PILOT: Annie Acid
Well known across scores of disreputable and dangerous forums, Annie Acid herself is not an especially dangerous individual. Lacking the mental or spiritual fortitude for direct confrontation and pathologically insecure, Annie constructed a mirror around her heart and decided to enjoy the reflections cast by others in lieu of her own experiences - especially those glimpses at the raw edge of life. Obsessed with collecting, distributing and watching footage of the most grotesque and humiliating cyberspace assaults, especially fatal ones, Annie rapidly became an expert in the field of covert surveillance and the corrosive heart of several fandom circles dedicated to Pilots who earn a reputation not unlike that of serial killers, treating their wanton acts as episodic installments in the greatest drama she could ever hope for.
For obvious reasons, her actions have lead her to cross paths indirectly with Seafoam, another Pilot obsessed with collecting vicarious experience - Annie's growing fixation on his elaborate honeypot ambushes and total ghost status, as well as her firm belief he represents a kindred spirit have driven her to pursue direct contact with him for years now, to no avail. Seafoam, dimly aware of her preoccupation with his "work", sees her alternately as a nuisance who could potentially expose him and as a kind of pathetic tourist in the world of serial experience extraction, seeing as she merely watches her collection of dizzyingly high resolution snuff films, whereas he directly relives every moment he pries from the brains of his victims himself. If Annie were to know the depths of his disdain fully, it might shatter her cold mirrored heart forever.
AVATAR: True Crime
Truly helpless in a direct confrontation, lacking all but the most basic neurohazard routines and with no real physical attributes to speak of, True Crime is a highly specialized tool. What it lacks in offense, defense and other combat utilities it more than compensates for in it's prodigious recording, surveillance and stealth capacity. Shrouded in a "chroma fog", a kind of multi-wavelength pan-visual cloak, True Crime records at resolutions higher than necessary by any standard and on hundreds of different depth layers, creating lavish three dimensional holographic dioramas of the worst moments of the lives of countless victims. Capable of subdividing into equally capable swarm units to cover every angle of a given scene, True Crime is directed by Annie to locations both carefully scouted as likely to play host to spectacular violence or, on odd nights, to completely random distant server blocks hoping to strike lucky. Sky is an innately hostile space and with little oversight on any actions that do not impinge on the authority of a given House or Union from the indifferent Firewall, who live only to preserve Sky itself rather than the lives of it's inhabitants it becomes upsettingly easy to bear witness to the worst excesses of human behaviour - and thanks to True Crime, a million unseen traumas can become a glittering chain of frames suspended forever in digital resin, to be lovingly caressed by the greedy fingers of Annie Acid.
