heat finds a way to rise somehow
- Eddies
- 14,551
| Alias/Handle | Pink Widow Daiya Holloway |
| Birthplace | Detroit, NUSA |
| Age | 19 |
| Lifepath | Solo (Streetkid) |
| Faction | Darkwire |
| Home | Watson |
| Ethnicity | American |
| Gender | Female |
| Language(s) | English (native) Russian (intermediate) Japanese (passing) |
| Empathy | 5 |
| Humanity | 37 |
| Height | 163 cm |
| Weight | 49 Kg |
| Handiness | Left |
| Eye Color | Blue |
| Hair Color | Blonde hair with pink highlights. |
| Skin Color | Fair skin, light freckles on her nose. |
| Face Claim | Dakota Fanning |
Daiya is confident, restless and driven; not by power, but by the need to defy expectations. A transplant to Night City, Daiya adopted its style and mercurial nature as easily as it adopted her. She grew up in the last chapter of Watson's glory, spending her youth dancing at a studio that later fell under Tyger Claw control. Her adolescent rebellious streak led her into the arms of a welcoming crew, the Red Ravens. They saw the potential in her raw charm and adaptability, shaping her into an asset for their own ambitions. With their help, Daiya embedded herself into the life of Alistair Holloway, a wealthy Corpo, and rumor is that she became his downfall as well.
The power she gained in marriage was not truly her own, however, for all power in Night City is as fleeting as the lives it wastes. Holloway's sudden dealth left her in legal battles and whispered suspicions, with the courts of Night City favoring their own self-preservation. Stripped of a fortune with which she had only briefly been acquainted, Daiya was cast back into the city's underbelly. She returned to Watson, not as a fallen widow, but as the Pink Widow, a scornful name that Daiya instead adopted as a mark of pride.
Always bold, she's refused to fade, building something new to replace what the city took. It's more than a crew, it's an idea, a movement: Darkwire. Operating from the shadows, she gathers the forgotten and underestimated, forging their shared hungers into something undeniable. Daiya is not the only loud voice in the masses of Night City, nor is Darkwire the only one to make rumbles, but there is one ambition they both share: Night City will not soon forget them.
APPEARANCE (Go Up)
Daiya is a young woman of average height, with a slender, dancer's build which adds a natural grace to her movements. She carries herself with purpose, her posture straight but never rigid, radiating confidence from bright azure eyes. Her blonde hair, streaked with vivid pink highlights, falls to her shoulder blades when it isn't tied up to keep her appearance tidy. Freckles dot the fair skin of her nose and cheeks, her face is characteristically expressive revealing the emotions that often simmer close beneath the surface.
Her wardrobe mixes function and flair, packing much of her needs into one neat package. She might typically don dropped jackets with reinforced lining, high-waisted tactical pants, and fitted tops that allow ease of movement without sacrificing a style that includes metallic accents and colorful threads woven throughout her outfits. She is light on her feet even in boots and heels, more willing to announce herself by color or speech when she wants to be known.
Personality (Go Up)
Someone might hear Daiya before they see her and come to the same conclusion either way. She is loud, unashamed, and commands attention with a confidence that borders on reckless. Yet for all her bluster and bravado, Daiya has an undeniable charm that lets others find her easy to talk to —even when they might know better. Her cleverness is something she prizes about herself, spinning stories that highlight herself while glossing over the impulsiveness that got her into trouble in the first place. Often over drinks that quiet the headaches that plague her waking hours.
Daiya's moral compass was groomed through struggle and hardships, manuevering her into the modus operandi of Night City: survival. When faced with a choice between her life and someone else's, she will always choose her own. There are few lines she won't cross to ensure that, save for cold-blooded murder, and she is no stranger to deception, manipulation and the occasional broken heart left in her wake. She seems unfazed by any whispers that follow her, embracing them instead as a game, along with anyone who might want to play.
Loyalty and honesty are prized above all else. Friends, true friends, are worth more than fleeting pleasures or easy profits. She shares the same in return with those she trusts the most, and they will find her fiercely protective of them. For anyone else, her word and willingness are flexible things, commodities she is willing to honor until they threaten her goals. She will lie, deceive, and seduce to survive, and do so without regret. Betrayal, however, is treated with disgust and contempt, an offense she cannot abide it at any length.
As serious as she may seem from a distance or while on a job, up close Daiya is an effervescent soul who loves bright colors and offers flashes of an innocence she should have lost long ago. Night City will eagerly corrupt any soul, and Daiya learned long ago how dangerous it is to let anyone see the full truth about her.
SKILLS (Go Up)
CYBERWARE (Go Up)
GEAR & STYLE (Go Up)
BIOGRAPHY (Go Up)
Family Ranking: Suburban
Parents: Both parents are living
Childhood Environment: In a decaying, once upscale neighborhood
Family:
Daiya Truman began life as a child of the Midwest, growing up in a subdivision of Detroit. Despite having all of life's necessities, her parents Marissa and Zane grew wary of their ever-present proximity to Detroit's combat zone and the growing boldness of scavengers who took advantage of the city's walled —and often disconnected— islands of prosperity. That was no concern to the youngest of three children of the Truman's, who never seemed to sit still for very long to realize anything was uncertain in her family's future.
Her parents were hard workers, and over the course of Daiya's early childhood they recognized what it would take to give their children a proper future. Leveraging connections and risking everything, they each managed to secure jobs in Night City, settling in the developing district of Watson where rising megabuildings challenged the very sky for its limits. At the tender age of 5, Daiya became one of the many new residents to call the Watson district home, where her family took advantage of the increasing affordability in housing and amenities of the prosperous district to provide anything imaginable for their children.
