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Fursona "character sheet"
13 years ago
So I just spent a bunch of time writing up a brief history of my fursona, the world she's in, and how she came to be in her current situation, and I decided I'd go ahead and post it here, I guess just for shits and giggles. Maybe an artist will find it useful some day, who knows? I tried to keep it... relatively somewhat brief. But, as usually happens with me, that didn't work out very well. :P
Here goes...
Background:
Iriomote Island. It was a small island, remote, largely unpopulated by permanent inhabitants. Most who lived there were farmers, fishermen, hunters, and priests - despite the advent of modern technology that had come with the increasing tourist traffic to the island, there was a strong sense of tradition on the island, and the islanders still liked to fend for themselves. It was to two such islanders - a pair of rice farmers - that Yu Lin Isara (伊沙羅・玉琳ま) was born.
Yu Lin's parents weren't particularly wealthy. In a world of technology and food grown in labs, rice farmers weren't very important anymore. Outside their small island, no one needed their rice, so the Isara family's only customers were the other denizens of the island.
And it was a small island. The family struggled, but survived... until Yu Lin's sister, Rosalyn, was born. A fourth member in the family was too much for their small budget, and even at 5 years old, Yu Lin could tell. Her parents needed help... and Yu Lin was determined to provide it.
She started by offering to help them run their stand in the market, but that didn't help, so she decided to find some other way to help. As it turns out, even a small island like that has crime, and as she was out looking for something to do, it found her: good money for standing on the street corner and reporting information to the mysterious stranger who had approached her. Too young to know any better, Yu Lin accepted, and this was the start of a short and slippery slope for the little girl.
As she proved herself more useful to the gang who'd hired her, they brought her more and more into the fold. They revealed their operations to her - they were a big group, it turned out, operating all over Japan and using her little island as their hideout. And they wanted to groom her to be one of them, so they started teaching her. She learned lockpicking, they taught her to shoot, she learned how to lie without getting caught, and they trained her in the art of parkour. Before long she was pulling the heists herself, sometimes going with the gang all the way to the Japanese mainland for a big score, always nimbly running off before anyone could catch her. But more importantly than anything, the gang was teaching her technology.
In the world she lived in, technology was everything. You could pick a lock and that was fine, but not many locks were pickable in the old style anymore. Everything was electronic security. Everything was computer-controlled. Didn't matter whether you wanted to steal, kill, or destroy, these days you had to have someone with you who could get past the tech. And Yu Lin was quickly becoming that person.
She showed a real affinity for it, too. The other things she picked up slowly. Fighting, stealing. Those things came, but with time. Computers... those came almost effortlessly. She understood them on an intuitive, intrinsic level. And thanks to the lessons of the gang's tech expert, she quickly became an impressive hacker. By the time she was 13, there weren't many computer systems left that she couldn't breach.
Unfortunately for little Glitch, her overconfidence in her abilities soon became her weakness: she was caught attempting to hack a government website for the gang. She thought she'd gotten in and out clean, until the doors to her hideout were kicked down the next day by soldiers. The whole group was arrested and taken in for questioning; as the hacker behind the security breach, Yu Lin was offered two choices: be tried as an adult and spend the rest of her life in prison for her activities with the gang, or spend it in community service serving the state as an agent of the Japanese-American Union's Joint Intelligence Administration. She took the obvious choice, and was sent into training as a field agent. After a few years of training and education, she was to become a field technical specialist for the Clandestine Services Division, supporting other field agents in their activities and providing hands-on services engaging in cyber espionage against network-isolated systems.
As she began her training, it quickly became apparent she'd dodged a bullet, and likely only because her age had given her some sympathy from the JIA. The rest of the gang was in prison. Some on death row for murders they'd committed. She hadn't fully understood exactly what her gang had been doing - she knew she'd helped them with a few thefts, but she had no idea that they were performing hits, too. As she trained and studied, she also matured, and she came to realize that she truly and honestly cared about the wellbeing of the citizens of her country - and rather than being in prison, she'd found herself in an organization that would let her help them better than most anyone could.
So she applied herself to her training seriously. Whether it was combat or weapons or tradecraft or advanced software engineering and security classes, she put everything she had into them. Finally, she graduated her training and made it out onto the field.
