Kadō

Kadō

Shintoist Magician
Previously a Fixer
Knows People
Discord	@ezene
Reddit	onomatopus
Metatype	Human?
Street Cred	0
Notoriety	1
Public Awareness	0
CDP	24
D.O.B.	August 14th, 2055
Age	30
Folder	Drive
Priority	Metatype - D Attributes - E Magic/Resonance - A Skills - B Resources - C
#Max IGs/Ascension	1

Character Information

Summary

Kadō is a young human woman who nearly matches the traditional Japanese ideal. With a petite figure, pale skin, and long, black hair, only her vivid green eyes separate her from the image of a yamato nadeshiko. Equally at home in street chic as in the dress of high society, she excels at captivating attention, knowing just how to speak and move to leave the impressions she wants.

For those with wider information sources, Kadō has operated for a few years in Neo-Tokyo as a fixer with rumored but unconfirmed connections to MCT. More recently, she's moved to Seattle for some reason - and despite having only been around a year, she's found her name in an impressive number of circles. This time, however, rather than setting herself up as a fixer, she's decided to take jobs herself as a runner.

Her specialty is social combat. Whether squeezing every bit of value out of a deal, running circles around a security guard's expectations, or convincing a group of workers she's one of their friends without having ever met who she's mimicking, any time Kadō is allowed to speak, she can work. This even holds true in a firefight - rather than ineffectually firing a gun (and risking snapping those thin arms with recoil), she stays back and observes the situation. Her vantage point gives her the chance to urge allies, using that talent for manipulation to cut past their hesitations and prod their instinctive reactions at just the right times. At least one rumor states she pulled off such an accurate 'drill instructor' voice that a number of corpsec jolted up to stand at attention... in the middle of a firefight.

Goals

• Short-Term: Start doing jobs, both for money and for reputation. Establish herself as someone who can keep up with running rather than just networking.
• Mid-Term: Accumulate soft and hard power to leverage for her continued... not freedom, but relatively loose leash.
• Long-Term: Figure out a long-term goal. What does she even want? After doing this for so long and convincing herself to focus on getting out from under the family's thumb, she forgot that she still needs to have something to do afterwards.

Background

Yamamoto Miho is 'adopted', in a sense - she never had parents to begin with, but commissioners, in the form of Yamamoto Kasumi, Yamamoto Kenji, and Fujimori Hideo.

Her creation was cocktail of ambition, delusion, chance, and wealth. As much as it's hidden, in the higher ranks of most corporations, incompetence abounds - the ultra-rich use their power to shield themselves from consequences, and as wealth is inherited along their lines, new generations enter an environment where they need never acknowledge mistakes. Kasumi and Kenji were (and are) traditionalist, conservative Japanese, intensely racist, specist, and sexist. Seeking more power to themselves and their clan, their position eventually drew the machinations of a secretive magician who wanted to draw on the resources of a triple-A corporation.

While actual members of the Black Lodge are few, each one certainly has their own net of contacts and resources. Hideo, part of one of Japan's cells, sought out connections to MCT both for his own benefits and to help encourage anti-elven/draconic ideologies, given the corporation's conservatism. The plan eventually proposed was to create a scion who could compete with the machinations of the immortal enemies of humanity, utilizing the magician's esoteric knowledge with the Yamamoto clan's resources to accomplish this.

While nominally human, the genetic blueprint was spliced heavily with elven aspects - enough so to leave the result closer to an elf, genetically, than a human, despite showing none of the signs. By stealing the advantages of their foes and placing them in a human, it was thought that this could allow them to, for an extent, fight fire with fire, bringing some of what the elves can bring to bear back against them. Immortality was arranged for when the subject would be of age, allowing them to carry on this legacy for humanity throughout generations. While ghilani vrykolakiviridae is an imperfect form of immortality, it also offers the chance to stimulate and encourage magical development; the need to maintain its function by sacrificing metahumans was considered negligable as a complication, because isn't it normal for corporate operations to spend people to maintain? The subject's sex was decided to be female not in spite of their sexist views, but because of it: creating an immortal god-king of humanity would be running down the same follies that trusting the elves or dragons or their minions would. Rather, by using a woman, the sex unfit for leadership, she could serve as an everlasting second across generations - executing the orders of the men in control and maintaining their estates with impossible expertise, always under the command of true human will.

