Joseph Hsiu Hsing-Liang
(aka 'Shadow')
Killer

“There is harmony, even in death.”

Body:

6

Chi:

0

(Fortune 2)

Mind:

7

Reflexes:

8

XP:

6

Hook:

Carve out peaceful life, at any cost

Played by Warren

Juncture:

Contemporary

Wealth:

Wealthy

Skills

Bonus

AV

Skills

Bonus

AV

Deceit

+2

9

Info/Eastern Phil.

+2

9

Driving

+3

11

Intimidation

+2

9

Guns*

+7

15

Intrusion

+2

10

Info/Triads

+2

9

Martial Arts*

+4

12

Schticks

Description

Both Guns Blazing III

3-shot action,uses 2 rounds from each firearm

Damage = nastier gun +7 vs. single named target

Hair-Trigger Neck Hairs

No cost

Use your Guns AV instead of Perception to detect ambushes, dangerous situations, bombs, etc.

Carnival of Carnage I

Shot Cost 1

Using Pistols, you can knock down loads of mooks.

Weapons

Stats

S&W Sigmas (2)

10/1/17+1

H&K PSG1

14**/6/30

Description:

Story:
Joe is an orphan from the floating shanty-town of Aberdeen in Kowloon Harbour, Hsiu Hsing-Liang was an urchin frequently in trouble with the law and with the tongs. By age eight he'd been recommended to a Cantonese Catholic orphanage where he was given the biblical name of Joseph. At the orphanage, Joseph formed a close friendship with another boy called Lung (Andrew) and a little girl called Mai-Ling (Mary), who used to follow the two older boys everywhere. As the grew older, their friendship secured and cemented by the terrible abuse heaped on them by the nuns, the trio developed pet names for each other: Joseph was Shadow and Andrew was Smoke, while Mai-Ling called herself Storm. The three swore an irreversible oath of friendship to each other that helped them survive adolescence under harsh circumstances.

When he was fourteen, Joseph was adopted by a man named Kwai, who people called "the General" after the household god of the same name. Joseph refused to leave his friends, but he swore his undying devotion to General Kwai when the man agreed to adopt Smoke and Storm as well. It turned out that Kwai was an extremely wealthy industrialist, and for a year or two the children were spared no expense.

Once Kwai was satisfied that the children had overcome the abuses of the orphanage and the deprivations of their education, he began training them for his own uses. Although everything was couched in terms of fatherly affection, the sort education they now received was anything but familiar.

Over time, General Kwai turned the trio into crack assassins, trained in almost every killing and infiltrative art known to man. Though each excelled in certain areas, it was often said that none of the three were any better than the others. Once they came of age, they each received a university education and at the same time they were inducted into what was called the Jade Wheel Society.

Slowly, the three young killers began performing routine tasks for General Kwai and, through him, other members of a shadowy elite known only as "the Twelve." Just as their training had slowly desensitised them to the tasks they had mastered, so too were their jobs for the Twelve designed to slowly wear away their resistance. Gradually the superficial Catholic morality that had been forced on them throughout childhood, counter-point to the nuns' abuse, was worn away, leaving no value system in place whatsoever. The three became hardened, and so their usefulness increased. In time, they began to be aware of what they had become, but each showed an indifference to the circumstances, focusing instead on the positive rewards and their relationship with the General. The Twelve had them working not simply as assassins but as agents of propaganda. Sometimes the tasks suggested a secret government agenda, and then other times the jobs appeared contrary to what the government would want, even at a secret level. Though they did not understand or know exactly who they were working for, the trio continued in that line of work. Some days they infiltrated companies, other days they executed criminals or notorious public figures. More often than not, Joseph found himself instructed to carry out his duties so that they would be attributed to other organisations, framing and throwing suspicion onto otherwise benign groups. During it all, the tight knit cameraderie between he three began to dissolve as each became lost in the ethical void that their actions created.

It came as quite a shock when one day Shadow was given a new target, a fugitive to hunt down. It turned out to be his blood-brother Smoke. Despite their legacy and everything they had been through, Joseph carried out the job. He found himself facing off against a defeated and helpless Andrew on the rooftop of a Taiwanese skyscraper, his childhood friend begging for mercy and explaining how he was just trying to break free of the awful existence Kwai had dragged them all into. Joseph's feelings tottered on a knife's edge, and for a moment, finger on the trigger, he reached a moment of complete ambivalence towards the world as a whole and Andrew as an individual.

He squeezed the trigger.

Despite having executed his best friend in cold blood without remorse, as the months followed (months in which he barely saw Storm more than once or twice) he found himself wracked by nightmares and unexplained emotional breakdowns. He did not experience guilt -- not consciously. Had he been willing to see a professional, help might've been possible, but Shadow, the international assassin, was beyond petty counselling. Instead he continued to crack up at the same time he continued to carry out deadly tasks for the Twelve.

Things came to a head when he was instructed to bomb a busload of school children in order to lay the blame on an up and coming politcal youth party that had its origins in a now defunct militant environmentalist group. Thumb on the remote detonator, Shadow realised he could not do it. Suddenly swept up in a tide filled with all the emotions he had repressed for so long, he felt liberated, renewed and freed. An awful moment later he watched as the yellow bus became a fireball. A split-second later, he swore that he saw Storm steal away in an unlicensed minivan.

Devastated, Shadow barely escaped capture by the authorities. An emotional ruin, the one thing he knew was that he could not return to the organisation. Quickly he packed his things, transferred the money from his bank into a secret Cayman Islands account, and then he torched his luxury apartment.

He spent a time wandering, leaving the killing behind, until he hit upon a plan. He realised that he had very little idea of who he was and what his background had been before the orphanage took him. He tracked down his parents over the course of a year, finding out that his mother had been a seamstress in a local factory and that she had died during his birth. Shadow's father had joined the Buddhist priesthood after his young love died, having never been told that she had been pregnant or that she had delivered a son. Wanting to know more about his father and about his own ulture, Shadow entered the training to become a zen priest and was eventually assigned to the monastery where his father was now the abbot.

For the first time in his life, he came to know real peace. Not only were the ways of zen buddhism somehow almost second nature to him, but being in close vicinity to the man who he knew was his father made him feel like he had found his niche in the world. He agonised over how or when or if to confront his father with the information, fearing that the scandal would lose the old man his position. Alas, Shadow agonised too long.

The hit squad came in the middle of the night, silently entering the monastery grounds. Unable to identify one monk from any other, they began systematically killing every tonsured man in the place. Shadow, who had vowed to renounce violence, watched as his brethren were cut down by machinegun fire. Although he used his martial arts to disable several of the assassins, Shadow's failure to kill them meant that one was left, disabled but with a concealed handgun, and with this weapon he shot Shadow's father as he tried to lead the surviving monks to safety.

Shadow lost it, first killing half a dozen hitmen with his bare hands before seizing weapons from the fallen and taking arms against the rest. He decimated the hit squad, but at terrible cost. His father was dead and the monastery was almost entirely depopulated. At that moment, Shadow realised that there would never be peace for him unless he first made it impossible for his enemies to ever find him and ruin his life again. And so his mission for vengeance began.