Temple

Name Temple ALIASES Priest, Prophet AKA Mark Church Philip Donovan Gideon Thomas Simon Groves Nationality British Metatype Homo Sapiens Sapiens Archetype Hermetic Mage Birthdate April 18, 2037 "Pray, think well of we English. We have the most rigid code of immorality in the world." General Information Appearance About 6 ft tall, this norm male is broad-shouldered and appears to be in trim but not muscular. His hair is cut short, and his face lightly dusted with stubble. The breeze carries a hint of his aftershave: an imported brand. The man's green eyes are often hidden behind a pair of silver wire-rimmed sunglasses with reflective round lenses, and as he turns his head to look about the area, they reflect the light in a flicker of white. He appears to be in his early thirties. While he tends to dress in corporate styles, he lacks the nervous tension or arrogance commonly seen on a wage slave found outside of comforting business surroundings. Instead, he seems relaxed and observant, an easy self-confidence on his face that doesn't cross the line into supercilious disdain. A slight bulge to every coat he wears, beneath his left arm, probably conceals his pocket secretary. Distinguishing Features Distinct British accent in Received Pronunciation Often wears silver jewelery with incised geometric decorations Often carries a briefcase Usually dressed in expensive suits and similar outerwear, even when not entirely appropriate Mannerisms and Habits As submitted by others Corporate Rigid Arrogant Charming Disciplined Verbose Fastidious Ruthless Reputation Temple? Oh, yeah. What I've heard is that he's moderately generous, to some extent resourceful, somewhat hard-working and to some extent rational. But I also heard that he's just a little cruel and a bit arrogant. I mean, he's got some promise. But overall, he's somebody who tries to do the right thing. That's all I know. Dependable: 4 Cruel: 1 Tough: 1 Honorable: 4 Arrogant: 1 Hard-Working: 5 Rational: 5 Generous: 5 Resourceful: 5 Shadow Scene Information General Information Associations Temple is known to associate with an elven runner known as Badb, often working in partnership. Capabilities Temple is known to be a hermetic mage, with skills around mind influence. History Temple is known to have recently arrived in the city from the Far East. Increased Details Associations Temple is known to have been involved in the South East Asia shadows for several years. Temple has been seen associating with Denver runners such as Genesis, Fray, Michael, Onyx, and Sharla. Capabilities Temple is known to be a hermetic mage, with a moderate spell list, but does not appear to make extensive use of elementals. Temple displays a good knowledge of shadow operation planning, negotiation and leadership. Temple displays a veteran's proficiency with the Viper Slivergun. History Temple has been rumoured to have been involved with the Sioux Sitting Bull Scandal Temple has been rumoured to have been involved with the Caribbean Liner Disaster Highly Detailed Associations Temple is known to have led a shadowteam known as the 'Clerics' based out of Hong Kong, under the pseudonym 'Priest' for several years. This team was roughly grey hat in nature, unwilling to perform political assassinations and having the almost traditional 'no children' rules, but otherwise not too burdened with moral qualms. They tended to specialise in noncombat resolutions of situations and infiltration/deception operations when at all possible. Temple is known to have angered the Four Eighty Eight triad, and to have been forced to flee Hong Kong. Capabilities Temple is a hermetic mage who is not known to be of initiate grade. Temple's spell selection consists mostly of mind-affecting and illusion spells. Temple has an extensive knowledge of magical security systems and the corporate procedures which accompany them. He has published several articles on the subject to various magical matrix-sites. Temple has an extensive knowlege of the hermetic principles of magic. History Temple is known to have previously been employed by a megacorporation as a global magical security consultant, and was once apparently well renowned in that field under his original name. Comments >>>>> [ Yāt louh pìhng ngòn, my friend. I fear it'll be a long time before we meet again.] <<<<< -Liu Bai (12:55:02/08-09-72) >>>>> [Steady under pressure, and even when the world's ending and the bullets are flying he's still getting out wry quips. Good at leading from the front. But he's tolerant to a fault, and I mean that. The middle of a job is not the time to coddle everyone's eccentricities and foibles! Sometimes the leader's job is to tell his troops to sit still and shut up.] <<<<< -Glimmer (22:11:06/03-9-72) >>>>> [I heard this man's been dead for some time. Prove me wrong] <<<<< -Henry Knox (12:33:21/05-19-75) Background This is a full background provided for OOC entertainment. Please don't use this information IC without asking me. Part One – Hong Kong, The Past - What Makes A Beginning? + Expand Part One . The smoke