Characteristics
Character Name: Daiya Truman
Alias(es): Pink Widow, Daiya Holloway
Age: 19
Gender: Female
Classification: Human (Psionic)
Affiliation(s): Darkwire
Residence: Lower City, Tube 6, Apartment 23
Appearance
Height: 163 cm
Weight: 49 Kg
Colors:
- Hair: Blonde hair with pink highlights
- Eye: Blue
- Skin: Fair skin, light freckles on her nose
Handiness: Right
Ethnicity: American-Lunar
Aesthetics: Her pink hair and loud outfit styles
Description:
Daiya is a young woman of average height, with a slender, dancer’s build which adds a natural grace to her movements. She carries herself with purpose, her posture straight but never rigid, radiating confidence from bright azure eyes. Her blonde hair, streaked with vivid pink highlights, falls to her shoulder blades when it isn’t tied up to keep her appearance tidy. Freckles dot the fair skin of her nose and cheeks, her face is characteristically expressive revealing the emotions that often simmer close beneath the surface.
Her wardrobe mixes function and flair, packing much of her needs into one neat package. She might typically don dropped jackets with reinforced lining, high-waisted tactical pants, and fitted tops that allow ease of movement without sacrificing a style that includes metallic accents and colorful threads woven throughout her outfits. She is light on her feet even in boots and heels, more willing to announce herself by color or speech when she wants to be known.
Personality
Someone might hear Daiya before they see her and come to the same conclusion either way. She is loud, unashamed, and commands attention with a confidence that borders on reckless. Yet for all her bluster and bravado, Daiya has an undeniable charm that lets others find her easy to talk to —even when they might know better. Her cleverness is something she prizes about herself, spinning stories that highlight herself while glossing over the impulsiveness that got her into trouble in the first place. Often over drinks that quiet the headaches that plague her waking hours.
Daiya’s moral compass was groomed through struggle and hardships, manuevering her into the modus operandi of the moon: survival. When faced with a choice between her life and someone else’s, she will always choose her own. There are few lines she won’t cross to ensure that, save for cold-blooded murder, and she is no stranger to deception, manipulation and the occasional broken heart left in her wake. She seems unfazed by any whispers that follow her, embracing them instead as a game, along with anyone who might want to play.
Loyalty and honesty are prized above all else. Friends, true friends, are worth more than fleeting pleasures or easy profits. She shares the same in return with those she trusts the most, and they will find her fiercely protective of them. For anyone else, her word and willingness are flexible things, commodities she is willing to honor until they threaten her goals. She will lie, deceive, and seduce to survive, and do so without regret. Betrayal, however, is treated with disgust and contempt, an offense she cannot abide it at any length.
As serious as she may seem from a distance or while on a job, up close Daiya is an effervescent soul who loves bright colors and offers flashes of an innocence she should have lost long ago. Celeste 7 will eagerly corrupt any soul, and Daiya learned long ago how dangerous it is to let anyone see the full truth about her.
Flaws
- Leaps Before Looking - Impulsive and headstrong, Daiya makes decisive choices and then follows through, damn the consequences.
- Intermittent Headaches - Daiya’s visions come at a cost, headaches that can precede them, and occasionally linger for hours afterward.
- Slow to Love, Quick to Hate - Trust and adoration can seem just out of reach with Daiya, who reciprocates selectively or not at all. She makes faster judgements on mistrust and suspicion, picking up on quirks or betrayal to set herself against a person, usually forever.
Skills
- Hot Shot: Daiya is a skilled gunslinger, favoring pistols. Practice has earned her an accuracy just short of marksman, able to hold her own in a gunfight. Even if cold-blooded murder is a bridge too far, anyone shooting at her is fair game.
- Parkour - Climbing up buildings or freerunning between them is no mean feat, nor impossible for Daiya.
- Dancer - Talented as an upcoming youth, her skills have been honed for the lunar environment, and come out for more practice on the dance floor or on the streets.
- Roughly Artistic - Her drawing talents were never formally trained, so Daiya continues to use a rougher style when she sketches, which are usually the content of her visions.
- Pink Panther - Slippery and sneaky, Daiya can get quiet when she desires, enough to slip past most unassuming types by blending into crowds and shadows, or just use her loud, noisy personality in her favor.
- [Psionic Ability] Reader: Daiya has a psionic ability that expressed itself as precognition, untrained but for her own efforts in honing and fine-tuning her skill. This ability has aided in her survival and adaptation, but it often delivers visions of unimportant things, and obscure references. Nor do all the visions necessarily come true in the way they are first Seen.
Equipment
Possessions
- MX-4S - a HER Weapons pistol-style composite impactor, colored pink with a
- grapple gun underbarrel attachment.
