Alixandra Demter [ALLY]

» PLAYER INFORMATION
Player NAME: Cocoa
Current AGE: over 18
Player TIME ZONE: PST
Personal JOURNAL: momijizukamori
IM & SERVICE: momijizukamori on AIM
Player PLURK: momijizukamori
Current CHARACTERS: Nathan Summers | Marvel 616 (oldsoldiersneverdie)

» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: Alixandra Demter
Character PULL-POINT: Early 2067, before her recruitment as a shadowrunner and the events of the Emergence story arc
Character AGE: 17
Character ABILITIES: Ally’s most prominent ability is technomancy - as a result of being hit by the viral wave that spread across the Matrix during Crash 2.0, her brain patterns were basically re-written to be a living wireless network node. As such, while she requires hardware data storage, she can run computer programs from inside her head, as well as build them up from scratch in an intuitive way that mimics spellcasting more than it does actual software-writing (aka, she cannot really explain how she does this except to other technomancers - the concepts would basically make no sense to an actual programmer). Basically anything someone can do with a computer program, she can do with her mind and willpower, though the harder she pushes herself, the more damage she risks doing to her own mind - it could be as minor as a headache, or as severe as a cerebral aneurysm.

She can also craft rudimentary semi-AI agents to assist her (more complex than most 21st century bots, but less complex than a true AI - they can carry out fairly complex instructions, but have little personality of their own), and can connect to anything broadcasting a signal wirelessly, or anything with a data input plug via a cable and the data jack she’s had since before the Crash. She tends to relate to systems and devices as if they were living, though the percieved sentience varies depending on tech level (and Exsilium’s are pretty far down on that scale). Also, technomancers get used to basically basking in a constant white noise of data, and being in low-transmission environments (THE WHOLE ISLAND) tends to throw them off-balance.

Her main trained skills are in firearms and mechanics, though the second took a pretty decent leap in ability when she could talk to the tech she’s fixing. She’s not a soldier-level sharpshooter, but she can hold her own with a gun, and she can fix most tech things, though it takes time, and she’s not as much a novel inventor - she can build things other people have designed from scratch, but that’s about it.

Character WORLD: Ally’s version of Earth was much like our own to all appearances, up until the early 21st century. Corporations started gaining even more power and status than they do in our world, to the point of being considered on par with nations, having extraterritoriality and their own private armies. Then magic, the levels of which had previously been next to nil, returned to the world in a major way, aided in part by the Great Ghost Dance. The result - children of human parents being born as dwarfs, elves, orks, and trolls, mages actually having power and status, and a whole host of spontaneous crazy geographical changes (half of California fell into the ocean). At the same time, tech grew by leaps and bounds. Prosthetics increased to the point of surpassing natural limbs and organs, and after the first global network crash (Crash 1.0), virtual reality became the norm, and AIs became a reality (for better or for worse). Then the second global Crash happened, and in the wake of it, networks went wireless, decks went handheld, and everyone who could afford to had an augmented reality interface of some sort. It’s a world of neon and chrome, of humanity continuing to wreck the earth and the earth saying fuck no, where things aren’t too bad for the megacorp wage-slaves and their bosses, but the gap between the haves and the have-nots is always growing, and more and more people slip through the cracks, turning to criminal action as a profession, a lifestyle, a protest against the status quo.

Or, in other words, it’s classic 80s cyberpunk with elves. A more detailed timeline of the events since they diverged from our own timeline is available here - Ally grew up in the 2060s, mostly. The TVTropes page (I’m sorry in advance for any timesuck) also gives a good overview of world flavor.

Character HISTORY: Ally was born Alixandra Elizabeth Demter, in a lower-class section of the Renton district of the Seattle Metroplex. Her parents were far from well-off - her father had been a mechanic at Federated Boeing who’d been laid off with a meager pension when a workplace accident had left him unable to work. They both did what work they could in odd, off-the-books jobs and managed to keep their family fed and sheltered. Her father did repair work for locals, and the tech they had was second-hand, salvaged, and patched up. Having no other real reference points for what life should be like, though, Ally never minded.

Her mother died of illness when she was five, leaving her father to raise her and provide for her. Without much in the neighborhood for a child to do, he often let her spend time in his workshop when he was working, and showed her how to do things like take something apart and put it back together the right way, solder a loose connection down, or replace a fuse. She took to it eagerly, fascinated by all the little pieces that went into making even the simplest electronics. She also got her first (carefully parentally monitored) taste of the Matrix, a place where you could be anyone, and learn anything.

