I will post Sakura's backstory for the amusement of everyone here, but be forewarned...it could totally ruin it for you if you want to have your character learn any of it in game. If you think our characters will never meet, don't care, or hate surprises, then read on....but you have been warned.
It starts pretty far back (I have been playing this character for over two years now) and it tells some of the story that may never come out in game, or at least only to a limited degree. I will post more later on this thread if feedback indicates that people are indeed interested in it.
Part I: Life and Death and Impermanence, a Suitable Place to Begin
Sakura grew up in the early part of the 21st century, born and raised in Saijo City, which was located near many other big megalopolis cities of the time. She had a relatively normal childhood, with a brother named Morpheus and two parents who were involved in local politics and activism. Her house was modest, but well-kept, and her neighborhood experienced only limited crime and upheaval. She graduated from high school like everyone else, going on to study medicine at a local university, where she had a difficult time deciding whether or not she wanted to focus on midwifery or forensic pathology, leading her to switch classes several times.
It was during this time that a trans-national business simply called “The Corporation” entered Saijo, first appearing on billboards advertising home security systems. They branched out into local police security, then government security (the United States had become a collection of city-states at this point, and Saijo was one of them), winning all contracts with almost no challenge and stunning the public when The Corporation’s very own Gregory Dix became the first Supreme Chancellor of Saijo City, eliminating the Saijo Council of Ten and the Senior Advisor almost overnight.
Mass political protest ensued, with thousands of people taking to the streets and occupying buildings that The Corporation had commandeered, gaining some ground and costing many lives on both sides of the conflict. Riots destroyed huge swaths of the Saijo city proper, and there seemed to be no end to the constant fighting. The Corporation fought back swiftly, and now provided security in the form of a fleet of tanks and black-clad soldiers who patrolled the streets and arrested anyone who resisted. Lists were compiled of political activists and their families, and the door-to-door midnight arrests began. Sakura and her brother watched from a hidden compartment in their apartment crawlspace as the soldiers took their parents away. It was unclear whether or not they still lived.
In the aftermath, Sakura and Morpheus fled to the scant safety of the main resistance movement that remained—the Urban Pirates or UP, as they were commonly called—and became soldiers themselves, engaging in a combination of guerilla attacks on Corporation interests and public protest, galvanizing others to resist and form independent communities in Saijo, becoming small cities unto themselves with medical complexes, marketplaces, facilities that provided combat training, schools, and (relatively) democratic governance in the form of autonomous councils, that interacted with the other factions and formed the cooperative umbrella of resistance movements that countered the Corporation. Sakura used her medical knowledge to both provide rudimentary health services and to train others, although she preferred being a field medic to one working in one of the squatter hospitals, as it let her remain close to her brother when he headed out to the front lines of protests.
The morning Morpheus was killed began like any other, with plans for the day being laid in the communal conference room and assignments being volunteered for. Morpheus rolled his eyes and grinned when Sakura raised her hand immediately after he requested front-line security duty, and as they were leaving the meeting he ruffled her hair, accusing her of playing Mama. She laughed and jokingly reminded him to wear his mask to protect his lungs from from the tear gas. Everything was quiet that morning on the front lines; Morpheus was standing with his arms crossed behind the “sitters” who were positioned in front of a Corporation Public Works building. The sitters, all seated with their legs crossed, were linked together with their arms inside of PVC pipes, encircling the front door of the CPW building and beyond, blocking the entrance from the Corporation executives who were trying to hold meetings there that day with neighboring city-states in a semblance of normal governance. Hundreds of protestors stretched across the courtyard directly in front of the building, and Sakura breathed in and out slowly through her own mask, wishing desperately that they had better ones to wear—actual chemical protective masks—but that was still largely impossible. She peered through the crowd, watching Morpheus as he stood there, reflecting on how much he had begun to look like their father lately, with a stubborn stance and playful eyes that seemed to be smiling even when they were angry.
When the tanks rolled in, Sakura tensed. This happened every time, sure, but she hated it. The show of aggression was always covered over with a thin veneer of being “for the interests of the people,” and the arrests, when they were made, were always couched as being done for the same. Corporation soldiers disembarked from the tanks, standing in long lines alongside the rows of protestors with their machine guns in their hands, some using bullhorns to order the crowd to disperse. No one moved, and followed their training to the letter, sitting stoically under the gaze of the soldiers, waiting for the tear gas to begin and the possible beatings to start, blocked in part by the front-line security. Cameras rolled on the periphery, and news journalists were chattering away in front of them. It was a surprise then, when the soldiers, en masse, simply began firing into the crowd, mowing down the front lines and sending people scattering in all directions. The sitters were still in place, but they were all dead, as were many of the front line security behind them. Sakura had thrown herself behind a concrete column when the shots started, but she was up as soon as they paused, her green eyes scanning the crowd over her black mask, searching for her brother.