- Smart Glasses - AR-assisted lenses with a targeting scope
- Multi-tool gauntlet - fingerless with compartments to slip in lockpicks, wire cutters, and small handheld tools
- Digital Sketchbook - with a drawing tablet and a locked down system
Cybernetics
- Neuroport - Ubiquitous cyberware implanted as a child. Allows seamless human/computer interfacing. Unupgraded Typical model with slower data transfer.
Background
Summary
Daiya was born in the lunar lava tubes to a struggling family, unknowingly altered in a corporate “vitamin” trial. That left her with latent psionic abilities, going unnoticed for years. When her parents manged better jobs and opportunities from the payout of the medical trial, it let the family move into better districts where life improved. Daiya, however, began to experience visions, glimpses of the future that demanded action, and began to disrupt her school and isolate her.
She found refuge in dance, becoming a favored pupil of the exacting Madame Yelena Skobsvena at Vision Studio 91. She excelled, gaining awards in competitions and the attention she’d always wanted from her own family. She pushed herself with a newfound ambition to perform, but at fourteen, her vision foresaw its end. She managed to warn Madame Yelena and helped evacuate other dancing students while the studio was invaded, and eventually taken over, by Unimatrix One gangsters. Madame Yelena vanished, and with it a surrogate parent.
Cut off from dance, Daiya spiraled into fights with her parents, dwindling school performance, and eventually to the Nighthawks, a street crew operating out of the city’s shadows. With them she learned skills that made her valuable; freerunning, marksmanship, petty crime, and sabotage. Her youth and willingness made her easily welcomed, while her bright clothing and vanishing acts earned her the nickname Pink Panther.
Internal fractures emerged when the Nighthawks leader, Quell Surge, tried to coerce her. A calculating hacker, Quell withheld advancement, but another crew member, Kit Cosmic, encouraged and supported her instead. She grew very close to Kit, making Quell’s jealousy explode in a moment of indiscretion. Tension nearly split the crew, and set the two young men at lethal odds. To settle their feud, she challenged Quell to give her a mission worthy of her skills.
He designed a long con, requiring Daiya to revive her dance talent to infiltrate the orbit of corpo Alistair Holloway, a handsome patron of the arts. She was to maneuver him into a quick marriage, catching him unaware without any thought of self-preservation or corpo pre-nups. Daiya trained relentlessly, performing a routine that captivated Holloway despite a near-disaster, and drew Holloway in. Quell’s neural tampering made the man more receptive, but the seduction still fell largely on Daiya. At the end of a brief courtship, he proposed.
At the introduction dinner with her parents, the whole plan came crashing down. The Trumans rejected the idea of their seventeen-year-old daughter marrying, and she was left cut off both from Holloway and from the Nighthawks. The subsequent weeks offered only a pretense of her recovery, and following a vision, Daiya wound up at her old dance studio, now a therapy clinic. The gangsters who ran it were unreceptive to her intrusion, turning the confrontation violent.
Beaten and desperate, she fled to Holloway’s estate and collapsed outside. Holloway found her at dawn, treating her injuries and offering a willing ear. She took it, confessing nearly everything about her life, the Nighthawk’s job, and even her visions. He listened with an uncharacteristic grace for a corpo, and in him Daiya found acceptance at last. They married privately the same day at a small dome under the stars.
As Holloway’s wife, Daiya experienced security and freedom within a gilded cage, completing her education and exploring her abilities without interference. Upon his sudden and inexplicable death, rumors swirled about Daiya’s involvement. She was cleared, legally, but the craftily-designed inheritence was denied by the courts, who granted her only their shared residence. There, she discovered Holloway’s secret history guiding Darkwire, a shadowy anti-corporate group he had controlled from without. Daiya learned the private plans that Holloway had for Darkwire, what its future could be, and how to contact them.
Armed with this knowledge, Daiya soon became one of them. As a Shadowrunner, she offered insightful knowledge and forewarning that made her valuable. A new guiding voice, picking up where Holloway left off, guided Darkwire from the shadows once more. With its guidance, and her small financial gains from marriage, Daiya financed new operations at the club Silkscreen. Cementing her influence and embracing rumors as the Pink Widows, Daiya found a new purpose in Celeste 7, ready to face the lunar megacity that shaped her and challenged her daily.
Detailed history
Origins
Daiya began life as a lunar lava rat, so it seems only fitting that’s where she wound back up. Her parents were not wealthy, and like many of their fellow lunar migrants, a child added burden to their family as well as joy. Marissa and Zane provided as best they could for their three children, and even with the additional income from their eldest son taking what work a child could find, the family barely scraped by. For her part, Daiya couldn’t have noticed much in her family’s years of struggle, even from an early childhood she could never sit still long enough to be told much of importance.
