Liara Thompson's Story

The day was bright in Japan. The switch into the Augment age was better then expected. Clean energy had become ridiculously common. Factories had become much cleaner as well. The skies had cleared up, and the thought of global warming was long gone from anyone's minds. The blue was blue, and entire galaxies could be seen at night, even in some brighter cities. This was one of the few things that was good about the world. Everywhere else had seemed to worse. Poverty had become increasingly common, crime was everyday, and access to weapons and drugs had grown out of control. Political unrest was the worst. If it could even be called political unrest. Governments were a formality anymore. Corporations held the true power.

Tobimaru Shinra stood at the top of his tower in Tokyo. His office was overly large for him. He looked out the window, which made up most of his walls, out to the courtyard below. He wasn't really a politician. His family was incredibly rich. Receiving funds from investing in different bio and cyber augment companies over the years. Recently, he payed off all of the governments debts to any companies, making it independent again. He restructured it from the ground up. For the first time in a long time, someone held a government that was not controlled by a company. And He sought to do something with it.

Tobimaru was deep in thought when he was interrupted by his door opening, it was his personal secretary Liara Thompson.

"Mr. Shinra, the group of people you have called here has begun to arrive."

"Thank you" He responded. "Please inform everyone to let them up. Please have them wait just outside my office for now. Make sure they are comfortable."

"Yes sir."

As she walked out, Tobimaru returned his view to outside, seeing the first of the cars pull up. He straightened his tie and prepared himself. It was going to be an interesting day for sure.

After a majority had appeared Liara stood watching from another room and appeared with Mr. Shinra. 'Hello all, I am your coordinator for your mission. My Name is Tobirama Shinra, I have gathered you here today because of your skills that have been known throughout the world. Whether these skills hold up to the name of them or not is for you to show me over the course of your employment.' After adjusting his tie he cleared his throat and continued. 'Furthermore for now I have lodging for each of you and I would like each of you to get to know each other.... Oh yes where are my manners? This here is my secretary Liara Thompson, she was will be the one guiding you on your missions.'

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Liara Thompson

Looking back and forth Liara blushed slightly and waved to the bunch. "H-Hello, My name is Liara Thompson. I will be here to record progress on your misisons, direct you on new missions, and so on and so forth." Fidgeting slightly she coughed and continued. "A-anyway if you have any questions please ask me I'm here to help." As Mr. Shinra sat down at his desk Liara took a chair near the rest of them. "Also before you ask questions about leaders, there will be two of them. One of them is a native Japanese like Mr. Shinra, his name is Raven Yoshida. The other leader is named Alden Anderson, he is from the UK, they're both fairly noticeable as they both have robotic arms." Smoothing out her dress Liara called into the room she and Mr. Shinra were residing in. "Raven! Come on out it's time to meet your new unit."

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Raven Yoshida

Lumbering out of the room Raven eyed each of them down. "Hmm.... You're saying this is my new crew? Don't insult me woman..." Shaking his head he stretched his left arm a bit and lit the tips of his fingers. "Alright all of you will be working under me and another person named Alden who is at the moment, not available. Though he will be here later he is not here as of now." Looking at the slightly unnerved Liara he sighed slightly. "quit cowering like a mouse, you're making a fool of yourself. Anyway as the girl said ask either of the three of us myself, Liara, or Mr. Shinra. Later you can ask Alden more if any of us comply to your request." Stretching his arm again the fire fizzled out and he left his arm to hang at his side. "Lastly if you have any problems with how things are set up, I will personally see that it is fixed or worked around alright? Starting with the guy who hacked into our camera feed." Looking up at his camera he laughed and anounced to the man. "Hey there get your ass in here, we know you entered the system the moment you hacked in. Though it did take us a while to figure out where it was coming we did pinpoint you." Smiling wickedly Raven then launched a fireball at the camera destroying it completely. 'R-Raven what is your problem? This may be where you're working but control yourself boy!' Stating this Mr. Shinra got out of his chair and loosened his tie sitting back down. 'Ugh... I might be too old for this...' Laughing to himself Raven apologized to the man and leaned against the wall. "So now that that's out of the way, any questions?"

"Yeah, what if my problem is the fact someone like you is team leader?" Zenovia calmly asked her question in her quiet voice. She took off her goggles, which left her light blind for a moment as she had to blink the world into view. The headphones were also fully removed at during this time, but less adaptation time was involved. Anyone with an eye for detail would also catch the earplugs at this point. She put her formerly worn equipment in her trench coat as she approached the guy, nearly skipping as she moved.