The field was nothing she could have been prepared for. It wasn't like the little heists the gang had taken her on to make her feel included. It wasn't anything at all like her training. It was scary. People almost died. People *did* die, and sometimes it was her fault. But gradually she got the hang of it, and with a little luck, survived long enough to find her groove and start to excel.
And excel she did. As she moved up in the ranks within the CSD, it became apparent that, in a world where technology was becoming the backbone of all aspects of society, technical specialists such as Yu Lin were in a special position to bypass many kinds of electronic security and get close to enemy personnel (and their secrets) more easily than other operatives. And Yu Lin's history as a gang member gave the agency an out to deny and denounce her as an asset if things went wrong. As a result, Yu Lin was selected as one of a small group of elite agents to receive an experimental operation to implant them with an advanced cybernetics suite, granting enhanced speed, mobility, agility, and survivability to help them survive the dangers of field work, and along with it, to receive special training... Yu Lin was to become one of the CSD's most deniable assets: an assassin.
Unfortunately, it was this new work that ultimately turned Yu Lin against her own government: while she had been working for the JIA in the hopes of improving the lives of the people of Japan and America, as she gained trust with the CSD, her operations began to grow steadily less transparent. She was sent after targets with little or no information on who they were or why they needed to be killed. Yu Lin became suspicious and uneasy, and when things finally came to a head, it turned out she was more resourceful than even the CSD had counted on... she hacked into the CSD's own computers and traced every lead she could on her last several targets.
After hours of tracing leads and piecing together bits of a carefully disguised puzzle, Yu Lin was finally able to uncover the truth - a terrible, shocking truth that shook her to the core. Her targets were not enemies of the state, not terrorists who posed a danger to its citizens. Her targets were civilians, those who had voiced dissatisfaction with the government, or worse, those who had taken actions that had negatively impacted the sales of one of the nations' larger megacorporations. The CSD had followed their activities, everything from their public conversations to their emails to their bathroom reading material, carefully compartmentalizing the operation to prevent any of their agents from uncovering the big picture, and then had sent Yu Lin and the other assassins to have them silently eliminated.
Yu Lin couldn't take the truth. Everything she thought she had been working for had been a lie. Rather than national secrets, she had been protecting corporate secrets. Instead of protecting the lives of the citizens, she had been ending them. Disillusioned and disheartened, Yu Lin fled, taking what assets she could - as well as any names she could uncover from what she had pieced together - and leaving the CSD behind her. The organization she had devoted her life to had betrayed her... and had betrayed all the people it had sworn to protect.
Several months later, an unknown cyborg assassin made her first hit on a government employee, leaving a senator dead on the stage of his own press conference, along with a message repeating on a loop on all of the nation's vid networks: "I am Glitch. I am the bug that brings down the system. Runaway code that you wrote, and I'll bring your whole machine crashing down around you. Your people have unknowingly suffered for too long. Your citizens don't know what's happening behind closed doors, but I do, and now they only need to know one thing: I will stop it, and for those responsible - like our late senator - my blade will be the last thing you ever see."
Personality:
Yu Lin is a feline, but she's a bit different from some other felines out there - the words "cute" and "playful" don't apply in any meaningful way whatsoever. Cold, cunning, occasionally sadistic, and often manipulative, she doesn't like to be fucked with and she won't take your shit. She's often been described as cynical or jaded, doesn't trust easily, and tends to hold everyone as guilty until proven innocent. That doesn't mean she doesn't have a warmer side, but it's not the default. However, she can be generally sociable and even occasionally witty when she's around people she doesn't consider to be idiots or assholes. Despite her cynical and cold attitude, however, Yu Lin can display a remarkable amount of optimism regarding the people to whom she grants her trust, and has faith in the basic goodness of people. She just believes her society has already taken all the goodness away from most of them.
In public, Yu Lin prefers not to be seen or interacted with more than necessary. She typically likes to remain in the shadows, out of the way of other people, observing but not participating. More often than not, however, she doesn't go into public in the first place, as she feels far more comfortable in the presence of machines than in the presence of other organics. Machines can be trusted. Machines do what they say they're going to do. Machines don't lie, stab you in the back, or make you unknowingly take innocent lives.
Yu Lin doesn't make friends. You can try all you want, but she simply doesn't do it. Let alone romantic relationships. There was a time, of course, when Yu Lin had friends. But that time is over. She can't afford to have friends anymore. Not as long as her government still stands. Anyone who knows her is a danger... so, for their own safety, Yu Lin knows, better than anyone, that it's best if she just lives her life alone.
