ANGEL
Street Name: Angel   B: 5   Reaction: 5 (6)   Karma Pool: 16
Real Name: Angelique Torres   Q: 6   Initiative +d6   Current: 0
Gender: Female   S: 4   Combat Pool: 7   Total: 163
Race: Human   C: 6            
Age: 27   I: 6   damage track
Hair: blonde   W: 4  
Eyes: blue        
Height: 5'8"   Essence: 2.95  
Weight: 145 lbs      Cash: 254,492      
Skills:   Cyberware Rating Bioware Rating
Armed combat 3 Cybereye
 
 Enhanced Articulation
Athletics 5
  • Flare Compensator
    		•  Synthacardium
    1
    Biotech (First Aid) 3 (5) * Low Light Tailored Pheromones       2
    Car 4
  • Thermographic
    		•
    Computer (Hardware) 1 (3) * Laser Comm Knowledge skills
    Electronics  4
  • Thermographic
    		•  Standard Security Firm Procedures     5
    Electronics B/R (Maglocks) 5 (6) Datajack Dolls/Stuffed Animals     1
    Ettiquette, Street 4 Skillwires
    3
    		 20th Century multimedia     2
    Ettiquette, Corporate 3 Softlink
    4
    		 Lock styles     4
    Interrogation (Verbal) 1 (3) Spatial Recognizer Standard Security     5
    Instruction  4 Balance Augmentor
     
    		 Fast Cars     2
    Lockpicking 4 Smartlink II
     
    		 Notorious Runners/Runs    6
    Pistols 5 Fingertip Lockpick
     
    		 English (R/W)  3 (2) 
    Singing 3 French (R/W)  3 (2)
    Stealth (Sneaking) 5 (6) Japanese  3 (1)
     Throallic  3

    Edges and Flaws


    Gear:

    Contacts:

    Description:

    History:

     Angel was born into a family that still believed in the old values, in the worth of the good old days. THey lived in a Middle-Lifestyle neighborhood in Chicago, her parents doing her best to shelter her from what was essentially the outside world. She was weaned on fairy tales, raised to believe that life is fair and the good always wins. This was especially true because she was her parents' second and last child, for they were too old to have another and hadn't expected to have more than her brother, Phillip. They named her Angelique, for the one who gave her to them, or so they were fond of saying. Her parents doted on her and her brother loved her deeply and she him. All three were very proud the day that Phillip joined Lone Star. Angel began to speak constantly about how, when she was grown, she would join Lone Star too and "have adventures" with her brother. She persuaded him to tell her everything he could, and her parents laughed and smiled and supported her. "Pip, tell me about the bad guys." "Pip, tell me about your day." "Pip, tell me, tell me, tell me."

     When Angel was eight, she gained a new brother: Gabriel Soren. Pip had gotten involved with him... somehow, she wasn't sure, she thought through the Star. He had been a sullen child at first, and then not quite blossoming but slowly relaxing till just shortly before her eleventh birthday Angel had developed a severe crush on her 'big brother'. Phillip watches this all with great amusement and affection; she never really knew if Gabriel was aware or not. They eventually grew so close as to spend every possible moment together, the older boys running first, Angel scrambling after, always teasing each other or being teased, defending Angel against 'those horrible boys' of elementary school, or acting as Phillip's eyes and ears in places where children were overlooked.

     Phillip Torres died in a race riot when Angel was twelve. She cried for three days, then locked herself in her room. Her brother wasn't supposed to die, he was a "good guy," and everybody knew the good guys always one. But her brother was dead, and he hadn't even accomplished anything by his death. No honorable martyrdom, just a bottle to the head and then several pairs of fists and feet pounding and kicking until there was a closed casket funeral and Angel was alone. Doubly alone, for Gabriel had disappeared shortly after she retreated to the dubious safety of her room. The last time she saw her brother was when he'd kissed his parents goodbye, ruffled her hair and hugged her and jauntily (easily) told her mother to keep dinner warm for him. Her brother was dead, the good guys hadn't won, in the end the bad men had been stronger, the bad men were always stronger, more, there were always strange shadowy people lurking on streetcorners no matter how hard her mother pressed her eyes closed, her parents had lied from the beginning. Her brother was dead.

