APPLICATION;
PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Riko
OOC Journal: riko
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: No
Email + IM: riko.tropes [at] gmail.com; fulgurite on plurk
Characters Played at Ataraxion: N/A
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Kasumi Goto
Canon: Mass Effect 2
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: Following successful completion of the suicide mission
Number: 032
Setting: Mass Effect @ Wikipedia
History: [ The following history assumes early recruitment, successful completion of Kasumi's loyalty mission, female Shephard, and the ultimate Paragon ending for both ME and ME2. ]
Kasumi is a master intergalactic thief, a member of the criminal underworld who with a reputation in certain circles but who has managed to keep much of her personal life (along with her appearance) a mystery. She considers herself not the most famous thief in the galaxy but the best and believes that some of her success comes from keeping a low profile.
As a result, only small details are known about Kasumi from her time prior to joining up with Commander Shepard's crew. Although to date she has no criminal record, Kasumi has been involved in the theft of information and items from all over the known galaxy. What few references she makes to her childhood suggests that it was normal and happy. She became a thief not out of need or greed but because she loves the actual act of stealing.
She worked alone for many years, leaving a single red rose at the site of her thefts as a calling card, until she met a man named Keiji Okuda when they were both hired to steal the same painting. Together, they chose to keep the painting for themselves and form a partnership. Not long after, they fell in love.
Before turning thief, Keiji had been a spy for the Alliance Intelligence Agency. He had a graybox, a neural recall stimulator which gave him a photographic memory, installed in his brain. This graybox proved to be his downfall, unfortunately, when he learned information that had the potential to greatly damage the reputation of the Alliance with other species. He was caught and prosecuted for stealing and selling classified information but was eventually released when the contents of his graybox were ruled to be protected by the right against self-incrimination.
After the trial, however, Keiji was tracked down by a man named Donovan Hock, who wanted to learn the secrets Keiji's graybox contained so that he could use the for his own personal gain. Hock murdered Keiji and stole his graybox and set about the long, complicated process of trying to decrypt it. Heartbroken and furious, Kasumi began to plot her revenge and the recovery of Keiji's graybox.
At around this time, Commander Shephard, a well-known hero of the Alliance military who was thought to have recently died following an attack on her ship by an unidentified enemy, resurfaces. Shepard is now working for a group known as Cerberus, a paramilitary force aimed at promoting human survival and ascension in the face of what they believe is threatening alien dominance in the galaxy.
Kasumi is contacted by Cerberus on Shepard's behalf and asked to join a team that is being put together to defend humanity from a new threat which has been kidnapping whole human colonies en masse. She accepts on the condition that Shephard assist her with the heist of Keiji's graybox. Shephard agrees, and Kasumi joins the crew.
She's developed a plan for sneaking into Hock's mansion during a party, past his complicated, state of the art security system, and into the vault where he keeps all of his most valuable possessions. She and Shephard arrive, posed as party guests, with their weapons hidden inside the "gift" they present to Hock. Kasumi, however, is recognized by Hock immediately and refused entrance to the mansion. She's forced to cloak herself and follow along behind Shephard, coaching her through the initial steps of the break-in.
Once through to the vault, they successfully find Keiji's graybox, but a transmission from Hock reveals that he's known their objective all along and this is a trap. Kasumi and Shephard are attacked by Hock's guard and forced to battle their way through the garages under the mansion and outside. There, they are attacked by more guards as well as Hock, in a small fighter plane. Kasumi manages to get close enough to take down the craft's shields, allowing them to destroy Hock's ship so that Kasumi finally has her revenge.
After they've left Hock's planet behind, on the shuttle out, Kasumi accesses Keiji's graybox. She finds a message left for her by Keiji, telling her that he's left the information he found for her, encrypted with a key that only Kasumi knows. The message begs Kasumi to destroy the graybox now that she has the information from it so that people don't come after her the way that Hock came after Keiji. Kasumi, wanting to hang on to the recorded memories of her life with Keiji, is reluctant. Shephard tells her to keep it, if it means that much to her, and Kasumi agrees that she's willing to live with the consequences, and danger, of keeping the box in order to keep the memories it contains as well.