Despite all of that, Yu Lin wants to believe in people, and in the idea that things can get better. She got her name from a Taoist nun who, before she was born, saved her parents' lives while visiting Iriomote Island. While she was in training with the JIA, she also started studying Taoism herself, and found its views incredibly compelling; now, she frequently meditates on the Tao, and tries her best to keep it in mind as she fights to free her people. Sometimes, she finds her fight to be at odds with Taoist teachings, but she strives to understand and incorporate the teachings, and hopes that some day, they'll show her a way to finally end all of the pain that her government has caused.
Physical Description:
Yu Lin is 5'10" tall, relatively tall for a girl, and has a slender, toned build to her body - a body that's the result of untold amounts of invasive cybernetics and a strict daily exercise and training regimen. Her frame is relatively curveless - her hips and breasts are both relatively small, with her breasts barely making the mark of B-cup.
Notably for her species, Yu Lin has a case of melanism - excessive melanin production causing her fur to all present in shades of black rather than brown and white, as is typical of an Iriomote Wildcat. Notably for an organic, the girl is heavily and visibly cybered - her right leg from the knee and her left arm from the shoulder are entirely mechanical, built with armored plating of kryronized aluminum to keep it both light and bullet-resistant, as well as to protect the precious innards from EMP blasts by acting as a faraday cage. Her tail is also fully prehensile - though not capable of fine motor function, cybernetic implants give it the strength and flexibility to wrap around structures and support her body weight.
Yu Lin tends to wear clothing that fit within the punk genre. The way she sees it, her society has become as cyberpunk as they get, she might as well dress like it. Thus, she tends to wear punk clothing - tops with buckles, elbow-length fingerless gloves, pleated skirts, flare pants. Whatever else she's wearing, she's rarely without her sleeveless hooded trench coat, which she uses to hide her face in shady areas. Additionally, while her brain is equipped with rudimentary augmented reality software, the fact that only one of her eyes is cybernetic means she often complements the AR display with a glowing green holographic visor, which shows her information on her surroundings, and frequently, on the computer or security system she is trying to hack.
When her clothing is gone, the power source for her cybernetics is revealed: a nuclear power core embedded into her back, with glowing green power and data lines stretching out in all directions across her body to power the vast suite of cybernetic implants - both the visible and the internal - throughout her body. Even when clothed, however, a few of these lines remain visible - those running up the back of her neck and onto her left eyelid, and the two connection points on the back of her right shoulder.
Yu Lin's hair is a short, functional bob haircut, extremely short in the back and shoulder-length in the front, with layers of black-over-green-over-black, giving the impression of jagged green tips all the way around her head. Her bangs are solid green and hang straight over her forehead, with a few antenna-like springs of black hair hanging down over them and reaching down to her cheeks, which again serves to provide an impression of mixed black and green colors in her bangs.
Weapons and Cybernetics:
Weapons: Yu Lin's arsenal is relatively small, aside from her cybernetics: she carries two selective fire machine pistols in shoulder holsters and a single cyber-enhanced chain whip, which is kept holstered inside her cybernetic arm. Each link of the chain whip contains within it two small, slightly curved monofilament blades, the same length as the link itself, as well as a small amount of poison. When activated via a mental command from Yu Lin (sent through her wireless network), the blades spring out of the whip, and when deactivated - or when the whip enters close proximity with Yu Lin's own body - the blades retract back into their links, granting the whip far enhanced killing power over a traditional whip. Additionally, the end of each link contains a powerful electromagnetic field generator, which, when activated, can cause some or all of the whip to stiffen, enabling it to block attacks from harder weapons.
Cybernetic Arm: Yu Lin's left arm hosts a number of extra features. Most notably of these, however, are the hidden blades contained within it - her fingers each conceal a two-inch-long, spring-loaded blade, which is normally kept stored in the palm to enable the fingers to bend, and the palm itself hides two additional blade the length of her forearm, which can be extended or retracted in an instant, granting her the ability to launch surprise melee attacks with these blades. When extended, these blades are arranged to enable her to use them as a trapping and disarming tool for enemy blades, and can additionally be extended sideways to dock at either side of her wrist for a more comfortable fighting grip. Finally, there are an additional two single blades that can extend from her elbow for further surpise attacks, one extending backward from the forearm, and the other extending downward from the upper arm; naturally, only one of these can be extended at a time.
