Hellcat is a character in the Shadowrun world of roleplaying games, a cyberpunk universe set in the relatively near future.

Hellcat

"You can't run away forever-
But there's nothing wrong with getting a good head start."
-Meat Loaf

Hellcat was born Anna Elena Sanchez on the twentythird of May, 2029. Her mother, Little Greybird (Susana) Sanchez, wa s Navajo, and her father, Andreas Luis, Spanish. Her father wished her to be a good and obedient daughter, and attempted to raise her Catholic. Her mother wished to teach her of her tribal heritage.

Anna as a child mostly wished to learn from her mo ther. She thought that the tension in her family was due to this defiance of her father's wishes. What she did not realize is that her father never recognized her as his daughter- for young Anna had richly colored red hair. While he never accused his w ife of adultery, he grew increasingly more violent and distant. The child's disobedience did not help.

When Anna turned thirteen, her mother instructed her in a tribal vision quest, to find her guide and guardian animal. Following these instructions , Anna went out and meditated on a plume of smoke. After a time of staring, the smoke to her eyes resoved itself into a jungle of ribbons of dark trees. Lying on the branch of one of these trees was a cat, a jaguar with fur as red as her hair.

She was in the process of telling her mother all about this when her father came home. Thrilled with her discovery, she told him. Finally driven to rage by this defiance, Andreas hit his daughter, partially blinding her with trauma to her left eye.

And as if this were not enough, he sent her to a corporate military school.

Anna and military school did not get along very well together. Or rather they did, but the people and A nna did not. The other tribal children saw her as a traitor to the tribe, because of her father. The Hispanic children saw her as another Native girl they could use and abuse. It did not help that she was an attractive girl.

At the age of sixteen, Anna decided to undergo a particular sort of surgery- a cyberware implantation. She wished to see again, and clearly. Her partial blindness on her left side was a liability. While she could have opted for a clonal replacement, she figured that the addi tional benefits she could get from the electronics would give her an edge. The night before she went under trank for the surgery, she was grabbed by five of her tormentors from the past several years (who came up on her blind side) and raped.

The nex t day, she had her eyes remade.

It is an interesting thing that magic and technology do not mix at all well. The implantation of cyberware shifts the body from the spiritual template that is so vital to the practice of magic. Anna had no idea that s he had magical potential.

However, when she awoke from her surgery, she woke insane. Not merely insane, but her body had shifted to the form of a great cat- a jaguar with red fur. She broke her way through a window of the training grounds' hospital and spent two months in mildly schizophrenic insanity, skulking about the area and hunting jackrabbits.

Anna's consciousness shifted over this time period. Her totem guide became a creature of anger, hate, fear and pain. She swore to her Goddess of the moon that no man would ever touch her again, with what small portion of her mind was not controlled by the instincts of the body in which she lived.

One day, she was lying on a limb, and heard someone pass beneath her. Recognizing him more as an enemy than as the ringleader of the trainees who had raped her, she pounced from that height and neatly snapped his spine. And the madness passed, and Anna found herself crouching, naked, upon a cooling body.

The court-martial was brief and she did n ot remember most of it. The shock of the events and the fact that she was interrogated mostly under magical truth spells meant that the next several days were nothing more than a blur. Deemed innocent by reason of insanity, she was removed from the mili tary training and plunged into magical work, geared only to the practical. However, she was not given more than the most basic of other training, mostly because the people in charge were slightly afraid of what she might do with a greater level of skill.

The first thing Anna did upon returning to training was to have diamond-filmed spurs implanted along her forearms. She was never going to be undefended again. With the subtle twitch of a muscle, these blades would slide out of the back of her hands . She trained with them vigorously. (Anyone who is familiar with the X-Men comics, think Wolverine here.) At the same time, she had the appearance of her cybereyes modified- to a yellow-green color, with vertical slits for pupils. Cat's eyes.

Afte r she mastered conjuring, two of the remaining four rapists died- one in a training accident in the forest, and the other killed in a holdup in one of the suburbs of Denver. Anna had discovered the usefulness of summoning nature spirits.

At eighteen, Anna was recruited by an elite paramilitary group- an "unofficial asset" of the corporation where her parents worked. The leader of this squad was a formidable elven woman named Claudia Marie Moonwalker, who used the name Fallen Angel. Angel assigned t o Anna a partner, Rose Desert Flower, also known as Fellstar, a gunner. Anna was given the nickname, "Little Hellcat," because of her red hair, temper, and totem. The Deathangels worked for the corporation for several years- until the corp was forcibly taken over by a megacorporation, Aztechnology.

Anna went to the building, only to find her mother dead in her office, two bullet holes neatly through her heart. She brought out the body and burned it. When she returned to the squad, she asked the de cker to find some information for her. When she returned the data, Anna slashed her spurs through the pages. She had seen the evidence she had suspected- her father had mentioned to an old friend the instability of the company, and that old friend had s taged the raid and given Andreas a position within Aztechnology. Anna took her motherŐs ritual knife and slashed open the top of her left arm, disowning her father and declaring a blood curse upon him, as his only child.

Deathangels became a mercenar y unit then, until their existence was deduced and raids began to kill off the members. The first to die was Fellstar, and Anna, now thinking of herself as Hellcat, added another curse to her soul and another scar to her arm.

