Characters / Drugs and Wires

Drugs & Wires has a relatively small but well-rounded cast.

Dan - Screen-name: The Escapist

Dan was once one of the most well-known (and controversial) figures in the Dreamspace community, famous for his drug-fueled VR trips. But as Dan spiraled further into depression he started to retreat more and more into VR... until one day a brutal computer virus fried his brain implant. Lucky to even be alive, Dan can no longer interface with Dreamspace, and now he has no option but to face up to his real life in the real world and to try to find the ones responsible for his near death. This is somewhat difficult since as a cyborg, many of his fellow countrymen would like to see him dead.

Misanthropic to a shocking degree, Dan nonetheless has a strange pull on other people and makes friends easily much to his dismay.

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• Addiction Displacement: He was always addicted to drugs, but his primary addiction was to Dreamspace. Now that he can't use Dreamspace, the drug abuse has gotten worse.
• The Aloner: Prefers to mope alone. Lin has to practically drag him to social events.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: An interesting variety. He channeled so much of his emotional creativity into his VR trips that when he became barred from Dreamspace, he became an emotional wreck who turned to drugs to replicate the trips.
• Deadpan Snarker: Appears to be his defense mechanism.
• Dull Eyes of Unhappiness: Constantly.
• Expy: Of Case from Neuromancer. He is much more of a mess though, which is impressive considering that Case was already a huge mess. Lampshaded by Lin here.
• Functional Addict: Inverted. Dan is only a functioning member of society when he's high. When sober, he just kind of mopes about.
• Misanthrope Supreme: Not that it's hard to blame the guy, considering half his country wants him dead.
• Mushroom Samba: Suffers from repeated bouts of extremely disturbing flashbacks and hallucinations even when he's sober.
• Riches to Rags: Implied to be his backstory.
• The Stoic: Not the "unflappable" variety, but the "emotional burnout" variety.

Lin

A med school reject and back alley surgeon, Lin is one of the very few people Dan actually considers to be his friend, a sentiment she reciprocates. That's not to say they don't fight, though.

Responsible for saving Dan's life from the skullfuck.exe virus that nearly fried his brain, Lin is one of the few people Dan can truly rely on as he tries to figure out who wanted him dead.

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• Ax-Crazy: In a barely-contained cheery sort of way.
• Back-Alley Doctor: A mildly psychotic dropout from med school who runs an unlicensed cyborg clinic. The hygiene and ethics of the "Kutting Edge Klinik" are exactly as dreary as you'd expect.
• Covert Pervert: She doesn't talk about it much, or at least with Dan, but her character bio reveals hentai is one of her top five favorite things.
• Expy: Definitely takes inspiration from Molly from Neuromancer, though she's much less blatant than Dan. For one, she's a surgeon instead of a Street Samurai, and her personality is somewhat different.
• Hollywood Cyborg: Has scalpels built into her fingertips and what appears to be a microscope for a left eye.
• Labcoat of Science and Medicine: Or in her case, a Labcoat of Mad Science and Unethical Medicine. Complete with High Collar of Doom.
• Mad Scientist: Treats her patients (except Dan) as test beds for dangerous and dirt cheap cyber implants and surgery techniques. If she accidentally cures them in the process then it's just icing on the cake.
• Manipulative Bastard: Always finds a way to get people (mostly Dan) to do her bidding, like offering Dan drugs as he's trying to get clean.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: Uses tools such as fish hooks, cattle prods, and her bare hands in her surgeries, and she's never even heard of anesthetics. At one point she eats Chinese takeout over a patient's open chest cavity and accidentally drops in a forkful of noodles which she then proceeds to eat out of the cavity.
• Occidental Otaku: Her favorite type of pornography is hentai.
• Odd Couple: Dan and Lin's only real common ground seems to be general misanthropy and a love of tech. They've made the friendship work somehow.
• Playing with Syringes: Surgery is mostly just an excuse for Lin to try out various implants on her patients that they don't even need.
• Wolverine Claws: Keeps a lot of sharp surgical instruments in her hands.

Vlad Adsky - Screen-name: 666_Satan_666

Lead editor of a well-known hacking and Dreamspace-themed magazine titled "Fear and Loading", Vlad is loud, obnoxious, and thinks he is way more important than he actually is. Well known for being a very public self-professed Satanist, despite the fact the actual Satanists of the city want nothing to do with him.

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• Badass Longcoat: Say what you will about him, he really does rock that leather trenchcoat.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: His public renown (and infamy) allows him to host rather large parties, during which most of the guests try to stay as far away from him as possible.
• Hollywood Satanism: Deliberately cultivates this image. Dan describes his style as "discount LaVey".
• It's All About Me: According to Eve, he's the most obvious case of NPD she's ever seen.
• Large Ham: Obnoxiously melodramatic and tends to veer poetic, in a pretentious way.
• Mad Artist: Considers himself a renaissance man and artistic genius. In reality, most of his VR "artworks" are barely playable, edgy pieces of soft porn with an obvious Self-Insert of himself as the player character.
• Small Name, Big Ego: His only claim to fame is authoring several VR trips which are widely ridiculed across the mindtripper scene. That does not stop him from having an ego the size of Australia.
  • Eve said she used his autobiography as a study for narcissistic personality disorder but her professor thought she was making it up.

Eve - Screen-name: Eve

Dan's ex-girlfriend, whom he lost contact with after his run-in with Skullfuck.exe. A straight-edged psychology student who originally joined the scene for the potential of good the technology held, she eventually broke up with Dan and gradually drifted out of the mindtripper community.

