Basic Introduction

Character Biography

Early Life

Dawn’s life started out normal enough --- She had a standard family, a standard education, and she was exploring a growing passion in programming and gardening — two avenues of work that could prove very lucrative in the Alorii homeworld. Being a very meek and modest individual, Dawn chose to go with the flow rather than make waves; it just wasn’t in her nature to put herself out there like that. She’s always kept to herself, holding a few close friends and just trying to live the best life she can for her sake and theirs. When she wasn't engaging in her passions of labor, she often sought comfort and intrigue in literature of great adventures, and found herself producing idle doodles and her own amateur literature of such grandiose tale of adventure.

As Dawn grew older, she began to take part in a rather common career path for those with her interests: tending to the plants and greenery that grew along and coiled throughout the buildings of the Alorii civilization. It wasn't necessarily hard work as much as repetitive, often spending hours slowly being raised and lowered along the side of buildings by harness to water, prune, and harvest the plants that they coexisted with. Repetitive as it might be, it was one of the most important jobs to ensure the greenery never overtook and damaged the underlying structure. The process was made easier through the use of gloves that contained long and prehensile wires, which could be used to cut at and handle plants in narrow geometry and to manage more delicate varieties of flora --- and Dawn was quite good at maneuvering the tools, making a name for herself among the workforce. With a pair of 'tether gloves', Dawn could do to a building in one day what often took a whole week for the average workforce.

It was that very fact that would lead to disaster, though. With Dawn so effective, she was often sent out with one or two others, or oftentimes entirely on her own. The mechanism used to raise and lower her along the building was remote-operated, after all, so it was easy enough for her to control it herself... yet that also meant she had no spotter to ensure the mechanism was functioning properly. When the cable lock gave out and took the failsafe with it, there was nobody to pull the mechanical break, and try as she might to slow her fall by snagging the plants with her tether gloves, it couldn't stop her impact with the ground.

It was a nasty impact. Things were looking grim by the time she made it to the hospital, and her life was fading by the second...

...But there was so much she hadn’t done yet, so much that she couldn’t do if she died now! Her life flashed before her eyes, the routine that had once felt so comforting now feeling so dull and taunting to her. Two whole decades going by in a constant cycle of work and play, so little changing over the years that it all blurred together. The only things to truly stand out to her were those very stories she read in her idle time, the artworks she produced and admired of fantastical stories and adventures. Things that, now, felt so alluring and made her feel so foolish for not pursuing.

Because she was going to die, and when she really stopped and thought… there was nothing that she could truly be remembered for. No unique experiences that she’d had, no mark left on the world or the people around her. She’d done everything she was expected to do, and nothing more.

They say that you die twice: Once when your body decays and falls away, and once when the last person to remember you ceases to exist.

It scared her how close those two deaths could be.

Perhaps it was that, or maybe it was fear — fear of the unknown, of what would come after. Maybe it was youthful stubbornness that drove her, or even just sheer willpower. But whatever truly gave her the strength needed, it was all these things that came together in a spectacular moment that in itself defied all expectations. In that moment, Dawn awoke in herself a power that none other had. Through fighting the rules of the universe and winning, she gained the ability to pull back the curtain and view the very building blocks the world was founded upon.

She was an unknown variable, a new type of being that had potential to destabilize the very core of the universe… and with such power, would come a conflict no individual could ever truly prepare for.

The Era of Eve

Having access to the underlying structure of the world came at a cost. Not only did it require Dawn to detach from her body (leaving it entirely vulnerable as she essentially astral projected), but it also was quite energy hungry. Even reaching into the data of the world proved quite exhausting mentally, leaving her physically awake but mentally overstimulated and drained on more than one occasion; she was grateful for it, though, as the exhaustion helped sleep come far more easily in the months after her brush with death.

During one of her late-night bouts of 'data-gazing', a realization clicked in Dawn's head as she watched the nebulous bits of information floating about coalesce into something tangible: the structure of the world's data was shockingly reminiscent of the code she often spent hours writing in her days off, so much so that she began to wonder if she could alter it...