He was on the far side of the courtyard, exchanging words with a soldier who was trying to convince him to step into a truck peacefully. That the soldier hesitated was odd in and of itself, and Morpheus was taking advantage of it, trying to convince him to give up the ghost and join UP instead. Sakura came up along the border of the courtyard, ducking behind columns and remaining low, her hands clutching the strap of her field kit. She had checked the pulse points on most of those shot in the first wave of bullet fire, but they were all dead. Her eyes met Morpheus’s as she crouched nearby, and he froze, then motioned her away with his chin before continuing the banter. The soldier touched the com device in his ear briefly, and then closed his eyes for a beat before lifting the gun in his hands and shooting Morpheus in the chest. Sakura screamed, lunging forward, only to be pulled back by another activist. Morpheus had already hit the ground, and Sakura broke free, rushing to his side and tearing at her field kit, items spilling onto the ground as she pressed her hands to the growing flower of red on his chest. She reached up to check his pulse, finding nothing. He had died cleanly, the shot stopping his heart. Her last act was to gently pull the black cloth mask from his face, touching her fingertips to his lips…then she was pulled away and across the courtyard, between the dead bodies, through the crossfire, and loaded up into the back of a jeep that drove expediently away from the din and smoke.
After that incident she was a living shell, moving about her days with little joy for life. She saw nearly all of UP eradicated over the next few months, and finding little in common with the thugs and gangs that moved in to take the place of the independent democratic movements that had been uprooted. She headed out of Saijo and into a nomadic life, travelling first through neighboring city-states like Midian and finally ending up in the Wastelands, where she stayed for some time, but never put down serious roots. Constantly on the move, she slept on rooftops and under bridges, stealing to eat and fill her medical kit, sometimes healing people she came across because they needed it. Most of the time she needed to dilute the medications she used to stretch them, and often there simply were no supplies and she needed to improvise. Sometimes people just died.
During a trip back to Saijo to tap some of her previous supply lines for resources, she walked through an empty area just outside the city limits, feet crunching the trash and plant debris underneath as she made her way towards a meet-up point for narcotics runners located in small warehouse made of corrugated steel. She tripped over a rock that was jutting out of the ground and went sprawling, landing on the ground and slicing her wrist open on some jagged metal. Cursing and bleeding, she sat down on a smooth whitish-yellowish rock, reaching for a cloth to press against the wound, which was spurting blood all over the rock and her. As she pressed firmly on the cloth in an attempt to stop the bleeding, she noticed that the blood that was hitting the rock was disappearing almost immediately, evaporating like steam…yet she was able to sit on it without it burning her. Intrigued, she opened the bottle of disinfectant she was using to clean the wound on her wrist, and dropped a little on the rock, watching it slide off and onto the ground.
After cleaning and bandaging her wound, she took out a small metal lock-pick and scraped some of the surface of the rock, finding that it broke easily enough for her to chip away a sizeable portion and store it in a tin. She continued to meet-up point, and through some finagling was able to gain access to a crude laboratory, where she tested the substance, discovering that it was nothing she had ever seen before. Glumly, she packed up her things and was preparing to go when one of the drug runners gave her a hassle about it, telling her it looked like stuff he could sell, and what did it do? She tried to explain that it had no purpose she could figure out, and was therefore strange….but worthless. He laughed, snatching the tin from her hand and opening it, eating half the contents. She looked on, horrified but mildly fascinated, and waited for the effects.
His eyes began to glow slightly, turning first orange then a light yellow, and he began to blink, looking around the room, exclaiming about his newfound sense enhancements. He felt his leg tingling where he had been shot a few days prior, and tore at the bandages, just in time for both of them to see the wound starting to seal itself up. “Holy shit, Sakky…you have found something that regenerates life….” He then put a gun to her head and demanded she get some more. Agreeing mainly to get away from him, she headed somewhere else for a few days to be certain she wasn’t being followed, and then made her way back to the site where she found the rock, taking a larger sample this time, storing it in small bags which she carried off in a backpack after covering the rock up with trash and debris so it was less noticeable.
Back at the underground squat she was staying in she pulled out a small portion, looked at her bandaged wrist, and mumbled a small prayer before eating it. Immediately she felt the effects…the dizzying warmth to the point of feeling flushed, followed by eyes that could see in the dark and ears that could hear a moth’s wings flapping over by her lantern. Her wound began to burn, and as she peeled off the bandage, she watched her skin knitting itself together before her eyes—not quickly by any means, but it was doing it. Astounded, she set about creating a safe storage place for the…whatever it was.