     A week later, when Angel finally came out of her room and her parents cautiously approached her, she had become cold, hard, and beautiful. Twelve years old, and she had aged centuries in ten days. She slowly began to distance herself from her parents, first emotionally, then physically. She began to watch the streetcorners that had taken her brother, to see if she could steal some of their power for herself. She was almost compulsively cheerful around her parents, asking for martial arts lessons, gymnastics lessons, never showing the cold stone inside.

    She had her first drink when she was fourteen. It was her initiation into one of the loose gangs that dominated the streets she watched, and eventually they had noticed her watching. They had invited her to join them, and after thinking it over, she had accepted. One drink was small, two drinks, then three. She spent her first morning away from home passed out on the floor of a stranger's bathroom, three inches away from where she had vomited up her dubious dinner. She decided later that day, after the nervous flutterings and screechings from her parents had subsided, never to let herself be so incapacitated again. But she did not stop running with the gangs. She became their lookout, whistling when trouble appeared and disappearing just as quickly; she became adept and darting away into the shadows, and was grudgingly respected for it.

     She had stolen her first car when she was sixteen, having watched impatiently for almost a year as the older boys whooped and laughed and spun the car around in crazy, tire-squealing circles. Watching them, she had learned which were the good cars, which ones were, say, not so hot, and how to defeat the simplest of guard systems. When she got herself fried on her first attempt, the boys taught her how to steal them successfully, after first laughing at her red-faced indignance. She snuck out of her room that same night, stole a nice flashy sports vehicle from the parking lot of a nearby club, and went joyriding for five hours. She had never felt so free, so exhilerated, it almost frightened her, and she was moody and morose for days afterwards. Later, though, she discovered that such midnight drives kept back the depression, if only for a short time. Then, whenever she was feeling unbearably down, she would steal a car and jack up the mileage, always returning it and then hiding to watch and laugh as the startled and irate owners wondered loudly and profanely why it was out of gas.

    At seventeen, she had seen ten of her new acquaintances fall victim to the streets, reinforcing her new opinion of the world. There was no fairness, she decided, no happy ending. She had lost her respected place with her childhood, becoming a joytoy to the gangers. It was only fast cars, faster bullets, the pat-pat-pat of running feet, flashes of light and deafening silences afterwards, and the heady rush of knowing you had survived another night. At eighteen, her parents could no longer keep silent. Her eighteenth birthday had been spent joyriding with her new "friends" and when she returned two days later, her parents had been furious. They had made surprises for her, and then sat up all night and all day in shifts, worrying. It was never clear to her, even years later, whether she had left or they had thrown her out.

    Angel had never been on her own before, and when her gang disbanded a few months later (leaving her bitter at their bad timing) she was quickly picked up. It was her first time in prison, and she did not like the experience. Her cellmate asked her her name, she introduced herself as Angel, making the final changeover. He introduced himself as Rykker, and was grudgingly impressed by her spirit, her cynicism and her stubborn refusal to hope for anything. She explained to him how she had been caught, and his reaction was a more adult version of the reaction of her boys when she had first tried to steal a car. Rykker explained to her what she had done wrong, and when his friends extracted him from jail (so he called it, extraction), he agreed to teach her all he knew. In exchange, she would perform services such as lookout, shill, and other things suited to her.

    Rykker took her to New York and introduced her to three others: Stedman was the demolitions expert; he could demolish a towering office building, explode a lock, or lay a mine field all with equal ease. Griffin was the hacker and cracker, sporting a lovely dot-matrix tan, scruffy-shoulderlength dark hair (greying at one forelock), and dark glasses. Sterling, she decided was the brains of the outfit, since everyone seemed to defer to him on those rare occasions when there were more than minor disagreements. Tall, dark, and debonair, he doubled as the team's con artist, getting them into and out of situations Angel had never previously dreamed off. Rykker himself was their weapons supplier and quartermaster. Each of them imparted to her, before they were done with their tenuous partnership, a little of their skills. She tested them all, and found them wanting of her personal flavor of excitment. It was not until a year later, two months before Sterling's death and the group's break-up, that she discovered her true talent: cat burglary and stealth entry.

    The mark had been the files on a supercomputer, unfortunately a stand alone, and Griffen had had to sneak into the building himself to hack into it. Rykker and Stedman had accompanied him, and Angel waited outside. It was not until Sterlng came running up to her, looking unusually out of breath and wild around the eyes, that she realized they had been set up. Sterling had brought entry gear with him, but it only took one look at the building to tell them both that he would never make it. The office was on the 23rd story, and Sterling was already showing symptoms of the heart failure that would carry him off soon. Angel had strapped on the equipment and scaled the wall herself. By the time it was over, she had gained a strange silver sparkle to her eyes that none of the older men had ever seen in her, though her boys, had they been watching, would have recognized it.

