mask or menace | application

[stealwithit]

Background | Personality | Powers
〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Anna
AGE: 22
JOURNAL: spiraea
IM / EMAIL: heartsimpact (at) gmail (dot) com
PLURK: camerata

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Kasumi Goto
CHARACTER AGE: 26
SERIES: Mass Effect
CHRONOLOGY: Mass Effect 3, just after Shepard recruits her into helping with the Crucible project
CLASS: Anti-Hero, Chaotic Good. Despite her thievery, she can very much be a Robin Hood type, using her skills to protect others or ~dispense justice.~
HOUSING: Housed alone would be ideal, but I’m open to being thrown into a random lot if it helps balance things out!

BACKGROUND:
Oh look a wiki link how convenient!

The events that transpire across all three Mass Effect games are influenced by the player’s choices through Commander Shepard. To make things easier, I’ll just say that the current in-game Shepard is the same one Kasumi knows and has pledged her loyalty to as of the events of the second game. But since she’s being taken from further along in the timeline, her Shepard is, technically speaking, also a different one.

That being said, Kasumi’s involvement in the main events of the Commander Shepard story begins when he finds himself needing a team to stop the Collectors. There aren’t many people across the galaxy who know Kasumi Goto by name, and fewer still can put a face to that name (or even put a name to that face). No one knows her beginnings or how she came to be who she is; for the most part, no one knows she even exists. In her words: she’s the galaxy’s best thief, not the most famous. So when she sees that the friendly neighborhood terrorist group Cerberus is trying to track her down for a mission with the illustrious (and thought-dead) Commander Shepard, Kasumi’s interest is piqued, and she decides to find them before they find her.

It helps, of course, that striking a deal with Cerberus to have her sign on for this mission comes with a benefit: the Commander’s assistance in a personal heist for Kasumi (and also the pay from Mr. Illusive makes the job pretty lucrative, probably). The mission involves retrieving the neural implant which stories memories (or graybox) of Kasumi’s former partner-in-crime and lover, Keiji Okuda, from the possession of dangerous weapons dealer and smuggler Donovan Hock. Sometime ago, Keiji had obtained extremely classified information that would implicate the Systems Alliance in a potentially war-igniting event if it ever came to light. After prosecutors failed to incriminate him (because they couldn’t use the memories in his own graybox against him) during the subsequent trial, Keiji and Kasumi fled to Bekenstein in hopes of starting anew. Their first target? Hock. The heist goes awry when the pair tip their hand too soon and are forced to split, which inadvertently allows Hock to corner Keiji and extract his graybox. Kasumi, who had otherwise been occupied with the goons downstairs, hears Keiji screaming on their comms channel but arrives too little too late, Hock gone and Keiji bleeding out. He had just enough life left in him to tell her that Hock took his graybox, and he implored her to live and get it back not only for the sensitive intel within, but because of the precious memories of their time together inside. Kasumi left him reluctantly, but vowed to find him again.

Enter Commander Shepard, who helps Kasumi retrieve the graybox by infiltrating a soiree at Hock’s estate as Solomon Gunn. The heist proceeds with only a few minor hiccups, like Kasumi being turned away at the door because why wouldn’t she get turned away at the door? Eventually, however, they do manage to crack the security into Hock’s vault through a mix of infiltration and sabotage. Hock’s ugly mug shows up to threaten them, intending to kill Kasumi to take her graybox as well, but she’s not about that life. She and Shepard fight their way out of the estate, taking down Hock in his own airship in the process, and return to the Normandy with Keiji’s graybox and some sweet new submachine guns.

When Kasumi accesses Keiji’s graybox, a pre-recorded image of him reveals that he encrypted the data within his graybox by lacing it together with his personal memories with Kasumi. The encryption key is within Kasumi’s, which explains why Donovan Hock never stood a chance at cracking the graybox and needed Kasumi’s. Of course, her having the key means that she’s become a target for anyone who would ever want the intel, and for this reason holo-Keiji begs her to destroy the graybox, even though he knows she’d want to keep it. It’s clear that she’s not ready to let go, even on his insistence that she “doesn’t need some neural implant to know he’ll always be with her.”

