Elf, identifies as Half-elf, easily mistaken for Human.
Gender: Male
Age: Inditerminate

Shadowhawk's early life was as a member of the street gang The Forsaken, a group comprised of street rats and orphans.  Though it didn't have any racial ties most of its members were humans simply due to the area they inhabited.  Despite having carved out a fairly sizable territory in the inner city, their members tend not to remain past adulthood.  Their leader Keldrix and technically Shadowhawk himself are the only members who haven't moved on to other gangs, though Shadowhawk did leave the gang as an official member at some point.

Within the Forsaken he was an electronics expert, bypassing locks and shutting down security systems.  Before long he was being rented to rival gangs growing the reputation and strength of the Forsaken through his skills.  Shadowhawk was a commodity, and the Forsaken put a great deal of effort into growing that commodity.  After acquired his first deck they heavily marketed him to gangs and runners alike.  The Forsaken began collecting clients and setting up contracts, carving out sections of the city all their own thanks to Shadowhawk's work.  He had significantly more freedom than other members and it wasn't long before they were getting so much business he had to train new kids in decking and electronics.  This also meant he could take his pick of what he wanted to do or not, and make decisions on who he was willing to work with.

It was through one of these contracts that he first met Whisper.  The Dulangas needed a cracker to shift account numbers and he was available.  They turned out to be quite efficient and they paid well, which landed them as a fairly consistent client.  If they hadn't all been wiped out some time later it's even possible Shadowhawk would have moved on to them when he out grew the Forsaken.  It was only due to his elven blood that he had remained as long as he did.  While the human kids, and the handful of meta-humans grew up and moved on he hadn't.  His longevity and importance to the gang is why it seemed natural for him to stick around when he finally decided to shift to running rather than continue the gang life.

Contacts:
Syrian Myth - Human, Female, 32 - Part time fortune teller and owner of Glyph Enterprises, the small shop with the big name.  Her shop stocks general and exotic magical supplies.  She owns the building which includes the shop and the two apartments above it, one of which she lives in.  She is, for all intents and purposes, Shadowhawk's girlfriend.
She keeps her eyes and her ears open, but doesn't get much information beyond what trickles into a magic shop.  She is a skilled caster, however, and fairly knowledgeable in magic and magic paraphernalia.

Grimm - Dwarf, Male, 76 - Freelance Street Samurai.  He is a pure mercenary.  Shadowhawk worked with him from time to time on different contracts even after leaving the Forsaken and has earned his respect, but professionally that's as far as his attachments go.  He gets a fair amount of work from different sources, and if you need a shield or a spear he's a quality hire.  But if you're looking for something long term he's not interested.

Keldrix - Human, Male, 28 - Leader of the Forsaken, Smuggler and Fence.  Keldrix is the only human to remain past his teens.  He has been aggressively mobilizing and securing Forsaken territories since he took leadership and is trying to turn the gang into more than just the place runaways turn to until they can join a big gang.  In an attempted to maintain Shadowhawk as a resource after he decided to "retire," he made an apartment available within their territory in one of the more devastated areas they control.  It's hard to find if you don't know what you're looking for, and well protected by the Forsaken, both aspects he knew would attract Shadowhawk to it.

Last edited by Kal Spiro (2016-04-17 03:59:55)

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: SD Shadowrun: Character Sheets and Backstories

Re-reading character backgrounds. Man I just missed Burnout's birthday. As in, he's an elf and relatively old and he was born a month and a day ago tongue

Boter, formerly of TF.N as Boter and DarthArjuna. I like making movies and playing games, in one order or another.