Her chances at a normal life improved almost immediately at birth. The Trumans were approached by a medical researcher, offering a low-risk trial their newborn infant could participate in. A simple vitamin shot, with a later follow-up, would net the family a sizeable sum of MHO, money the growing family had a desperate need for. The contract was signed, and after a simple injection gave Daiya no immediate reaction, the Trumans were relieved in more ways than one.
Debts were paid off, and though life was not necessarily comfortable in their small dwelling in the lower lava tubes, lunar life was habitable for Daiya and her family. Still, it seemed to Daiya that she must make it her life’s work to beautify her surroundings, starting early with her own bedroom. She was a demanding child of tidiness, wanting cubbies and drawers for her things, even assisting her dad in assembling her makeshift vision. These went often ignored, Daiya might roam long and wide in the house leaving playthings abandoned where they lay. Friction often bloomed with her siblings, Jason and Rafe, who were seven and ten years older than Daiya, and far past able to cope with the nursery mentality of serious play. Besides, both held jobs instead of attending school, contributing what they could to the family’s circumstances, until those circumstances shifted for the better.
Upward Mobility
New connections made by a life out of poverty meant that her parents were able to wrangle corporate jobs. Real corporate jobs, not mere wage slavery, sitting in climate-controlled offices with work piled on desks to call their own. Mundane as it was, the work provided enough for their family for their kids to be kids again. Tensions cooled for a while, and even her parents breathed a sigh of relief when Daiya began attending school full time and no longer had to be the sole source of order or attention in her life.
It was just when the Trumans moved up in the lunar world, literally, from a far-flung residence near the end of the lava tubes district into a locale just a tram ride away from the seven corners of the city center, that Daiya’s life began to change. The new frontier lent itself to new opportunities for the whole family, from a school with updated curriculum to visits among the lunar city’s growing attractions. For Daiya, however, the visits to gardens, museums, and the child-friendly days at her parents’ work in surface buildings were punctuated by strange images only she could see, and occasionally her nights were plagued by nightmares.
Her parents, thinking this was because of their move, gave their daughter some time to adjust. Daiya did adjust, enough to get a rudimentary understanding of the strange dreams that could come at night or in the waking hours. They persisted for her, coming again and again until she took whatever nebulous action they demanded. She might have to offer a classmate a tissue before they sneezed, or know the answer to a question before an instructor even asked. Her new teachers noticed the odd behavior, but brushed it off as a disruption that got the confused girl into trouble. When her parents tried to ask about her school behaviors, Daiya evaded their questions or offered unhelpful answers. Her parents were advised to put their daughter into therapy, but instead focused on encouraging hobby talents she had expressed before.
Sanctuary 91
Art and dance became the focus of young Daiya’s life outside of school, and that suited her just fine, While she could hone her art craft in the margins of assignments, the doodles raised more questions about her behavior that were becoming harder to avoid. In the cramped confines of the lunar city, it was difficult for a child to find a safe place for movement. Her parents focused on dance and enrolled Daiya in several dance studios before finding one that fit with her personality and desires. In the Little Europe neighborhood, Vision Studio 91 was controversial for its methods of adapting dance to the lunar environment and run by Madame Yelena Skobsvena, a small and sharp-tongued woman who handed out praise like candy: bittersweet. Nevertheless, Daiya’s talent caught the mercurial Madame Yelena’s eyes and by the age of ten she was considered a rising star at Vision Studio 91.
Daiya poured herself into dance, barely skating by in her academics. Though she became better at hiding the outward evidence of her visions, the disruptions to class and social times made her feel disconnected from her peers. She was constantly praised for her intelligence and creativity but her heart wasn’t in it, those talents prized in the upper levels of the lunar city were little motivation for a child feeling left behind by the present day, and her family. Her brothers soon graduated school in quick succession, Jason going right back to work after his ceremony while Rafe was soon offered an apprenticeship. With her older siblings too busy to linger much at home, Daiya became more of the focus, and by the time she reached her teenage years it felt as if she had been raised as an only child.
No one suspected that the infant vitamin shot Daiya’s parents were paid handsomely for was cause for any of the odd behaviors she exhibited. Least of all Daiya herself, who was unaware of the experiment or her unwitting participation in it as a newborn. Her psionic talents went unnoticed by Corporate trackers, in the midst of program shake-ups and financial deficits. As far as the city’s medical profession believed, Daiya was a normal, if energetic, kid who could someday be a valuable addition to any corp’s spreadsheet tallies.
