Entry tags:
Application for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
synodiporia
P L A Y E R;
NAME: Kira
AGE: 29
PLAYER JOURNAL:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
narva
TIMEZONE: CET
CONTACT: discord: Narva#9949 ; plurk: narwa
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Bob Laughs-At-The-Storm
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Kitty (the name on her "legal stuff" fake ID is Ebru Özdemir, and she uses that name fairly frequently)
CANON: Shadowrun
POINT IN CANON: 2078
AGE: 7, looks 9
APPEARANCE:
In her human form she looks like a regular girl for the most part: 1.30 cm tall, black middle-length hair, fairly dark skin and an average kid's build. Her eyes don't quite match, though, because they're clearly yellow cat eyes, and her ears are slightly pointy and covered in a coat of short black hair on their back. In her cat form, she is a regular (if unusually large) black kitten, past the super fluffy stage but still very much a kitten and still has the same yellow-ish eyes.
She typically tries to appear like a regular metahuman child due to safety concerns, using contacts or magic to hide her eyes.
CANON HISTORY:
While not exactly the future of our world - the timelines parted a bit before the dissolution of the Soviet Union - the world of Shadowrun still in many ways is ours, just with a reawakened magic and the technology of 60 years into the future. And the pollution of 60 more years of only barely regulated environmental irresponsibility, can't forget that. I'll try to just name some highlights in each area.
The internet is wireless, you can enter it on a way more physical seeming level than today. Advanced technology makes it hard to avoid it; augmented reality (AR) is widespread, pretties up almost every business's reality and makes you be bombarded with AR ads instead of billboards or neon signs when walking around a shopping district. You can use the internet by leaving your body behind and stepping into the virtual reality. People rarely drive their cars themselves anymore, vast advancements in medicine and technology have enabled a widespread use of implants and other technical enhancements to human bodies and advanced technology, guns typically come with network abilities... and so on. Oh, and most recently there are artificial intelligences that are fighting for their civil rights. Or stealing bodies and committing terrorist acts, that depends on your viewpoint.
And there's magic! Dragons and other magical animals, metahuman magic users, magic storms, astral planes, and yes, ...metahumans. While classic humans still exist, a number of them have been born or changed into dwarves, elves, trolls and orcs (and their subspecies) as the levels of magic in the world rose. Magic is everywhere, and it is not always nice - indeed, it can be pretty nasty. Magic critters can be quite dangerous, and in especially polluted areas they sometimes are more toxic than their surroundings. Viruses have created ghouls and vampires. All in all, most magical creatures in lore exist in the world of Shadowrun in one way or the other.
A highlight of pollution is certainly the SOX, an area in central Europe so radioactively polluted that it can only be entered in protective suits, filled with storms that negate all magic and thus kill spirits and dual beings. But other natural disasters are around too - water smuggling is a major issue in the countries of California and Australia because of the water shortage there. And magical calamities have joined the natural ones.
Nation states have lost most of their power where they still exist, with very few exceptions. Corporations have taken their place as the main power players; the biggest of them having their own extraterritorial areas all over the world and their own citizens. Organized crime is huge as well, and corruption and general shadiness is so widespread in all three, countries, corporations and crime syndicates, that they often are less different than they try to pretend. Society can be roughly split in two groups: Upper and middle class people living in more or less highly controlled and pleasant environments with citizenship status and lower class people who are poor, often without a real ID and without any structural protection, who at least don't have their every move tracked and controlled. To make it a little less abstract: A poor person will only eat food made of soy and enriched with artificial flavours while a middle class person will sometimes have real foods and a rich person will have only that and real meat, too. ID-less people, especially when they are orcs, will often be killed in droves in "police raids" (there are almost no real police systems anymore, the standard is private for-profit security firms now) without anyone caring or a good reason, while a higher up person might just discreetly vanish, but it would actually in some way be about them. There is minor movement between the groups - talents that are snatched off the streets or people who work their way into the corrupt systems, and people who for one reason or the other leave the perfect world to work in the shady underbelly of society. Chantalle, Kitty's owner, is one of the poor people who have a state ID - a kind of ID that doesn't award real privileges as corporation IDs do, but at least she officially exists, which brings its own set of advantages, and has enough money to afford her own flat in a fairly safe section of the worse parts of the sprawl. Shadowrunners like the ones that Kitty met are in-betweens; they come from both sides of society and end up as highly skilled independent criminals for hire for various reasons. To use examples from her team: For the troll street samurai, it was a steep climb up the social ladder from a poor slum kid, for the elven mage it was a heavy fall from a high society member in his homeland to a fugitive in a different country selling his abilities. tl;dr: It's dystopian, but at least dead people aren't turned into soylent green. If they lie wounded on the street, they might however be disassembled for all their parts that can be sold with profit.
Now to talk about Kitty herself. She was born as the biggest kitten in the litter of a stray cat somewhere in the Rhine-Ruhr Megaplex, a huge, polluted, multicultural sprawl in the very west of the Alliance of German Countries, for short ADL. The mommy cat didn't return one day, and this might have been the early end of the baby shapeshifter, had a little old lady by the name of Chantalle Schulz not found the hidden corner that Kitty had been born in and rescued the only surviving baby cat. The strangely large size of the kitten didn't tip Chantalle off about something being off with this cat, nor did the fact that she aged very slowly - and really, considering the neighbourhood, it could always just have been that the mommy cat had eaten some science lab's incorrectly disposed waste, hindering proper growth in her litter. It wasn't that strange, and the woman was just glad that her new companion didn't require much food - or medical attention, really, never getting sick. And what a bright and understanding little kitten it was. No, Chantalle was way too happy and uninterested in questioning her luck to make enquiries. She was also not particularly inventive when naming her kitten.
Kitty on the other hand was quite happy the way it was as a young kitten. She did sometimes turn into a human, but always quickly turned back, so that Chantalle never noticed. And then, when she was old enough to comprehend the trideo news flickering on after the shows that Chantalle had fallen asleep to, she started learning about the world outside the apartment. One night, there was a documentary on magical critter extinction measures in Quebec, and shapeshifters were mentioned, too. For a long time after she thought that being hunted down and killed was what happened to animals like her, bigger than they should be and able to turn into metahumans, everywhere. And when she learned that most countries and companies just didn't consider them metahuman but also didn't hunt them, and that there were even a few countries where they were valued more, it felt way too late to tell Chantalle about what she really was. So she just pretended that it wasn't there when the old woman was around, and started experimenting with her human form elsewhere. For this, she started to sneak out of the apartment more and more regularly and through trial and error learned how to appear metahuman and interact with people like she was one.
Chantalle's apartment was located next to a waste facility run by the Shiawase corporation. One day, a curious new scent came from over there, so one young shapeshifter cat decided that sneaking in there was an excellent idea to figure it out. All went well until she suddenly found herself without a place to hide and two security trolls came towards where she was - and she did the next best thing and jumped into the back of an open transporter (not a waste one. It was very clean inside). The security trolls closed the doors and walked away. She was stuck in a dark, mostly empty space with no food and slowly decreasing amounts of oxygen.
