Kim Nakasone

Kimberly Patricia Nakasone is a MIT math grad and former member of the Vespuccian Intelligence Department's network exploitation corps who has found her latest calling in fighting extradimensional horrors by using a very special branch of mathematics to "hack" the fundamental fabric of reality.

Motivated by profit and the thrill of a real challenge, Kim wields her fists, guns and summoning gadgets against the forces of darkness, simply because it's the least boring thing she's found so far. She joined the Tarot Deck out of convenience more than anything, since they have the resources to pick up on enough trouble to keep her busy.

Appearance
Kim is of Japanese descent with medium skin, Jade-green eyes, and black hair that's been dyed a bright pink. Her clothes are dark-blue or black jeans, sometimes with silver studs, or padded biker pants, and plain flat-color shirts. Her line of work is often messy, so she tries not to wear anything that she wouldn't mind losing. Over this, she wears a black leather shell with enough pockets for the tools of her trade. Accessories include a necklace with a silver pentacle-shaped pendant (a ward), a ½" gauge in her right earlobe, and her MIT class ring.

Personality
Kim is, first and foremost, a free spirit. Fiercely independent, and prone to reject any authority she doesn't think is reasonable unless said authority has something she wants. Don't let her punkish looks and behavior fool you—she's quite intelligent, and is known for ruthlessly dismantling the opinions of people who tell her how to do her job, professionalism be damned.

She isn't motivated by any particular moral drive, but instead goes to where the latest, most interesting challenge can be found. On the whole, though, serving the Greater Good by hacking enemies' computers and killing demons has been sufficiently profitable and challenging for her.

Affiliations

 * Tarot Deck of Peregrine
 * Vespuccian Government (former).

Family

 * Parents and one older sibling still living in MA.
 * Father is former military.

Friends and Foes

 * Friends: TBD
 * Allies: TBD
 * Frenemies: TBD
 * Enemies: TBD

Skills and Abilities

 * Handgun: medium proficiency, was a hobby until she began freelancing.
 * Computer programming and exploitation: scary good.
 * Krav Maga: green belt (Graduate I).
 * First Aid: just the basics, is more likely to try healing by magic.
 * Algomancy: sorcery, but the spells are programmed into her gadget of choice.
 * Third Eye: a form of ESP, useful for spotting strong magical forces/fields.

Weapons

 * S&W 1046 semi-automatic 10mm pistol (often uses silver and/or warded bullets)
 * Basilisk camera app (does what it sounds like)

Other Equipment

 * Ward pendant: enchanted to absorb many forms of harm, up to a point.
 * Warrant Card: enchanted to compel weak-minded individuals to assist her mission.
 * Motorcycle: not magical, but goes fast and looks cool.

Key Items

 * Programmable summoning grid - manifests a variety of stronger magical effects.

Biography
Kim started life where most of her family calls home: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Of the two children her parents had, she was by far the hardest to "control". Growing up, her rebellious attitude didn't reflect her grades or her prospects for higher education. She quickly learned where the limits were and how to creatively bend them, often just because she could. Her independent and competitive nature was well-suited to the cutthroat environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and where she found it a simple matter to stay on top of her classes while pursuing a number of other interests.

One thing led to another, and she quickly found that her natural talents were well-suited to making and breaking computer security systems. Such talent doesn't go unnoticed by the Proper Authorities, and she was (reluctantly) recruited to exercise her skills quasi-legally for the Fed, after graduating with a degree in applied math.

Working for "The Man" was both frustrating and exhilarating for Kim. On one hand, she was able to unleash her talent under legal cover, and stay far ahead of the bleeding edge in her craft. Every day was a new challenge, and she tackled each with the same single-minded drive… until the true nature of her latest target was revealed. She had stumbled upon a trove of extremely complex formulas which were structured to communicate with something, with no obvious means of getting a reply. And yet, whoever was operating this system was getting responses from seemingly nowhere. Her curiosity got the best of her and, before scrambling the target's drives to irrecoverable noise, she made a personal copy of this trove of mysterious code.

Two weeks later, she found out what the code was for when she was pulled into a boardroom of serious-looking men with more stars than she'd ever seen together at once. Her father still invited his colleagues from the Air Force over from time to time, so she had met people like this before. Anyway--her own description of the algorithms she "destroyed" seemed to confirm what many at the meeting of had suspected. There were mentions of "summoning" and "successful containment", all connecting back to the topic of what most people would call occult arts. They filled her in: Computational Demonology was the science of using math and algorithms to interact with the fundamental fabric of reality, particularly the borders between universes. Over the centuries, many mathematicians have accidentally discovered certain numbers and ways of processing those numbers which are capable of breaching those borders and bringing things from other universes into ours. It was a good thing she destroyed it all, they said, else this knowledge could fall into the wrong hands.

And then life returned to normal, as far as anyone could tell. But she was living two lives: the first as an offensive hacker on government payroll, the second as a mathematician unlocking the secrets of the boundaries between universes. The latter proved to be far more interesting to her, so she left the government's employ after four years of distinguished service.

As with all secrets, these came with a cost. Not only were many of the shadowy horrors of myth real, but they were far more dangerous than the fairy tales gave them credit for. She learned this the hard way:  on more than one occasion, she had to flee for her life from her temporary "work" site, often returning later to find it a smoking crater or empty field. But over a series of harrowing months, Kim's careful study of these phenomena led to an understanding of how to vanquish them herself. And so, for the past five years, her job has been hacking the fabric of reality to banish the things that go bump in the night back to the void from whence they came. Needless to say, not many things of this world so much as faze her anymore. She calls her new craft "Algomancy".

Kim's new "career" brings her to all sorts of interesting places, but out of all of them, Peregrine has drawn her there, perhaps to stay. The boundary between dimensions is especially weak there, which has served to draw researchers, magicians and tentacular horrors from beyond spacetime alike. But as far as she's concerned, the more the merrier. Her hunting has often crossed paths with people and groups of similar goals, one of which she eventually became familiar enough to join forces with: the Tarot Deck.