Introducing: Fei 880
Earth & Jupiter (BF 35 - AF 2)
There is a lengthy and taxing epic to be written about the lives and narratives that collided and unfolded in the time leading up to the conception of Fei 880. Perhaps it could be taught in Jovian secondary schools, but I imagine the latter details might scandalize the youth far beyond the educational and patriotic elements that appear earlier in the story. For our purposes… we’re going to scrap it. It’s tired, boring, and riddled with clichés. All that you need to know is that when it first woke up in that Nine-Lives body shop on Legba it was very convinced that it was an ascending member of the Junta’s political machine named Formosus (ha!), it was very convinced that it had lost its “eternal soul” (double ha!), and it was shocked, terrified, and hurting beyond belief.
Sure, there’s other important stuff that happened. Possibly a brilliant and much-decorated career as a member of the Space Force and military chaplain. Perhaps a forknapping by a violent criminal gang on behalf of Consortium interests. Maybe even a series of simulspace hell-worlds, psychosurgeries, and interrogations of a confused and battered ego. Who can say really? Who would want to? BORING. It’s already time to move on if you ask me. There’ll be plenty of time later on for us to cover the life and times of Formosus Pius Seijiro Tanaka. This document is for a far more interesting figure: Fei Gozen aka Fei 880, the baddest space samurai on this side of the Jovian Trojans.
Legba (AF 2 - AF 4)
Anyways… Fei-rmosus woke up in a Nine-Lives Body Shop in AF 2, the collateral of a paramilitary probe into the defenses of the Jovian Republic by criminal elements operating at the behest of high-level Consortium interests. Sure, that’s totally true. The Nine-Lives Gang, having poked and prodded her ego over the last couple of months of captivity had decided that it would be fun to embody it in a hot and heavily modded bouncer morph and throw it in a pit with their other favorite forks to see which one would break first. Fei had her wits about her, sort of, so usually it was the other one. Sometimes though, she ate it. It was never anything a little time back in the body shop couldn’t fix and after a while she learned not to sweat it. Or wait… no, no, no she contracted a substrain of Watts-McLeod that really warped her perception of things for awhile. Yeah, that’s the ticket…
So anyways, one day in the pit, she was beating back a gaggle of neotenics with a crowbar and all of a sudden… woah. Things just seemed to slow down a little bit. Little child-like limbs were still flailing; their teeth were still gnashing… but Fei was really able to witness it, almost like it was playing back for her ahead of time. Their inertia, trajectories, collision paths all fell into place. That day she beat five of those little fuckers to a pulp and didn’t look back. She probably should have cause the sixth bastard caught her from behind and she had to spend another week in the vats. Later she realized more things
about herself: how to use new tools to efficiently rend flesh, how to keep fighting on in spite of her own wounds, and how to armor herself when she felt the tug of someone something like her. This became a major focus: camouflaging and armoring herself from these powers she still didn’t understand.
On a personal level, Fei grew by leaps and bounds on Legba. Sure, her identity, gender, race, religion, morality, metaphysics, and sense of purpose had been shattered to nothing but… well isn’t that just liberating? It’s sooo nice to not have a concrete sense of self or real meaning, isn’t it? She didn’t think so actually… Fei spent most of her recovery time between bouts ruminating once, twice, thrice-over every single element of who she thought she was. Finding there wasn’t much to hang on to, and that what did remain had greatly been complicated by the overlapping experiences of forking, sex-swapping, bloodsport, and the nagging feeling that she was, in fact, a large isopod trapped in a transhuman body… she decided to start over. Her life was too confusing to stick to the absolutism of her inherited self. She abandoned it, and Formosus, entirely. She would approach the “horrors” of transhumanity with an open mind. From that point on she took the name Fei 880. If pressed she’d say that 880 is when she stopped counting, but no one would ever get the context of what she might have been counting to begin with.
