Ware's Questionnaire

Ware lives near San Francisco, because it is near all of the things that she might ever need. Silicon Valley, food, boba, and water. Her home, however, is not actually in San Francisco. That would be crazy - there's people there. No, her home is, rather sensibly, a large underground bunker-lab. It contains state of the art facilities including but not limited to: A trampoline, a firing range, a PS5, seven different kinds of 3D printer, a trampoline, a large kitchen with a "cook for you" robot (food processor, let's be real), a trampoline, various biology, botany, and robotics labs (separated by type, of course, and with air-lock bulkheads) and a trampoline.

She has no idea how she gets her money. There's at least three people and probably one shackled AI that manage that kind of thing for her. Probably "investing" or something. Maybe a patent or two is sold when the need arises. The rest just builds up in her accounts from interest and she doesn't know how to spend it any faster. It's spent on random purchases of materials, experiments, and any charities she hears about (aside from the right wing ones, anyway). She also will occasionally pay random medical debts or student tuition payments and loans. When she hears of any, anyway, which isn't that often.

Ware has, for as long as she can really remember, had more money than she is able to spend. She also has, for almost as long, thought that that's not something that should be possible. She knows her having these resources means someone else doesn't, and she's not even able to use and enjoy all of them! She also realized that if it's impossible to properly disperse her funds under this system she has to do the next best thing - disperse the system. Into nothingness. She hasn't really thought too hard about what that actually means, as she's got a bit of a kindergartner philosophy. Sharing is good, be nice to people, etc. To this end, she's considered just blowing up all the politicians, but thought that might cause more problems in the long run. So she's still work-shopping means. And End.

Anyway she would definitely kill for it if it was necessary! But it probably isn't, she thinks. And it's not really realistic to think she might die seeking to destroy capitalism, I mean have you seen how much money she has? She'll be fine.

The most defining event in Ware's life has got to be when she inherited a large enough sum of money that she doesn't actually know how much it was, even today. Her parents used to control everything about her life before that moment, but then they died so she can do whatever she wants now! She immediately got to work building her new home and making her money other people's problem, and then retreating from society at large to work on random bullshit that interested her. Just think, before that moment she had someone that dressed and made her up just to go to a sitting room, where she was supposed to look pretty and not do anything. Not anymore!

Ware's closest acquaintance is "R4D", pronounced "Rad". They've never actually met in person but Ware hired them on the dark web to test out their random inventions and send back feedback and video. Most of the time, the pay is just keeping the invention - unless something goes terribly wrong like it usually does, in which case Ware pays their hospital bills and gives them extra on top. This is why we get beta testers, people!

There's also Dominique Crenn, the world's best female chef. Ware pays her to make her food and ship it via drone to her kitchen every day. It only costs her about $500 a day when all is said and done, and the wine pairings are always to die for!

Finally, Ware's main accountant (the accountant manager, maybe? The point of contact, anyway...) is a guy called Richard Chin. He knows a lot about numbers, but more importantly knows about people and how to deal with Ware's bullshit.

Ware's childhood was perfect - according to her parents. She was the ideal child who did what she was told and got perfect marks in school. She had just the right amount of friends (most of whom were more interested in coming over to her house and the snacks and games available there than in her) and excelled at every extracurricular she tried. She did not try any sports. Her favorite way to spend her free time was in the library, reading encyclopedias and technical manuals. Her parents put her into a prep school so she could "be successful" and she excelled there as well, although didn't have time to entertain any connections with people outside of work-related networking. None of those people really matter any more, as after her parents died Ware changed her name (to Ware - a mononym.) and distanced herself from those people - letting her business keep up any needed connections for her.

Ware has never been very interested in men. She spent most of her early years assuming that girls married men because they had to, and that she would eventually have to settle for one - but that obviously if they could everyone would want to marry a girl instead. By the time she realized what the reality of the situation was (that she was a lesbian) her schooling had gotten intense enough that she never really did anything about it. She tends to get a small infatuation with anyone that is a moderately attractive woman that isn't trying to use her for her money, though. She shared a drink with Karin Lavoro in her latest contract, and that made her realize she could maybe seek out romance soon.

One of Ware's worst fears is that she will lose access to all of her wealth. If that were to happen, she would no longer be able to be the master of her own destiny. Her future would be left to the whims of fate and she would once more be forced to do things that she doesn't want to do. Everything she has done since inheriting her parents' wealth has been to distance herself from who they were forcing her to be, and to make sure that she did not rely on others for her survival. If that was all stripped away she would lose herself in despair.

But that's not the only thing she fears:

She fears that even after she has amassed enough power and allies to finally take down the corrupt systems that made her parents treat her the way they did, that even then nothing will improve. That under any system humans would still act the same way, and still treat each other this horribly.

Or, perhaps worse, that once she has the power to go through with her goal, she will have become the very thing she despises, and won't be able to go through with it, in the end.

Ware's most prized possession obviously has to be her Energizer Exo-Skeleton. It is proof of the superiority of her mind, and her skills at creating tools. It keeps her alive in these dangerous jobs, and helps her to make alliances even though she's not good at talking by offering trades with her fellow contractors in exchange for their own Energizer Exo-Skeletons. The shield it creates has already saved one such contractor that she has a deal with, Edith. It has yet to actually save her, but surely a moment will come soon where it will be all that stands between her and destruction at the hands of some supernatural beast. Until then, she will keep fine tuning its systems - next on the docket is a plasma launcher so she can defend herself without having to dirty her collectible weapons, and without ever running out of ammunition. All in all, a beautiful piece of technology.