Hellcat and Fallen Angel survived and escaped to Denver, where they established a sort of street gang in favor of local order in one of the worst areas of the CAS sector. The speed at which this was accomplished was in part due to the fact that when one of the local gang chieft ains came close to assaulting Hellcat, she snapped out the spurs and removed his throat, without looking over to the side. She had a very low tolerance for any sexual advances.

After a while, Hellcat moved to Seattle, did some shadowrunning there, an d went into retirement. After deciding that making alchemical radicals was entirely too dull a way to make a living, she returned to the streets, joining a reasonably successful shadowrunning group called Post Mortem, which had just lost its previous sha man.

This would be all to the story had Hellcat not met an old member of the group who returned- a hermetic mage named Darkfire. After some time of running together, she became friends with him, a physical adept known as Lance, and a wolf shaman name d Tatiana, who went under the street name of Indigo.

Hellcat, being less than experienced in such matters, absolutely failed to notice that Darkfire was being, quite frankly, flirtatious. She and Tatiana lived in his house, although Hellcat had an ap artment where she spent a good deal of time on her own. Being a Cat, she did maintain her independence. One day, while they were in a druidic encampment east of Seattle, Tatiana informed Hellcat that Darkfire was being slightly more than friendly.

H ellcat was more than slightly flummoxed. This was alien to her experience, and she didn't believe it would ever happen to her. After all, she was the psychotic, the mestiza freak. A long series of miscommunications and misundersatndings ensued, which w ent largely unnoticed by the entire group, aside from Tatiana, who spent a long time getting somewhat drunk with Hellcat in the middle of it. However, by the end of it, Darkfire had forgiven Hellcat the things she said.

When they returned to Dark's h ouse in Seattle, Hellcat turned to go to her own room. He held her close and said, "Don't leave me," right after giving her a passionate kiss. In some significant shock and bemusement, she let herself be led to the room and persuaded into the bed. It w as shocking to her that Darkfire merely curled up against her, wrapped his arms around her, and fell asleep. She did not sleep at all.

Over time, she came to realize that Dark would not hurt her, and told him her true name- Red Jaguar. He shortened this to Red, which slowly shifted to the way she thought of herself. She was no longer entirely the Hellcat. The first night he did anything other than curl up against her and fall asleep, she fought a war in her head. After a long battle, in which she came close to plunging the spurs into his back in self-defense, she realized that she was, in fact, in love with him.

On a subsequent assignment, Post-Mortem confronted the self-proclaimed King of the Squatters, one Earl. Hellcat spotted someone pee ring through the roof of the squat, and slipped out, to find herself confronted by a little girl wearing only a somewhat grungy shirt. The girl named herself as Theresa and asked Hellcat, "Are you a kitty lady?" Somewhat startled, she said, "Yes." "Wow ," said Theresa. After some conversation, it became clear that the girl was another cat shaman, who worked for Earl to get information. In exchange for this, he kept the other squatters from hurting her. Hellcat traded looks with Darkfire, and said to the girl, "Would you like to come with me?" "Is it nicer than here?" "Yes." "YES!" Theresa hopped off the top of the hovel and took Hellcat's hand. Earl erupted out of the hut and demanded the girl, asking where Hellcat was taking her. "Home." "She lives here, she's mine." Hellcat pushed the girl behind her and popped her four blades out of her wrists, standing up to her full height, and glared down at the man. "Are you going to argue with me about it?" Earl looked at her, looked at the spurs, a nd decided that flight was the better part of valor.

Red married Dark in an incredibly private and personal ceremony in the Hawaiian islands.

After a nasty incident involving a Vindicator minigun and a major mess, in a run she encountered when wit hout Darkfire, Hellcat determined that now was the time to retire.

It will be a hell of a party.

They are expecting their second daughter on the eighth of November, 2057. The first being, of course, Theresa.

*Story updated as events merit.*

Character Data

Statistics:

Body:

4
Quickness:
4
Strength:
3
Charisma:
6
Intelligence:
5
Willpower:
6 (9)

Physical Description:

Anna is about six feet tall, with a slender, well-muscled body. Her skin is a smooth golden caramel color, indicative of her mixed Hispanic and Navajo blood. Her hair is a littl e longer than shoulder length and slightly curly, a rich red color. Her eyes are her most disconcerting feature, being a strange shade of greenish yellow, with vertical slits as pupils. This is one of her imitations of her totem, which is Cat. There ar e two sharp white scars across her left arm near the shoulder, and her forearms are laced with an inticrate lacy network of white and yellow scars.

She is a striking woman, though for the longest time she had a significant attitude that detracted from that. This was essentially the perpetual air she carried of, "Bother me and I'll rip your nose off." However, her most recent experiences have mellowed her immensely, and her pregnancy has made her positively beautiful.

Hellcat has three cats: Shadow , Spitfire, and Regulus. Spitfire littered recently, and Hellcat has been giving her friends kittens, because eight cats is more than slightly ridiculous. The only one of the new cats that will remain in the house is Blake, a tiger-striped kitten who ha s adopted Darkfire. (He is a literary cat- he sits on whatever Dark happens to be reading. Perfect cat for a hermetic mage.)

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