As a result of successfully completing the heist, Kasumi's mind is cleared of other worries and priorities, and she's able to fully dedicate herself to Shephard's mission.
Kasumi travels with Shephard as she continues the process of recruiting her crew and trying to unravel the mystery of the missing colonies. It becomes clear, eventually, that the colonists are being kidnapped by an alien race called the Collectors who are in turn working for the Reapers, an advanced machine race that had been seen as little more than a legend until Shephard was thrown into a conflict with them two years earlier.
The crew travels to the colony of Horizon when they receive word that a Collector attack may be under way. They manage to fight off the Collectors, saving some of the colonists, but the majority are taken away.
The head of Cerberus, a figure known only as the Illusive Man, decides that the team has to take the fight to the Collectors, by jumping through the Omega-4 relay to their baseship. Shephard is instructed to board an abandoned Reaper craft and retrieve the IFF drive that will allow their own ship to make the jump safely. The ship turns out to not be as abandoned as believed, but the crew manage to retrieve the IFF, escape, and blow up the engine core to take out the last of the threat.
The engineering crew begin the process of integrating the IFF into their own ship's systems. Shephard and the rest of the team depart for more recruiting work. While gone, the onboard AI discovers that the IFF is sending out a signal that then summons a Collector cruiser which attacks and attempts to board the crew's ship. The AI, with some assistance from the pilot, battles off the Collectors in time for Shephard's return but the rest of the crew are captured.
Following their captured crew, the remaining team jumps through the relay, flies through a debris field, and battles a cruiser to reach the Collector base where they must then fight their way to its heart. On their way, they discover that the Collectors have been kidnapping humans in order to liquefy them and use their organic matter to construct a giant Human-Reaper hybrid. The team destroys the prototype hybrid and prepares to blow up the facility. They are contacted, at the last moment, by the Illusive Man who asks them to preserve the facility so that Cerberus can use it to fight the Reapers and protect human interests from future alien threats. Shephard refuses and sets the bomb with just enough time that the team manages to escape safely.
Victorious, for now, they fly away as the Collector base explodes, aware that the threat of the Reapers isn't gone yet.
Personality: As a thief, Kasumi has travelled across the known universe, seen both the best and worst of humanity and the alien races she's come across, and learned to embrace an unarguably morally grey lifestyle.
Given all that, what's perhaps most surprising about Kasumi, is that it hasn't done much to jade her. Though difficult to surprise and certainly prone to fits of sarcasm, Kasumi could never be described as world-weary. She retains a deeply romantic viewpoint on the world, able to see and cherish the beauty in much of the world around her (and probably contributing a lot to why she became a thief of art and antiquities in particular). Even in terrible situations, Kasumi can generally retain her sense of humour and look to the positive.
Her romanticism can sometimes slip into the realm of sentimentality if she isn't careful. Sometimes her attachment to objects and gestures can lead her to make decisions that are not particularly practical. In this, Keiji used to be her balancing half who could curb Kasumi's sentimentality when it threatened to put their role as thieves into jeopardy. Without him, she's still learning how to do that for herself. But having grown up and become more self-aware since she met Keiji, she's not doing a terrible job.
Kasumi's largely positive approach to life inspires one of her strongest personality traits: playfulness. Kasumi is friendly and enjoys interacting with people but even more, she enjoys teasing other people. She has learned to observe and pick apart the motivations and emotions of others for her job and, as a result, has learned to enjoy poking and prodding at people to see how they react.