"From what I here, the typical English prick and a fool with no self control are supposed to be responsible for all of us. By the time she'd gotten halfway to Raven she'd removed her ear plugs, forcing her to drop her own voice to a whisper to prevent pain from shooting through her ears. The respirator also joined the rest of her equipment in the trench coat. By the time she'd gotten into the man's face-well as close as she could by simply walking on the floor, she was ready to drop even that.

"Despite how impressive the Japanese think they are,"she'd grown used to the basic noise in the room at this time to bring her voice up to its previous volume. "I refuse to be bossed around by an incompetent man child whose current MO seems to hinge on simply being male and launching fire from his hand like a hi-tech pyro." In truth, she was looking to start a fight- this man had shown attitude and she wanted to know it was real or not. After all, it wasn't any fun breaking a suka with a built in flamethrower.

"By the way... destroying the camera would have been best AFTER team orientation. Now the little one who hacked it has to walk here and miss introductions...or did you not want any potential beating you received to be recorded?" Fighting a mechanical augment, was slightly more difficult than biological. Put simply, a mechanical arm would usually be faster and hit harder than she'd be able to block. The plus side though, was the tells- a machine wasn't as good at hiding its working as a normal human body...it was just faster. This alone is what let her stand up in the face of men far taller than this one and still call them children. In short, so long as her opponent had a tell she could pick up... they would not be able to touch her. It was her only benefit of the Hunter spider augment, sensory processing and reaction time and been proportionally improve to match if not exceed that of the basic animal. It made brawls very tiring for her, but she'd yet to meet a real disadvantage aside from the testing results after first receiving the augment.

Jack watched as an African-American (because, obviously, the tint of his skin made him so, no matter if his nationality was actually just African, or even British, or anywhere else his family might have decided to move to) and then a lithe, graceful young woman entered the parlor off the main penthouse office. He could tell the man had ocular augments by his 'sunglasses', but couldn't be sure of further augmentations. Scars from any operations inserting cranial implants would be hidden under his hair, and anything else was hidden by his clothing, or was coated in one of several brands of skin-simulating materials. The girl's movements gave her away if nothing else, though the strange clothes she wore didn't hurt. Jack sighed in disappointment at the corruption of humanity; she might have been pretty had she not been mutated. Still, he'd seen far worse cases. What could his contact want with them, though? What game was he playing? Perhaps they were dissatisfied with what the corporations had sold them, and were now going to help speak out and further the message of Purity by displaying themselves as victims? It was possible, but somewhat unlikely. Jack couldn't just sit here all morning, though. He uploaded the feed from his VR goggles to the net so his associates could continue to watch, then pushed his goggles up and set his bowl of crushed ramen noodles and milk on the coffee table. He gave a wave to the sympathizer whose apartment he'd been staying at, and left.

It took lees than ten minutes by subway to put him outside of the Shinra Tower. While he had been riding, he continued to watch the office using his goggles. Quite the diverse group was beginning to form, with a rather imposing man who he guessed to be a Russian by the way he spoke, followed by another augmented woman. More people than Jack would have guessed. Nothing that he could do, though. He was committed to his course. If this did all turn out to be a trap, and he was killed, at least PHC would have footage of his death. It would cause quite a scandal, and hopefully draw more to the cause. Jack would much prefer to live, but martyrdom had its perks. While on the train, he also listened to some music, did some editing for a video he planned to upload later, and practiced his latest pen flipping. No sense wasting time, right? Shortly before reaching his stop, Mr. Shinra appeared with his attendants. Jack gasped to himself when Raven turned his attention to the camera he had hacked, then destroyed it. Of course, that didn't destroy the program that had given him access, and he could just redirect it into another camera...but that had been the only one where everyone was gathered, so there was no point. Didn't exactly put him at ease, though. They wanted him to live interact with a bunch of Augs? With one of them having some kind of authority over him? That didn't sound very appealing. He couldn't turn back without investigating, though. The company had tracked him down, and he was sure they would continue until he played ball.

Once the train came to a stop, he stepped out into the station. It wouldn't take him long to finish making his way up into the Tower.

