Devi

History

Devi

I was born in 2053, and grew up in Manhattan, a spoiled little corp princess. My father was a midlevel executive for Saeder-Krupp North America, running one of the bigger departments in their Orbital Dynamics subsidiary, providing communications towers and orbital satellites. It paid well, and he was well-kept. My mother was the love of his life, so he claimed, and I believe it. He worked far too much, yes, but she was always there waiting for him when he came home. The other executive's wives were jealous of her, and found her standoffish. She wasn't interested in the things they were: shopping, beauty treatments and plastic surgery, vacations, more shopping, affairs with much younger men and occasionally whose child had scored better in which social event.

My mother is a Hindi woman from a Brahmin-caste family, and she took her dignity and integrity very seriously. Don't get me wrong - she wasn't some super-enlightened being. She simply had very different priorities and ideals. She was very severe to me, insisting that I make good grades, and comport myself with the dignity she expected of someone of her blood. I was jealous of the other kids, honestly. It seemed like they had it easy, with mothers who didn't pay much attention to them, who lavished them with spending money instead of discipline.

Considering what my father did, it should be no surprise that I grew up on the Matrix. It was my one true escape, as my mother didn't know enough about its ins and outs, its hundred little secrets, to know the difference between me studying and me wasting time in a chat room talking about the latest fads or my favorite trideo shows (which I also watched via the Matrix, as my mother did not approve of such time-wasting entertainments).

There were some things about my mother that fascinated me, however. One room in our house was set aside for her sole use, and I was not permitted in there. I was eight when I finally managed to sneak into that room, and it was a place filled with wonder. She'd set it up as a shrine, and the wonderful brass statues of the strange (to me, at least) gods of India were everywhere, along with candles, incense holders, strings of beads and a thousand-thousand other delights to the senses. I don't know how long I stood there, just soaking it all in, wandering from shelf to table to little box shaped like a house for the statues, just looking at everything. I finally realized my mother was standing in the doorway, simply watching me with a slight smile on her face.

"These are not for you, Lilian," she told me. I thought she sounded somewhat sad. "These are the things of my religion, of the religion of my family in India. Your father wants you to fit in with your peers, and to not bother with such things."

She then ushered me from the room, closing and locking the door behind us. She was very firm, but also strangely kind. I think she did it on purpose, because from that day, I wanted nothing more than to know everything about that world. The Matrix provided me a wide variety of sources of information, from ancient, traditional Vedic texts to Hindu history to message boards and chatrooms describing the latest innovations, sects and theologies.

What struck me most was the incredibly egalitarian nature of the practices. Because all the world was Maya - the great illusion - every manifestation of the gods was valid. There was no such thing as "heretical." If humanity could bend its imagination in any direction and see the gods there, that was a true manifestation of those gods.

It was, of course, only inevitable that I should eventually find BrahmaNet, a vast and beautifully sculpted network of virtual temples, with rites and teachings occurring at all times. At the tender age of eleven, I submitted my application to become one of its postulates, and was accepted immediately. My father, of course, noticed the change in me. I was spending more and more time in the Matrix, and less and less time being his little girl. It was nothing for him to investigate my online activities and find out what I was up to.

I can still remember the fight that broke out between my parents as a result of that. My father blamed my mother, of course, accusing her of inspiring "that nonsense" in me. My mother denied it, of course, and even told him that she'd forbidden me access to her temple, and never spoke to me of it. But I was a daughter of a Brahmin's daughter, and our souls seek out the Ancient Truths no matter where we live or who our fathers are.

X

• From Manhattan
• Emerged during the Crash
• 19 in 2072; born in 2053; Crash in 2065 when she was 12.

Appearance & Personality

Devi

X

Stats

Devi

• Technomancer
• Stream: Networker (Charisma + Resonance; Code, Courier, Crack, Data and Sleuth Sprites)
• Paragon: Delphi (+2 to Analyze tests, +1 to Data Sprites)