Finn the Malkavian's page

Everyone in the city knows you, and knows that you’re no threat to their plans. While that sort of estimation may seem insulting, it’s also what kept you from being killed. No one considers you worth their time to deal with, and that low opinion keeps you safe. Of you start acting in a way that demonstrates that you are not longer harmless, others’ reactions to you will likely change as a result.

There is conviction of spirit, there is unshakable will, and there is just plain being ornery. You fall into the last category. When your mind is made up, or when you're set on doing something, nothing can divert you. For one point, you're set in your ways, but a convincing argument will turn you around.

Finn has had a paradigm shift, one that there can only be one reasonable explanation for (at least as far as she's concerned). She's obviously found herself in some sort of virtual world. Perhaps she hacked too deeply into some military database. Or this is someone's revenge for her attempts to sabotage them. Her brain might even be in a jar somewhere with electrodes coming out of it connected to a Cray supercomputer. None of this is real. BUT the brain MAKES it real. Perception causes reality. That must be why she can still feel pain, for example. As she tries to master her mind, she's found she has certain abilities that normally make no sense, like being able to disappear, or see auras. It's a truly complicated program. And apparently, someone wants her to play vampire for a while. Fine. When she finds out who's done this, she'll rip his lungs out and drain his blood.

+1 stat: 5
+3 abilities: 6
+celerity: 7
+3 Will: 3

Raise Obfuscate from 1 to 2: 5

Lisa Finnegan (aka Finn) was a bright child. Her teachers often felt she was smarter than they were (and so did she). And as so often happens in those circumstances, she was bored. To assuage that boredom as much as possible, she read. She was that kid that always had a book with her, no matter where she went. And some of the other kids thought she was weird because of that. Who wants to read instead of playing soccer, or shopping at the mall, or whatever. She didn't care. She had her fantasies. Her favorite genre was science fiction. By the time she was 15, she'd read everything Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein had published.

It was no surprise to anyone when she applied to college that she wanted to get into computers. She foresaw a world beyond 8-bit platforms and monochrome monitors and floppy disks that most people were satisfied with. Robots, androids, AIs, virtual reality: the possibilities were endless, and all anyone needed was the creativity and the know-how. Unfortunately for her, college wasn't much more interesting than high school. She was bogged down by all the "requirement" classes. She'd been a capable programmer for years in FORTRAN, LISP, BASIC, C++, and here they were making her take classes in PASCAL. Not to mention subjects like Composition and English Lit. How could everyone else move so damn slowly?!

After a year of college, she had left and was moving on with projects where-ever she could find them. She had enough computer saavy to fake credentials to get in on the ground floor at a relatively new company called Qualcomm. She moved to Sun Microsystems for better funding after a year. She was finally doing cutting edge research, and making quite a bit of money for it, too. But her past caught up with her. Someone in HR discovered that she had faked her degree. She lost her job and was practically black-balled by Silicon Valley.

Something about that experience broke something in Finn. She had some savings; she barely spent any money as it was. It was the indignity of it all. How the hell could they fire her? Who did they think they were? And she suspected that they looked more closely at her credentials because she was a woman. She wanted to get back at them, desperately. And so she began to surf the internet. She would find something in her old bosses' pasts. She would dredge up some embarrassing secrets and make them pay.

She became a dedicated hacker, and she was good at it. There were very few systems that were closed to "FIN," her hacker alias. Not only could she look through files, she planted fake ones, made stuff up whole cloth. It's possible she even found some real dirt on her former employers. As her plans grew ever more complicated, it soon became difficult to tell which ones were real. She became lost in conspiracy theories, became paranoid, and started believing that maybe there were coordinated plots against her. She felt like someone was watching her in RL, and tracking her online activity. (In fact, she was very close to being recruited by a Virtual Adept who had spotted her on the web and began to do research on her. She actually WAS being followed by him, but not for nefarious purposes.)

And then she was Embraced. It came out of nowhere, literally. One moment, she was sure she was looking at a blank wall, and this strange man walked right out of the shadows. Her rational mind was already having some difficulty, but this violated everything she knew. Or did it? She was so busy trying to make sense of this that she barely registered that he was draining her blood. She fell to the ground, cold and limp. But he must have cut his wrist, because the next thing she knew, she was sucking blood from his arm. He pushed her away after a few blissful moments. He looked her in the eyes... and laughed. "Life's a b*&$& and then you die!" Cackling like a banshee, he walked right back into the shadows and vanished.

Darkness. Light. She was awake and lying on a couch. Her couch. She had no memory of how she got there. There was a guy next to her, not the same one from before, but she was sure she'd seen him... maybe at a coffee shop? Skinny, geeky looking fellow. Bizarre looking glasses. Some strange device on his belt. A PDA? "Damn, I wish I'd contacted you sooner. You'd've made one hell of a Mage, lady." What? Who the hell is this guy? And why was she so thirsty? "I thought it was only polite to make sure you made it home safe. Wish I could stay, but... well, circumstances suggest I not be around you physically. Maybe I'll see you around the Web. Best of luck to you." He flicked her a surfer's wave and picked up his device. She heard what sounded like a modem connection and then he was gone, device and all. Darkness again.

That was 9 months ago. Although she has no idea who her sire is, she was found by a few other Malkavians who taught her the basics. She's still getting used to it all. She's moved back to her hometown, Aurora, Illinois. She still has enough money put aside to live a meager life-style. She rooms with a number of humans roommates, all hackers and gamers. They think he affliction is "far-out." She sips from them from time to time; they don't seem to mind.