that rose from the burning incense sticks dissipated in the rising breeze. In every direction, the small, squat stone pylons marking the last resting places of the deceased crowded the small Chinese cemetery. At this time of night, the place was deserted, the thin light from lanterns stapled with iron brackets to the encircling brick walls cast long shadows that dappled the markers which stood atop each buried urn. All around, outside the brick wall, massive skyscrapers rose up to challenge the heavens, shimmering glass and plasti-steel and massive advertising screens and sweeping lights looming over the walled enclave on each side. Here in Hong Kong, the old jostles shoulder to shoulder with the new, the arcane with the mundane, the foreign with the local. A grey-suited man stood in the half-light before a stone, watching the sticks curl and turn to ash in the offering bowl that stood like all the others in front of the grave, apparently speaking to another individual hidden in shadow. "When you're looking at your own grave, the final marker, the notice of eternity, I suppose it's natural that your thoughts turn back towards the beginning. But where was the beginning? Was it the day I was born? Was that really the point that made me what I am today? No, it wasn't my childhood, wasn't the experiences of my former life. It was the day I died. That night in the Manchester hospital room, when the five black-clad runners came to yank me out of my expensive recovery bed and drag me half naked down the corridors towards the emergency exit? When the security teams, subverted by the other side in a vicious departmental corporate infight, open fire on everything that moves, trying to take no prisoners? Even after being in the security biz for so long, it was the first time I had heard gunfire. It's louder than you'd think, and also, more like a ripping buzz than a staccato pounding. Louder than the thumping of my heart in my chest as my life flashed before my eyes. Louder than the swearing of the two bleeding men who made it with me to the escape vehicle, leaving three of their chummers dead in pools of blood that spread darkly on the hospital's linoleum floors. Louder than the shouted argument about the Johnson who had 'sold them out' – it seemed that one of my bosses' opponents had leaked the information about my relatively unguarded hospital stay to a Universal Omnitech recruitment team, who'd launched an extraction. I had skills they wanted. Like all the Shadowruns on Trid, it was a doublecross. The leakers had gone right ahead and made sure that security wouldn't let any of us out alive, and there I was, killed in a 'tragic accident during a hostile recruitment operation'. So sad. My boss would have to turn over control of my projects to them, until my shoes – dead man's shoes – were filled again. They say that running the shadows is the most vicious existence on earth. Maybe so. But the corp life is nearly the same. You're just better dressed and better fed. Dazed and weary, I knew I was dead. I now knew who'd set me up. The same people who'd landed me in the hospital in the first place after a 'minor accident' on a site I was consulting on. They couldn't let me live, even if we made it to UO and I signed up with that corp instead. They couldn't take the risk I'd hand the information over to my new bosses, who would cheer me on as my old bosses ripped each other apart some more as the new fuel went onto the fire. I was woozy, traumatised, still trying to understand what was happening to me, as I jounced around in the back of the speeding van. Even more stunned when the tires blew out as the runners went over the suddenly-reactivated denial grid that blocked the entrance out of the hospital's well-groomed and expansive grounds. When the vehicle stopped rolling, my ears were ringing, my nose was bleeding, and I didn't have much time. The runners were out cold, but they'd left a gear bag in the back of the vehicle. Clothes, a few credsticks. I grabbed what there was, used nearly the last of my strength to make myself invisible, and got the hell out of the van. Just in time, too. A security team skidded up in an SUV and hit the truck with an incendiary. Boom. All the evidence, neatly cleaned away. Except for the fact that there was me, bloodied and confused, hiding under a nearby bush. Even if I got away, my groggy brain managed to process, my employment prospects at Transys were all finished. If I stayed, the opposition would try to geek me because I knew too much. If I ran, my bosses would be after me for disloyalty. They'd find out soon enough that I wasn't killed: I needed to escape. To disappear. To let them call me dead: and in the end, the tragic accident story they had already prepared went ahead, better for both my former corporate masters and their foes within the very corp that I'd once called home. I was a victim of a terrorist attack. Everyone must stay vigilant. Security is our watchword. My parents still don't know that I'm not a porcelain pot of ashes under this stone. It cost me everything