Saturday 20 June 2015

Damson - Ballerina Spy

My week in London is over! Hotel wi-fi failed on me, so I didn't bombard you with posts after all. Thought I'd take a bit of an opportunity to go through a few more characters. This one was  designed for a Cyberpunk game that never got off the ground.

Street Name: Damson
Real Name: Isabella Paris
Role: primary Athlete/secondary Shadow

Intelligence 6, Cool 6, Move Allowance 7, Reflex 8, Attractiveness 6, Body 8, Tech 6, Luck 6, Empathy 5(/3)
Run 21/63, Leap 5.25/15.75, Lift 80/320
Humanity 30.5
Skills: Special - Prowess 3, Sneak 2
Attr - Personal Grooming 2 
Body - Endurance 2, Fitness/Body Building 2
Cool - /
Emp -  Lip Reading 2
Int - Awareness*/Notice 3, Education/Gen Know 1, Expert (poison) - 4, Navigation 2, Shadow/Track 4
Ref - Athletics 3, Blind Fighting 3, Dance 6, Initiative 2, Martial Arts (offensive) 2, MA (defensive) 3, MA (weapon - Sai) 3, Stealth/Evasion - 5
Tech - Pick Lock 2, Pick Pocket 2

* +2 visual, +1 audio with an additional +2 when eavesdropping

Height: 5'6", Weight: 10st (140lb), Hair: black tinted with dark blue, Ethnicity: American (gonna assume I meant European-American), Language: English-ish

Family: deceased
Traits: detached, anti-social
Most valued person: no one
Most values: independence
View on people: indifferent
Favoured possession: recording of the music from the ballet Giselle

Armour: balacalava (SP12), t-shirt (SP6), jacket (SP8), trousers (SP8), scarf (SP4) and gloves (SP4)
Carried possessions: mobile phone, mastoid comm-link, UV torch
Cyberware: Head - neural interface
Optics - anti-dazzle, UV night vision, image enhancing, dodgeball (giving +1 to melee/martial art skills)
Audio - phonesplice, bug detector (3m, 60%), level dampener, amplified hearing
Weapons - Sai, Kendachi mono-knife, 1m monowire

Isabella was born to middle-class parents in a nicer part of Night City. They had good, if fairly low-level, jobs as corporate-monkeys for the company who housed them and it was assumed she would probably follow in their footsteps if she couldn't make it as a dancer: her greatest love was ballet and it was how she spent all her free time until her parents died suddenly when she was 16. The company continued to house her but never explained how her parents had died, so she started investigating, ignoring requests and warnings to back off. In the process, she became romantically entangled Warren Barley. He'd had enough work done that she didn't realise how much older he was until his 22 year old daughter Louise showed up to warn her off.

She doesn't remember the 2 or 3 months leading up to the accident or exactly what happened, but she spent 8 months in a coma and required rehabilitation afterwards. At this point the company her parents had worked for felt their debt to her was paid and left her to make her own way. She ditched her birth identity and took the name 'Damson' - the affectionate name her parents had used for her when she had been very small.

The accident left her with a lower tolerance of other people but she did manage to make some close friends and contacts, who helped train her in martial arts and espionage techniques - the more physical of which she took to readily with her dance background.

Fate threw Louise Barley back in her path when she was 19. Now a successful lawyer, Ms Barley had worked her way up in the DA's office and called on Damson's abilities through a mutual acquaintance. Initially, the two were suspicious but soon realised they could help each other and their relationship has deepened to what might not be friendship but certainly involved trust and respect: Louise is the only person remaining in Damson's life who knows her birth name.

Dance remains important to her, although professional performance is now no more than a dream. She teaches ballet to the children of a nomad tribe and, whilst maintaining a degree of distance, is closer to them than anyone else, and they are prepared to take her as one of their own - up to a point.

Damson is prepared to take any job going - for the right price. She's done some wetwork and found herself curiously unattached, which she assumes relates to the damage done that caused her coma. Her primary goal, though, remains to find out what happened to her parents and bring justice as required. This drive has become a secret obsession, one she would not share with anyone and which probably has more to do with habit than actual desire. Not that she'd necessarily recognise the difference.

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