Additionally, her arm has several small storage compartments, which she can use to hide anything from poisons to bullets, and which are shielded to keep those items from showing up on any scans. Her arm also hosts an extra data port in the tip of the forefinger, which can be used in lieu of or in conjunction with those on the back of her neck, and her pinky finger houses a small cutting laser (unsuitable for combat use) and an arc projector, which first uses the laser to create an path of charged ions in the air, and then launches a small pulse of electromagnetic radiation, which will follow the ion path and disable any electronics it comes in contact with.
Organic Arm: Even Yu Lin's organic arm isn't 100% organic. It hosts a few utilities to assist her in primarily non-combat situations. Most notably, like her cybernetic arm, her organic pinky has a cutting laser embedded in it, though it lacks the arc thrower feature of the other arm, and it contains a few sensors - including magnetic field and sonar sensors - that provide her tactile feedback on her surroundings when her eyes are disabled.
Cybernetic Leg: The leg, like the arm, also hosts hidden blades - though in its case, only a single blade the length of her shin that can be launched from the bottom of her heel. Also like the arm, the leg has hidden, shielded storage containers. Additionally, the leg can store six small grenades, ranging from flashbangs and EMP grenades to fragmentation grenades and incendiary grenades, which can be thrown as normal or dropped behind her as proximity mines as she runs, detonating on any target following her.
Eye: While most of Yu Lin's augmented reality overlay is handled by her visor, her left eye does have a few features of its own - namely, magnification, infrared vision, low-light vision, and ultraviolet vision. Since only one of her eyes is prosthetic, the eye has been designed to interface directly with her brain, replacing the vision from her right eye with the image from her left to prevent the awkwardness of functioning with one eye closed - but at the loss of depth perception and peripheral vision to the right in the process. Additionally, in the event that her visor is broken or disabled, the eye also is able to provide an augmented reality display, though again, using it comes with the sacrifice of depth perception and peripheral vision in her right eye.
Body: Yu Lin's body is heavily cybernetic, incorporating, in addition to her arm, leg, and left eye, a full suite of muscle and mind augmentations. Her bones have been coated with a ceramic laminae, her joints enhanced with servomotors, her muscles strengthened with cybernetic fibers, and her mind augmented with a tactical computer system. As a result, her speed, durability, strength, agility, dexterity, computational ability, and reaction time have all been dramatically increased - she is able to withstand falls from heights of up to ten stories without breaking a bone, run at speeds of over 40 miles per hour bipedally or 100 miles per hour quadrupedally, leap up to three stories into the air, and lift up to 500 pounds. Additionally, Yu Lin's cybernetic implants are responsible for her tail's prehensility, having reinforced and strengthened the muscles in the tail enough to make it suitable for grasping, though while it can hold onto large objects such as pipes, it lacks the ability to do any fine motor manipulation or hold onto particularly small objects - she cannot, for example, fire a gun or swing her whip using her tail.
Her body is powered by a nuclear power core embedded in her back. In an emergency situation, when completing the mission is more important than either her survival or that of any number of other innocents in the surrounding area, the power core can be detonated, generating an explosion capable of taking out several city blocks. Naturally, this is a one-time operation, as there's no operator left to attempt it a second time.
Mind: Yu Lin's tactical computer deserves special attention, as it comes with a number of special functions. Combined with the AR display in her visor, it provides more than just computational assistance. It also provides an IFF display, which interfaces directly with her brain to label targets as friends, foes, and neutral parties. It provides a direct network uplink, enabling her to find information at a moment's notice and view it on her AR display. But most importantly, it provides combat functionality - auto-adjustment of her hand to help compensate for weapon recoil, target movement, and wind conditions, tactical analysis of the battlefield conditions, including odds of mission success and/or survival, prediction of enemy behavior based on pattern analysis when battles last long enough, and execution assistance for complex acrobatic maneuvers, including particularly dangerous parkour techniques, such as running across the face of a billboard to bridge the gap between two skyscrapers.
