Name: Azure Anriz/Banhammer 40k/Khazad Boom

Sect: Virtual Adepts

Faction: Union Underground/Traditions

Apparent Age: 25

Demeanor: Celebrant (online) Curmudgeon (anywhere else)

Role in NYC: Digital Webmistress/Dwarf Enthusiast

Vital Information

Script kiddie, nuisance, nerd, cyberterrorist, iconoclast, whatever one calls the Virtual Adepts’ current reigning champion of IP ban falsification and exploding Moria dioramas (her nicknames are not coincidence), Azure is hard to ignore on her home turf. She’s been running the shadows (and yes she will use that term) since she was barely old enough to drive, and making things miserable for bad guys almost as long. She’s gone on record that her Awakening came as a consequence of losing three months’ sleep trying to figure out an encrypted Progenitor project and learning… Things she didn’t want to know. Coalition or not, she hates those fuckers and refuses them access to any DW space she controls.

No one’s quite clear on how she wound up running with the Underground, especially since she apprenticed at the Hess Estate, but given her habit of exposing uncomfortable truths and putting them up in neon wherever there’s internet access, she probably cheesed someone off. Most of the time she’s a non-entity in meatspace, finding the limitations of the physical world annoying, boring or both, and preferring to have dozens of subroutines and complex tasks going at the same time to keep busy.

She holds a portion of the DW in NYC, affectionately or derisively called Dwarf Fortress, a hub of ongoing projects typical to a Virtual Adept enterprise, only with significantly more forges, dwarves, and a rather literal interpretation of data-mining. It resembles Khazad Dum to an uncanny degree, though there are more than a few places where different interpretations of the source material conflict and Word of God is absent, leading to some confused and headache-inducing Escher-space even for the Web, and her fondness for street art and the punk scene has changed the sober mien of her denizens and the icons of her friends. This great bastion is located under Manhattan, in meat-space correlating at its entrance with the J/M/Z platform at Canal Street, and diverging wildly from there.

Her magickal practices are DW-based and data-driven, with peculiar cryptographic twists and an alchemical bent, and it’s known that she loves to build and craft things even in meatspace (probably why the fondness for dwarfs). She’s not the only player on the Web, of course, and she’s always looking to talk shop with newbies, when she can pull herself away from her work.

Appearance

Her icon is a dark-skinned, red-mohawked dwarf girl who looks ready to mount an expedition, start a war, or rob you blind, and could change her mind partway through. This is sort of an attempt at truth in advertising, since she’s terribly mercenary. Why she chose to look like a dwarf out of WoW is anyone’s guess, but she’s very comfortable in this form and her mastery of the DW makes her nigh omnipresent if she decides to talk to you (Hey! Listen!). She’s fond of steampunk gizmos that approximate the function of computers, grand difference engines composed of bizarre strings of repeated mechanical functions recorded in ludicrous ways, and it’s been suggested that her Dwarf Fortress is a virtual trinary machine of unprecedented scale… Though this has never been proven, and it would be hard to credit since she’s so young… Right?

Here, her personality is laid back, confident, proud and forthright, even when she’s doing something questionable or foolish. After all, this is her world, and she’s boss bitch here. This doesn’t necessarily mean she’s rude, or cruel, but it can be more than a little abrasive.

When forced to appear in person, she’s a bit less dramatic. Waifish, pale, still punk but not exactly glamorous unless she has time to gussy up and rarely looking like she’s slept, Azure has a bit of a stammer and keeps trying to fix her (usually very product-intensive) hair, like she’s a nervous teenager. There are things the Underground doesn’t ask, and why she’s so scared in her own skin is one of them. Rumors abound, but bringing them up is a good way to get Truant to cut you off, kick you out, and torch your car.

If she is called forth into the desert of the real for good reason, she tolerates it with something like grace, shy and so very different from her iconic persona, hoping to get things done and return to the world where she’s got some control.