Kabinga Lovat Loredano
At 20 years old, Kabinga Loredano has been through so much more than almost any other girl her age. She used to be quite normal, if you could call it that. She had normal hobbies, normal aspirations, a group of normal friends who went out and did normal things, a normal family with two normal parents and a normal older brother, and she was set on a perfectly normal life path, leading her toward a career in the technology industry. The thing is... Kabinga saw herself as anything but.
Where the rest of her classmates preferred a cooler, more laid-back style of clothes, Kabi came to school in her neons, her plaids, her radioactive greens and yellows; her miniskirts and thigh-highs, her arm-warmers and crop tops. Where other girls wore their hair up in ponytails and curls, Kabi much preferred a shaggy mohawk, all the way down her spine. She was seen as a bit of an anomaly, and not just because she liked flashier colours. Kabinga's heritage was in itself very special. Her kind, the Asiatic cheetah, had all but died out during colonial times, yet some stragglers managed to tough it out, cross the oceans, and settle worldwide. The Loredanos were one such family, hailing from as far afield as Italy and Germany, Britain and India, Iran and Pakistan, too.
As is well known, cheetahs are the fastest land animals in the world. This is a fact Kabi loved to flaunt whenever she could, and it's why she joined Lower Manhattan Tech's track and field team, their volleyball team, and tried out for women's basketball in high school. She was, in every way, a showoff of the highest caliber, and had the grades to back herself up. All of her notoriety at school disappeared overnight, though, on a chilly January day in her seventeenth year.
She knew it was a stupid idea from the start, really. Exploring abandoned tunnels in the Undercity, at night, by herself, was just asking to be killed in an alleyway. Fortunately for her, the alleyways that night were empty of criminals and homeless people, but this turned out to be a curse of the worst kind. It sowed the seed of false confidence into Kabi's mind, and she pressed onward. She'd been spelunking in an abandoned subway tunnel for roughly an hour when a tremor in the ground touched off a catastrophic collapse, pinning her beneath tons of old rubble. Only by the grace of someone holy did Kabinga survive, and even still, she lost something near and dear.
Her legs.
Kabi's recovery in Manhattan's well-known Bellevue Hospital was projected to last over a year, but that was before Akropolis Biotechnologies stepped in to make an offer neither Kabi nor her parents could ever refuse. In exchange for being used as a sort of real-conditions testbed, Akropolis would install their latest and greatest prototype cybernetic assistance system. A whole new pair of legs to help the cheetah run again.
At the start, Kabinga detested the angular, misshapen lumps of steel she had to call legs, as well as the pill-sized miniature extractor embedded into her brain stem to augment her endocrine system. They made her feel like a robot, in more ways than one. Learning to walk again was almost as tragic an experience as the initial incident itself. Her self-worth tanked, her desire to spend time with her friends plummeted, and she could go days without a shower, if only to stop herself from having to look at her scarred body, chopped up like beef because of a stupid decision.
Months of bedrest and staying home from school permanently damaged Kabi's reputation in the eyes of fellow students. Now they all whispered about her behind their backs, giggled and laughed as they pointed at her pitiful attempt to hide the metallic sheen of her prosthetics, and shunned her for being "lesser". In spite of all this, though, Kabi hung onto one friend, a girl she met in freshman year who, admittedly, she pitied greatly. Heino Raine, a sheep, was just as meek and outwardly pathetic as the stereotypes dictated. She shivered at the sound of raised voices, trembled when she spoke or walked, but had the mind of Einstein. She attached herself to Kabi when the latter joined the volleyball team, and the girls formed a quick connection over their mutual love for the shooter game Fields of Battle 1.
Toward the end of Kabinga's graduating year, something happened that would change her life irreversibly. Heino turned up dead. Accidental poisoning, it was said, but with the whispers of increased gang activity in and around the school, Kabi knew deep down that her old friend--her only friend--had run across the wrong people at the wrong time, and she'd paid dearly for it. This one incident touched off Kabinga's unquenchable desire for vengeance, and directly spawned her vigilantism which continues to this day.