Jason "Arclight" Richards
Background
Jason Richards was born in Montreal in May 2015, the third child of a middle class family whose father was a high school teacher and mother was a nurse. However, despite the relative comfort of his family home, Jason was always quite rebellious but blessed with the boyish good looks needed to talk his way out of trouble. Realising quite early on that his charm was an effective means of doing small deals to supplement his meagre pocket money, Jason quickly progressed in his teens to selling drugs to others at school, before dropping out of sight and entering the Montreal underground.
Richards quickly established himself as a “face man” for a small shadowrunning team based in Montreal during the early 2040s, fronting the team when dealing with various fixers and Johnsons across the north eastern UCAS region, in areas such as Boston and Quebec, and forming a solid reputation as a capable crew. His skill at charming people, and extracting information from them, was put to great use, and Richards – now running under the moniker Arclight – built an impressive number of contacts over a relatively short amount of time.
This all changed on the night of 14th November 2046. A small datasteal job against a small Ares site went desperately wrong, based on faulty information acquired by Arclight. As the team attempted to access the site, the team were disabled by a virulent gas and apprehended. Arclight – on overwatch at the time – was mortified, as he had been utterly duped and this had led to the loss of his team. Fleeing the site, he effectively dropped out of sight for 72 hours, acquiring false travel documents and a significant quantity of cash, before buying a second hand car and driving out of Montreal towards the other side of the continent.
Arriving in Seattle after several minor “incidents”, Arclight drifted back into the shadows within days, using a few remaining (and trustworthy) contacts from his Montreal days to get him introductions into Seattle’s circuit. Again, using his boyish good looks and charm to distract, deceive and gain information, Arclight began rebuilding his damaged reputation, eventually earning enough to purchase a set of cybereyes and some headware. However, something in Arclight had changed, and he had become a little more cynical and hardbitten. Seeking thrills on his down time, it was in mid-2047 that Arclight started his love-hate relationship with gambling, that would later come to dominate his life. Often using casinos and gambling dens as legitimate meeting places for other fixers, Johnsons and team members, Arclight would often place a wager or two. However, as with most gamblers, his luck was usually bad than good, and he started to run up some fairly significant debts, leading him into a number of scrapes with casino heavies and to take on riskier jobs for higher pay. Only through his charm and his use to certain mobsters did he walk out of several casinos at all.
Operating Style
Arclight is a human male in his early forties with short blonde hair that's starting to go white at the temples. A well trimmed goatee adorns his friendly face, which is often found wearing a smile. A pair of blue chrome cyber eyes harking back to his days of running the shadows, something that gives a striking contrast to his otherwise impeccable dress and appearance. For all his boyish good looks, a few wrinkles have still managed to creep into his features, tell tale signs of the all too constant stress of being in debt to one mob boss or another.
Arclight's one of the pros, a fixer at the top of his game, with connections all over the Seattle area. Unfortunately, he also has a gambling problem, something that has kept him in debt a little too often for comfort and has also hampered his otherwise great street rep.
Fixers like Arclight are a diamond in the rough, a fixer that's willing to stick his neck out for his runners, go that extra mile, dig around a little and do what he can to keep the teams he finds work for from becoming next weeks special at the local chop shop. This comes from the fact that Arclight used to work the other side of the fence, was once the runner on the other side of the table, getting paid to do the corps dirty work. He still does in a way, but as time wore on, his connections grew, and his age started to creep up on him, he decided it was time to sit back and pass the work forward. He's also sharp as a tack, extremely resourceful, and always tries to stay one step ahead of the game with connections that tend to give him the heads up on what's going on in the shadows.
Arclight tends to go through small time teams when doing biz, having them drop off gear, run errands, and so on. The small time stuff will tend to be errands he needs run and generally won't pay much. He also uses such jobs to get a feel for new teams, test out their capabilities as well as professionalism before giving them the bigger gigs. Unless he trusts who he's working with, expect most business to go through third parties or to be conducted over the phone. Arclight's not one to generally do face-to-face meets. When he does though, Arclight will be accompanied by an ork bodyguard by the name of Stone, highly trained, cybered out, and absolutely professional. Stone's also liable to be the one sent out on high risk errands where expensive gear is at stake.