Shepard allows her to keep the graybox, bless his soul, but Kasumi must pay the price by staying off the grid and being vigilant about her identity and reputation.

About six months after the squad’s suicide mission into the Omega Relay and the destruction of the Collector base, Kasumi’s path crosses with Shep’s once more when Jondum Bau, a salarian Spectre, asks for his help in investigating a Hanar diplomat. This diplomat and others were present during an Alliance black ops raid on a batarian research station for Reaper tech that resulted in a massacre, no useful findings, and a subsequent cover-up of the incident, and Bau believes the hanar were indoctrinated. All this information he gets from an anonymous tip, but he suspects it’s Kasumi, and apparently he’s been trying to catch her for years now.

When the Spectres split up to search, Kasumi reveals herself to Shepard, admitting that indeed was the one who leaked the information to Bau. It turns out that information on the black ops incident was the data in Keiji’s graybox, and Kasumi had decided to leak it to Bau due to the danger of there being an “indoctrinated jellyfish out there.” She tags along, cloaked, as Shepard and Bau look into the hanar activities, during which time she makes it clear that she does not intend to come back to the Normandy (unless Jacob is there). She eventually reveals herself again when the Spectres confront the diplomat, who is already in the process of uploading a virus to shut down the automated defenses on the Hanar and Drell homeworld of Kahje, which would have rendered the planet ripe for the Reapers’ taking, had Kasumi not jumped in and stopped the upload. Shepard and Bau take care of the diplomat and his goon, meanwhile, but things go awry once again when Kasumi discovers a failsafe which triggers an explosion.

And that is how Kasumi Goto, master thief of the galaxy, dies.

Or so she would have you (and Jondum Bau, quite possibly the only individual to ever get close to catching her) believe.

After Bau expresses his disbelief at him failing to realize she’d been along for the ride all along, Shepard sends him along, reminding him that Kasumi helped him against the Collectors basically just saved Kahje from planetary destruction at the cost of her own life. And Shep, having figured out Kasumi’s gambit, tells her to come on out. She reiterates that she’s not joining another suicide mission and definitely not a galactic war, but Shep manages to sway her by baiting the thought of hacking and stealing expensive, rare tech for the Crucible Project (a galactic undertaking to create a mass super weapon against the Reapers as per ancient blueprints from the last Reaper cycle) in front of her.

And that, folks, is how the Kasumi do.

PERSONALITY:
In spite of her enigmatic, dark appearance, Kasumi is quite friendly, playful, and really goddamn sassy--and especially so around those she trusts or is comfortable with. These traits are infallible and are carried even into dangerous situations in the middle of missions or in combat. And as expected as someone who makes a lifestyle out of stealing things, Kasumi can be quite a daredevil and a trickster. She has a lot of confidence in her abilities, and isn't afraid to show them off, even just to prank people. She is also keenly observant, which comes in handy in her profession, and is the only other person aboard the Normandy apart from the yeoman (and informal shrink) who can pick up on certain things about some crew members. Which also plays into her inquisitive nature; she’s always wanting to know more, and in turn she ends up snooping around or being a gossipy hen at times. She also exhibits her thieving tendencies outside of her heists, insinuating that she spies on Jacob as he works out, among other such antics. Her curiosity and nosiness, however, are all in good nature, and she seems to come to genuinely care for the crew, albeit quietly and from the shadows.

