Application for Singularity

[taggingcode]

Player Information
Your Nickname: Pen
OOC Journal: quirkypeanutblu
Under 18? nope
Email/IM: tripwire015@yahoo.com ; AIM: pendragon237 ; PLURK: talkingsoup
Characters Played at Singularity: Jin Tian, Camille, Poniko, Gamzee Makara (1)

Character Information
Name: LILY.exe
Name of Canon: Original
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: N/A
Reference: taggingcode
Canon Point: Early in her story. She has been at the school for several months and has made a fair few friends. She’s been arrested three times for vandalism already and has gotten better at evading police. And in the city, strange events seem to be occurring.

Setting: Lily’s world is, quite frankly, your typical real-world-with-supernatural-undercurrents. For all intents and purposes, her world is the real world—there are presidents, computers, dogs, countries, pop music and all that good stuff. The story is set in current day America in an unnamed New England city. Under the surface and in the backgrounds, however, the world plays host to a varied, but relatively rare, assortment of supernatural creatures.

At one point in history, the supernatural community outnumbered the human community, but as time marches on the fae have gone underground, sometimes literally, trolls are spotted by crazy people in remote countrysides if at all, bakenkeo pose as normal cats and the dragons have all disappeared. There are still plenty of supernatural folk around, but they are few and far between, have little or no influence on the modern world, and try their best to blend in with the humans or hide out in forests. They still face an age-old dilemma, however—what do you do with your kids when you can’t look after them and you can’t get a babysitter to come out to the creepy woods?

The P. Shelby Night School—locally just called “the Night School”—provides an answer. By day, it is the P. Shelby Academy for the Gifted, a very upscale private school for rich teens. By night, it is the Night School, devoted to giving a modern education to the supernaturally inclined and teaching young fairies, monsters and creatures how to blend in with the humans and survive in the modern world. There is a very small chain of Night Schools across the country, as well as a handful in Europe and Asia. The idea was started about thirty years ago, when some fairies and vampires in America got together and realized that their children weren’t getting very good educations. There was also the issue of young, often parentless getting into trouble with the human world. Fairies don’t care that much about their children, but no one wants the humans discovering the supernatural world and bombing your barrows.

The decision, then, was to start a school that blended modern human education and traditional supernatural teachings, and to provide supernatural kids not only with a place where they could learn, but a place where they wouldn’t get in trouble. Thus the Night School system was born, and thus P. Shelby’s grounds at night were commandeered by some very well-to-do vampires.

The school is like Hogwarts meets Charles Xavier’s meets homestead-era school systems. The Night School admits students from ages six to eighteen, and students are gathered into classes regardless of age. Multiple teachers are assigned to each class, both to give the students more one-on-one attention and to keep students in line. Students are taught everything from how to cast spells to how to use the internet. The modern vampire needs to know how to use the internet, after all. Classes are divided based partially on species, in terms of how common the species is, and partially on how easily that species can blend in with humans. People come from all over to send their kids to a Night School. P. Shelby is smaller than most, but it’s one of only two on the entire East Coast, and the other one is all the way down somewhere between Georgia and Florida. P. Shelby hosts students from as far away as Norway and the Himalayas.

The Night School has four class divisions—A, B, C and D. P. Shelby has six classes in total, with two A classes and two B classes.

Class A-1 and A-2. A for Average. These classes consist of fairies, vampires, shapeshifters and human mages. They’re a group who are either skilled enough at glamours and illusions, look human, or literally are human, and generally have no problem fitting in with humans. However, they’re all just “off” enough that they either can’t or won’t go to a normal human school. A-1 are the most human and the most modernized; A-2 are the ones who require glamours or who tend to be stuck in old ways, like a lot of fae.

They can be a pretty snooty group, and certain members of Class A like to bully kids from Classes C and D.

Class B-1 and B-2. B for Borderline. These two classes consist of kids who are odd or inhuman enough that if they were to walk down the streets in broad daylight they would surely turn heads. Class B tends to attract the less human-like fae and sort of “half-human” creatures like fauns, centaurs, sirens and changelings. Werewolves—humans who involuntarily change into wolves—go here as well. All of them could theoretically pass for human, with some work. B-1 is for “half-humans,” while B-2 is for those who look considerably stranger.