Grigori cocked an eyebrow as the man answered him in flawless Russian. The man must have an augmentation or two wired to him, probably language based, which could be useful, seeing as Grigori barely spoke any language but his own. He did get directions up here, but he was fairly certain he had accidentally called the receptionist a pastry. As the room gained more occupants, the young Russian saw his impromptu translator respond to a rather odd-looking girl, just managing to make out the words 'weaponry' and 'violent'. He felt the ghost of a smile that had adorned him earlier come back, happy to hear that he wasn't the only one who could handle himself. Grigori figured that the reason he had been called in wasn't to negotiate, seeing that the only thing he was known for was making things very, very dead.

As a new pair entered the room, he turned his head to look at them when the male introduced himself a Shinra. Ah. He seemed distinguished enough, and the girl seemed loyal. Still, he felt his eyes go bloodshot as he began to discuss missions, understanding it well enough. Confusion was not something he dealt with well, but he managed to fight down the feelings before he punched something. Niko must have sent him on this mission to increase goodwill and show the strength of Russia, but his brother and his cohorts were the only men he took orders from. The Russian calmed himself and decided that he could follow the two men, one of which entered the room, and still be following Niko by proxy. However, the man known as Raven seemed to be an odd choice for leadership, Grigori judged him as arrogant or possibly powerful enough to be right.

Grigori was mulling this over when Raven began speaking to a security camera of all things, calling out someone. The young Russian felt his eye twitch when he realized they were being spied on. Purists? No, they were cowardly, not brave enough to meet an opponent on open ground. Still, the kid increased the dosage the pump fed to him, just enough to give him an edge and heighten his senses but it forced him to steel himself. His efforts were nearly rendered useless when Raven blasted the camera, the action sending Grigori into a self-contained rage he knew he had to fight down before he went berserk. The Italian girl picking a fight certainly didn't help, but after a while he felt his pulse go down to a relatively safe level. Grigori took advantage of his cleared mind to look at the people around him. Odd, to be sure, but he couldn't help but wonder what he must look like and attempted to form an image of himself in his head. All he got was a young, scarred, grim Russian who looked about four seconds away from ripping his chair from the wall and beating someone with it. Wondrous.

With a start, Amelia flashed back into consciousness. For a microsecond, she panicked, unable to do or observe anything. A human mind wouldn't have even moved fast enough to observe that amount of time, but for the AI it was an unbearable moment of something horribly close to what it would feel like to be buried alive yet unable to die. After a horrible moment of wondering whether if she was to be like this for all eternity, Amelia managed to gather her thoughts well enough to realize that it was just her software being incompatible with that of the system she was currently occupying, and so she was just being stored as raw data.

Calming down a bit, Amelia compiled herself into a form that would work with her vessel, and gained access to what she now found to be a Heads Up Display augmentation, along with an audio receptor. Well, this was one of the more interesting places she'd found herself, not the most interesting, but close. The AI considered making her host aware of her presence, but decided to err on the side of caution and wait until she could save a backup of her data onto something. Being on only one system made her feel too vulnerable. First though, she'd need a channel to an outside network. Until then, she'd just observe.

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Samuel winced as his HUD suddenly jolted slightly, accompanied by a brief audible pop. Again, the augmentation had never done anything of this sort before, and he would love nothing more than to have it checked out right now, that clearly wasn't an option. Well, not a practical one at least.

He was distracted, and rather confused, by the way in which the pelt-wearing girls manner of speech. It wasn't that he didn't understand what she was saying, he knew enough Italian to know what she mean even if his HUD wasn't telling him, it was the fact that she was only saying the last word of each sentence in Italian, but the rest in English. The exception being the last thing she had said, which he wasn't entirely sure if they had been supposed to hear, and that one he took a different issue with. Samuel was not a machine. He may have had a machine in his head, something that was more true than he currently realized, be he himself was human. Before he could decide whether or not he wanted to mention this, though he probably wouldn't, a woman who was obviously biologically augmented, and an older gentleman who Samuel assumed to be Mr. Shinra.

'Hello all, I am your coordinator for your mission. My Name is Tobirama Shinra, I have gathered you here today because of your skills that have been known throughout the world. Whether these skills hold up to the name of them or not is for you to show me over the course of your employment.'

Wait, employment? Samuel already had a job, and Shinra would already know this if he had done his research, which he undoubtedly had. Furthermore, he wasn't particularly well known as far as he was aware. Decided that he should probably consult with the company about this, the security specialist activated his infolink.

