Sevine is a hacker born in Edinburgh. She plans to find a way offworld to search for aid for her mother back on earth, and help others she cares about amongst the stars... No matter the cost...
Sevine “Sevs” Kell (pronounced Seveen) was born an only child in 2143 in Scotland to Scottish / American parents, Frella and Severn Kell, mother and father respectively.
Sevine grew up fairly poor, especially in her younger years. She attended basic school and despite her spotty attendance, did quite well as a student. In her off hours she would typically hang out in the alleys and under the North Bridge with her best friend Jackson “2Jax” (pronounced Chax) Goodwin. Together they would do whatever they could to make extra credits, frequently rigging various games of chance with the other youths in their favor. When one was living in the ancient but now neon drenched gutters of Edinburgh’s Old Town you did what you could to survive and asked for forgiveness later. Sevine hated resorting to such measures to carve out her place in the world, but she, and her mother Frella needed the money to keep their hole in the wall lit and livable.
Edinburgh could get absurdly cold, and was eternally wet. The city had been built over many times, going all the way back to medieval ages, and the deeper you went the more ancient things became. Stretching cathedral spires scraping the bottom of megabuildings that permanently eclipsed the sun, like long sharp fingers clawing at the top of a coffin. Rough cobblestone streets with a constant stream of water trickling between them, catching neon light and casting it back upon the surrounding brick walls, shimmering and distorted. And the great Edinburgh Castle at its center, now built over with massive supports clamping down alongside the gigantic, and resolute rock outcropping it stood upon helping to hold up the newer tiers of the city. History didn't mean as much as it used to. Only progress. And power.
Growing up Sevine and her mother Frella would frequently play chess together in the evenings after they both returned home from school or work. Of course this was when her Father Severn, was not around. Severn hauled heavy mining equipment out to the belt and would be gone for months at a time. Life was good when he was gone, and bad when he wasn’t. He was a heavy drinker and could barely hold on to his Hauling License. He would frequently beat Sevine’s mother, and occasionally that would also spill over to Sevine herself. She could tell that he always regretted it instantly whenever he struck her, but he showed no such affectation towards her mother.
In 2156, when Sevine was 13, she and 2Jax struck gold one night on the streets. A corporate shuttle crashed through the bottom deck into Old Town, and luckily Sevine and 2Jax were first on the scene. Everyone onboard was dead. Blood was splattered all over the cockpit from the impact, and the passenger compartment was somehow even more gruesome. 2Jax didn't hesitate to dive into the wreckage and start scouring for any tech that could turn into a payday or upgrade. It was here that Sevine, amongst the shattered skull of one of the corpo’s riding as a passenger, found a high level neural implant. 2Jax found many heavier body mods for himself, but Sevine, being several years younger than 2Jax, decided that the neural implant was enough risk for her. They grabbed the loot, and ran. Looking back beyond the buildings and alleys obscuring their view, they could make out the Response Craft of the UFN descending through the smoke. They had made it out just in time. A rare moment of luck in an environment that had never known the meaning of the word.
Sevs and 2Jax took the implants to a local friend, and rather eccentric Ripper Doc, who referred to himself as “Prince William.” He took the implants, cleaned and wiped them, and installed them that night. First Sevine’s, then 2Jax. It was the most extreme pain Sevine had felt up to that point, and it took longer than average to heal from the procedure due to her young age. The wreckage had been all over the net. She covered her procedure saying she was injured in the chaos when the shuttle crashed through the deck. No one knew she had the implant installed in her own skull.
Sevine quickly took to the implant. She would practice every night until the early morning hours and had a natural affinity for hacking in general. The goal was to either get skilled enough at hacking and exploring the net that she could pull her family, or at least her mother, out of poverty. Sevine preferred to do this with a legal job, but was willing to let that detail slip if necessary if it meant less suffering for everyone in her household, bar her father who was usually on a long haul to the Belt. In three years time Sevine was extremely competent with the implant and was well versed in all sorts of software, hacks, netrunning, etc.
Just after Sevine’s 17th birthday, her now pregnant and nearly due mother were at home like any night, playing chess, watching holos, and cooking dinner. Suddenly, her father stumbled in the door, more drunk than usual. He proclaimed his “great physical needs and desires!” to her mother and when he was denied, struck her hard enough to spin her 360 degrees. She fell against the edge of the counter hard enough to knock the wind out of her, doubled over, holding her belly, trying to protect the baby within, and slid down to the floor. Severn walked over, kicked her in the ribs saying something obscene, and then pulled his leg back for another kick.
