FoxyLady

Sakura was "acquired" as a cub by a Japanese-run, Korean-located division of Yamatestu(which would become Evo) in 2060. Their intent was to try and reproduce otaku artifically. The project manager managed to get it greenlit by suggesting the use of shapeshifters, which were close enough to metahuman to produce usable data, while they could still be argued to be dumb animals.

The first stumbling block however was that datajacks would not take due to their regeneration, so they were forced to use electrode nets instead. One advantage though was that it let them examine brain activity in more detail while the shifters were jacked in. This led to the thought of using some medical techniques to make minute adjustments to the brain itself, and this was successful on the first handful of subjects. Sakura was among this group; they all demonstrated increased responsiveness in VR, well beyond the normal sluggish speed of unaltered shifters. When the scientist responsible tried to reproduce the method for his superiors however, he instead ended up with drooling, lobotomized, fully mundane animals.

Rather than risk the only known working samples of the seemingly failed technique, research was now redirected to instead study the interactions of these net-aware shifters with the Matrix itself. By this point Sakura had begun to realize that not all of the adults here had her best interests at heart, and so when they attempted to connect her with just ASSIST, as rumors stated otaku were able to do, she would instead hold back, pretending confusion and only taking advantage of the full scope of her ability when unwatched. This allowed her to find a back door in the lab's systems, which she began to use to secretly educate herself during their 'free time', and cover her tracks afterwards.

A couple years into the program, a new researcher transferred in who had recently lost his daughter and was looking to get away from the memories. He was put in charge of Sakura, but the more he worked with her the more she reminded him of his lost daughter, Jessica, despite the fact that her metahuman form was elven. Before long he found himself thinking of her as a person, rather than as a research animal, and Sakura began to respond in kind. Here, it seemed, was someone she could finally trust, and somewhere along the way the two began to actually regard each other as (secretly) surrogate father and daughter.

By chance, Sakura was the only one connected to the facility's matrix when Crash 2.0 happened, as there had been a diagnostic in progress and she had thought she could sneak on for her own purposes during the downtime without getting caught. She fell unconscious for a couple weeks, and when she woke up, she noticed her vision was duller. She could no longer see the auras of those around her, and an incident with a knife revealed her regeneration was no longer quite as effective, at least for now. Her "father" was able to keep this hidden, though he did not know for how long that would ultimately be feasable.

With the Matrix out of action and new protocols under development that would render their previous research unusable, management decided it was time to scrap the program. Rather than simply dispose of the subjects, due to the difficulties in acquiring shifters, they instead decided to send their remaining samples to other facilities for magical research. Realizing that Sakura would likely not survive this in her weakened condition, he made contact with a group of shadowrunners to have her extracted and sent safely far away.

To maintain cover, the runners freed not only her, but her fellow shifters that remained. Sakura however was the only one given tickets, clothes, and a small portion of funds to help her reach the UCAS safely. With their subjects effectively eliminated, management decided it was cheaper to shut down the lab entirely rather than attempt to re-acquire new subjects that would just be sent elsewhere anyways, and dumped the research data into encrypted cold storage, on the off chance it could still prove usable with the rebuilt Matrix once it was complete.

Following her "father's" last message of 'Run, keep running, and don't look back.' she disappeared off the grid and into the Shadows. As the wireless grid began to come online however, she found she could see objects and images that seemed strange, yet familiar. The first few times she thought it was her Astral sight returning, but the images and sensations were much more akin to her time on the Matrix than the things she had seen outside it. It was after an acquantaince showed off the brand new commlink he had stolen that she put two and two together, and realized she was seeing the Matrix itself around her; the same one that the new devices were connecting people to.

Acquiring one herself, she reacquainted herself with this new Matrix, and how to use her new abilities to interact with it. In her Matrix excursions she learned of the emergence and existence of technomancers, and deduced she was one of them, by some strange fluke. Further research showed her that it shouldn't be possible, but it explained how easily the Matrix had come to her compared to some of her former "siblings" at the lab, and the strange fading of most of whatever magical ability her kind naturally came by.

The news articles showing how the technos were treated only reinforced her belief that it was best to stay in the shadows, without even taking her shifter side into consideration. As valuable as a technomancer would be for the corps to study, even more so would be one that was supposedly also Awakened, despite her inability to access most forms of magic.

Deciding that the best place to hide would be in plain sight, she crafted her Matrix persona to blend her forms, playing up her resemblance to the old mythical kitsune, and started looking for jobs as a "changeling decker" called FoxyLady, after an old song her foster father had liked to listen to. Most, it seemed, didn't care what she was or how she did it as long as she was successful, and thankfully, EVO has yet to show any signs of reactivating the old project that created her technomancer abilities. As long as those files exist, however, there is always the slim chance that some middle manager looking for a promotion could uncover them and start things up once more.

Her other main concern at this point, besides surviving day-to-day, is finding her former foster father. Despite his warning to not look back, she truly did miss him, even taking his dead daughter's name for her false SIN identity. If she could ever find out what became of him after the shutdown of the lab, she intended to make him a part of her life once more; perhaps even put a run together herself if needed to free him from whatever Corporation he was now being forced to work with and show him a new way to survive... among the shadows.

Sakura's original concept came to me when I was looking into 4th edition Shadowrun. Given the way the fluff tried to suggest Resonance was a type of magic, and the way technomancer abilities sounded like the shaman to the decker's ascetic mage, I had the idea of a fox shifter who discovered she could see the Matrix, and then play off the "on the internet, no one can tell you're a fox" meme. Now, it is technically against the RAW(rule as written) for every edition since technomancers were introduced, as shifters naturally have a magic stat, and losing that is supposed to trap them in their natural animal form. My thought was that her magic was mostly directed at the Matrix instead in the form of resonance, just leaving her with the other natural abilities of a shifter, such as being able to change shape between fox and metahuman. If I'm ever to play her I'll obviously need GM buy-in, but I love the concept, and I think I came up with a good enough story justification above.

I ended up settling on making her an elf in meta human form as I tried to build her in the 4th ed rules set, simply replacing her Magic 1 with Resonance 1(or just mostly ignoring the magic stat), and making her a fan of fantasy Japanese stuff gave an easy explanation for her to go full kitsune for her Matrix avatar. Leaning into that also was a fun way to fluff out her Sprites she compiles, by making them foxfire balls or fox messenger spirits, and just really lean into the fantasy of a trickster kitsune in the Matrix.

The main reason not much has been done with her is due to the dearth of opportunities to do anything in the Shadowrun universe. The HBS games are set before technomancers existed, and Shadowrun itself has a habit of very messy rules, so while people may enjoy the setting, it's far harder to find a game to join. Especially when I need the level of buy-in required to convince them to allow me to play Sakura despite her bending the rules and lore to exist. Not a lot has been happening with the Shadowrun universe either since the release of 6th edition, to my knowledge, as HBS has yet to release another Shadowrun game, and Catalyst far prefers to work in the Battletech setting and lacks the rights to do anything with the Earthdawn connections to Shadowrun, so there just hasn't been enough of a reason to pay attention to it either.