Travis Connor

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IamLEAM1983
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Travis Connor

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Name: Travis Connor
Age: 29 years old
Gender: male
Species: anthro rat, cyborg

Strengths: a math genius who happens to lack motivation, Travis gets his jollies out of his skills by poking his nose where it doesn't belong. Mastering the modern programming languages and knowing his way around more esoteric code bases, Connor compiles programs and new handy subroutines the way Honoré de Balzac wrote his novels : practically all day, through a good chunk of the night, the whole of it powered by a liberal dose of coffee, sugary drinks, pastries, sodas and microwave tacos. Thankfully, like all cyborgs, his nutritional needs aren't solely calculated based on the number of kilojoules he needs to keep running, but also in terms of the need of the electric cells located in his spine. You could say he has to eat not only for his meat, but also for his non-organic components.

People like to throw the term “genius” around like it's some sort of synonym for “eminent” or “well-respected”, but this isn't Travis' case. He powered through high school in three years, completed his university cursus in five – Bachelor's and Master's included – and spent two extra years at M.I.T. as a teacher, before realizing he was bored to tears. Travis honestly thrives when left in the deepest crevices of Cyberspace, where he and other hackers work their craft. His sizable advantage, however, is that what he does is sanctioned by Wyvern Holdings' Investigations department. Being paid to do fairly dickish things to security systems and private networks worldwide gives him the kind of power that few people can easily comprehend.

As he likes to say, he can damage, ruin or kill a lot of people with nothing but a computer and a decent hardline connection.

On a physical level, a former target's aggressive retaliatory efforts left him dependent on Wyvern's resources for survival and continued functionality. Aldergard found him with his eyes poked out, his spine shattered and his hands broken beyond repair. One contract with Goliath Cybernetics later, Travis began his transformation into a transhuman.

Today, Connor is equipped with twin Alkaev-Canon optics giving him high-definition grayscale vision, along with a discreet nightvision IR micro-bulb for each optic device, along with Goliath's Accu-Grip model of prosthetic hands. With more joint points and flexible surfaces than your average fingers and palm, his words-per-minute count tends to verge on the superhuman. It also helps that his fingers and palm are lined with a rubberized and patterned surface, allowing for stronger grip on objects diverse and improving on his stability with firearms.

His spinal collumn was partially replaced and extensively grafted with titanium alloy segments and high-frequency cabling, re-establishing the nerve connections that should have remained broken and allowing him to keep walking. The segments eventually become apparent at the base of his tail and replace it entirely from this point, the very tip of it containing a rotating cylinder of lockpicks and various multitools common to regular builders and users of “Phreak Boxes” - essentially broadcast devices allowing him to interface with nontraditional electronics like signage, stop lights or locked doors without passing through his target's mainframe. That's if such a mainframe even exists, as they oftentimes don't.

By far, however, his most useful implant has to be the heuristic computation chip that's set to interface with his frontal lobe. It doesn't so much make him think faster as it offloads brute-force work from his workstation to a sort of ultra-specialized implanted “laptop” he controls with a few preset images and concepts. Where we might use mouse clicks and specialized dictionary programs, he uses simple shapes and colors as mental cues for certain actions, like pointing his chip to this or that port, or increasing or decreasing the priority of the attack software he's set to run. He could've had a graphics component installed as well, but he preferred to keep his field of view unobstructed. If asked, he tends to claim that a single, physical screen is all he needs.
Weaknesses: mention you're a cyborg in passing, and despite all the laws put in place, people will automatically expect you've got enhanced strength or speed, or that your arms can collapse and reveal bladed weapons or semiautomatic firearms. As far as cyborgs go, Travis is almost entirely geared towards hacking and general I.T.-related tasks. His increased stability with firearms isn't much more than a happy accident and unfortunately doesn't come complete with superhuman proficiency levels. Similarly, don't expect to find his chest to have been laced with self-hardening microconduits of Karthian design or anything fancy. Shoot him once or twice and if you aren't a hopeless case with guns, you're liable to kill him.

Like any excessively sedentary person, his scrawny nature doesn't so much hide a reservoir of physical capability as it does a general lack of stamina. He's not a terribly effective runner, has no outstanding skills as a mêlée fighter and is lucky if he's able to hack a corner to a set of unchanging red lights after ten minutes' worth of solid work. Hollywood would have you believe hackers like him have a modified cell phone and an ill-gotten XLTE connection, both of which are ready to interface with a conveniently always-online city infrastructure, but it isn't the case.

