Extended Character Writeup 4: Jolt
Technical School Education allows only a +1/2/3 defaulting modifier to background knowledge skills instead of 2/3/4.
Friendly Face allows a -1 to TN's to infiltrate unknown groups or meeting new people in new places.
Natural Hardening gives 1 point of Hardening, cumulative with cyberdeck hardening.
Impulsive requires a Willpower(6) test to jump into situations without thinking.
Braggart requires an Intelligence(6) test with 2 successes to not show off while telling a story.
Appearance and Personality: Jolt is the youngest member of the team, at only 18, and still sort of looks his age. He's average height-around five nine, and has a fairly average and wiry frame. He's in good health, and isn't a couch potato, but he's also not particularly the guy that goes out of his way for athletics, though he enjoys skateboarding from time to time. Jolt is Afro-Brazilian, though his parents were both born and raised in the UCAS(his grandparents may have lived in South America for awhile, though not for long if they did; his family is pretty thoroughly and solidly from the UCAS.) He has a long, braided mohawk-usually tied up but sometimes left to go fairly wild, and gray eyes(his eyes are cybereyes, but they're designed to look fairly normal; his natural eyecolor was brown but he wanted something a bit more interesting), his style of dress usually consists of jeans or baggy shorts, high-top sneakers and various punk-rock T-shirts, sometimes with the sleeves torn off. He wears a synth-leather armored jacket is colder weather and throws on form-fitting body armor underneath if he knows things might get dangerous.
He does have some obvious 'ware; he has two datajacks(two on his right temple), and a multislot chipjack down behind his left ear. (The rest of his ware is all internal; headware memory, knowsoft link, smartlink and a Math SPU; after his initial escape and large load of stolen nuyen he had gotten a Cerebral Booster installed as well.) He often wears black eyeshades for style.
Jolt is a child prodigy; a bonafide genius(he, Vallie and Silver can occasionally use words and discussions lost on the other members of the group), and his cerebral booster allows him to do even more abstract things. He's an absolute whiz at all things math, science, and engineering; though magic is something he doesn't get no matter how hard he tries. He's a tech-nut through and through. Jolt is easygoing, laid back(sometimes outright lazy sometimes), and pretty easily likable and sociable; even the more hard-edged Talon took a fairly fast liking to him(in so much as Talon actually likes people.)
Jolt has a fairly good schooling of the ways of the world, despite his young age. He knows places to lay low, recognizes certain areas as being not too good to hang out in, but where he really shines is matrix topography and all places Matrix. He knows where the Matrix gangs hide, he knows where to go deal with them, if there's a chat room with information he can probably find it if he doesn't already know where it is. He has a fairly decent network of other hackers and pirates(and other people of the cyber world) at his fingertips.
He's probably the happiest in his big warehouse-loft thing he has set up with a computer and electronics shop; he's currently saving up for a full blown facility(there's plenty of room for it.) His living quarters look more cluttered than what might be good, though he can seemingly find whatever spare parts you might need fairly quickly. He has a large trid set up along with other odds and ends(he does some pirate trid broadcasting on his spare time and makes some okay bonus cred from it), a large area for his music collection; punk rock is his favorite, particularly older bands like Black Flag, DRI, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, the Misfits and Bad Brains, though he's quite into some of the newer ones too(if they have a raw edge to them.)
In terms of food he is happy stuffing his face with Bucket-burgers, anything from the Stuffer Shack or whatever; he's not too particular if it's real or soy(and buying soy lets him spend more money on stuff like toys and gadgets anyway.) He's probably one of the least-picky members of the group when it comes to eating, with several of the other members preferring real or at least halfway real fare. He'll even drink soykaf, much to the chagrin of Downfall, Talon and Silver, and he's been known to sustain on a lot of that-along with energy drinks-for those late night gaming or tinkering sessions. His nickname is sort of derived from an old energy drink.