To prevent hacking, the computer is separated into two separate pieces - the first, which is networked and only capable of executing programs on her AR display, and the second, which is not connected to any network and is the only part capable of causing movements in her body. The second computer is responsible for coordinating her organic and cybernetic components, so if it ever does get disabled, she becomes nearly paralyzed, as moving the servomotors on her joints manually is incredibly difficult.
Here goes...
Background:
Iriomote Island. It was a small island, remote, largely unpopulated by permanent inhabitants. Most who lived there were farmers, fishermen, hunters, and priests - despite the advent of modern technology that had come with the increasing tourist traffic to the island, there was a strong sense of tradition on the island, and the islanders still liked to fend for themselves. It was to two such islanders - a pair of rice farmers - that Yu Lin Isara (伊沙羅・玉琳ま) was born.
Yu Lin's parents weren't particularly wealthy. In a world of technology and food grown in labs, rice farmers weren't very important anymore. Outside their small island, no one needed their rice, so the Isara family's only customers were the other denizens of the island.
And it was a small island. The family struggled, but survived... until Yu Lin's sister, Rosalyn, was born. A fourth member in the family was too much for their small budget, and even at 5 years old, Yu Lin could tell. Her parents needed help... and Yu Lin was determined to provide it.
She started by offering to help them run their stand in the market, but that didn't help, so she decided to find some other way to help. As it turns out, even a small island like that has crime, and as she was out looking for something to do, it found her: good money for standing on the street corner and reporting information to the mysterious stranger who had approached her. Too young to know any better, Yu Lin accepted, and this was the start of a short and slippery slope for the little girl.
As she proved herself more useful to the gang who'd hired her, they brought her more and more into the fold. They revealed their operations to her - they were a big group, it turned out, operating all over Japan and using her little island as their hideout. And they wanted to groom her to be one of them, so they started teaching her. She learned lockpicking, they taught her to shoot, she learned how to lie without getting caught, and they trained her in the art of parkour. Before long she was pulling the heists herself, sometimes going with the gang all the way to the Japanese mainland for a big score, always nimbly running off before anyone could catch her. But more importantly than anything, the gang was teaching her technology.
In the world she lived in, technology was everything. You could pick a lock and that was fine, but not many locks were pickable in the old style anymore. Everything was electronic security. Everything was computer-controlled. Didn't matter whether you wanted to steal, kill, or destroy, these days you had to have someone with you who could get past the tech. And Yu Lin was quickly becoming that person.
She showed a real affinity for it, too. The other things she picked up slowly. Fighting, stealing. Those things came, but with time. Computers... those came almost effortlessly. She understood them on an intuitive, intrinsic level. And thanks to the lessons of the gang's tech expert, she quickly became an impressive hacker. By the time she was 13, there weren't many computer systems left that she couldn't breach.
Unfortunately for little Glitch, her overconfidence in her abilities soon became her weakness: she was caught attempting to hack a government website for the gang. She thought she'd gotten in and out clean, until the doors to her hideout were kicked down the next day by soldiers. The whole group was arrested and taken in for questioning; as the hacker behind the security breach, Yu Lin was offered two choices: be tried as an adult and spend the rest of her life in prison for her activities with the gang, or spend it in community service serving the state as an agent of the Japanese-American Union's Joint Intelligence Administration. She took the obvious choice, and was sent into training as a field agent. After a few years of training and education, she was to become a field technical specialist for the Clandestine Services Division, supporting other field agents in their activities and providing hands-on services engaging in cyber espionage against network-isolated systems.
As she began her training, it quickly became apparent she'd dodged a bullet, and likely only because her age had given her some sympathy from the JIA. The rest of the gang was in prison. Some on death row for murders they'd committed. She hadn't fully understood exactly what her gang had been doing - she knew she'd helped them with a few thefts, but she had no idea that they were performing hits, too. As she trained and studied, she also matured, and she came to realize that she truly and honestly cared about the wellbeing of the citizens of her country - and rather than being in prison, she'd found herself in an organization that would let her help them better than most anyone could.
So she applied herself to her training seriously. Whether it was combat or weapons or tradecraft or advanced software engineering and security classes, she put everything she had into them. Finally, she graduated her training and made it out onto the field.
The field was nothing she could have been prepared for. It wasn't like the little heists the gang had taken her on to make her feel included. It wasn't anything at all like her training. It was scary. People almost died. People *did* die, and sometimes it was her fault. But gradually she got the hang of it, and with a little luck, survived long enough to find her groove and start to excel.