Nothing happened for well over a day - she can't tell how long it was, exactly, but it felt like eternity - and she was too afraid of what they might do with her to start meowing for help. But then something did happen: Someone opened the door, and she only in time managed to jump into a hiding spot before yelling and fighting erupted outside, and just as the transporter started moving two street samurai, a human woman with a balance tail and a male troll, jumped into the back of the vehicle. As it sped out of the facility, gunshots erupted.
They made some headway before people started following them, and while there was a moment of peace, the troll noticed Kitty. And recognized her as the cat that a little old lady had asked him to look out for earlier that day when he had been in disguise to find an observation point of the waste facility a few stories above Chantalle's flat. There was no more time than for a few nice words and an attempt to calm her down from a distance, but when the shadowrunners (because that was what they were, Kitty would later learn) got into trouble, and the trouble threatened to take out the whole transporter, including Kitty, the shock and fear made her magic abilities surface - she switched into her human form and sent an acidic wave towards the helicopter that was about to shoot big grenades at them.
The mix of surprise and the actual damage that her (rather weak because unlearned) attack caused got the group the time that they needed to turn the tides of the battle, and they managed to escape without casualties.
Once escaped, introductions were made, and the runner team after some hasty discussions offered her a deal: She would help them in future runs, and in return they would get her ready to participate in metahuman society - get her the skills and the more materialistic means like a commlink and a fake ID - and also teach her how to make better use of her magic and her agility. It was a good deal for both sides. Kitty got what she needed at that time, and the runners got a team member that only wanted a small part of the monetary rewards for runs but due to her skills in infiltration and magic was quite valuable. Two members of the team became especially valuable to her: Ivokat, the mage, taught her how to use her magic and helped her find resources where what he had and could do stopped working for her. And Malicia, the street samurai with the balance tail, took her along for runs away from the other team members sometimes and taught her how to work alone. Not that the other team members were unimportant: Leo, the rigger, who taught her some Japanese and got her a miniscooter to drive around on; Eärendil, the decker, who introduced her to the world of those of the upper and even higher classes; and Simon, the troll, who showed her how to blend in in parts of the town worse than the one she had been raised in. With the team having three Elves, two of which had ties with Tír na nÓg, an Elvish country, it happened almost naturally that she also learned some Sperethiel, the Elven language.
She still lives with Chantalle; the woman was overjoyed to have her kitten back. But she has now become a free roaming cat, and after some panic the woman understood that her cat would always return to her, even if sometimes she stayed away for a few days.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Most things are a game to Kitty. She wasn't raised with duties and responsibilities, having been perceived as nothing but a cat for the longest time, and her nature didn't exactly support a sense for either forming. That doesn't necessary make her unreliable, but it takes a conscious effort of will for her to take things seriously enough to do them the fast and practical instead of the fun way. She can technically stab a person to death quickly and effectively before being noticed, but it is a lot more fun to not kill them immediately and make them jump around instead, isn't it? The matter can be as simple of complicated, as important or unimportant, as dangerous or safe as they may be, Kitty will only treat them seriously if she's either upset, disturbed, hurt or angry herself or if she is trying hard to not make it a game.
The one major exception to this rule are interpersonal relationships that mean something to her. She might still tease such people and play with things that belong to these people, but she will take the relationships themselves very seriously. That is why she can be dependable: Wanting a person she cares about to be safe and well is her main motivation for going through with something efficiently and for persevering in the face of frustration or boredom with a task. It even surpasses her own survival as a motivator, mostly because she does not worry for her own safety very much, subconsciously considering herself invincible in the way that children do sometimes. Consciously, she can make rather accurate estimates of the dangers in a situation and act on them, but when she doesn't have to or take the time to consider things thoroughly, all that goes out of the window. The other thing that can throw those accurate estimates off is when her phobia of rooms that are too dark for her to see and which have no available exit is triggered, which was acquired when she thought she would die in that transporter. Her functionality is severely limited under such circumstances, and it takes her much willpower to think about anything that is not flight.
It won't be very apparent most of the time that she cares about someone or is loyal to them, though, as she only really shows it clearly in a pinch. As a pinch constitute situations in which the other is in danger or seriously injured or sick as well as very sad, and comparable situations. She will try to do what she can to help, and if there is nothing, she will just try to stay close and provide comfort that way.
Another reason why she might get all close and cuddly is when she is feeling upset herself, is injured or otherwise isn't well. Or if she's just needy and wants attention. This kind of proximity is a lot easier to get than the other kind - while she won't go to a stranger with it, it only requires a very basic level of trust in the other person.
Let's return to the fact that she needs strong motivators to overcome frustration or boredom and still do something despite them. Normally, when the well-being of someone that she cares about isn't at risk, she will only do things that seem interesting to her and usually abandon a task when it stops being interesting to her - runs fall under the well-being of people that she cares about being endangered. Generally, she is full of energy, but she can also be supremely lazy and just lie or sit around for hours if she's content. Likewise, when something goes wrong or something awkward happened, she will abandon it and just pretend that it never happened. If confronted about it, she won't deny it, but outside of that it will be nothing to her.
Something else that is, while not nothing, a lot less troublesome to her than for most people is killing someone or inflicting harm on them. This is not due to trauma, as she grew up in a household where she was not treated as a human, yet still beloved and treasured. But most of her knowledge about the metahuman world comes from watching movies and from interacting with people who are more or less deeply stuck in the ugly, corrupt underbelly of metahuman society and life. She can feel compassion, she just tends not to. To a big part, this approach ties back into considering things a game, and it changes with people whom she doesn't consider a game. For them, she can feel very strong compassion. One could perhaps say that she isn't so much a psychopath as someone who hasn't quite learned to apply her theory of mind to people whom she isn't close enough to to have witnessed their personhood first hand. This incomplete ToM coincidences with surroundings where violence and other ugly things are fairly normalized and in which she is capable of being a (minor) predator, so that no external forces really keep her in check, either.
While Kitty was born as a cat and raised as such, she has never really been around other cats so that she isn't used to dealing with them, and all the people she cares about are metahumans - metahuman adults, more specifically, none of whom really occupy the spot of a parent or legal guardian. Chantalle loves her, cherishes her and made sure that she had food and shelter, but well, she's nothing but a cat to her, and Kitty in turn cares a lot about her, but their relationshp is built on Kitty being nothing more than Chantalle's cat, and while Kitty would sometimes like to change that, she also doesn't want to change things between them because it would mean losing the sense of home and normalcy that that is. Ivokat, Malicia and Leo are (were) in some form of mentor positions, but that was always focused on getting her fit for the job. She is (was) closer with most of the people on her team than them being colleagues would require, but she loathes others exerting more authority over her than strictly necessary, so she would do her best to block all attempts at someone trying to parent her.