I could liquidate to get my SIN and everything about me professionally erased. I was lucky to know people that could do it. When you work in Corporate Security, you meet a lot of… professional people that your average wage slave wouldn't. Even if you're a magical specialist like me. That wasn't even the hard part. The really hard part was getting the ritual sorcery done to change my astral signature. Transys had ritual samples, so did the Lord Protector's Office thanks to my magical status, and there was the blood in the van. The favours I had to offer up to bribe the pair of NDM druids to perform the rite took me years to pay off. I went home. Not Cardiff, not Oxford. I went back to Hong Kong. To let my birthplace claim me again, the place where my expatriate family had raised me til I went back to Britain, the mother country, for my university education. There, broke, SINless, and with a freshly retuned aura, what was left? I couldn't go to a corporation. What did I have? Magic. That was pretty damn rare right there. It wouldn't open as many doors as it had done as a wagemage, but still, as the saying went, it was always stupid to slot off a mage. What else did I have? I knew corporate procedure, I knew corporate magical security inside out: half the Transys facilities in Wales had at least some of my ward and biowall, elemental and watcher patterns in them somewhere. People would pay for that information and expertise, just like the corporation had. People in the shadows." The incense sticks shed their final puffs of scented smoke into the night-time air, and their glow faded. The grey suited man lifted a hand in farewell to the figure in shadow, and turned to trudge out of the cemetery, blurring into the strobe-broken darkness of the bustling city streets. Part Two – Strait of Malacca, The Past - Hong Kong Nights + Expand Part Two. The grey-suited man leans over the back rail of the supertanker's aft deck, watching as the massive screws far below churn the water to grey-white foam. In the background, high-sided cliffs loom over the water of the straits, other shipping visible in the crowded waterway that is the gateway to the Pacific. A shadowy, indistinct figure stands against the white-painted bulk of the aft funnel, behind him, as he speaks. "I was thirty years old when I left my old life behind in the middle of 2067. From a happy and successful wage-mage powering my way up the corporate ranks, to a spell-slinger for hire job by job, Johnson by Johnson. I lived through the first year, that's the hardest part, they say. Money comes, money goes. I can't say I ever really tried to save it: life seemed too short, and every mission was a chance to get dead. You can't take it with you, and there's more to life than being an invulnerable arse-kicker with a legion of elementals at your command and a spell for every minute of the day. I haven't made myself a towering reputation, I didn't get myself a pile of notoriety or a Criminal SIN. I'll take that: I'd rather live than die in a blaze of glory. I've worked all over South East Asia - Thailand in paddy fields, the urban sprawl of Manila in the Phillipines, research labs in the jungles of Vietnam. Hong Kong's my home, though. I can't imagine leaving it behind. The people, the places, the food. I've met some amazing people, seen some amazing things. Done some pretty terrible ones. Learned to shoot a gun. Learned to heal a wound. Saved lives. Taken them. I guess it all balances out in the end. Four years in the shadows. And of course, I met Badb there. Hell knows what she's up to now. She'll stop by again. She usually does." He turns away, and the shadowy figure blurs into the fog sliding up over the vessel's stern. Part Three – Denver Free Trade Zone, Dec 2071 - Another Stop on the Long Road + Expand Part Three. Temple should have been tired. Well, no. Tired did not begin to cover how utterly flat-out exhausted he should, by all rights, have been. After five years of running the shadows of Hong Kong, he'd ended up in Denver. Five years of running, hiding, grifting, fighting. Five years of battling against and alongside some of the worst lying, murderous drekheads society could produce. Five years of existence, til it all went to hell when the deal went wrong and the triads were after his blood. Nothing to do but flee. Leave the team he'd formed, led, lived with, shared danger with, shared humour with. All scattered now across the world. Denver, an hour from true dawn, and he should have been so deeply asleep a Troll could tapdance on his pillow and not raise a stir, but he was lying sprawled on a motel bed in a hastily secured room in the Free Trade Zone, thirty-six stories above the street. He was on his side, propped up on one elbow, the hand beneath his chin. Racing to escape the vengeance of the Chinese mob, he'd come to America with whatever he could salvage: clothes, a weapon, some ready currency, the contents of his bug-out-bag. The rest had gone: abandoned, destroyed, or traded for the country-hopping route-masking escape route out, the