The Tenuous Trek of Viktoria Scriptchilde

Gwendolyn is an odd young lady. She goes by the shortened form Gwen in public as is custom. She'd also later be known as -V or the Scriptchilde to many, many others in more... professional and technical venues. Her birth certificate labeled her Gwendolyn Torey Christenson and she was born in Norwich, NY. She knew little else of where she came from due to the hazy nature of her past. She did know Gwen felt wrong for her though.

Gwendolyn had lived a strange life. Some would call it lucky, some sketchy but early on she saw it as vexing. Her parents died when she was very young and was fostered by her only known living relation, Mary Davis. Gwen rarely saw her though. Her Aunt Mary was a famous attorney who traveled the country with no time for home or hearth and certainly saw her young ward as more burden than blessing. Thankfully for Mary's sake, she had money to solve that problem. Young Gwen bounced from boarding houses to academies and other such places high and low through her formative years. Mary was happy to write check after check to keep the girl provided for but always distant. As such, Gwen never really felt more than a burden to the aunt she rarely heard from.

On her 17th birthday, Gwen was in a car crash that many said should have ended her life. They called it a miracle, she called it a life lesson. After a long convalescence, she returned to school life with only a crooked nose and slight limp to show for the ordeal. Gwen was traumatized by the experience, with her physical limitations a constant reminder in her mind of the world's indifference to her existence. She was driven from that time on to exert as much control over her circumstances as she could arrange. Upon her 18th birthday, Mary established a small stipend for her niece, and off to the university she went.

By this point, she was a forgettable girl. Gwendolyn stood barely a hair over five feet and tended to wear her light brown hair in a long, midback ponytail. Her skin tended toward pale, gaining the slightest of color at the height of summer and only then if she spent a good deal of time in the sun. Gwen tended to avoid that like the plague though. She was more at home inside. Otherwise, she had a fairly petite frame with perky b-cup breasts and a slight bottom, all topped by her noticeably bent nose. She resembled in the minds of some a tiny, fragile porcelain doll. Gwen would eventually prove sturdier than most gave her credit for.

Mary was pleased to have completed her duty to the child, successfully in her mind at least, and left Gwen to her own devices forthwith. Not surprisingly, the girl felt rudderless and alone at first. It should have been no surprise to any that she found herself drawn to the computer sciences, programming in particular. Computers and code were solid and dependable. In other words, they had established rules that perform as advertised so long as one followed them and worked diligently enough, unlike her experiences with life in general. The magic of these written ciphers greatly appealed to her analytical mind and she became very, very good with them.

Her social life was far different, however. Due to Gwen's propensity to bury herself in her interests, she was barely on the radar screen of any of her peers at school. Unless they wanted help with a subject she found interesting... which of course could be arranged for a price. Even with her roommate Bridget, relations were mostly just transactional. It was simple really, Gwen would help with her studies and money problems. In exchange, Bridget scrounged up tutoring jobs for Gwen in the beginning and generally just ran protective interference or handled simple tasks for her later. This left Gwendolyn in her comfortable cocoon and her pretty blonde roommate was able to escape the drudgery of working for party money. The arrangement suited both.

By the end of her first year at Houndstooth Private University in upstate New York, Gwen was well known among the department's professors. They'd easily found her a scholarship to supplement Mary's stipend and regarded her as a progeny to be guided rather than taught. This allowed Gwen to cut way back on tutoring, withdraw further from the real world, and deeper into her constructed one. She'd fallen hard for the new up-and-coming discipline of Virtual Reality and the idea of worlds of her own making captured her imagination.

Using the programming pen name "Viktoria Scriptchilde", she wrote dozens of mods, plug-and-play subroutines, and programs for the few VR platforms on the market at the time. All this was freely distributed on the webserver she set up for her tech persona and most of it proved popular. At first, she was content with that but soon found herself drawn deeper.

It started one day when she was reading through tech forums and found herself rewriting code on the fly for someone struggling with what they considered an unsolvable problem. Then she started moonlighting with an occasional video on Youtube offering deep thought on how to tackle a particular coding issue that fascinated her. She always signed posts with a "-V" as a virtual signature and before long each little step further built this into an online identity rather than just a pen name.

Gwen was always careful never to associate her identity or face with her online life, using an animated avatar on the rare occasion a personal video feed was needed. The Scriptchilde was to have no flesh and blood face, she like her work was a cipher. Youtube made her soothing voice and anime persona another part of the virtual package to her tech followers. These safeguards worked for longer than she'd had any right to expect and others were taking quiet note of her accomplishments from the sidelines.

Gwendolyn picked up a minor in engineering at the beginning of her second year. The primitive VR gear that could be purchased at the time felt too limiting for her work. By the end of her second year of study, Gwen had a heavily modified VR headset all her own. Her programming was now done through it and an extensively rebuilt tablet she'd thrown together. She tinkered with both constantly. The glasses and cyberpad (CP as she lovingly referred to it) were her tools of the trade.

Her professors had put together an individualized study plan which allowed her to spend even more time alone with her hobby and online pursuits. The papers and projects they assigned were simple and easy for her. So it all consumed far less time than her mentors had assumed. Life was grand for a while. The Scriptchilde was anonymous and beloved in her small corner of cyberspace but while the mysterious persona may have shielded Gwen's identity from her fellows online, it wasn't proof against others operating closer to her level.

Since change is life's only constant, Gwen was suddenly made aware of the fact she wasn't as anonymous as she'd thought she was before long. Early one September morning in the fall semester of Gwen's third year, Bridget placed a package delivered by courier on the work desk while Gwen was busy showering. It was addressed to "VS" and came from a well-known town in New Jersey. Bridget then tidied up and left to eat breakfast, certain her roommate had ordered more gadgets as was fairly common. Bridget didn't know it but that package was soon to change her dormmate's life and she'd be swept along for the ride.

Here our story begins. . .