In the middle-class lifestyle of Watson, there was always plenty of comfort to go around. Still, it seemed to Daiya that she must make it her life's work to beautify her surroundings, starting early with her own bedroom. She was a demanding child of tidiness, wanting cubbies and drawers for her things even when they were not always used. Daiya might roam long and wide in the house, leaving playthings abandoned where they lay. Friction often bloomed with her siblings, Jason and Rafe, who were seven and ten years older than Daiya, and far past able to cope with the gradeschool mentality of serious play. Even her parents breathed a sigh of relief when Daiya began attending school full time and no longer had to be the sole source of order or attention in her life.
Art and dance became the focus of young Daiya's life outside of school, and while she could hone her art craft in the margins of assignments —and the all-too-infrequent, for her taste, classroom hours devoted to it— it was difficult for an urban child to find a safe place for movement. Her parents enrolled Daiya in several dance studios before finding one that fit with her personality and desires. Vision Studio 51 in Little China was run by Madame Yelena Skobsvena, a small and sharp-tongued woman who handed out praise like candy: bittersweet. Nevertheless, Daiya's talent caught the mercurial Madame Yelena's eyes and by the age of ten she was considered a rising star at Vision Studio 51.
Daiya poured herself into dance, barely skating by in her academics. While school was interesting and she was constantly praised for her intelligence and creativity, it didn't motivate her to sit still for coursework or absorb it by someone else's memories shown in educational braindances. When Jason graduated school, and then college, and Rafe went into an apprenticeship after high school, her older siblings became too busy to linger much at home. With each successive change, Daiya became more of the focus at home, and by the time she reached her teenage years it felt as if she had been raised as an only child.
Her schoolwork became a point of contention between Daiya and her parents, while at dance she was lauded with praise from the normally-reticent Madame Yelena. Perhaps Madame Yelena would have become a surrogate parent to Daiya if she did not have two at home, instead her time at practice and during performances were a bright escape from the persistent commentary on her academics on the homefront. Daiya had long realized by now that she didn't need to be good at school to be good at something, and even Madame Yelena's bouts of withering criticism could be suffered for the way she glowed while talking up Daiya to other students. She was, after all, the winner of Night City's Little Miss Rockettes competition at 11 and 12.
Daiya excelled at dance to the point where she began to break into routines that Madame Yelena insisted would her years to master. No matter how many times she fell or stumbled, or came under the receiving end of the Madame's famous tongue lashings, Daiya refused to give up on her ambitions. Once, she begged Madame Yelena for an easier way, and perhaps in a moment of weakness, the Madame mentioned how the great dancers of her day did all their practice without shortcuts or implants. That sparked the beginning of Daiya's new ambition, which she was sure would satisfy Madame Yelena's dreams, the expectations of her parents, and of course, herself.
Convincing her parents was the hardest part of it all. Even Madame Yelena interceded once on her behalf, and she spoke of Daiya in the manner she reserved for outside of her earshot. Times following the Unification War were growing more difficult, however, both of her parents have had their jobs moved outside of Watson to the burgeoning zones of Japantown and City Center. Watson itself was showing signs of decay, with creeping costs and risks that made spending thousands of eddies, even on a life-changing operation, an ever-increasingly bitter pill to swallow. Her parents said no.
Daiya took it hardest. Seeing her parents provide everything for her brothers and now to deny her the one thing she knew would open the world up to her...it felt like that world had ended for her at 13. She was irascible at home, and even Madame Yelena noticed her lack of efforts at the studio. When the Madame responded with more structure, Daiya went her own way instead. She stopped attending her dance practices and stopped going home until very late, spending hours wandering Watson and immersing herself in the world she felt was being so cruelly denied to her.
It was her artistic side that did her in, brought home by a friendly NCPD cop who took pity on a delinquent girl with no priors, where Daiya had to confess she had been picked up for shoplifting beauty care products. The shop had noticed the someone picking away at the bright colors one by one, catching her in the act on that occasion. After a long, tearful discussion with her parents, and a meeting with Madame Yelena, Daiya was encouraged and allowed to return to her dance studies with a promise of openness from her parents. In the end, that day was the catalyst for Daiya to finally receive the life-affirming Flash Cortex implant.
The operation was more than she had ever undergone, yet Daiya faced it with only her most private fears voiced to the Madame, who reassured her with promises that she would dance better than the Russian greats. For a few weeks after the surgery, she pushed herself to find only a struggle awaiting, frustrated at the slow results from the miracle device. Cobbled together from old Soviet plans, the Flash Cortex promised more than the sum of its parts, and a wiser moment might have seen her pass on it altogether. But after a month, Daiya found routines coming together more quickly for her, and even complicated schoolwork began to lighten in rigor. The implant worked at last, and Daiya was flying high on life again.
Just as she was soaring, the reality of Night City came crashing down around her. At 14, Daiya had begun to feel unstoppable, so the change at Vision Studio 51 seemed to come on suddenly, though Madame Yelena had been in rare form for weeks already. Daiya would arrive to locked doors at the studio, a new rule by the Madame who said she needed to keep her students safe between classes. One evening during her private lessons with the Madame, they were interrupted by burly figures from the Tyger Claws gang. Loud and demanding, they argued before Madame Yelena Skobsvena made a soft, gentle request of Daiya to gather the lingering students at the studio and get them out. The abrupt change in demeanor in the face of the brutal gangsters kept her fearfully quiet while she obeyed, helping the rest of her dancemates grab their things to leave. When Daiya returned the next day, broken windows of the studio were boarded up while Tyger Claws moved equipment into what would become the Deravaja Dojo. Rarely shy, Daiya asked but no one had answers for her, only firm warnings to move on. The Madame was gone and Vision Studio 51 was no more.
