//YOUR SELF
Name: Nicolas Edgardo Tuaño dela Rosa
Age: 31
Gender: Male
Affiliation: Black Yangtze (enforcer)
Appearance: Stocky, broad-shouldered visibly healthy male of Malayan descent. 5’9, 170 lbs, brown eyes and black crew-cut hair. Elaborate black-colored dragon tattoos on his neck, back and arms, a clear sign of his allegiance to the Black Yangtze. Square, muscled face with minimal facial hair and a very stark, soldier-like jawline. Prefers plain T-shirts, cargo pants, and military boots.
//YOUR SOUL
PERSONAL GOAL: To make enough money to leave New Malacca and find his family in the United States.
LIKES: Pork dishes, science magazines, target shooting
DISLIKES: Kimchi, gambling, hangovers
REPUTE: To his bosses in the Black Yangtze, Nicolas is a reliable enforcer: imposing and intimidating, yet professional and discreet. The average person on the street would recognize the tattoos on his arms and wisely back away on the assumption that he is on “official” business. To his colleagues on the job, Nicolas is a bit of a square - doesn’t do women, doesn’t do drugs, and less alcohol than most. Most of the time they just attribute it to his religiosity and have a good chuckle.
HEEL: Nicolas likes to consider himself a generally “principled” person, but he very well knows his single biggest weakness is the desire to see his
Family again. He is willing to take any job, kill anyone who needs killing, and betray anyone if only to get a chance to be reunited with his wife and child.
CODE: The traditional churches of old are barely more than museum relics in New Malacca, but Nicolas tries to follow what is left of the tenets of his
Catholic faith. He takes communion and confession at a small hole-in-the-wall chapel nestled within an alleyway in Hibiscus Lane.
QUIRKS: Nicolas generally has very specific and exacting preferences for food and drink. He insists on certain combinations of beer and squid chips, soy sauce and fish, wine and cheese, etc. The most reliable bar chow combo for him though, is roasted pig skin with Handakoro apple cider.
//YOUR PAST
Nicolas was born in an age between ages, when the dying political dynasties that ruled the Philippines raged against the rising influence of the megacorporations. His father, a taxi driver, was shot in the streets of Manila in a shootout between a real estate corporation and squatters defending their shanty towns against demolition. Nicolas’s mother worked as a casino receptionist by day and a wares merchant by night to make ends meet. Growing up in the neon-lit reclaimed slums by Manila Bay, Nicolas was surrounded by severe wealth inequality, all sorts of vices in virtual reality, and the looming threat of random violence hanging like a dark cloud over everyone he met.
Nicolas hated school and spent most of his time playing esports in the virtual reality cafes nearby, much to the chagrin of his mother. At one point he seriously considered going pro, until one fateful day when the internet cafe he was in was being robbed at gunpoint. Nicolas also witnessed the subsequent shootout between the robbers and police, and wondered if the warriors he played as in his virtual video games could also exist in real life. Lacking the actual ambition to make it to university, Nicolas instead opted to enlist in his local police academy after high school.
The Philippine National Police in the 2080s was a corrupt, underfunded, poorly regulated excuse for a national law enforcement body. But for Nicolas, it was home, and sooner or later he began to almost enjoy the place. By being willing to put himself in danger in the many raids the force conducted against Chinese drug runners, Muslim pirates, and the occasional anarchist cell, he rose up through the ranks to become a respected senior corporal. He even managed to find a woman and raise a son. Though the pay could have been somewhat better, things were going well until the boy caught the wasting disease.
His condition needed a steady supply of medicine so consistent Nicolas had to resort to stealing from the department’s infirmary. His meager salary wasn’t enough to cover the hospital bills. He had to stop taking on dangerous cases for fear he would die and leave his family without a father. He could only be promoted so much until his salary hit a ceiling. From then on, he was on his own.
Out of desperation, he turned to the colleagues he hated the most. They were the “bad” apples in the ranks: they took bribes, ran drugs, and did the occasional hit, but they made way more money than anyone else in the force. And for a while, he was part of them, his typical responsibilities being raiding a warehouse with a certain amount of amphetamines while the next one over was shipping ten times the amount. But he could keep the medicine flowing and the child happy, so he didn’t think much of it - and neither did his wife. Until the day that someone snitched, and they needed a fall guy.
It happened all so fast. The sirens in the dead of night, his own brothers threatening to break down his condominium door, and one panicked, final decision made in a dark, quiet room: they would split up, temporarily, and find each other again.
That was the last time Nicolas ever saw his wife and child.
He wandered on the streets for several months, until being recognized by one of the rivals of the gangs he used to do “business” with. They knew who he was and the grudges he held, and so they recruited him for a similar line of work - with no pretenses this time.
It has been five years since Nicolas saw his family. While rising up in the ranks of the Black Yangtze, being shipped from place to place, he’s thrown thousands of asyuan at private investigators who have failed to find a single lead except one: there were reports of two persons matching the descriptions of his family sighted somewhere in Los Angeles. Coincidentally, the job also came up. Nicolas requested from his superiors that he be deployed on this specific contract for official Black Yangtze purposes, knowing full well this would be his last. All he needed was one more score to escape New Malacca, wipe himself from the grid, and make his way across the Pacific one last time.
//YOUR PERSON
ATTRIBUTES:
- Sharpshooter: Nicolas is a very reliable shot with almost any sort of firearm, honed from years of combat experience in a variety of environments.
- Drug sniffer: Nicolas knows how to identify all sorts of illegal narcotics from black ganja to synthetic opium, and has a rudimentary knowledge of how they’re manufactured.
- Bad cop/good cop: Nicolas kinda knows how to deal with people in general. Wine and dine them, or cut them up, or somewhere in between - he has a way with extracting information and “compelling” people to do what needs to be done.
BODY MODS:
- Verge Battletech Orion-model Biosystem: composite neural network and muscle bioweave in his limbs to make Nicolas more responsive and reflexive to stimuli while enhancing his overall physical ability.
- Paradigm Plus BioID Network: neural implant embedded in Nicolas’ eyes to identify a person’s physical and psychological states, and from that determine the possibilities of them doing certain actions e.g. drawing a weapon, fleeing an altercation, etc.
EQUIPMENT:
- Nandago TC-39 Tactical Rifle System: base assault weapon template with a plethora of customizations to adapt it to sniper fire, CQC, explosive rounds, non-lethal rounds, etc. Favorite amongst elite Malaysian PMCs and well suited for unpredictable combat situations.
- Zeiger A-45 Semiautomatic Pistol: reliable sidearm and staple of New Malaccan gang violence. Is almost impossible to jam due to its simplicity of design. Has two main ammo options: stun and kill.
Combat knife: never runs out of ammunition.
RisingSun