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saveourearth
OOC INFORMATION
Name: Kira
Are you over 15? Yes
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
narwa
Current characters in the game: N/A
IC INFORMATION
PREINCARNATION
Name: Kitty
Canon: Shadowrung (5th edition)
Age: Looks nine, actually about seven
Species: Cat shapeshifter (a cat who can shapeshift into a human form)
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.
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.
REINCARNATION
Name: Lilo "Kitty" Singh
Age: 9
Appearance: She looks like her preincarnation's human form, just that her eyes are naturally dark brown and her ears are perfectly regular ears, too.
History:
Lilo was born in Mossgate as the long hoped-for first child of older parents. She grew up loved on and pampered, though only by her parents and one set of grandparents - her father was an immigrant of the second generation and her mother of the first, so she only met her maternal parents once (and was too young to remember them now), and her father had no surviving siblings himself. But everything was fine - until, when she was four, her parents died in a car crash while she was with her grandmother. Her grandfather didn't survive the death of his beloved son for long, and her grandmother's health abruptly declined at all those losses, too much for her to continue to live in her house or care for the orphaned child.
Instead, Lilo was entered into the foster system and put up for adoption. They always tried to keep her in Mossgate Council, close to her one living relative, but that regional consistency aside, she's been around a lot since.
The first family that fostered her meant to adopt her, but just as the paperwork was coming together, the mother of the family found out that her pregnancy was with a special needs child, and they decided that they would not be able to give enough attention to both children, so Kitty went on to the next family. That family was simply a foster family, and all seemed well - things came to a head and the parents went through a nasty divorce. The next foster family moved abroad because of a parent's job, and the one after that had one parent's mental health issues suddenly worsen.
In the five years since she's been in the system, she's been through four foster families and is currently on the fifth one, which has three foster children plus one biological one, stretching the parents thin.
That has had four main results:
Firstly, her truancy is through the roof. She skips hours, days, or weeks, "loses" teachers' notes to the parents, gets creative with her current foster situation to cover her tracks, and so forth. She's still doing well enough in school; both because she is naturally quite bright, and because she does actually go religiously if something interests her. One term she didn't miss a single day because the term project was right down her alley.
Secondly, she keeps her most important belongings that she doesn't need daily in her grandmother's tiny flat in the retirement home and visits her often. And if anywhere, she considers that place home - it never changes.
Thirdly, in a related vein, she has made herself stopping-off spots at various other places. Since she can't rely on her home remaining the same place, she's made other, stable places for herself. She for example wandered into Gytha's (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
grainneog) place one day when her son had left the door open to let some summer air in and found that the old woman would happily feed her treats and let her stay and watch TV for a while, so she keeps finding her way in there.
Lastly, her eating behaviour is a bit messed up - she won't eat when she's being watched, and eat in bouts when presented with a food she likes and a spot where she'll be unobserved (part of why she likes Gytha's place - the woman will spend enough time on Facebook while she's visiting to let her comfortably eat as many cookies as she wants).
First Echo:
Kitty was born at home, in rather dim lightening. Opening her eyes out in the open for the first time, seeing things in dim light for the first time, she echoes something that the original Kitty had already had when she did the same - a cat's eyesight, specifically the ability to see clearly in very dim light conditions.
PERSONALITY
Pre-Incarnation 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 or 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.
Any differences?:
Lilo, unlike Kitty, has been raised as a child. She was given chores, she was chastised for wandering away while someone was talking to her, she had to learn to sit still and do things that she didn't want to do. Through all of this, she learned some tolerance of frustration and a certain level of patience. Where the only thing that keeps Kitty on a task is active interest or danger of death or significant harm to someone she cares about, for Lilo social necessities and the knowledge that she'll be in trouble otherwise will also do the job - staying awake during a boring class, doing the dishes according to the schedule of chores, and so on. She still won't be good at things that she just has to do, and try to get out of them, but she is much more likely to end up doing them.
Being raised as a child and not a cat also meant that those raising her put an emphasis on getting her to consider the other person's point of view and generally imbue her with social skills. In short, she's been raised to be compassionate. On top of this, Lilo has grown up in surroundings where laws are generally meant to protect everyone, where a social system tries to guarantee at least some support for everyone, and where society as a whole is based on the principle of justice and equality. Kitty's world, on the other hand, is characterized by social inequality, the right of the powerful, and the differences between criminal and "lawful" organizations/individuals being gradual at best. In short: Lilo has grown up in a functioning society that allows some idealism, Kitty hasn't. Both of these factors, being raised to be compassionate and seeing the world around her at least try to be just and kind have left her less cynical and jaded and, indeed, more compassionate.