He works fast, yes, but always within the realm of what can be expected, considering the security levels of his target. Logically, the more private or secretive his target, the thicker the security measures.This is true, but that logic doesn't account for systems any I.T. specialist would know to be weak. To go back to those red lights, chances are the city's Transit and Transport Authority servers are going to be the city's closest equivalent to Fort Knox. Anything that must function for the citizens' safety to be ensured is likely to be severely guarded, even if it doesn't quite fit the popular notion of an airtight corporate nexus.

In short, yes, Travis might brag about being something of a god, whilst in close communion with Cyberspace – but he's a god who has to wrestle and fight his way through various degrees of man-made murk, locked doors, open-sesames and mine fields. This seriously dials back his capabilities, from pretty damn well near omnipotent to simply powerful in his own right.

As for the “killing people from a distance” part, he needs to be able to exploit some sort of pre-existing system. Gas lines, power mains, via conduits being tapped into by a power source which is itself plugged to a network he can access – it isn't rocket science or magic, and he needs time to make it happen. Even when he's directly targeting someone, that someone needs to either be a cyborg as well (for him to have electronic bits to tamper with) or has to hold something that's electronic, that has wired or wireless acces capabilities, and that's wired in such a way as to be conceivably made to overload and explode.

He might have once held small private power plants hostage from his keyboard and consecutively been able to kill hundreds of aiding and abetting mortal felons in the service of a Columbian undying filch; but for something like that to happen, there's a lot of factors that have to conveniently fall into place. It obviously doesn't always happen.

When they do, however, you get to see just how potentially more dangerous he can be than the most trained and committed of all soldiers.

Of course, working online when your meat-space isn't as exclusive as it used to be comes with drawbacks, as well. Any neural hub can be attacked with the right viruses or DDoS farms. While this is exceedingly rare and hasn't happened so far, Travis continuously runs the risk of being infected with malicious software of one nature or another. It's a low enough risk for him to feel comfortable, but he isn't so naive as to think that rendering him blind, deaf and paralyzed in his upper limbs wouldn't appeal to certain assholes. Considering, he doubles down on personal maintenance and tends to use his sleeping hours as autonomous maintenance periods. The last thing he wants is to crap on his network components' essential firmware and being stuck with extra surgery and new chips to install.

Appearance: at five feet something and a hundred pounds soaking wet, Travis wasn't exactly the most impressive of rats, before his life-saving surgeries and augmentation procedures. While anthro rats tend to be slightly burlier than their mouse cousins, Travis wasn't exactly in line with typical anthro rat development. With a hyperactive thyroid gland he managed to kill shortly before his being attacked, he always burned through piles of food and had serious trouble attempting to keep his weight in a healthy margin. Even today, he maintains the kind of rail-thin and illusory appearance of being malnourished, with his body's mechanical and electronic enhancements upsetting the way he generates or stores carbohydrates or lipids.

That lanky build involved a pointy muzzle, slightly rounded ears and vaguely prominent incisors. With ashen fur and a bare tail, he tended to avoid actually helping his lean physique with his preference for baggy clothes that would have been a better fit during the Grunge era. Even today, red plaid shirts maybe one size too big are worn by him the way others might comfortable robes, with tee-shirts that followed him through his adolescent and collegiate years being found underneath. As can be expected of a terminal geek such as himself, his chest-based ornaments contain as many references to video games, Pop culture, Internet memes, science-based humour or hacker collective-based in-jokes as they do occasional sights of more professional ornaments. To be fair, he seems to binge on ThinkGeek or SplitReason designs and only rarely deigns to put on the Wyvern-labelled shirts or polos Aldergard has had put at his disposition. His jeans are the only actually fitting part of his wardrobe, along with his perennial sneakers.

Of course, his post-augmentations appearance brings a few notable differences. With his eyes having been replaced with optical sensors and with 2025's technology not allowing for a complete aesthetic reproduction of the average eyeball, he likes to joke that he rocks the Ivo Robotnik look : the black expanses of the iris-covered area of each eye replace the white of his sclera, and he seems to be bereft of recognizable irises. Instead, bright red dots track the world around him where you'd normally find pupils. When going out in public, Connor tends to put sunglasses on to try and alleviate the potential shock others might experience. As transhumanism hasn't gained complete traction or approval with the public, he deems it more wise to minimize his body's now diverging traits. If his eyes weren't obvious enough, a long octogonal depression in his forehead shows the spot where his procedures required a bit of trepanning to be performed. It isn't very deep, but it's also rather hard to hide without the use of a cap or some sort of motorcycle helmet.