Altering the data of the world seemed to be the physically exhasuting part, though not as much as she would've thought. She spent the better part of an hour doing simple changes: Changing the innards of an apple into a pear, making a white mug blue. Duplicating her mother's delicious candied bacon so she could steal some away without anyone knowing --- little, seemingly insignificant things. When she stopped her whole body ached dully, as though she'd spent that hour exercising instead, but even amongst the physical and mental exhaustion she was utterly giddy at the implications of what more she could do with this power. For once, it felt like her brush with death had actually done something good for her, and she looked forward to what good she might be able to do with this power in turn!

Yet, for all the good she thought it was to do, her actions set in motion a force she didn't even begin to know how to stop. A being that spent all of its time monitoring the world for disturbances, an entity that sought to maintain the order of reality and correct the course of anomalies, found itself staring at something that raised its alarms: Alterations to the Codebase of the world... made by a being of elevated privilege. There was only meant to be one of such status, and that was the overseer herself: Eve.

So, off to Alori she went, keen to pinpoint the cause of these alterations and deal with it.

Dawn was walking home from her data-writing testing ground when she was confronted by Eve, the woman ethereral and mysterious. She normally preferred to infiltrate the anomaly's life and correct the course through more delicate means, but with something like Dawn, there was simply too much risk. Dawn was bound and encased by the road as it seemed to rise up to swallow her whole, and Eve seemed intent on wiping her from existence itself. Yet, try as she might to summon forth Dawn's data, it seemed as though there was a strange block. Eve could not access Dawn's data unless she permitted it. Taking advantage of that moment of shock, Dawn broke free from her body, rendering her prison of earth into sand and dragging her body away to safety.

By burying herself alive beneath a thin layer of gravel she seemed to evade Eve, and quickly came to understand that any use of her newfound abilities gave a vague 'ping' of her location, when Eve stood nearly on top of her for about five minutes before departing. It was for this reason that Dawn had to force her way back to the surface without use of her new abilities, making her very glad that she hadn't buried herself any lower.

Though she narrowly escaped death this time, their exchange set into motion a chain of events that would unfold over the next decade. Dawn quickly left home with little notice or apology to her parents, adopting a nomadic lifestyle to prevent Eve from narrowing her search. Dawn knew the only way she'd ever live without fear was to grow strong enough to defend herself, however, and thus began the game of cat and mouse that spanned all across Alori, and soon Chonol. Dawn would travel, practicing with her powers -- Codebase, as she'd learn they were called during her travels -- as much as she could before Eve would stumble upon her. There were periods where Eve seemed to entirely ignore her use of Codebase, as though her attention was elsewhere, but then there were times that a single usage would have Eve bearing down on her in no time at all.

Very early on, Dawn was forced to find creative ways to defend herself. Having to abandon her body to fight meant she was at constant risk of Eve destroying her effective corpse in her absence, but that also meant that she could use it as a distaction vector. Eve's Codebase strikes were methodical and structured, often using similar methods of warping the world around them to assault Dawn and bind her in place. Meanwhile, Dawn was far more comfortable with creating tools, producing matter that didn't exist moments before and disrupting the natural order of the world to produce chaotic and unpredictable assaults. If Eve tried to cave a whole forest in on her from every direction, Dawn would manifest a simple cannon with enough stopping power to blast a hole right through the wooden prison. If Eve tried to rip boulders from the earth to turn Dawn to paste, Dawn would spend that same time turning the isolated balls of rock and earth into nothing but air before they could ever hit. Basic counters, yet ones Eve never had to face becuase she'd never fought an equal.

Dawn wasn't sure when she realized it, but at some point she caught onto the fact that Eve had stopped trying to kill her. She would throw everything she had at Dawn, sure, and sometimes she would even innovate in a way that felt directly inspired by Dawn's own usage of codebase (though never in such a way that she couldn't immediately revert to 'preserve the balance'), but when it came down to it, even if Eve had the perfect opening to end her, she would just... depart. She never understood why, but the answer was simple: Dawn had proven interesting to Eve, interesting in ways that nothing had before. The rate at which Eve could consistently put Dawn into a loss state meant she felt comfortable letting her live, to pursue that intrigue and experience something more than the dull monotony of her work even if only for a short while.

