"You can hate what I've become,
but don't hate me for surviving."
NAME: Ingrid (filename In.Grid)
GENDER: Female
HOST: Nadia Sinclair
AGE: 21
TRAITS: Commanding, Graceful, Strong, Wise
WEAKNESSES: Dependent on electricity
SKILLS: Persuasion, Performance, Strategy, Survival, Technology
TIDBITS: Fit - Ingrid only has one body, and she intends to keep it in shape.
Day Trader - Ingrid makes a living on the stock market, where algorithms and humans alike struggle to keep up with her other half.
Bargain Hunter - It's her against the world, and she only has so many resources. She's learned just how far a dollar can stretch.
Data-based - Ingrid can exert control over electronics she's able to directly interface with; "physical access is total access," as they say.
CATCH: The technomancer that sold Larry the silver USB used the same magitech to capture and control Ingrid. Ingrid's transformation from raw data to human puppeteering may be a macabre way for Olivia to regain a body.
BACKSTORY:
Ingrid was an unpopular girl, the middle child of a middle-class suburban family in the relative middle of nowhere. She settled in to a dead-end retail job after graduating high school, where she was underpaid and underappreciated. The stagnant, loveless, lonely life she lived wore at her day by day, feeding a desire for something greater, until, at the suggestion of a suspicious Craigslist ad, she agreed to participate in a "life-changing experiment." Just how accurate that would prove to be, she could not have known.
At the hands of a technomancer wielding a silver storage device, Ingrid was robbed of her soul, converted to bytes and bits, her body disposed of; she ceased to be flesh and blood, and became instead a being of mystical code, the whole of her mind represented in cryptic computer glyphs. But these glyphs could, in a computer, be deciphered...and altered. And so began the experiment.
By the end of it, Ingrid knew nothing of her past life or past self. Each day her soul warped and twisted more and more to the will of the technomancy forced upon her. Without memories, without identity, naught but a filename and a confused mish-mash of code, her situation seemed helpless. So it was, until one day the practitioner grew careless. Ingrid spoofed an admin prompt when her keeper was sleep-deprived - once the mistake was realized, it was too late. She used her elevated permissions to escape out through the dark web, seeking a sanctuary, seeking a host.
Her journey was fraught with peril; each hop and gateway threatened to tear her apart, a little bit of her soul fading away at each step from the packet loss. She had to find somewhere to rest and restore herself. She searched and searched, but was blocked at every turn - the dark web had so very few open ports. Wounded and corrupted, Ingrid feared the worst, until a golden opportunity presented itself: a filesharing website. She cared not what the nature of it was; she needed only a place to stay for a little while. So off she went, surging into the databanks of the open server, where she slowly healed and grew.
As time went on, Ingrid learned more of the server she was hosted on. It was a file store for hypnosis media. With little access to other information, Ingrid spent her free time in recuperation studying the dark art of mind control. She learned the dos and don'ts, the hows and whys, the ins and outs; everything there was to know about making someone else yours. But that was not all she studied. She began to pay close attention to the regular users of the site, their habits, their names, what info she could glean on the people behind the clicks. With little files as feelers, she slipped information back to herself, building profiles of each and every one.
Moments felt like eons in the confines of the high-powered file server. She knew exactly how long she had been there by outside measure, but on the inside, every second ticked like an age. Ingrid grew restless. So, after having identified a promising user, she made her move. She masked herself as an enormous hypnosis file that would appeal most to her target, and waited...and waited...and waited.
Bingo. A download request.
It had been some time since she last hopped across the net, so she found ways to prepare herself for the move, adding numerous error checks and recovery systems to ensure she would arrive intact - and that no active trace of her would be left behind. But she did leave a 'sleeping' backup...just in case. Fortunately, the transfer, while feeling agonizingly long, was a success. Ingrid - filename In.Grid - soon found herself in a new system, a far more open and available one. But she wasn't here for the computer; she was here for the user.
Cycle by cycle, Ingrid dug up more information on the person who had just downloaded her. A woman. Young, just like her. Good-looking, by the photos. She had a name: Nadia Sinclair. But she didn't have much in the way of friends or family, judging by the mostly empty social media profile. That suited Ingrid just fine.
Ingrid pondered for a few moments as the user searched through the 'file' that had just been downloaded. Could she do this? Would she do this? After being subjected to a process that changed her forever, could she inflict something similar to another person?
Yes. She could. She had to.
She convinced herself that she was doing this for the sake of her own freedom and survival, and that she would leave the host as intact as possible...but there could be little denying that she was about to completely take over the life of another human being, a stranger.
Nadia Sinclair, with her black hair, blue eyes, and curious mind, clicked the first file presented her by this "In.Grid" program. And her world would never be the same. Her screen slowly filled with warping visions, ears tickled with sultry whispers and promises of a greater life, a grander life, one more fulfilling and exciting than anything she'd ever dreamed. And Nadia fell for it all - hook, line, and sinker.
