Race: Human
Birthday: 8/10/1980
Height: 6’0″
Weight: 210 pounds
Zorn is a slightly overweight man of Italian descent who moves with the hunched, coiled tension of a lifelong gamer, and smells perpetually of ozone, solder, and cheap coffee. He’s a mechanic who joined the Jester Gang to fight for the freedom America once had. He was born as Frankie Moretti, a legendary arcade hustler, nicknamed “One-Credit”, who could beat any cabinet on a single quarter, but shed that name like dead skin after the fall. The neon-drenched, data-flooded ruins of Neo-Ventris are now his kingdom of scrap and circuits. One man’s obsolete hardware is Zorn’s treasure map. His weapon of choice, Ultra Guy, is a cobbled-together mech made from scavenged industrial bots, security drones, and parts from a high-end animatronic mascot. Dr. Greist upgraded it and installed an AI to allow it to act autonomously when needed. The gamepad built into the gauntlet of his left arm is the golem’s heart. Zorn guides Ultra Guy in the physical world, a hero emerging from the city’s own trash.
Ultra Guy’s main weapons are a plasma shotgun and metal knuckles. It has enhanced thrusters in its feet to make it deceptively fast, and can transform into the Ultra Bike, a motorcycle mode for transportation. As a last resort, Ultra Guy can deploy the BHG (Big Honking Gun) from its back, a weapon that overloads the bot’s systems but delivers devastating area damage.
Zorn speaks in a dialect of old-school gamer slang, 80s lingo, and cynical grievances that makes him a near-perfect bridge between the old world and the new. To the younger members of the Jester Gang, he’s a wise, grizzled veteran; to the older ones, he’s a tragically obsolete relic. He found Jester’s techno-anarchist manifesto not in a shared philosophy, but in a pragmatic solution. If the system is a rigged game, the only winning move is to break the console. He doesn’t quite grasp the metaphysical underpinnings of meme magic, dismissing rants about the noosphere as “storyboard fluff.” But he understands its power. A sufficiently viral meme can overload a server farm or crash a stock trading algorithm just as surely as a well-placed EMP.
His codename Zorn comes from the final boss in the obscure 1987 arcade game, a notoriously difficult boss that could only be defeated by exploiting a specific, frame-perfect bug in its attack pattern. It represents his belief that no system, no matter how powerful, is unbeatable if you’re willing to break the rules to win.
To Zorn, the fight against Vortex Neural isn’t a holy war, it’s the ultimate boss run. Argus is the final stage, the Ventral Core is the unwinnable minigame, and Cassandra Lux is a deceptive mini-boss who uses social manipulation instead of brute force. But he never forgets the most important rule of any game: the final boss always has a second phase. And you only get there by learning the patterns, exploiting the glitches, and never, ever putting down the controller.
