Difference between revisions of "Bunny Hop"
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Revision as of 02:21, 2 October 2023
 | |
| Matrix | |
|---|---|
| Matrix Freeter, Tool of the Kanaga-gumi | |
| Discord | @jit |
| [1] | |
| Metatype | Human |
| Street Cred | 0 |
| Notoriety | 0 |
| Public Awareness | 0 |
| CDP | 78 |
| D.O.B. | March 03, 2064 |
| Age | 21 |
| Folder | [2] |
| Priority | Metatype - D Attributes - B Magic/Resonance - A Skills - C Resources - E |
| #Max IGs/Ascension | 0 |
Character Information
Summary
Sad goof of a technomancer with a chip on her shoulder and a grudge against her dad and the Kanaga-gumi.
BHop, born and raised in the Seattle area, is the first child of Takashi Kurosawa, then a rising star of the Kanaga-gumi. Though groomed from childhood to follow in her father's footsteps as part of the gumi's Kumi-in, her poor aptitude for such things and her apparent dissociative PTSD from the death of her mother at a young age led to her being passed over as her father's favored heir. Her awakening as a Technomancer around the same point in time gave her the independence and rebellion she craved to discover herself along the fiber optic roads of the Matrix.
She made small waves, vandalized some hosts and competed in some duels and played at being an activist, though here too she quickly realized that she was in some way aberrant compared to those around her, just like she was in the meat. While proper deckers talked shop and hardware in precise and learned terms, Bun compiled sprites in code that she felt more than understood. Deckers talked marks on devices, and Bun instead simply reached in to feel the souls she swore were there. Small wonder, then, that she fell to obscurity, unwilling to out herself and unable to match more capable codeslingers in brute strength alone. Competitive games were her salvation instead - in the Matrix, a place that felt more real than her own meat, running and gunning and fighting in ways without blood or death, in ways where she could dream of going pro and being free, were her hope in the face of worlds that couldn't understand what she was and didn't want to try.
The meat, however, was unfortunately an inescapable hole. On her twentieth birthday, during her own Seijin no Hi celebration, she thwarted an attempted hit on her father from those dissatisfied with his policies and unwilling to see his aspirations of leadership go any further, disabling their SmartLinked guns. Rather than praise, she was beaten and berated by her father for both being a Technomancer and for concealing her power from him. In a fit of reckless rage he told her that he should have had her killed as well, alongside her mother - in order to better reflect the Yakuza's traditional values, his American wife needed to be out of the picture so that he could remarry a properly Japanese woman. Divorce wouldn't look good either, and so the most honorable path was a violent death defending their child from gangers, or so his logic deemed.
She snapped. With impotent balled-up fists, she spat that not only was she a Technomancer, but that she, his first son, was a woman as well, and was instantly disowned. She was given two options - with a blade at her neck, she could die, either here or as an MCT lab rat, or she could become his tool, another pawn in a game of power. He could use her - and more importantly, could not stand the familial shame were all her truths made light. With gritted teeth and salted tears, she accepted. Even as she said it, however, gears of furious rebellion turned in her head. She knew people - years of living on the Matrix can give a girl access to all sorts of people and places, and not all of them are well within the watchful eye of the Yakuza.
Goals
- A Secure Identity Unknown to and Unexploited by the Yakuza
- The Professional Downfall and Death of Her Father, Takashi Kurosawa
- Figure Out What Happens After That
Background
CW: Mentions of death and child abuse.
Where does the story of someone's life begin? Not with an introduction, but with a thousand little tragedies, all disconnected in time and space until the red thread of fate woven between them pulls them taut and stitches them close.
As a young child, Akiha fights with pangs of jealous hurt seeing other girls his age, and he does not yet know why. He is struck when he expresses that hurt to those around her. When she looks back as an adult, as she often does, she will try desperately to reach across time to comfort that child, and always finds she cannot.
Some time before her birth, the man who will be her father, Takashi Kurosawa, loses his job, and another, and again, always to bar fights and drunkenness, until a chance encounter with a Yakuza Kaikei in the drunk tank connects him with the Kanaga-gumi, and he begins a shadowy life as a Kumi-in. His pregnant wife, an American woman he insists doesn't know the prestige of the Yakuza, spars against him with whispered screams behind closed doors in protest.
