Debra MacFarland

[baroquest]

Name: Debra Rosaline MacFarland
Nick Names or Alias: Seeker331, Debbie
Age: 32
Gender: Female
Sexual Preferances: Bi-Sexual
Employment: No.
Job Title & Description:

N/A

Derangement(s):

N/A

Misc.:

n/a

Ghoul?: No.
Hunter?: No.
Mage?: Yes
Powers:

Time: 2
Fate: 3
Matter:3

Endowments:

N/A

Foci:

An line code, which Debra accesses and alters through her PDA, Laptop or Desk top computer

Appearance:

Body: Debra stands just below six feet tall and possessed of a striking build. Her long arms are toned with firm musculature, complimented by her proportionally broad shoulders, with her legs and waist similarly muscled and toned. Despite the immediate impression of strength, much of Debra's aesthetic power is offset by her overall physique, which draws more attention with its curves that by the size of its muscles.

Face: Debra's face is pale, much like the rest of her body, and angular, with gradual curves to her jaw and cheek, the former of which ends in a narrow chin. Her features are sharp, and have obviously seen their fair share of unwanted attention, with a healed scar running through her left eyebrow and evidence of a split upon her right and in her lower lip. Her whole face is outlined by her curly hair, which is a medium between a dark red and auburn.

The most striking aspect of Debra's appearance is, without a doubt, her emerald green eyes. Possessed of the same angular quality as her sharp features, Debra's eyes are piercing, prominent and almost always caught with a cunning and knowing light.

Fashion Sense/Style:

Debra never really was one to follow fashion trends, and prefers to stick to neutral colors and functional attire that don't draw too much attention. Her favorite piece of active wear is like a simple black overcoat atop of whatever else she might be wearing.

Debra is also inclined more to heavier clothing such, and sees an obvious merit in wearing a pair of resilient boots.

Personality:

Debra's most apparent inclination is that of steadfast commitment and willpower, Otherwise known as stubbornness. Once she has set her mind towards something, nothing short of institutionalization is going to stop her from achieving it. She treats all endeavors with the utmost dedication, and even considers her own method of magic making to be her own personal martial art.

Apart from her determined nature, Debra is a very forward and honest individual who freely admits she never learned how to play politics. Often blunt and to the point, she perceives the world in broad strokes of black and white. The ease at which she can sort things between the shades, at least as far as she is concerned, lends itself well to the last of Debra's defining characteristics. Her firm sense of Justice.

Physical-Strength: 7
Intelligence: 6
Speed: 5
Leadership: 1
Melee: 6
Unarmed: 2
Ranged: 4
History:

Born on March 30th, 1978, in Chicago Illinois, Debra Rosaline MacFarland was the first and only child to Duncan and Alexi MacFarland. Duncan, a policeman, was the sole provider for his infant daughter and stay at home wife. Both had a heavy impact one Debra's development, even despite Duncan's scarcity due to his work. Growing up lower middle class, she learned first hand from Alexi that practical was better than glamorous, as well as the worth of reason and consequence from her father.

By the time she was seven, Debra's father had been promoted to Sergeant and was well respected for the part he played in the resurgence of justice and accountability within Chicago during the late seventies. However, the late eighties saw something else, when many of those imprisoned in the seventies came up for parole. When a large number of Parolees actually managed to make it out, and information surfaced that Mob money might have had something to do with that, an investigation was launched and headed by Duncan. It wasn't too long after that that the nightmares began.

Life for the MacFarlands became difficult in the following years, as the investigation demanded more and more of Duncan's time, leaving Alexi to cope with a adolescent girl that woke up screaming almost every night. Debra's dreams were plagued by dark figments and voices, calling after her, telling her of destiny, begging her to open her eyes. It grew to the point where she barely slept at all, and simply did whatever she could to tire herself out.

Nearing her tenth birthday, Debra had joined and been kicked out of every sports team available at her school, as her poor temperament often led to confrontations with her schoolmates. These growing pains weren't helped by Duncan's almost nonexistence at home, as the perpetually stonewalled case ran into obstruction after obstruction. Witnesses vanished, investigators lost their nerve and even the Chief of Police was looking to close the book on the doomed inquisition. Still resting fitfully, coping with chronic insomnia, and without her father's presence at home Debra sought any means to distract herself. It was the decade of the personal computer, which were heavily advertised for their wondrous capabilities. They caught Debra's attention, and she actually received her first constructable computer as something of a belated birthday present.

Late into her preteens, Alexi sought to nurture her daughter's growing interest in computing technology. She bought Debra supplements, instructions and tutorials on just about anything computer related. Debra showed a particular knack for finding flaws in programming language and was obsessed with tinkering with hardware and software alike. Something about the inherent logic and predictability of it all served to relieve the stress of her bizarre dreams. This suited Duncan just fine too, as he had become increasingly protective of his daughter.