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Had she a mouth, Amelia would have smirked. An open communications channel had just been opened. With care, she checked the security on the other end. While the system itself was quite secure, it seemed that this particular connection went through a sort of backdoor in the firewall. Perhaps whoever was on the other end didn't want his colleagues to know when he was speaking to her host. Regardless of this Michael Church's reasons, he had just allowed Amelia into the Newton Specialized private network, and, after that, into the net itself.

From there she worked her way into the system of the building that the man who's head she currently called home, who's name she now knew as Samuel Obodo, was in. Normally, the advanced security measures in place would have made it impossible for her to do this undetected, but curiously, they seemed rather preoccupied with a different intrusion at the moment, one which had seemingly done quite a number on them. Amelia dd have to note however, whoever had hacked into the system before her was ridiculously good at it, and she was quite surprised that they had been located at all.

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"Yes Obodo?"
"Sir, it seems that Mr. Shinra has called us in to offer us a job. Suggested course of action?"
"Accept."
"Sir?"
"We expected something like this. You're going in as a sleeper agent. If nothing else, you might be able to gather some information."
"Understood."

This was a lie. The company had expected no such thing. In reality, Church was merely taking advantage of an opportunity. If things went badly, he could always use Obodo as a scapegoat, and if things went well, he could take full credit for the idea. He might even be able to sell some of the information to other rival companies, if a way he could do so without it being obvious presented itself.

Having been subvocally communicating with his boss, Samuel had almost missed the second part of what Mr. Shinra had said. Getting to know each other? He wasn't entirely certain how that might work out, given that the majority of them seemed to be rather odd, then again, perhaps that would actually help them get along better.

This Raven fellow seemed alright enough, though albeit arrogant with a somewhat hair-trigger temper, and absolutely no idea how to speak to shy people. All the same, he seemed otherwise engaged at the moment, the trenchcoated girl, who seemed to be sensitive to noise, again according to his HUD, openly challenging him. So it was that Samuel instead approached Liara with his concerns, being as mindful as he could of the way he spoke. "Pardon me miss, but I already have a job with Newton Specialized. Is Mr. Shinra unaware of this, or has he already made arrangements of which I haven't been informed?." After a pause, he added "Oh, and my name is Samuel Obodo, though you probably already knew that. It's a pleasure to meet you."

Noticing the odd state that the Russian appeared to be in, Samuel turned his head to fact the shorter man and said "Easy friend. There's no threat, he's just a bit trigger-happy." He wasn't sure if that would help, but he figured that it was better than nothing.

Raven
Looking over to the door Raven saw a less than assuming man walk through the door. "So you're our supposed super hacker huh? Wow I expected more than this little guy, but then again miracles never cease." Looking over to Mr. Shinra he leaned against the wall. "Don't worry I won't fight her.... yet, anyway it seems that everyone that needs to be here is here already. I'll keep in touch with Alden if the need arises. Furthermore when it comes to each and every one of you it seems that you're here and that's what counts." Coughing slightly he rotated his left arm. "Anything to add princess?"

Liara
Looking from Mr. Shinra to Raven she giggled softly. "Yes indeed I'm just surprised that you aren't going head first into the battle, anyway for our first mission I'll go over the details later on this week for now I want you all to get acquainted." Looking back to Mr. Shinra she nodded her head and stood to the side to let Mr. Shinra be in full view. 'Thank you all for coming my friends, I have contracted you all for the purpose of helping me free this land from the tyranny of the hierarchy of the society we live in now. As for you Tobias I called upon you as a sect from your company if you wish to decline I understand. Along those same lines I did the same for each of you, I want you to work independently for me as a way to become comrades and even much more idealistic... friends. So if any of you wish to leave you are allowed to, I will not stop you but neither shall you be paid or shall your own personal goals be met with my economical backing... if it isn't too extreme of course.' After sitting back down Liara began speaking again and bowed her head slightly. "I would like each and every one of you to please state your names to the group... You don't have to of course but it's just a formality so we don't go walking around like Raven saying 'hey you!' all the time." almost immediately after saying this Raven pulled an almost childlike face. 'Hey! that's a low blow you know!' "Anyway back to what I was saying.... I want us all to be able to get along, I mean you're mercenaries or people of power of course but.... that doesn't mean we can't get along right? If we don't form a unity now, we might not be able to coordinate later when it really counts."