Biographic Information
Character Name: Cassus Akovin
Alias(es): The Red Hand
Age: 22
Gender: Male
Classification: Human
Affiliation(s): Darkwire, Tsubaki Collateral Recovery LLC
Physical Characteristics
Height: 1.75m
Weight: 60kg fleshweight
Colors:
- Hair: Blonde
- Eye: Blue
- Skin: Pale
Aesthetics or Distinguishing Features: Red hides blood splatter from ripping out corporate property, the mask keeps it out of the eyes… and provides killer lighting when dropping a sick beat.
Description: A faceless agent of the corporate people mill, draped in malevolent crimson, ready to pull you apart to meet his Mean Hourly Output. His helmet with illuminated “tears” falling down the face plate glares with an emotionless analysis as you glance down to his plated cyber-leg, outfitted with a number of complicated adjustment modes you can only guess at. Light and steam suddenly pours out of his torso, and the laser beams pixelate a holographic mix table that one gloved hand taps on like an interface while the other hand goes to his ear as rhythmic sound thumps out of the speakers on his mask. Cassus likes to keep the people around him guessing about his intentions or what he plans to do next, but under the mask is a young man with a tear tattooed down his face to memorialize his mom.
Personal Details
Personality
Your character’s perspective on and response to life in general. What is their general behavior/mannerisms? Do they have any strengths or quirks?
- Passion: Doing things in half-measures is antithetical to progress, either you give something your all or its not worth your time thinking about. When Cassus sets his mind to something it absorbs his whole attention and focus, perhaps even to the detriment of other things he aught to focus on…
- Arms-Length: Keeping people at a distance helps keep thing in focus, being as passionate as he is, he is vulnerable to emotional manipulation. To guard against this kind of weakness, he avoids forming strong bonds and placing up barriers (sometimes literally physical ones) to knowing him personally.
- Charitable: If Cassus judges someone to be innocent, he thinks little of helping them. If he is tasked with repossession for the cybernetics off of someone he deems as an oppressed, he will use some of his homespun cybernetic stock to craft them a replacement pro-bono without informing his corporate “superiors.”
Flaws
What your character’s failings are, the chips and cracks that make the character real. What are their weaknesses?
- Stubborn: As a consequence of a passionate temperament, Cassus finds it supremely difficult change his way of thinking.
- Social Starved: Cassus desires connection with people, but constantly denies himself these opportunities as they present themselves. His fear of manipulation creates a negative feedback loop where he feels he cannot establish connections, and as such he shouldn’t even try, and whenever he does work up the courage the try, he often engages in self-sabotage, setting him back to square one.
Skills
What your character can do particularly well, is trained in, or has a particular knack for.
- Medi-Technical: As a Repo contractor for Tsubaki Collateral, his familiarity both with the human body and the technical specs of the cybernetics he is tasked with recovering them from has expanded his repertoire enough to manufacture his own.
- Medically Sick Beats: People let their guard down at parties, and no one suspects a DJ scouting out a crowd for marks… or at least, no one suspects one that’s good. Practice and equipment investments have made “The Red Hand” a sought after entertainment commodity, but most of his popularity extends from the Silkscreen scene.
Equipment
Possessions
What things does your character own, what’s their daily carry?
- Custom Helmet: Built with AR (Augmented Reality) software and integrated AI analysis for identifying Repo Bounties, targeting solutions, and optimal beat tempo. Also includes speakers, voice modulator, and multi-channel integrated headphones with a direct connection to his Neuroport.
- Personal Hologram Rig: Placed over his composite body armor is a series of polychromatic lasers and steam projectors to generate AR enhanced holographic projections.
- Electro-Sai: Used for violent Repo targets that refuse peaceful surrender. Useful for puncturing armor-hardened cyborgs and shorting out circuits. A little bit of damage is acceptable for turn-in.
- Sonic Boomstick: What kind of DJ would he be if he couldn’t weaponize his beats on the streets? This sonic weapon is amped up to 11, and can cause physical damage with its concussive blast within 1 meter. Not a bad method of stunning for most targets, especially if they aren’t expecting it.
Cybernetics
List your character’s cybernetics, if they have any
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Name / Description / Abilities / Drawbacks
-
Advanced Cyberleg (Left) / A red ceramic armor-plated prosthetic that has been heavily modified from its base model, outfitted with an illegal black-market pop-out SMG with ballistic ammunition hidden in the knee cap, multiple storage compartments, a hydraulic shin for extended height/reach and sudden upward momentum, and a modular foot that can support a prehensile variant or a “Cyberskate” (a magnetic blade that can accelerate the user on most common lunar surfaces in and out of the city).
-
Neuroport / Everyone’s got one / Provides the basic connections to network resources, however, this one’s got a Tsubaki Neuro-stimulant fabricator modified to its interface port. This provides the benefit of simulating drugs that “enhance” wakefulness, at the expense of fatigue later. Since it is not specifically designed for this implementation, exact mileage may vary.
Background
History
In prose, explain how your character came to be the person they are in the present.