Life without dance was dull and monotonous for the lover of all things bright and colorful. Home life felt more and more oppressive to Daiya, who rankled against the suggestions from her parents to find another dance studio. They didn't understand that it wouldn't be the same, could never be the same for her. So Daiya stopped trying to make them see. Instead, she filled her free time on afternoons and weekends roaming around Watson, lingering in the marketplaces, slipping into clubs she was too young for, crossing paths with others who also had no better place to be. She didn't always seek out mischief, it often found her, dressed in red and black like the city's shadows.
They called themselves the Red Ravens, most of them older and more practiced at blending into the city's chaos. They welcomed her with easy smiles, and words that felt like an irresistible dare. Brimming with a confidence that made them seem like they belonged to the city itself, like they were its chaos, and stimulated Daiya in ways that not even Madame Yelena had managed. Before she knew what was happening, Daiya found herself one of them, getting swept up into a world where the unsavory felt nothing short of satisfying.
Daiya learned far more with the Red Ravens than she ever had out of school, and soon enough it felt as if she was living another life entirely. She learned to shoot a gun, to freerun her way between buildings, to drink and swear like breathing, new talents she picked up as if she had been doing it all her life. Daiya kept it all from her parents, who grew worried at how secretive she was becoming, curious about how their teenager was spending her time. They learned enough from her growing sentiments against the city's capitalist forces, the Red Ravens helped her see that even the actions of the Tyger Claws were driven by the corps and their persistent demand for more power and money. To operate in a city consumed by money, one had to have power and money. All except the Red Ravens, who thought themselves above it, using what power and money they acquired to wreak havoc on the means for others to acquire it.
Her parents learned more of their daughter's activities when she was picked up by the cops for trespassing, or for tagging the side of a building with an anti-corpo slogan, or for being in the wrong place with a weapon when the Red Ravens were conducting illicit activities nearby. They were angry and confused that their once-ambitious child, a rising star in the world of dance and an achieving pupil —at last, with the help of her implant— would denigrate herself to running with thugs and lowlifes as chosen chooms. Daiya fought with them, arguing against their discipline and mustering enough good behavior only to be allowed out again, not to the Red Ravens themselves but lying and stretching the limits when necessary to get back to them anyway.
Daiya got better at avoiding capture, earning the moniker Pink Panther among the Red Ravens crew, whom she thought of fondly as family by now. Their actions were bold and often illegal, but she got such a high from helping them pull off a job that they began to feel more like a game to her. Some days, she skipped school entirely for an important job, making it up by cheating with her implant or paying a classmate to do the work for her. Some days, she just didn't care, leading to more arguments and grounding from parents whose authority was slipping away faster than Daiya's budding reputation on the streets. She yet wasn't a household name, but by now the teenager had realized that she wanted to be.
Within the Red Ravens, however, Daiya was earning more than a name for herself. She earned their trust and had become an indispensable part of the crew. Whether it was stealing cargo off a moving train or rescuing a captured netrunner from a rival crew, Daiya's age didn't prove to be the impediment her parents or school would have her believe instead. They were, she had come to understand, just more victims of the corpo brainwashing, instilling the pigeonholed life that they themselves were set on fulfilling. If she felt sorry for them, it only made Daiya more passionate when a job to strike at a corpo directly came up.
She was 17 when the opportunity of a lifetime arose. The Red Ravens set themselves upon a job more ambitious than any attempted before and it was Daiya they wanted at the center of it all. The job put her in the spotlight and at the ultimate risk, one that would rely on her skills of dance, deception, and ask a sacrifice of her. Hearing the details was genuinely chilling, she hadn't danced for a performance in years and to follow through with the rest would take guile, cunning and a patience even she wasn't sure she had. Her crew was honest, the idea might go badly, especially for her, but the payoff would be huge. Literal billions were at stake, and for a girl who had learned not to take much interest in money, even she was salivating at the magnitude of the windfall.
After not much consideration, Daiya agreed. She would pose as a dancer, not much of a mean feat considering her past and her implant. The routine was more complex than any she had ever attempted, and the crew was lucky enough to have acquired a braindance recorded by a dancer who had done it once before, badly. Daiya would have to overcome the failure and give the performance of her lifetime, and only then would the job begin. Her dance would catch the eye of Alistair Holloway, whose love of dance and theatre had never waned even into his greying years. His patronage of the arts was only part of his reputation, his widower loneliness was widely known in Corpo circles as well. It was said that he refused every offer of viable marriage but was a religious attendee of performance halls, waiting for just the right woman to catch his eye from the stage.
That was to be Daiya. When her performance nearly ended in a heap on the stage, rising to a collective sigh of relief in the crowd, she thought she could hear Holloway's applause louder than all the rest. The Red Ravens had made arrangements for her to meet with him after the show, along with other arrangements. Daiya was no seductress, her schoolyard crushes and few, fleeting relationships had all ended shortly, sometimes in tears. That was something else the Red Ravens had helped to tutor her in, but there was no script that could convince Alistair Holloway of her worthiness. There was, however, just the right adjustment of Holloway's neuralware, with ICE that had taken weeks for a team of netrunners to crack, that made him far more susceptible to Daiya's charms that evening. He was dazzled by her, asking to see her again and again, and on their third encounter Holloway proposed marriage.
Marriage was part of the plan, the hardest part to pull off. The Red Ravens were clear, and had done their best to make Holloway amenable to the idea, but the bulk of the work rested on Daiya's slender shoulders. It was up to her to get Holloway to rush into marriage, forgetting the most crucial part of all for him: protecting his fortune. When Daiya brought him to meet her parents, breaking the news to them for the first time, they had a screaming match in the middle of the upscale restaurant. Daiya was crushed, and a sturdy Holloway cradled her as she cried that she had failed. Worse yet, not even the Red Ravens would answer much when she reached out later. Cooler heads and words with her parents prevailed. Daiya agreed not to see Holloway any longer, who took her rejection with gentlemanly esteem, acknowledging for the first time that Daiya was probably too young for marriage after all.