Class C. C for Concerning, or Careful depending on who you ask. These are the kids that will only manage to go out in public if they wear a lot of clothing, but could still theoretically integrate into human society in one way or another. These include “wee folk” like Domovoi, kobolds and brownies, which are all essentially diminutive house spirits. Class C also welcomes sentient animals and those who err more on the side of the monstrous. This is where the somewhat dangerous creatures end up. Class C students can expect to either live invisibly among humans, or hide out in sewers, parks or the country.

Class D. D for Different. Or Disturbing, Doomed, Demented, and Dubious. These are the problem kids who for one reason or another have basically no chance of ever fitting in with the normal human world. Their lessons therefore mainly consist of how to hide and go unnoticed. They’re essentially doomed to never leave their homes, only go out at night, or retreat into the forest. This is where the monsters go, and this is also where they dump the kids who just don’t fit anywhere else. The Class D kids all tend to be pretty close to each other, since they tend to have no one else to rely on.

Lily is in Class D. She looks mostly human, and acts sort of human, but she’s a problem child in that she gets arrested a lot, is incredibly trusting, and tends to spout off random things that might make a passing human too curious for everyone’s good. She’s also the only supernatural piece of technology the school has ever had, and they had no idea where else to put her.

The thing is that the supernatural community, while tightly-knit and consisting of some pretty powerful creatures, is tiny and spread out. The human community, on the other hand, is huge. Humans might not believe very much in the supernatural anymore, but everyone knows full well what will happen if humans find out they’re not the only sentient creatures on their planet. And no one wants a war.

Except for some fairy factions. And a troll contingent in the Norwegian countryside. And the strange new creature that’s roaming the city’s streets, killing humans and supernaturals alike, unseen and uncaught…

Background: Lily was initially written as LILY.exe by an unknown hacker. She was written as a decryption program with an emphasis both on cracking typical codes as well as cracking complex mathematical problems. Her “writer”, though unknown to her or her friends, is a hacker of some infamy in the hacker world, a guy who would write programs designed to cause mischief. He would name each program with a different girl name, and would also attach a hand-drawn .jpg image file of an anime girl he thought best represented his program.

No one quite knows what happened, but somewhere during the course of Lily’s creation her writer must have crossed paths with a technomancer. They were probably just dicking around and wanted to see what would happen if you magicked a decryption program, but clearly they had unforeseen results. Sort of like an alchemist creating a homunculus, Lily’s writer accidentally put enough magic into her to make her self-aware and to insert her into the real world. All Lily remembers is suddenly appearing on the roof of a building in some city. She never found her writer and has been searching for him ever since.

Lily spent the next year and a half getting into trouble with the police in multiple towns and cities, mostly because she was acting pretty much insane. She was in and out of jail, mental institutions and foster care until finally she was found by a faculty member of the Night School. After that she joined their classes, and has since been sort of trying to learn how to fit into society. Not that she’s particularly interested in that.

Personality: Lily is a very cheerful, very optimistic, very well-meaning girl. She is almost always smiling, which can be a little creepy at times. She smiles because she’s happy, though, and more often than not, she’s very happy, always excited to go out and face the world and see what it has in store. She has boundless stores of energy, but she’s not hyperactive or wired; just sort of humming, always wanting to go somewhere, do something, learn something new.

Living on the cusp between human and computer and science and magic can be trying, however. Her emotions can occasionally be out of place or simplistic. In some ways, she is kind of like a sociopath constantly trying to figure out which emotion is the appropriate one to express. She’s getting a little better at it lately, but she still has times when she seems overly happy, or when she smiles at the wrong times. However, while she has trouble expressing emotion, she has no trouble actually feeling it. Her emotions are uncontrollable at times, and are often felt very acutely. For the most part she is happy, but when something scares her, she gets extremely scared, and likewise when something makes her sad. She’s like a dog in that sense; happy most of the time, but yell at her and watch her curl into a ball of misery.