Her father, unfortunately, died of a heart attack when Ally was eleven, which, with no other relatives and no safety net, left her effectively homeless with what she could carry with her as basically her only possessions. Despite growing up poor, she wasn’t fully prepared for life on the streets, and the only reason she made it more than a few months was being lucky enough to be taken in by someone more knowledgeable in the ways of that life, and had at least some concern for her well-being. That person was a young man named Jack, who’d lived on the streets on and off his whole life, and who had turned to drug-dealing to make a living. Ally was a drug-runner for him, her young age making it unlikely she’d be stopped and searched, and in return, Jack taught her how to find food and shelter, how to stay alive, how to shoot a gun.

She also began doing some of the same work her father had done - for free as practice at first, and then in trade for other necessities. She found other street kids her age, some in dire need of protecting themselves, and eventually formed a little group of friends who lived together in a dilapidated, abandoned building on the edge of the Redmond Barrens - a second family of sorts, one built on ties of friendship and loyalty, who protected each other and provided for everyone.

Ally continued working as a mechanic and tech, occasionally dabbling in software, which, in 2064, led to another major change in her life. She was jacked in to the Matrix accessing hardware schematics when the virus wave-front that caused the second global crash hit the node she was working in, at nearly the same time as EMPs detonated over Seattle and several other major population centers. Ally was dumped, as was everyone else jacked in, and spent most of the next week unconscious, while fires blazed and the city rioted in the aftermath of such a major catastrophe.

She thought she had recovered fully after the first few weeks, but months later, when the Metroplex brought it’s wireless backbone online, she began experiencing what seemed liked hallucinations - snippets of sound out of the blue, images in her peripheral vision that vanished as soon as they appeared, brief periods of feeling like her mind was overwhelmed with white noise. She was terrified, and did her best to hide what was going on from everyone except her best friend - particularly as months went on and rumors started to circulate of people who’d been permanently damaged during Crash 2.0, rendered untreatable schizophrenics and locked away in mental hospitals.

As she dug deeper, though, desperate to figure out what was wrong with her, she uncovered a new truth - the effects of the crash had altered her mind in such a way that she no longer needed tech to access the Matrix. The others like her called themselves technomancers, and she made contact with them, though aliases, and began to hone her own skills. It added a new dimension to the work she was doing already - tech now seemed to have personalities to her, something she could perceive about it’s nature like she would a person. It also netted her significant skills in dealing with software, and she dedicated more time to the code end of things.

This would eventually lead to recruitment for a shadowrunner team, black ops who worked in twilight shadow of megacorps, doing things that other people could not have their names and reputations tied to. And in time, the existence of technomancers would come to light, bringing Ally along with it - but for her current canonpoint, that’s all in the future right now.

Character PERSONALITY: At first glance, Ally is easily to dismiss as another obnoxious, airheaded teenager. She certainly acts that way a lot of the time - excitable over little things, with a chronic disregard for the personal space of others, a penchant for irritatingly bright colors, and a tendency towards childish petulance when she doesn’t get her way. Combined with her small stature, it’s easy to mistake her for someone younger and way more immature than she actuall is.

In reality, the aggressive cheerfulness is... not quite a facade, but a coping mechanism. Her father raised her to always try and look on the bright side of things, and after his death and the subsequent complete restructuring of her life at an age most people shouldn’t be expected to deal with some changes, she made the conscious choice to stick to that philosophy. You could be jaded, cynical, bitter about the hand life had dealt - or you could look at the best you had, and appreciate that instead. Ally took the second option, and with typical pre-teen determination, took it to the max.

It does sometimes hide darker feelings - worry about her friends, about her own safety. She lives in a world where being young and alone and female is a ticket to all sorts of bad things happening, and she’s all too aware of that. But she feels like expressing those worries will only make other people upset, so she brings an extra taser and buries them as best as she can. She also has her own share of concerns about her recently emerging powers. They were, quite frankly, terrifying at first - hearing things nobody else did, seeing things out of the corner of her eye. She did her best to flat-out pretend it wasn’t even happening at first, refusing to worry others with it. Even after discovering what she had become, it was clear that revealing that would be an all-around negative. So she keeps it a secret too, from everyone except her most trusted friends.