Weeks went by, and to all around her, Daiya appeared to be returning to her old self. She chanced by her old dance studio, now a seemingly-innocent dojo only associated with the Tyger Claws by whispers. Daiya braved the inside, finding a chilly reception to her polite interest. When she mentioned having once been a student years ago, before it was a dojo, the receptionist seemed confused but allowed her to peek into one of the practice rooms. They were like she remembered, with more mats and props that Daiya ignored as she began to dance. The music was in her head and the routine was made up as she went. She ignored requests to stop by the dojo's staff, and again when several Tyger Claws appeared to make the threat real. When her limbs struck one of the approaching gangsters as she danced, things got physical. Daiya didn't hold back either.
She arrived at Holloway's estate bloodied and sorely beaten, sobbing into the microphone at the gate to his estate. When she was told to leave, Daiya broke down right there, unable to move. Spending the night huddled against his gates, it was Holloway himself who opened it for her in the morning. Upon seeing the state of her, he called for his personal physician to bandage her wounds and help mend the several fractures the Tyger Claws had given her. She cried and confessed to Holloway for hours, until he knew every detail of her life until the studio closed, some vague stories to fill the time between then and now, and, between the lies, enough about the Red Ravens to ruin what was left of the job. It didn't seem to matter anymore, Holloway was the last person to whom Daiya believed she could share anything and hear a kind word without judgement. He delivered all that and more than she was ever expecting.
They were married that afternoon, at a private ceremony in a little pagoda outside the city. Of the few who attended, Holloway would hear nothing but praise and admiration for him and his new bride. Daiya had succeeded with the Red Ravens plan at last, marrying a Corpo in his most vulnerable state, whether that had been her intention or not. Even she didn't know, and when the Red Ravens re-established contact, Daiya turned them away. Instead, she reached out to her parents, trying to mend bridges and make up for years of heartbreak on her part. With access to money and the power to change lives, Daiya finally understood why so many in the city sought it out.
Daiya tried to make the lives around her better with her newfound access, reaching out to her parents and trying to track down Madame Yelena. Her parents did accept a move out of Watson and into a comfortable place in The Glen, away from the gangs and hardships plaguing the now-wayward district. The Madame was nowhere to be found, however, suggesting a permanency to her demise that Daiya took as a weight on her own shoulders. Even her newlywed husband discouraged her from taking out the revenge she wished upon the Tyger Claws, and when Daiya pushed forward anyway, she discovered just how gilded her cage was as a corpo wife.
Life as Holloway's wife was not uncomfortable for Daiya, either, and she settled in with an ease that surprised even her. Part of that may have been the implant's doing, or perhaps it was as the Red Ravens never wanted to believe: that power and money ran Night City because it worked. The Holloway name and his wealth shielded her from many of the city's cruelties, squaring her record with the NCPD and allowing her to complete an education on her own terms in her abundant free time. Alistair was as devoted as she could have ever expected, far beyond the level her peers could muster. She grew bold and confident in their relationship, and even she would seem to be taken by surprise when it ended.
Holloway's death was sudden, and news! There were no shortage of accusations, suspecting the wife was something of a pastime for Night City's elite when one of their own passed, even of natural causes. And it certainly seemed to be that way, the city's coroner and the private ones that Daiya and a third-party investigator —who showed up briskly but unannounced day-of— all agreed there was nothing to suspect foul play. Nothing to pin suspicion upon the grieving 18-year-old, wrapped in black lace and legal battles, whose fleeting year of marriage had ended without any of the aplomb she herself would have prized.
The official reports were signed and sealed, though whispers spread in circles Corpo and 'Runner, murmurs of a heart too burdened or a mind too addled to see the end coming. In some stories it was a knife, in another, poison. More salacious tales were told, some of which Daiya found herself enjoying and wishing she had been their teller. One group was suspiciously quiet, the Red Ravens never reached out to her, nor did Daiya try. Yet she couldn't shake the feeling that, somewhere in the city, they were toasting to a job well done.
In the courtroom, her parents sat behind her and paid homage to their daughter's honor, but they would never linger long enough for her to really reach them. The few friends of Holloway's, and hers, also faded into city's neon fabric, leaving Daiya to fend for herself as before. Without a prenup, however, the courts were left hanging. Daiya was Holloway's lawful wife, of that there was no doubt. Whether his fortune should pass to her was a question that Night City's elites seemed deeply divided on.
Even if her marriage was legal, even if the character witnesses and falsified documents her lawyers had drawn up —clearing her name of the many misdeeds and connections to the Red Ravens, by virtue of the naivete of youth or by disassociation or by other means— all stood up to scrutiny, to allow her inheritance to stand would be to invite more chaos to descend upon the unsuspecting in Night City's wealthy circles. And so the courts found largely against her, ruling that Daiya was entitled to a mere pittance out of Holloway's entire fortune, which would disburse among his company's shareholders and subsidiaries instead. Without a win, or being able to claim the stock in his name, Daiya's windfall vanished before her eyes, leaving her among Night City's masses once more, and angry about it all over again. But survival wasn't just about holding power, it was about knowing where to pull the right strings, and Daiya had learned too well to be counted out just yet.
Daiya returned to Watson where she grew up, unbothered by any whispers that followed her. The Pink Widow, as she was known, became something of a badge of honor for the returning hometown castaway. Daiya quickly set out to do what she was used to, defy expectations and make a name for herself. A new crew took shape under her aims, and a new name whispered in the corners and alleyways began to supplant her own as the latest around Watson. Darkwire, it was called, seemed almost as elusive as Daiya was bold, reaching out to new contacts from the shadows and establishing their reputation one job at a time. Bit by bit, Darkwire would build to be a force to reckon with Night City itself, no matter how long it took to get there.