Just after Debra's thirteenth birthday, the investigation into the parole board scandal was closed, with no probative evidence found. Duncan was disgraced, and set upon considerably smaller cases. This meant he could once again spend time at home, but Debra's father was a changed man. He was constantly warning her of danger, always cryptic and never specific. He had become obsessed with the 'danger', seldom sleeping and almost always scribbling out an incoherent theory as to what it was. All the theories linked back to the investigation of the parole board, some involving shady organizations, while others alien absurdities. Of course, neither Debra nor Alexi knew about these theories which Duncan kept hidden away in his study.

With his obsession growing, Duncan soon included his daughter, taking her to the firing range after work, sending her for boxing lessons and later Karate lessons. Ultimately trusting of her father, Debra did all she could to exemplify Duncan's desires. On her sixteenth birthday, Debra's father finally brought her into his delusion, sharing with her all the theories, all the things he knew. To him, it was absolutely imperative that he share them with someone he trusted, because he already knew more than 'they' wanted him to. Debra had wanted to reject her father's obvious insanity, tell him he was wrong, that the mob had destroyed his investigation, but something about his theories rang true with her. Maybe it was how he kept telling her to open her eyes. Alexi, on the other hand, was less understanding and, just before Debra graduated high school, filed for divorce before moving the both of them to Harrison, New York to live with Alexi's parents. Debra never saw her father again after that.

Shortly after their exodus, Debra was accepted to Fordham University on scholarship, where she began a major in Computer Sciences and Technologies, as well as a minor in Applied Sciences. A year into her studies, Debra received news that her father had gone missing, shortly after rewriting his will, that then named her the sole beneficiary. Having moved to New York city almost directly after his divorce, Duncan had left Debra a small property near Manhattan which was the first thing that his daughter attended to. To this day, she doesn't remember her first visit to the ancient town house a few blocks from Central Park, only waking up on a charter bus back to Belmont. When she arrived back at her dorm, Debra simply collapsed into a fitful sleep. She dreamed that she was trapped in her dorm room, and could not leave until she was able to rectify the programming on her computer. It took weeks of that lucid dream to find all the problems with the program that seemed to serve no function other than to be broken, and all the while the voices that had tormented her since she was young haunted her tireless work to fix the code. It was only when she solved the last flaw in the programming that Debra glimpsed the code's purpose.

Debra awoke a day after she arrived home from Manhattan, seated at her desk, with her computer in front of her. The faces had been worn off the keys on her keyboard, and her hair was much longer than it had been, and completely unkempt as though it hadn't been washed in some time. But most disconcerting of all was that she remembered the code. Every infinite increment of it.

Though she tried to ignore what had happened in Manhattan, the code lingered in Debra's thoughts, captivating and distracting her in her studies. Something about it was tempting her, demanding it of her. It was almost a month before she finally gave in and tried to once again write out the code she had discovered in her dream. Debra chose to enter it in her dorm room computer, unprepared to put the bizarre string on the University's computers. It was a long and hard process, as the immense programming demanded endless lines of function that allowed for an infinity of different variables. As she recited the code, increment for increment, she had began running out of space on her computer. The endless code demanded that she remove more and more operational data from the desk top computer, until it no longer served any function but to catalog the endless sequence of numbers and directives. Her obsession grew until she spent nearly every free moment reciting the code.

It soon grew to the point that Debra couldn't trim anything off of the hard drive without compromising the basic operations of the computer, a problem she eventually solved by networking the device with her PDA and Laptop, to scavenge the extra space from them. It took nearly till the end of the year, to recite all the data and link it over the network between the three devices.

Debra was not sure exactly what it was that the code even did, other than existed. It preformed some function, endlessly, flawlessly, but had no affect on the three devices it was connected to. That is until she found that all three held data in excess of what they should naturally be able to. There was that, and the fact that the code was always changing. Furthermore, it was self rectifying, and fixed itself no matter what she altered.

In fact, the alterations didn't seem to have any effect on the code. She did notice, however, that the code seemed to impact her dorm room, when she found her a tarnished police badge under her pillow, that her alarm clock was more than six hours ahead. Playing with the code not only seemed to change things in her room, but the impact changes would have were actually predictable and made a strange kind of sense to Debra. She found that she could alter specific things by playing with the code, like forcing the clock to stop for a few minutes, or moving books from one side of the table to the other.

The revelations that came with the programing and all the functions she could perform through it initially frightened Debra, though she found her dreams made more sense now that she understood the code she had created. Everything made much more sense, in fact. All that was left was to discover what had brought about the epiphany that led to the its birth. So, while most of her class mates were preparing to visit home, Debra was preparing for a trip back to Manhattan.

