The runner known as Raton (or “mouse” in Spanish) is a slight and unimposing Latino human. He was born Diego Icarez in Seattle in 2044 and grew up in a ghetto in Seattle's Puyallup district. Unknown to him, his father is the elven shaman Tolkien Jones. His mother barely knew the elf, and certainly didn't know his name, so Diego grew up without a father figure. As a boy, the heavily metahuman population of the area made a bad part of town even more dangerous. The Black Rain ork gang running out of the southeast and the elven gangers running out of the southwest frequently ran into conflict, and humans had little protection from their various depredations.

To keep himself out of trouble, Raton’s mother set him to working from the time he was six for a local doc who went by El Medi, which was simply short for medico (Spanish for doctor). The doc was nice enough, and Raton idly dreamed of one day becoming a doctor himself, but he simply didn’t have the patience for it. The doctor, while old, was a wise man, and taught Diego enough to constitute a descent education and became a father figure to him.

The doc dealt a lot with used cyberware since the area’s poverty lead to a lot of people selling off their loved ones’ ‘ware to pay for their funerals, and it was from him that Raton got his first implant when he was twelve. A ganger who had taken one too many chances died but left behind a perfectly good set of skillwires and a chipjack. They were heavily damaged, but the doc managed to get them working again. The set sat in the store window for two weeks before Raton worked up the courage to ask about them.

“Those wires are old, Diego, and they look like they are about to short out. No one wants to buy them, even for so little.”

“I would by them, Senor, if I had the money.”

“You would, now?” El Medi, as old as he was adjusted the glasses on his nose. “I suppose I could let you have them, if your mother agrees. I have been able to pay you little enough these last five years…”

After much begging and a little bribery, his mother agreed, and the old doctor installed the wires and jack. When he woke up from the surgery, the doctor set him to adjusting with a very old, dodgy chip on electronics repair. Though he didn’t know what his own hands were doing, Diego quickly learned to use the chip to his best advantage. When he saved up a little more money, he bought another old chip on medical practices and soon became able to help the doc with his business, though he wasn’t able to diagnose anyone with just the one chip.

When he was thirteen, however, the old doctor passed away. Without a job and its meager income, Diego turned to using the skillchip for electronics repair to earn some income. It didn’t produce much cash, and his entrepreneurship soon attracted the sights of a local fragment of the Black Rain gang running protection in the small neighborhood. When Diego couldn’t pay up, the set fire to his apartment. Even though Diego escaped, his poor mother did not.

With his mother dead, his home destroyed, and no real allies, he was forced to seek refuge elsewhere. After a few days wandering from squat to squat, he stumbled upon a party going on in an abandoned warehouse. Some of the folks inside were wearing gang colors, but they looked friendly enough, and many folks weren’t. Cautiously, he snuck inside.

The warehouse was an orgy of drugs, BTL abuse, and technology laid out beneath a pulsating light show with bone rattling music. The scene was frightening and intriguing all at the same time. As he stumbled through the dark (but bright) interior of the building, he ran face first into someone who bounced back. A girl, not older than sixteen, looked down at him. “Hey, who let the kid in?” she asked in a yell, which barely carried three feet.

Diego stumbled away and found a door. He opened it and half-fell inside, only to realize that he’d just come across another part of the party. The door closed behind him and the noise faded to a background level. Two kids in their late teens were reclining on couches and appeared to be asleep, though each had a cable leading from their foreheads to something that looked like nothing so much as a large synthesizer. Half a dozen other kids were gathered around two large vid screens watching and cheering.

Curious, and currently not being observed, Diego moved closer and saw that each screen showed the vivid iconography of what could only be the Matrix whizzing past one icon on each screen. He watched in fascination as they bounced through hosts and evaded IC with precise movements and flare. After a while, one of them got nailed by something shaped like a rabbit wielding a cartoon mallet and the small crowd erupted in curses or laughter. Money changed hands and both of the “sleeping” teens jacked out. The one who got nailed rubbed his temples and congratulated the winner.

