OOC: History

[lady_bounty]

Faye was born August 14, 1994, in Singapore, Earth. She was the daughter of a very wealthy Chinese family in the city-state, the family name of which she has no memory. She was fluent in both Mandarin and English from an early age, and attended schools in which subjects were taught in English and the student bodies were mixed-race. Her home, a large and extravagant mansion, was within walking distance of her secondary school and the ocean. Faye was on the cheerleading squad at her secondary school, and had a close group of girlfriends.

In 2014, when Faye was 20, she ventured into space for the first time. The passenger shuttle she was in had just attained near-Earth orbit when an accident occurred. There was an explosion, and the atmospheric seal of the shuttle was compromised. Faye survived the accident, but was so badly injured that she was cryogenically frozen in the hope that the medical technology of the future might be capable of healing and re-animating her.

Faye remained in cryogenic stasis for 54 years, during which time the Earth hyperspace gate exploded, destroying a large chunk of the Moon, pelting Earth with meteors, driving the people of Earth underground, and sending Earth into decades of economic recession. Many records were lost during this time, including Faye’s. Faye was transferred to a hospital on Mars, and in 2068 she was treated and revived by Dr. Bacchus and his assistant Miss Manley. Faye had amnesia and couldn’t remember her own name or anything about herself, much less that she had been in an accident and cryogenically frozen. Bacchus and Manley informed Faye that she owed the hospital 300,028,000 woolongs (about $3,000,280) for the operation, hospital fees, and 54 years of interest. She was provided with a lawyer, Whitney Hagas Matsumoto, who, unbeknownst to Faye, was the nephew of Dr. Bacchus. At the request of Totus Insurance Company, which had insured Faye’s operation, he did some research on her past. He told her that her name was Faye Valentine; in reality, the name Valentine was chosen by Dr. Bacchus, in reference to his favorite song, “My Funny Valentine”. Matsumoto informed her that she had been in an accident, and cryogenically preserved for 54 years. Faye did not believe him at first, and when he tried to prove to her that 54 years had passed, she threw a fit and passed out. That night Faye attempted to sneak out of the hospital, but tripped a motion-sensing alarm on the hospital grounds. She ran to a nearby highway, where she was frightened by holographic ads in a rest stop and a “narrow-sense” monomachine, or zipcraft, flying above the road. As she ran down the highway towards a city visible on the skyline, Matsumoto caught up with her in a car. Faye jumped the barrier and ran away from the road; Matsumoto pursued her on foot and caught up to her when she stumbled. Faye, sobbing, protested that she couldn’t pay all of that money, that it wasn’t fair to ask her to pay when she couldn’t even remember anything about herself. Matsumoto assured her that he would help her to pay off the debt little by little, and that her memory might come back some day. He carried her back to the car and took her out to eat.

Matsumoto befriended Faye and helped her to learn about the strange new world she found herself in. As time passed, they developed a romantic relationship. One night, after a date, they were chased by a zipcraft sent by the collection agency. Matsumoto drove his car off the highway and into a forest, attempting to escape them. He told Faye to get out of the car and run, and that he’d meet her at the hospital. He faked his death in an explosive car accident. Faye, sobbing, returned to Bacchus and Manley, who were in on Matsumoto’s scheme. Matsumoto had named Faye as his sole beneficiary, but instead of assets, she received his debts, several thousand woolongs in total. Faye, displeased, threw another fit.

Faye escaped from the hospital again and spent the next several years on the run from the authorities, haunted by her massive, unpayable debt. A woman named Linda Wise found Faye being hustled in a game of cups. Impressed with Faye’s eye for the game, she took up Faye’s debt and won all of the hustler’s money. The two women went out to eat together, and Faye attempted to lift Wise’s purse. Wise recruited Faye and taught her everything she knew about hustling, including three rules: win and move on, keep your money hidden, and don’t get involved with a man. They became close friends and partners, hustling at casino poker tables. In 2069 Faye left Wise without saying goodbye, fleeing her debt collectors.

