MY MAJOR CRAVING AT THE MOMENT:
Jackson DuMonte is not a sociable guy. He has four close friends at his college, and they're his roommates. Without telling him, they put out an ad to try and get one more roommate in order to get a grant or something from the university. Unfortunately, it would seem that someone screwed up the listing when some girl showed up at the house while Jack was home alone. After a very awkward phone call, in which his roommates realized their mistakes, they worked out a deal with the girl because it was too late to find a rental near the apartment. Unfortunately, that had Jack sharing a room with a girl since everyone else was doubled up already.
Name: Taryn Turing (was Sinead O'Ciardha)
Age: 18
Gender: Female
Appearance:
Personality:
Taryn is brilliant, driven, and reclusive. She is afraid to form close connections to anyone, lest her enemies bring ruin into their lives. She has a near-phobia of guys and romance. Underneath her quiet and taciturn exterior though, she is kind-hearted, and would be affectionate if she dared. She loves computers, robots, and advanced technology in general. Her clothing and possessions are chosen to fit a futuristic aesthetic.
Bio:
Sinead's mother died in childbirth, and her father and brother chose to blame her. She was raised by a series of "girlfriends" of her father's (women brought from poor countries to be sold into prostitution rings, treated more like slaves).
Sinead's father was a member of the Irish Republican Army during the Troubles. Over the years, he honed skills in combat, torture, demolitions, and terror tactics. His job in his cell was to interface with the black market economy (drugs, prostitution, human trafficking, extortion, and so on) in order to make money for the group. It was not long before he lost sight of the cause he'd been ostensibly fighting for and came to enjoy thuggery for its own sake. Over time, and especially as peace negotiations between the Irish resistance and the English began to bear fruit, he shifted over entirely into criminal enterprise.
He started passing on his skills to his son Lorcan from the boy's earliest childhood. When he found out his boy was extorting lunch money from smaller kids at school, he gave him a set of brass knuckles as a present. "That's me boy!" A few years ago, he started working, ironically, for a crime lord who belonged to the people who had once been his sworn enemies: Tobias Wren. After Wren's drug smuggling ring was busted, he was forced to scatter his family, sending his daughter Jasmine and two cousins to America while he, his wife, and youngest daughter fled to Spain. He sent Sinead's father to America, to open up a new branch and have Lorcan and Sinead attend school with Jasmine to keep an eye on her.
After this near brush with arrest and imprisonment, Wren decided to take a page from the big banks and Wall Street firms from the financial crash in 2008: be 'too big to fail.' He arranged for his crime syndicate, the Operation, to graduate from ordinary street crime to serving the most deviant and despicable tastes of the rich and powerful. Since he'd set things up so that if he went down,
they went down, the Operation became all but untouchable to ordinary law enforcement. Sinead's hopes for escape to a better life shrank each day.
As a little girl, she'd seen the movie
Hackers on television, starring Angelina Jolie. Though she had only the faintest grasp of what a "hacker" was, she took inspiration from Jolie's character. The hacker-girl was
powerful in a way that had to do with something real—computers--rather than fantasy magic. Before the credits rolled, Sinead had resolved, with every fiber of her being, to become the best "hacker" she could be. In the world of computer science and robotics, she found a refuge from the everyday terrors and brutality of her normal life.
In school, Sinead pushed herself relentlessly. The sooner she graduated, the sooner she could go to college and get
away. She skipped two grades, entering her junior year in high school when she was 14. Meanwhile, her father started trying to muscle in to the local organized crime scene. During a deal gone bad, he was shot, and the bullet went through his spine. He survived, but was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Since her father's injury, Sinead became "the woman of the house," which meant it was her "duty" to wait on her father and brother, cook their food, and clean up after them.
Until that time, she had been more or less able to learn and tinker in peace. Since she was "just a girl," nothing she did could have significance in her father's eyes. When her father ended up in the hospital and Lorcan took over more responsibilities for running the local branch of the Operation, Lorcan decided that his sister's talent for technology could be put to use. He started forcing her to hack for the gang, create surveillance devices and the like. Sinead had no choice but to bide her time, build "back doors" into the software she created for the Operation, and collect enough evidence to try and bring the whole thing down.
In her junior year, she was selected to join the planning committee for that year's Prom. She and the other kids appointed to the committee had been chosen at the behest of a reality TV show that would be filming their 'stories' in the lead-up to the Prom, and the Prom itself. Thrust into the limelight and the pressures of "Prom romance," Sinead's own budding womanhood became a threat. How long before her father and brother decided she could be used for other things, besides her technological skills? As conflict escalated between Lorcan and Sinead's friends, it became more urgent by the day that she break the Operation's power, win her freedom, and protect the people she cared about. Secretly, she made contact with Mr. Wren's daughter Jasmine, and persuaded her to help her access her father's passwords and encryption keys.
Sinead was not the only one making plans. With the TV show's cameras on him, Lorcan started playing the role of a troubled teen (rather than the hardened criminal he was), the product of a poor upbringing. When he got the chance, he gave the cameras a glimpse of his and Sinead's home life, trapped with a drunken, abusive father and forced to look out for themselves. He knew that Tobias Wren would also be watching, and that what he saw would make him amenable to Lorcan's next move. As soon as he could arrange a private moment with Sinead, he shoved a wad of benjamins into her hand and ordered her to get a dress: she was going to the Prom, whether she liked it or not.
This was out of character for her brother, who otherwise made the notion of romance for her into a living hell. Having her suspicions, Sinead covertly set up hidden surveillance devices throughout her house.
On the night of the Prom, Lorcan had the perfect alibi: he was in public, on national television. Sinead was also present and accounted for, away from computers so she couldn't cause any mischief. Which meant, it was the perfect night to have his 'boys' raid his house and kill his father, framing another gang for the deed. Then, he would be able to take his place as the Operation's newest rising star. After the Prom, Sinead stepped away from her date to have a private conversation with Lorcan, and egged him into telling her why he wanted her to go in the first place. That's when Lorcan made his fatal mistake. He bragged about
his latest triumph, that they wouldn't have to put up with their father's crap anymore, and
he was now the local boss. "You're the boss alright," Sinead replied. "Just remember: in Mr. Wren's eyes, ye were
responsible for me," she told him in her lilting Irish accent before rapidly backing away to rejoin her date.
That's when Federal agents and SWAT cops boiled out of hiding to place Lorcan under arrest for the murder of his father, and the long list of other crimes for which Sinead had been patiently accumulating proof through the very technology he'd had her create for him to commit them with. Then Sinead drew her smartphone and triggered the release of the incriminating files Jasmine had helped her acquire. By the next day, WikiLeaks and the major news networks had all received the files, and the biggest corruption scandal since Watergate had exploded into the news cycle.
Sinead was whisked away into Witness Protection, placed with a foster family, and given a new name, Taryn. She finished high school online, so she could stay out of the public eye until her "moment of fame" from the "Teen Life" reality show could fade. She has graduated from high school, and recently received a scholarship to Columbia University's robotics engineering program. She is currently taking part in
Festo Robotics' Bionic Learning Program, and seems a shoo-in for a researcher position at the company.
All in all, things seemed to be looking up, at least until there was a mix-up with her application for student housing at Columbia. The person taking her application over the phone got distracted, and accidentally typed her name as 'Tyr Taring.' During processing, it was assumed to be a male name, and she was assigned to a male housing block...