Elysium (AF 4 - AF 5)
After over a year of spectator bloodsport, Fei was purchased by the scion of some Consortium oligarch and shipped off-world. Registered as an indenture under the false identity of Fei Gozen, she became the legal property of one Yoshi Sakamoto. The whelp was wealthy beyond measure, extremely into Bouncer XPorn, and was influential on a number of VolCel circles on the mesh. That may sound pretty terrible, but for Fei that just meant that he shelled out the cash to have her entire body shipped physically to Elysium, on Mars, and that her indenture amounted to financially dominating a pathetic and mesh-addicted fail-son that nobody paid much attention to. He mostly wanted her around to look at and keep as a trophy, but that left her plenty of time to freelance and earn some credits on the side. Or it would have if she hadn’t gotten sick. Weeks after landing on Mars, she came down with multiple co-occurring infections of some severity. Yoshi protected his investment, popped her into a med-vat and got all the necessary testing and analysis done. It turned out that Nine-Lives had shoved her into a defective morph- susceptible to all kinds of disease. Still, he didn’t want her in a new body and she wasn’t quite sure that she wanted that either- the concept of an eternal soul still had some grasp on her mind. Once recovered, Fei was out of the healing Vat and into a VacSuit.
Now, with a permanent, protective membrane between herself and the big bad Martian world Fei was ready to fully immerse herself. She accompanied Yoshi on his XP streams and the rare occasions that he would make public appearances, but outside of those obligations had plenty of free time. She began freelancing, first in more boring, legal avenues and then in more interesting… less-than-legal courses of work. Contract work for Barsoomian separatists, fencing objects of value offered by Zone Stalkers, running security for shadowy corporate entities, or even diving into underground pit-fighting as a voluntary participant were all jobs that Fei took on for the thrill and the coin. After a while, she grew sick of the return to the Sakamoto compound, of taking up her mantle as a trophy once more. Utilizing help from both criminal and Barsoomian contacts, she had her cortical stack removed and then left behind after a particularly zealous Barsoomian cell bombed administrative facilities of the Sakamoto corporation, owned by Yoshi’s grandfather. If Yoshi still wanted her, he’d keep a pruned and mollified fork of her, but the actual Fei 880 was free to go.
Olympus Mons (AF 5 - AF 9)
Fei left Elysium quickly and struck out with some Zone Stalking colleagues that she’d had fair dealings with previously. Living out of a buggy and constantly on the move, she grew accustomed to a life moving between Quarantine Zone ruins and the smugglers’ base of operations at the edge of Olympus Mons. Fei did not replace her cortical stack; she found some appeal to coming face-to-face with exsurgents or the defenses at the edge of the zone and risking true death. Of course, her combat and psi abilities instilled in her a confidence that perhaps it would never really come. Her experiences with forking now: in her creation, in her flight from Yoshi Sakamoto, instill in her a curiosity. While living with the smugglers, she did it… again… and developed an informorph-muse out of her own fork. The two of them get along well enough and the informorph, called Phalanx to avoid confusion, became a good conversation partner that helps Fei talk through big ideas. It lives in the ecto of her VacSuit and she takes great care not to damage it in her work. Aimlessly risking her life, putzing about with Zone Stalkers, and shooting the shit with Phalanx is not a bad life but it is… particularly unmoored. She lived this way for over two years, until the smugglers find themselves a new neighbor in AF 7. A man called only Yasuke begins teaching acolytes his Neo-Bushido philosophy at the caldera of the great mountain. After a couple of unwitting Uplifts stumble into the smugglers’ den, Fei travels herself to the summit to see what the hubbub is about. There, she falls in love with the philosophy. Since her birth, she had struggled with meaning and purpose and the Shugyōsha provided each in spades. She began training alongside uplifts and AGIs and recontextualized her own fork-humanity in light of her new comrades.
The importance of a biochauvinist soul recedes from her mind. Neo-Bushido moored Fei to herself and to the world in a way nothing had been able to for the past five years. She trained hard and well, and practiced the precepts of her teacher and his philosophy. In that pursuit, she also made fast friends with the others training under Yasuke. As they grew more confident and capable in their abilities they would descend the mountain and travel Mars in order to test their skills and their commitment to Neo-Bushido. For the first time, while traveling the planet and assisting its people, Fei truly began to feel like a Martian.
Outer System (AF 9 - Present)
Nothing lasts forever, of course, and eventually it became time for Fei to embark on her own musha shugyō. With the blessing of Yasuke and the well-wishes of her fellow acolytes, she set out to travel the broader system. Adventures and escapades abounded, but the specifics thereof are stories for another day. She is still on her warrior’s journey now that she’s found her way into the ranks of Firewall on Enceladus, but she’s settling for a moment. What better place is there to test her mettle and her resolve than against transhumanity’s greatest threats?