In a lot of ways, she never really was a metahuman child - she entered the metahuman world as someone who looks like a child and can use that to her advantage, but it also kind of ended her childhood. She approaches many things as a child would, but the tasks that she performs and the skills that she acquired are an adult's. She is more independent than a child would be, but at the same time also very dependent because she wouldn't be taken seriously or exploited without someone to act as her adult and go-in-between for interactions with business relations and others. All that means that she's used to occupying a precarious middle spot that shouldn't really exist and has learned to act as if she was a normal metahuman child as a survival mechanism. She's never really had someone her equal around - Eärendil, the team's decker, is probably the closest that she's ever had to a peer due to them acting like siblings around one another a lot and being the closest in age mentally and in behaviour, but he's still older and of another species. But she isn't particularly bothered by her situation. It's all she knows, and really, she feels that it is preferable to a lot of situations of other children that she's seen.
POINT OF DEPARTURE:
One day, Kitty stepped through a door and suddenly she wasn't with her team anymore, she was in a ...different place. A city surrounded by high walls beyond which there was nothing, with clockwork-like machinery in the least plausible of places. A city that was very little like the place that she was from. Yes, magic existed in both places, but that was pretty much the end of the similarities.
(cityofhex is a reverse-memloss/AU jamjar DWRP game based on NWoD, which is an urban fantasy type of setting set roughly in present day where most regular people do not know that the supernatural exists. Hex has the addition of nobody in the city knowing/realizing that there is nothing outside of the walls and never having been outside of the walls. Characters entering Hex will slowly decay: They become a creature from that world as their memories, abilities, appearance etc are in ten stages exchanged for (that of) someone who has always lived in Hex. Kitty is on level 8 of the decaying process.
Kitty is turning into a girl called Lilofee Schulz, who is a Changeling. At this point that means that her memories have started to get fuzzy around the edges and that she has acquired a Mask that gives her a completely human/cat-like appearance depending on which body she is in. But, visible to those who can see through Masks, her human body has acquired short, light black furry fluff everywhere, pointy ears and hands that are starting to look a little bit like paws. In cat form, her paws are starting to look human-like, with a bit of an opposable-thumb- fingery shape to them, her weight is shifting a bit so that she can manage to walk upright if she was so inclined, and her ears have shifted a bit down the side of her head and become more solid and thick around the edges and more upwards-pointing. He cat form also has gills on the sides of her body. Mentally, this change means that she's starting to get more and more unsure about what truth and reality are and how much she can trust her own memories. Her abilities are also shifting, though at this point this mostly means that they'll malfunction at times and sometimes be wonky even if they work.
It took her a while to figure out Hex and settle in, but at this point she mostly has. She's living on the edges of society, squatting in an abandoned building in a worse part of town for the winter together with a boy called Tobias who is a Beast and living of pick-pocketing and hitting up foodbanks, and sometimes mooching off another boy called Ryoji who is a Sin-Eater. She's also poking around Hex a lot, both out of curiosity and to perhaps find a way back home. After it was confirmed to her that the underworld wouldn't offer a way out, she's currently set her eyes completely on the Hedge, the territory between the mundane world and the world of the Fae, hoping to perhaps find an exit somewhere that leads to her home world, because she misses her friends(/teammates) there, and she prefers living in a world where she can work at what she is good at. Being in the Hedge so much has made her decay a level, and then she died, which knocked her down another level. It wasn't pleasant. Yes, she was returned in time to a while before she died and managed to avoid the circumstances the second time around, but having died most certainly freaked her out. She's doing her best to not think about it and pretend that it was just a dream, but deep down she knows that it wasn't. Luckily (?) she has something else to worry about enough to shove everything else aside, and that is the decaying - her body changing on her and her memories and knowledge about herself and her history becoming fuzzy around the edges and wonky under closer scrutiny. It's like when you retell a story about a party and upon thinking more about it realize that you aren't actually sure that you really made out with Becky and didn't just dream about it.
In Hex, she's mainly made four friends. Two of them she's primarily a human child with, and both of them know that she's a shapeshifter.
Tobias she cares about the most and trusts the most because their situation is the most similar and because she feels like she has the best grasp on how he works. He's also the person that she lives with, so he's both the older person that she'll use as her "adult" and the person who provides stability and safety, so aside from practical considerations to trying to keep him safe there are also emotional ones. Ryoji is at this point mostly a practical person to mooch off of, and she's only beginning to care about him.
Nitou, a Changeling, on the other hand only knew her as a cat at first and after Tobias is the second person that she'll go to when scared, and the person that she'll go to about issues with the Hedge and ask for assistance when she needs back-up-muscle. He's also very nice for napping on. A fourth friend, this one entirely on a childlike playmate level, is a plant kitten that she met in the Hedge and visits regularly. Weird kittens have toplay stick together.
ABILITIES:
- Cannot read and write (functionally illiterate) and generally will have a hard time grasping academic knowledge or fine arts related things. She has a lot of street smarts, though, and possesses a good deal of knowledge gathered through listening to gossip, observation of places and people and consuming popular media. (Her housekeeping abilities are zero, too. Nobody asks their cat to do the dishes.)
- Stealth. She can use magic to make herself invisible, but even in her human form she's very quiet and moves fluidly and without more movements than necessary, and wears clothes that help her with not being seen. She also has solid experience with sneaking into well guarded places. In addition, she knows how to navigate most social situations in a way that will allow her to not draw attention to herself, and can always fall back on her cat form.
- Fighting. She can use pistols, handle daggers and has basic Krav Maga training. Generally her fighting abilities are tailored to allow her to either stealthily take out one single person or get out of situations of violence quickly. She's a scout and infiltrator, foremost, and when her abilities are needed in an actual fight it will be her magical abilities, not the physical ones.
- Regeneration. All shapeshifters have an enhanced regeneration- it is so good that she would grow back lost limbs if necessary and that any implant below deltaware (the highest, most expensive, least accessible quality of implants) wouldn't stay in her body. Her healing rate is also vastly above average. It's still possible for her to die, though.
- This is not so much an ability as that it needs to go somewhere - ageing in shapeshifters is a /leshrug thing. While there was once the assumption that they simply aged doubly as fast as regular humans, research has shown a vast variety of ageing speeds and processes among shapeshifters that isn't even clearly based in the origin species. Kitty is seven and her human form looks 9.
- She speaks Standard German, Ruhrspeak (an amalgam language, made up of German, Polish, Turkish, Russian and a few other languages), a little English, Sperethiel and Japanese.
- Better senses: Sees better in twilight, hears ultrasound, perfect balance. In cat form, she has all the advantages (and disadvantages) of a cat.
- Kitty can shift from a little kitten into a human child and back. She'll lose her clothes on the way. As a shapeshifter, she is a dual natured being. That means that she continuously exists on the physical and the astral plane at once - think of her as half-spirit if you will. The downside of this is that all physical and spiritual barriers will be the same level of barrier to her and as she can't turn it off she'll always register as spiritually active. The advantage is that she always perceives astrally (= can see spirits and such) and takes no malus for it.
