Indira

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Neurosurgically enhanced hitter with a chip on her shoulder. Being phased out in favor of newer models. On the run with an old fashioned meatsack to avoid that fate.

World Description: Indira is from a neo-noir cyberpunk setting that is around a couple hundred years post-apocalyptic. People live in sprawling megacities that are separated by vast swaths of abandoned wasteland, and almost all traffic between them consists of freight by train or ship. Very few people travel between cities, and for most the idea of doing so is absurd. For anyone not at the very top of the socio-economic ladder, the city you're born in is the city you die in, so much so that their names have fallen out of use. To the vast majority of its citizens, every city is the city.

While there is some semblance of formal government, most of the power in the world rests with megacorporations. By nature they are very few in number, and each has its own strongholds, but at any given moment there is a power struggle going on beneath the grimy city surfaces, especially in places where no faction has a significant advantage over another. Indira's home city is like that, embroiled in constant behind-the-scenes conflict. Of course, each corp keeps itself properly distanced from its black ops teams and stable of freelancers. In public, everything is above board.

Constant exposure to, integration with, and usage of technology is just a fact of life. Cosmetic cybernetic surgery isn't uncommon and minor enhancements for practical or professional purposes have been available for decades. More recently, however, corporations have been experimenting with much more advanced modifications – ones that greatly increase human capabilities. Initially, most recipients didn't make it more than a few days post-procedure, but as the technology was refined there were more and more successes. Officially, they were “enhanced humans.” Colloquially they were stick men, because they were always thin and hungry no matter how much they ate; spiders, for the frightening speed at which they could ascend the slick side of a skyscraper; glasseyes because the surgeons go in through the eyes for the brain grafts and install high grade multifunction optics in their places. And once the corporate scientists perfected the procedure, they started tinkering with physical as well as neurological enhancements. They've made enough progress that older models – those who refuse further surgery, or whose implanted tech is not compatible – are becoming obsolete.

History: Slum-born, Indira was raised as part of the sort of amorphous ragtag cloud of neighborhood children that no one took full responsibility for but that everyone looked after. There were varying levels of involvement by parents and, once she joined the urchin mob, Indira didn't see hers much. Since then, she's maintained a cordial but distant relationship with her mother, and her father disappeared when she was eight. She figures he either managed to climb out of the slums or he's dead.

Though a lot of living below the waterline was communal out of necessity, no one had much of anything. And beyond that, having so few resources fostered a competitive nature in some. After a couple times through the loop of someone giving her a hand one day and selling her out the next, Indira learned to play her hand close to her vest. It was also pretty obvious that “legitimate” jobs were either uninterested in slum kids or paid less than any number of less legal alternatives. Indira picked up a lot of hard-knock skills young and by the time she was old enough to support herself she was mostly getting by on thievery. Her hands were quick and being small and light on her feet made it easy to for her melt into a crowd and disappear. She never got good at seeming innocent and harmless, but she figured it didn't matter so much if she just never got caught. She did get caught, a few times – everybody did – but the police generally had more pressing issues than underaged pickpockets to deal with, so it was never really more a than a few days inconvenience.

Around the time she turned eighteen, sleek black sedans started rolling up her neighborhood streets once or twice a month. No one seemed to know what for, exactly, but every time a few more of the kids she grew up with left for the city proper. None of them came back. Indira figured she wouldn't if she got out either, even if no one knew how. There were plenty of rumors and wild speculations, but she didn't put much stock in any of them until it was her turn.

Turned out that some of the rumors were right – they wanted test subjects, lab rats, and hey, why not flip through juvenile offenders and pick out a couple slum rats? No one would miss them and they'll do anything for money. And, once Indira said she was interested in this mysterious money-making opportunity, there was no turning back. There were lawyers in those cars, lawyers with terse explanations and thick stacks of legal documents to sign, wreathed in medical jargon and experimental procedure stamped red on every sheet. No one said as much, but it was pretty clear saying no after hearing what was being offered was just a ticket to an early death and an unmarked grave. So she said yes.

She never even learned the name of the corporation – Praxis – until after the surgery. Later, she found out that most of those kids died – some on the table, some not long after. They were up to a 30% success rate then, up from single digits not all that far back, and they had a couple handfuls of fledgling operatives to show for it. Training camp picked off a few more, and first assignments halved what was left of the field. Even if Indira were inclined to form attachments, it wasn't an environment conducive to it.

Most of her close calls early on were from inexperience and reckless aggression, and then from overconfidence and reckless aggression. As much as she disliked admitting to her mistakes to others, she learned, and along with her physical skills and increasingly finessed control of her new abilities, she began developing and eventually refining some tactical skills. She was never going to be a strategist, but it was good enough to keep her alive.