Cassus Akovin was born into a life already shaped by flight, debt, and unfinished business. His mother, Triam Akovin, had once been a mercenary and cybernetics engineer supporting a revivalist Neo-Soviet faction that destabilized the regions surrounding the Russo-Sino sphere on Earth. The Neo-Soviet’s nearly brought the world to the brink of global war, supporting dozens of armed insurgencies aiming to supplant the consolidated wealth of the global oligarchies masquerading as democracies and civilized governments. Despite their successes, the Neo-Soviets were crushed by a combination of national forces and corporate interests, and Triam was among the survivors forced to flee. Lunar corporations, eager to poach the engineers and scientists of a defeated enemy, arranged the acquisition of infamous and valuable survivors. HER Weapons chief among the opportunistic corporations, smuggled Triam to Celeste 7 for her infamous expertise, in exchange for protection from extradition. She arrived pregnant, or became so almost immediately after arrival; her child an inconvenience tolerated only because her expertise was too valuable to discard.
Under HER Weapons corporate tenancy in the Helios Circuit, Triam and Cassus were housed in an environment that was sterile, controlled, and never truly private. Cassus grew up knowing that their safety was conditional. HER Weapons treated her as leased property, pulling her into sealed facilities and classified projects for days or weeks at a time. Cassus learned early to occupy himself, to stay out of sight when corporate eyes passed through the corridor, and to explore the half-finished city beyond their block when they did not.
Helios Circuit was a district largely known for its entertainment with the arts, theater, and cultural appropriations from Earth, but none of those things much excited the few kids that lived there. True entertainment, made your heart work, and nothing did so quite as well as free running through the maze of service catwalks, maintenance shafts, and unfinished construction of “the dome” in the Crown District. It was an irresistible playground for children with nothing to lose, which made fitting in more difficult for Cassus. Cassus stood out as a kid whose clothes were too clean and his cheeks too full, which garnered little trust from the kids with nothing to look forward to at home. Still, with persistence and adolescent bravado, Cassus managed to ingratiate himself into this little gang of free runners.
Cassus ran with these kids who learned the city by leaping across gaps and racing along scaffolds meant for machines, not people. The accident that ended that life was sudden and merciless. Cutting through the unfinished site, Cassus misjudged a landing and his left leg broke through unsecured paneling into an atmospheric sealing aperture. The emergency system snapped shut, amputating the limb instantly; in the same moment, foam sealant flooded the wound to prevent decompression. The mechanism that took his leg also saved his life, preserving him just long enough for medical intervention. Triam was nearly broken by the sight of her son laid low. Naturally, he was forever forbidden from leaving the home, and for once, their desires aligned. The fall and the loss of his leg left the adolescent Cassus traumatized and in a state of re-evaluation; seeing the terror in his mother especially convinced him to remain indoors and study more useful matters for his future.
Nonetheless, as the concern over his life was reassured, as an expert cyberneticist, his mother found the time to custom-build his new leg. It was simple and functional at first, but as time passed and she made more time to see him under the pretense of maintaining his leg, it became more personalized and unique to her son. For the first time in years, since the demands of HER Weapons had put a rift between them, mother and son could bond over a shared interest. As she worked on him, he asked questions and learned from her experience and knowledge. He was eventually entrusted with being able to do some of the work himself and practice on some of her less-specialized cybernetics.
Good things don’t last forever, and a child who has learned a lesson once has learned nothing at all. Despite the trauma his teenage rebellion caused, despite the restoration of the bond with his only parent, HER Weapons’ demands only grew more aggressive, and old habits and desires resurfaced. One day, while confronting his fear and reliving his past joys with a new foot forward, regaining his confidence with the superb handiwork of mother and son, his return home was anything but victorious. He returned to their unit utterly violated, ransacked, and bloodied. Triam suffered in her last moments, melted from the inside by HER Rifles. Seeing her remains scarred Cassus forever.
Cassus never learned if it was actually the corporation finally severing loose ends, or some kind of set up by enemies trying to make it appear as such. What he did learn, standing in that carnage, was what corporate power did to people it no longer needed.
Mechanics
Story Purpose
How your character fits into the story, or what kind of role you intend for them to carve out.
The go-between for the underbelly of corporate filth, and the lively culture of the oppressed underground. A self-made and perhaps hypocritical robinhood figure that sees himself as tearing down the system even as he actively participates in it, but is nonetheless ideologically opposed to the corporations and desires their destruction, violently, if possible.
Stats
Optional stats for rolls, assign 3, 2, or 1 to the following (with no duplicates). To give additional context, you may add a sentence or two to explain your reasoning.
- Muscle: 2 - Cassus is always ready for a throw down with several nasty surprises if he has to use them, but he would generally rather stay away and not use them… then they wouldn’t be surprises, now would they?
- Grit: 3 - Cassus is the ideologically motivated, he does not join the cause, he becomes it.
- Savvy: 1 - While no fool in the technical sense, his passion and emotional weak-points make him a susceptible target to manipulation.
Dialogue Color: [color=#22c1c3] “Do not go softly, into that good night.”