- She has an aura reading type of ability, allowing her to perceive information about someone or something's health (and also things like what they were poisoned with), species, magic level and type, implants and other modifications to the body, emotional state, aura (a personal spiritual signifier that doesn't change).
- Speaking of magic, she's a quite adept shaman for her age. Being what she is she doesn't see any merit in dabbling with spirits - her guardian spirit is more than enough of those guys, thank you - but she has poked at the other fields of magic (witchcraft and wizardry). That means that she can both handle free magic and magic bound to items. The spells that she can currently cast are advanced invisibility, mask (an illusion that changes the appearance of her body to all senses and technical applications; primarily used to hide her cat eyes), acid wave, mana flash, immaterial punch, levitation, creation of darkness fields and physical/mana barriers (mana barriers prevent everything non-physical like spirits, ghosts, disembodied mages etc from passing through). She can also create foci, items that support a magic user's magical abilities, homunculi, and watchers.
- Fighting on the astral plane: In addition to being able to use both her bodies without any additional gear she might have in the real world (aka not particularly effective), she can also use her magic (as far as it affects mana) to fight astrally.
- Allergic to silver.
[Due to her being a game transplant from a reverse memloss/AU game, most of her abilities are still there, but may malfunction. In return she gained
- a Changeling Mask, so she effortlessly looks like a regular child/kitten to almost everyone (unstable if she used the spell mask recently)
- a low level of the merit Mantle (Summer), which denotes court affiliation towards other Changelings, making the air around her a bit warmer (unstable if she recently used globe of darkness)
- the ability to open portals into the Hedge and navigate inside it* (unstable if she recently accessed and navigated the astral sphere)
She has an instinctive but inexperienced and more or less accidental grasp on the following abilities:
- the ability to harvest people's feelings and use them as energy that she can then work with (unstable if she recently tried to gather or use reagents)
- lucid dreaming and all abilities affiliated with it. She can invade and alter her own and other people's dreams and even have a fight inside them* (unstable if she recently fought on the astral plane or created a focus)
[*Lilofee has three dots in the contract Dream]
Unrelated to Changeling antics, she also became Stigmatic, capable of seeing parts of reality most people cannot see and gaining a faint scent of industrial, and, when she's stressed, toxic, waste.]
INVENTORY:
- Contact lenses (give her dark brown human eyes; contains: smartlink; infrared vision; video link) (+ one pairs of replacement lenses); earbuds (contains: audio link; selective noise filter); subvocal microphone; commlink with simsense function
- Colt America L36, ammunition, hidden holster; Defiance EX-Shocker (taser: 4 darts on strings + close range function); 2 Battle knifes
- Dirty dark grey coat (+9 armour) and street clothes, perfect for melting into the night; a colourful hat with a HK on it; geckotape gloves and boot covers; regular gloves and boots; breath mask
- 3 foci, 200 dram in form of pretty pebbles made into a necklace, a little bag of Deepweed
- her commlink contains, always in pictorial/spoken form: focus formulae and notes about lie detection and mind control, a couple of Urban Brawl recordings, a few games
- a locket with fae glitter in it
- cheap children's backpack (Frozen)
- a handful of candy, a few dollars
- guardian spirit: Cat (invisible to anyone but her; makes her want to play with prey as long as she hasn't gotten hurt herself)
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? I've been thinking a lot about this lately, but Laughs and Kitty are in most ways polar opposites, even if at first glance they seem to have a lot in common (having been born as animals and being able to shift into humans, mostly).
M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION:
Fool: Beginnings, Innocence, Openness, Inconsequence, Folly, Recklessness, Inexperience, Immaturity, Spontaneity, Adventure, Happiness are the keywords that apply to Kitty. She's only beginning to explore the world and very fundamentally still a child and thus immature in how she approaches everything. Tying into that, she often doesn't have the worldliness and experience to make proper estimates about how those things will go. That makes her open to new things and lets her go on adventures/turns things into adventures, but it also makes her reckless. Much of what she does is spontaneous and can thus be a bit foolish, and she's a pretty happy person.
Sun: Optimism, Expansion, Positive feelings, Vitality, Innocence, Energy, Personal power, Happiness, Joy and Enthusiasm are the keywords that apply to Kitty. She's young and new to the world and excited about seeing everything (except for the parts that are boring/require patience, books can stay home). Her emotional landscape never stays sullen for long, and even if something scared her enough to freak her out she'll not dwell on that for too long. She can laze around, but more often than that she'll have too much energy for her own good and just run around to poke at everything. Lastly, personal power - I mentioned that she is powerful enough to be a minor predator in her surroundings, and as that is what founds her independence, it is an important part of who she is to her.
Devil works for her not so much because the single words describe her well, but because of how self-centered they are and how little thoughtful compassion and compassionate thoughtfulness they imply. Kitty isn't wilfully self-centered and lacking the latter two, but she's young and hasn't had proper reason nor opportunity to develop into someone generally caring, compassionate and thoughtful yet. To look at specific words, ignorance, passion, instincts and temptation would fit with her, because self-control is another item that she isn't very good at. This makes her easily respond to instincts, temptations or passions. Often, she's ignorant of consequences or details about the situation because she's just young and inexperienced.
VETO: Moon, as I already have a character who's on her team.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: Here, and for actual, albeit too short, actionspam here. Also Kitty as she will enter the game.
PROSE SAMPLE: Here.
NAME: Kira
AGE: 29
PLAYER JOURNAL:
narvaTIMEZONE: CET
CONTACT: discord: Narva#9949 ; plurk: narwa
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Bob Laughs-At-The-Storm
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Kitty (the name on her "legal stuff" fake ID is Ebru Özdemir, and she uses that name fairly frequently)
CANON: Shadowrun
POINT IN CANON: 2078
AGE: 7, looks 9
APPEARANCE:
In her human form she looks like a regular girl for the most part: 1.30 cm tall, black middle-length hair, fairly dark skin and an average kid's build. Her eyes don't quite match, though, because they're clearly yellow cat eyes, and her ears are slightly pointy and covered in a coat of short black hair on their back. In her cat form, she is a regular (if unusually large) black kitten, past the super fluffy stage but still very much a kitten and still has the same yellow-ish eyes.
She typically tries to appear like a regular metahuman child due to safety concerns, using contacts or magic to hide her eyes.
CANON HISTORY:
While not exactly the future of our world - the timelines parted a bit before the dissolution of the Soviet Union - the world of Shadowrun still in many ways is ours, just with a reawakened magic and the technology of 60 years into the future. And the pollution of 60 more years of only barely regulated environmental irresponsibility, can't forget that. I'll try to just name some highlights in each area.
