My latest character is an ork sam in his early twenties. The idea is that he was born into the life, his mom was a Prime Runner from back in the day. I see her as equal parts Sarah Connor from Terminator 2, John Winchester from Supernatural, with a heavy dose of Angelica Huston's character from Choke and a little Tyler Durden from Fight Club.
For those of you not familiar with Choke (I'm going to go out on a limb and assume everyone has a passing familiarity with T2, Fight Club and Supernatural), in it Angelica Huston played a paranoid schizophrenic who would periodically kidnap her own son from fostercare and take him with her in her life as a fugative. That's really the main inspiration for the character; his mom was a runner but she was also crazy, and growing up he never knew how much of what she would tell him was real and how much was mental illness. He'd spend a few months in forstercare or as a ward of the state, then she'd abduct him and he'd spend a few months living like John Connor in T2, learning weapons training and living off the grid before he'd get caught or she'd disappear again.
The character was born around 2050, and so he lived that chaotic pattern until about the mid-2060's. I'm looking for things his mom might have been involved in prior to his being born (2040s), and then stuff he grew up with, keeping in mind that everything he knows about his mom he learned from his mom (or from the authorities hunting her), and so there's no way of knowing how much of it might be true.
The character hasn't seen his mom since Crash 2.0, so the theory there is she was involved with Winterknight and is now dead or living off the grid or something. In the 40's, I figure she was doing the revolutionary thing against Aztlan, either on the Amazonian side or in Central America. I'm looking for things in between that the character could have been involved with or thinks he was involved with, with more emphasis on the political stuff over the corporate or mob. I figure the mom was a Neo-Anarchist type and running was more about revolution for her than money (regardless of how much of it is in her mind).
Mainly I'm looking for outrageous claims to pepper into everyday convo, but that this character thinks of as the most normal and pedestrian stuff. As to how much if any of it is true-- that doesn't really matter. (In fact, some of it probably should contradict itself, given the source.)