Patience was not a virtue of Daiya's, but Darkwire didn't need to wait. It only needed to grow.
CHARACTER RELATIONS (Go Up)
ROLE-PLAYS (Go Up)
TBA
The power she gained in marriage was not truly her own, however, for all power in Night City is as fleeting as the lives it wastes. Holloway's sudden dealth left her in legal battles and whispered suspicions, with the courts of Night City favoring their own self-preservation. Stripped of a fortune with which she had only briefly been acquainted, Daiya was cast back into the city's underbelly. She returned to Watson, not as a fallen widow, but as the Pink Widow, a scornful name that Daiya instead adopted as a mark of pride.
Always bold, she's refused to fade, building something new to replace what the city took. It's more than a crew, it's an idea, a movement: Darkwire. Operating from the shadows, she gathers the forgotten and underestimated, forging their shared hungers into something undeniable. Daiya is not the only loud voice in the masses of Night City, nor is Darkwire the only one to make rumbles, but there is one ambition they both share: Night City will not soon forget them.
APPEARANCE (Go Up)
Daiya is a young woman of average height, with a slender, dancer's build which adds a natural grace to her movements. She carries herself with purpose, her posture straight but never rigid, radiating confidence from bright azure eyes. Her blonde hair, streaked with vivid pink highlights, falls to her shoulder blades when it isn't tied up to keep her appearance tidy. Freckles dot the fair skin of her nose and cheeks, her face is characteristically expressive revealing the emotions that often simmer close beneath the surface.
Her wardrobe mixes function and flair, packing much of her needs into one neat package. She might typically don dropped jackets with reinforced lining, high-waisted tactical pants, and fitted tops that allow ease of movement without sacrificing a style that includes metallic accents and colorful threads woven throughout her outfits. She is light on her feet even in boots and heels, more willing to announce herself by color or speech when she wants to be known.
Personality (Go Up)
Someone might hear Daiya before they see her and come to the same conclusion either way. She is loud, unashamed, and commands attention with a confidence that borders on reckless. Yet for all her bluster and bravado, Daiya has an undeniable charm that lets others find her easy to talk to —even when they might know better. Her cleverness is something she prizes about herself, spinning stories that highlight herself while glossing over the impulsiveness that got her into trouble in the first place. Often over drinks that quiet the headaches that plague her waking hours.
Daiya's moral compass was groomed through struggle and hardships, manuevering her into the modus operandi of Night City: survival. When faced with a choice between her life and someone else's, she will always choose her own. There are few lines she won't cross to ensure that, save for cold-blooded murder, and she is no stranger to deception, manipulation and the occasional broken heart left in her wake. She seems unfazed by any whispers that follow her, embracing them instead as a game, along with anyone who might want to play.
Loyalty and honesty are prized above all else. Friends, true friends, are worth more than fleeting pleasures or easy profits. She shares the same in return with those she trusts the most, and they will find her fiercely protective of them. For anyone else, her word and willingness are flexible things, commodities she is willing to honor until they threaten her goals. She will lie, deceive, and seduce to survive, and do so without regret. Betrayal, however, is treated with disgust and contempt, an offense she cannot abide it at any length.
As serious as she may seem from a distance or while on a job, up close Daiya is an effervescent soul who loves bright colors and offers flashes of an innocence she should have lost long ago. Night City will eagerly corrupt any soul, and Daiya learned long ago how dangerous it is to let anyone see the full truth about her.
SKILLS (Go Up)
- Deadeye
- Parkour
- Dancer
- Roughly Artistic
- Pink Panther
CYBERWARE (Go Up)
- Neuroport
- Kiroshi Optics (Basic)
- Flash Cortext*
- Smartlink (Advanced)
GEAR & STYLE (Go Up)
- Yukimura Smart Pistol colored pink with
- Grapple Gun Underbarrel attachment
- Smart Glasses equipped with
- Recon Grenade
- Multi-tool guantlet: fingerless with compartments to slip in lockpicks, wire cutters, and small handheld tools
BIOGRAPHY (Go Up)
Family Ranking: Suburban
Parents: Both parents are living
Childhood Environment: In a decaying, once upscale neighborhood
Family:
- Father: Zane Truman (b. 2025)
- Mother: Marissa Truman (b. 2028)
- Brother: Jason Truman (b. 2052)
- Brother: Raphael "Rafe" Truman (b. 2055)
Daiya Truman began life as a child of the Midwest, growing up in a subdivision of Detroit. Despite having all of life's necessities, her parents Marissa and Zane grew wary of their ever-present proximity to Detroit's combat zone and the growing boldness of scavengers who took advantage of the city's walled —and often disconnected— islands of prosperity. That was no concern to the youngest of three children of the Truman's, who never seemed to sit still for very long to realize anything was uncertain in her family's future.
Her parents were hard workers, and over the course of Daiya's early childhood they recognized what it would take to give their children a proper future. Leveraging connections and risking everything, they each managed to secure jobs in Night City, settling in the developing district of Watson where rising megabuildings challenged the very sky for its limits. At the tender age of 5, Daiya became one of the many new residents to call the Watson district home, where her family took advantage of the increasing affordability in housing and amenities of the prosperous district to provide anything imaginable for their children.
In the middle-class lifestyle of Watson, there was always plenty of comfort to go around. Still, it seemed to Daiya that she must make it her life's work to beautify her surroundings, starting early with her own bedroom. She was a demanding child of tidiness, wanting cubbies and drawers for her things even when they were not always used. Daiya might roam long and wide in the house, leaving playthings abandoned where they lay. Friction often bloomed with her siblings, Jason and Rafe, who were seven and ten years older than Daiya, and far past able to cope with the gradeschool mentality of serious play. Even her parents breathed a sigh of relief when Daiya began attending school full time and no longer had to be the sole source of order or attention in her life.