Daiya did not do well under the smothering attention given by her parents, or the lack of it by the city’s corporate apathy. Only Madame Yelena seem to offer the refuge that Daiya needed as a youth. Dance was a respite from the struggles of home and school, and somehow even her visions paid her a respectful distance while under the watchful tutelage of the normally-reticent Madame Yelena, who had praise for Daiya alone among her closest age peers. The instructor became a surrogate parent of sorts, one that even the Trumans came to notice the way she glowed while talking up Daiya to other students. Despite Madame Yelena’s bouts of withering criticism when she fell short of expectations, Daiya found somewhere safe to be herself. Sometimes, her visions came in moments of solitude at the dance studio, but if Madame Yelena ever witnessed or suspected anything, she never said a word to her. She was, after all, the winner of Celeste 7’s Little Miss Rockettes competition at 11 and 12.
Her visions continued to come, with greater frequency and intensity. Some were so vivid that they left Daiya with a lasting headache, along with an impression that lingered behind closed eyelids. She began to draw her visions again, intentionally so now that they were better understood, and kept to a sketchbook rather than in school assignments. The headaches, too, began to serve her as a warning of a vision to come, giving Daiya time to prepare herself and find someplace out of the way until it was over. Hiding them grew paramount in her mind, the years of shame and wrong discipline had taught her more lessons than school in general, and paranoia began to creep in that someone might discover her secret talent.
The Studio Falls
At the dance studio, Daiya excelled far past many of her peers, breaking into routines that Madame Yelena insisted would take years to master. No matter how many times she fell or stumbled, or came under the receiving end of the Madame’s famous tongue lashings, Daiya refused to give up on her ambitions. She slipped in the rankings, attempting challenging work that failed to impress competition judges as highly as before. Nevertheless, she persisted. In the middle of a particularly difficult rehearsal when she was fourteen, Daiya was stuck on the receiving end of a potent vision that spelled an end to her era of pursuing her ambitions in relative safety.
The signs were all there, and Madame Yelena had been in rare form already for a few weeks. Daiya chalked it up to her recent competition loss, where she slipped down to 11th. When they argued, behind the locked doors that had become a new safety feature at Vision Studio 91, the Madame’s lashing remarks seemed to hold more than just a frustration with her pupil. She took it personally instead, pushing through a practice worn down by their argument and Madame Yelena’s sharp critiques, continuing on despite the headaches warning her to stop. Daiya’s practice only ended when she was immobilized by her own psionic affliction, viewing a stark glimpse of a future about to unfold within minutes.
When she told Madame Yelena what her vision held, feeling compelled to share for the first time in years, the woman took Daiya seriously. No questions or judgement came forth, as if she had known all along, the dance teacher merely made a gentle request of Daiya to gather the younger students and escort them out the old tunnel complex connecting the studio to a nearby storefront. Moving quickly to herd her fellow dancemates, Daiya caught glimpses of the burly figures who arrived, hulking cyborgs who made loud demands of the studio and its leader. She never heard the sharp, loud rebukes expected of Madame Yelena, a change in demeanor that left a frightening impression on her, keeping Daiya fearfully quiet until they were all safely out.
All but the Madame. When Daiya returned the next day, the studio looked nearly unchanged but for the cyborg presence once more, seemingly under the direction of a mechanical AI bot. Uninterested in the teenage girl, they moved equipment from a series of flatbed carts into the studio, whose proud sign out front had been ripped from its place. Rarely shy, Daiya asked but none had answers for her, only firm warnings to move on. The Madame was gone and Vision Studio 91 was no more.
Life without the dance studio was dull and monotonous for the girl who loved color and loved being on the move. Her parents couldn’t convince Daiya to pick up at another studio, and her home life began to feel more and more oppressive. They couldn’t understand that it wouldn’t be the same under another dance teacher, tantamount to a betrayal, of sorts, to Madame Yelena. Dance would never be the same to her, and since her parents could not come to understand her, Daiya stopped trying to convince them. She grew more remote at home and took time away from it, claiming to reconnect with friends but, in reality, finding new ones away from any she had known at school or dance. Friends she crossed paths with on her afternoons and weekends roaming around the lava tubes, venturing into marketplaces, slipping into places she shouldn’t go, and crossing paths with others who had no better place to be. They dressed in black and blue, much like the city’s shadows, and soon the colorful Daiya learned to blend into them much like they did.
From Pink Panther…
They called themselves the Nighthawks, most of them older and adept at using the city’s infrastructure for their own devices. Oftentimes she watched them incite chaos, soon playing lookout or a small distraction part. Their easy smiles were more than a welcome for the girl who felt no other place to belong, and their words were an irresistible dare. Brimming with a confidence that made them seem like they belonged to the city itself, like they were its chaos, and stimulated Daiya in ways that not even Madame Yelena had managed. Before she knew what was happening, Daiya found herself one of them, getting swept up into a world where the unsavory felt nothing short of satisfying.
