Post by Ulani Kapahu Lachance on Jul 8, 2012 16:14:56 GMT -8
[/font][/i]
Ulani Kapahu Lachance
Gender: Female
Age/DOB: 28 / July 1984
Occupation: Professional Thief
Race: Evoker
Appearance;
Ulani is a tiny bit taller than average, standing at 5’6”, though sometimes height is an illusion on account of her willowy stature, which could make her seem taller than she is, even though she doesn’t like being a stick and not having much in the way of curves. She is very lithe and sure in her step (and she has to be considering her line of work), and it’s apparent by the way she moves that she’s very athletic. Her skin is a natural tan – none of that fakey orange crap – and she has a heart shaped face whose features make her islander heritage very obvious. Her plain black hair is straight, thick, and layered, usually swept back from her face, and sometimes tied into a ponytail when the situation calls for it.
She dresses casually, and rarely ‘dresses up’ except for on nights out or some special occasion, or, again, if a certain ‘job’ calls for it. She’d be happy to be in shorts, tank, and flip flops all the time, but as she’s found out, that’s not as ‘normal’ here on the east coast as it is on the west coast and back home, so ... only for trips to the beach is that ensemble thrown together.
Personality;
Nothing really ‘loud’ stands out about Ulani’s personality. She usually greets most people with a smile, and she seems pretty cheerful most of the time, almost to the point where one could hardly imagine her angry. Maybe this is natural, or maybe it’s just a cover up; either way, she seems to know that people are more willing to deal with you if you’re smiling at them rather than acting stuck up or bitchy or whatnot. She doesn’t carry any airs of ‘attitude’ and for the most part is fairly down to earth, and she’s totally down with making new friends provided they’re not douchebags.
She’s not very confrontational, preferring to walk away from a fight if something breaks out, but if there’s no way out, well, then she’ll go in fists flying. Sometimes she feels she needs to compensate for her unassuming disposition with a fist, and unfortunately it can be the only way with some people.
Beneath that cheery exterior is a rather shrewd, calculating mind, however. Put her in a room and she’ll have formulated all possible entries and exits (conventional and not) within a few seconds. She’s also mildly kleptomanic and can’t help ‘helping’ herself to the occasional pretty looking shiny now and again, which has gotten her into trouble more than once. Needless to say, she’s not above bending and breaking rules when she feels it’s necessary, but it’s been more on account of habit than any real ill will.
On her off days, she enjoys spending time at the beach and other such water activities: swimming, snorkeling, scuba diving, spear fishing, and boating. She also loves hiking, although in her belief the scenery on the east isn’t as pretty as back home, and … well, she’s kind of got a point.
History;
Ulani was born in Kaua’i to one of those rare families of pure islander descent. Regardless of descent, however, Ulani was always caught in between the more traditional, older family, and the ‘newer’ generation of modernization. She even eventually adopted a westerner surname, since that just happened to be the thing to do at the time, and eventually down the line she would lie about her heritage, claiming that she had a French-American father (to explain the fake surname) so as not to disadvantage her too much in the mainland.
Despite all that, she was a pretty good kid growing up. She went to school, earned high marks, and got along well enough with her schoolmates (barring the occasional schoolyard fight in which she was more than happy to get involved). She mellowed out as she grew older, though, learning quickly that being loud and obnoxious got you nowhere. Besides, despite Kaua’i being a tiny island, it had plenty of distractions to offer, and tourism had not yet blossomed there like it had in the larger islands, and so a lot of the day could be spent playing at the beach, digging for clams and crabs, swimming, snorkeling, and fishing. There was always somewhere new to explore, and more than once Ulani got lost, sometimes overnight, but that’s what the jungle does to you.
She went straight to the University of Hawaii after high school, at first to pursue a degree in marine biology, since the thought of being able to work out in the field was one that appealed greatly to her, considering her hobbies. Unfortunately as she soon found out, it was more about sitting in a laboratory recording volumes of numbers about boring things like water salinity and population growth and decline. Around the same time she began to discover her knack for computers; the computer science field was a rapidly growing one (and still is today), and so she soon switched over her major, delaying her another year or so.