The spot where his forearms' flesh gives way to the rotation points for his wrists is deliberately covered with a bit of fur, but the difference is also hard to miss. Travis' hands look like permanent and form-fitting futuristic ski gloves, their hard plastic covering having a vague “sports model” look, in the way his hands' rubberized coating starts in blade-shaped forms on their back and widens into complete and segmented covering for his palm and fingers. The plastic parts may be charcoal and the rubberized segments might be black, their nub-covered grooves hiding screws or manual adjustment ports don't allow the illusion of seamless transition between flesh and machine to last more than the length of a cursory glance.

Otherwise, you'd have to catch him chestbare to see the rest of his modifications. His spine is covered with a segmented array of nanotube titanium panels that hide the spinal surrogate he required in order to remain ambulatory. His actual spinal collumn now only begins very close to the cerebellum. Color-fitting flexible plastic panels line the edge of that spine, showing big black nubs where the array's secondary anchor points with his surrounding bones are to be found. The artificially lightweight titanium segments join with one another where the coccyx begins in humans, and form his surrogate tail. Its tip is rounder than is typically expected of anthro rodents of a similar lineage, hiding a set of various multitools he can put to use in the case of Wyvern-sanctioned B&E or court-ordered mucking-about with a building's fiber-optic mainlines.

His least visible implants would also include a cochlear receiver, allowing him to respond to Aldergard or Katherine's cell phone calls in a completely hands-free manner. Audio is directly fed to his auditive nerves, bypassing the eardrums and the sensitive little bones beyond. It also enables him to stream Black Metal more or less directly into head at top volume, ignoring the tired and now largely obsolete warnings about going deaf. He can work in an environment covered in blaring Gorgoroth or Children of Bodom and won't bother anyone – not even in a library – because he literally is the only one who can hear that music. It also makes it difficult for snoops to eavesdrop on cell phone conversations, as the person he might be speaking to can't be heard anywhere else but inside the rat's head.

Still, and for purposes of general safety, his eyes and ears come complete with flashbang suppression subroutines. The neural hub which controls his implants can calculate the imminence of the actual “flash” and “bang” parts of certain suppressive devices, and momentarily cut his audio-visual feed. Going blind and deaf for the exact duration of the detonation has allowed Travis to remain functional in occasionally harrowing circumstances.
Behaviour: cyborgs tend to get a fairly bad rep in Hope and elsewhere around the world. The more conservative the environment, the more open the general hatred and suspicion. People have tons of room and tolerance for forced augmentations or work being done in order to overcome crippling conditions, but popular media tends to be rather fond of the stereotype of the raging “tin can”, turned completely oblivious to its own maintained humanity and grown convinced of Humanity's inferior status to the point of homicidal and wanton sociopathy. Popular culture seems to love the idea of cyborgs literally “breaking bad”, with celebrated television series having explored the sordid underbelly of transhumanism. While there is some truth to this, most legal clinics around town have to fight to maintain an awareness of the inherently noble pursuits of this technology. For every former soldier who goes nuts and slaughters half a shopping mall's worth of civilians, there's tens of thousands of amputated children or handicapped kids who ascend to better standards of living thanks to their implants.

What doesn't help is that as a hacker, Travis is one of the cocky ones. As celebrated as Kevin Mitnick was in his day, he's one of the few “jockeys” in town who embody at least a fraction of Hollywood's concept of the Information War. He can code viruses on jailbroken cell phones, he can punch his way through the most opaque and consumer-proof entertainment products on the market currently, and quietly sniggers when one of Griffin Securities' network engineers supposedly releases an “unhackable” biometric sensor or keypad. He's once made it his duty to upload every operating system produced by Goliath on BitTorrent trackers on the day of their release, and has made the knees of several multinationals and crime syndicates shake, the local Commission included.

He's a cheerful, friendly and brazen asshole with a motor mouth and breezy attitude that can only come out of having achieved the status of Internet legend, and that surety of purpose is only strengthened by the fact that he's not only survived a spiteful hit against him, but has also been hired by one of his former targets. Now operating as a security consultant and one of Wyvern's chief I.T. Investigators, his asshole-like bent allows him to give the finger to cops who might try and nab him – while holding up one of Katherine's subpoenas as proof that he's legally entitled to dig his nose around.

He loves every minute of it, as can be expected.

Travis' initial working relationship with Starr and Kuhn was strained, but having spent the last seven years with them, he's had time to have them tolerate and sometimes appreciate his total lack of respect for authority. He's called Starr “Kat” from day one and Aldergard “Al”, and peppered the sternest of boardroom talks with jokes and references. It took some time for the Wyrm to come to terms with the rat's personality, but what helped was the memory of how things tended to turn out in mead halls where his tribesmen celebrated after having emerged the victors of a battle. Cheerful assurance is a human trait he tends to be fondly attached to, as it echoes his own ribald penchants when allowed to solidly intoxicate himself. He'd already found it in Katherine, for all of her professionalism, and came to realize that it was simply more apparent in the anthro.