smuggled route in, and the new identities that were needed. A few contacts here, a few passed-on names. A life to rebuild. Work to find. His green eyes flick to the dark, curtained glass, looking for movement beyond the slightly billowing drape. Out there, sat on the balcony ledge looking out over the city, immobile, the woman he'd come to this far-away place with. She was probably telling herself he was still asleep. To his mage-sight, the flickers of her aura were tinged with regret and with nostalgia, with hope and uncertainty, with determination. The letter again. Her endless search that made them pick Denver as the final destination in the crazy rush across the world. Their paths had crossed again as they often did over the years, this time at the right time, or the wrong time, depending on your perspective. Denver. The point at the end of the trail though Africa, the Carib League, the CAS. He waits patiently for her to finish her vigil and return. Sleep will come when it does. Stories from the South Asia Shadows This are stories from background provided for OOC entertainment. Please don't use this information IC without asking me. A Priest and the Clerics Tale: Dancing Along Corridors + Expand This Story . Hard rain lashes down onto the pavement, deepening the etched paths where runoff pools and seeps into the gutters at the edges of the slowly dissolving road surfaces. The sound of sirens howl far-off in the night, lost and searching but never satisfied amid the background roar of traffic. Scrolling walls of neon coat the sides of the skyscrapers that wall the roads up to the heavens, shedding the acid rain as they pour their advertising glow into the night. Citizens scurry beneath arched corroded polyplas sidewalk shields, treated umbrellas hoisted to ward off the acrid spatters and the rising steam from pavement vents shrouding their ankles in mist. Chinese characters spill onto the pavement in twisting patterns of light, backlit from the scrolling signs that beckon and entice shoppers into the corporate webs of consumption and avarice. Come inside, come buy, come buy. The poor eat from noodle carts and vans tucked into alleyways, the rich sip tea and eat dim-sum in the chrome palaces of the wealthy. At the foot of a towering block of steel and glass, sleek vehicles pull up and drop off their high-rolling precious cargo. Elegantly suited men and ravishingly dressed women saunter up the red carpet, through the uniformed ranks of white-gloved attendants, towards the gaping glass doors that suck them inside the lavishly decorated atrium of the massive building. Decked out in red silk for luck, with massive drapes and plush settles, brass-sheathed columns and great bronze statues of the gods of luck and chance, the casino-hotel lobby is filled with the wealthy and indulgent. A couple passes through the main doors, walking arm in arm. He's medium height, genial, rotund, and wrapped up in an expensive suit that makes him look as slim as possible under the circumstances. The woman on his arm is far from mere eye-candy, hard-eyed and calculating in an elegant but hardly seductive dress. The bellboys bow in sequence as they move up the carpet, stopping in front of the circular central desk beneath the ten-storey atrium's apex, directly beneath the massive crystal globe chandelier hanging on its wrist-thick chain. "122. Execute. 123. Execute." The voices are robbed of all emotion and inflection by the hissing crackle of the encryption and ECCM that the communications system is loaded with. "221. Rolling." There's a brief pause. "321. Rolling." Figures move from their positions in the atrium, joining the milling crowd. A tall man with green eyes and a silver earring, dressed to impress in a well-tailored neotuxedo moves away from the matrix terminals. A woman with striking platinum hair in a blue chinese dress that covers everything but insinuates everything exits the lobby restrooms. A stocky dwarf in the red-gold-and-white uniform of the hotel moves from his position in line at the bellhop's stand. The eyes of all three light on the couple at the main desk a moment. "Mr and Mrs Xiang, you are booked into your usual randomised room of course, and I have the only keycard here. All your requests have been taken care of." The receptionist is obsequious - more so than usual. He passes over a freshly encoded high-security keycard, claps his hands, and a nearby bellhop rushes to take the trolley of cases that has been wheeled in by the top-hat clad doormen. The bellboy - a stocky dwarf - collects up the trolley, and guides it carefully across the floor as they move to one of the glass pod elevators that lines the walls of the atrium, hoisting them smoothly fifteen stories into the air. Two more elevator pods rise from other walls of the lobby, the green-eyed man staring down at the atrium floor below as he rises up to the fifteenth floor, watching the people below shrink into miniature ants scurring in the circle of chandelier light. The platninum haired woman presses herself against the glass wall