Slouch

Appearance

Slouch typically appears as a man of average height, with most other particulars unknown. He favors an ankle length heavy hoodie, a garment that has the shape and form of a trench coat or great coat, but has a cowl that pulls up over the head and is deep enough that it can hide the face in shadows. The outside of the heavy hoodie has a mimetic layer and can provide optic adaptation so Slouch can vanish into the background, or match the general color of the people around him, such as mimicking the blacks and grays of men in business suits, the orange of convicts being moved in public, the bright pink of contamination cleanup and body disposal, the plain green of civic workers, and so forth. It is assumed that Slouch is a man of Caucasian, Asian, or mixed ancestry, and of middle years. Everything else is mixed conjecture and conflicting reports. 

Equipment

Great Cyberhoodie - this garment is a reflexokinetic jacket capable of spreading kinetic damage out to the point that it is harmless. It's armor rating is sufficient to ignore light pistols, and non-edged melee weapons at point blank range, and heavier caliber weapons with distance. The liner is thermoablative, allowing the jacket to absorb a small amount of laser and maser fire before burning the coat out. The outer layer is mimetic and can color match, employ active adaptive visual countermeasures, employ anti-electronic surveillance countermeasures aka dazzle patterns or mirror coat. Dazzle patterns confuse facial and human recognition systems, while mirror coat makes the outer layer reflective, which can disorient machines and confuse human observers.

Traditional iKasa - the iKasa favored by Slouch conceals his face and has a scatter light pattern in it, which changes color and angle of the light it shows on his face, changing the apparent contours and shape of his face. Slouch earned his street name because of the iKasa and hoodie, and his penchant for standing with his shoulders slumped and head down.

Special boots typically depending on the job, but silenced boots and reinforced boots are the most common.

A Sneak Suit under the great cyberhoodie should the need arise to be completely invisible.

A matching set of hyperedge blades, a traditional katana and wakazashi. These are openly carried.

Neat Tricks

Deflection and Disarmament - Slouch is fast and keen with his blades and with hand and foot. He doesn't take a lot of interest in killing, a dead body is disposable. A wounded man or woman who requires lengthy and expensive medical attention is a constant reminder. As such, he is skilled in using his blades to deflect attacks, destroy his opponents weapons and render them unable to fight. He would much rather leave a foe holding a bloody stump than a headless body.

KO - why kill a foe when a concussion will leave them on the ground long enough for him to accomplish what he needs? Despite have blades that can slice through armor, a foe is as likely to catch the butt of the blade to the skull and take a medically induced nap.

Disable - Slouch has some basic understanding of cybernetics and armor. When facing a foe in power armor, or a heavily modified foe, he can make called shots to disable his foe, usually severing blows against power supply or fuel cell elements. Most power armor is heavy, and without power assist they're often helpless, sometimes even trapped in the steel shell until someone is able to get them out. 

Background

Slouch is a man of great renown and is wanted by a variety of agencies, private enterprises, and a large number of personal interests. Almost all of these people want him dead, or incapacitated, or otherwise ended, as his interests commonly conflict with theirs. He was formerly a man of some wealth but little to no influence. He found himself caught up in a sketchy land deal and was burned, literally and figuratively. One side of the dirty deal found out about him and saw to his social destruction, ruining him financially and socially, rending him an outcast to the men and women who were previously his peers. The other side, unable to ruin him financially settled on setting him on fire.

He survived both, and had a few years of recuperation in a geofront free clinic. After a few skin grafts and eye transplants he became human again, and his physical therapy came from other patients at the clinic, who used their own downtime to help him with martial arts, stretching, and general gym work. He found peace in Kendo, and traditional Nipponese swordsmanship. After leaving the clinic, finding a McDojo was simple, and he continued his therapy and turned it into training, and his burning hatred of the people who ruined his life and stole hiw wife into cold calculation.

Slouch's revenge is a legend in the Westlake Contecology. In a week long orgy of blood and death, the Westlake branch of the Black Dragon Tong saw its membership reduced by half. Many of those who survived the invisible assassin with blades had to undergo lengthy recovery periods and to adapt to life with prosthetics. Their onsen and several of their front businesses were likewise destroyed by carefully placed firebombs. The Westlake Investment and Planning Organization also felt a horrid bloodletting as five of its seven sitting board of directors members were executed, and their holdings ransacked, their accounts emptied. Law enforcement and security forces became involved, and three people involved in the investigation of his own case suffered unthinkable and sociopathically calculated maiming, though none died from the torture. One officer had their face removed with the hyperedge wakazashi, another had a lung punctured and arm removed in two inch sections. The third was castrated with the wakazashi and then their eyes were exposed to the blade until the vitreous fluid boiled and the corneas burst.

Revenge settled, Slouch became a sort of vigilante living in the geofronts and cruising through the underworld of the Cosmic Era. Through robing his victims and fencing their goods, he has a large stockpile of money, ample equipment supplies, and connections through the gray underworld. As much as many agencies want a piece of him, most have found it better for their budgets and human resources to ignore him, or hope he goes somewhere else.

Roleplaying Notes

Slouch is just another everyman, wandering through the gray drizzle of the geofront, sniffing at the stink of the overcity and the shadows of the arcologies. He used to live there, he used to be one of the coddled people, one of the entry level elite. In a day, in a stroke, he lost it all, and revenge gave satisfaction, but it brought nothing back. He cant go back. His biotelemetrics are gone, his eyes were taken from two different dead people, his face has been reconstructed, and his fingerprints are ruined. The system will never accept him back. The same applied to his wife, she was still very much a creature of luxury and jaded hostility, xenophobic to anything that doesn't live in the shining towers. She is the only person who knows who he used to be, who he was. She won't talk about it, not after seeing his determination, what he did to get her back, down to mutilating and then butchering her new husband like a blood sacrifice.

Slouch can fix things for other people, people who still have a chance. He stands up for the middle guy, the one caught between the criminals and the system, between the law and just trying to survive. If there isn't anything to pursue, there is time for exercise, for training, for fixing and making new weapons, new gadgets, getting another device working for a small community in need. There is also always time for a bottle of beer and a bowl of noodles, vegetarian please. No synth meat, smells like skin grafts.