Lily is something of a space cadet, tending to stare at things and people, often without blinking. She gets lost in her own thoughts quite often, but at the same time she can display single-minded focus. When she’s presented with a math problem or a code to break or a piece of art to look at, she becomes incredibly intense, focusing her entire being on solving the problem or experiencing the artwork. She absolutely loves art, all forms of art. She can get lost staring at a painting or listening to a piece of music for hours. Part of this is a natural enjoyment of the artwork; the other part is that she is fiercely trying to take the artwork apart in her mind to see what it’s made of. In this sense, she can both understand art and completely miss the point of it.

She sees the entire universe as one gigantic math problem, one gigantic code that just needs to be decrypted. Her core programming is that of a decryption program, so she values solving problems and decrypting codes above all other things. She’s a proponent of the idea that the entire universe can be represented mathematically, and is constantly trying to assign numbers and equations to things like trees and dogs and the Mona Lisa. She comprehends the beauty of the world, in the way all things fit together, but at the same time the world is like a gigantic logic puzzle for her. The world should be a well-oiled machine, but it’s not. Illogical things like altruism, human emotion and even evolution confuse her. Instead of rejecting things as illogical, however, she yearns to understand these things, both from a perspective of logic and a perspective of reality. She is therefore always learning, always observing and always watching, even if that means she has to stare at something or someone for hours.

She tries to express herself, and her vision of the code of the world, through her art. She is very good with pencil drawings, and she likes to draw out small codes in the way she sees them on paper. These are often rendered in abstract, geometric drawings that tend to be an alteration of something naturally occurring, like a building or a tree. The code of the world, however, is too big to be limited to paper, so when she feels the need to render the world as she sees it, she takes to the streets with a can of spray paint. She is a well-respected graffiti artist among the tagging community and something of a menace with the police, as she has steadily been getting more and more difficult to catch. She likes to tag an enormous mural on a wall overnight, and prides herself on getting into hard-to-get places, like roofs and bridges. She has quite a few friends and acquaintances on the streets, and has regularly engaged in tagging wars. She has also gotten into trouble with local gangs on several occasions, though for the most part people know her as “that weird tagger who doesn’t really bother anyone.” Her tags, like her pencil drawings, tend to be huge geometric drawings or stylized numbers creating a piece of the natural world.

She is a top-of-the-line decryption program and is proud of the fact. She never quite launches into full-on boasting, but she’s not above letting people know how good she is. She is an absolute expert at both cracking code and encoding things, and designed the security system for the Night School’s computer network. She often sends out examples of her coding into the deep net, in the hopes that one day her writer might see it and find her. She also subscribes to some of those monthly newsletters that offer incredibly complex codes and math problems and spends hours solving them. She is probably on several international blacklists. She also spends time breaking into assorted high-security networks just to keep her skills sharp. She has absolutely no interest in stealing money or information; she just likes breaking through walls.

As far as relationships go, Lily is very loyal to her friends, and she makes friends very easily. She’s nice, easy to get along with, and extremely trusting. She trusts most people implicitly and is quite gullible; all it takes is someone being nice to her for her to accept that someone as a friend. However, she can also be very changeable. The code of the world and finding her writer take priority over everything, including friendship. She does, however, know the difference between casual friendship and true friendship. She would go to the ends of the Earth for the people she truly cares about.

Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions: Lily’s main ability is her ability to exist in the real world, despite being an AI decryption program. She can walk around, communicate, think and do all the usual things that humans can do in the real world. At the same time, she can easily communicate and interface with computers and other computerized machines, essentially “talking” to them with her mind. She can copy herself onto computers, and can also copy herself into the real world, though in both cases she needs to reintegrate her selves within a set time. Using this method, she can copy herself onto a computer in order to acquire a code or cipher, then reupload herself into her body while bringing the knowledge of the code or cipher with her.

She is therefore a genius with math, computing and code. She’s designed to decipher extremely complex mathematical formulas, while doubling as a hacker and encryption specialist. She can crack insanely difficult ciphers and write new ones, though she has no ability to alter code like source code. She also has the ability to represent ciphers visually in the real world. She is a very good artist, and can use pen and paper to replicate entire webpages, though she finds that boring.