And then there was the money. There was a lot of it, almost as much as she'd been promised, but she was an investment. She was monitored constantly and it was made clear that she was not a freelancer – Praxis paid for her enhancements and training, Praxis expected loyalty. They never got it. She never stepped outside the bounds of her contract – that would have been suicidal, effectively, but she never got comfortable with it the way some of her compatriots did. Business was business.

Eventually, around twenty-two, she found a niche, partially through her skill set and partially through her lack of subtlety. She was the statement killer, the one Praxis sent after someone when they wanted to send a message. She rode it out through another seven years of work. But lately, the assignments have been slowing down. The game is changing, the technology is advancing, the modifications becoming more extreme, and she's never met a hitter over thirty-five – usually not over thirty.

Then her jobs start going sideways. The target moves unexpectedly, there's a new security system, oops did we mention that small army of surveillance drones? The last straw is when someone beats her to the punch. Someone fully human, with her own eyes and everything. Unenhanced hitters are rare these days, much less ones almost as old as Indira is, and there would've been one less if Bennett weren't such a fast talker. The conspiracy theory sounded like a lot of bullshit, but combined with all the things going wrong lately it was enough to make Indira pause – and that was enough for the slippery bastard to get away.

Bennett was just trying to save her own ass, but she was closer to right than either of them knew. So after a couple fresh new stick men punks break into Indira's apartment and fail miserably to kill her, she goes looking for her. She can throw her farther than she trusts her, but there's no one else to turn to.

Personality: A first blush, Indira seems blunt, pushy, and utterly lacking in refinement. This impression is entirely correct. She is, in general, a strike first and ask questions later kind of gal, and is largely uninterested in the finer points of interpersonal relationships. If she wants something, she will tell you, and she will expect to get it – or a good reason why she can't. She is straight forward and upfront and enjoys people who are the same way.

Despite this, she is incredibly internal. She doesn't share her thought processes or feelings with anyone, prefers to chew over problems on her own, and just generally needs time and space to herself. Once she's set in her plans/opinions/feelings/etc she doesn't care so much – but while she's working things out, she wants people out of her business. Way, way out.

This is something of a change from her younger days, when she didn't really think anything out and just went for it. Being aggressive and persistent got her through a lot of things, but once she was in the world of corporate cloak-and-dagger rather than the usual street hustle, that didn't work nearly as well. She had to learn to take a step back – to make plans and be ready to both follow and abandon them as appropriate. There are still problems with it – she's likely to focus on her end objective to the exclusion of all else and isn't much good at planning for variables, but she's even better at smashing little snags with her fists than she used to be.

That's part of why nuances tend to escape her. She's not stupid, but she tends not to read into things. If it's important, she expects it to be spelled out. Her first couple handlers were frustrated by that, but eventually they learned. She takes people at face value, if not what they actually say to her. As long as she keeps an eye out for the knife aiming for guts, she figures she doesn't really need to know more.

She's also less hotheaded than she used to be, mostly out of necessity and survival instinct. It used to be that if someone or something made her angry, she destroyed it. It got more complicated once she was physically capable of destroying large objects and structures in addition to soft, fleshy humans, and she learned to redirect her anger pretty quickly once Praxis yanked her by the leash a couple times. She's always going to make mistakes, but she learns from them, and her base directive is always just to survive.

Either way, she doesn't hold grudges. Once she gets over the rage of the moment, she lets it go. There are a few scenarios that might engender lingering resentment, but she's not going to go out of her way to mess with anyone. If it's not her business, she'd rather stay out of it, and if you make it her business she will probably try to take over, unless you show her you're in charge – and why.

In short, Indira is neither unfriendly nor overly interested in other people, generally more inclined to get along with other plainspoken sorts and dislikes those who don't just say what they mean, is not particularly prone to taking up causes, doesn't like taking orders unless someone's earned the right to do it, and is very, very scary when angry.

Abilities: Indira is effectively superhuman. She is several times stronger and faster than a regular person, can leap long distances both vertically and horizontally, and has enhanced senses, though her sense of smell isn't quite acute enough for tracking purposes. Her body has been reinforced to withstand the physics of her profession, and her pain receptors have been altered to politely inform her brain of injuries rather than screaming wildly and disturbing her focus. She shrugs off minor cuts and contusions very quickly, and generally heals faster than a normal human would. It's not a superpower, however – bones need to be set, wounds need to be dressed, and at this point in her life she's probably had a couple tissue grafts. It's the bits after that that go faster. The trade off for all of this is that her metabolism is jacked way up – she needs a ton of food, and is almost constantly some degree of hungry.

Her eyes have been replaced with high grade optics; while they look real for the most part, they have a variety of built in functions, in addition to greatly enhanced vision. They are not hampered by lighting conditions, can be used like binoculars or a rifle scope, and are capable of a variety of informational scans.