In 2071 Faye was captured by Gordon, the manager of a casino satellite orbiting Mars. He knew of her gambling and hustling skills, and also of her debts. He offered to pay off her debts in exchange for her services. A contact carrying a certain poker chip was to go to a table where Faye was dealing, lose all his money, and give her the chip as a “tip” for his dealer. Faye would then pass the chip to Gordon. Faye mistook a bounty hunter named Spike Spiegel for the contact, and became upset when he didn’t give her his last chip. Spiegel walked away from the table, and Faye chased after him. Spiegel collided with the contact, and their poker chips were switched. Faye caught up to him and yelled at him again, and Spiegel swallowed the chip. Casino security attempted to accost Spiegel, and a fight broke out. Faye used the chaos to make her escape, with Spiegel and his partner Jet Black clinging to the outside of her monocarrier, the Redtail. Spiegel and Black took Faye captive in Black’s ship, the Bebop, an old interstellar fishing vessel, handcuffing her to their toilet. Since it was Faye’s fault Black wasn’t able to redeem his casino winnings, they planned to sell the Redtail. Faye told them that Gordon would pay a fortune for the chip, and Spiegel coughed it up. Black analyzed the chip and discovered that it contained a computer microchip, containing the key to a decryption program. Spiegel, watching the bounty hunter television show “Big Shot”, discovered that a bounty had been placed on Faye. Faye contacted Gordon with a hidden communication device, not knowing that he had placed a bounty on her. Spiegel and Black informed Faye that they were turning her in to the police. She attempted to convince them to let her go by telling them that she was a Romani and would die if she had to stay in one place, which they didn’t buy, but she did convince them to unhandcuff one of her hands. Left alone again, Faye picked the lock. Gordon contacted the Bebop and they worked out a deal to exchange the chip for 30 million woolongs. The exchange turned into a gunfight, during which Faye burst from the hangar of the Bebop, stole the money, and jetted off.

Faye quickly lost the money at a casino then ran out of fuel in the orbit of Jupiter, near Ganymede. Adrift, she called out for help to any passing ships. To her dismay, her signal was picked up by the Bebop, and the bounty hunters took her on board and handcuffed her again. While Black and Spiegel are distracted by another bounty head, a terrorist in hyperspace, Faye picked the lock again, shackling the resident dog Ein in her place, and headed for the hangar. When the venture went sour, Faye offered to bail them out for a cut of the bounty. Faye and Spiegel failed to catch the bounty head and narrowly avoided getting sealed in hyperspace when the Ganymede government closed the hyperspace gate. Faye installed herself on the Bebop, mostly against Black and Spiegel’s will, and eventually established herself as a permanent crewmember and bounty-hunting partner. The crew was joined shortly by a young genius hacker from Earth, a 13-year-old girl calling herself Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV, and the group worked together for several months.

During her time on the Bebop, Faye became attached to the other crewmembers; although she would never admit it, they became a sort of replacement family for her. She unwittingly became embroiled in Spiegel’s criminal past with the Red Dragon syndicate and his rivalry with a man called Vicious. Much against her will she found herself falling for Spiegel. Panicking about her unlooked-for attachment to Spiegel and the rest of the crew, Faye drained the Bebop of coolant, emptied the ship’s safe, and escaped to Callisto. Becoming embroiled again in Spiegel’s war with Vicious, she was rescued by Black (who claimed he only wanted his money back) and learned that Spiegel was searching for a woman named Julia, a woman whom he loved but had lost track of due to intra-syndicate warfare and politics.

Shortly after this incident, Black caught a con man that turned out to be Whitney Matsumoto. Bacchus and Manley showed up to try to help him escape, and told Faye everything they knew about her. Some time later, a mysterious package was delivered to the Bebop with Faye’s name on it, forwarded from address to address for decades. The package contained a Beta videocassette. Another package arrived containing a Beta cassette player, and the crew sat down to watch the tape. It contained a video letter from 13-year-old Faye to her future self. Faye watched the video over and over again, trying to figure out where it was made. Edward told her she knew where it was, and Faye hijacked the Bebop in the middle of the night, landing on Earth and flying with Edward to Singapore. Faye ran into Sally, a secondary school classmate of hers, now an old grandmother in a wheelchair. Sally recognized Faye, but Faye still didn’t remember anything. Brooding and pensive, she returned to the Bebop. Unable to sleep, she took a shower; abruptly, most of her memories returned to her. Bumping into Spiegel, she told him she was going and took off for Singapore again. She ran to the site of her old home, but found nothing but a ruin. Using a stick, she outlined the locations of the old rooms in the dirt, and then lay down where her bed used to be. Faye returned to Mars, feeling that she had nowhere she belonged anymore. Spiegel called her and told her to come back to the ship, but she refused and hung up on him. A car zoomed by, driven by a woman, chased by another car full of men, firing on her. Faye shot out the pursuers’ tires and jumped into the car with the other woman. Another car pursued them, and Faye shot out their tires, too. Faye told the woman that she was a bounty hunter, and the woman said that she was looking for a bounty hunter. The woman told Faye that her name was Julia, and Faye introduced herself as Faye Valentine. Julia told Faye to “tell Spike I’ll be waiting there” and drove off. Faye returned to the Bebop to relay the message, and was followed by syndicate ships. Spiegel and Faye fought off the ships, and Spiegel flew off to find Julia. Black and Faye argued about Spiegel, both thinking that he would die, and talked about Julia. Spiegel returned to the ship after several hours, had a meal with Black, told him Julia was dead, and started to leave again. Faye pointed a gun at him and asked him not to leave, telling him that the Bebop was the only place she had to come back to now. Spiegel walked away and Faye fired her gun into the ceiling several times, before breaking down in tears. Spiegel was killed in a fight with Vicious. Several days later, Faye was abruptly transported from the Bebop to Econtra.