Post by Portia Travers on Nov 3, 2010 19:49:16 GMT -5
Portia Travers
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Everyday Info.
Name: Portia Travers
Age: 24
Gender: Female
Birthday/ Zodiac: March 20, Pisces/Aries
Occupation: Intern at the British Museum, Hacker
Nationality: British
Physical
Appearance: Portia has a wan face, a little thin and a little drawn, showing the lingering effects of some earlier illness or trauma. Her cheekbones are high and her jaw fairly rectangular, giving a sense of compactness that is intensified by her disarmingly direct gaze. Portia’s eyes are a deep brown, almost black in their umber, with thick lashes, and they hint at her Greek origins. They are extremely expressive, revealing respectively great good humor, sardonic amusement, and deeply-felt pain. She seems extremely aware of this fact and therefore tends to hide behind a set of very thick glasses. Her straight dark hair is cropped very short and probably has only just grown back past her slightly pointed ears. Her nose, slightly pointed as well, gives her an Elvin look and her lips are thick and rather dark. One corner is often twisted up into a slightly shy, slightly sardonic smile that becomes more twisted under pressure. She is very thin, probably the result of her not thinking to eat— the idea escapes her. She must dress nicely for her job at the museum, but outside of work she hides inside baggy shirts and sweatshirts.
Celebrity Claim: Stephanie Leonidas
Emotional
Personality: Portia is a dreamer. She was someone whose intelligence made her un-relatable in school and whose brusqueness, along with a brusque and acerbic sense of humor, made her likable but alienated her from others. She isolates herself in books and research, especially those focused on mathematics and ancient history. She uses hacking as an escape, a way to find comfort in the abstract intake and analysis of facts and the distant observation of people. She is always looking for second-hand ways to satisfy her great curiosity. The world Portia operates in is one based mostly on her imagination, the one she creates to protect her dreamy self from a dull and/or cruel reality. It is a world of sketches, compendiums of facts, and worlds of coding and numbers.
Portia has and is capable of making friends, but her honesty can border on tactlessness. She is not afraid to voice her thoughts or to pass judgments, but she often does not have the courage to interact with other people. She loves to draw and write, but because of darker, more recent events in her life her artwork has taken a turn for the anatomical and faintly morbid. She is very proud of her achievements in the hacking community, considering that it did not take her long to become fairly adept. She is known as PiRat online.
Talents: One of Portia’s few great oddities is her eidetic memory, a characteristic that aided her retreat into the world of words and images. She knows far too much about far too much and this, fuelled by her need to know, is the source of her talent. She is semi-fluent in three languages not counting English and extremely capable of translating and reading two others. She also has a proficient knowledge of the human anatomical system and is dangerously capable at code-cracking and hacking.
Strengths: Portia is very adept at handling and understanding languages, whether they are computer codes or spoken word. She is therefore eloquent and semantically accurate, and this, combined with her characteristic honesty, is a great strength. She is highly imaginative and is sensitive to the emotions and reactions of others, though she has no courage to interact with them. She also has a witty and subtle sense of humor that influences her hacking, creating amusing puns and puzzles within her coding and algorithms.
Weaknesses: She is ridiculously shy and, frankly, socially awkward. Portia, when she becomes nervous, begins having panic attacks, and when she encounters one of her phobias (clowns, sewers, and drowning) they become rather severe. She can become cruel as well, if she loses patience with you.
Likes: Portia likes going into or hanging around in the museum at night (when she can) and giving herself tours throughout the galleries, testing her understanding of the archives and allowing herself to slip into her fantasy world. She loves baking even if it just for herself, taking the warm, fresh biscuits, and sitting down to enjoy a book. Portia also likes people watching in Trafalgar Square and imagining the damage the metal lions could do if they came to life.
Dislikes: Portia hates the water and cannot swim. She also can’t stand clowns and fears the sewers. She also dislikes microwave dinners, the silence that falls when she realizes that she’s alone in the flat, and, conversely, loud parties. She also avoids discussions about her family and friends and tends to avoid making new acquaintances unless they pique her overweening curiosity.
History: Portia’s family life was rocky— her father left the house when she was four then sued for custody of her. He won the legal battle because her mother was desperately trying to find work and couldn’t support her daughter. After Portia was assimilated into her new home, she never heard from her real mother again. She believes that her mother is still alive, and a major component of her imaginary world was the home she built in her mind where she could visit her mother. Portia’s stepmother was not cruel but the two of them could not overcome the barrier of really belonging to two different families. Her stepbrother, however, Alex, was a different story, and his companionship was the part of her life that kept Portia anchored in reality. Rather than fleeing into her mind, she tried to interact with the students at her school with his encouragement, but when their relationship first became strained, then twisted, she broke off contact with human society and retreated into a world of codes and cyber-criminality.
