Name: Michael Lee Nickname/Aliases: Known among hackers as Deep Risk. DOB/Age: January 6th 1983 / 26. Legal status: American citizen. No criminal record. Place of birth: Okinawa, Japan. Education: Was never able to complete High school. Lineage: Human. Family: American father, Japanese mother. Hasn't spoken to his father since he was 13 and his connection with his mother is trying at best. He considers his former STN-J team as a non-blood related family and frequently keeps in touch with them via emails.
PB:Michael Weatherly General appearance: Michael is skinny despite spending his days munching chips behind the computer screen, he's got a really good metabolism and since STN-J's reformation has taken up running. Spending hours on end doing this has given him a lean body and has him in a very good shape. He's a little over 5'8", blue eyes and ash blond hair. He has a serious case of bed head hair which is usually because he's not bothered with it too much since he spends his days mostly by himself.
The scruff comes from pretty much the same habit, days on end spent by the computer which of course includes nodding off and sleeping comfortably there. His eyesight isn't necessarily bad, he is by no means unable to live without his glasses but all the hours behind the screen is cause enough for him to wear them in order to keep it from deteriorating further. Much due to his work he's usually dressed down more than up, a pair of comfy pants and a t-shirt is really all he needs and he has piles of them. It's highly unusual to find him dressed in anything else and there’s always a very good reason behind it if he ever dresses up.
Distinguishing features: A set of very messy hair, slightly orange tinted glasses and a white iPod that’s nearly always plugged into his ears.
Powers & abilities: Michael has a way with codes, doesn’t matter what kind of code it is, given enough time he will figure it out. This was something that kept him occupied as a kid and out of all the codes, computer codes were the ones to catch his interest best as it seem to be ever changing and ever growing. He grew up coding things, at first it was just smaller stuff, games, programs but it really didn’t take him too long before he found his way into hacking and was something a natural in it.
Has in adult years learned to handle a smaller variety of firearms. Specialized knowledge: Michael knows witches. Having spent the last 12 years hunting them has caused him pick up a thing or two along the way and could probably be seen as walking encyclopedia for basic witch and witchcraft knowledge. Department: Research and Development.
Personality: Michael is a curious person and doesn’t really bother hiding that fact from anyone but he’s more likely to do some digging on his own about them than outright ask. He tends to distance himself from people that differ a lot from himself, while he can be polite to everyone he is less likely to bond with someone who doesn’t have common interests. He’s really focused and loves what he does but there’s nothing that annoys him more than when people try and talk to him while he’s deep in his work and he gets rather snippy when they do.
But despite all this, or maybe asides from all this Michael is a people person, he’s spent too many years alone in Raven’s Flat to not treasure having people around him. He’s also a bit of a flirt, another thing that comes from being locked away for his entire teen years. He loves making a pretty girl smile and will go out of his way to do so, using it to overcompensate for the years of pain and agony he’s seen and the dreary thoughts that sometimes occupy his mind. Strengths: Diligent worker, gets along with people, works great in groups and is overall good natured. Weaknesses: Testy and easily annoyed, judgmental, prone for antisocial tendencies and can never say no to a pretty woman.
History: Michael was and still is a rather normal person; he just has a bit of an issue with his curiosity claiming that if it was between the law and his curiosity, he would pick his curiosity every time. His father was a Chinese-American soldier stationed at the Kadena Air Base in Okinawa and his mother was a local Okinawa woman whom his father had married a while back. He was born on the Air Base and due to his father being American and his parent’s marriage Michael was given American citizenship. But due to certain issues and cultural crashes Michael and his mother came to live off base. He still saw his father as often as possible but this was as time moved on made less and less frequent due to his fathers work.
He was never really an active kid and since he was able to read he spent hours on end with cryptology books, something his mother often blamed her father for. The old man had been a cryptologist during the Second World War and he was overjoyed that his grandson seemed to share his love for codes. But Michael’s adoration for codes took on a different tone when he was given a computer and that would be something that would change his life forever. He started coding, at first computer programs and games but soon he also started decoding things, cracking things and when he reached his teens he was already a very skilled hacker. His curiosity was what drove him on and one late afternoon he managed to hack his way into a secure network of an organization called STN-J, what he found there was immense amount of information about witches, witch hunters and something called seeds – people who carried the latent witch gene. It didn’t take long before he realized something was wrong and no matter how he tried he could not disconnect from the server.
A group of black clad men came stomping in, arresting him and claiming his computer, the accusation was cyber terrorism but things were a bit more complicated than that. Michael, at the time 14, was brought into the headquarters of the STN-J and was there confronted by a man named Zaizen, the STN-J’s administrator. Zaizen had been impressed with the young man’s skills and offered him a deal, Michael would stay at Raven’s flat and work for the STN-J for the remainder of his life, or he could be killed instantly. At 14 the choice wasn’t too hard and Michael started his job, keeping the STN-J’s server and databases safe and functioning as a technical support to the field team.
He grew into the job over time but it wasn’t easy and for the longest time he resented not only himself for his skills but Zaizen for keeping him trapped and the other people for being able to come and go as they wanted but the people he worked with became a second family for him over time. Some of the people who had worked there when he started got old or careless and were killed. There wasn’t really too much of a retirement plan for people in their line of work, and especially not when they were constantly battling people with powers that could crush them all in seconds.