At the end of the day, though, Kasumi is a thief and assuming, based on her friendly nature, that she's wholly what she seems on the surface is a mistake. Kasumi has the discipline to have trained herself in all the arts of thievery and forgery and to keep herself in excellent physical and acrobatic shape. Although very young still, she has a quick and strategic enough mind to have pulled off some daring heist while keeping ahead of the law. Her sense of morality is also not as stringent as some. Some immoral acts don't bother her as much as they bother the average person, and she certainly subscribes very little value to the personal privacy and property rights of others. Once her friendship has been truly won, however, Kasumi (like most Mass Effect 2 characters!) makes a loyal and strong ally.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: Kasumi has a number of skills that she has developed and perfected in her time as a thief. She's good at recon and planning heists, slipping in and out of places unnoticed, and forging the necessary items she needs to get away undetected. She's a bit of a gymnast as well and has weapons training in both heavy pistols and submachine guns. She's well-versed in the use of her omni-tool (see below) which she uses to hack her way into anything from security systems to enemy shielding. Her omni-tool also allows her to cloak, and Kasumi has learned how to move silently while cloaked so that enemies don't hear her coming. At the same time, Kasumi is only an ordinary human and given that so much of her time has gone into perfecting skills of avoidance and long range combat, she's bad at close combat and generally physically vulnerable. Since most of her fighting techniques rely on having a gun and her omni-tool, without either or both, the best she can really do is hide, dodge, and run away.
Inventory: [1] hooded body suit, [1] heavy pistol and extra clip, [1] omni-tool, and Keiji's graybox [Note: I can understand if the omni-tool might seem over-powered in context. Essentially Kasumi uses it for three main functions: cloaking, hacking, and assisting in forgery. At minimum, I'd really like to keep the cloaking ability, but I'm certainly open to suggestions in terms of limiting the other two. Please let me know if this is a concern!]
Appearance: Kasumi is a young human woman of Japanese descent. She has a small build overall, which makes sneaking through tight space all the easier. Due to her occupation, she goes to great lengths to keep her exact physical appearance concealed, generally wearing a hood that makes the upper half of her face difficult to see. Her most distinguishing physical characteristic is her choice of lip make-up which consists of a single maroon mark down the centre of her lower lip and a small matching mark on the curve of her chin. [ Picture ]
Age: Not given. Physically appears to be in her mid-twenties.
AU Clarification: N/A
SAMPLES
Log Sample: Kasumi didn't get into this business to see the universe; that was just a side-effect. If someone somewhere built a warehouse and filled it with all the amazing artifacts and beautiful art and interesting gadgets that all the intelligent species in the galaxy had collectively emassed throughout their existence then Kasumi thinks she would've been more than happy to buy an apartment just a few buildings over and live out her days stealing from it.
The parts of Kasumi that are soft and sentimental -- and there are more of those, Kasumi knows, than most people imagine when they picture an intergalactic thief -- likes the idea of a home. Somewhere to keep all the bits and pieces she's gathered for herself over the years: memories in objects and the things she stole just for herself, not because someone was paying her. She likes the idea of a place that doesn't move, a bed that smell familiar, a window that looks out on something other than stars.
It's like a terrible cliche from one of her books but for a while, she had that in Keiji, wherever they went. He was her fixed point in the universe, the place she could come back to which made going away "going away" and not just moving on. Now he's gone, and she still has the memories of their time together -- kept safely in Keiji's graybox -- but they've come unmoored and so she's unmoored too.
She tries to take that matter-of-factly and not get too dramatic about it. Maybe it's just a sign that she was always going to need to choose, that stealing -- the other love of her life -- and home were never meant to co-exist together, fundamental opposites in a universe where opposites rarely get along. In which case, it is what it is, and Kasumi can't regret the choice she's made. She'll never have a home, but she'll have her memories, and they'll go with her wherever ends up next.
Comms Sample: [ The voice is obviously female but beyond that it sounds a little strange, digitized, as though someone has run it through a computer program to strip out all other identifying characteristics. The computer program can't disguise her sing-song amused tone, though. ]
I was on a job once -- not telling you for who, that would be cheating -- and I wound up on a big old civilian ship a bit like this one but with soft pillows and real food in the mess hall. [ Her pause seems wistful. ] Everyone was smiling and happy. You'd think they were settling in for a two-week cruise and not a few hours jump through a mass relay. I spent three of those hours hiding in a ventalitation shaft before I could make my move. Between you and me, some of those passengers looked a lot less happy by the time we landed.