The internet is wireless, you can enter it on a way more physical seeming level than today. Advanced technology makes it hard to avoid it; augmented reality (AR) is widespread, pretties up almost every business's reality and makes you be bombarded with AR ads instead of billboards or neon signs when walking around a shopping district. You can use the internet by leaving your body behind and stepping into the virtual reality. People rarely drive their cars themselves anymore, vast advancements in medicine and technology have enabled a widespread use of implants and other technical enhancements to human bodies and advanced technology, guns typically come with network abilities... and so on. Oh, and most recently there are artificial intelligences that are fighting for their civil rights. Or stealing bodies and committing terrorist acts, that depends on your viewpoint.
And there's magic! Dragons and other magical animals, metahuman magic users, magic storms, astral planes, and yes, ...metahumans. While classic humans still exist, a number of them have been born or changed into dwarves, elves, trolls and orcs (and their subspecies) as the levels of magic in the world rose. Magic is everywhere, and it is not always nice - indeed, it can be pretty nasty. Magic critters can be quite dangerous, and in especially polluted areas they sometimes are more toxic than their surroundings. Viruses have created ghouls and vampires. All in all, most magical creatures in lore exist in the world of Shadowrun in one way or the other.
A highlight of pollution is certainly the SOX, an area in central Europe so radioactively polluted that it can only be entered in protective suits, filled with storms that negate all magic and thus kill spirits and dual beings. But other natural disasters are around too - water smuggling is a major issue in the countries of California and Australia because of the water shortage there. And magical calamities have joined the natural ones.
Nation states have lost most of their power where they still exist, with very few exceptions. Corporations have taken their place as the main power players; the biggest of them having their own extraterritorial areas all over the world and their own citizens. Organized crime is huge as well, and corruption and general shadiness is so widespread in all three, countries, corporations and crime syndicates, that they often are less different than they try to pretend. Society can be roughly split in two groups: Upper and middle class people living in more or less highly controlled and pleasant environments with citizenship status and lower class people who are poor, often without a real ID and without any structural protection, who at least don't have their every move tracked and controlled. To make it a little less abstract: A poor person will only eat food made of soy and enriched with artificial flavours while a middle class person will sometimes have real foods and a rich person will have only that and real meat, too. ID-less people, especially when they are orcs, will often be killed in droves in "police raids" (there are almost no real police systems anymore, the standard is private for-profit security firms now) without anyone caring or a good reason, while a higher up person might just discreetly vanish, but it would actually in some way be about them. There is minor movement between the groups - talents that are snatched off the streets or people who work their way into the corrupt systems, and people who for one reason or the other leave the perfect world to work in the shady underbelly of society. Chantalle, Kitty's owner, is one of the poor people who have a state ID - a kind of ID that doesn't award real privileges as corporation IDs do, but at least she officially exists, which brings its own set of advantages, and has enough money to afford her own flat in a fairly safe section of the worse parts of the sprawl. Shadowrunners like the ones that Kitty met are in-betweens; they come from both sides of society and end up as highly skilled independent criminals for hire for various reasons. To use examples from her team: For the troll street samurai, it was a steep climb up the social ladder from a poor slum kid, for the elven mage it was a heavy fall from a high society member in his homeland to a fugitive in a different country selling his abilities. tl;dr: It's dystopian, but at least dead people aren't turned into soylent green. If they lie wounded on the street, they might however be disassembled for all their parts that can be sold with profit.
Now to talk about Kitty herself. She was born as the biggest kitten in the litter of a stray cat somewhere in the Rhine-Ruhr Megaplex, a huge, polluted, multicultural sprawl in the very west of the Alliance of German Countries, for short ADL. The mommy cat didn't return one day, and this might have been the early end of the baby shapeshifter, had a little old lady by the name of Chantalle Schulz not found the hidden corner that Kitty had been born in and rescued the only surviving baby cat. The strangely large size of the kitten didn't tip Chantalle off about something being off with this cat, nor did the fact that she aged very slowly - and really, considering the neighbourhood, it could always just have been that the mommy cat had eaten some science lab's incorrectly disposed waste, hindering proper growth in her litter. It wasn't that strange, and the woman was just glad that her new companion didn't require much food - or medical attention, really, never getting sick. And what a bright and understanding little kitten it was. No, Chantalle was way too happy and uninterested in questioning her luck to make enquiries. She was also not particularly inventive when naming her kitten.
Kitty on the other hand was quite happy the way it was as a young kitten. She did sometimes turn into a human, but always quickly turned back, so that Chantalle never noticed. And then, when she was old enough to comprehend the trideo news flickering on after the shows that Chantalle had fallen asleep to, she started learning about the world outside the apartment. One night, there was a documentary on magical critter extinction measures in Quebec, and shapeshifters were mentioned, too. For a long time after she thought that being hunted down and killed was what happened to animals like her, bigger than they should be and able to turn into metahumans, everywhere. And when she learned that most countries and companies just didn't consider them metahuman but also didn't hunt them, and that there were even a few countries where they were valued more, it felt way too late to tell Chantalle about what she really was. So she just pretended that it wasn't there when the old woman was around, and started experimenting with her human form elsewhere. For this, she started to sneak out of the apartment more and more regularly and through trial and error learned how to appear metahuman and interact with people like she was one.
Chantalle's apartment was located next to a waste facility run by the Shiawase corporation. One day, a curious new scent came from over there, so one young shapeshifter cat decided that sneaking in there was an excellent idea to figure it out. All went well until she suddenly found herself without a place to hide and two security trolls came towards where she was - and she did the next best thing and jumped into the back of an open transporter (not a waste one. It was very clean inside). The security trolls closed the doors and walked away. She was stuck in a dark, mostly empty space with no food and slowly decreasing amounts of oxygen.
Nothing happened for well over a day - she can't tell how long it was, exactly, but it felt like eternity - and she was too afraid of what they might do with her to start meowing for help. But then something did happen: Someone opened the door, and she only in time managed to jump into a hiding spot before yelling and fighting erupted outside, and just as the transporter started moving two street samurai, a human woman with a balance tail and a male troll, jumped into the back of the vehicle. As it sped out of the facility, gunshots erupted.
They made some headway before people started following them, and while there was a moment of peace, the troll noticed Kitty. And recognized her as the cat that a little old lady had asked him to look out for earlier that day when he had been in disguise to find an observation point of the waste facility a few stories above Chantalle's flat. There was no more time than for a few nice words and an attempt to calm her down from a distance, but when the shadowrunners (because that was what they were, Kitty would later learn) got into trouble, and the trouble threatened to take out the whole transporter, including Kitty, the shock and fear made her magic abilities surface - she switched into her human form and sent an acidic wave towards the helicopter that was about to shoot big grenades at them.
The mix of surprise and the actual damage that her (rather weak because unlearned) attack caused got the group the time that they needed to turn the tides of the battle, and they managed to escape without casualties.