    That evening, Angel joined them at their club where she had never previously dared to intrude. No one made a protest as she joined them with almost natural ease; it was as though she had become "one of the boys" again, only this time without the objectification and rough sexplay that had marked her as free meat for anyone higher than her. The next day, all four of them began teaching her the aspects of their specialties that would apply to her chosen profession. Rykker taught her the basics of guns and the weaponry she might resort to using in a crisis. Stedman taught her the art of disarming explosives, how to recognize them, what simple household chemicals could be combined to make lethal concoctions. Griffen taught her the fundamental principles of computer espionage and thievery, and did strange and arcane things to her own personal computer which he claimed would make it hack-proof. But it was Sterling whose teachings she truly kept, the art of dissembling, of the short con, of the convincing lie and of talking her way into or out of any situation. Two days after he pronounced her "fairly proficient", he died of a simple heart failure.

     After Sterling's death, Rykker and Griffen set her up with a man named Bishop for her informal training. Bishop, as much her elder as the others had been, took her in hand almost as a daughter and taught her all the tricks he knew of the trade. Against her better judgement, Angel began to soften and regain some of the emotions she had cut off nine years earlier. Bishop, who had known Sterling in his early years and had run many schemes and cons with him, was pleased to find that she had picked up quite a number of his tricks... and not so pleased to find that she had picked up a number of his bad habits. She also had a fixation on fast, flashy cars which Bishop tried to train her out of, to no avail; Angel still resorted to carjacking and joyriding. Another habit she had picked up, though from Griffen and not from Sterling, was the tendency to be very reluctant in working with anyone who was not already well known to her or emphatically vouched for by a well known fixer. Still, they spent two fairly calm and successful years together.

     She remained in sporadic contact with Rykker and Griffen, and after learning all Bishop had to teach her, also allied herself with a young woman named Li Ann. She'd met Li Ann when the both of them tried to con the same person, who in any event turned out to be a plant. They'd escaped together, and the resulting grudging mutual respect was enough to form a tentative alliance. Their first job as a team went so well that the alliance was cemented, and celebrated in their habitual club "The Rat House" with Bishop. The two of them, with Angel's acrobatic techniques and Li Ann's skill at disguises, went on a crime spree that gained them much media attention... almost too much. When the city got too hot to hold them, Angel called to Rykker and Griffen for help, and she and Li Ann fled up to Seattle to spend a few months in hiding.

    The emotions that Angel was grudgingly letting back into play resufaced with a vengeance in the presence of two attractive, kind older gentlemen; she and Griffen paired off at about the same time as Li Ann and Rykker. Eventually, they left Seacouver and went back to her hometown to resume their normal activity. They even met Bishop again, this time in the company of a young man, Aleki, who served much the same purpose that Angel did a year and a half previous. The one sticking point was that Griffen did NOT like the young man at all. He felt that Aleki was too slick, too calm, and far, far too neat and perfect. His suspicions were proved out when Aleki betrayed them to a Yakuza lord they'd offended with their thievery, and all but Angel were killed in the process.

    Angel was severely wounded, and but for her gymnastics skills and her stubbornness, she would not have survived. However she did, and several months later she was a great deal poorer but in possession of new cybered reflexes and tools. While in the hospital, she had encountered the wonderful world of cyber-enhancments, which her friends had previously been either too poor to afford and still keep their lifestyles or, in Bishop's case, had been eccentric and disdained to use. Now, with the bulk of all their funds falling on her shoulders, she found herself suddenly much much richer than she really wanted to be, and so enhanced herself to the point where she found she could perform much, much better than before. Her cold marble statue shell was also in place, and now she was more determined than ever not to let it slip, not even attending the brief, anonymous funerals of her dead friends and lover. Instead, she shoved the whole six or seven months into the back of her mind, glossing over the details and blocking out what was too painful to remember, as had become her habit.