She also has somewhat greyer morals than many people - this is a direct consequence of growing up on near or on the streets, of being surrounded by people whose very existence wasn’t always recognized by the government. In a world like that, you do what you gotta do to live, and sometimes it isn’t nice or pretty, no matter how hard you try to make the best of it, in her opinion. For example, as she got older she realized the degree of danger Jack had put her in running drugs, but after a brief outburst of annoyance and pouting, hasn’t held it against him, and the two remain friends. Her best friend is a thief, and having honed her skills a little more, she’s taken jobs as a hacker, as well. She does her best to pick her targets - it’s one thing to break into a AAA megacorp and swipe some paydata, and another to wipe the accounts of some poor wageslave just trying to support their family. That distinction aside, she doesn’t hold on to most guilt for what she’s done, and as such, her perspective of the world is different than that of someone who had the luxury of never having to make those hard choices.

Still, despite the fact that it serves sometimes as a mask, and that she’s actually very intelligent once you look past first impressions, the cheerfulness is genuine, interwined with a nearly insatiable curiosity about people, places, and tech. Especially tech.

» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON: Ally’s weapon will be her little aerial drone, because for a hacker and a rigger, that’s how they fight. Its first upgrades will be to it’s own strengths - greater signal range, more durable, able to go longer between charges. If she keeps using it and acting through it for a long period of time, it will begin to become a minor Resonance well - when Ally works from within it, her technomancer powers will increase.

Character INVENTORY:
-Pocket toolkit
-flashlight
-Goggles (low-light comp, vision enhancement, wireless link)
-taser
-flechette gun
-semi-auto handgun
-form-fitting body armor
-leather bomber jacket
-commlink (aka tiny powerful portable PC)
-Fake ID, credit chip, assortment of cheap colorful jewelry
-MCT Fly-Spy (aerial microdrone, about the size of a large insect)
» SAMPLES
First PERSON: http://dramaticshitinlatin.dreamwidth.org/28621.html?thread=12165069#cmt12165069 (candystar in this thread)

Third PERSON: This place was, Ally mused, a total dump. Connected via VR, she was hovering above a basic map of the area’s network traffic overlaid on a geographic map of the city. There were little flickers of light marking every network device, but they were barely visible. A few brighter lights marked what were probably personal online archives or the like, and then one luminescent block that marked the Initiative hold. That was the motherlode, the biggest cache - as far as this place went, anyway. To her her it was more like trying to go star-gazing on a cloudy night. Even out in the Barrens, the traffic density was like a city skyline, and at the rates she was using for scale, a high-traffic area like downtown, or the Singapore datahavens would be a solid, eye-searing block of white. This was nothing in terms of data, in terms of traffic. People here still used keyboards, for god’s sake.

She pulled herself out of the data abstraction, and disconnected from the digital immersion she’d put herself in. Blinking, she returned her focus to the room around her. It was plain - she really was going to have to do something about that, it was just flat-out depressing right now - but there were four solid walls and a roof, and that was more than she could say about some of the places she’d lived. Even the factory had leaks they hadn’t quite managed to patch, which about twice a winter managed to short out their stolen power connection. Sure, the whole city was run-down, but compared to the Barrens, it was very nearly a bastion and civilization and polite society. Which was kind of weird, when she thought about it. How did you behave in polite society, anyway? She could deal with dealers, junkies, go-gangers, would-be thieves, and all spectrum of the bottom layer of the world, but she had accepted a long time ago that she wasn’t meant for ‘normal’ life. Somehow she was going to have to adjust.

She sighed, and peeled her goggles off before tossing them down next to her, and then flopping back on her new bed. This whole thing was weird, really. Fight someone else’s war, in another world, another time. She wasn’t sure how much of this she even believed, and it was halfway tempting to believe she was caught in some major-strange ice, or that someone had laced that last batch of acid with something extra. She did jobs for other people, sure - but they paid. And it wasn’t like she’d never shot anyone, but those times it had been them or her, and she hadn’t had a choice - her, it seemed like, she did. Maybe they’d let her fight in her own way - in the corridors of cyberpsace, in what passed for a Matrix here. A hacker who knew what they were doing could do as much devastation as a street sam to the right target. She just hoped she could find more answers before she had to make those choices.

» ADDITIONAL NOTES
I know her powers have the potential to cause trouble for the Initiative, so I will definitely talk with mods before doing anything that might disrupt that part of the game-world

( ... )
(Thank you moonything~)