ENTRY 17: THE SKULL MERCHANT (Adriana Imai)
"A cunning and ruthless hunter, The Skull Merchant strives to be the ultimate apex predator. Using her gruesome Drones to track Survivors, she specializes in creating a deadly web of surveillance. Many have fallen prey to her dark innovations, their bones later repurposed into her next invention."
LORE SUMMARY: Adriana was a child genius whose father always wanted to be an artist, working long hours at a canning factory while obsessing over his original manga series - one in which a little girl protects others with the help of a lovable robot friend. He sometimes paid more attention to his manga than his family, but she admired him and loved his stories regardless.
When her father lost his day job, and his art continued to be rejected by publishers, both he and Adriana grew increasingly troubled. She began to develop stalking habits and violent thoughts about her school rivals, while her father had shifted focus to a much darker, crueler manga about a murderous woman who turns the skulls of her victims into deadly robot drones.
Adriana's father would later walk out on his family and disappear, but Adriana would become a ruthless businesswoman, buying out companies just to gut them and have many of her rivals killed or kill them herself. Obsessed with the characters and world her father created, she eventually became the spitting image of her fictional counterpart, skull drones and all.
LORE SUMMARY: Adriana was a child genius whose father always wanted to be an artist, working long hours at a canning factory while obsessing over his original manga series - one in which a little girl protects others with the help of a lovable robot friend. He sometimes paid more attention to his manga than his family, but she admired him and loved his stories regardless.
When her father lost his day job, and his art continued to be rejected by publishers, both he and Adriana grew increasingly troubled. She began to develop stalking habits and violent thoughts about her school rivals, while her father had shifted focus to a much darker, crueler manga about a murderous woman who turns the skulls of her victims into deadly robot drones.
Adriana's father would later walk out on his family and disappear, but Adriana would become a ruthless businesswoman, buying out companies just to gut them and have many of her rivals killed or kill them herself. Obsessed with the characters and world her father created, she eventually became the spitting image of her fictional counterpart, skull drones and all.
So this lady is an evil tech CEO, an otaku, and a cybernetically enhanced serial killer with flying skullbots. That's certainly something! Which aspect did this concept even start with? I imagine the springboard may have been the gameplay of hunting survivors with high-tech drones, so I guess that leads into the idea of a tech geek with a whole lot of money. Making this a cool, scary woman with a rougher upbringing was probably one of the few ways they could make that premise into something at all tolerable, less of an insufferable Elon Musk figure and more like a wannabe Star Wars Bounty Hunter. It's such an odd combination, about as absurd as the mortal human killers have ever gotten, but that's just what makes this a memorable and fun one to me. At the very least, she's not a rehash of anything too familiar, nor an obvious pop culture reference.
Her default design is...alright. A little cheesy? She wears a half gas mask, but it's a fancy gas mask with a scaly silver texture and golden lens, which is cool but does not match the rest of her outfit, which just consists of a dirty white undershirt and khaki overalls(?) that strap into her bladed cyborg arm rig.
BEST SKIN(S):
"HEART STOPPER:" Adriana has a lot of very different outfits, which all just change her clothes and accessories so far, except for one, which also much, much cooler looking than any of the others.