And excel she did. As she moved up in the ranks within the CSD, it became apparent that, in a world where technology was becoming the backbone of all aspects of society, technical specialists such as Yu Lin were in a special position to bypass many kinds of electronic security and get close to enemy personnel (and their secrets) more easily than other operatives. And Yu Lin's history as a gang member gave the agency an out to deny and denounce her as an asset if things went wrong. As a result, Yu Lin was selected as one of a small group of elite agents to receive an experimental operation to implant them with an advanced cybernetics suite, granting enhanced speed, mobility, agility, and survivability to help them survive the dangers of field work, and along with it, to receive special training... Yu Lin was to become one of the CSD's most deniable assets: an assassin.
Unfortunately, it was this new work that ultimately turned Yu Lin against her own government: while she had been working for the JIA in the hopes of improving the lives of the people of Japan and America, as she gained trust with the CSD, her operations began to grow steadily less transparent. She was sent after targets with little or no information on who they were or why they needed to be killed. Yu Lin became suspicious and uneasy, and when things finally came to a head, it turned out she was more resourceful than even the CSD had counted on... she hacked into the CSD's own computers and traced every lead she could on her last several targets.
After hours of tracing leads and piecing together bits of a carefully disguised puzzle, Yu Lin was finally able to uncover the truth - a terrible, shocking truth that shook her to the core. Her targets were not enemies of the state, not terrorists who posed a danger to its citizens. Her targets were civilians, those who had voiced dissatisfaction with the government, or worse, those who had taken actions that had negatively impacted the sales of one of the nations' larger megacorporations. The CSD had followed their activities, everything from their public conversations to their emails to their bathroom reading material, carefully compartmentalizing the operation to prevent any of their agents from uncovering the big picture, and then had sent Yu Lin and the other assassins to have them silently eliminated.
Yu Lin couldn't take the truth. Everything she thought she had been working for had been a lie. Rather than national secrets, she had been protecting corporate secrets. Instead of protecting the lives of the citizens, she had been ending them. Disillusioned and disheartened, Yu Lin fled, taking what assets she could - as well as any names she could uncover from what she had pieced together - and leaving the CSD behind her. The organization she had devoted her life to had betrayed her... and had betrayed all the people it had sworn to protect.
Several months later, an unknown cyborg assassin made her first hit on a government employee, leaving a senator dead on the stage of his own press conference, along with a message repeating on a loop on all of the nation's vid networks: "I am Glitch. I am the bug that brings down the system. Runaway code that you wrote, and I'll bring your whole machine crashing down around you. Your people have unknowingly suffered for too long. Your citizens don't know what's happening behind closed doors, but I do, and now they only need to know one thing: I will stop it, and for those responsible - like our late senator - my blade will be the last thing you ever see."
Personality:
Yu Lin is a feline, but she's a bit different from some other felines out there - the words "cute" and "playful" don't apply in any meaningful way whatsoever. Cold, cunning, occasionally sadistic, and often manipulative, she doesn't like to be fucked with and she won't take your shit. She's often been described as cynical or jaded, doesn't trust easily, and tends to hold everyone as guilty until proven innocent. That doesn't mean she doesn't have a warmer side, but it's not the default. However, she can be generally sociable and even occasionally witty when she's around people she doesn't consider to be idiots or assholes. Despite her cynical and cold attitude, however, Yu Lin can display a remarkable amount of optimism regarding the people to whom she grants her trust, and has faith in the basic goodness of people. She just believes her society has already taken all the goodness away from most of them.
In public, Yu Lin prefers not to be seen or interacted with more than necessary. She typically likes to remain in the shadows, out of the way of other people, observing but not participating. More often than not, however, she doesn't go into public in the first place, as she feels far more comfortable in the presence of machines than in the presence of other organics. Machines can be trusted. Machines do what they say they're going to do. Machines don't lie, stab you in the back, or make you unknowingly take innocent lives.
Yu Lin doesn't make friends. You can try all you want, but she simply doesn't do it. Let alone romantic relationships. There was a time, of course, when Yu Lin had friends. But that time is over. She can't afford to have friends anymore. Not as long as her government still stands. Anyone who knows her is a danger... so, for their own safety, Yu Lin knows, better than anyone, that it's best if she just lives her life alone.