She soon found she didn’t just have a knack for the stuff, though. She was extraordinarily talented in the field, but she couldn’t really understand why. Some things she understood right away, but she when she was stuck on some frustrating bit of coding or something, sometimes she found it would just write itself. At first she figured she was just having some weird episode like the kind you hear artists have when painting their masterpieces, but it happened more than once, and eventually, intrigued, she started to experiment with just what she could do.
Internet security at that time was still very much underdeveloped, and so she tested out various means of hacking … eventually worming her way into the database of a private company situated on Oahu. Whilst stumbling around on their computer, she found a series of correspondence that explicitly outlined their underground operation in the sex trade … and without the right connections to tell her what to do, she did what anyone else would have done: taken the information to the police.
As to be expected, they could only do so much against a corporation who lawyered up faster than anyone could blink. Ulani, in over her head, couldn’t afford a defense and neither could her family, and so she was sent to prison for cybercrimes before she could graduate. Luckily the sentence was not as harsh as it would be today, and she was out within a year on parole, and completely clear within two.
By then she was frustrated with the weakness of government and large-scale bodies in general, beginning to realize that it was a free for all and it was up to the individual to do what had to be done. With hardly so much as a goodbye to her family who had been oddly silent and unsupportive of her actions, she left the islands and headed for the mainland, where she became employed in the Silicon Valley as a coding monkey despite her lack of degree. The money was good, but not as good as it could have been if she had finished school, so soon enough she hit a ceiling. Add that to the fact that her boss tried to make her his mistress and she left California, migrating even further east.
In Boston, she got a job again as a coding monkey. However, one day on the way home, she stopped by one of those used bookshops, looking for a little something to read about that didn’t have to do with programming language. A book about the supernatural caught her eye, and after paging through it a bit, she found something that hit close to home: something about strange powers, some of which had to do with the ability to manipulate technology.
That couldn’t be her, could it? Well, she’d soon find out, as she tracked down the author of the book who was, of course, living under a different name. Living with her family in a suburb of Boston, Saint-Calais, the author turned out to be one of those talented people herself, people she had termed ‘evokers.’ The woman was willing to teach, and Ulani was willing to learn, commuting to Saint-Calais once a week for her lessons.
It was around this time that she met up with another coding monkey, a certain Takashi. The man was a genius with computers, ten times more than she knew she’d ever be, but the man also came with a plan, and he soon coerced her into being his comrade. The jobs started small enough, petty thefts and whatnot, but soon they set their sights higher and began making a reputation for themselves. The grand finale was to be a job for a client who wanted a rare piece of art stolen from the Boston Museum of Art, and with Takashi as the hacker and Ulani the thief, they pulled off the heist to near perfection … but a week later both were arrested because allegedly they’d been caught on tape even though Takashi was pretty thorough about that stuff.
Both figured the client had turned them in to cover their tracks, but it was too late to get out of that. However, though the sentence was to be at least ten years, another client tracked them down, one that had apparently been after the same piece of art. They claimed that if Takashi and Ulani spilled the beans on who had hired them, they’d pull some strings to bail them out. Not much for sticking up for a client that had ratted them out in the first place, Takashi and Ulani pointed the newcomer in the right direction, and they were good to their word; both were let out of jail.
In the few years following, Ulani continued to pursue her career, though it was never enough to get enough cash together to go back to school and finish her degree. Recently, however, she hooked back up with Takashi who claimed that the people he was working for now had a lot of jobs to offer her, if she was interested, and so she’s moved back to Saint-Calais to check them out …
… turns out they’re the same ones who bailed them out of jail, so she’s definitely interested.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
OOC;
Name: Kai
Other Characters: Lots
Preferred method of contact: MSN
How did you find us?: >_>
[/blockquote]
