Kaettong/Kim Ŭn-yŏng
Born in poverty near the border city of Sinuiju in 1987, Kim Ŭn-yŏng starved throughout her childhood, losing her mother and siblings to famine in the mid 1990s. Her father made ends meet through illegal smuggling and trade across the Chinese border, thanks to a distant cousin in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Zone in China's Jilin province. He sent her enough food and money to survive under the care of a local imo (aunt). Thanks to her imo, she was able to attend school and hoped to one day grow up to be a nurse and help people. However, her dream was put on hold as her imo grew sick from a liver disease. Despite saving the money her father sent her, it was practically impossible to get the right kind of medicine. She asked her father to purchase some in China and send it to her, but unbeknownst to her, her father had been arrested in a police raid on the logging camp he was working in. She began to think he had abandoned her.
Without word and imo slowly deteriorating, she decided to make the crossing across the Yalu River herself in the winter of 2001. She contacted a local broker to help set her up with a contact on the other side. After a harrowing night swimming through ice-cold waters and hiding from patrols, she discovered she had been tricked. She was kidnapped by an organized crime syndicate and forced into sex slavery. For three years she was kept naked in a filthy room and used by hundreds of men. She was, however, fed better than she had ever been and even made friends among the other women held there. One day a regular customer took a fancy to her young looks and bought her as a wife. The forced marriage improved her quality of life, but an existence of fear and powerlessness. While her husband was thankfully more neglectful than abusive, she constantly feared detection as an illegal alien.
The one bright light was the birth of a son, Minsu, whom she adored. But in 2008, Chinese security forces realized she was an unregistered alien, and she found herself arrested and forcibly repatriated to the homeland. Lacking money or family connections, she was unable to avoid imprisonment and was sent to a “re-education” camp for her crimes against the state. Her new life became one of torture, sexual abuse and forced labor, but this was nothing in comparison to her fear of what had become to Minsu. She feared her husband would abandon the boy who, lacking official citizenship or registration in China, would be reduced to a street orphan. Desperate to return to China and find her son, she made a daring escape attempt. She lost her way in the piercing sleet and died of exposure having walked barefoot ten miles in the wrong direction. Her corpse was discovered by camp guards, who were prepared to leave it to rot except for a peculiar request the camp had received regarding an intact, young, female corpse for an office of the Central Military Command.
Her body was packed in ice and sent to the Office 44 headquarters in Pyongyang, where the witch-shaman Paek Kŭm-ae waited to perform an occult experiment based on an intriguing parallel between a 17th century treatise on witches and a 2nd century BC Chinese Taoist text. Paek performed the ritual and Kim was reborn as a Rat-thing. Her SAN was shattered but her will became stronger as all the pain and suffering in her heart turned into twisted hate. She bonded, however, with Paek Kŭm-ae, who reminded her of her old imo. This imo gave her the name of Kaettong, literally dog-shit (a nickname with a more positive connotation in Korean than might be expected). She works now as a familiar for the old shaman, prowling the darkened streets of Pyongyang, assisting with rituals and performing various errands. Being born again after a life of horror and disappointment, she is fiercely loyal towards Paek Kŭm-ae, but now cruel, spiteful and xenophobic (towards Chinese in particular). She has only one ghost from her past life she cannot exorcise. She continues to miss and fear after her lost son. When she is free from tasks, she travels to China by sorcerous means to search for him, and occasionally find and chew the hearts out of those who victimized her.
Kaettong/Kim Ŭn-yŏng [개똥/김은영]
Rat-thing Familiar and Woman Scorned, age 25
Race: Rat-thing
Gender: Female
Nationality: North Korean
STR 2 CON 7 SIZ 1 INT 16 POW 8
DEX 20 HP 4
Move: 9
Damage Bonus: -2
Education: Several years of elementary-level schooling and indoctrination
Skills: Dodge 95%, Hide 80%, Sneak 65%, Asian Mysticism 22%, Western Occult 15%, Listen 40%, Track 70%
Languages: Korean 60%, Chinese 34%
Attacks: Bite 35%, damage 1d3
Armor: Subtract 40% from chance to hit while running, and 20% from chance to hit while attached to someone.
Spells: Voorish Sign, Create Limbo Gate, Rat Pain*
- New Spell to be detailed in a future update.
SAN loss: 0/1d6, or 1/1d8 to someone who knew her in real life
Physical Description: Kim Ŭn-yŏng possessed a soft beauty that continued to shine through despite poverty, abuse and deprivation. Her face retains a certain charm, making its presence on the squat and hairy body of a rat-thing even more jarring. Her skin is sallow and her fur black and retains the look and consistency of black Asian hair.