Once she realized the change, though, Dawn took full advantage of it. She took more time than before in any one place to train, and even ended up spendinga bit of time getting a neural implant manufactured for her that would allow her to ""exist in superposition"", projecting from her body while intertwining them in a localized field that allowed her to continue controlling her physical form. No longer was she always half-vulnerable in her fights, and it even meant that further fights entailed physical combat from her side. Where she might reduce an incoming attack to dust with Codebase one moment, the next she'd smash her Tili-hardened fists clean through a chunk of concrete that had been sharpened to a lethal point and launched her way. She even managed to acquire a pair of Tether Gloves, which led to the first instnace of her actually landing a physical blow on Eve instead of the duo lobbing attacks at one another. She'd caught Eve with multiple tethers, then reeled them in such that she landed a left hook that actually seemed to daze the godlike entity. It was the first time Dawn actually felt like she had a chance

Days blended into weeks into months, and soon it'd been years since this careful dance with Eve had started. Despite their utter antagonism towards one another, and despite Dawn's strong resentment, there was this strange sense of mutual respect. They recognized each other for being as capable as they were, even if there was an unspoken understanding that their game of cat and mouse would someday come to an end.

And come to an end it did.

Dawn got sloppy. She left herself open to a counterattack, because in all their years of combat Eve had never 'degraded herself' to the level of a physical attack.

The sole of Eve's heel smashed her skull, at the exact place needed to render the neural implant in her head into a nonfunctional piece of techtrash.

Dawn was sucked back into her body, and in that instance Eve bound her up fully. Though they'd played this game for so long, Eve knew she couldn't allow it to go on for any longer --- that she'd been forced to use physical strikes showed her that things would soon spiral fully out of control, and a world where Dawn became superior, interesting as it might be, was not one that Eve could allow. She revealed that she'd been meticulously repairing the damage of every past battle after Dawn fled, righting the wrongs of reality where possible and minimzing the impact of both Dawn's actions and their bouts. Always keeping a lid on the chaos. But, in this most recent fight, a whole city had been evacuated. Entire buildings were dragged into the fight, whole city blocks leveled. The chaos was growing too widespread, too chaotic.

Dawn was going to die. The life crushed out of her, and with it, the risk of the world falling into disarray and anomalous unpredictability.

But, for everything Dawn had seen and experienced, she'd still failed to make anything of herself. Eve reverted any mark of her presence along her decade of travel, had Eve erased the memories of those she interacted with, too? Was she condemned to a simultaneous death of body and self? Her hopes to do something good with this power were fading by the second. All she'd brought was destruction, all she'd done was play into the game that Eve had made her an unwilling participant in.

When dealing with an anomaly like herself, it wasn't surprising that lightning would strike twice. Once more, Dawn pushed through a certain end through nothing but sheer force of will. She fought in Superposition, without the help of any tech. She used everything she'd learned, everything she'd been forced to overcome, and brutalized Eve in a way that neither even knew was possible. Every strike brought Dawn closer to a world where she could once again know peace, every use of codebase taught to her by the decade of running and fighting brought this all closer to an end... but, when the time came to strike Eve down as Eve had meant to do to her mere minutes prior...

She could not.

All of this had started because Eve opted to try and destroy her. Rather than try and coexist, or to adapt to the new reality they were faced with so long ago, Eve simply wanted to extinguish it. If Dawn did the same, she was sure she would not be able to sleep soundly, feeling herself to be no better than the woman who'd chased her to the ends of the planet twice over. So instead, she extended an olive branch, one so undeserved and unearned on Eve's part that it stunned the entity.

A simple request: To leave Dawn in peace, to never do to anyone what Eve had done to her. In exchange, Dawn would walk away, and they could both live on. So naive, so forgiving, even after a decade of what even Eve knew to be a form of living hell --- even after so long, Dawn proved utterly unpredictable to her, still so new and exciting even when she thought she'd eeked all she could. She was sure that to let Dawn exist unhindered would result in disruption of the balance, a risk of disarray that she could not pull the world back from.

...But that was new. That would be... interesting. And it would most certainly prove less destructive than anything they'd become capable of in their final bouts.

Their climactic battle ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. With a shaking of hands and a parting of ways, Dawn was free... and after so long on the run, she wasn't sure what to do with that freedom.

Later Years