Basic Introduction

Character Biography

Aisha was born on the Alorii planet in the year 556, to a loving mother and father many years into trying and failing to conceive. Her parents were well-respected employees in the Interplanetary Resource Conservation and Production Organization, but despite the high demand on their time they ensured that they made time for Aisha and that she knew she was loved and would never have to want for anything.

Aisha's first few years weren't free of incident, however. It was quickly made apparent to her mother and father that she wasn't like the others, seeming to have greater difficulty in learning and retaining the information that they could grasp so easily. It led to many long nights of flash cards and practice quizzes just to keep her in the running with her classmates, much to Aisha's chagrin.

If that wasn't enough, her day-to-day received another heavy blow when her parents were informed they'd need to emigrate to the Chonoli surface in order to aid in a complete overhaul of one country's farming and hydroponics. To leave behind everything and everyone she knew should've upset Aisha, but to her parents' confusion (and perhaps concern), she seemed to take it quietly and in stride.

In reality, she just didn't see anything worth being upset over. Her grades were poor, and her friendships similarly thanks to her self-admitted struggle to form connections. She figured she'd just be going from one bad place to another.

From a planet full of life and greenery to an industrial dystopia, most Alorii would've been devastated. For Aisha, though, it was how she realized where her interests truly lay: The world of advanced technologies. With a topic so enrapturing to her young mind, she suddenly found herself able to engage for hours on end without so much as a hint of boredom --- a far cry from practically any topic found on her home planet.

Though her grades in most classes remained lackluster, any class focused on technological development in the slightest boasted much higher marks. Aisha began to bring home assignments, only to take them apart and entirely rebuild them in an effort to find greater efficiency.

...She may have also disassembled a kitchen appliance or two, but her parents chose to overlook that, seeing as this was the first time she seemed truly happy.

Friends were still a real issue, with Aisha struggling to connect even within tech-oriented settings, but Aisha cared less than ever for those social connections. She had a new concept to sink her teeth into: bionics. Aisha practically inhaled all and any information she could gather on the topic as the years went by, and not wanting to stifle this newfound passion her parents gladly fed into it. By the time she was nearing the end of middle school, Aisha was consuming entire college-level journals on the topic and assembling full-scale bionic wearables.

With an interest to sink her teeth into and little motivation to socialize, Aisha's introversion continued well into her teenage years. With the hope of someday getting a proper degree in bionic engineering, Aisha found the motivation to pull her grades up to B's and the occasional A, but any more than that would be shrugged and dismissed as "not necessary for college".

Aisha was a prodigy in her craft, that much was apparent to anyone who spent even a few minutes around her. She could create bionics with relative ease if given the time and materials, or she could take a pile of techno-scrap parts and craft it into something of actual use --- perhaps a carryover from the emphasis on recycling and reusability seen in her home planet's culture.

Many of Aisha's techniques would've been considered cutting edge at the time, and if she'd kept on the straight and narrow then she would have risen to the level of the historical greats of the bionics industry!

...But, much as the structured nature of the schooling system interested her little, the idea of spending her upcoming adult years working as a slave to the industry as a cog in the machine appealed to her less and less. Though she kept college in her back pocket (knowing that a fallback pan was never a bad idea), the teenaged Aisha turned her attention to a less legal route: the black market bionics trade.

The hard part was getting enough of an understanding of the underground network and finding the connections needed to start marketing and selling her creations in the first place. The beautiful thing about technology, though, was that with enough time she could find everything she needed from the comfort of her own bedroom. Behind the protection of several VPNs daisy-chained together and some stolen internet, Aisha's "in" was through the shadier parts of a tech forum.

She posted increasingly probing questions to the forum, scattering more and more criminal allusions and shady intentions in her posts until finally she got a bite in the form of an encrypted personal message.

A local gang was in need of some bionic enhancement --- a "simple" job, replacing flesh with cold alloyed metal. She didn't ask why, and they didn't tell her. What mattered was they were not only offering money, but the materials, and Aisha had the knowledge to make it work. Heading out in the late of night (because she knew that claiming she was 'going out with friends' would never fly), Aisha slipped away to the gang's hideout.

The bionic parts they gave her were serviceable at best, and she couldn't help but tweak and add to them as she assembled the limbs into their proper functioning states over the course of several hours (much to the annoyance of her newfound clients). If that wasn't bad enough, Aisha found herself trying to haggle for more money, using the upgrades that they didn't ask for as justification --- frankly, it's luck that they not only didn't kick her ass out, but agreed to a higher payment.

With a few hours before the sun was to rise, the bionics were assembled and ready to go. That was the easy part, though --- the hard part was going to be installing the bionics.