Once escaped, introductions were made, and the runner team after some hasty discussions offered her a deal: She would help them in future runs, and in return they would get her ready to participate in metahuman society - get her the skills and the more materialistic means like a commlink and a fake ID - and also teach her how to make better use of her magic and her agility. It was a good deal for both sides. Kitty got what she needed at that time, and the runners got a team member that only wanted a small part of the monetary rewards for runs but due to her skills in infiltration and magic was quite valuable. Two members of the team became especially valuable to her: Ivokat, the mage, taught her how to use her magic and helped her find resources where what he had and could do stopped working for her. And Malicia, the street samurai with the balance tail, took her along for runs away from the other team members sometimes and taught her how to work alone. Not that the other team members were unimportant: Leo, the rigger, who taught her some Japanese and got her a miniscooter to drive around on; Eärendil, the decker, who introduced her to the world of those of the upper and even higher classes; and Simon, the troll, who showed her how to blend in in parts of the town worse than the one she had been raised in. With the team having three Elves, two of which had ties with Tír na nÓg, an Elvish country, it happened almost naturally that she also learned some Sperethiel, the Elven language.
She still lives with Chantalle; the woman was overjoyed to have her kitten back. But she has now become a free roaming cat, and after some panic the woman understood that her cat would always return to her, even if sometimes she stayed away for a few days.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Most things are a game to Kitty. She wasn't raised with duties and responsibilities, having been perceived as nothing but a cat for the longest time, and her nature didn't exactly support a sense for either forming. That doesn't necessary make her unreliable, but it takes a conscious effort of will for her to take things seriously enough to do them the fast and practical instead of the fun way. She can technically stab a person to death quickly and effectively before being noticed, but it is a lot more fun to not kill them immediately and make them jump around instead, isn't it? The matter can be as simple of complicated, as important or unimportant, as dangerous or safe as they may be, Kitty will only treat them seriously if she's either upset, disturbed, hurt or angry herself or if she is trying hard to not make it a game.
The one major exception to this rule are interpersonal relationships that mean something to her. She might still tease such people and play with things that belong to these people, but she will take the relationships themselves very seriously. That is why she can be dependable: Wanting a person she cares about to be safe and well is her main motivation for going through with something efficiently and for persevering in the face of frustration or boredom with a task. It even surpasses her own survival as a motivator, mostly because she does not worry for her own safety very much, subconsciously considering herself invincible in the way that children do sometimes. Consciously, she can make rather accurate estimates of the dangers in a situation and act on them, but when she doesn't have to or take the time to consider things thoroughly, all that goes out of the window. The other thing that can throw those accurate estimates off is when her phobia of rooms that are too dark for her to see and which have no available exit is triggered, which was acquired when she thought she would die in that transporter. Her functionality is severely limited under such circumstances, and it takes her much willpower to think about anything that is not flight.
It won't be very apparent most of the time that she cares about someone or is loyal to them, though, as she only really shows it clearly in a pinch. As a pinch constitute situations in which the other is in danger or seriously injured or sick as well as very sad, and comparable situations. She will try to do what she can to help, and if there is nothing, she will just try to stay close and provide comfort that way.
Another reason why she might get all close and cuddly is when she is feeling upset herself, is injured or otherwise isn't well. Or if she's just needy and wants attention. This kind of proximity is a lot easier to get than the other kind - while she won't go to a stranger with it, it only requires a very basic level of trust in the other person.
Let's return to the fact that she needs strong motivators to overcome frustration or boredom and still do something despite them. Normally, when the well-being of someone that she cares about isn't at risk, she will only do things that seem interesting to her and usually abandon a task when it stops being interesting to her - runs fall under the well-being of people that she cares about being endangered. Generally, she is full of energy, but she can also be supremely lazy and just lie or sit around for hours if she's content. Likewise, when something goes wrong or something awkward happened, she will abandon it and just pretend that it never happened. If confronted about it, she won't deny it, but outside of that it will be nothing to her.
Something else that is, while not nothing, a lot less troublesome to her than for most people is killing someone or inflicting harm on them. This is not due to trauma, as she grew up in a household where she was not treated as a human, yet still beloved and treasured. But most of her knowledge about the metahuman world comes from watching movies and from interacting with people who are more or less deeply stuck in the ugly, corrupt underbelly of metahuman society and life. She can feel compassion, she just tends not to. To a big part, this approach ties back into considering things a game, and it changes with people whom she doesn't consider a game. For them, she can feel very strong compassion. One could perhaps say that she isn't so much a psychopath as someone who hasn't quite learned to apply her theory of mind to people whom she isn't close enough to to have witnessed their personhood first hand. This incomplete ToM coincidences with surroundings where violence and other ugly things are fairly normalized and in which she is capable of being a (minor) predator, so that no external forces really keep her in check, either.
While Kitty was born as a cat and raised as such, she has never really been around other cats so that she isn't used to dealing with them, and all the people she cares about are metahumans - metahuman adults, more specifically, none of whom really occupy the spot of a parent or legal guardian. Chantalle loves her, cherishes her and made sure that she had food and shelter, but well, she's nothing but a cat to her, and Kitty in turn cares a lot about her, but their relationshp is built on Kitty being nothing more than Chantalle's cat, and while Kitty would sometimes like to change that, she also doesn't want to change things between them because it would mean losing the sense of home and normalcy that that is. Ivokat, Malicia and Leo are (were) in some form of mentor positions, but that was always focused on getting her fit for the job. She is (was) closer with most of the people on her team than them being colleagues would require, but she loathes others exerting more authority over her than strictly necessary, so she would do her best to block all attempts at someone trying to parent her.
In a lot of ways, she never really was a metahuman child - she entered the metahuman world as someone who looks like a child and can use that to her advantage, but it also kind of ended her childhood. She approaches many things as a child would, but the tasks that she performs and the skills that she acquired are an adult's. She is more independent than a child would be, but at the same time also very dependent because she wouldn't be taken seriously or exploited without someone to act as her adult and go-in-between for interactions with business relations and others. All that means that she's used to occupying a precarious middle spot that shouldn't really exist and has learned to act as if she was a normal metahuman child as a survival mechanism. She's never really had someone her equal around - Eärendil, the team's decker, is probably the closest that she's ever had to a peer due to them acting like siblings around one another a lot and being the closest in age mentally and in behaviour, but he's still older and of another species. But she isn't particularly bothered by her situation. It's all she knows, and really, she feels that it is preferable to a lot of situations of other children that she's seen.
POINT OF DEPARTURE:
One day, Kitty stepped through a door and suddenly she wasn't with her team anymore, she was in a ...different place. A city surrounded by high walls beyond which there was nothing, with clockwork-like machinery in the least plausible of places. A city that was very little like the place that she was from. Yes, magic existed in both places, but that was pretty much the end of the similarities.