If anything, Connor considers the dragon as equal parts a stickler and a stuck-up, as a fussy principal insisting about the rules – but also as a permanent client of sorts, someone who can appreciate what he does, and who's provided him with a stable environment in which to do it. Working freelance, going up against the law is a given. Having turned into an agressive White Hat of sorts, he feels like a sort of modern-day privateer, in that he's legally protected and required to go and make other people's lives as miserable as possible. As for Starr, while she isn't exactly going to build her own PC anytime soon, she can at least understand his enjoyment at seeing his efforts and hers combining into a set of unfortunate circumstances that land immortal scumbags in jail. His job is to give her the dirt she needs and to keep a satellite or two on her in case she needs to slip into hot zones, and that tends to work rather well with her need to turn said dirt into a court order.

While this won't surprise many people, Travis also has a few entry points in Paradise. His morals coinciding with the Drifter ethos and his notoriety garnering him respect even if he doesn't look all that impressive with a gun, he's managed to turn distant contacts for laser-pulse access to Yakuza compounds into fast friends, which themselves turned into Wyvern's extraterrestrial arms and legs. There's not a whole lot of social engineering required in a place like Gilese's satellite, not when most of everyone agrees with you and considers legal ownership to be more of a hurdle than a democratic principle.

Goals: currently, Travis isn't so much Katherine's handler as he's her disembodied lockpick or her fly on the wall. As she operates in close proximity to Holden Hall's vigilantes, however, Connor has essentially become the team's offsite coordinator, helping them when stealthy infiltration is required or supplying them with information as they go along. Being only the tip of the proverbial spear that is Wyvern's I.T. department, he tends to deliver not only his work, but that of some thirty other Internet security specialists and software analysts.

He also serves as handler for Spearhead's Operations team, providing largely the same benefits and tools. As time goes on and as Operations and Shield more or less merge into a larger operational entity, the only changes to occur would be a noted decrease in his workload and an increase in overall efficiency.

As much as he'd like to fall back on old habits and snoop in his employer's drawers, he can't. He's acutely aware of the fact that one does not eavesdrop on a black dragon in impunity...

At least, not unless said black dragon actually asks you to do it.

History: born in Los Angeles in 1992, Travis' childhood was a peculiar one. Seemingly bored by everything in kindergarten and almost driven insane with the lack of challenge in elementary school, his only solace was to be found online. With an electrician for a father and a stay-at-home mom, he seemed set to mature as another L.A. deadbeat kid – until his parents found out about their son's activities with the family computer...

As early on as 1999, Travis had made a name for himself online, operating under the alias of “Intersect”. His name stood out amidst all the “0Cool”s and “Cereal Killa”s of Cyberspace. He might have been seven years old, but he was already schooling seasoned jockeys two or three times his age. Math and programming, it seemed, were his core assets. Unfortunately, his parents didn't learn of Intersect through the usual over-the-shoulder spying – an FBI agent knocked on the Connor's door, backed up by three brickhouses who had seemingly expected a grown and armed man to be their target.

Being a minor, no imprisonment arrangements could be made for him, and he was still well below the bottom-most limit for Juvenile Hall entries. The only available verdict was the confiscation and prohibition of electronic material. As to why?

Travis had attacked the central servers of Wyvern Securities, seemingly out of jest. Aldergard still has the typo-riddled Text file the then-young rat had left behind as a calling card. Considering the perpetrator's age, he advised Katherine and her team to do nothing. They'd wait, and continue observing.

As expected, Intersect didn't stick to the ban for long. The case strained his parents' relationship and caused the rat and his mother to move to Providence in 2002. What didn't help was the fact that after seeing her son try for the slowest of suicides possible (death by school flunking and complete inaction), she gave in and bought him what she hoped to be an inferior IBM PC laptop.

Little did she know that all he needed was a decent processor for code assembly purposes, and an Internet connection. The call of the hacker bulletin boards was too strong for him to resist. He was a junkie and his mother had foolishly given him his first fix in years.

Intersect changed his name and changed his ways. He became Daedalus, and Daedalus advertized himself as being for hire. His crimes padded the bills for his accelerated high school curriculum and his blitz through the collegiate spectrum. One tantalizing email by the M.I.T. later, he moved south to try and impart his particular skills to people who couldn't think like him or see the world like him.

By the dean's observation, this was a success. By Travis' own admission, it was a stinking pile of shit. His skills were unique. Anyone who tagged along as Padawan would only produce some pale copy of the original product. People didn't hire Daedalus to get some cheap knockoff who still might leave critical flaws in their back door-tracing software, they hired him to get the real deal.