Despite all of that, Yu Lin wants to believe in people, and in the idea that things can get better. She got her name from a Taoist nun who, before she was born, saved her parents' lives while visiting Iriomote Island. While she was in training with the JIA, she also started studying Taoism herself, and found its views incredibly compelling; now, she frequently meditates on the Tao, and tries her best to keep it in mind as she fights to free her people. Sometimes, she finds her fight to be at odds with Taoist teachings, but she strives to understand and incorporate the teachings, and hopes that some day, they'll show her a way to finally end all of the pain that her government has caused.
Physical Description:
Yu Lin is 5'10" tall, relatively tall for a girl, and has a slender, toned build to her body - a body that's the result of untold amounts of invasive cybernetics and a strict daily exercise and training regimen. Her frame is relatively curveless - her hips and breasts are both relatively small, with her breasts barely making the mark of B-cup.
Notably for her species, Yu Lin has a case of melanism - excessive melanin production causing her fur to all present in shades of black rather than brown and white, as is typical of an Iriomote Wildcat. Notably for an organic, the girl is heavily and visibly cybered - her right leg from the knee and her left arm from the shoulder are entirely mechanical, built with armored plating of kryronized aluminum to keep it both light and bullet-resistant, as well as to protect the precious innards from EMP blasts by acting as a faraday cage. Her tail is also fully prehensile - though not capable of fine motor function, cybernetic implants give it the strength and flexibility to wrap around structures and support her body weight.
Yu Lin tends to wear clothing that fit within the punk genre. The way she sees it, her society has become as cyberpunk as they get, she might as well dress like it. Thus, she tends to wear punk clothing - tops with buckles, elbow-length fingerless gloves, pleated skirts, flare pants. Whatever else she's wearing, she's rarely without her sleeveless hooded trench coat, which she uses to hide her face in shady areas. Additionally, while her brain is equipped with rudimentary augmented reality software, the fact that only one of her eyes is cybernetic means she often complements the AR display with a glowing green holographic visor, which shows her information on her surroundings, and frequently, on the computer or security system she is trying to hack.
When her clothing is gone, the power source for her cybernetics is revealed: a nuclear power core embedded into her back, with glowing green power and data lines stretching out in all directions across her body to power the vast suite of cybernetic implants - both the visible and the internal - throughout her body. Even when clothed, however, a few of these lines remain visible - those running up the back of her neck and onto her left eyelid, and the two connection points on the back of her right shoulder.
Yu Lin's hair is a short, functional bob haircut, extremely short in the back and shoulder-length in the front, with layers of black-over-green-over-black, giving the impression of jagged green tips all the way around her head. Her bangs are solid green and hang straight over her forehead, with a few antenna-like springs of black hair hanging down over them and reaching down to her cheeks, which again serves to provide an impression of mixed black and green colors in her bangs.
Weapons and Cybernetics:
Weapons: Yu Lin's arsenal is relatively small, aside from her cybernetics: she carries two selective fire machine pistols in shoulder holsters and a single cyber-enhanced chain whip, which is kept holstered inside her cybernetic arm. Each link of the chain whip contains within it two small, slightly curved monofilament blades, the same length as the link itself, as well as a small amount of poison. When activated via a mental command from Yu Lin (sent through her wireless network), the blades spring out of the whip, and when deactivated - or when the whip enters close proximity with Yu Lin's own body - the blades retract back into their links, granting the whip far enhanced killing power over a traditional whip. Additionally, the end of each link contains a powerful electromagnetic field generator, which, when activated, can cause some or all of the whip to stiffen, enabling it to block attacks from harder weapons.
Cybernetic Arm: Yu Lin's left arm hosts a number of extra features. Most notably of these, however, are the hidden blades contained within it - her fingers each conceal a two-inch-long, spring-loaded blade, which is normally kept stored in the palm to enable the fingers to bend, and the palm itself hides two additional blade the length of her forearm, which can be extended or retracted in an instant, granting her the ability to launch surprise melee attacks with these blades. When extended, these blades are arranged to enable her to use them as a trapping and disarming tool for enemy blades, and can additionally be extended sideways to dock at either side of her wrist for a more comfortable fighting grip. Finally, there are an additional two single blades that can extend from her elbow for further surpise attacks, one extending backward from the forearm, and the other extending downward from the upper arm; naturally, only one of these can be extended at a time.