Hideo only partly believed in the ideology sold to the strongly prejudiced clan. While certainly a boon against what lurking evils the Black Lodge nobly fights in the shadows, having a lasting apprentice who could be guided and taught the way he preferred would be of just as much value to him, and the expanded access to MCT facilities in the process of pushing this through would have many more far-reaching benefits than either of them. And if he would be receiving an eternally young apprentice to study and serve under him, wouldn't it be more pleasant to have a woman?

Naturally, these plans tied together by half-truths and selfish ambitions, built of pride and delusion, wouldn't quite work out perfectly. Miho was split between two misaligned sets of indoctrination, and built with the insight necessary to notice and pretend to follow both. This process added a third point of view on her 18th birthday, where she was given the gift of being killed and flooded with awakened microorganisms, greedily pulling her soul back to its form and hoarding it for their own. Awakening again herself, Miho was now continually, permanently exposed to the Astral world and its impulses, with no way to simply keep her from ever encountering parts of the world counter to their narratives.

Her mystic education began in earnest after that point, joining business, management, and politics. Her seeming obedience and dedication soon earned her relative freedom - a large part of the Mitsuhama operations are tied tightly to criminal syndicates, after all, and those would be another part of Miho's education. With a decade more spent between those three parts of her life, she eventually developed enough to be viably sent elsewhere on her own, a fact she had been encouraging.

Seattle was chosen for Miho's new placement due to its relatively chaotic state. With so many different groups jockeying for control, there could be less concentrated opposition to risk their investment, as well as more chances to learn how to thwart their true foes. Advancing MCT and Lodge interests in the area would be proportionally more effective than simply sending her into a more stable, long-term conflict elsewhere. And as for Miho herself, having established she could be trusted to remain loyal and maintain reports, leveraged that trust to get out from under direct supervision for once in her life.

Miho has longed for freedom since she first experienced it in the passing whims of the spirit world, since she found something that might be genuine when she could thoroughly understand her upbringing was not. Leaving entirely simply isn't an option for her, however, and she knows it; no matter what she tries or where she goes, if she truly attempted to break the chain, she would be hunted down and retrieved and be far worse off for it. At the same time, as distasteful as they are, she does hold great potential power to develop from those unbreakable connections, and it would be a waste to throw them away rather than make something better out of them.

The only question is... what would 'something better' even be?

Narrative Significant Qualities

Positive

• Infected (Banshee): Kadō doesn't drink... wine.
• Prototype Transhuman: Miho was designed and biologically constructed, not conceived and born. Part of this has blended human and elven genetics; her natural state is one that appears, externally, to be a perfectly normal human.

Negative

• SINner (Corporate) (Mitsuhama): Kadō is one of the elites, born in an ivory tower with everything she could want served to her through the suffering of regular people... or so many in the shadows might think, anyway.

Run History

Name	GM	Metaplot	Threat	Date of Run
Harvest Season	Sarcarian		High	10 October 2085
Sanctum Sundered	Eva		High	3 April 2085
Fish in a Bucket	Anumati	Deep Hunting	Deadly	30 March 2085
Plucking A Bird	Anumati	Deep Hunting	Deadly	18 March 2085
The Bill Comes Due	Archtmag		High	12 March 2085
Dear Helena	Asmodeus		High	1 March 2085
Runnin' from the Dock of the Bay	LHOG		Medium	27 February 2085
Chain Mail	Sleevey	La Famille Du Peintre	High	10 February 2085
Alea Ecta Est	Fangblade_		Deadly	30 December 2084
Party Balloon	Syphilen		High	29 December 2084
Hot Potato (Chips)	Sample Text			9 December 2084
Tying A Yoke to Yamada	LHOG		High	30 November 2084

Affiliations

Contacts

Contact	Connection	Loyalty	Archetype	Profession	Aspects	Chips

In Character Information

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

Character Plot Hooks

Here are characteristics of the character that GMs may take advantage of to add complications to runs, or to otherwise use when in use. If you want to use them in unrelated to runs, please ask first.

Aspect	Information	Related Run(s)
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Aspect 5