Angela wasn’t supposed to learn about the truth behind her father’s position at the company, but sometimes rebellious teenagers can surprise even the most well-prepared of parents. She had been raised as a normal, average daughter of a mid-level wageslave, a beancounter of some stripe, one of an innumerable working for the corporation that owned her school, her housing unit, even the mall she frequented.
She had been raised in a lie.
It’s true that her parents both worked for the corporation, that’s straightforward enough. What her father truly did however, was enough to make Angela’s trid-fueled imagination run wild—he was a professional Johnson, a man who hired Shadowrunners for all number of quasi-legal (and some straight illegal) jobs on behalf of the corporation. Once she found out, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle—she wanted to know everything about the “real” ‘runs he had helped organize, not the sanitized, made-for-entertainment stories she saw online.
Always capable in her schoolwork, Angela never seemed to particularly excel at any one subject or task. It was obvious she had the mental acuity and physical prowess to succeed, but she had a difficult time retaining the lessons that were put to her. More than anything she relied on her natural intuition and reflexes to see her through any challenge, which worked out fairly well for her.
Graduating from secondary school with high exam marks would take more than natural talent, however, and both she and her parents worried about her future prospects if she couldn’t apply her ample schooling to the looming tests. Some may question the ethics of what happened next, but Angela never gave it two thoughts—a straightforward family meeting and it was decided.
Taking a “surprise vacation” for two weeks, the school was sad to learn that she had broken her leg while traveling the world, and would require an additional two weeks of recovery before she could return to school. Warning that she would miss very valuable lessons and prep time leading up to the end-of-term exams, they nevertheless acquiesced to her father’s demands that she be allowed to rest and recuperate at home.
Angela walked into the first day of tests with no trace of a limp. “Modern medicine, she chuckled,” and proceeded to absolutely ace her cumulative test, aside from several carefully-chosen errors she included for good measure. By the end of the week she had seemingly mastered organic chemistry, aeronautical physics, the history of (modern) magic, German, and tennis, of all things. Nobody suspected fraud—after all, her father was some sort of important corporate drone, wasn’t he? Of course his daughter would excel.
They never thought to look for implanted skillwires and carefully-hidden ports where she could load new skills directly into her nervous system and musculature. By relying on skills and knowledge recorded by masters of their respective crafts, she was able to put forth a command performance on anything she had access to.
Though it was against his better judgment, her father soon saw the value of such a naturally-gifted person when it came time to fill in missing holes in the teams he was hiring. With a few slotted skillwires his daughter could be a ace helicopter pilot, the next Richard Feynman, or a top-class ballerina; the only limits were her father’s pocketbook and her natural talents, of which she had been blessed with a surfeit.
Soon she was filling gaps in easy or low-risk operations orchestrated by her father. A little decking or infiltration for this job, a little gymnastics and unarmed combat for that one. She quickly became his go-to when he needed to make sure a team had all of their bases covered.
Soon she realized that she not only liked being (temporarily) proficient in any manner of skill, but also that running the shadows was everything she had hoped for and beyond.
I thought it would be interesting to play a character which had almost no points in skills, instead everything in attributes, relying on cybertechnology to bridge those missing pieces. With Mental and Physical attributes all but maxed, I thought this character would be an interesting study in (meta)human psychology and the nature of identity/self.
Now along in the world and with only a handful of skillwires, she has to be very choosy when it comes to what runs she will accept—though there’s also the ever-present, lingering fear of going against her old corporate family, her insider knowledge has proven useful on more than one occasion.