Art and dance became the focus of young Daiya's life outside of school, and while she could hone her art craft in the margins of assignments —and the all-too-infrequent, for her taste, classroom hours devoted to it— it was difficult for an urban child to find a safe place for movement. Her parents enrolled Daiya in several dance studios before finding one that fit with her personality and desires. Vision Studio 51 in Little China was run by Madame Yelena Skobsvena, a small and sharp-tongued woman who handed out praise like candy: bittersweet. Nevertheless, Daiya's talent caught the mercurial Madame Yelena's eyes and by the age of ten she was considered a rising star at Vision Studio 51.
Daiya poured herself into dance, barely skating by in her academics. While school was interesting and she was constantly praised for her intelligence and creativity, it didn't motivate her to sit still for coursework or absorb it by someone else's memories shown in educational braindances. When Jason graduated school, and then college, and Rafe went into an apprenticeship after high school, her older siblings became too busy to linger much at home. With each successive change, Daiya became more of the focus at home, and by the time she reached her teenage years it felt as if she had been raised as an only child.
Her schoolwork became a point of contention between Daiya and her parents, while at dance she was lauded with praise from the normally-reticent Madame Yelena. Perhaps Madame Yelena would have become a surrogate parent to Daiya if she did not have two at home, instead her time at practice and during performances were a bright escape from the persistent commentary on her academics on the homefront. Daiya had long realized by now that she didn't need to be good at school to be good at something, and even Madame Yelena's bouts of withering criticism could be suffered for the way she glowed while talking up Daiya to other students. She was, after all, the winner of Night City's Little Miss Rockettes competition at 11 and 12.
Daiya excelled at dance to the point where she began to break into routines that Madame Yelena insisted would her years to master. No matter how many times she fell or stumbled, or came under the receiving end of the Madame's famous tongue lashings, Daiya refused to give up on her ambitions. Once, she begged Madame Yelena for an easier way, and perhaps in a moment of weakness, the Madame mentioned how the great dancers of her day did all their practice without shortcuts or implants. That sparked the beginning of Daiya's new ambition, which she was sure would satisfy Madame Yelena's dreams, the expectations of her parents, and of course, herself.
Convincing her parents was the hardest part of it all. Even Madame Yelena interceded once on her behalf, and she spoke of Daiya in the manner she reserved for outside of her earshot. Times following the Unification War were growing more difficult, however, both of her parents have had their jobs moved outside of Watson to the burgeoning zones of Japantown and City Center. Watson itself was showing signs of decay, with creeping costs and risks that made spending thousands of eddies, even on a life-changing operation, an ever-increasingly bitter pill to swallow. Her parents said no.
Daiya took it hardest. Seeing her parents provide everything for her brothers and now to deny her the one thing she knew would open the world up to her...it felt like that world had ended for her at 13. She was irascible at home, and even Madame Yelena noticed her lack of efforts at the studio. When the Madame responded with more structure, Daiya went her own way instead. She stopped attending her dance practices and stopped going home until very late, spending hours wandering Watson and immersing herself in the world she felt was being so cruelly denied to her.
It was her artistic side that did her in, brought home by a friendly NCPD cop who took pity on a delinquent girl with no priors, where Daiya had to confess she had been picked up for shoplifting beauty care products. The shop had noticed the someone picking away at the bright colors one by one, catching her in the act on that occasion. After a long, tearful discussion with her parents, and a meeting with Madame Yelena, Daiya was encouraged and allowed to return to her dance studies with a promise of openness from her parents. In the end, that day was the catalyst for Daiya to finally receive the life-affirming Flash Cortex implant.
The operation was more than she had ever undergone, yet Daiya faced it with only her most private fears voiced to the Madame, who reassured her with promises that she would dance better than the Russian greats. For a few weeks after the surgery, she pushed herself to find only a struggle awaiting, frustrated at the slow results from the miracle device. Cobbled together from old Soviet plans, the Flash Cortex promised more than the sum of its parts, and a wiser moment might have seen her pass on it altogether. But after a month, Daiya found routines coming together more quickly for her, and even complicated schoolwork began to lighten in rigor. The implant worked at last, and Daiya was flying high on life again.
Just as she was soaring, the reality of Night City came crashing down around her. At 14, Daiya had begun to feel unstoppable, so the change at Vision Studio 51 seemed to come on suddenly, though Madame Yelena had been in rare form for weeks already. Daiya would arrive to locked doors at the studio, a new rule by the Madame who said she needed to keep her students safe between classes. One evening during her private lessons with the Madame, they were interrupted by burly figures from the Tyger Claws gang. Loud and demanding, they argued before Madame Yelena Skobsvena made a soft, gentle request of Daiya to gather the lingering students at the studio and get them out. The abrupt change in demeanor in the face of the brutal gangsters kept her fearfully quiet while she obeyed, helping the rest of her dancemates grab their things to leave. When Daiya returned the next day, broken windows of the studio were boarded up while Tyger Claws moved equipment into what would become the Deravaja Dojo. Rarely shy, Daiya asked but no one had answers for her, only firm warnings to move on. The Madame was gone and Vision Studio 51 was no more.
Life without dance was dull and monotonous for the lover of all things bright and colorful. Home life felt more and more oppressive to Daiya, who rankled against the suggestions from her parents to find another dance studio. They didn't understand that it wouldn't be the same, could never be the same for her. So Daiya stopped trying to make them see. Instead, she filled her free time on afternoons and weekends roaming around Watson, lingering in the marketplaces, slipping into clubs she was too young for, crossing paths with others who also had no better place to be. She didn't always seek out mischief, it often found her, dressed in red and black like the city's shadows.
