Sierra's background and history will be posted soon...honest.
Takashi Kasai was born in a private, corporate hospital in New York City. His father, a highly-payed computer engineer and programmer worked for Fuchi Industrial Electronics and is believed to have been a part of the project which developed the first cyberdeck.
Exclusive corporate schools with highly technical training in the area of computers was Takashi's lot early in life as his father tried to form his son into his image. Takashi's mother, who was from New York, was a little more giving, but was equaly proud of her sons achievements in school when he brought home top grades. Takashi entered MIT&T in 2043 on his fathers urging and started on a degree in Computer Engineering. He never completed his degree though. In 2045, his father died in a plane crash while returning from Japan where he was soon to be transfered too.
Taking his chance to rebel against his father's narrow vision of who his son should be, Takashi dropped out of college and enlisted in the UCAS Army. As soon as he finished basic training, Takashi was rushed off to combat decking school (CDS) where he recieved advanced training in matrix operations and military decking applications. While in CDS, Takashi learned that he really was good at decking and that his skill wasn't just driven by his father's wishes for him. After his year at CDS, he qualified for Ranger training and succeeded in not only completing Ranger School but going on to the Special Forces where he recieved training as an electronics/field decking specialist.
After his various schooling, Takashi went on to active duty with the Special Forces. sometimes he just performed Matrix overwatch, other times he actually went in with the team to provide electronics expertice and to handle internal computer networks. During this period he aquired his handle of 'Sierra'. The word was assigned to Takashi as his callsign on a particularly nasty op on which he made all the difference in getting everyone out and the name stuck.
Sierra spent time in several city cities while in the service, including Seattle and DeeCee. while in Seattle, he became involved in a couple money making rackets with some of his teammates which involved selling mil-spec weaponry and equipment to buyers in the local black market. Much of the details which needed to be tracked and handled for these deals to go down properly ended up being handled by Sierra who made a tidy sum of money and a number of contacts in the area which would serve him well a few years down the line when he entered the shadows himself.
His military service was cut short in 2053 when most of his team was killed on an urban strike operation in an undisclosed location in North America. During the mission, Sierra discovered from the computer system on site that the operation had been arranged by their unit's control officer to erase potentialy embarassing information of a personal nature from the target's systems. When Sierra returned from the op, which had had an 85% casualty rate, he was understandably pissed. He showed up at the colonel's home in DeeCee (where they were both stationed at the time), and made certain the man knew that Sierra didn't appreciate his friends dying to solve the Colonel's personal problems. Sierra threatened to distribute the data he had been sent to destroy and the Colonel countered him with the threat to reveal Sierra's part in the more seedier aspects of the balck-market operation he ran in Seattle.
The Colonel and Sierra cut a deal which allowed Sierra to get out of the military without any black marks and with all of his cyber intact. Sierra never told anyone the details of what happened other than the fact that Sierra would not go back to DeeCee.
After recieving his discharge, Sierra decided the best place for him to go would be Seattle. He had contacts there and could probably get back into the Shadow Community full-time now that he did not have any obligations to the military. When he returned, he linked up with Teflon, a bodyguard and part-time black marketeer who he had worked with previously and Sierra soon became known as a top notch shadowrunner and decker. Other shadowrunners whom he worked with quite extensively were Leprechaun, Slick, Lone Wolf and Top Spin.
The team worked the Seattle shadows for a couple of years before beginning to break apart. They were involved in some sort of game between a couple of super-powerful elves (Harlequin was the underlying story line of the campaign). they were also the preferred target of a particularly obnoxious toxic racoon shaman and an ultra-cybered goon who came back for revenge after being left for dead on one of our earlier runs.
In the end, the different members of the team began to wander off in other directions. Sierra, Leprechaun and Slick remained fairly tight while White Wolf, Top Spin and a couple of newer runners drifted in another direction. Part of what drove this (other than the impending end of the campaign...) was Teflon's falling out of favor with Sierra. A growing tendency to behave non-professionaly was added to by an incident when Teflon got in over his head in the matrix and almost got Sierra killed for it and compounded the situation by leaving Sierra's body unguarded in a non-secured hostile corporate compound while Sierra was trying to deal with the mess Teflon had caused in the matrix. All parties managed to survive, but it spelled the end of good working relations between Teflon and the rest of the group.
When the group finally retred, Sierra moved into the fixer business,taking over a good portion of the operation run by Silvertongue.