The biggest problem in Ware's life right now has to be figuring out how to mass produce her energizer exo-skeletons once they're ready to go. The prototypes are doing great but they each require careful and personal attention throughout the process of their creation - which is working well enough for her current needs but means it will be impossible to outfit any sizable force, or village, with her designs. This means that if some mass production method is not figured out, she will have to go about fixing the world in another way entirely. Perhaps self-maintaining agricultural robots, or nanites, might be another route - but then theyd need some sort of way to ensure their spoils were distributed, instead of owned. This is why the energizer exo-skeletons are plan A: give the people the power to seize the means themselves, and the rest of those problems would fall away. Ideally.

Ware used to like sleeping in, but since she's become a contractor she has been keeping her Energized Exo-Skeleton (™) and it helps her get up and moving around early in the morning. She gets enough sleep to not feel the deprivation, carefully monitoring her vitals to ensure that's the case, and then once she's at the end of one of her sleep cycles the suit gets her up and she gets dressed for the day while her food is made and delivered to the room next to her lab so she can eat it quickly and then go get to work. While eating, she checks her messages from her agents and her "people" to ensure nothing is on fire that needs her attention, and then as she walks into her lab she goes through any incoming field reports of prototype testing and notes from previous nights so she knows if there is anything specific she needs to work on that day.

Ware's definition of "special place" might not match with most people in her bracket. When she was younger, her parents had multiple maids whose entire jobs were to ensure that Ware was made up, in a dress, and looking drop dead gorgeous for when they went to donor events, balls, and other shmoozy places. She always hated the whole process, so nowadays she doesnt do any of that at all - she doesnt go out, and if she has to for some reason outside of her control she doesn't wear make-up, she's cut her hair short so she doesn't have to deal with it, and she wears baggy but high quality clothes that hide the frame of her exo-skeleton.

Because of this, it doesn't take her long at all to get ready - just a few minutes to throw on something nice and make sure her hair's not a rat's nest and she's good to go.

Ware doesn't keep track of her birthdays anymore. She usually finds out from her accountant sending her an e-mail in the morning, and then depending on how she's feeling she'll get something nice for herself, like an extra trampoline or a new VR room and call it a day.

That said, now that she's starting to make so many breakthroughs so quickly she might set up some sort of promotion for her equipment on that day. She recently got invited to Offr Red.... maybe for her birthday this year she'll set up a new exo-skeleton and sell it for other tech artifacts. That'll be fun!

Ware's greatest regret is that she let her parents control her life so exactly for so long. That they had to die for her to break free. That she really truly believed she could never be anything more than their puppet. She spent so, so long just coasting in her life, not making any decisions or understanding that she always had a choice. Even after they died, it took her a little to understand that there was no one to tell her what to do anymore. It has made existing significantly more difficult than it would otherwise have had to be. The money helped, of course, but she will never be able to stop wondering... What if she had fought back? What if she had let herself be her own person and grow and make mistakes and fail and fall and tear away her chains? If she had run, like she wanted?

Ware's gifts are her unlocking the potential of her mind, and tapping into the arcane reality that she finds herself in now. This is most obvious with her first gift: During her first contract she met a man who was able to create a barrier for as long as he concentrated. She studied that effect, and offloaded the concentration portion into the electronics in her exo-skeleton. Without the gifts, she would have been able to create an exo-skeleton that helped with mobility and everyday tasks. Instead, that has been pushed past its natural stopping point into becoming a machine tuned with a touch of the arcane, which protects its wearer in dangerous situations as well as helping with everyday tasks and mobility. As she does more and more contracts, her mind is more and more able to parse and utilize the arcane in her tech, and learning how to reproduce more varied and powerful effects.

A difficult question to answer, after all Ware has been through. She grew up Catholic, and then became an atheist - or agnostic at best - after the death of her parents. But... she's seen what are essentially minor gods about once a month now. She's seen the dead interact with the world after their own death. She's seen so many unexplainable things, and so many things that she has since learned to explain. First and foremost, she is a scientist. She needs to know more, to understand. Spirituality is one facet of the way people understand the world around them, and it would be foolish to simply dismiss it. The fact is, given enough time and power, anyone can do anything. This has been proven to her. So, she wouldn't call herself religious, but she's no fool. The unexplainable is one good ritual away from being explained, and if there is a capital G "God" out there... Well, it isn't the Abrahamic one.

This was touched on a little in the last question, but Ware has definitely learned to expand her ideas further than they otherwise would have reached. She had already been doing research into the idea of integrating the supernatural into her work, although at first she was looking for things with unexplained regenerative properties. This didn't pan out, but the contracts allowed her to witness and examine the effect of many confirmed supernatural things, in order to attempt - and succeed at - their integration with her work. Even when young she was the kind of person who might be surprised by, say, meeting a ghost, but wouldn't think it changed anything about the world. If people believe in something, there's a reason for it. It might not all be correct or true, but belief is a powerful thing. And there's reasons for every belief each person holds. She knew already the world was wider than what she had access to, she's just happy to have gained that access now.