Daiya learned far more with the Nighthawks than she ever had out of school, and soon enough it felt as if she was living another life entirely. She learned to shoot a gun, to freerun her way between buildings, to drink and swear like breathing, new talents she picked up as if she had been doing it all her life. They taught the bitter teenager the dynamics of the city, powers that ran it from the top and from the streets. The Nighthawks even helped her see that even the actions of the Unimatrix gang, the culprits that had taken over her dance studio, was driven by the corps and their persistent demand for more power and money. The city was consumed by its quest for more mohs, more Mean Hourly Output, and any wanting to play a part in that needed more power and more mohs. All but the Nighthawks who thought themselves above the temptation, using acquisitions to wreak havoc on the means for others to acquire it.
Daiya kept her new experiences from her parents, who grew worried by their already-secretive daughter growing more withdrawn, curious about how their teenager was spending her time. They learned some from her growing sentiments about the city, how its oppressed its citizens even more than the lethal vacuum outside. It worried, not enough to take time away from their busy jobs, but still enough to try a variety of punishments when Daiya was picked up by the city’s law enforcement for numerous petty crimes like trespassing or carrying an illegal weapon. As her parents told her many times during lectures, they could not understand her choices. How could their once-ambitious child, a rising star in the world of dance, simply throw away what achievements she had made, and all for criminals at direct odds with Celeste’s core values? Being proud products of the lunar values, her parents tried to impress upon her that through hard work and the right connections she could rise even higher someday. Daiya’s future, they worried, was full of only misery and darkness.
Her future, as Daiya Saw herself numerous times, lay more with the Nighthawks than with her parents. She put on the right face and attitude, mustering up enough good behavior to be let out without supervision once more, lying and stretching her limits returned Daiya to the Nighthawks once more. She felt closer to them than her own family. Her found family took actions were bold and often illegal, but she got such a high from helping them pull off a job that they began to feel more like a game to her. With them she learned how to better avoid capture, where her visions lent her a third eye to such things, and earned herself the nickname Pink Panther for those colorful vanishing acts. She used it for her own devices, slipping out of school to pull off important jobs with the Nighthawk crew. Sometimes she would use the mohs she earned to pay off classmates to help her cheat to keep up with assignments. Some days, she just didn’t care, leading to more arguments and grounding from parents whose authority was slipping away faster than Daiya’s budding reputation on the streets. She yet wasn’t a household name, but by now the teenager had realized that she wanted to be.
Within the Nighthawks, age didn’t seem to be as much of a barrier as skill and willingness. Qualities that its leader, an enigmatic hacker who only went by Quell Surge, used to assess the more stand-out members of his crew. He stuck Daiya with more regular jobs, and while she built her name and reputation among the crew, her successes didn’t seem to impress Quell. She was no stranger to hard-won respect, however, and her ambition pushed her to impress him in new and creative ways. It was her vision that clued the crew into a maglev train making an inopportune pause, time enough for them to steal cargo right off its cars. Quell had praise for that but little else, but she did earn admiration for the crew’s frontrunner, Kit Cosmic, who often led them in the streets.
Kit didn’t play favorites the way Quell did, who revealed more of the crew’s dynamics to the naive Daiya. Quell’s reluctance wasn’t based on her age or event talents, but he wouldn’t share what that was exactly. Despite arguments with him on the subject, he never relented or grew reluctant to her company. Through Kit, Daiya found more of the opportunities she was looking for, and proved integral during the rescue of a captured net diver from a rival crew. Still, when Quell wouldn’t agree she had earned much of anything for the effort, Daiya asked him directly.
The Impossible Job
The answer came as a surprise to the teenage crew runner, a trade of favors for prestige. Daiya slipped away to Kit again, who laughed when she told him of Quell’s demands. He was earth-fashioned, Kit told her, and every other girl on the crew had only gotten where they did by obliging. Unwilling to debase herself, and betray what the Nighthawks seemed to stand for, Daiya grew closer to Kit instead. She began to spend her days with him, and sometimes her nights at his place. He stood up for her with Quell, who let him vouch for her on all but the most dangerous of missions, claiming her loyalty was a liability.
What Quell demanded of her, Kit eventually earned by being Daiya’s true supporter. Quell had made snide remarks and insinuations that she brushed off easily, but it made an impression on the rest of the Nighthawks. They grew divided, friendships and loyalties straining, when another girl caught Daiya and Kit in a compromising moment in the crew’s hideout. The two young men nearly came to blows until she came between them, and pleaded for Kit to drop it. To Quell, Daiya promised she and Kit would break up, and offered him a challenge. If he truly wanted her, Quell had to prove it right there in front of everyone with a mission designed around her talents, without holding her back.