As a nine year old, Akiha begs through bloody tears for her mother to cling to life. Halloweeners flee from the shattered glass and shell casings littering the street beside their overturned scooter with a scant few hundred nuyen as a reward. Though it was supposed to be a safe part of the city, the nearby screech of Knight Errant is small comfort as her mother says her goodbyes to her oldest child and the light leaves her, taking Akiha's along with it, who even years later will still dream of this night. Her father, the bright, powerful, and ruthless presence that he is while sober, counts his blessings - he is looked on favorably as a long term candidate for a role in the gumi leadership, and though a haafu child will be tolerated if abnormally scrutinized, a non-Japanese wife would be unacceptably gauche.
As a ten-year-old, Akiha awakens to the Resonant, though knows enough to keep her secrets just as she has with all the other things her heart desperately wants and can't have. She flies the skies of the Matrix in ways she has never known before, and finds that here, her body does not chafe against her as it does when made of meat. Doctors struggle to find a medical cause for her apparent dissociation, and can only attribute it to PTSD. She is beaten for it behind closed doors in desperate bids to fix her in the only ways her father knows how. She does not feel it with hotsim as her shield.
As a tween, she is forced to fist fight her brother to learn a killer instinct, and then her father himself to learn pain. She is taught to shoot guns, and to hold swords, and to withstand burns and wounds, though as years pass she will forget all but the hurt. She is told that this makes her strong, and that when the time comes that she might become useful to the Kanaga-gumi, she will be ready for it. Her father is made Shategashira for his years of loyal service, and their family, along with her father's new wife, made wealthy.
As a teenager, Akiha struggles for purpose of her own. She begins vandalizing smalltime hosts and setting data free, some with righteous purpose and some only for the fun of setting fires, and finds some power in escaping the grasp of GOD. She finds comfort in competition, and throws her soul into fighting games, team-based shooters, MMORPGs. She learns to find the souls of the Matrix, and speaks to them as though they were friends, in hosts, and when she could stand to be offline, in ridealongs on her scooter. For the first time in her life, she makes friends, and chases dreams of her own, she likes to think. Her father outside the Matrix, who finds her more often than not staring silent holes into walls, abandons his first son as his preferred successor in the organization, and gives up on grooming his closeted child for a position in the "family business" in favor of Akiha's younger brother by only a year, Jiro.
She is twenty now. Though she is abandoned as his heir, she is still Takashi Kurosawa's oldest son, and so their family celebrates a less-than-authentic Seijin no Hi with kimono and fried food in Seattle's downtown. Her father promises a flight to Tokyo to properly celebrate her brother's ceremony next year, and though she knows he speaks not to her but to the oyabun and the wakagashira and his underlings and whoever else might catch wind and think highly of his traditional values, she smiles politely so as to avoid seeming ungrateful. She has learned by now that things are easier here when she is silent, even when she resents this man who should have stayed in Japan if he liked it that much.
They walk, all five, through the streets, stalls, back alleys. Some of the Kumi-in he has stationed slip away surreptitiously, and Akiha only notices by the conspicuously SmartLinked guns they carry in AR. Odd - they'd been there to keep watch, and to leave their post is unusual. As more guns gather, their icons swarming like flies in back alleys and around corners, she pieces together a conspiracy, and as they're followed through crowded city streets, she's gripped by a tense fear, and a horrific sense of deja vu. She smiles and, turning into an alleyway, lies that she'd like her picture taken against a mural. She tells the others to go on to the restaurant without her, and asks only her father to stay, to take her picture.
She gestures subtly to call forth her sprite, and pleads for its help under her breath. To her father, as they walk together into the dimly lit space, she announces softly that guns are coming, only a few for a hit this out in the open - she tells her father with a presence he hasn't seen from her before that most of his men here aren't present where they should be, and that he should be armed and prepared to defend himself. For all his evil, even now a merciful part of her does not yet want him dead.
She disables one gun with little trouble as it rounds the corner - they didn't bring a Matrix presence to cover their asses, and she is endlessly grateful for their oversight. Her sprite effortlessly takes another, and they act in sequence, one after another. To those in the meat, she is possessed, rambling with knowledge she shouldn't have, gesturing out of habit in ways that do nothing in the flesh - her father, nonetheless, recognizes with furious shock what she must be. When those impotent guns fully stroll round the corner in front and behind (Yakuza themselves, the analytical part of her makes a mental note to remember), they find their triggers jammed, their smart weapons made dumb, and their smug confidence immediately gone. Her father, a concealed blade at the ready, swings without mercy until their intruders lie dead or fleeing. Any screams are made mute by the roar of the downtown crowd in the surrounding streets - and the sound of steel through flesh is itself only silent.