They also have left her more innocent. Kitty knew how terrible her world was to an even higher degree than most people, living among professional criminals and seeing the darkest sides of society that they were confronted with in their line of work. Lilo might be less sheltered than most children her age, but while she's fallen through the cracks of the system more than once, she's never encountered it - or the adults in her life, at that - as cruel, abusive or fundamentally dysfunctional. At worst, they were incompetent or had their own problems. So all in all, Lilo is a much more normal child than Kitty ever was: Death would frighten her, people being treated cruelly would make her want to step in, and she would never knowingly inflict harm on someone. At the same time, she is generally more idealistic and while she doesn't think that her world is perfect, she'd say that it is full of people who try to make it good.
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 penalty 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. 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).
- 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.
ROLEPLAY SAMPLES
- 3rd person/action: Link!
- 1st person/network:
I got a boat! [There is no preamble, no explanation. She's way too excited to care that most people wouldn't know about her conversation with Maria a while ago.] Or, well, I got the keys. We have five days, that's how long the people that I got it from are out of town and won't need it. [It's not theft if she came by the keys fair and square, right? And picking them up after someone dropped them when digging for their purse is totally fair and square.
It's not like she's going to steal the boat. She's even going to return the keys to their owners once they come back into town. They should be thankful for her help.] So, who is coming? And does someone know anything about boats? [She could figure it out herself, but if the knowledge should be there, why not use it?]
...We're going to the Moss Army Fort! Phillip saw something out there, and we want to figure out what it is. And even if it's nothing, I've never been there and I bet they are cool. It'd be a shame to always have seen them in the distance and never have gotten there before they fall into the ocean, right?
Anyone who comes should bring a lot of food so we won't starve while we're out there! [And this would be the true reason for her asking the whole network for volunteers. She doesn't really have the funds to bring much herself.]
ANYTHING ELSE? If you need to clear up any lingering questions or concerns, here's the place to do it.>
Name: Kira
Are you over 15? Yes
Contact:
Current characters in the game: N/A
IC INFORMATION
PREINCARNATION
Name: Kitty
Canon: Shadowrung (5th edition)
Age: Looks nine, actually about seven
Species: Cat shapeshifter (a cat who can shapeshift into a human form)
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.
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.
REINCARNATION
Name: Lilo "Kitty" Singh
Age: 9
Appearance: She looks like her preincarnation's human form, just that her eyes are naturally dark brown and her ears are perfectly regular ears, too.
History:
Lilo was born in Mossgate as the long hoped-for first child of older parents. She grew up loved on and pampered, though only by her parents and one set of grandparents - her father was an immigrant of the second generation and her mother of the first, so she only met her maternal parents once (and was too young to remember them now), and her father had no surviving siblings himself. But everything was fine - until, when she was four, her parents died in a car crash while she was with her grandmother. Her grandfather didn't survive the death of his beloved son for long, and her grandmother's health abruptly declined at all those losses, too much for her to continue to live in her house or care for the orphaned child.
Instead, Lilo was entered into the foster system and put up for adoption. They always tried to keep her in Mossgate Council, close to her one living relative, but that regional consistency aside, she's been around a lot since.
The first family that fostered her meant to adopt her, but just as the paperwork was coming together, the mother of the family found out that her pregnancy was with a special needs child, and they decided that they would not be able to give enough attention to both children, so Kitty went on to the next family. That family was simply a foster family, and all seemed well - things came to a head and the parents went through a nasty divorce. The next foster family moved abroad because of a parent's job, and the one after that had one parent's mental health issues suddenly worsen.
In the five years since she's been in the system, she's been through four foster families and is currently on the fifth one, which has three foster children plus one biological one, stretching the parents thin.
That has had four main results:
Firstly, her truancy is through the roof. She skips hours, days, or weeks, "loses" teachers' notes to the parents, gets creative with her current foster situation to cover her tracks, and so forth. She's still doing well enough in school; both because she is naturally quite bright, and because she does actually go religiously if something interests her. One term she didn't miss a single day because the term project was right down her alley.
