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This character is provided as an example of how I like to see a PC background detailed instead of just
Parents both died, grew up at private school
16 - Make Friend - Teacher (Hide/Evade)
17 - Love affair with problems
18 - etc..
This is neither my favourite character nor what I would call a very well-rounded character. Réthe is a pretty twisted kind of guy, my attempt to convey what a low empathy character can be like.
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"We've all seen that movie "Starship Troopers" when "our heroes" all lose their families when the bugs dropped a rock on their home town... Well, when they Euros dropped a rock on my parents' house in Colorado, all I felt was relief. Without their help, I would never make it to med. school - which is what I was relieved about"
"Also, without the funding of the Zaibatsu dad worked for, I coudln't go to the private school they kept me locked away at in Utah. I lied to the administrators and said my aunt would pick me up that evening, and Hitched to New Orleans."
"Life was rought out there on the streets of the French Quarter. Luckily for me an old con artist named Cody took me under his wing. He claimed to have been a fighter jock before the Orbital Cutters made most of his training obsolete; but I was always under the impression there were regs about eyesight in the USAF and Cody's pale gray eyes were always seen through his thick glasses... But that's waht you get when you ask a con artist about his past."
"We worked well together while it lasted, I acted as his eyes while he ran his cons. On the side I would keep him alerted to the comings and goings of the local Five-Oh."
"But no real story has a "happily ever after" and we went our seperate ways soon after I met Linda. I guess Cody realized he was going to need a new partner after she got her scratchers into me. It was a match made in hell, and I was in love with the devil, a twisted little girl. She was 16 when we met, two years my junior, and already hell on wheels."
"Once Again I was playing look-out for someone else's scams, only this time it wasn't con games. I kept an eye out for cops and CorpSec while my red-dreaded partner ran micro-runs on security systems and the older ATMs that weren't tamper-proofed yet. And then the euro started rolling in and we started living the life. WIth euro came better clothes, and with that and more euro we could go to the good clubs and do the good drugs and she would bring home the hot boys... annd I would leave them at our conapt and crash in the coffin hotel down the block."
"Two things followed that really changed my style..."
"She got hooked on the wire. Not real bad, but hooked. She had to tap in at least twice a day, but rarely for more than an hour or so. But this lead to her deciding to build her own wires, copying the designs of the two she had bought. And I started selling them - mostly to college kids at the clubs and to other up-towners wanting to four-oh-four in the zone. Some of Linda's pieces weren't too hot, and some were way to hot - she was still learning ya know. I watched one of my "clients"' hair smoulder as he twitched to death under her wire... but that's just a lesson for those uptowners - stay out of the zone, zombies!"
"The other event really changed things. One day she came home from a night at "the Temple Of Doom" meatrack and asked me to provide some "ballistic counselling" to one of the club kds she had brought home a few weeks before. Seems this drek had jacked her white lace and had started spreading the word around that she was the one manufacturing the bad wire in town."
"It took a lot to work up the nerve to do it, but once I had that little gonk of a club kid on the ground in front of me, aiming my first gun at hime and yelling that I was gonna execute the mother fucker, I had this erotic / adrenaline / dominant high that i started getting off on. I had the gonk describve in exact detail everything he had done with my input the time they had jammed. Once I had that out of him I shot both his ankles and yelled for him to tell it again. When he moaned and started puking up instead, I shot him another dozen times until the gun cycled on an empty chamber, spat on him and went back to my little devil."
"We left New Orleans for Dallas, Texas not a month later. Turns out the Bronze were hot on my ass when we skipped, but I only found that out a few years later. We were actually on the run from the rep Linda's wires had, off to find new markets now that she had "perfected" a new wire."
"In Dallas we prutty much had to start from scratch, and it looked to be a long road back to our old lifestyle. I dealt wire and Blue Glass to the proles out of a sequence of dives through the run-down parts of town, scratching out a living and supporting Linda's habits."
"Two months into our Dallas time, a chilly just-above-freezing janurary night, I met Carlucci. He was a scary son-of-a-bitch with cehemically-altered monotonous gray skin and matte silver implanted mirrorshades. Everybody in the scene new who he was - he moved armament that's legal in Texas all over the rest of the US and Canada, as well as a bunch of armament from small third world countries that wasn't even legal in Texas."
"He first contacted me tow ork part time as one of his facemen, wheras it turned out he really wanted me as an enforcer. Linda and I fought about it constantly once I took the job since she wanted me to devote my time to moving her wire instead of working Carlucci's smuggler contacts."
"Then, with the first bright days of spring, I came home after eliminating a delinquent client of Carlucci's in New Mexico to find the conapt stripped of everything valuable and all her gear. To this day I occasionally run into one of Linda's people - she's one of the hottest wire-builders in the East COast Underground now. I can still feel the textrure of her dreadlocks on my shoulder and chest and feel her breathing at my side when I wake in my coffin in the early morning after a rought night."
"With Carlucci, we continued to pretend I was a faceman and not just "local talent". I actually learned quite a bit about conducting gray business in his employ, between settlements of accounts and dealing with competition. Nice part about working as "talent" for an armament dealer is having a new toy for each hit - fire and forget like they say."
"But I started losing my taste for the Business Of Punishment, sometime around meeting Annie again. Annie had been one of my wire customers back in New Orleans. We met at a Hindu Flesh Mechanic's stall on the strip where I was checking out a pair of implant mirrorshades like carlucci's, she was looking for a cheap RAM expansion for her wetware drive. We had both dumped the wire and just started talking about New Orleans, Dallas and the old scene and stuff and hit it off. Two jobs later I gave Carlucci the bad news that I was pulling myself out of the loop and moving with Annie to Night City, where her job was taking her. Our parting was pretty damn amicable, as one could only hope for when dealing with someone who owns a large selection of autonomous assassination units."
"Annie and I settled into a small conapt in Night City. She worked nights as a SysOp while I made some new contacts and friends in our new environment. We'd go clubbing in the early evening at the best meatracks that her salary allowed."
"I still see Annie once a week, but don't expect that she notices. 'Bout a year and a half ago a netrunner whacker her with some nasty Black ICE while trying to crack her security perimiter. Her contract with Raven Mycrocyb indicates that they'll keep her on life support for another 7 years in case of such an eventuality..."
"So now I'm in business for myself. Buying and selling favours and tid-bits and generally getting by with the dreck of Night City. But I'm not killing folks this time out. I'm trying to exercise a bit of restraint like Annie tried to teach me."
"One year later I've only fired my guns a dozen times each - damn good for Night City, and haven't sent anyone to the body bank to my knowledge. I've brought together a lot of my old contacts or my old contact's contacts in Night City and things are looking up again."
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