Additionally, her arm has several small storage compartments, which she can use to hide anything from poisons to bullets, and which are shielded to keep those items from showing up on any scans. Her arm also hosts an extra data port in the tip of the forefinger, which can be used in lieu of or in conjunction with those on the back of her neck, and her pinky finger houses a small cutting laser (unsuitable for combat use) and an arc projector, which first uses the laser to create an path of charged ions in the air, and then launches a small pulse of electromagnetic radiation, which will follow the ion path and disable any electronics it comes in contact with.
Organic Arm: Even Yu Lin's organic arm isn't 100% organic. It hosts a few utilities to assist her in primarily non-combat situations. Most notably, like her cybernetic arm, her organic pinky has a cutting laser embedded in it, though it lacks the arc thrower feature of the other arm, and it contains a few sensors - including magnetic field and sonar sensors - that provide her tactile feedback on her surroundings when her eyes are disabled.
Cybernetic Leg: The leg, like the arm, also hosts hidden blades - though in its case, only a single blade the length of her shin that can be launched from the bottom of her heel. Also like the arm, the leg has hidden, shielded storage containers. Additionally, the leg can store six small grenades, ranging from flashbangs and EMP grenades to fragmentation grenades and incendiary grenades, which can be thrown as normal or dropped behind her as proximity mines as she runs, detonating on any target following her.
Eye: While most of Yu Lin's augmented reality overlay is handled by her visor, her left eye does have a few features of its own - namely, magnification, infrared vision, low-light vision, and ultraviolet vision. Since only one of her eyes is prosthetic, the eye has been designed to interface directly with her brain, replacing the vision from her right eye with the image from her left to prevent the awkwardness of functioning with one eye closed - but at the loss of depth perception and peripheral vision to the right in the process. Additionally, in the event that her visor is broken or disabled, the eye also is able to provide an augmented reality display, though again, using it comes with the sacrifice of depth perception and peripheral vision in her right eye.
Body: Yu Lin's body is heavily cybernetic, incorporating, in addition to her arm, leg, and left eye, a full suite of muscle and mind augmentations. Her bones have been coated with a ceramic laminae, her joints enhanced with servomotors, her muscles strengthened with cybernetic fibers, and her mind augmented with a tactical computer system. As a result, her speed, durability, strength, agility, dexterity, computational ability, and reaction time have all been dramatically increased - she is able to withstand falls from heights of up to ten stories without breaking a bone, run at speeds of over 40 miles per hour bipedally or 100 miles per hour quadrupedally, leap up to three stories into the air, and lift up to 500 pounds. Additionally, Yu Lin's cybernetic implants are responsible for her tail's prehensility, having reinforced and strengthened the muscles in the tail enough to make it suitable for grasping, though while it can hold onto large objects such as pipes, it lacks the ability to do any fine motor manipulation or hold onto particularly small objects - she cannot, for example, fire a gun or swing her whip using her tail.
Her body is powered by a nuclear power core embedded in her back. In an emergency situation, when completing the mission is more important than either her survival or that of any number of other innocents in the surrounding area, the power core can be detonated, generating an explosion capable of taking out several city blocks. Naturally, this is a one-time operation, as there's no operator left to attempt it a second time.
Mind: Yu Lin's tactical computer deserves special attention, as it comes with a number of special functions. Combined with the AR display in her visor, it provides more than just computational assistance. It also provides an IFF display, which interfaces directly with her brain to label targets as friends, foes, and neutral parties. It provides a direct network uplink, enabling her to find information at a moment's notice and view it on her AR display. But most importantly, it provides combat functionality - auto-adjustment of her hand to help compensate for weapon recoil, target movement, and wind conditions, tactical analysis of the battlefield conditions, including odds of mission success and/or survival, prediction of enemy behavior based on pattern analysis when battles last long enough, and execution assistance for complex acrobatic maneuvers, including particularly dangerous parkour techniques, such as running across the face of a billboard to bridge the gap between two skyscrapers.
To prevent hacking, the computer is separated into two separate pieces - the first, which is networked and only capable of executing programs on her AR display, and the second, which is not connected to any network and is the only part capable of causing movements in her body. The second computer is responsible for coordinating her organic and cybernetic components, so if it ever does get disabled, she becomes nearly paralyzed, as moving the servomotors on her joints manually is incredibly difficult.
