Bunny Hop
 | |
| Technomancer | |
|---|---|
| Matrix Freeter, Transgirl, Unwilling Tool of the Kanaga-gumi | |
| Discord | @jit |
| Reddit Name | |
| Metatype | Human |
| Street Cred | 0 |
| Notoriety | 0 |
| Public Awareness | 0 |
| CDP | 76 |
| D.O.B. | March 03, 2064 |
| Age | 21 |
| Folder | [Drive URL Link] |
| Priority | Metatype - D Attributes - B Magic/Resonance - A Skills - C Resources - E |
| #Max IGs/Ascension | 0 |
Character Information
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Summary
Goals
Background
TLDR: BHop, born and raised in the Seattle area, is the first child of Takashi Kurosawa, a rising star and Shategashira 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 age nine 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 as she discovered herself along the fiber optic roads of the Matrix.
On her twentieth birthday during a family dinner to celebrate her coming of age (though , 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 by 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, 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. She was instantly disowned and given two options - with a blade at her neck, she could die, or she could become his tool, another pawn in a game of power. 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.
---
(THIS NEEDS TO BE UPDATED AS PER THE TLDR ABOVE) 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 teenager, Akiha struggles for purpose of her own. She begins vandalizing smalltime hosts, some with righteous purpose and some only for fun, 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. For the first time in her life, she makes friends, and chases dreams, 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.
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. She is taught to shoot guns, and to hold swords, though as years pass she will largely forget how. 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, and their family, along with her father's new wife, made wealthy.
She is eighteen now. Though she is abandoned as his heir, she is still Takashi Kurosawa's oldest son, and so their family celebrates her western Seijin no Hi with a small, traditional dinner. Her father promises kimono and hanabi on her twentieth, and though she knows he speaks not to her but to the oyabun and the wakagashira and his underlings and whoever else might hear of this dinner 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.
She sits beside her father on the floor in the traditional way only because he places her there. His wife sits beside him, Jiro beside her, their youngest beside him. Through the thin walls of their home, she notices movement - icons of smartlinked handguns traipse through their bedrooms, their halls. She traces their path to find them approaching. Her body goes stiff, and though her father notices her unease, he does not have eyes like her, and he cannot understand what she does.
She gestures subtly to call forth her sprite, and pleads for its help under her breath. As footsteps become audible and the splintered shouts of broken doors erupt, she lets loose, springing to her feet, gesturing as if by instinct just as she would in the Matrix. She announces that guns are coming, a half dozen - she tells her father with a presence he hasn't seen from her before to send the others to another room and to call in his kumi-in from the garden, though she already doubts they will come. These men infiltrated silently, right through the front door - were palms greased, to make it past the security?
She disables one gun with little trouble - they didn't bring a Matrix presence to cover their asses, and she is endlessly grateful for their oversight. Her sprite gladly takes another, and they act in sequence, one after another. To those in the meat, she is possessed, rambling, flailing - it's only her father who seems to recognize, with furious shock, what is happening and what she must be. When those guns break down the door (Yakuza themselves, the analytical part of her makes a mental note to remember), they find their triggers jammed, their smart weapons made dumb. Her father, handgun at the ready, fires without mercy, until their intruders lie dead or fleeing.
She pants, addrenaline 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 the family, because even that ugliness could be useful. He tells her, with careless rage, that he should have arranged to have her killed too, all those years 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 instead of hitting her now, apoplectically red, he raises his gun. She asks, staring past the barrel into its icon on the Matrix, what exactly he plans to do, and as he hesitates, she waves a conspicuous hand and disables his weapon. He tells her quietly to leave, his first son and only daughter. She does.
The shadows have places for people like her, odd jobs and research requests. For some few months, that's enough - it's ramen and a coffin-sized scenic freeway view, but it's enough.They bring her in touch with people she'd known before, who in turn bring her in touch with those with more esoteric needs and more credsticks to burn.
Months after their confrontation, her father contacts her. He behaves as if nothing had happened. He says that they need a Matrix presence at one of their gambling dens while they find a new spider, and she tells him to bite her, and he clicks his tongue and laughs in the kind of way that's supposed to choke back a scream - he'll sell her to MCT, Renraku, he'll buy his way to the top with her brain and blood if he needs to, if she won't help him succeed.
She thinks it's a bluff - she hopes it's a bluff, at the very least. What damage would be done to his reputation, for his child to be a technomancer? A technomancer who, while being dragged away, would gladly spill every hideous little secret of her identity and her father's life to deny him any chance of rising through the ranks of an organization he's given his family's lives for? She would be dead, but he would be ruined, surely. He must know that.
But even as she thinks it through, she doubts. What damage would it really do, at the cost of what he would gain? She's more useful to him on the Matrix, but she must imagine her corpse worth enough to buy his way out of any debt to the gumi her secrets would put him in.
And more importantly, she realizes, shaking, that she doesn't want to die for a grudge.
So she pretends to be Yakuza, and accepts their stoic praise with her own stoic silence. She buys a comm and pretends she's a decker, 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 her Matrix tricks on the side, but they're not enough to break her out. Not enough to ruin the man or the organization who have ignited a vengeful flame inside her. If she's going to make waves tall enough to crash, she'll need more than this.
Luckily, her dear friend and Fixer has heard of a little runner's hub called ShadowHaven, as long as 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 | |
| 3 | |
| 6 |
Shadow Community Table
| Threshold | Result |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| 3 | |
| 5 |
Assensing Table
| Threshold | Result |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 |
SINs
Appearance
On the meat, Akiha is short 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 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. On runs, she also sports a pair of red reflective goggles to cover her eyes, and a little side-satchel to carry her gear.
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 always 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.
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.