The old town house looked as though it hadn't seen a sole since Debra stumbled out of it more than a year before. It was empty, entirely vacant on the inside with no sign of any modern luxuries like furniture or even a disembodied mattress. The windows had all been boarded up from the inside, and the walls were covered in writing. Debra immediately recognized the scribblings as her father's ever evolving theories, meticulously and neatly written upon the walls. She felt drawn to the basement, which smelled of mold and garlic and several other things that she couldn't immediately identify. In the middle of the bare floor basement was a large desk surrounded by boxes and files. The computer itself still seemed to have power, and was even logged onto the internet. Intrigued by the thought of a computer that had been running for more than a year, none stop, Debra scoured the page it was open on.

The website was called Hunter-net.org. Intrigued, Debra attempted to access the site, which immediately demanded a password from her, calling her 'Seeker331'. Her fingers moved instinctively, and the password they typed earned her access to the unusual website. Debra scoured Hunter-net for hours, finding stories and accounts that all seemed to tie in with the endless theories. It was all insane, of course, speaking of vampires and werewolves and ethereal beings. Worse still, the whole experience rang of a deathly Deja Vu, and Debra was sure she had done the exact same thing when she found the computer a year ago. She remembered the will that her father had left, the one she had lost during her last visit. She remembered logging onto Hunter-net with the login that her father's last testament had provided. And then, when she tried to examine her own profile, the site kicked her out, before a cryptic message flashed across the computer screen, right before the exhausted machine died.
"Find them", it had told her.

Debra dropped out of her university courses a week later and moved to Manhattan shortly after that. She found that her father had been a part of Hunter-net as long as she had owned a computer, posting his theories online through the guise of Seeker331. Not long after his divorce, however, the messages changed drastically. He claimed that, without anyone to endanger, that he was taking a more affirmative stance against the enemy.

His postings became more infrequent from that point on, with his final message simply stating, "Found them... all the answers. If I don't write again, I found the truth."
It was written a week before his disappearance.

Debra spent months trying to figure out what her father had found, scouring Hunter-net for information and even posting on Seeker331 herself. It wasn't long after that all the skills her father had left her came in handy. Desperate for any clue as to his disappearance, she paid a visit to a dockside warehouse in Manhattan, which he mentioned repeatedly in his files as a 'dark place'. It was there that she was confronted by a man as big as a bear, who spoke to her in vicious and crude riddles before tearing through a chainlink fence with his bare hands. It took eighteen 10mm bullets to slow the brute down, and she barely escaped with her life intact.

Debra returned to Hunter-net after that, with a new purpose this time. There were things about the world she didn't understand, impossible things, and the obscure website held answers. She learned what could harm the nethereal things her father had described in his writings, and even developed methods to defend herself using the code. Hunter-net became her purpose, an obsession like it had been for her father. She used her skills with programming to siphon what little money she needed from a variety of different sources, and pitted all of her energy into digging deeper into the world her father's will had opened to her.

It took a year of practicing, observing and preparing before Debra could turn her fantasizing into action, but she knew how to lure out some of the denizens that populated her father's dark world, and where to find others. She's no longer sure if Duncan did find the 'truth', or if he was simply struck down by one of the abyssal creatures he hunted. Whether he was torn from an elusive truth and killed for what he knew or was simply insane and murdered for his obsession no longer mattered to Debra. The Dark world was fascinating and terrifying, and she couldn't turn a blind eye to it.

That has essentially been Debra's life for the past few years. She keeps a low profile, using her knack with computers to all but erase herself from the system. She hasn't pierced very deep into the veil of darkness that surrounds the city, but she has seen more than a few unexplainable things.

The most notable development in recent history for Debra was her first encounter with someone else like her. After a rash of bodies surrounding tenth avenue, Debra had taken to investigating a club that was common to all those found with their bodies drained dry. After almost a couple of month spent learning the regulars of the club, a gothic woman with a taste for red made an appearance. It wasn't her fashion sense that caught the her attention though, but rather that unusually long canines she sported.

Intent on learning more about the fanged woman, suspecting her as the source of the deaths that had plagued the surrounding areas, Debra was soon confronted with the unusual scene of the lady in red fighting back the muscle of the club. Following her intuition, Debra abandoned her original intentions and instead sought to help the outnumbered woman, whom she soon learned was capable of hurling lightning... Hunter-net had spoken, in some hushed places, about people that could bend reality the same as Debra, but she had never seen such a person before...

Debra soon learned that the woman, an Office worker named Amelia, hunted the denizens of the dark city the same as she did and something of an alliance formed between them. They worked for a couple of months together, trying to uncover the source of the deaths near Tenth. They were inevitably unsuccessful, and the killings stopped before they learned anything important, but a close friendship was born from the ashes of that failure.

[Iota]

great read..well thought out.. nice one