Your Name: Riko
OOC Journal: riko
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: No
Email + IM: riko.tropes [at] gmail.com; fulgurite on plurk
Characters Played at Ataraxion: N/A
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Kasumi Goto
Canon: Mass Effect 2
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: Following successful completion of the suicide mission
Number: 032
Setting: Mass Effect @ Wikipedia
History: [ The following history assumes early recruitment, successful completion of Kasumi's loyalty mission, female Shephard, and the ultimate Paragon ending for both ME and ME2. ]
Kasumi is a master intergalactic thief, a member of the criminal underworld who with a reputation in certain circles but who has managed to keep much of her personal life (along with her appearance) a mystery. She considers herself not the most famous thief in the galaxy but the best and believes that some of her success comes from keeping a low profile.
As a result, only small details are known about Kasumi from her time prior to joining up with Commander Shepard's crew. Although to date she has no criminal record, Kasumi has been involved in the theft of information and items from all over the known galaxy. What few references she makes to her childhood suggests that it was normal and happy. She became a thief not out of need or greed but because she loves the actual act of stealing.
She worked alone for many years, leaving a single red rose at the site of her thefts as a calling card, until she met a man named Keiji Okuda when they were both hired to steal the same painting. Together, they chose to keep the painting for themselves and form a partnership. Not long after, they fell in love.
Before turning thief, Keiji had been a spy for the Alliance Intelligence Agency. He had a graybox, a neural recall stimulator which gave him a photographic memory, installed in his brain. This graybox proved to be his downfall, unfortunately, when he learned information that had the potential to greatly damage the reputation of the Alliance with other species. He was caught and prosecuted for stealing and selling classified information but was eventually released when the contents of his graybox were ruled to be protected by the right against self-incrimination.
After the trial, however, Keiji was tracked down by a man named Donovan Hock, who wanted to learn the secrets Keiji's graybox contained so that he could use the for his own personal gain. Hock murdered Keiji and stole his graybox and set about the long, complicated process of trying to decrypt it. Heartbroken and furious, Kasumi began to plot her revenge and the recovery of Keiji's graybox.
At around this time, Commander Shephard, a well-known hero of the Alliance military who was thought to have recently died following an attack on her ship by an unidentified enemy, resurfaces. Shepard is now working for a group known as Cerberus, a paramilitary force aimed at promoting human survival and ascension in the face of what they believe is threatening alien dominance in the galaxy.
Kasumi is contacted by Cerberus on Shepard's behalf and asked to join a team that is being put together to defend humanity from a new threat which has been kidnapping whole human colonies en masse. She accepts on the condition that Shephard assist her with the heist of Keiji's graybox. Shephard agrees, and Kasumi joins the crew.
She's developed a plan for sneaking into Hock's mansion during a party, past his complicated, state of the art security system, and into the vault where he keeps all of his most valuable possessions. She and Shephard arrive, posed as party guests, with their weapons hidden inside the "gift" they present to Hock. Kasumi, however, is recognized by Hock immediately and refused entrance to the mansion. She's forced to cloak herself and follow along behind Shephard, coaching her through the initial steps of the break-in.
Once through to the vault, they successfully find Keiji's graybox, but a transmission from Hock reveals that he's known their objective all along and this is a trap. Kasumi and Shephard are attacked by Hock's guard and forced to battle their way through the garages under the mansion and outside. There, they are attacked by more guards as well as Hock, in a small fighter plane. Kasumi manages to get close enough to take down the craft's shields, allowing them to destroy Hock's ship so that Kasumi finally has her revenge.
After they've left Hock's planet behind, on the shuttle out, Kasumi accesses Keiji's graybox. She finds a message left for her by Keiji, telling her that he's left the information he found for her, encrypted with a key that only Kasumi knows. The message begs Kasumi to destroy the graybox now that she has the information from it so that people don't come after her the way that Hock came after Keiji. Kasumi, wanting to hang on to the recorded memories of her life with Keiji, is reluctant. Shephard tells her to keep it, if it means that much to her, and Kasumi agrees that she's willing to live with the consequences, and danger, of keeping the box in order to keep the memories it contains as well.
