227: Luvia

ENTRY 227: Luvia

“First I was a witness. Then I became an accomplice. Finally, I became a victim.”

- Luvia, “The Favela Within”

Every habitat has a window, where the inhabitants can look out at the stars and endless blackness between them, to escape for a moment the walls that close them in. It is at such portals that Luvia likes to sit as she writes, a Galatea in glass and chrome, beneath her transparent skin a glowing fluid shifts and flows—and very few know that the real luvia is not the skin, but the liquid that flows beneath.

Luvia is an ego on the run. As a freelancer for the Nine Lives she did what she was told and didn’t ask any questions. One day, she saw too much, and got pulled in deeper. Where once she smuggling minor contraband, now she was ego-trafficking, taking cortical stacks from habitat to habitat. Luvia fell deeper and deeper into the business, subliminating her desires of escape into her writing and cutting deals on the side, even selling information to various habitat authorities. Eventually she arrived to find out that she was the next delivery.

What happened next, Luvia doesn’t remember. No hidden memories, simply discontinuity. When next she woke her biomorph was gone, her ego encoded into the nanoswarm. Since then she has been on the run…from the Nine Lives, from her past, from everything. She makes a small living as a fanfiction writer, the incremental rep boosts enough to cover her modest physical and mental needs. Every couple of months she gets antsy, switches habitats, keeping one optical sensor open for anyone on the lookout for her.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
20	19	14	15	12	18	21	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
5	1	42	8	84	30	6	45

Morph: Synth/Liquid morph*

Skills: Academics: Philosophy 45, Art: Writing 56, Climbing 35, Deception (Impersonation) 56, Free Fall (Microgravity) 40, Fray (Dodge) 25, Infiltration 37, Infosec 45, Interests: Crime 45, Interests: Law 38, Kinesics 25, Language: Native Lithuanian 86, Language: English 50, Language: Mandarin 50, Medicine: Paramedic 36, Networking: Autonomists 50, Networking: Criminals 50, Palming 35, Profession: Courier 55, Profession: Writer 60, Protocol (Criminal) 35, Scrounging 30

Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Cyberbrain, Mnemonic Augmentation, Specialized Hive (liquid morph)

Advantages: Armor 6/6

Disadvantages: Social Stigma (Clanking Masses), Uncanny Valley

* The “real” Luvia is permanently encoded in a nanoswarm suspended in a glowing fluid; the Synth morph is just a shell specially modified to carry her liquid form around. If the shell is ever destroyed, the nanoswarm still exists unharmed and follows the rules for nanoswarms in Eclipse Phase, p.328-9. The nanoswarm is Luvia’s cortical stack; if it gets destroyed, her ego is lost.

Using Luvia

Luvia is adventure-bait, a living macguffin to hang some simple plots off of. Lots of people might want her: the Nine Lives, the security forces of a dozen habitats, and the hypercorp that invented her liquid morph. The PCs are likely to be brought in because these groups lack physical representatives in the habitat. Sufficiently mercenary PCs might be approached directly to find and collect her, only to find that Luvia is a bit more slippery than she seems. If the PCs are soft-hearted, then the interested parties will probably pose as part of Luvia’s past life—friends, family members, lovers. Where it goes from there depends on the PCs, but the multiple groups involved gives plenty of potential for complications.