In 2002, things started changing. One of the team’s Craft users were killed under very suspicious circumstances and a replacement was sent in from the SOLOMON headquarters in Italy. A young woman named Robin, it was a well known fact that she too was a Craft user and due to her age and power Michael was a bit weary and did his best to just ignore her. It worked well enough until she started bringing him coffee, just smiling at him when he looked questioning at her and for the first time ever he found himself facing someone who actually cared about him rather than just the work that he did. Robin was friendly and innocent but showed a curiosity he could relate too and it didn’t take too long before him to grow attached to her, she was a friend, perhaps something even more. It was possibilities that were never explored.
But Robin was a Craft user and after a while, when they all had grown attached to her came two attacks on her life, it seemed like SOLOMON had grown to see her as a threat rather than an asset. They stashed her away in Raven’s flat in order to try and protect her while Michael tried to find out what was really going on, but it was a failed attempt and left one team member with a broken bone, two missing, Robin being one of them. For the following months, the team was severely weakened, crippled even but they tried to keep it together and keep working because the witches didn’t stop just because they had a hard time.
The events that followed that was all in rapid succession as it became clear that Robin was indeed hunted but not by SOLOMON as believed but by another fraction called Factory which STN-J have been working along side with in order to more humanely take care of dangerous witches. Factory by the governing of Zaizen does not take care of the witches more humanely but uses them as experiments to extract an essence called Orbo that allows the hunters to hunt without fear of harm from the witches powers. STN-J, rebelling against Zaizen goes out of its way to take him down, that was the first time in five years that Michael went outside the walls of Raven’s flat. Their improvised mission was a success, Factory crumbled and with it Zaizen was gone, but so was also Robin and Amon, another one of the team. The group was crippled again but alive and under new management soon went back to work. This time though, Michael chose to stay on and to work with the team, it was home for him but with being allowed outside now he got an apartment a couple of blocks away and at 20 was once again able to start to live his life.
He got in touch with his mother but it was hard trying to reconnect after 6 years especially with all the questions and the fact that he couldn’t explain. He learned that his parents had separated and that his father had returned back to America. There was really not a lot left of the life he’d lived before STN-J and he was more than happy to leave it like that. Time moved on though and SOLOMON started slowly deteriorating making the STN-J into more or less a sole sufficient organization working to keep up with the developments that time brought, it started growing bigger and there were finally three hunter teams instead of just one, with that also came other tech support and research people and Michael more often found himself doing outside consultant work.
In 2007 he started working with the Xi'An branch of BPRD, at first he was just a liaison between the two organizations but as he felt the work at BPRD was more challenging and much more interesting he resigned from the position as tech support at STN-J and came to work full time for BPRD. Though the language was an issue he got along well with his co-worker and in the spring of 2009 was transferred to the main Fairfield office.
1st person: I'm just getting settled in, will probably take some time to get used to the new office but it's nice. Doesn't quite feel as closed in as I expected it would do. Haven't met any of the co-workers yet, spotted a few on the walk through. This place isn't quite what I was expecting but then again none of these places ever are. Break room is a big plus.
Really should do something about the apartment too I guess. Anyone willing to give a guy a hand?
[Filtered: Private] Call Karasuma. Mail Sarasaki and Doujima. Upgrade memory. Plants. Stock up crisps. [/filtered]
3rd person: His eyes were fixed on the monitor in front of him, text flying past as he dug through yet another file, the obscurity of some things never failed to amaze him. He copied a piece of text and pasted it to another document and promptly reached for some crisps which he munched on as his head started bobbing along with the beat of the music blaring at him through his earpieces. Out of the corner of his eye he noted someone enter the room but react to it, instead he stopped for a second, frowned and then went back to typing. His job would be so much easier if everything was stored electronically. Reaching around he grabbed a pen and jolted down a series of numbers on a piece of paper, he'd have to check that part later.
"Michael, I need your findings on my desk in an hour." he managed to pick up on the voice, barely drowned out by the music. That was the worst thing about a new work space, people who didn't know not to bother him while he worked. He ignored the person behind him and kept typing, one hand dancing across the keys as the other went for the bag of crisps. His eyes never left the screen, he could however feel how he was being stared at.
There was nothing that annoyed him quite like people intentionally or unintentionally distracting him. Michael didn’t like distractions, him always ended up being as uncooperative as he possibly could to people that annoyed and distracted him. "Michael!" He didn't bat an eyelash at the shrillness of her voice but his top lip twitched a little.
"I heard you the first time," came the drawled out response and leaning back in his seat he glanced up and back over his shoulder at the annoyed woman behind him. His slightly sour look was replaced by one of mild surprise and then he smiled. "I don't like being distracted from work, not even by a pretty lady like yourself. If you want me to work faster, letting me take you out to dinner is a much better way." He could see just how annoyed she was and his little comment didn't really seem to make it better but he could have sworn he saw the corners of her lips tug upwards, ever so slightly and as she stormed off his grin just grew.
"So, that's a yes then?!" He shouted after her, letting her eyes linger a bit longer than they had before he turned back to his work, and truth be told, maybe if all the distractions looked like that he wouldn't mind them so much.