As a result of successfully completing the heist, Kasumi's mind is cleared of other worries and priorities, and she's able to fully dedicate herself to Shephard's mission.
Kasumi travels with Shephard as she continues the process of recruiting her crew and trying to unravel the mystery of the missing colonies. It becomes clear, eventually, that the colonists are being kidnapped by an alien race called the Collectors who are in turn working for the Reapers, an advanced machine race that had been seen as little more than a legend until Shephard was thrown into a conflict with them two years earlier.
The crew travels to the colony of Horizon when they receive word that a Collector attack may be under way. They manage to fight off the Collectors, saving some of the colonists, but the majority are taken away.
The head of Cerberus, a figure known only as the Illusive Man, decides that the team has to take the fight to the Collectors, by jumping through the Omega-4 relay to their baseship. Shephard is instructed to board an abandoned Reaper craft and retrieve the IFF drive that will allow their own ship to make the jump safely. The ship turns out to not be as abandoned as believed, but the crew manage to retrieve the IFF, escape, and blow up the engine core to take out the last of the threat.
The engineering crew begin the process of integrating the IFF into their own ship's systems. Shephard and the rest of the team depart for more recruiting work. While gone, the onboard AI discovers that the IFF is sending out a signal that then summons a Collector cruiser which attacks and attempts to board the crew's ship. The AI, with some assistance from the pilot, battles off the Collectors in time for Shephard's return but the rest of the crew are captured.
Following their captured crew, the remaining team jumps through the relay, flies through a debris field, and battles a cruiser to reach the Collector base where they must then fight their way to its heart. On their way, they discover that the Collectors have been kidnapping humans in order to liquefy them and use their organic matter to construct a giant Human-Reaper hybrid. The team destroys the prototype hybrid and prepares to blow up the facility. They are contacted, at the last moment, by the Illusive Man who asks them to preserve the facility so that Cerberus can use it to fight the Reapers and protect human interests from future alien threats. Shephard refuses and sets the bomb with just enough time that the team manages to escape safely.
Victorious, for now, they fly away as the Collector base explodes, aware that the threat of the Reapers isn't gone yet.
Personality: As a thief, Kasumi has travelled across the known universe, seen both the best and worst of humanity and the alien races she's come across, and learned to embrace an unarguably morally grey lifestyle.
Given all that, what's perhaps most surprising about Kasumi, is that it hasn't done much to jade her. Though difficult to surprise and certainly prone to fits of sarcasm, Kasumi could never be described as world-weary. She retains a deeply romantic viewpoint on the world, able to see and cherish the beauty in much of the world around her (and probably contributing a lot to why she became a thief of art and antiquities in particular). Even in terrible situations, Kasumi can generally retain her sense of humour and look to the positive.
Her romanticism can sometimes slip into the realm of sentimentality if she isn't careful. Sometimes her attachment to objects and gestures can lead her to make decisions that are not particularly practical. In this, Keiji used to be her balancing half who could curb Kasumi's sentimentality when it threatened to put their role as thieves into jeopardy. Without him, she's still learning how to do that for herself. But having grown up and become more self-aware since she met Keiji, she's not doing a terrible job.
Kasumi's largely positive approach to life inspires one of her strongest personality traits: playfulness. Kasumi is friendly and enjoys interacting with people but even more, she enjoys teasing other people. She has learned to observe and pick apart the motivations and emotions of others for her job and, as a result, has learned to enjoy poking and prodding at people to see how they react.
