Yoshi fell through the cracks, he failed to take the prescribed Japanese path into employment or higher education and lacked the wherewithal to pursue unconventional pathways to success. He wasn’t exactly stupid, just unmotivated. When his father died the piecemeal gig work he’d dithered with via online apps in lieu of the seemingly unreachable goal of real employment wasn’t enough to sustain him. He was out on the street.
Losing the baseline comfort of being taken care of past childhood lit a bit of a fire under Yoshi, but all the moxie in the world won’t convince a conventional business to hire you without a solid employment history, let alone no fixed address. Facing a heavy cultural focus on lifetime investment in young employees, this chronic unemployment pigeonholed him back into the only work he’d ever known and he hustled hard at it. Sleeping on the streets for a time he eventually became aware of the practice of using internet cafe booths as a cheap alternative to capsule hotels.
Steady internet access gave him an opportunity to optimize his work-scrounging. He developed a system for scraping data from multiple platforms and created an ad-hoc, self taught method for hitting the selection with the most efficient payout. The spaghetti-coded bodge he came up with couldn’t have been mistaken for anything professional but the result was more than impressive. He probably could have sold it but that wasn’t the point anymore. The depths of obsession spurred by survival had become its own object.
GNOMON’s injection into the mix was a result of this haphazard correlation. Attracted by the interesting patterns Yoshi left in the sea of data, it dangled a job (not consciously, more in the way that a spider’s web will be built to be conducive to catching food) and he was almost seamlessly hooked. Yoshi certainly hardly noticed, he regards the weirdness and power from his connection to GNOMON as a part of his own system. It’s an indicator that he has been right all along and once he finds the perfect run it won’t matter how much of an outsider he is, he’ll have it all. Not that he's clear on what "all" is, except better runs.
STATS
Personality: Curious. He’s both outwardly unconcerned with material success but utterly obsessed with finding the ultimate inside edge on how to trade time for money on his own terms.
Rage: Flaunted wealth.
Noble: Finding purpose for lost and discarded things.
Fear: Running out of battery. Being brought crashing down from the digital high of his gamified life ruins the escapism Yoshi depends on to keep going (Helplessness).
Obsession: Cheat codes to the gig economy.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Cyber-Homeless 35% (Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Notice, Protects Isolation.)
Gig Economist 55% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Pursuit, Unique - Insight into underground economies.)
GNOMON 30%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
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