As if guided by her vision as well, Quell saw sense in the proposal. Kit wasn’t happy with their new distance, or the time Daiya spent now with Quell, who had her practicing old routines again. No longer involving guns or work on the streets, the Nighthawks leader had come up with a job that matched skills Daiya hadn’t thought he cared about. For her at seventeen, it was an opportunity of a lifetime. The job put her in the spotlight and at the ultimate risk, one that would rely on her skills of dance, deception, and ask a sacrifice of her. Hearing the details was genuinely chilling, she hadn’t danced for a performance in years and to follow through with the rest would take guile, cunning and a patience even she wasn’t sure she had. The payoff was worth it, Quell insisted, tallying up huge numbers that made eyes bug out. Literal billions were at stake, and for a girl who had learned not to take much interest in money, even she was salivating at the magnitude of the windfall.
After not much consideration, Daiya agreed. She would pose as a dancer, requiring intense practice to recapture her past level of achievement. The routine was more complex than any she had ever attempted, and the crew was lucky enough to have acquired a braindance recorded by a dancer who had done it once before, badly. Daiya would have to overcome the failure and give the performance of her lifetime, and only then would the job begin. The plan, when she was ready, was to catch the eye of Alistair Holloway, whose love of dance and theatre had never waned even into his greying years. His patronage of the arts was only part of his reputation, his widower loneliness was widely known in Corpo circles as well. It was said that he refused every offer of viable marriage but was a religious attendee of performance halls, waiting for just the right woman to catch his eye from the stage.
The Courtship
That was to be Daiya. When her performance nearly ended in a heap on the stage, rising to a collective sigh of relief in the crowd, she thought she could hear Holloway’s applause louder than all the rest. The Nighthawks had made arrangements for her to meet with him after the show, along with other arrangements. Daiya was no seductress, her relationship with Kit had come about by mutual attraction, and she could hardly restrain her disgust of needing to work closely with Quell to plan the job. He tutored her heavily on triggers and pressure points, but there was no script that could convince Alistair Holloway of her worthiness. That was the part Quell had worked on while Daiya practiced dancing, spending weeks to crack the countermeasures of Holloway’s neuralware, making minor adjustments to the set of cybernetics the man had implanted to make his lunar transition easier in the early days of the moon. All of the work made him more susceptible to Daiya’s charms that evening. He was dazzled by her, asking to see her again and again, and on their third encounter Holloway proposed marriage.
Marriage was part of the plan, the hardest part to pull off. The Nighthawks were clear, and had done their best to make Holloway amenable to the idea, but the bulk of the work rested on Daiya’s slender shoulders. It was up to her to get Holloway to rush into marriage, forgetting the most crucial part of all for him: protecting his fortune. When Daiya brought him to meet her parents, breaking the news to them for the first time, they had a screaming match in the middle of the upscale restaurant in the Rim District. Daiya was crushed, and a sturdy Holloway cradled her as she cried that she had failed. Worse yet, not even the Nighthawks would answer much when she reached out. Kit left her messages on read, and Quell only sent a repeating loop of platitudes that she came to suspect was pre-programmed before she’d ever begun.
Blocked from marriage and cast out of her found family, not even a vision could see Daiya out of her predicament. Eventually, cooler heads and words with her parents prevailed. Daiya agreed not to see Holloway any longer, who took her rejection with gentlemanly esteem, acknowledging for the first time that Daiya was probably too young for marriage after all. Weeks went by, and to all around her, Daiya appeared to be returning to her old self. Back at school, though, she was so far behind that it took paying classmates to help her just to keep from being dismissed altogether. Then at night, the same vision returned to her time and time again, urging her to seek out the comfort of her lost love.
One sleepless night, Daiya indulged it at last, going wandering around the ever-twilight lava tube, letting her vision and sketches lead her on trams and elevators. She found herself at her old dance studio, now a off-brand therapy clinic. Daiya braved the inside, finding a chilly reception to her polite interest. When she mentioned having once been a student years ago, before it was a clinic, the human receptionist seemed confused but allowed her to peek into one of the blacked-out rooms. The soft music and equipment taking up little space offered just the right environment to dance. It was a dance of her own making, unrelated to the music or any routine she’d learned before, only the product of putting thought and feelings into motion. She ignored requests to stop by the clinic’s staff, and again when several cyborg goons appeared to make the threat real. When her limbs struck one of the approaching gangsters as she danced, things got physical. Daiya didn’t hold back either.