Proving he had the skills but also a severe lack of maturity, he resigned and moved back to Providence, squatting a little flat and raking in enough money to make local drug dealers, of all people, nervous. People who didn't know believed he dealt crystal meth, and those who did know knew the rules. They didn't talk. They stuck to secure chat rooms. No phones. Nothing else. The money was wired in, Daedalus did the work and he occasionally ventured outside for some groceries or fresh air. That was it.

That was the extent of his independent life.

In 2018, however, he was asked to piggyback a laser pulse to Paradise and shunt his way into the Russian mob's project servers. Some sort of new drug was being worked on, his client wanted his own product to take precedence and needed the prototypes and working files destroyed. He proceeded as usual, working on a network for a few weeks before entrusting his few men on the inside with the task of isolating the Russian compound's server room. He claimed the data, only to be struck with inspiration.

Why destroy this one-of-a-kind shit when he could sell it to a competitor and make some extra money on the side? It wasn't as destructive as meth, it carried the same psychoactive and psychotropic effects, and it could be chewed rather than crushed and sniffed. It was a bomb waiting to go off with North America's lot of cooks.

As blithely as could be, the rat provided the Commission's chemists with the stolen documents behind the creation of Mint Glass, a Drifter refinement of Crystal Meth. As expected, the payoff was huge, both from the hoodwinked morons and Weasel's associates. Walking from that last job with six million dollars in cash, he intended to simply disappear. Chilling out in Costa Rica seemed like a very good idea, at the time...

One week later, he was packing his bags when three fridges with pug noses and heavy Baltic accents pinned him to his cheap waterbed and went to work. Knives, bats, hacksaws – Travis was subjected to more pain than he'd ever experienced before in his life. With empty pits for eyes and bloody stumps for hands, the message he'd received was painstakingly clear.

There wouldn't be a next time, and he owed his life only thanks to the fact that the landlord picked the same day to stop by and pick up her check.

Considering, he doesn't remember seeing Aldergard or Katherine, at first. He remembers their voices, as heard through a haze of antibiotic cocktails, and only remembers the bullet points of the terms that were offered. Of course, Kuhn repeated himself once his new catch was lucid and granted eyesight once again, but the initial exposé stayed with him much more than the sans drugs recap.

He'd punched through encryption that had “ex-KGB” written all over, turned the kind of countermeasure lattice that had once completely baffled scholars dating back to the early years of the Information Age into cheesecloth – and that still stumped most military-grade analyst programmers after being revised and mutated with the passage of time. He'd cracked one of the myriad little computer-based Fort Knoxes of Paradise – and Wyvern Holdings required that talent. If he followed a few simple rules, Aldergard would pay for everything required to put him on the mend – if not even better than his own old self.

He remembers the rules more than anything. He was a Wyvern man now, the days of Daedalus and Intersect were done. He'd be Travis Connor and nothing but – and wouldn't snoop around his new employer's architecture without the express consent of its CEO.

In return, all he remembers past that is passing out as strong anesthetics were fed to him, and waking up to the world in a grayscale and vaguely grainy filter. Hands came later, as did the returning sensation of what stood below his sternum. Physical therapy followed, along with a string of psych evaluations that still continues to this day, on a monthly basis. Travis didn't miss the intent behind this, which was to ensure that he wouldn't develop anything resembling a disconnection with his new reality.

Years passed. The awkward “Sirs” and “Ma'ams” shifted to the lawyer and dragon's respective diminutives, relationships grew to be challenging, yes, but also fairly cordial. The I.T. crew warmed up to the brazen, yet personable hacker that had been put in charge, and bullying or contempt shifted to acceptance over time. Today, a good chunk of Wyvern's Investigations department eschews the suit-and-tie standards – even if they're kept largely outside of the public eye. Travis' little corner of the skyscraper is a messy and lively collection of desks, Post-It notes, posters and action figures; and the other engineers have started added their own touches to their desks. He's the one guy who attends boardroom meetings and has enough chutzpah to stick his feet on the desk without incurring the boss' wrath. He strained the limits of office protocol, but simultaneously proved invaluable and undeniably professional in his results.

Today, he regards working with Shield as being a new opportunity. The contentious nature of the team is echoing some of his time spent as a typical Black Hat, and he finds himself pleased and amused by the fact that Aldergard – ever the stickler for social justice and equality – is completely fine with the idea of helping out the city's new batch of superheroes. If anything, he realizes that his lack of respect for authority figures has been greatly mitigated over time, and he now largely have a problem with authority figures who have no business being authority figures...
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