The change was initially a reaction to Portia’s only “boyfriend” type of relationship, and while it started off as protective, it became obsessive and possessive. Alex tried to control her life and her relationships more and more until he finally revealed how he felt about his stepsister. Not so much horrified at this confession but at the fact that she could not reciprocate feelings for person who had loved and cared for her all her life, Portia escaped from her house in the suburbs and went to Oxford partly in order to avoid her messy familial history. When Alex followed her into town, they fought. The confrontation quickly became physical and Portia was dealt a heavy blow to the head. After the depressed fracture in her skull was taken care of, Portia left with a great knowledge of Grey’s Anatomy (the reference book, not the TV show) and a greater feeling of distrust towards other human beings. She now lives in fear of waking up and realizing that the blow to her head has robbed her of her intelligence, her memories, and her little world of facts and cyberactivity. To combat these fears she applied to be an intern in research and archiving at the British Museum’s Ancient Greek and Roman department and has thrown herself deeper into the world of computers, becoming more and more involved in the hacking community.
Extra Things
Sample RP: Sweat beading a little on her forehead from the heat of the high-powered laboratory lamp, Portia gently turned the Bucchero ware drinking cup under its glare, dark eyes hidden by the sheen across her glasses. The two stylized soldiers enacted a dramatic battle across the vase’s deep orange surface, tiny eyes mostly whites, with tiny pupils. Just as they would have been, she thought, dancing their way across the dark earth, eyes wide and full of barely-suppressed fear. Their arms rippling and jerking back with every attempted blow and parry, bodies painted with sweat and feeling exhaustion and lactic acid sear through every overworked muscle. Portia could still see the vase underneath her cool fingertips, but the image below her had changed. She saw the larger man bearing down on the other who was barely kneeling, still thrusting with his spear in desperation towards the other’s throat—
Her cellphone buzzed.
Portia jumped about a foot in the air, hands flying away from the vase only to be clamped back down onto the wildly rocking artifact. “…Christ,” she muttered to herself, heart thudding like a timpani inside her chest. Portia steadied herself and stepped away from the table, delicately removing her still-shaking fingers from the vase, then turned to the interfering piece of technology. Jabbing at the ENTER button, her eyes flew over the short text and she let out a quiet curse, spinning around to open her briefcase. With swift, deft motions, she pulled out her thin, black laptop and, punching the option + ctrl + enter keys, immediately brought up a program that was running through thousands of strings of numbers, every once in a while freezing a number in place, highlighting it, and discarding it. As she watched in growing frustration, a block of numbers suddenly turned white and disappeared. “Bollocks,” she cursed again, shoving a Bluetooth into her ear. “ID, you getting this?”
“I see it PiRat, looks like someone’s started catching up with us. Any plans?” Why did this always happen? Portia thought furiously, punching code into the grid at the bottom of the screen. Always at this section, with this algorithm. It wasn’t as if the code was faulty; the Fibbernacci, despite the unfortunately dorky name she had given it, was one of the best viruses in the cyber crime world. She gritted her teeth as another bar cut through her precious coding. Well, she wasn’t going to let her baby become the joke of the virtual world— again.
“How close are we to the mainframe? Are we almost finished tunneling?”
“Pi, at this rate, does it really matter?” The young guy’s voice was higher-pitched and more pinched than usual. Late nights running on cheap drugs and a shite-ton of caffeine would do that to a person, Portia thought bemusedly, not to mention the fact that he probably would never psychologically hit puberty. Three years working with ID, aka Dave, had helped her realize that if he wasn’t getting fame and fortune, the boy wasn’t happy. They’d met at Oxford at a “tech party” and after she’d beat him in a cracking competition he’d basically become her sidekick, depending on her skills to make them both cybervillains. Not that she’d ever given that idea much consideration. Outwitting the system was just a big game, another escape. “Portia, they’ve seen through the Fib! They’re probably tracing you right now!”
“That’s why I’m asking you, Dave, to not get overexcited and tell me if we’re—” She broke off abruptly, giving a squeal of delight. “ID! We’ve got it! The passwords are downloading as we speak, mate— we’re going to be able to siphon off Swiss bank accounts for the next twenty years of our life!” Portia could feel the exhilaration and adrenaline rush through her veins, the computer screen glowing brighter in her eyes. To have cracked one of the greatest computer systems in the world… to be staring at the result of absolute brilliance, of her absolute brilliance; it was almost enough to make her forget how much danger she was in.
“Portia, this is great and all, but it won’t do us any good if we’re IN JAIL.” Instinctively, Portia nodded, forgetting for a second that Dave wasn’t in the room then coughed and muttered her agreement, watching the passwords spiral into her hard drive even as the bars of disappearing code became larger and more purposeful.
“Bugger… Okay, we’ll have to settle with ten years of plenty. I’m setting off Phi.” And with that she hit the option + fn + shift keys, bringing a large image of the capital phi symbol onto the screen, a symbol that began running multiples and powers of the irrationality into the cyber connection, attacking the trace and causing enough confusion to sufficiently shut down that part of the bank’s computer system. As the numbers began to overwrite her own Fibbernacci code, the algorithm self-destructed, shutting down the program with a quiet “pip”. All that was left was a blank, neat desktop with a new folder full of passwords.
Anything Else: Nope!
Where You Found Us: A search for Sherlock RPGs.
Other Characters: None yet. =]