At the end of the day, though, Kasumi is a thief and assuming, based on her friendly nature, that she's wholly what she seems on the surface is a mistake. Kasumi has the discipline to have trained herself in all the arts of thievery and forgery and to keep herself in excellent physical and acrobatic shape. Although very young still, she has a quick and strategic enough mind to have pulled off some daring heist while keeping ahead of the law. Her sense of morality is also not as stringent as some. Some immoral acts don't bother her as much as they bother the average person, and she certainly subscribes very little value to the personal privacy and property rights of others. Once her friendship has been truly won, however, Kasumi (like most Mass Effect 2 characters!) makes a loyal and strong ally.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: Kasumi has a number of skills that she has developed and perfected in her time as a thief. She's good at recon and planning heists, slipping in and out of places unnoticed, and forging the necessary items she needs to get away undetected. She's a bit of a gymnast as well and has weapons training in both heavy pistols and submachine guns. She's well-versed in the use of her omni-tool (see below) which she uses to hack her way into anything from security systems to enemy shielding. Her omni-tool also allows her to cloak, and Kasumi has learned how to move silently while cloaked so that enemies don't hear her coming. At the same time, Kasumi is only an ordinary human and given that so much of her time has gone into perfecting skills of avoidance and long range combat, she's bad at close combat and generally physically vulnerable. Since most of her fighting techniques rely on having a gun and her omni-tool, without either or both, the best she can really do is hide, dodge, and run away.
Inventory: [1] hooded body suit, [1] heavy pistol and extra clip, [1] omni-tool, and Keiji's graybox [Note: I can understand if the omni-tool might seem over-powered in context. Essentially Kasumi uses it for three main functions: cloaking, hacking, and assisting in forgery. At minimum, I'd really like to keep the cloaking ability, but I'm certainly open to suggestions in terms of limiting the other two. Please let me know if this is a concern!]
Appearance: Kasumi is a young human woman of Japanese descent. She has a small build overall, which makes sneaking through tight space all the easier. Due to her occupation, she goes to great lengths to keep her exact physical appearance concealed, generally wearing a hood that makes the upper half of her face difficult to see. Her most distinguishing physical characteristic is her choice of lip make-up which consists of a single maroon mark down the centre of her lower lip and a small matching mark on the curve of her chin. [ Picture ]
Age: Not given. Physically appears to be in her mid-twenties.
AU Clarification: N/A
SAMPLES
Log Sample: Kasumi didn't get into this business to see the universe; that was just a side-effect. If someone somewhere built a warehouse and filled it with all the amazing artifacts and beautiful art and interesting gadgets that all the intelligent species in the galaxy had collectively emassed throughout their existence then Kasumi thinks she would've been more than happy to buy an apartment just a few buildings over and live out her days stealing from it.
The parts of Kasumi that are soft and sentimental -- and there are more of those, Kasumi knows, than most people imagine when they picture an intergalactic thief -- likes the idea of a home. Somewhere to keep all the bits and pieces she's gathered for herself over the years: memories in objects and the things she stole just for herself, not because someone was paying her. She likes the idea of a place that doesn't move, a bed that smell familiar, a window that looks out on something other than stars.
It's like a terrible cliche from one of her books but for a while, she had that in Keiji, wherever they went. He was her fixed point in the universe, the place she could come back to which made going away "going away" and not just moving on. Now he's gone, and she still has the memories of their time together -- kept safely in Keiji's graybox -- but they've come unmoored and so she's unmoored too.
She tries to take that matter-of-factly and not get too dramatic about it. Maybe it's just a sign that she was always going to need to choose, that stealing -- the other love of her life -- and home were never meant to co-exist together, fundamental opposites in a universe where opposites rarely get along. In which case, it is what it is, and Kasumi can't regret the choice she's made. She'll never have a home, but she'll have her memories, and they'll go with her wherever ends up next.
Comms Sample: [ The voice is obviously female but beyond that it sounds a little strange, digitized, as though someone has run it through a computer program to strip out all other identifying characteristics. The computer program can't disguise her sing-song amused tone, though. ]
I was on a job once -- not telling you for who, that would be cheating -- and I wound up on a big old civilian ship a bit like this one but with soft pillows and real food in the mess hall. [ Her pause seems wistful. ] Everyone was smiling and happy. You'd think they were settling in for a two-week cruise and not a few hours jump through a mass relay. I spent three of those hours hiding in a ventalitation shaft before I could make my move. Between you and me, some of those passengers looked a lot less happy by the time we landed.