Diana Foster's Questionnaire

Diana grew up in a suburb of Chicago and moved to Pasadena to study at Caltech (mechanical engineering with a focus on surveillance systems). Unfortunately, she was expelled in her junior year due to a string of paranoid episodes that culminated in her wiretapping and planting cameras in her dormmates rooms. She ended up stuck in California with 0 friends, 2 charges of felony unlawful surveillance, 5 years of parole to serve, and 80,000 dollars of student debt. Needless to say, her career options were limited. However, her unique skill set and unique criminal background lent itself well to paparazzi work. Unfortunately, paparazzi work does not pay very much, so she currently lives in a studio apartment with four roommates in downtown Pasadena. Three of them are also paparazzi, which has caused a fairly intense rivalry and some very frequent carpool commutes (the three of them share a single smartcar). The fourth roommate is just some girl named Laura. She doesn't really do much. The apartment looks completely filthy at first glance but upon further inspection, nothing on the ground is actually trash, they've just decided it was easiest to organize their possessions into messy piles.

As it stands, paparazzi work is the only thing that's able to pay her rent. She doesn't think of her job as immoral, she views publication of any private information to be altruistic, what mostly bothers her is just how boring it usually is, she wishes that she could spend all day ambushing and photographing something a bit more significant than celebrity sex scandals. Any payment she gets from her clients is almost entirely used up by paying rent and meeting the minimums on her debt, her only non-essential expense is are the frequent spare quarters spent to use any coin operated binoculars she sees around touristy areas. Diana also runs a cryptoleak account and accompanying blog where she posts all her non celebrity photography as well as the occasionally political or conspiratorial diatribe. While she puts hours into the blog every day, her patreon, ko-fi, venmo, cashapp, ad revenue, and cameo have only netted her a combined total of 3 dollars and 74 cents.

Diana fundamentally believes that secrecy is the primordial engine that drives all human evil and all societal ills. A public without a full, clear understanding of the workings of the world is a public that is unable to act in any meaningful way against evil. The emotional underpinnings of her ideology had existed in her for most of her life, but she only began to intellectualize her feelings and extend them to the societal level later in her life when she began to research and understand illuminations. An entire world, an entire aspect of reality, had been hidden from the public for who knows how long. Surely, had research into the supernatural been publicized, tens of thousands would never have died defenseless in the face of a threat they were utterly ignorant to. From this view she slowly developed a vision of a perfect world, one of complete elucidation. In pursuit of that utopia, she is willing to do practically anything, but would only take another's life (outside a self-defence scenario) or lay down her own if it meant an unprecedented step forward to universal omniscience.

When Diana was twelve, a secret that her father had been holding for years came to light and ripped apart her family (going to keep this slightly ambiguous for now just in case an opportunity for a fun setting tie-in comes up, otherwise, assume affair). The ensuing divorce was messy and drawn out. By the time it was over, Diana's mother was in no state to be a single parent, despite her newly won custody. Diana managed to salvage a mostly normal, if somewhat maladapted, adolescence by committing herself to academics. She knew her mother loved her and was trying her best, but it was clear her father's lie had irreparably shattered her. Although she would never admit it, seeing her mother like this formed in her the rigid core from which her entire belief system grew around.

The only people that Diana talks to on a consistent basis are her roommates Terrance, Imogen, Mel and Laura.

Mel: 24-year-old woman with an extremely eclectic style. Has a Chelsea cut, somehow pulls it off. Diana's best (and only) friend, met each other in freshman year at Caltech but lost contact for a while after Mel dropped out second semester. Mel is affable and loudly charismatic, but she's also constantly oblivious of her surroundings and like definitely a little bit dumb. She's very different from Diana in a way that clearly balances her out when they're together.

Terrance: Late 30s balding British man, he's very hardened to the business and talks about celebrities like they're toys that spit out money if you yell at them loud enough. Where Mel usually yells out a charming one-liner to catch the attention of celebrities, Terrance's approach is usually screaming obscenities. Other than that, he is a shockingly kind, non-problematic man in his personal life.

Imogen Cooper: Hacker-type gal in her mid 20s, she usually looks a little unkempt, but never unclean. At one point, she used to be a more active paparazzo, but eventually she switched to just doing desk work. Now she gives out tips and information on the locations of celebrities to her roommates in exchange for a cut of whatever they make off the photos.

Laura: Just kind of there sometimes

Diana was a remarkably well-adjusted child right up until the start of eighth grade, two loving parents, small school in the suburbs, all that. A few days after her thirteenth birthday she saw her father downtown pushing a stroller she didn't recognize alongside a woman she didn't recognize. She hadn't said anything there but she spent the next week following him, looking through his computer, listening to all his hushed phone conversations. He was a sloppy liar and it didn't take much pulling on the thread to unravel it fully. Two wives, two families, two houses, the whole deal. He'd been keeping up this lie since Diana was a toddler. She'd had no idea, neither had her mother, and it wrecked both of them. Diana found solace in academics, not as an escape so much as an exercise of control, and it served her well! She passed high school with flying colours and got into a good university. Her mother didn't find solace in very much at all, she never really was the same and Diana mostly raised herself. She didn't have many friends after middle school and never really developed the social skills she should've, but she was never really interested in friends. Not that she wasn't interested in the other kids, she was, but only ever passively.

Diana has never trusted herself or another person enough for romance. She would occasionally develop crushes in her adolescence but they were never reciprocated and she beat the feeling out of herself. She isn't disgusted by the idea of romance, but she doesn't long for it either and she's gotten in her own way at every opportunity she's ever had. She thought she might have been in love with her best friend Mel for a couple of months, but she decided she wasn't and it was just that Mel was the coolest person she's ever met (she definitely is in love with her best friend Mel).