Aisha'd read about the process so many times she could recite it in her sleep. She'd watched videos explaining the steps taken, and pored over medical journals that chronicled the process complete with pictures. She was a theoretical master of surgery, if you asked her. Reading was one thing, though; doing was another.

The act of cutting off an arm, bloodying her gloves to connect nerves, sinew, and blood vessels to the bionic baseplate was like a whole others world. It was a fight to keep her hands steady, to silence the gags that clawed at her throat and cease the tremble of her body as she worked. But she did, because it was all that she truly knew how to do, and if she couldn't succeed in this then what could she?

As the sun crept over the horizon, bringing with it blazing heat and the rainbow hues of pollution in the air, Aisha was sneaking back into her home with money in her pocket and the beginnings of a customer-base. It was good news, really good news! How bad could the lingering visuals of blood and viscera truly be? At least, that's what she told herself as she scrubbed herself clean in the shower for hours, still able to feel and smell the blood long after it was gone.

After that day she considered quitting altogether. Her dreams were marred by the gory visuals, and more than once she was plagued by nightmares of mistakes and slipups that plastered her with the label of 'murderer'...

...And then, the gang she'd helped contacted her with an offer: upgrade their bionics, and in turn they'd pay her more.

Aisha... couldn't bring herself to say no. The money she'd earned was already running low, and she was quite enjoying having the funds to actually afford nicer parts to use for her pet projects.

It was almost scary how little her hands shook when she got to work the second time. Sure, much of what she was doing was just improving her existing work, but it was sprung on her at the last second that she would indeed be installing a new limb for a recent addition to the small gang. She would've thought that she'd be completely crippled with fear and anxiety this time, as she cut into skin and separated bone.

But it was like her brain had completely shut off the parts of itself that reacted so harshly the precious time. In the blink of an eye she'd replaced flesh with metal, as though it were never a problem in the first place. She still couldn't stand to look at the bloody mess left in the aftermath, but there was a hope forming: a chance that she could actually do this...

That was the day a new underground business truly started. The day Aisha used this gang as her springboard into the underground society of Chonol.

She moved out of her parents' home soon after under the guise of going to college, moving into an apartment close to one of the many gateways to the underground cities and tunnels of the planet. Beneath the surface, she set up a modest base of operations where parties from all gangs and walks of life could come to have her create, repair, or install bionics.

What she hoped to be her initial point of appeal was her 'neutral zone' policy, promising dont-ask-dont-tell service to anyone who didn't start problems on her premises. This meant that she could be servicing a gang's bionic needs in one breath, and then discussing cheap repairs for a police officer's bionic heart in another

A new problem she quickly understood though, was that she'd have to launder the money somehow if she wanted to make a consistent income --- the government would only look the other way for so many thousands of dollars, after all. So, she chose to set up a secondary business based on a less-demanding hobby of hers: cooking and baking. So, while sometimes Aisha was an increasingly active member of the underground bionics trade, at other times she was on online blogger building a slow but steady following around her crazy food ideas.

...of course, viewbotting and the fake supporters sending cleaned portions of her own money back to her as donations certainly helped make the career viable , but she shockingly had a genuine following amidst the bots and fake personas she created for her benefit.

Things were looking good, but there was still a roadblock in her way that she knew would have to be broached sooner or later: Most people wouldn't trust a biomechanic who didn't sport some of their own work.

Aisha wasn't a body purist per se, but she acknowledged that augmenting herself where she didn't have to risked sapping her of valuable reflexes and muscle memory... So, she'd just have to choose a body part that was visible, but didn't run that risk.

Late in the night and doped up on the strongest non-inhibiting painkillers she could find, Aisha sat in front of a mirror and carefully replaced her own eyes. There was something almost deadly in the fear she felt as she worked; it was different to see her own body being 'maimed' by her hand, to have to gaze upon a damaged reflection as she worked to install one eye, and then repeated the process through a digital gaze for the next... but she persisted.

When she was finished, organic eyes had been swapped out for custom-made and rather advanced bionic ones. The eyes boasted everything from a zoom function to a toggleable expanded color range, and with their crosshair-style pattern it was easy to tell they were anything but organic. If she had to drink herself to sleep that night in particular, then that was just a sacrifice she'd have to make for the long term.

By her late twenties, Aisha was comfortable in her new lifestyle. She had a nice range of repeat customers and new ones alike, and word of her neutral zone policy had spread so far that even high-ranking government officials woujld occasionally seek out her high-end work rather than settling for some government-sponsored hack.

Aisha couldn't be happier, living her dream and being good at it. Of course, she was forced to lie to her parents about the specifics of her job and how she made a living (as well as why she never showed up in any big-name bionics journals by anything other than the occasional drop of a pseudonym), but breaking the news to them could come later... probably!

For now, she was more than content to reap the benefits of her double life, so long as nothing forced her to change.