stretch i am on my fucking knees gasping 4 air SHARE THE HACKER LORE!!!!!!LIKE RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!
It occurs to me that I don't think I've ever fully shared Hacker's lore on Tumblr so this might be a little long but bear with me
What HASN'T changed is her OG backstory—Tess's mom was a pageant queen in her youth, and from the moment Tess was born, it was decided that she'd follow in her mother's footsteps. She entered her first beauty pageant at age 3 & from that point on, everything about Tess's life was planned out. What she ate, what she wore, how she spoke, how she spent her time, etc. She was enrolled in tons of extracurriculars (dance classes, singing lessons, piano, guitar, etc) as supplements when pageants weren't going on. Her mom was EXTREMELY critical of her. Nothing she did was ever good enough for her mom, and the only thing that seemed to satisfy her was winning competitions. Second place was only the first loser. If she didn't win, then her effort was worthless.
When she graduated high school, she left for university on a pageant scholarship. It was there that she discovered her passion for computer science. However, she still hadn't completely escaped her mother's influence. She was not supportive of her major at all & insisted she should be using her time to find a husband. She also kept pressuring her to participate in pageants and other competitions at the university level.
NOW here's the new stuff—
After getting her degree, Tess decided she needed a clean slate. She put her computer science skills to work and found ways to completely erase her online identity so her mom wouldn't be able to track her and moved to New Mexico. She got a boring little office job at Mann Co. and was content for a while.
A year or so into her job, she was approached by a rival company looking to buy some of Mann Co.'s confidential information. It was a pretty significant sum—more than she'd managed to earn at her shitty desk job in her entire tenure. She agreed and hacked into Mann Co.'s system, got the info, and handed it off to the buyer. Confident that she'd covered her tracks, everything seemed to go pretty smoothly.
About a month later, she was ambushed on her way home from work, knocked unconscious, and taken to an unspecified location. There, she was bound to a chair & face-to-face with Admin herself. Admin explained that her contact wasn't as discrete as they'd promised and had sold her out as soon as their own life was threatened. With their confession, Admin could easily have her charged with corporate espionage—and with her contacts, it wouldn't be difficult to pull strings so that Tess would die before seeing the outside of a cell.
But! Good ol' Admin hates to waste talent. She admits that, without the contact's confession, she never would have known it was her. So she offers her a deal. She can either rot in federal prison...or she could agree to participate in a biological experiment. All she has to do is sign some papers. Not wanting to die in prison, she signed whatever Admin put in front of her.
What she didn't know was that she was agreeing to have her body go through the process of respawning—a highly dangerous and experimental process with a 90% fatality rate—and sign over most of her rights to Mann Co. The experiment was a success. She did, in fact, respawn completely intact and functionally identical to her previous self...though she definitely saw Something during the in-between. As a result, she is now the property of Mann Co. and given the code name Hacker.
Admin puts her to work as Miss Pauling's assistant, primarily so she can monitor her. Miss Pauling is the only other person who knows Hacker's circumstances. None of the other mercs know—they're all under the assumption that she signed up to be a part of Team Fortress willingly. Her job is mostly just what Miss Pauling does, with one exception. Miss Pauling has not undergone the process of respawning, so she is just as susceptible to dying & being dead as any normal person. Because Hacker has the ability to revive, her primary duty is to keep Miss Pauling safe and alive, regardless of the personal cost to her.
Aaaand I think that's everything!!!! Thank you for sticking with me this long mwah