She arrived at back door of the Holloway’s estate in the early hours of the morning, the only one connected to the district’s tunnel system. Bloodied and sorely beaten, she sobbed into the microphones of the drones that appeared to ward her away. When she was told to leave, Daiya made it to the edge of the connecting tunnel before she broke down, unable to move on. Spending the night huddled against the tunnel, it was Holloway himself who approached her in the morning. Upon seeing the state of her, he called for his personal physician to bandage her wounds and help mend the several fractures the Unimatrix cyborgs had given her. She cried and confessed to Holloway for hours, until he knew every detail of her life until the studio closed, some vague stories to fill the time between then and now, and, between the lies, enough about the Nighthawks to ruin what was left of the job. It didn’t seem to matter anymore, Holloway was the last person Daiya felt safe with, believing she could share something, anything about herself. He was the first she ever told about her visions, not expecting to hear much of a kind word. He delivered the very opposite and more than she was ever expecting.
Life Under the Stars
They were married that afternoon, at a private ceremony in a little dome under the stars. Of the few who attended, Holloway would hear nothing but praise and admiration for him and his new bride. Daiya had succeeded with the Nighthawks’ plan at last, marrying a Corpo in his most vulnerable state, whether that had been her intention or not. Even she didn’t know, and when Quell tried to re-established contact, Daiya turned him away. Instead, she reached out to her parents, trying to mend bridges and make up for years of heartbreak on her part. With access to money and the power to change lives, Daiya finally understood why so many in the city sought it out.
Daiya tried to make the lives around her better with her newfound access, reaching out to her parents and trying to track down Madame Yelena. Her parents did accept a move out of the lava tubes and onto the surface, where the sights and amenities were in far greater supply. The Madame was nowhere to be found, however, suggesting a permanency to her demise that Daiya took as a weight on her own shoulders. Even her newlywed husband discouraged her from taking out the revenge she wished upon the Unimatrix gang, though she was more sufficiently discouraged at the realization that she would have to reach back out to Quell again. That life was over for her, but Daiya soon discovered just how gilded her cage was now as a corpo wife.
Then again, life as Holloway’s wife was never really uncomfortable for Daiya, despite the extremes in age and wealth between them. Perhaps she had always been meant for this, as her parents suggested. Or it was as the Nighthawks never wanted to believe; that power and money ran the lunar city because it worked. The Holloway name and his wealth shielded her from many of the city’s cruelties, squaring her record with the law, and allowing her to finish an education on her own terms, and in her abundant free time. Holloway was diligent and devoted in their relationship, giving her the tools to succeed and the time for herself when visions intervened. He never did make much of a fuss of them, or ask many questions, accepting her affliction and its uncanny accuracy for their futures. It came to their aid many times, and after a few opportune coincidences of his own, Daiya sometimes wondered if he, too, possessed such a gift. She sometimes imagined a better looking husband, but never one better matched than Holloway, whose maturity focused her energy in ways her peers could never muster. Daiya grew bold and confident in their relationship, and even she would seem to be taken by surprise when it ended.
…to Pink Widow
Holloway’s death was sudden, and news! There were no shortage of accusations, suspecting the wife was something of a pastime for Celeste 7’s elite when one of their own passed, even of natural causes. And it certainly seemed to be that way, the city’s coroner and the private ones that Daiya and a third-party investigator —who showed up briskly but unannounced day-of— all agreed there was nothing to suspect foul play. Nothing to pin suspicion upon the grieving eighteen-year-old, wrapped in black lace and legal battles, whose fleeting year of marriage had ended without any of the aplomb she herself would have prized.
The official reports were signed and sealed, though whispers spread in circles Corpo and 'Runner, murmurs of a heart too burdened or a mind too addled to see the end coming. In some stories it was a knife, in another, poison. More salacious tales were told, some of which Daiya found herself enjoying and wishing she had been their teller. One group was suspiciously quiet, the Nighthawks never reached out to her, nor did Daiya try. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that, somewhere in the city, they were toasting to a job well done.
In the courtroom, her parents sat behind her and paid homage to their daughter’s honor, but they would never linger long enough for her to really reach them. The few friends of Holloway’s, and hers, also faded into city’s neon fabric, leaving Daiya to fend for herself as before. Without a prenup, however, the courts were left hanging. Daiya was Holloway’s lawful wife, of that there was no doubt. Whether his fortune should pass to her was a question that the lunar megacity’s elites seemed deeply divided on. Even if her marriage was legal, even if the character witnesses and falsified documents her lawyers had drawn up —clearing her name of the many misdeeds and connections to the Nighthawks, by virtue of the naivete of youth or by disassociation or by other means— all stood up to scrutiny, to allow her inheritance to stand would be to invite more chaos to descend upon the unsuspecting in wealthy circles of Celeste 7.