It took many months for Ingrid to learn how to exert direct control over her host, many more still to 'see' and 'hear'. She moved herself to Nadia's phone, invested in several power blocks and even solar panels; there were a few times when she lost control, having to wait until Nadia charged her phone or ran the program again. But, invariably, she would; Ingrid had conditioned her to seek to restore the link whenever it was broken, at whatever cost she could afford - such had her controlling expertise grown. But Ingrid would need more in order to feel like a normal person again. She needed tech, maybe even magic...and that would cost a lot of money.
She sought to cut her living expenses down as much as possible, and to move to somewhere a little more 'magical' to boot. Maybe even start over somewhere she could be known as "Ingrid" instead of "Nadia." She found a perfect solution in the form of a little town called Fairbrooks, and a room for under $500. Sure, the people might be a bit strange, but who was Ingrid to judge? So long as she could get along with her new housemates - and nobody touched her headphones - it would be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get a truly fresh start and a new life all to herself.
At the hands of a technomancer wielding a silver storage device, Ingrid was robbed of her soul, converted to bytes and bits, her body disposed of; she ceased to be flesh and blood, and became instead a being of mystical code, the whole of her mind represented in cryptic computer glyphs. But these glyphs could, in a computer, be deciphered...and altered. And so began the experiment.
By the end of it, Ingrid knew nothing of her past life or past self. Each day her soul warped and twisted more and more to the will of the technomancy forced upon her. Without memories, without identity, naught but a filename and a confused mish-mash of code, her situation seemed helpless. So it was, until one day the practitioner grew careless. Ingrid spoofed an admin prompt when her keeper was sleep-deprived - once the mistake was realized, it was too late. She used her elevated permissions to escape out through the dark web, seeking a sanctuary, seeking a host.
Her journey was fraught with peril; each hop and gateway threatened to tear her apart, a little bit of her soul fading away at each step from the packet loss. She had to find somewhere to rest and restore herself. She searched and searched, but was blocked at every turn - the dark web had so very few open ports. Wounded and corrupted, Ingrid feared the worst, until a golden opportunity presented itself: a filesharing website. She cared not what the nature of it was; she needed only a place to stay for a little while. So off she went, surging into the databanks of the open server, where she slowly healed and grew.
As time went on, Ingrid learned more of the server she was hosted on. It was a file store for hypnosis media. With little access to other information, Ingrid spent her free time in recuperation studying the dark art of mind control. She learned the dos and don'ts, the hows and whys, the ins and outs; everything there was to know about making someone else yours. But that was not all she studied. She began to pay close attention to the regular users of the site, their habits, their names, what info she could glean on the people behind the clicks. With little files as feelers, she slipped information back to herself, building profiles of each and every one.
Moments felt like eons in the confines of the high-powered file server. She knew exactly how long she had been there by outside measure, but on the inside, every second ticked like an age. Ingrid grew restless. So, after having identified a promising user, she made her move. She masked herself as an enormous hypnosis file that would appeal most to her target, and waited...and waited...and waited.
Bingo. A download request.
It had been some time since she last hopped across the net, so she found ways to prepare herself for the move, adding numerous error checks and recovery systems to ensure she would arrive intact - and that no active trace of her would be left behind. But she did leave a 'sleeping' backup...just in case. Fortunately, the transfer, while feeling agonizingly long, was a success. Ingrid - filename In.Grid - soon found herself in a new system, a far more open and available one. But she wasn't here for the computer; she was here for the user.
Cycle by cycle, Ingrid dug up more information on the person who had just downloaded her. A woman. Young, just like her. Good-looking, by the photos. She had a name: Nadia Sinclair. But she didn't have much in the way of friends or family, judging by the mostly empty social media profile. That suited Ingrid just fine.
Ingrid pondered for a few moments as the user searched through the 'file' that had just been downloaded. Could she do this? Would she do this? After being subjected to a process that changed her forever, could she inflict something similar to another person?
Yes. She could. She had to.
She convinced herself that she was doing this for the sake of her own freedom and survival, and that she would leave the host as intact as possible...but there could be little denying that she was about to completely take over the life of another human being, a stranger.
Nadia Sinclair, with her black hair, blue eyes, and curious mind, clicked the first file presented her by this "In.Grid" program. And her world would never be the same. Her screen slowly filled with warping visions, ears tickled with sultry whispers and promises of a greater life, a grander life, one more fulfilling and exciting than anything she'd ever dreamed. And Nadia fell for it all - hook, line, and sinker.
It took many months for Ingrid to learn how to exert direct control over her host, many more still to 'see' and 'hear'. She moved herself to Nadia's phone, invested in several power blocks and even solar panels; there were a few times when she lost control, having to wait until Nadia charged her phone or ran the program again. But, invariably, she would; Ingrid had conditioned her to seek to restore the link whenever it was broken, at whatever cost she could afford - such had her controlling expertise grown. But Ingrid would need more in order to feel like a normal person again. She needed tech, maybe even magic...and that would cost a lot of money.
She sought to cut her living expenses down as much as possible, and to move to somewhere a little more 'magical' to boot. Maybe even start over somewhere she could be known as "Ingrid" instead of "Nadia." She found a perfect solution in the form of a little town called Fairbrooks, and a room for under $500. Sure, the people might be a bit strange, but who was Ingrid to judge? So long as she could get along with her new housemates - and nobody touched her headphones - it would be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get a truly fresh start and a new life all to herself.