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What follows is the background history for Lyle Canthros. While Canthros was originally a PC I used, when I 'elevated' him to NPC status, I tossed a lot of the original story behind him out the window. So, what I've done is write what is, I hope, a more plausible, hopefully even believable, explanation of how it was that Lyle Canthros came to be in the shadows, and what personal events brought about the creation of the shapeshifter-mage. With some luck, this will have corrected what I saw as a serious flaw in the plausibility of the character.
--John Pederson
Despite being born and raised among a werewolf pack inhabiting part of the Seattle underground, Canthros took great interest in the affairs of humanity. So great, in fact, that he was never called by Wolf, despite the amount of magical potential that he possessed. When Wolf had not called him by his sixteenth winter, the pack began to see him as 'cursed.' In late 2045, he left the pack to seek his fortune in the world of man. Canthros quickly found himself at home in the urban wilderness of the Seattle Metroplex sprawl.Shortly after leaving the safety of the pack, Canthros was taken in by a group of the so-called 'wiz kids,' the young magicians that roam the Barrens, often as parts of gangs, occassionally as a single gang. While living with this small group of magically endowed youth, Canthros picked up the name he uses to this day. The wiz kids endeavored to impart to Canthros the ability to practice hermetic magic, leaving him with rudimentary knowledge of hermetic sorcery, magical theory, and conjuring. Canthros also spent this time learning more about the human race, allowing him to better fit in with them.
With only minimal training with either the weapons or magic of man, Canthros found himself quickly initiated into the workings of the shadow community when the wiz kids were hired to provide some magical security for a small research facility owned by a small corporation. What they didn't know was that the facility (a building on the outskirts of Hell's Kitchen in Puyallup) was to be assaulted by two groups of shadowrunners that night, both groups in pursuit of a new weapon prototype. Casualties were heavy on all sides, only 2 of the wiz kids, Canthros, one runner from each team (one of them managed to get the prototype gun), and 5 (out of nearly 20) security guards were left alive. Word spread quikcly when Canthros walked into the follow-up meet the next day, unharmed and with the two remaining wiz kids hobbling in on either side, supporting his claims that he hadn't simply sat through the previous night's battle with his head between his knees.
Before long, Lyle Canthros was working full-time as a small-time shadowrunner. He didn't make a whole lot of money, but it was more than he'd made among the wiz kids. It seems that he managed his first initiatory grade within this somewhat turbulent time period. This continued for about a year, right up until his first big run, right up against the Azzies.
The mission was completely hosed, almost from the get-go. It was supposed to have been a simple extraction: get in, get the guy, get out. Simple, except for one thing: the guy was to be extracted from the Pyramid. The assembled team contained a high number of physads and magicians, selected for skill, and reliability: while Canthros didn't have much for skill, reliability was very high in his favor. The team was lead by an experienced merc, one of only three mundanes on the team (the other two were a decker and a rigger). In the end, only Canthros, the merc, one of the physads and the rigger made it out alive, the physad died before the van could drop him off at either a hospital or his apartment. The target of teh extraction died in the process of the extraction, and jobs dried up for Canthros.
In a very human pattern of behavior, Canthros spent some time attempting to drown his sorrows in a local bar, one that shadowrunners tended to congregate at the time. As he began to discover that his efforts at inebriation accomplished little, if anything at all (besides several killer hangovers), he was found by Alistair Yarbrough.
Yarbrough was an older human, born in 1998, and a mage of some repute both on and off the streets. He had a habit of taking in what he called 'strays', young people who lived on the streets but had the potential for a normal life. Alistair would take them in, give them an education and would do the best job he could of giving them a second chance at a normal life. Alistair provided the education his young wards lacked often through the use of private tutors, in the case of mundane subjects, and through his own tutelage when dealing with magical matters. His education was geared to provide them skills which would prove most useful in the life of a legitimate citizen, rather than in the life of a shadow-person. In at least a few cases, Yarbrough even provided SINs for wards who did not have them. So he did for Lyle Canthros.
It was under the watch-care of Alistair Yarbrough that Lyle picked up much of his knowledge about hermetic knowledge, as well as nearly all of his experience with reading, writing, the English language, and with computers. Unfortunately for Canthros, Yarbrough died almost three years after he took Lyle in. The last thing that Yarbrough gave Canthros was a sword, a stacked weapon/power focus/hardened spell lock, rumored to be of Atlantean origin.
Canthros was again plunged into the shadows when a friend, a former wiz kid, pleaded with him for help. This time, however, Canthros went in with the skills in magic to be a serious combat mage. Lyle did not leave the shadows for nearly three years, during which time he increased his proficiency in hand to hand and armed combat, and became an average shot with a gun. His high survivability, however, allowed him to gain a spectacular reputation in a short period of time. Within a few months of re-entering the shadows, Canthros met up with one Shintaro Yakamura, another rapidly rising shadowrunner. Within the next few years, the two continued to work closely, to the point that they were an almost inseparable team, both in and out of the shadows. The duo became almost unstoppable late in their careers, providing magical support for an equally skilled team of mundaners during the majority of the runs in the last year and a half that they worked. In November of 2053, Lyle Canthros decided to retire from the shadows, after a series of lucrative, but dangerous, assignments earlier that year. That December, he co-founded a magical group known as The Silver Lions.
Since 2053, Canthros has become deeply involved with the magical group he helped found. He has spent a great deal of time learning more about the abilities he possesses, and about humanity in general. His training in the past four or five years has included a good deal of combat training, lest he grow soft and lose his edge, as well as a great deal of magical study, particularly in the areas of conjuring and enchanting, two areas he was rather lacking in previously. He has also spent a large amount of time simply learning how to be human, for instance, he rarely orders his meat raw in restaurants anymore. About a year and a half ago, Canthros summoned a familiar for an initiation. He has also recently found himself a love interest.
Canthros appears to be rather happy with his lot in life. He spends a great deal of time among people, and seems to have adopted the members of his magical group as his pack. While he tends to be a bit cold toward outsiders, he is still a social animal. He seems to have found a rather odd hobby in watching Urban Brawl matches on the trid. He does not seem to have any desire to re-enter the shadows, though he does still maintain his contacts from his previous tenure there. He does a little bit of traveling and has visited both Britain and CalFree at least once. He makes fairly frequent trips into the NAN, however, where it would seem that he has a few friends. Canthros has also made several trips into Tir Tairngire and is apparently fairly fluent in Sperethiel, a skill he seems to have picked up in the shadows and honed in the intervening years. Canthros also seems to have an average command of Gaelic. Canthros makes regular postings to Shadowland, usually about various magical goings-on, rarely anything very large or (seemingly) of great importance. He seems to maintain some contact with various groups, including a few low-level contacts in the Atlantean Foundation.
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