(
cityofhex is a reverse-memloss/AU jamjar DWRP game based on NWoD, which is an urban fantasy type of setting set roughly in present day where most regular people do not know that the supernatural exists. Hex has the addition of nobody in the city knowing/realizing that there is nothing outside of the walls and never having been outside of the walls. Characters entering Hex will slowly decay: They become a creature from that world as their memories, abilities, appearance etc are in ten stages exchanged for (that of) someone who has always lived in Hex. Kitty is on level 8 of the decaying process.Kitty is turning into a girl called Lilofee Schulz, who is a Changeling. At this point that means that her memories have started to get fuzzy around the edges and that she has acquired a Mask that gives her a completely human/cat-like appearance depending on which body she is in. But, visible to those who can see through Masks, her human body has acquired short, light black furry fluff everywhere, pointy ears and hands that are starting to look a little bit like paws. In cat form, her paws are starting to look human-like, with a bit of an opposable-thumb- fingery shape to them, her weight is shifting a bit so that she can manage to walk upright if she was so inclined, and her ears have shifted a bit down the side of her head and become more solid and thick around the edges and more upwards-pointing. He cat form also has gills on the sides of her body. Mentally, this change means that she's starting to get more and more unsure about what truth and reality are and how much she can trust her own memories. Her abilities are also shifting, though at this point this mostly means that they'll malfunction at times and sometimes be wonky even if they work.
It took her a while to figure out Hex and settle in, but at this point she mostly has. She's living on the edges of society, squatting in an abandoned building in a worse part of town for the winter together with a boy called Tobias who is a Beast and living of pick-pocketing and hitting up foodbanks, and sometimes mooching off another boy called Ryoji who is a Sin-Eater. She's also poking around Hex a lot, both out of curiosity and to perhaps find a way back home. After it was confirmed to her that the underworld wouldn't offer a way out, she's currently set her eyes completely on the Hedge, the territory between the mundane world and the world of the Fae, hoping to perhaps find an exit somewhere that leads to her home world, because she misses her friends(/teammates) there, and she prefers living in a world where she can work at what she is good at. Being in the Hedge so much has made her decay a level, and then she died, which knocked her down another level. It wasn't pleasant. Yes, she was returned in time to a while before she died and managed to avoid the circumstances the second time around, but having died most certainly freaked her out. She's doing her best to not think about it and pretend that it was just a dream, but deep down she knows that it wasn't. Luckily (?) she has something else to worry about enough to shove everything else aside, and that is the decaying - her body changing on her and her memories and knowledge about herself and her history becoming fuzzy around the edges and wonky under closer scrutiny. It's like when you retell a story about a party and upon thinking more about it realize that you aren't actually sure that you really made out with Becky and didn't just dream about it.
In Hex, she's mainly made four friends. Two of them she's primarily a human child with, and both of them know that she's a shapeshifter.
Tobias she cares about the most and trusts the most because their situation is the most similar and because she feels like she has the best grasp on how he works. He's also the person that she lives with, so he's both the older person that she'll use as her "adult" and the person who provides stability and safety, so aside from practical considerations to trying to keep him safe there are also emotional ones. Ryoji is at this point mostly a practical person to mooch off of, and she's only beginning to care about him.
Nitou, a Changeling, on the other hand only knew her as a cat at first and after Tobias is the second person that she'll go to when scared, and the person that she'll go to about issues with the Hedge and ask for assistance when she needs back-up-muscle. He's also very nice for napping on. A fourth friend, this one entirely on a childlike playmate level, is a plant kitten that she met in the Hedge and visits regularly. Weird kittens have to
ABILITIES:
- Cannot read and write (functionally illiterate) and generally will have a hard time grasping academic knowledge or fine arts related things. She has a lot of street smarts, though, and possesses a good deal of knowledge gathered through listening to gossip, observation of places and people and consuming popular media. (Her housekeeping abilities are zero, too. Nobody asks their cat to do the dishes.)
- Stealth. She can use magic to make herself invisible, but even in her human form she's very quiet and moves fluidly and without more movements than necessary, and wears clothes that help her with not being seen. She also has solid experience with sneaking into well guarded places. In addition, she knows how to navigate most social situations in a way that will allow her to not draw attention to herself, and can always fall back on her cat form.
- Fighting. She can use pistols, handle daggers and has basic Krav Maga training. Generally her fighting abilities are tailored to allow her to either stealthily take out one single person or get out of situations of violence quickly. She's a scout and infiltrator, foremost, and when her abilities are needed in an actual fight it will be her magical abilities, not the physical ones.
- Regeneration. All shapeshifters have an enhanced regeneration- it is so good that she would grow back lost limbs if necessary and that any implant below deltaware (the highest, most expensive, least accessible quality of implants) wouldn't stay in her body. Her healing rate is also vastly above average. It's still possible for her to die, though.
- This is not so much an ability as that it needs to go somewhere - ageing in shapeshifters is a /leshrug thing. While there was once the assumption that they simply aged doubly as fast as regular humans, research has shown a vast variety of ageing speeds and processes among shapeshifters that isn't even clearly based in the origin species. Kitty is seven and her human form looks 9.
- She speaks Standard German, Ruhrspeak (an amalgam language, made up of German, Polish, Turkish, Russian and a few other languages), a little English, Sperethiel and Japanese.
- Better senses: Sees better in twilight, hears ultrasound, perfect balance. In cat form, she has all the advantages (and disadvantages) of a cat.
- Kitty can shift from a little kitten into a human child and back. She'll lose her clothes on the way. As a shapeshifter, she is a dual natured being. That means that she continuously exists on the physical and the astral plane at once - think of her as half-spirit if you will. The downside of this is that all physical and spiritual barriers will be the same level of barrier to her and as she can't turn it off she'll always register as spiritually active. The advantage is that she always perceives astrally (= can see spirits and such) and takes no malus for it.
- She has an aura reading type of ability, allowing her to perceive information about someone or something's health (and also things like what they were poisoned with), species, magic level and type, implants and other modifications to the body, emotional state, aura (a personal spiritual signifier that doesn't change).
- Speaking of magic, she's a quite adept shaman for her age. Being what she is she doesn't see any merit in dabbling with spirits - her guardian spirit is more than enough of those guys, thank you - but she has poked at the other fields of magic (witchcraft and wizardry). That means that she can both handle free magic and magic bound to items. The spells that she can currently cast are advanced invisibility, mask (an illusion that changes the appearance of her body to all senses and technical applications; primarily used to hide her cat eyes), acid wave, mana flash, immaterial punch, levitation, creation of darkness fields and physical/mana barriers (mana barriers prevent everything non-physical like spirits, ghosts, disembodied mages etc from passing through). She can also create foci, items that support a magic user's magical abilities, homunculi, and watchers.
- Fighting on the astral plane: In addition to being able to use both her bodies without any additional gear she might have in the real world (aka not particularly effective), she can also use her magic (as far as it affects mana) to fight astrally.
- Allergic to silver.