She pants, adrenaline waning. Her father turns to her, and she half-anticipates praise before he slaps her across the cheek. He berates her. For being aberrant and ugly, and most of all for concealing it from him, because even that ugliness could become strength, for the family, for him. He shouts with careless rage that he should have arranged to have her killed too, all those years ago.
The realization overwhelms her, the truth of that mugging so long ago. Something in her snaps. Like kindling, years of dry rage ignite all at once. She tells him, recklessly, that not only is she a technomancer, but that she is a woman, and his child, and that if anyone should have died it should have been him just a moment ago, and instead of hitting her now, apoplectically red, he seethes and raises his blade point first toward her chest. Cold, traditional steel without a thought or care for the Matrix, in his flesh and blood arm only a little less deadly than the chrome. He hesitates, as if he were hoping combat lessons from a decade ago might suddenly leap back into her mind, as if even now he wants his child to be strong, as if he regrets raising his blade against her. "Choose," he says, "since you choose not to be my son. Be my tool instead. Or else, die."
She wants to see him dead, for herself, for her mother who she barely knew - but with red hot cheeks and clenched fists, with salty tears that dribble down her nose, fear wins her over. Shivering, she accepts his ultimatum. There are enemies within his ranks - Kanaga-gumi or some other faction, she can't say. But if he has enemies, then in his mind he'll have use for her, more use than for a corpse, more use than she would be worth as a disgrace to his honor and a body in an MCT research laboratory, at least she hopes.
He lowers his blade, twirls it, wipes it clean with a small kerchief he keeps in his pocket for just such an occasion, and sheathes it. He uses a comm to call his men back, the loyal ones who'd been told to go on break. He nods his head toward the wall, the enormous mural with shrines and yokai, and Akiha shakes her head in disbelief. He gruffly tells her to smile, and she does - just out of frame, a corpse bleeds out, and loyal hands drag it away.
So she resolves to be Yakuza, to pretend, or to be a handy consult for them at least. While she's pretending, she buys a comm and pretends she's a decker too, and that's normal enough. She wears a suit and pretends she's a man, and this more than either of the other two kills her, though it protects her from Old School yaks more reliably than kevlar.
She turns Matrix tricks on the side, research and oddjobs, but they're not enough to break her out, to buy her freedom, and certainly not enough to ruin the man or the organization who have ignited a vengeful flame inside her. If she's going to put Takashi Kurosawa into the ground, she will need a far bigger shovel.
Luckily, her dear friend and Fixer, a ghost from her rebellious teenage past, has heard of a little runner's hub called ShadowHaven, provided BHop is willing to take the risks. She'll hook her up, point her toward the host - so long as she always comes back with another story to tell.
Narrative Significant Qualities
Positive
- Analytical Mind
- Bilingual
- Instinctive Hack
- Ninja Vanish
- One With the Matrix II
Negative
- Basement Dweller
- Driven (Revenge on Father)
- Emotional Attachment (Dodge Scoot [Haruko-chan])
- Phobia (Uncommon, Moderate) (Clowns [Halloweeners])
- Social Appearance Anxiety 1 (Gender Dysphoria)
Run History
Affiliations
Contacts
| Contact | Connection | Loyalty | Archetype | Profession | Aspects | Chips |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anhe | 3 | 5 | Fixer(K,N,G,A) | Matrix Information Specialist and Fixer | Detached, Lore Hunter, Chronically Online, Shadowrunning, "Oh? Tell me more.", Information Specialist, Fact vs. Fiction, AI "Ally", Protosapients and Technocritters, Digitization and Archival | Even |
| Takashi Kurosawa | 4 | 1 | Custom (A,G,N,K) | Shategashira of the Kanaga-gumi | Cyberware, Automatic Firearms, Handguns, Long Arms, Blades, Don't Talk Back, Yakkity Yak | Even |
Organizations
Allies
Enemies
In Character Information
Symbols and Signatures
Matrix Search Table
| Threshold | Result |
|---|---|
| 1 | Junk: "Bunny hopping (bhopping) is an advanced movement technique used in some varieties of pre-Matrix first person shooters. To perform a bunny hop..."