They called themselves the Red Ravens, most of them older and more practiced at blending into the city's chaos. They welcomed her with easy smiles, and words that felt like an irresistible dare. Brimming with a confidence that made them seem like they belonged to the city itself, like they were its chaos, and stimulated Daiya in ways that not even Madame Yelena had managed. Before she knew what was happening, Daiya found herself one of them, getting swept up into a world where the unsavory felt nothing short of satisfying.
Daiya learned far more with the Red Ravens than she ever had out of school, and soon enough it felt as if she was living another life entirely. She learned to shoot a gun, to freerun her way between buildings, to drink and swear like breathing, new talents she picked up as if she had been doing it all her life. Daiya kept it all from her parents, who grew worried at how secretive she was becoming, curious about how their teenager was spending her time. They learned enough from her growing sentiments against the city's capitalist forces, the Red Ravens helped her see that even the actions of the Tyger Claws were driven by the corps and their persistent demand for more power and money. To operate in a city consumed by money, one had to have power and money. All except the Red Ravens, who thought themselves above it, using what power and money they acquired to wreak havoc on the means for others to acquire it.
Her parents learned more of their daughter's activities when she was picked up by the cops for trespassing, or for tagging the side of a building with an anti-corpo slogan, or for being in the wrong place with a weapon when the Red Ravens were conducting illicit activities nearby. They were angry and confused that their once-ambitious child, a rising star in the world of dance and an achieving pupil —at last, with the help of her implant— would denigrate herself to running with thugs and lowlifes as chosen chooms. Daiya fought with them, arguing against their discipline and mustering enough good behavior only to be allowed out again, not to the Red Ravens themselves but lying and stretching the limits when necessary to get back to them anyway.
Daiya got better at avoiding capture, earning the moniker Pink Panther among the Red Ravens crew, whom she thought of fondly as family by now. Their actions were bold and often illegal, but she got such a high from helping them pull off a job that they began to feel more like a game to her. Some days, she skipped school entirely for an important job, making it up by cheating with her implant or paying a classmate to do the work for her. Some days, she just didn't care, leading to more arguments and grounding from parents whose authority was slipping away faster than Daiya's budding reputation on the streets. She yet wasn't a household name, but by now the teenager had realized that she wanted to be.
Within the Red Ravens, however, Daiya was earning more than a name for herself. She earned their trust and had become an indispensable part of the crew. Whether it was stealing cargo off a moving train or rescuing a captured netrunner from a rival crew, Daiya's age didn't prove to be the impediment her parents or school would have her believe instead. They were, she had come to understand, just more victims of the corpo brainwashing, instilling the pigeonholed life that they themselves were set on fulfilling. If she felt sorry for them, it only made Daiya more passionate when a job to strike at a corpo directly came up.
She was 17 when the opportunity of a lifetime arose. The Red Ravens set themselves upon a job more ambitious than any attempted before and it was Daiya they wanted at the center of it all. The job put her in the spotlight and at the ultimate risk, one that would rely on her skills of dance, deception, and ask a sacrifice of her. Hearing the details was genuinely chilling, she hadn't danced for a performance in years and to follow through with the rest would take guile, cunning and a patience even she wasn't sure she had. Her crew was honest, the idea might go badly, especially for her, but the payoff would be huge. Literal billions were at stake, and for a girl who had learned not to take much interest in money, even she was salivating at the magnitude of the windfall.
After not much consideration, Daiya agreed. She would pose as a dancer, not much of a mean feat considering her past and her implant. The routine was more complex than any she had ever attempted, and the crew was lucky enough to have acquired a braindance recorded by a dancer who had done it once before, badly. Daiya would have to overcome the failure and give the performance of her lifetime, and only then would the job begin. Her dance would catch the eye of Alistair Holloway, whose love of dance and theatre had never waned even into his greying years. His patronage of the arts was only part of his reputation, his widower loneliness was widely known in Corpo circles as well. It was said that he refused every offer of viable marriage but was a religious attendee of performance halls, waiting for just the right woman to catch his eye from the stage.
That was to be Daiya. When her performance nearly ended in a heap on the stage, rising to a collective sigh of relief in the crowd, she thought she could hear Holloway's applause louder than all the rest. The Red Ravens had made arrangements for her to meet with him after the show, along with other arrangements. Daiya was no seductress, her schoolyard crushes and few, fleeting relationships had all ended shortly, sometimes in tears. That was something else the Red Ravens had helped to tutor her in, but there was no script that could convince Alistair Holloway of her worthiness. There was, however, just the right adjustment of Holloway's neuralware, with ICE that had taken weeks for a team of netrunners to crack, that made him far more susceptible to Daiya's charms that evening. He was dazzled by her, asking to see her again and again, and on their third encounter Holloway proposed marriage.
Marriage was part of the plan, the hardest part to pull off. The Red Ravens were clear, and had done their best to make Holloway amenable to the idea, but the bulk of the work rested on Daiya's slender shoulders. It was up to her to get Holloway to rush into marriage, forgetting the most crucial part of all for him: protecting his fortune. When Daiya brought him to meet her parents, breaking the news to them for the first time, they had a screaming match in the middle of the upscale restaurant. Daiya was crushed, and a sturdy Holloway cradled her as she cried that she had failed. Worse yet, not even the Red Ravens would answer much when she reached out later. Cooler heads and words with her parents prevailed. Daiya agreed not to see Holloway any longer, who took her rejection with gentlemanly esteem, acknowledging for the first time that Daiya was probably too young for marriage after all.