[Due to her being a game transplant from a reverse memloss/AU game, most of her abilities are still there, but may malfunction. In return she gained
- a Changeling Mask, so she effortlessly looks like a regular child/kitten to almost everyone (unstable if she used the spell mask recently)
- a low level of the merit Mantle (Summer), which denotes court affiliation towards other Changelings, making the air around her a bit warmer (unstable if she recently used globe of darkness)
- the ability to open portals into the Hedge and navigate inside it* (unstable if she recently accessed and navigated the astral sphere)
She has an instinctive but inexperienced and more or less accidental grasp on the following abilities:
- the ability to harvest people's feelings and use them as energy that she can then work with (unstable if she recently tried to gather or use reagents)
- lucid dreaming and all abilities affiliated with it. She can invade and alter her own and other people's dreams and even have a fight inside them* (unstable if she recently fought on the astral plane or created a focus)
[*Lilofee has three dots in the contract Dream]
Unrelated to Changeling antics, she also became Stigmatic, capable of seeing parts of reality most people cannot see and gaining a faint scent of industrial, and, when she's stressed, toxic, waste.]
INVENTORY:
- Contact lenses (give her dark brown human eyes; contains: smartlink; infrared vision; video link) (+ one pairs of replacement lenses); earbuds (contains: audio link; selective noise filter); subvocal microphone; commlink with simsense function
- Colt America L36, ammunition, hidden holster; Defiance EX-Shocker (taser: 4 darts on strings + close range function); 2 Battle knifes
- Dirty dark grey coat (+9 armour) and street clothes, perfect for melting into the night; a colourful hat with a HK on it; geckotape gloves and boot covers; regular gloves and boots; breath mask
- 3 foci, 200 dram in form of pretty pebbles made into a necklace, a little bag of Deepweed
- her commlink contains, always in pictorial/spoken form: focus formulae and notes about lie detection and mind control, a couple of Urban Brawl recordings, a few games
- a locket with fae glitter in it
- cheap children's backpack (Frozen)
- a handful of candy, a few dollars
- guardian spirit: Cat (invisible to anyone but her; makes her want to play with prey as long as she hasn't gotten hurt herself)
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? I've been thinking a lot about this lately, but Laughs and Kitty are in most ways polar opposites, even if at first glance they seem to have a lot in common (having been born as animals and being able to shift into humans, mostly).
M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION:
Fool: Beginnings, Innocence, Openness, Inconsequence, Folly, Recklessness, Inexperience, Immaturity, Spontaneity, Adventure, Happiness are the keywords that apply to Kitty. She's only beginning to explore the world and very fundamentally still a child and thus immature in how she approaches everything. Tying into that, she often doesn't have the worldliness and experience to make proper estimates about how those things will go. That makes her open to new things and lets her go on adventures/turns things into adventures, but it also makes her reckless. Much of what she does is spontaneous and can thus be a bit foolish, and she's a pretty happy person.
Sun: Optimism, Expansion, Positive feelings, Vitality, Innocence, Energy, Personal power, Happiness, Joy and Enthusiasm are the keywords that apply to Kitty. She's young and new to the world and excited about seeing everything (except for the parts that are boring/require patience, books can stay home). Her emotional landscape never stays sullen for long, and even if something scared her enough to freak her out she'll not dwell on that for too long. She can laze around, but more often than that she'll have too much energy for her own good and just run around to poke at everything. Lastly, personal power - I mentioned that she is powerful enough to be a minor predator in her surroundings, and as that is what founds her independence, it is an important part of who she is to her.
Devil works for her not so much because the single words describe her well, but because of how self-centered they are and how little thoughtful compassion and compassionate thoughtfulness they imply. Kitty isn't wilfully self-centered and lacking the latter two, but she's young and hasn't had proper reason nor opportunity to develop into someone generally caring, compassionate and thoughtful yet. To look at specific words, ignorance, passion, instincts and temptation would fit with her, because self-control is another item that she isn't very good at. This makes her easily respond to instincts, temptations or passions. Often, she's ignorant of consequences or details about the situation because she's just young and inexperienced.
VETO: Moon, as I already have a character who's on her team.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: Here, and for actual, albeit too short, actionspam here. Also Kitty as she will enter the game.
PROSE SAMPLE: Here.
Lilofee Schulz
Lilofee's father is unknown and her mother was much too young when she had her and couldn't take care of her. Thus the child grew up with her grandmother, and it was that woman, Chantalle Schulz, who also named her. Chantalle's thought was that the girl should feel like a princess, so she scoured her people's folklore for princess names and came out really liking Lilofee.
Too bad she never paid attention to what happened to the princess Lilofee (she got abducted by the water spirit living in the lake under the castle - first he marries her, then when she leaves he blackmails her into returning). Narratives are important. Now, shortly before the granddaughter's fifth birthday, the girl met a woman in a lake who was the envoy of a True Fae, and she spent the next four years in an underwater realm as a cute pet cat (the Fae eventually figured out that she needed gills, too), treated very well when there was interest in her and locked away in a small, dark crate when not.
Eventually, she escaped together with a few others, and together with another escapee from the same place returned home... only to find that back in Hex, 11 years had passed instead of four. The fetch that had been left in her place was sixteen now, so there was no chance of swapping back.
At this point, Lilofee is still trying to find her footing in a world that has become foreign for her. She goes by Kitty as she understandably dislikes her birth name, lives with a Beast called Tobias more or less on the streets, and otherwise tries to get by through soup kitchens and pick-pocketing. She joined the Summer Court mostly because the woman whom she escaped with, an Elemental called Malicia, joined it and she liked their direct approach and thought they were cool.
Her grasp on reality is tenuous at times; her Durance wasn't as long as some, but started very early on in her life, and alone she most likely wouldn't have made it back through the Hedge.
Lilofee's Mask looks exactly like original!Kitty with contacts in and normal ears, but under that she looks like a cat-human hybrid, with a tail, her hands, feet, legs and head shaped like a mix between the two, gills at her neck and ribcage and eyes as cat-like as original!Kitty's.
Contracts:
Dream 3
Eternal Summer 2 (create heat, shine light)
Fleeting Summer 2 (sense wrath, redirect wrath)
Fang and Talon 1: cats (communicate with cats)
Alternate timeline
But then, one day, she is poking around an interesting place in what is totally her territory and a security mage spots her. Bad news. She's knocked out by the mage and when she wakes again, they're about to stuff her into a tank full of green goo. She tries to get away, but it doesn't work, and after being hit with a tranq patch she slides off into unconsciouseness... and finds herself as a RPG persona modelled after herself. She can influence her actions to a degree, but keeps running into game-imposed barriers.
And then she blanks. And wakes up again tired and confused in the front of a lorry between two people, one of whom she knew from the RPG world.
Over time, it turns out that she's suffering from CFD: Cognitive Fragmentation Disorder. While she was in the tank, she was infected with nanites that carry two personalities which both try to take over her body now: The RPG persona that she was stuck in, and a middle-aged male doctor from the same RPG. Her luck is that due to how they were created, they have basic knowledge of how to deal with a body, so they at least don't completely work it into the ground while they take over...
At her side, there are an elven decker from London, Eärendil (Leo), and a human street samurai from Berlin, Malicia (Elsa), who primarily have a relationship with the dominant invasive persona of the Doc.