of another pod, scandalising the elderly co-occupant of the lift as she squirms against the chill, and not co-incidentaly fixing that outrage into his mind rather than her features. The chiming noise announces the arrival of the liftcars near-simultaneously, and all three groups step out into the circumference corridor out of sight of the others. The door to the suite opens at the touch of the keycard in Mrs Xiang's hand, and she and her husband swan inside, followed by the baggage cart. The bellhop bustles around, lifting the suitcases and bags into place on the racks, stealthily fixing a small spy-eye camera/microphone onto the ornate brass mirrorframe with a press of his thumb as he lowers the makeup bag into the desk. Then with bows and scrapes, after recieving a small handful of notes from the smiling Mr Xiang as a tip, he eases his way out and around the corridor, re-entering the lift and descending to the fourth floor, entering a small hotel room of much lower quality. Swiftly removing his clothes and placing them into a briefcase, he keeps an eye on the proceedings in the room via an image link in his eyeglasses, watching the waterfall bars of the microphone indicator as it records the discussions within. "223. Package en route." Back on the fifteenth floor, the door opens, and Mr Xiang emerges to stroll back towards the elevators, ready for a night in the casino. Just as he reaches the bank of lifts, the blonde bombshell turns the corner and approaches, giving him a warm smile. They brush past each other, and none but a true expert would notice the flicker of her hand into his suit jacket as he makes a gesture of apology for the contact. His reward is a sparkling grin and a look at the undulation of her rear as she walks on past him, and once again, her assets are all that stick in the mind as he gets into the lift which rapidly drops the gambler down to the casiono floor. "321. Package collected." She turns another corner, as they walk in sequence around the square central corridor, and impossibly passes Mr Xiang once more, who gives her a solemn nod as she brushes next to him and slips her hand into his pocket, depositing a small old-fashioned metal key within. "123. Recieved." She continues her undulating progress and enters the third bank of elevators, hitting the glowing plastic button for the underground taxi rank. "321. Exfiltrating." Below on the fourth floor, the former bellhop disconnects the small electronic device from the communications rig and places it carefully into the shielded case with the remains of his disguise. "221. Transmission complete. Target location Delta. Exfiltrating." The door to the small room closes behind a respectable briefcase-carrying dwarven businessman in an unimposing suit who moves to the stairwell down to the lobby. Mr Xiang enters the casino below, walking past the Luck Dragons and into the neon studded LED-flashing temple to the gods of chance and fate. Mr Xiang walks up to his suite door and presses the button. His wife's questioning voice emerges from the speaker above the round eye of the door camera, and the rotund gentleman presses a button on his 'watch' which plays a synthesised recording of his 'own' voice. "Forgot my lucky pen, bao bei," comes the sequence. There's a snort from the suite that's audible even without the door communicator, and the door swings open. Mr Xiang puts a half-dozen chips on red, and watches the roulette wheel spin, his eyes glazed in excitement and anticipation. Mr Xiang walks into the suite through the opened door, smiling at his wife as he touches her on the shoulder in greeting and she smiles back at him. Then, still smiling, she goes into the cavernous bathroom on the other side of the dressing room to adjust her make-up, having suddenly had the notion that the shade of lipstick and foundation she chose, after all, is quite unsuitable. Mr Xiang cheers as the ball comes to rest, and a pile of chips is raked onto his area of the green baize. Mr Xiang moves quickly to the concealed safe in his suite, moving the sliding picture on the wall aside and inserting the key from his pocket to make the lock click open. It's only the work of a few more moments to extract the grey silk gem bag, and the safe is closed again, the bag is in his pocket, and the door to the suite is closing behind him. The lift banks are ahead, and the doors slide open, then closed behind him. There is a brief shimmer of light, and then the only occupant riding down in the lift is the green-eyed man, who swiftly crosses the lobby. From the casino comes a roar as Mr Xiang doubles his stake yet again. Lucky for some. Tucking the lapels of his neotuxedo into sharper positions, the green eyed man exits the brass-gold finery of the lobby and enters a taxi. "122, 123. Hallelujah." A Priest and the Clerics Tale: A Linear Sequence of Scares Coming Soon! The title you enter here is not shown and only serves as visible title in the indices. Simply enter the commenting character alias. SEARCHING SHADOWLANDS.........[ OK ] THREADS FOUND: 0 DISPLAYING