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• Amicable Exes: Downplayed. While she's still not comfortable with the idea of getting back together with Dan, she's quite friendly to him and willing to talk out his issues.
• Everyone Has Standards: She's very patient in general, but eventually even she couldn't deal with Dan's repeated drug abuse anymore.
• Morality Chain: Used to be this for Dan until their falling-out.
• Shaped Like Itself: Her screen name is just her own real name.
• Token Good Teammate: Seems to be one of the few genuinely good, altruistic people in the comic.

Nate - Screen-name: Cybernator

Back when Dan could still access VR, Nate was his usual partner-in-crime, despite the fact the two got along as well as nails and a chalkboard. Indulged by rich parents and gifted with a natural aptitude for technology, Nate quickly rose to become one of the core operators in the VR scene. When the "skullfuck.exe" virus begins killing off his friends, he and Dan decide to team up once more

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• Child Prodigy: He's been hacking since he was a kid. At the start of the story, he's still not even 18 yet is one of the most accomplished operators in the scene.
• Insufferable Genius: He is genuinely gifted with technology, and he won't forget to remind you of that.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: With Dan in the backstory, back when Dan could still use Dream Space and they went on operations together. Nate hated Dan's downer-misanthrope attitude, Dan hated Nate's cockiness. They still managed to work together to become two of the most respected operators in the scene.

Mira - Screen-name: Terminatrixx

One of Dan's associates, Mira is a VR operator widely known across the mindtripper scene for her erotic and fetish-themed trips.

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• Everyone Has Standards: Not even she will give Vlad the time of day.
• High-Class Call Girl: Works as a dominatrix-for-hire for rich tourists looking for the forbidden trips they can't get at home.
• Good Bad Girl: Seems to be concerned for Dan's wellbeing as she objects to continuing Fixer's attempts to restart his implants when it's obvious it's hurting him.

Fixer - Screen-name: Fixer242

Another one of Dan's more-or-less friends. Fixer is a tech expert who can fix up pretty much anything related to electronics. He's a veteran in Unylsk's VR scene who has been there since day one. Runs a dingy little shop where he repairs people's VR gear.

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• The Big Guy: Towers over most everyone in the cast.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Never called anything else than Fixer.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Fixing and tweaking VR equipment is his business, and he's damn good at it.
• Mr. Fixit: If you need something repaired, he's the man to visit.
• New-Age Retro Hippie: Inexplicably fascinated with the 60s beat scene, and even makes trips themed around it. Nate thinks they suck.

Code4Food

A heroin-addicted mindtripper completely out of touch with reality. She develops an inexplicable attachment to Dan, convinced that he is a restless ghost stuck in the mortal world and trying to help him "move on".

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• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Hooo boy. She barely seems to register her environment.
• Crazy Homeless People: She dresses like a bum and lives in a half-ruined building scheduled for demolition. She's also quite crazy.
• Creepy Shadowed Undereyes
• I See Dead People: At least she thinks she does. She's convinced that Dan is actually a ghost who hasn't found peace.
• New-Age Retro Hippie: Aside from VR and heroin, she also seems to be into New Age faiths and various paraphernalia of unrelated pagan and folk religions are strewn across her apartment.
• The Nicknamer: Consistently refers to Dan as "Pale Rider".
• The Ophelia: Deconstructed. Her "pretty insanity" is actually the result of a debilitating addiction to heroin and VR, and it's not pretty at all.

Vitaly

Dan's drug dealer, an obnoxious street thug wannabe kid of rich parents. Vitaly may seem like a harmless idiot trying too hard to be "street", but he's as ruthless as any other dealer.

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• Beware the Silly Ones: "Do not scorn your dealer" still stands even if your dealer is a jive-talking clown, as Dan painfully learns.
• Foreign Culture Fetish: Obsessed with Western pop culture.
• Jive Turkey: Talks in a mishmash of painfully forced street slang.
• The Nicknamer: Makes a sport of coming up with new punny nicknames for Dan related to the letter D.
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy: He's the whitest kid to ever live, but he tries so hard to appear "gangsta".
• Spoiled Brat: Apparently his parents pay for all his bling.

Nagy

An alcoholic bumpkin with a history of several accounts of dognapping. Nagy works for Legit Delivery alongside Dan, and as the only employee willing to visit the toxic countryside of Stradania for delivery jobs, Dan is frequently forced to accompany him.

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• Good Ol' Boy: Basically the Eastern European equivalent of a redneck.
• The Pigpen: He is unbelievably filthy.
• The Slacker: Leaves the actual work to Dan whenever he can while he goes to kidnap dogs or get drunk.

Marilyn Hope-Fokker

CEO of Hope-Fokker Capital Ventures, Marilyn Hope-Fokker is a heartless vulture capitalist who is willing to steamroll over thousands of lives in the pursuit of profit. Notably, one of her corporation's subsidiaries is Synacon, the company developing Dreamspace.

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• Bad Boss: Working under her is extremely unpleasant.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Ruthlessly utilitarian, exploitative, and treats her employees like factory equipment.
• Deadpan Snarker: For all her reprehensible qualities, she has some excellent snark.
  Today isn't your daddy's cushy little factory floor in Cowpat, Nebraska. Today is cyber-factories in Indochina pushing out goods in 18-hour shifts. "Made in America"? Cute. There's AI-driven lines in the heart of Seoul that'll crank out 50 tractors in the time it takes for you to finish a long shit.
• Electronic Eyes: She has cybernetic eye implants which give her black sclera and glowing irises which change color based on her mood. Usually, they're red.
• Meaningful Name: Hope-Fokker.

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