Jolt tries not to kill. He will pull out real ammo if necessary, but he relies mostly on gel rounds or his trusty large stun baton if he has to fight; he's not in bad shape at all but prefers keeping overwatch and handling Matrix duties(he will not think twice about burning enemy decker's decks, and will attack them directly through the matrix if push comes to shove as well.) He tries to remember that a lot of the security are just people, and he's occasionally curious onto the brutality of some of the members like Downfall or especially Talon(given the former will strike to disable if the enemy does not try to kill him first), but he is content with knowing that different people have lead different lives that cause them to react differently.
The team gets on well with him; while they occasionally find his bragging a bit eye-roll worthy and sometimes need to temper his impulsive nature, his general good attitude and computer/electronics skills have saved them more than once, and they all can count on his unflagging loyalty to the group. He always has a positive word and a generally optimistic outlook, which can be a rarity in the 2050s.
Right now his goals are to gather enough money to expand his shop into a facility, customize a deck that can make an Excalibur look slow(his current Kraftwerk has been hacked apart and put back together and highly customized already with a ton of additions; nothing off the shelf is good enough for him) , and he wouldn't mind-on a personal level-to get his parents out of the corporate life, since he knows Ares is not he cleanest of the corps around(well, none of them are, but he really hasn't liked what he's heard of them.)
Getting an even bigger warehouse would be to his liking, as well; he actually sort of likes the Tacoma district and all of the industrial-style things it offers. He also one day sort of dreams about getting his own pirate trid station going full time and becoming a sort of 'anarchist news leader' one day; one of those legends that goes down as the guy who managed to hack insert scary thing here.
“'Bootleg' or 'Pirated Copy' sounds so...bad. I prefer to call them 'Imports.'”
“I can do a number on this thing. Easily. What sort of mods ya want? Full mods? Medium? I can even put a pretty wiz anti-theft device on it. Won't even hurt any of the microtronics inside!”
“The first demo is always the best. The latest album, that's usually the one they sell out on.”
History: Brian Bower was born to two Ares employees, Jason and Victoria Bower, in May of 2037. Both of them worked in some R&D department(weapons, to be sure) that he didn't find out what it was until much later. They lived a rather decent lifestyle in one of Baltimore's more expensive business districts(Ares Arms has their HQ in Baltimore, and the city took on quite a corporate bent after that) and Brian grew up not wanting for anything.
Things were looking even more up when he was discovered to be a bonafide genius; his tests were through the roof and regular school quickly got him bored. While he was not magically active he had a strong leaning toward engineering, and he was moved ahead in school rather quickly. He graduated at the age of fifteen and immediately went into technical school; he wanted to go to MIT&T, but his parents felt that it would be better for him to stick in one of Ares' technical schools, given he was likely going to be working for that corp(they were putting him through said school and had already made a deal with his parents to get him into a very high paying position once he turned eighteen.)
He enjoyed technical school, but stuff started feeling more and more 'wrong' to him. Being highly intelligent and curious, he wondered why his parents rarely talked about what they did. He was no fool; he knew Ares Arms were the weapons manufacturing branch of the corporation, but he didn't know exactly what they did(any corporation has anyone from secretaries, to finance specialists, to lawyers, to computer specialists...and yes, to the weapons engineers themselves, which they did.)
Brian let things alone for some time, up until his last year of technical school. Ares brought him in for cybernetic implants; datajacks, cybereyes, headware memory, and such things that would help a decker along. Brian loved decking and did it on his spare time(though already delving into some of the shadier aspects...very much on the down-low, of course), and things just started to feel very funny now, since he knew how much cyberware could cost...and free school, free ware...he had a feeling he was in for a time of 'servitude' to the corp. Brian's more punk-rock attitude(he took a big liking to old punk-rock music of the 1970s and 1980s while surfing old Matrix archives, and also liked the attitude there) sort of chafed at the possibility of being a company man.