The kick never came. Sevine’s eyes lit up as she hacked into his piloting implants, short circuiting them. Her father stood paralyzed, eyes full of rage, and tried to pull his arm back to strike out and catch Sevs, but to no avail. His arm merely shook as his eyes continued to become portals of fury.
She pushed harder and dove deeper. The final security protocol in his implants melted away, and he fell to the floor unconscious. Sevine briefly had unlimited access to all of his implant's functions. Overwhelmed, she backed out, also collapsing to the floor, clutching her temple. From this moment on, to the best of Sevine’s knowledge, her father would now have permanent short term memory loss. An unintended, but not entirely undeserved outcome of his now scrambled implants.
Sevine crawled over to her mother, whose face was a bloody mess, and called for medical assistance. None came. Sevine called 2Jax for help and together they lifted her mother, and carried her outside, leaving her father still subtly convulsing on the floor. As they ran to the closest thing that resembled a doctor they could hear sirens sent to retrieve her father. His implants were corpo. He had basic coverage. The rest of them didn't. There would be consequences for this.
Sevine, 2Jax and her mother Frella stumbled into the closest thing to a doc they could get to: Prince William’s Ripperclinic. They begged for him to help her mother to the best of his ability. Despite doing all he could with the limited medical knowledge he had, he was able to save her mother’s life. Frella went into premature labor that night. After hours of trying, the baby was lost. A baby brother Sevine would never know. They cremated the small baby boy that night and stored his ashes in a vacuum sealed box for safe keeping.
Consequences came fast the following morning. Sevine, 2Jax, Frella, and Prince William awoke to the door being burst open. Police units swarmed into the room taking everyone into custody. En route to the station, they scanned each of them for implants. They quickly discovered 2Jax’s heavy musculature mods, and Sevine’s illegally obtained neural implant. After dumping her mother back on the street to fend for herself, they took 2Jax to a maximum security holding facility, and took Sevine to a Juvenile detention platform one deck up in New Old Town.
Sevine and 2Jax were blamed for the shuttle crash that happened years prior. It was theorized that they had hacked the navigation system and brought it down, resulting in the deaths of 77 people, and resulting in catastrophic damage to some of the support structures of the upper levels. Sevine was released on her eighteenth birthday, while 2Jax, who was five years older than her at the time, took most of the fallout. He was sentenced to serve as heavy labor without parole in the same Belt facilities that Sevine’s father had hauled equipment for. Sevine's punishment was not as severe due to her being a minor, but also due to that fact, her implants were forcibly removed during her sentence.
Years after being released, Sevine still kept in loose contact with 2Jax. Sending messages out to the belt can be expensive when the person on the receiving end is prohibited from any inbound / outbound traffic, but by getting a bit creative they were able to occasionally communicate using a very basic scripting language hidden amongst crew manifests that were uploaded to ship's CPUs that were bound for the Belt.
Sevs had returned home after serving her sentence, where her mother Frella and her lived a sparse existence. She worked at a cyberware repair store during the day mostly focusing on the software side of things working for much less than was the required minimum. Her mother was a cook at a local diner during the day, and part time Cyberware repair technician by night focusing on the hardware side of things at the same place Sevine worked during the day.
On nights that Sevine's mother would work at the Cyber shop, Sevs would sneak out to scrounge up extra credits on the streets via whatever means she could, stopping shy of violence. Robbing expensive vehicles of their credits via hacking the on board CPU, intercepting fractions of illicit credit transfers among the local criminal populace, etc. It felt as bad as it felt necessary. Finding work was extremely tough, and the work she did find always undercut her pay due to her history and association with the shuttle crash of 2156.
Currently, Sevine's mother has fallen ill, plagued by an aggressive and dangerous respiratory disease common amongst the residents of Old Town after the shuttle crash of 2156. Sevs dreams to eventually book passage offworld to find more lucrative work, and maybe carve out another place to exist where she can hopefully earn enough to renounce the morally ambiguous methods of survival she has had to employ her whole life, and to provide enough for her mother that she might be cured, and book passage off world. Further more, Sevs wants to uncover the events that led up to the shuttle crash of 2156, suspecting that there was more to the disaster than the authorities communicated to the general populace due to the strange respiratory disease now running rampant through Old Town. Beyond that, Sevs wants to figure out a way to rescue 2Jax from his forced labor in the Belt. Once again, though it seems that all roads point to finding some equipment, a ship, and a crew, to journey Into the Black...
- Age
- 26
- Date of Birth
- 2143
- Gender
- Female
- Eyes
- Blue Green
- Hair
- Raspberry blonde, but dyed blue.
- Skin Tone/Pigmentation
- Light
- Height
- 5'7
Social
Birthplace
Edinburgh, Scotland
Current Residence
Old Town