Blackbird
Mr. Tom Jonas Livingston
Written by: Null Kit
NeuSec is for most intents and purposes no different from any other gang in Raleigh, but nontheless they maintain a perpetual (albeit paper-thin) facade of professionalism and desire to be seen as a 'legitimate' security provider, and few in NeuSec represent these veneers of civility than its acting leader. To potential 'clients' of NeuSec he is Tom Livingston, an affable Floridan gentleman in a white seersucker suit and stetson, with an approachable personality and a tendency towards puns. To those who truly know this person call him by his former operating handle: Blackbird, a former Military and HTR Rigger with a well-earned reputation for his feats of marksmanship and brutality in tactics that brought pause to even the most hardened of his comrades.For the record, 'Blackbird wasn't Livingston's handle while he was serving: Rather, it was the name of his favourite drone, a milspec roto-flier model that carried a sniper-rifle and one hell of a sensor-suite. Couldn't believe the crazy marksmanship this guy could do with drones until I saw the leaked footage myself.Blackbird's leadership is, for the time being, a provisional one: NeuSec's true leader, Denzel Falin, continues to run matters from his incarceration-limbo whilst Blackbird acts as the face and oversees 'day to day' management of NeuSec. In spite of this, he has had a substantial influence in the current direction NeuSec has taken, being the instigator for its rebranding as a faux-legitimate service and pushing for more aggressive expansion and eradication of the 'competition' of other gangs present in NeuSec by any means necesarry.
Physical Description
General Physical Condition
If the results of a recent datasteal are to be trusted (and I have no reason not to, being the one who stole said data), Blackbird is currently teetering on the absolute limit of how much cyberware can be safely installed into a metahuman body. Eyes, ears, arms and lower legs are all sporting military-grade chrome, as well as portions of the spinal-cord and occipital bone to accept an extensive array of rigging cyberware and reflex-boosting systems. Blackbird himself appears to otherwise be in acceptable health, albeit underweight when factoring in surplus mass from cyberware.
Mental characteristics
Personal history
Little is known of Tom Livingston's upbringing in Orlando Florida, save for his own public recollections of having grown up 'dirt poor working on the family bug-farm (note: no such farm currently or formerly under the Livingston name could be found despite extensive searching). With few prospects in education or higher employment, Tom signed up to the Florida exclusive 'Ares Armed Scholarship' program, trading several years of military service upon reaching adulthood for a subsidised education in engineering. Tom's skills in repairing and piloting drones were sufficiently impressive that his scholarship program was updated to include training in military drone-piloting, including a partially-paid-for installation of cyberware necesarry for drone and vehicle rigging.
Seems awfully chummy for Ares to give someone in their teens tens of thousands of NuYen worth of implants. What's the catch?
Read closely, he said the control rig was partially-paid-for. That's corpo/military for 'we won't tell you how much you owe unless you quit or get discharged and we can drop the whole debt on your head'. It's the natural step up from the old trick of giving soldiers credit-cards to max out and keep them indebted into the system, while also giving them incentive to continue their training out of fear of lost-investment and still comes across as a generous gift to impressionable idiots.Livingston's career as a military rigger was, by all means, exemplary: Graduating top of his class in boot camp and completing year after year of service in high-profile conflicts across the globe, where he earned a reputation as a particularly efficient marksman through armed drones and vehicles and several awards for meritous service. Livingston was honorably discharged at age 40, when in a military operation, after a biofeedback-induced injury on a field-operation made his superiors force their hand in retiring him from field-duty, against his wishes. Upon retiring, livingston spent an additional few years working for Dragoon Tactical Investments Ltd., on account of their more lenient policy on field-duty age limits (and conjecturally as a middle finger to his former Ares employers), but while he was quick to adapt to PR-friendly corpsec enviroment, his ruthless tactics and preference for lethal force were too unsuited to Dragoon's growing presence in law-enforcement, leaving his advancement prospects pessimistic. It's unknown when exactly Livingston joined the ranks of NeuSec - then called the Dahlgreen Watch - having lived in the Neuse districts since his honorable discharge, only that in 2073 he officially retired from Dragoon's forces, and less than a year later he was seen at Denzel Falin's side, operating a fleet of drones faithfully constructed to resemble his old military fleet and acting as both the Watch's eye-in-the-sky and logistical expert. Though he wasn't initially a resident of Neuse, he quickly endeared himself with Falin through his optimisation of the gang's day-to-day businesses and providing a great deal of contacts within Ares and Dragoon, to aid both in procuring hardware and getting the drop on enemies via shared documentation of gang activity When Falin was arrested in an arms dealing swing, Blackbird (who was out on a 'field op' at the time) was the first to reestablish a consistent contact-line with Falin via his contacts and communication-arrays, and that leverage was more than enough to secure his position as acting leader, a status only solidified when Falin agreed wholeheartedly with Blackbird's idea for a more professional, 'legitimate' rebranding of the Dahlgreen Watch into NeuSec. To this day, Blackbird makes NeuSec his primary concern every waking moment, whether it's negotiating with potential 'clients', managing the logistical systems of the group, or taking his drones to the sky and pouring copious amounts of death from above on the unfortunate gangs that don't follow his eviction notices...
Age
53
Children
Pronouns
He/Him
Gender
Male
Eyes
Yellow, Prosthetic
Hair
Black, Regulation-Cut
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
White
Height
5'10''
Weight
151 lbs.
Aligned Organization
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