Secondly, she keeps her most important belongings that she doesn't need daily in her grandmother's tiny flat in the retirement home and visits her often. And if anywhere, she considers that place home - it never changes.
Thirdly, in a related vein, she has made herself stopping-off spots at various other places. Since she can't rely on her home remaining the same place, she's made other, stable places for herself. She for example wandered into Gytha's (
grainneog) place one day when her son had left the door open to let some summer air in and found that the old woman would happily feed her treats and let her stay and watch TV for a while, so she keeps finding her way in there.Lastly, her eating behaviour is a bit messed up - she won't eat when she's being watched, and eat in bouts when presented with a food she likes and a spot where she'll be unobserved (part of why she likes Gytha's place - the woman will spend enough time on Facebook while she's visiting to let her comfortably eat as many cookies as she wants).
First Echo:
Kitty was born at home, in rather dim lightening. Opening her eyes out in the open for the first time, seeing things in dim light for the first time, she echoes something that the original Kitty had already had when she did the same - a cat's eyesight, specifically the ability to see clearly in very dim light conditions.
PERSONALITY
Pre-Incarnation 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 or 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.
Any differences?:
Lilo, unlike Kitty, has been raised as a child. She was given chores, she was chastised for wandering away while someone was talking to her, she had to learn to sit still and do things that she didn't want to do. Through all of this, she learned some tolerance of frustration and a certain level of patience. Where the only thing that keeps Kitty on a task is active interest or danger of death or significant harm to someone she cares about, for Lilo social necessities and the knowledge that she'll be in trouble otherwise will also do the job - staying awake during a boring class, doing the dishes according to the schedule of chores, and so on. She still won't be good at things that she just has to do, and try to get out of them, but she is much more likely to end up doing them.
Being raised as a child and not a cat also meant that those raising her put an emphasis on getting her to consider the other person's point of view and generally imbue her with social skills. In short, she's been raised to be compassionate. On top of this, Lilo has grown up in surroundings where laws are generally meant to protect everyone, where a social system tries to guarantee at least some support for everyone, and where society as a whole is based on the principle of justice and equality. Kitty's world, on the other hand, is characterized by social inequality, the right of the powerful, and the differences between criminal and "lawful" organizations/individuals being gradual at best. In short: Lilo has grown up in a functioning society that allows some idealism, Kitty hasn't. Both of these factors, being raised to be compassionate and seeing the world around her at least try to be just and kind have left her less cynical and jaded and, indeed, more compassionate.
They also have left her more innocent. Kitty knew how terrible her world was to an even higher degree than most people, living among professional criminals and seeing the darkest sides of society that they were confronted with in their line of work. Lilo might be less sheltered than most children her age, but while she's fallen through the cracks of the system more than once, she's never encountered it - or the adults in her life, at that - as cruel, abusive or fundamentally dysfunctional. At worst, they were incompetent or had their own problems. So all in all, Lilo is a much more normal child than Kitty ever was: Death would frighten her, people being treated cruelly would make her want to step in, and she would never knowingly inflict harm on someone. At the same time, she is generally more idealistic and while she doesn't think that her world is perfect, she'd say that it is full of people who try to make it good.
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 penalty 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. 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).
- 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.
ROLEPLAY SAMPLES
- 3rd person/action: Link!
- 1st person/network:
I got a boat! [There is no preamble, no explanation. She's way too excited to care that most people wouldn't know about her conversation with Maria a while ago.] Or, well, I got the keys. We have five days, that's how long the people that I got it from are out of town and won't need it. [It's not theft if she came by the keys fair and square, right? And picking them up after someone dropped them when digging for their purse is totally fair and square.
It's not like she's going to steal the boat. She's even going to return the keys to their owners once they come back into town. They should be thankful for her help.] So, who is coming? And does someone know anything about boats? [She could figure it out herself, but if the knowledge should be there, why not use it?]
...We're going to the Moss Army Fort! Phillip saw something out there, and we want to figure out what it is. And even if it's nothing, I've never been there and I bet they are cool. It'd be a shame to always have seen them in the distance and never have gotten there before they fall into the ocean, right?
Anyone who comes should bring a lot of food so we won't starve while we're out there! [And this would be the true reason for her asking the whole network for volunteers. She doesn't really have the funds to bring much herself.]
ANYTHING ELSE? If you need to clear up any lingering questions or concerns, here's the place to do it.>