<div class="floatright">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/e/e0/Content_alice_and_her_guitar.jpg)</div><strong>Tempo</strong>(https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e1BnU5gycqV252KhLP9gKxlsBooN6zknCXYFlzmTAOo/edit)<br/><br/>Growing up in an Evo archology, Niski Quade's family had deep ambitions for their daughter.  They filled her every waking moment with music and dance.  Part of it,  maybe, was that they wanted to help her fit in despite being a dwarf.  They started her on enhancements that would make her more alluring company and a more fantastic dancer as young as they dared.  By age 15, Niksi was part of a girl band.  Initially, she was dazzled by the job, but quickly became disillusioned.  She got to dance, sing, and play her guitar for adoring audience, yes, but it was all strictly according to Hoyle.  The music was dull and formulaic, she wasn't allowed to perform her own compositions, and she occasionally caught her managers talking about who would be 'the next big thing'.<br/><br/>Niski's parents may have obsessed over her musical career, but her uncle Otis was a bit more pragmatic.  He thought Niski to defend herself with unarmed combat, even took her to the rifle range, and was willing to talk to her about the life of adventure and terror he and her mother had lived before Dunklezhan's will made it possible for them to get a SIN.<br/><br/>By the time she was seventeen, Niski realized that the managers at EVO didn't intend for her to last as a musician—weren't going to give her the chance to be more than a cute young performer, and were sacrificing some of her education and opportunity to enjoy her teen years for their own profit.  Partially for reasons like this, and partially out of a simple sense of adventure, she decided she was going to become a runner.  She let her father arrange a trust fund for her, and paid in to it 'til she could live a comfortable middle class lifestyle for life after retirement.  Meanwhile a lot her her money was going into—not the trips to the mall and parties with friends she claimed—but investments in gray and black market cybernetics and weaponry!<br/><br/>By age nineteen, though Niski was still working 10 hours a week with her band doing recordings and concerts, it was clear that her star was falling.  The corp had never really expected them to be more than teenage sensation—one of a hundred in any given generation.<br/><br/>It was time for her next adventure to start.