Japanese Neko

by on March 18, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Races of Humanity

The Neko of New Japan, or New Nihon as they call it, are non-conformative rebels in many, chaotic ways, and traditional conservatives in other, well-defined ways. They will always be a product of their home culture, seeing class and birth in ways that few Americans can understand. They have simply transformed their minds to see such concepts differently than their ancestors ever did. A high class Neko is one who has undergone a full gengineering transformation, down to the fur. Even higher class is one born to the fur. Lower class Nekos often have permanent tails and ears. Lesser classes use cybernetic or cosmetic augmentations to imitate full Nekos. The full Nekos are both more rebellious from normal culture than almost any other and are the most conservative in their chosen culture. It is a dichotomy of spirit and mind the Neko are able to process better than the vast majority of those who grow up in more Western culture. It makes them a fascinating society to study.

 Comment 

Reina Ono

by on March 17, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles

Reina Ono told everyone she signed up for military service on her eighteenth birthday. The problem is that computer records were messed up pretty bad the day the Shang attacked. And what was left could be easily massaged to say what anyone wanted it to say. Many people started new lives, or walked away from lives they didn’t like, in the days after The War began. Reina could have been fifteen for all I knew the day I met her on Sunnydale. I personally think she was sixteen or seventeen, but that didn’t matter much at the time. A lot of people grew up quick when The War came for us. I knew how many friends all of us had lost. Who was I tell her some calendar was going to deny her the right to fight for them? So that’s how Reina became the first Neko in the Cowboys. She told us she was eighteen, a legal adult with the right to sign her life away on the dotted line, and everybody from the recruiting officer on up to Major Wolf pretended to believe her. That’s the day she became part of our family.

High rez version available for free on Patreon

 Comment 

Japanese Neko

by on March 16, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Races of Humanity

Neko culture in New Japan could almost be described as something out of cyberpunk stories. Los Angeles was a far more utopian setting that most of them, but the Neko embraced everything else. Cybernetic intelligence, cybernetic augmentation, and a mixing of the cybernetic and physical worlds in ways most people never saw. A person walking through downtown Los Angeles before The War would have seen only half of the world around him. But augmentations, or glasses logged into the local networks, showed you the virtual world of glowing, hovering billboards overlaid over everything else. Dragons flew in the skies, advertisements flashed for your attention, and Neko wearing artificial eyes or manipulator arms designed to be noticed moved through the hybrid worlds like they were born to them. They lived in amazing places and times.

 Comment 

Japanese Neko

by on March 15, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Races of Humanity

The Neko of New Japan are unique in many ways. The physical features that resemble cats are merely one of them. Another is their naming conventions. America has spent centuries absorbing some names and modifying or abandoning others. A man named Anders in his home country might change his name to Andrew to blend in with the sounds that American speakers can best understand. Place names, foods, and basic concepts have met similar modifications when coming to America. But the Neko take pride in choosing Japanese, or Nihonese as they call it, names for everything. One can easily hear a Neko walking down the street in conversation with a friend, effortlessly moving from American to Nihonese so smoothly that they baffle most listeners. They proclaim their differences in ways that most people do not dare, and that daring is part of what made them so effective when they went to War.

 Comment 

Reina Ono

by on March 14, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles

Reina Ono lived in Los Angeles back before The War. She was a fully gengineered Neko, only lacking the tail that some Neko had. I remember her saying that was a plus. She had a cybernetic tail for the times she wanted to show off, but she related stories of what happened when fellow Nekos sat on their real tails by accident. She was happy to avoid that particular sensation, though was also happy to inform me that she felt every other sensation from it just fine when it was attached. She’d had other cybernetic attachments when she was younger, but either lost them when Yosemite fell on Los Angeles, or outgrew them in the chaotic years that followed. By the time she was old enough to volunteer for military service, all she had left of her previous life was her subdermal personal computer and her tail. She was pretty proud of both, let me tell you.

High rez version available for free on Patreon

 Comment