Empires may rise and fall, but the scum of the galaxy are eternal. Criminals just move with the times. <!-- Load Bio Kara Seiko ‘Psycho’ --> Nar Shaddaa has always been a haven for criminals. Walk into any given bar and you’ll be surrounded by smugglers, gangsters, assassins, conmen and thieves. And this is the upper class. Descend to the neon-lit streets of the lower levels and you won’t find crime, you’ll find a meat-grinder. The yakuza and triads that run this underworld’s underworld are pervasive and brutal. In a megacity like Nar Shaddaa, turf-wars can span continents as gangs with a complicated web of centuries old allegiances and emnities fight over whatever sources of potential income fall beneath the gaze of the hutts. Kara Seiko - ‘Psycho’ to the rest of the gang - had been running with the King Cobras, an undercity yakuza, since she was old enough to hold a slugthrower. It’s a life that has left visible marks. With the abundance of cheap, powerful droid-tech, the sort of surgeons who fix up thugs like her don’t bother with bacta - after all, why heal someone up to how they were before when you can make them better (and for cheaper)? During the course of her short-but-violent career, Psycho has had a good portion of her body augmented - sometimes because of injury, sometimes to give her a combat edge, sometimes for the sheer hell of it. Most of her limbs, an eye, and a good chunk of her torso have the dull shine of prosthetics. Black, silver and gold - a mish-mash of a dozen different techs from a dozen backroom surgeries. Glowing neon subdermal tattoos play across her arms and back. Her matted black hair has a few strands dyed with bioluminescent colouring. Life expectancy in an undercity gang isn’t great, and Seiko would no doubt have died in some meaningless skirmish over a few pounds of drugs if not for the intervention of outside forces on her insulated world. The Cobras found or stole something important - she never found out exactly what - but it was enough to make the normally tolerant powers-that-be (read: hutts) take notice. In the normal course of events, nobody messed with the gangs, but somewhere, a line had been crossed. <!-- Embedded memory fragment begins --> Psycho and her crew are on guard at the perimeter of the abandoned industrial zone the Cobras call home. Security’s tight because somewhere within, the yakuza bosses are meeting to discuss whatever this mysterious find is. And that meant the grunts were stuck out here, looking at bugger all. She pulls a gabaki stick and an antique cigarette lighter from a pack on her waist and lights up, inhaling as she surveys the damp road in front of her. Not a thing. Until... There’s a clinking of metal and a round object lands in front of her. She dives for cover, twisting her body so her more heavily augmented side catches most of the blast as the grenade goes off. The blast throws her to the ground. As she loses consciousness, she sees the armoured men flooding the street. Well armed, disciplined men. This was no gang attack. These were mercenaries. Her eyes close, and she hears shouting. Gunfire. Then nothing. [selfPreservationSystemsActiveInducingForcedConsciousnessInThreeTwoOne] She wakes up scarce minutes later to a scene of carnage. Her crew hadn’t been as lucky as her - the ones who hadn’t been eviscerated by the initial blast had been caught by the mercs. The wall behind where they’d been standing is smeared with blood and bullet holes. Burning with rage, Psycho draws her gun - a repeating, Uzi-style slugthrower - and heads into the complex. She passes gang members, bystanders, even one or two mercenaries. All dead. The streets are covered in blood, bullet casings and scorch marks. Gunfire and shouting can be heard in the middle distance, but her immediate surroundings are as quiet as the grave. Then, there’s a roar of engines, and a heavily damaged armoured car screeches around a corner, careering across the road before smashing into a building in front of her. It’s marked as a yakuza vehicle. She runs over to it and forces the front door open, her prosthetic arm making short work of the already-damaged metal. Inside, the driver is already dead. In the back of the car, severely injured, is a stern-faced man, probably in his late 40s, who Kara recognizes as one of the gang’s three heads. He coughs violently, and the ruined vehicle interior is coated with a fine spray of blood. He looks up and sees Psycho’s glowing snake tattoos. With a curt nod, he draws a small data-stick from his pocket, and hands it to her. “Keep... this… safe…”, He is interrupted by a fit of coughing. More blood. “Avenge us.” As the man’s eyes close, a squad of mercs also round the corner, guns levelled. Psycho ducks behind the wreckage of the car as a hail of bullets smash into the wall above her head. Cornered, she blind-fires her SMG over the cover of the ruined vehicle, shouting curses at the silent professionals. There is a clicking as her gun runs dry. Cautiously, the mercs close in on the bolt-hole. Fingers on triggers, they warily round the wreckage of the car, to where Kara had been firing from. She is gone. All that remains is a discarded SMG, a handful of shell casings, and an open manhole cover. Steam rises from the sewers below as the mercs peer down into the depths. <!-- Memory fragment ends. Bio resumes --> After that, the escape was easy. Figuring out what to do next was hard. The HoloNet news teams reported it as an outbreak of localised gang violence that had left almost a thousand people dead, including the entire upper hierarchy. The King Cobras had effectively been beheaded. The data stick contained junk data. Either it was corrupted or encrypted. Psycho had no way of knowing which, but hung on to it anyway. It wasn’t until she’d killed the second hit squad that came for it that she decided to get off-planet. Lay low. Arm up. Then get even. <!-- EoF -->