It was about then that the crowd noticed Diego’s presence and Diego realized that he was the only one in the room not in gang colors. “Who’s the new guy?” one of them asked.

The girl from before, who Diego hadn’t seen come in, answered, “Some kid. I think he was trying to feel me up earlier.”

One of the guys laughed, “Angela, don’t fool yourself, ain’t no one wants to feel you up.”

She punched the guy in the ribs and he doubled over, though it was clearly more from laughter than anything else.

“Hey kid, you want a turn?” one of the guys asked and Diego realized he was being spoken to.

Diego stammered, “I… yeah, I guess.”

Ten minutes later, Diego was wearing a ‘trode network and nervously fidgeting on the couch. The girl, Angela, had taken the other couch and muttered to him. “Try to keep up, newbie.”

The boy in charge of the game hit a button and suddenly Diego was gasping for breath as his consciousness raced into the Matrix. Barely knowing what he was doing, he concentrated on following the directions he’d gotten from the guy before the game started. He was supposed to try to find something, anything, of interest to the group. The first person to find something won. If you got tagged by IC, you lost. It sounded simple, but Diego’d never done anything more complicated than access the local commcode directory.

He managed to sleaze his way into the sat host they were decking through and grabbed at the directory. He found his way to an RTG and started boring down, just looking for something useful. He found a host and bounced off of its surface. He backed up and tried again and got through and tried to find the index, but it kept slipping from his grasp. Instead, a glowing red eye appeared and started at him. He sliced out with his icon and the eye vanished long enough for him to grab the index for real. He picked a file at random and started the dump just as another eye showed up. The progress indicator showed that he’d have to deal with this one, as well, if he wanted to get his goal, so he sliced at it. It dodged and evaded, and he tried again, only to find that the IC had shifted forms and now appeared as nothing so much as an eye in the center of a field of whirling blades.

He dodged back as it attacked him and the progress indicator suddenly went green. He slammed another program and tried to log out. The IC whirled at him, but he winked out of existence just as it was about to connect.

He lay on the couch and panted as he fumbled to take the ‘trodes off. He’d reacted on instinct over and over, but somehow he’d avoided having his brain fried.

The group was standing him around, watching silently. Angela wasn’t on the other couch, but was watching him as well. “Angela got some data first, kid, but… damn,” the controller of the switch said. “Most novices try to avoid those Red hosts their first time out.”

Diego blinked, he wasn’t aware of what he’d picked since he’d been grabbing addresses at random. There wasn’t any clear labeling, after all. “Is that bad?”

One of the guys laughed, “I’m surprised you’re not a veggie. You’ve got some hope yet, kid.” He took off his armband which was emblazoned with the gang log and tossed it to Diego. No one objected. “What do you say? Want to learn how to do that the right way?”

With no where else to go, Diego nodded and became a member of the Puyallup Hackers.

When Diego was in his mid teens, he was inducted into the smallest core of the gang where he discovered the Deep Resonance and its power. No longer needing to use a cyber deck to access the Matrix, he withdrew further from the gang's day-to-day activities. Then the Yaks crossed the Hackers and things started getting hairy. Several of the gang were killed, and Diego became disenfranchised with it. He’d grown into a good hacker, but the gang’s ideas weren’t giving him purpose like he’d once hoped for. Instead, he left the gang and set out to freelance. He’d met a few folks during his tenure with the gang, and they put him into contact with a few other people and things went from there.

He bounced between mail forwarding services, information searches, and the other smalltime biz until he finally landed a spot on a shadow team taking on a security facility. Irving and Kaneda were a part of that team, and Raton ran overwatch and saved the team from any trouble by seizing the system and not letting go until he'd covered the entire run's operations. He earned a lot of rep for the job and since then he’s been able to find fairly steady work.

He has even found his way into another small, low profile tribe which has established a Well deep in the Seattle LTG over the Puyallup area.