What really drove the nail of 'no fucking way' home for him was when he discovered one of the projects his parents were working on-that they helped develop. A weapon that could cause rather large-scale death and destruction. Poking further(he was rather impulsive about sticking his nose into things, and he had the decking skills to cover his trails), he discovered more weapons they helped develop. Feeling like he had been living on blood money his whole life from this, he confronted his parents about it.
The discussion got a bit heated(more on his end...his parents, while caring, were fairly blasé about the whole thing...possibly, he thinks, because they have simply told themselves over the past fifteen years or so that this is how stuff was, this is what they do, and they're not the ones deploying them), and Brian ran off to cool off for a few days, ostensibly at a friends house. Which he was...but he was making his plans to get out.
He had easy access to his money, thanks to a family bank account and his hacking skills, anyway. He had been funneling away money on his own, and he figured a few more withdraws over the days would give him enough. He was looking at Seattle, which he knew, through a few people he knew over the Matrix, had plenty of people willing to pay for his services. He thought to himself that yes, he was probably going to be involved with some dirty business, but it would be to stop things like the development of weapons that hurt large groups of people.
He was able-after some time-to locate a sort of warehouse like place in the Auburn district, which seemed to be as good a place as any to set up shop, and the 'realtor' was a bit of a 'no paper trail needed' type-which was much better for the young man, who was able to set a few things up right over the Matrix. He set up a train ticket with some certified cred(so it had no trail), and then, after unloading a fair bit of cred onto various certified and forged credsticks, loaded a bunch of belongings into a large military style backpack-including his cyberdeck, some of his favorite music chips, clothing and other odds and ends, threw on his leather jacket and disappeared on a late-train for his cross country ride.
Thanks to his well-made fake SIN and the like, he made it cross country without issue; he was getting a bit bored after a couple of days. In Seattle he was able to set up quickly in his new place where he immediately lay low for a couple of weeks, burning as much of his old trails as he could via his own decking skills and his contacts.
Eventually, his pokings around the various corners of the Matrix put him in contact with Spanky, who knew a team who happened to be looking for a decker. While he was a bit apprehensive around the older, more experienced runners, he fit in rather quickly, even getting along fairly decently with some of the surlier members of the group, finding video games being a rather common link between them, of all things. After seeing how much he went to the wall for them on a particularly hairy run(resulting in him having to stay in Dr. Douglas’ clinic for a few days to recover from a nasty Black IC attack), he was fairly set as a steadfast member.
Being young, he doesn’t look ahead too far. Right now he just wants to build bigger and better toys and stick it to several corps while he’s at it. He’s still idealistic; it remains to be seen if the shadows will affect this or not.
Besides the usual crew(Spanky, etc.), Jolt also knows:
Nate is a young ork ganger who looks otherwise human(Human-Looking edge); he's just a particularly big guy. He looks like he dropped right out of a heavy metal band, with his death metal t-shirts and long, brown hair. He's a deadly fellow despite his age though he's defensive against those smaller or less able to defend themselves.
Taris is an elven street cop who is a closet fan of various video games. Jolt gives him tips on how to get better(and even plays with him sometimes), while Taris will give him useful tidbits of information about varied things. He's not on the take, so to speak, but he's a little disillusioned on how Lone Star handles things.
Kyra, the decker who is the huge K-pop and J-rock fans. She's extremely schooled on all things Matrix and chatrooms.
Franklin is his deckmeister, a dwarf who excels at getting stuff that falls off of trucks-and new tech, too. Jolt sometimes helps 'test' some of it. He's often up for a good game of Quake 6.
Killswitch is a heavily cybered elven combat tech-wiz. He's got a torso, two Kid Stealth cyberlegs and a cyberarm, all heavily modified with a lot of strength and blades and everything. He's very useful for runs that need an on-site tech(he's good with electronics, computers, and vehicles, though not specialized in any one), since he can also wreck enemies who get in his way as well. He trusts metal more than meat, but he loves retro video games and the two bonded over both that and tech.