Bunny Hop keeps a low profile online, for the most part. Some known aliases are BHop, Bun, and Hops. She's had some good results in amateur leagues for Shadowrun Online and Road Fighter as recently as one year ago, but seems to have dropped off from the competitive circuit since then. She has public accounts on anime and game discussion sites, as well as cooking forums, art discussion groups, and others, all with relatively sparse public post histories. |
| 3 | Some details begin to add up in seedier parts of the web - common elements from her more public and innocuous profiles can be pieced together, giving a probable link between them and some Matrix vandal going by a variety of ascii rabbit emojis. Examples include: ₍ᐢ. .ᐢ₎, ໒꒰ྀི´ ˘ ` ꒱ྀིა, ૮₍ ´• ˕ •` ₎ა, and others. The bunny face vandal has been inactive for several years, however, and has not made a marked impact on either commonly shared blacklists or in other decker circles. |
| 6 | A name appears, associated with the bunny face vandal: Akiha. Those few who are familiar with the bunny face vandal's techniques and MO remember her taking a peculiar approach to decking, one that was indirect and seemed to flow with the Matrix rather than imposing upon it, like a digital Aikido. She spoke briefly of spirits in the wire. Disturbingly, some unrelated deckers in unrelated incidents have reported similar techniques used by a Yakuza spider in recent months, a nameless and textureless silhouette of an oni, appearing as negative space, like a hole cut into the Matrix. |
Shadow Community Table
| Threshold | Result |
|---|---|
| 1 | "Bunny Hop? Never heard of 'em, sorry." |
| 3 | "Well, you know, come to think of it, there was that bunny face vandal a few years back. Cheap way to pwn a smalltime host. Did decent work but the other deckers seemed to think her style was real weird." |
| 5 | "Actually, this just occurred to me - and this is strictly between you and me - some of the Yak hosts have been harder to hit on the Matrix lately. New spider or somethin'. Some of the cowboys seem to think they're not using your standard hardware or running some new IC or something weird like that - I wonder if she was closer to whatever that guy's doing now." |
Assensing Table
| Threshold | Result |
|---|---|
| 1 | Bun is generally healthy - not a specimen of particular physical value, but someone who is reasonably fit despite appearances. No matter what her outward expression and mood, an undercurrent of hurt and longing bleeds through, beneath her other emotions. She does not appear to be awakened. |
| 2 | Bun appears to have no cyberware. |
| 3 | Bun appears to have no alphaware, and an untouched Essence. |
| 4 | Bun appears to have no bioware or betaware. Essence 6, Magic N/A, Force N/A |
| 5 | Bun appears to have no deltaware, gene treatments, or nanotech. No chronic illness seems to afflict her physically. She is a technomancer. |
SINs
Yuuki Love (Fake Rating 4, UCAS)
- Fake Firearms License (Rating 4)
- Fake Private Investigator's License (Rating 4)
Appearance
On the meat, BHop is short and lean for a boy at only 5'8", but gargantuan for a woman, which she's of course very self-conscious of. Her dark hair curls softly around her face, framing it well and lending it a round femininity, even as her shoulders flare on the masculine side of androgynous. She is pale, leaning more closely to her American heritage than her Japanese. Her dark eyes bounce between the bratty mischief she tries to play up online and the riptide of dull, bitter fury that swirls underneath. Overall, she is a woman of opposites struggling to reconcile.
Clothing
Doing Yak work, her outfits are decided for her. Button ups and blazers and belts. Her hair is done up in a top-knot. Her shoulders visibly slump in these scenarios.
Most other times, BHop covers up in facemasks, baggy hoodies and jeans. Goofy cat faces and ironic Japanese written in gana and kana are printed all over her mask and clothes, and augmented by AR tags with light-up decorations surrounding her - speech bubbles, moving cat ears, and so on, provided neither stealth nor tact are needed. On runs, she also sports a pair of red reflective goggles to cover her eyes, and a little side-satchel to carry her gear.
Bun always has some kind of corrective vision on - typically a proper pair of glasses.
Matrix Persona
On the wire, Bun is much more plainly herself. She flits between personas, though typically sports two large bunny ears, whether anthropomorphic or purely fashion. Her hair is typically bright and long, defaulting to a blonde red, and her height a meager 5'1" on average, though she'll sometimes adjust to at least try to be the shortest in the conversation by a centimeter or two (with the largest chest to boot, if she's feeling jealous). Her eyes are bright and playful, mischievous and fun, always shimmering in whatever color she chooses to match her aesthetic that day - though defaulting to a deep purple. Her outfits are copious: lolita fashion, stylishly baggy street wear, promiscuous bunny outfits, and so on - she always attempts to coordinate these outfits with the body of her persona, and will adjust the color of her hair and eyes to match if needed.
In rarer moments, when her guard is down, she may even dress down. She holds in reserve a lovingly crafted render of herself, her real body, edited only far enough to become what it always should have been. This persona is only ever shown to those she trusts.
When doing Yak work, she limits herself. A simple, textureless mesh with only the silhouette of an oni to give it shape are all she needs to please the Kanaga-gumi and disguise herself from the other side of her work.