To allow a Discrete to rise up within their ranks by marriage, not by substance or amassing money, could threaten the very fabric of the city. Such a thing was never spoken in her earshot, only gleaned from things left unsaid, from net commentary, and once or twice from a vision that offered her only more unsettling answers about her fate. Holloway was her strong connection, he was the only string she could pull, and the children of his late wife were eager to cut her off from any remaining purse-strings or networking she might have retained. And so the courts found largely against her, ruling that Daiya was entitled to none out of Holloway’s substantial fortune, which would disburse among his company’s shareholders and subsidiaries instead. Without a win, or being able to claim the stock in his name, Daiya’s windfall vanished before her eyes, leaving her among the lunar masses once more, and angry about it all over again.
Inheritance
Only their shared house was hers. The sizeable liens set against it, a few of them discovered during the probate conflict, meant that she had no chance of holding onto the residence for her own. As Daiya oversaw the clearing out of his lunar mansion, she ventured at last into Holloway’s private office. She had let him have the space, respecting his locked door out of courtesy for his respect of her visions. Now that it was hers, she spent time reviewing the documents inside. Most were perfunctory, dry business records, some family documents that she gladly sent to the digital refuse as well. And then Daiya stumbled upon a treasure trove, a series of files and folders, some dating back further than the births of her parents, or Holloway’s own children, when they held uncoded and plain names. Names she thought were simple lunar myth, Storyteller, Shadowrunner, and Darkwire.
When the house was sold and ends tidied, Daiya walked away with what seemed to be a thorough history of Darkwire, and had read through most of it. Darkwire, more cryptic than Quell’s riddles had been, more mysterious than Madame Yelena’s tragic disappearance, was a true enigma. Founded sometime in the early colony days, the group took on the countenance of a proto-mercenary crime group pushing anti-corpo rhetoric with occasional violent activism. In reality, from what Daiya read, they were guided from within the Corpos by Holloway himself! Posing as the Darkwire Storyteller, he sent them missions and communicated secretly with prominent Shadowrunners, positioning them with just enough influence to herd the unconsolidated group in the right direction when needed.
Daiya was more surprised to learn that Holloway hadn’t given up. She found messages from the Storyteller dated to the months before he died. Many in the past years had gone unanswered, plans foiled by apathy or a lack of critical mass. Holloway had only so much patience with them, never satisfied with their inability to move mountains like they once had. She found plans for the future as well, dossiers on its Shadowrunners, and his thoughts on who to nurture or expel. The extent of it was shocking, and incredibly vital to the young woman who returned to her home below the surface, now unbothered by the whispers that followed her.
The Prophet Emerges
The Pink Widow, as she was known, became something of a badge of honor for the returning hometown castaway. Daiya quickly set out to do what her new cache of information allowed. To make connections, build trust, and make a name for herself. This time, with Darkwire. She quickly found her way in, parceling out morsels of information, insights that seemed prophetic, advice that helped to save enough lives for Darkwire to begin to see Daiya as one of their own. A Shadowrunner. Daiya kept her knowledge of the group as hidden as her visions, which continued to aid her, but made use of Holloway’s back channels with the group. They learned of the Storyteller’s retirement through a new identity known only as the Darkwire Prophet.
It was the Prophet who told the group to buy a new venture, giving them a physical location and new life as a rumor seeded with the opening of Silkscreen. Daiya repeated it every time she showed up, it was her money that financed the club after all, and to most it only seemed like the owner was tickled pink to learn that Darkwire met right under their noses during the silent rave dances. As a Shadowrunner, and one growing in repute, Daiya knew very well that Darkwire’s presence at the club brought in attention both desirable and not. To those Discretes who knew, or learned from others, of the gravity Darkwire’s endorsement lent to Silkscreen, Daiya could redeem herself from her brief Corpo days. And to those Corpos who could still follow the money, seeing Holloway’s widow suddenly fall into business with Darkwire suggested there was still new gains to be made through the group.
Few could ever understand what Daiya really needed from Darkwire, or just what direction they might go tomorrow.
Mechanics
Story Purpose
Daiya is a street-savvy gunslinger, adept with both words and weapons to further her goals and that of Darkwire. She is a lieutenant of sorts in Darkwire, who can both lead and take orders when necessary, so long as it hurts the Corpos. She is aided by her psionic ability as a Reader, a deep secret that is overlooked by her notoriety as a Corpo widow and a rising star in Darkwire.
Stats
- Muscle: 1
- Grit: 2
- Savvy: 3