Friends/Lovers/Enemies and all the rest
Friends
Iris Botha, Orbital Air executive protection specialist. Martin's one-time savior and ongoing mentor in the biz. Humorless and metronome-precise when working; dabbles in her partner's florist shop and goes rock climbing on her own time. Tall, thin, shaven-headed, West African ancestry, titanium chrome cyberhand with a built-in subgun, prefers to dress in corp-approved spacer-derived style.
ChrisAlice (pronounced "chrysalis"), prefers the street title of "brain-ripperdoc" to the earned title of "psychotherapist." Former Biotechnica researcher now freelancing for reasons unspecified but probably involving unpleasant truths told in executive company. Martin's source for both cyber adaptation therapy and acquired tastes for expensive liquors. Gender-nonconforming, rarely goes a month without at least a minor cosmetic surgical alteration, fond of butterfly motifs for both attire and office decor.
Brother Roland of the Holy Order of the Perpetual Railgun, retired solo turned self-proclaimed gundamentalist preacher. The sheer insanity of his fictional syncretic religion gets casual offenders to leave him along, which is what he prefers - it diverts attention from his actual serious and lucrative biz of crafting custom modern firearms and restoring antiques. Public persona involves monastic robes, crossed bandoliers, a techhair beard threaded with smoking slowmatch, and a maniacal gleam and cackle. Very few people have connected this fanatic with the greying, slightly threadbare guy in the grey suit who drinks and swaps war stories with the other vets at Vernon's on Saturday nights.
Cheval Noir (born Casey Rutherford), music shop worker, guitar teacher, occasional rockerboy, half-hearted news stringer covering the club scene, and former frontman of Night City's third-best Samurai cover band. Martin's best friend from their teenage years, frequent instigator of minor delinquency, now somewhat more stable after having found a parallel path to something resembling financial solvency. Used to be good at starting fights, is still hopelessly inept at winning them. Wears classic Gibson Battlegear and other retro edgerunner style.
Enemies
Fullback (Frank Chaney), owner of Wall of Meat, Night City's largest talent agency for bouncers and club/concert security. Former solo who got out of the front-line biz because he realized talent management was more lucrative. Unfortunately, he doesn't actually have a talent for management, so Wall of Meat tends to communicate poorly, pay subjectively, schedule shifts without regards for employee availability, and generally run labor relations as if it were a corp several orders of magnitude its actual size. Frank and Martin have a urinary olympiad going back so far that neither of them actually remembers its cause, but it probably has something to do with the unspecified incident that led to Martin ragequitting a Wall of Meat contract and subsequently getting blacklisted for future gigs.
Vikenty Markov, steroid and nanosurgery abuser, corporate marketing strategist, and big thick Ivan Drago-looking motherfucker. Vikenty was the ex-input of another exec who hired Martin for protection when the relationship turned abusive and violent. Somewhere out there is footage of Martin - at the time, half the Russian's size - disarming Vikenty, pistol-whipping him into reconstructive surgery with his own gun, and ejecting him from Club N2 through a cryoplast window. Martin barely remembers the incident, but to Vikenty, it was the start of a series of devastating losses in romance, bodybuilding championships, and SovOil performance reviews alike. Vikenty's primary obsessive focus is Etsuko Nikolaev, his ex, but everyone associated with the relationship's fallout has a precisely-calibrated ranking on his shitlist.
Lovers
Juliana Tuazon, sonar and electronic warfare tech for patrol boats of the Arellano Nomad family. The Arellanos operate the Twelve-Mile Limit, a converted container ship that works the northern Pacific trade circuit. The family makes port calls in Night City every two to three months, an occasion for which Juliana and Martin have been inseparable for the last year and a half. They are unknowingly monogamous - each is stupid for the other, assumes that the other has other partners when they aren't together, and hasn't said anything for fear of ruining the relationship. In addition to direct neural interface for vessel operations, she's cybered for her diving hobby/maintenance duties, with internal air, cyberoptics with underwater compensation, and cyberfeet with retractable swim fins. Like most of the Arellanos, she's an escrima practitioner; her focus is knives, especially the barong. Juliana is of Taiwanese and Filipina ancestry, diminutive, salt-weathered, and fond of elaborately braiding her techhair. She has a full-back high-definition light tattoo of the Twelve-Mile Limit's route, with a nightly GPS update ensuring that it reflects the vessel's current position. For formal occasions, she hot-swaps her workaday cyberfeet for designer versions with built-in stiletto heels.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:55, Sat 01 May 2021.
