Ovidia

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I'd rather have sixty years and the long goodbye than never having said hello in the first place.

(Hover over an underlined phrase to see additional, frequently non-diagetic, context about that phrase.)

Description

• Gender: 83% girl
• Pronouns: she/her/her/hers/herself
• Species: Spring Peeper

A rendering of Ovidia using the HeroForge miniature creator.

Ovidia is tall, lanky, and froggy, with very thin arms but thick thighs and calves. Her skin is shiny and azure, with light buttercup yellow along the underside of her chin and down her front, ending in a W shape that follows the line of her mons and the creases of her thighs. She has X markings across her back in the same buttercup yellow, and stripes on the tops of her forearms and thighs. Her eyes' sclera are brick-red, with slit pupils. Her hands and feet are both webbed, with buttercup-coloured palms and soles, and bulbous fingers and toes.

She typically wears a fitted black Counter-Logic Gaming esports jersey with the blue logo across the front, and a pair of black yoga capris, while keeping her feet bare. She wears a smart watch on her wrist, and a belt clip for a smartphone. Around her neck, she wears a brass molecule necklace on a black cord.

Background

Ovidia's actual job title is "Cerebral Sysadmin", a tongue-in-cheek blending of the two lobes of her line of work. In her universe, a brain-computer interface has been largely perfected, and her job is to use it to diagnose and correct errors in thought processes the way an IT professional diagnoses and corrects errors in computer processes. She has a limited amount of control over the biochemistry of the brain, which isn't to say that she has a limited amount of control over the qualia a patient experiences, which is where most of her work lies.

She's not just a script-writing psychiatrist, she's also a client. She suffers from unipolar depression, a condition that can be temporarily, but not permanently, kept at bay through the use of these same techniques. She undergoes weekly treatment in order to function properly, which triples her chance of developing Alzheimer's later in life; no technology is perfect. But she is young and smart and cursed with inertia, and she has been given the opportunity to escape the laws of physics, so she's taken it.

Personal Life

The brain-computer interface is, of course, used for much more than business. Ovidia in particular is an avid esports player— her favoured game is Counterstrike —and she frequently wagers her own personality in matches. Because it's so easy to change herself, and to change back, she doesn't have any special attachment to her own personality, viewing it as a kind of aesthetic she can swap out if the mood strikes her.

By default, though, her personality is open and caring in her professional life, and good-naturedly shit-talking and competitive in her personal life. She equally enjoys winning and losing, as long as the match itself is high-level and interesting, and she has a team she likes, but she doesn't tie her own emotional fortunes to that team; she roots for the entire tournament, and voraciously consumes VODs when she can't see other matches. Her first and strongest love is always for the intricate dance of the metagame, and she is both fascinated by and highly supports changes to even entrenched pillars of a system that force people to make more interesting choices.

Gender

Her self-description of "83% Girl" is a tongue-in-cheek reference to an online quiz that purported to scan your brain and tell you what your gender was. She does not, in fact, believe that the quiz is accurate, nor that the vastness of gender can be quantified with a definitive percentage. At best it's an indication of how closely a person's gender expression aligns with what the author thinks the gender expression of a gender is. But she still liked the ring of it, so she kept it as a meme.

Gear

Her main brain-computer interface is a diadem peripheral attached to a computer. Thus, any computer with enough bandwidth can have one. Handheld devices tend to not have enough power (the 2021 equivalent would be a tablet attempting to run a VR rig), so the most powerful changes are only truly accessible if she has access to a desktop.

That said, simple scripts can be sideloaded through the use of special audio renders. She even has one for self-defense, albeit an illegal one, as it bypasses the neural encryption that people have to protect theirselves from exactly such an attack. This is deployed through the speaker in her smartwatch.

She possesses some consumer-grade mood-altering technology, as well. A walkman-like device uses the same audio interface to produce a continuous state in the user. It has two dials: "Euphoria" and "Relaxation". Ovidia uses it both as a sleep aid and a kink platform, as at high settings, she can be aware but unresponsive and/or spontaneously orgasm.