Weeks went by, and to all around her, Daiya appeared to be returning to her old self. She chanced by her old dance studio, now a seemingly-innocent dojo only associated with the Tyger Claws by whispers. Daiya braved the inside, finding a chilly reception to her polite interest. When she mentioned having once been a student years ago, before it was a dojo, the receptionist seemed confused but allowed her to peek into one of the practice rooms. They were like she remembered, with more mats and props that Daiya ignored as she began to dance. The music was in her head and the routine was made up as she went. She ignored requests to stop by the dojo's staff, and again when several Tyger Claws appeared to make the threat real. When her limbs struck one of the approaching gangsters as she danced, things got physical. Daiya didn't hold back either.
She arrived at Holloway's estate bloodied and sorely beaten, sobbing into the microphone at the gate to his estate. When she was told to leave, Daiya broke down right there, unable to move. Spending the night huddled against his gates, it was Holloway himself who opened it for her in the morning. Upon seeing the state of her, he called for his personal physician to bandage her wounds and help mend the several fractures the Tyger Claws had given her. She cried and confessed to Holloway for hours, until he knew every detail of her life until the studio closed, some vague stories to fill the time between then and now, and, between the lies, enough about the Red Ravens to ruin what was left of the job. It didn't seem to matter anymore, Holloway was the last person to whom Daiya believed she could share anything and hear a kind word without judgement. He delivered all that and more than she was ever expecting.
They were married that afternoon, at a private ceremony in a little pagoda outside the city. Of the few who attended, Holloway would hear nothing but praise and admiration for him and his new bride. Daiya had succeeded with the Red Ravens plan at last, marrying a Corpo in his most vulnerable state, whether that had been her intention or not. Even she didn't know, and when the Red Ravens re-established contact, Daiya turned them away. Instead, she reached out to her parents, trying to mend bridges and make up for years of heartbreak on her part. With access to money and the power to change lives, Daiya finally understood why so many in the city sought it out.
Daiya tried to make the lives around her better with her newfound access, reaching out to her parents and trying to track down Madame Yelena. Her parents did accept a move out of Watson and into a comfortable place in The Glen, away from the gangs and hardships plaguing the now-wayward district. The Madame was nowhere to be found, however, suggesting a permanency to her demise that Daiya took as a weight on her own shoulders. Even her newlywed husband discouraged her from taking out the revenge she wished upon the Tyger Claws, and when Daiya pushed forward anyway, she discovered just how gilded her cage was as a corpo wife.
Life as Holloway's wife was not uncomfortable for Daiya, either, and she settled in with an ease that surprised even her. Part of that may have been the implant's doing, or perhaps it was as the Red Ravens never wanted to believe: that power and money ran Night City because it worked. The Holloway name and his wealth shielded her from many of the city's cruelties, squaring her record with the NCPD and allowing her to complete an education on her own terms in her abundant free time. Alistair was as devoted as she could have ever expected, far beyond the level her peers could muster. She grew bold and confident in their relationship, and even she would seem to be taken by surprise when it ended.
Holloway's death was sudden, and news! There were no shortage of accusations, suspecting the wife was something of a pastime for Night City's elite when one of their own passed, even of natural causes. And it certainly seemed to be that way, the city's coroner and the private ones that Daiya and a third-party investigator —who showed up briskly but unannounced day-of— all agreed there was nothing to suspect foul play. Nothing to pin suspicion upon the grieving 18-year-old, wrapped in black lace and legal battles, whose fleeting year of marriage had ended without any of the aplomb she herself would have prized.
The official reports were signed and sealed, though whispers spread in circles Corpo and 'Runner, murmurs of a heart too burdened or a mind too addled to see the end coming. In some stories it was a knife, in another, poison. More salacious tales were told, some of which Daiya found herself enjoying and wishing she had been their teller. One group was suspiciously quiet, the Red Ravens never reached out to her, nor did Daiya try. Yet she couldn't shake the feeling that, somewhere in the city, they were toasting to a job well done.
In the courtroom, her parents sat behind her and paid homage to their daughter's honor, but they would never linger long enough for her to really reach them. The few friends of Holloway's, and hers, also faded into city's neon fabric, leaving Daiya to fend for herself as before. Without a prenup, however, the courts were left hanging. Daiya was Holloway's lawful wife, of that there was no doubt. Whether his fortune should pass to her was a question that Night City's elites seemed deeply divided on.
Even if her marriage was legal, even if the character witnesses and falsified documents her lawyers had drawn up —clearing her name of the many misdeeds and connections to the Red Ravens, by virtue of the naivete of youth or by disassociation or by other means— all stood up to scrutiny, to allow her inheritance to stand would be to invite more chaos to descend upon the unsuspecting in Night City's wealthy circles. And so the courts found largely against her, ruling that Daiya was entitled to a mere pittance out of Holloway's entire fortune, which would disburse among his company's shareholders and subsidiaries instead. Without a win, or being able to claim the stock in his name, Daiya's windfall vanished before her eyes, leaving her among Night City's masses once more, and angry about it all over again. But survival wasn't just about holding power, it was about knowing where to pull the right strings, and Daiya had learned too well to be counted out just yet.
Daiya returned to Watson where she grew up, unbothered by any whispers that followed her. The Pink Widow, as she was known, became something of a badge of honor for the returning hometown castaway. Daiya quickly set out to do what she was used to, defy expectations and make a name for herself. A new crew took shape under her aims, and a new name whispered in the corners and alleyways began to supplant her own as the latest around Watson. Darkwire, it was called, seemed almost as elusive as Daiya was bold, reaching out to new contacts from the shadows and establishing their reputation one job at a time. Bit by bit, Darkwire would build to be a force to reckon with Night City itself, no matter how long it took to get there.
Patience was not a virtue of Daiya's, but Darkwire didn't need to wait. It only needed to grow.
CHARACTER RELATIONS (Go Up)
- TBD
ROLE-PLAYS (Go Up)
TBA
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