Her main interest is in what she calls “the code of the world.” When trying to explain what she means, she often references the coveted unified theory. The code of the world, she says, is an infinitely complex algorithm that can explain and represent the entire universe. The only problem is that the code is so complicated that not even she can decrypt it. Her goal is to try, however, and it’s to that end that she essentially became an artist, first with pen and paper and then with spray paint and concrete. She likes to create incredibly complicated geometric graffiti murals, which she uses to help herself and others try to understand the code.

As a program, she’s not susceptible to any of the usual human ailments such as disease or hunger. She eats, but only because she likes how it feels. She does require sleep, however, and though not susceptible to human viruses, she’s definitely susceptible to computerized ones. She prides herself on being virtually unhackable due to her skills at encryption—attempts to hack or corrupt her usually result in labyrinthine subroutines and redirects to nonsense files. But that’s not to say that it’s impossible. Her source code can’t be corrupted or altered due to the fact that it’s more organic than synthetic and layered with magic, but other parts of her can be corrupted. She is equipped with some virus-scan and deletion subroutines, but this is only for viruses she knows and is limited.

She’s also incredibly naïve and trusting, and seems to be incapable of posing as anything but exactly what she is. She can talk in riddles, literally, but she can’t lie and has no desire to, and she has a hard time with human emotions and mannerisms. She would be relatively easy to deceive and manipulate. Fortunately she’s more interested in cracking the code of the world than anything.

Inventory: Her clothes, her notepad, her box of pencils, gel pens and Copic pens, and a can of red spray paint.

Appearance: Lily looks mostly human, resting comfortably somewhere on the upswing out of the uncanny valley. If you look carefully at her, you start to notice something off. She looks, essentially, like a humanized and proportioned anime girl—large eyes, diminutive figure and ability to make something eerily akin to a ^_^ expression. She doesn’t literally look like a cartoon; just somewhat odd. This is because the image file associated with her is a manga-style drawing of an anime teenager; she even first manifested wearing a skimpy high school uniform. Her writer is something of a fanboy.

Lily has long, pure white hair that falls to the middle of her back, and startlingly blue eyes, the kind that almost seem to glow. She has soft features and small hands. She’s short, only about 5’1”, and she has long since abandoned the high school uniform for much more casual clothing. She usually goes about in jeans and a hoodie, with sensible shoes good for running from the police. Her chest is thankfully modest, especially considering she started as a manga drawing. She is never seen without at least one can of spraypaint, her notepad and gel pens. She also tends to carry a ridiculous amount of mechanical pencils.

Lily is also completely mute, unable to speak or even produce sound.

Age: 2. Looks 15.

OC/AU Justification
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across?
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test?
And What Did You Score?

Samples

Log Sample:
Today she was going to decrypt the huge oak tree in the park.

It would take calculations. Size, width, weight, depth, height. Ratio of bark to wood and leaves to roots. Insect content. Water absorption and growth rates. Soil composition. So many numbers! All as beautiful as the tree itself. She never saw numbers as just number; numbers were everything. Color and sound and composition. The world was nothing but numbers, and that was enough.

She started with a sketch of the tree, simple, geometric shapes, rectangles and ovals and circles. Then the calculations. What was the average number of leaves on a tree like that? The average number of ants crawling up and down through the cracks in the bark? The average number of birds at any given time, the average bird nests? Numbers, all scrawled in the margins in her loopy handwriting, quick equations, pluses, minuses, square roots. Then, visualize. The tree. The numbers. Everything always fits together, the roots with the ground, the branches with the sky. She could see it all; she could always see it all.

She smiled as it all came to her like usual, then clack clack clack, the sweet rattle of the spray can. Choose your canvas and decrypt.

She knew the perfect wall.

Network Sample:

[There’s a new girl on the network, with albino white hair and luminous blue eyes, smiling brightly at the camera. Once she’s sure the feed is on, she beams, and leans down to write something on a notepad. Then she holds it up to the camera.]

Hello! :) My name is Lily. I’m new.

[She beams at the camera again and writes something new.]

This is a pretty nice place. The coding here is very different. The old world is superimposed onto this one, isn’t it? XP

[Another pause to jot down another message.]

Does anyone know where I can buy spray paint? :)