Shadowrun RPG NPCs - Maria Mercurial

GM Section

References - Maria's Luxury Condo (48th Floor, Star Gardens Endominium)

Persona - Amazon

When Maria is the Amazon, she is filled with energy, almost to the point of being in a rage. She is abrupt, with no patience for lengthy discussion, and has a hair-trigger temper. The Amazon is her usual personality when performing. Maria often gets wound up very tight in this persona, which makes her seek to unwind through

Persona - School Mistress

When Maria is the School Mistress, she is quet and withdrawn, her emotions repressed. This is a thoughtful, reserved woman, filled with pain at the injustice and cruelty of the world. Oddly, perhapds, it is as the School Mistress that Maria writes most of her lyrics, even such rage-filled challenges to the masters of the Sixth World as "Take It To Mister". In this persona, Maria cannot cope with violence, and seeks escape from it by any means possible, even emotional collapse.

Persona - Innocent

Maria's third and last personality is the Innocent. In this mode, she is, in a sense, a child again. In the time before he life was wrenched out of shape to satisfy Texamachach's fantasies. Innocent is friendly, open to people, and trusting. She does not act childish, but has the naivete of a child. This personality surfaces when Maria feels safe, a rare occurence in her life these days. It is the foundation on which Dr. Kenner hopes to build an integrated personality for her patient.

Persona - All

The GM needs to keep these charactistics in mind whenever they portray Maria, deciding which personality is in control, based on the situation. She can, however, change from on to the other in a flash. In times of tremendous stress, she may whip from one persona to another, trying to find a way to cope. If this horrible dilemma is prolonged, she will collapse under the terrible psychological strain.

Some things are consistant for all persona:

• Maria lives and respects Amando Hernandez. She expresses this with friendship, but if she trusted herself more, would admit that it is an even deeper emotion. She is torn and confused by his apparent evil and by her own latent feelings. This permits the GM to make her very stubborn about seeing the truth of the bad guy's frame-up.
• Denial is a strong defence mechanism for Maria. She has had to confront things that would drive most people into complate insanity. She will, therefore, simply refuse to dealw ith threats if they can be avoided. Even the bravest person cannot face continual pain, day after day, without suffering trauma.

References - Mercurial (2050, p13, p19, p30).

Secret Information to be discovered

Sorayama Datastore (and Taetzel Building mainframe) - Ultra design #84 commissioned 2044/06/13 by johnsonsan, whom my sources identify as an Aztechnology rep. Subject Maria Anguilar, apparently under standard indeture to corporation. Almost relictant to undertake modification, but even when nature accidentally creates such beauty, art can improve on it. Estimate time to completion at 90-120 days.

Specifications include novel dermal replacement (see attachment), heightened reflex response, improvements in musculature, and various cortical implants. Additonal fee specified for the new ultra-secure sealed memory space, modified to be transparent to most current scanning technology. Direct Interface modifications also route primary datalonk plugs through pleasure/pain centres of brain. I have pointed out to the client that this will intesify many cybernetic activities to the point of endagering subject's sanity. Simsense, direct data access, even sythlinking a simple music generator will have profound effects on the subject. This is acceptable to the client.

The entry continues for sveral hundred pages, with accompanying medical data, picutres of Maria in various stages of modification, and so forth. Notes indicate that the use of a sythlink to train her in the use of her neural circuits had the greatest success. Sorayama notes - Subject appears to find the concentration involved in sythlinking sufficiant to control possible psychological trauma due to the pleasure/pain interface of the datajack.

Near the end, the follow apepars. Per instructions from client, applied customised simsense chip at illegally high amplitude to subject until dependence was established. Subject response indicates profound addiction after ten days of two exposures per day.

At the end of the medical report, a brief ntoe is appended. Surprised and not a little please to observe this subject recently on tri-vid. Apparently, she was released from indenture and is now artise of renown, under name Maria Mercurial. Though the music is not to my taste, the performance of her modificiations is obviously still at appropriate standards. Perusing references to her in various popular journals, I suspect that the subject suffered psychological damage from extended exposure to high-amplitude simsense addiction, but has somehow overcome the dependency. Judging from the intensity of the synthlink performance, this maybe ascribed to the eddects of the pleasure/pain interface of the datajack, so that music, became, in itself, an influence stronger than the simsense addiction. This may be the subject of an interesting future monograph.

Finally, there is an entry dated 2050/02/12. It notes that an Aztechnology rep requested a copy of the file, which was delivered to a system address in Seattle, on LTG 6206.