Being the galaxy's most enigmatic master thief and a skilled hacker, Kasumi is also extremely intelligent. It is suggested, however, that despite being a thief and bona fide kleptomaniac, Kasumi isn't actually a malicious person. Of course, she enjoys the thrill of the heist as well as the getaway, and sometimes she’ll steal things just for fun, but she would never commit crimes such as kidnapping or taking hostages. It also seems like her portfolio for stealing consists mainly of stealing information, artifacts, tech, or pieces of art. But she’s also surprisingly compassionate and especially so to children and those in need--so, yes, meet sci-fi Robin Hood; she’s done things like saved a young girl from slavers or stolen from the rich to give back to refugees of the Reaper War.

Speaking of art, though, she appreciates it greatly, along with literature, and historical artifacts (so it’s probably safe to assume that she knows a decent amount about ancient Earth aka the 20th-21st centuries). Kasumi may live in the space age but she still enjoys the feel of paper between her fingers when she reads the classics, and knows a genuine piece of art when she sees it. That said, she's also quite a sentimental person and a romantic, and she has a weakness against nostalgia. When Shepard lets her keep Keiji’s graybox, it seems that she ends up spending a lot of time in it, trying to relive her memories with Keiji over again, and before Shepard convinces her to sign on for the Crucible Project she seems like she’d sooner spend the rest of her days in the graybox than fight in a war; when she gets attached, <i>she gets attached</i>.

In short, she is a classy, sassy klepto thief trickster who is actually also really caring and compassionate despite her enigmatic and secretive nature.

POWER:
Kasumi’s in-canon skill set are centered around her omni-tool, the Mass Effect universe’s quintessential, powerful personal holo-computers; so while she has not been blessed by the biotic gods, but her tech skills are top-notch. The most important skill of which is her tactical cloak, which grants her invisibility. She can sustain the cloak for an extended period of time, but not ridiculously so (like, she probably couldn’t spend entire an hour cloaked as much as she would want to). Furthermore, it’s also limited in that there’s a minor delay between her coming out of cloak and then going back into it, so she can’t reappear only to disappear again instantly; she has to wait a couple of seconds. Kasumi uses it to move across the battlefield and get up close to enemies to deal a knockout blow when they least expect it (a move called Shadow Strike), or simply to confuse enemies.

Her omni-tool also comes in handy when tasked with hacking and cracking secure data or security systems, and lets her dish out tech attacks like Overload, which sends an electric shock through a target to disable shields or just electrocute the hell out of them. It is also presumably equipped with an omni-blade for her melee Shadow Strike.

Omni-tool aside, she’s proficient in the use of heavy pistols and submachine guns. She also makes up for what she lacks physically in brute strength and size by being very nimble and fast, shown to be able to climb and move quickly and hold her ground in hand-to-hand combat situations by being evasive and precise with her moves.

After being ported in, her assigned superpowers would be:
01 • Omni-Tool: It is her baby, but a somewhat watered-down version of the in-canon version. For one, because of the disconnect between technologies, it cannot really be used to connect to the networks or to hack into systems--thus it merely serves as a vehicle for her tech skills and attacks such as the tactical cloak, Overload, and for deploying her omni-blade in close-combat.

02 • Infiltration: This is a slight twist from her in-canon passive skills. Even without her tactical cloak/invisibility, she’s trained herself to be physically adept at stealth and infiltration, but here her footsteps and movements may actually seem quieter than a regular person’s; she retains the litheness that she’s trained her body to have, and she’s fast. And unfamiliar as she might be with the technology of the times, she seems oddly in-tune with it; learning the ins and outs of the tech and eventually hacking might come easily to her (but not without some effort, of course).

FINAL NOTES:
It might also be worth noting that Kasumi has a neural implant in her brain, called a graybox, just like Keiji’s. It allows her to record memories and be able to recall them--almost like having a photographic memory, but not quite, so it’s more of an assisted memory tool. It doesn’t seem like she uses it much apart maybe from storing data for jobs and recalling more personal memories from time to time. (So I’m not entirely sure if this would be counted towards one of the powers since it’s just. Embedded in her brain, and she doesn’t really use it as a power.)