    She returned to her old haunting grounds, recognized only by the bartender (Charlie) who had served so many of her friends. Upon questioning, she recieved the information that all but one of her old friends were dead, certainly all of the gangers for whom she had been free sex, and the one friend that was left was doing a decent business in stolen goods. She traveled back and forth from this friend's house to the bar, locked in her despondancy. When her friend (Mac) began to lose money to a particularly aggressive client on the selling end, though, she was just drunk enough to loudly claim that she could get better for less. The client took her up on the challange and she not only left him in the dust, she made him take the fall for her. She enjoyed that experience so much that she made it her standard punishment for anyone who became a serious danger to her and her lifestyle; they would take the fall for her heists, and if she thought it was called for, she would pull off a very outrageous job just so that the retribution would be that much greater.

    This renewed her interest in life, inasmuch as she ever had been interested in life since her brother died, and she returned to work. Mac introduced her to a couple of Fixers, one of whom she later framed when he attempted to double cross her. Her first solo job went surprisingly well; the target was a set of particularly expensive custom-ordered chips and the holder was the Yakuza family she had already offended. She saw in this job a chance to wreak havoc on both the Yakuza family that had taken her friends and the slimy double-crossing bastard who had betrayed them to the Yakuza. She stole the chip and then, having previously memorized Aleki's personal quirks and techniques, framed him for her heist. She went so far as to watch him as he was taken down by the Yakuza hitmen before finally turning her back on him and blocking the episode out of her memory.

    Her gymnastics, martial arts, and stealth abilities, as well as her remarkable beauty and her cyber-enhancments, made her very very skilled at her thievery. She eventually made enough off her plunder to set herself up in a moderate apartment, and decorated it, ironically enough, with paintings and books and potted plants reminiscent of her childhood. Her friend, her fixer, and the bartender began to wonder about her past a year later when Stedman sought her out trying to find the rest of their old friends. She reacted with hostility and more anger than any of the four of them had ever seen in her, and none of them asked questions about her history of her again. Before Stedman left, though, the bartender managed to pry at least some of the story from him, but Charlie ain't telling.  Her two brief periods of emotional vulnerability, both followed by the sudden, violent deaths of those she cared for, had left her even colder than before and more determined than ever to keep everyone at at least arm's length, preferably farther. Since her disownment/running away from her family, she has never been heard to mention her brother's name, and only rarely talks about her parents. (Usually referring to them by their first names and never acknowledging any connection to them. Not that she really had much of one to begin with.) She only discusses her old friends from Rykker's group when under the influence of several shots of Soylent Blue. The one time Charlie tried it though, she became first morose, then sickeningly angst-y, then violent. Charlie turned her loose in a back room, which she nearly demolished before she collapsed from exhaustion. After a year or two, though, she had been growing restless, growing tired of the small- to medium-time jobs, and has been looking for bigger and better-paying things.

    Several higher-paying jobs later, she has collected a new team, and a much more motley crew than she had begun with. An ice mage who once was an ally spirit, a Jedi, and a Celtic demolitionist make up the magical side, while another Celt (rigger), her gun-toting felon-for-hire lover, and herself make up the physical side. There were drifters in and out of the team, one of whom was her foster-brother and lover for a brief time after his reappearance, the sec specialist Gabriel. They had a stormy relationship for nearly a year, drifting in and out of the team, until one night when Gabriel had been particularly stupid, and entered into a battle between Reika and another mage. There was a huge fight, and in the end Angel stormed out and went to live with WyldChylde, for reasons that to this day she does not understand. That Halloween marked the beginning of their relationship, a relationship and partnership which seemed to ease everyone's mind in her new team. A month and a half later, Gabriel was dead, in the blast from a bomb that killed him and the magical nasty that they had been hired to find and kill. Angel grieved herself to sickness and catatonia, Reika and WyldChylde drew her out, finishing the healing of the mental wounds of her brother's and her former team's deaths.

    Angel is heart-stoppingly beautiful on first sight, but in conversation she is cool, polite, and very distant. Her cynicism is acute, even cutting at times, and when alone, she views the world with almost dead eyes. When with her team, more often, these days, she is laughing and bright; you would not think to look at her that such a beautiful young woman is one who kills and steals for a living, though you could easily think it of the cold, dark, and scary man who looms behind her. Occasionally, when her life seems to much for her, even now she will steal a car and joyride it around the city. Those who she feels are a danger to her, she sets up to take the fall for her heists; there are few enough of those, however, as she truly cares very little for very few people. Those few, her lover and her team, she will defend to her own death, with a viciousness that belies her angelic form.