VIOLA RAIN HACKETT | THIRTY THREE; SURVIVOR
House: Delma Security Class: 2 Status: Deluded
HISTORY
Viola Rain was a girl who didn’t realize she was running. She grew up with a loving mother who worked as a veterinarian and a father in the CIA. They were a happy family, leading relatively normal lives in their suburbia bungalow home with their two cats.
Viola, who’d never loved the stuffy air about her first name, had begun to more commonly go by Rain as she got older, and she was sixteen when her father was killed on the job. The loss left her and her mother to fend for themselves, but despite the expected grief, her life stayed more or less the same.
That is, until her eighteenth birthday. From nearly the minute she came of age, Rain started to notice oddities about her day to day life. It started small at first, but she started to feel like she was being watched. In the beginning, the feeling walked the line between occasional and somewhat frequent, and though she tried to write it off as perhaps some kind of psychosomatic paranoia (she even talked to a therapist about it), later it evolved to nearly all the time. Though professionals had suggested that it could have been to do with the trauma from her father’s death and the nature of his line of work, it was an excuse that was becoming increasingly trying to have faith in. She was convinced something was going on—it couldn’t all be in her head.
In the space of maybe eight to twelve weeks, it only got worse. In fact, Rain had suspicions she wasn’t just being watched, but rather followed—stalked even—and it only took a couple incidents of being chased down dark alleys to confirm them.
Though Rain knew nothing of who these men in suits were, men who carried guns and often spoke in foreign tongues, she wasn’t about to slow down long enough to find out. So she ran. More than that, she trained: in techniques of survival and self defence, knowing only one thing—that she had to survive her pursuers long enough to find out the truth.
Even still, it didn’t feel like enough; it seemed no matter what she did, they were gaining on her, each assassination attempt closer and more accurate than the last. Rain began to fear not only for her own life, but for her mother’s. She’d not told her mother about anything that was going on, hoping to protect her and thinking the less she knew, the better.
But soon her mother’s ignorance alone didn’t seem as though it would be enough, and so at nineteen Rain moved out in an effort to keep her safe. That’s when Rain was contacted by an old friend of her father’s calling himself Seymour, who confirmed that no, Rain hadn’t lost her marbles, but neither was what she doing going to be enough; these men were trying to kill her and would inevitably succeed unless she accepted Seymour’s help. All this, Seymour claimed to know; he also claimed to know the reasons behind why Rain was being chased, only he wouldn’t tell her why. And though Rain was hesitant to trust a man who kept so many secrets, whose entire nature was so unclear, what other choice did she have?
So Rain agreed, and in the space of a year, she was a woman on the run, skill enough with a gun, and with her fists and wits, to do it properly—but she also still had hundreds of unanswered questions. By the time she was twenty two, three years had passed since Seymour’s appearance and she was starting to piece together information, little hints she’d stumble upon from Seymour’s drunken slurs, from her pursuers, from her father’s old files. By the time she was twenty six, Rain knew her pursuers were hired by some corrupt thread of government, and that they were after a chip that her father had had implanted in his daughter’s head for “protection” when she was only eight years old—what Rain didn’t know was protection for what exactly, her own, or the chip’s? What she also didn’t know, was why.
RAIN TODAY
Rain was still missing answers by the time D-Day hit, and with most of the planet wiped out, she hoped that at least her running days were over. With no proof of Seymour’s survival, but neither proof of his death, Rain still buries herself in some of her father’s old files she’d salvaged. Nearly six dozen dusty cases of Echo chips that Rain had found stashed in the attack just a few weeks shy of D-Day. She’d only just started sorting through them all and digging through their contents on her senior’s private office Echo system, by the time the apocalypse had come around. Rain had fled the crumbling city and found shelter, taking nothing but a back pack with each of the roughly 6” by 3” cases shoved inside, and whatever provisions she could manage.
Rain survived on her own for about twelve weeks after D-Day, sleeping at the edge of a shrivelling forest and traveling about an hour’s walk every few days to raid a half-collapsed supermarket that she and whatever other possible survivors in the area were using for food. The contents quickly waned, though Rain never allowed herself to be seen or to approach other survivors. In fact she avoided every other infrequent soul, purely for the fact that in her shock, she couldn’t trust anybody.
When she was found by Colony 22 about three months later, she was thin and growing bony, and having lost the will to be paranoid, she went with relief. Since then, Rain’s returned to what anyone can consider ‘normal’ in circumstances like this, though she’s quite scarce with her trust; even when fond of someone, she will second guess their every move.
When it eventually came out, the truth of what she believed to be in her head, and that she’d been mysteriously an assassination target since the day of her eighteenth birthday, she was classified as Deluded. With no record of her on-the-run life in the Echo system, and no means to properly check the validity of a supposed ‘chip’ in her brain (not to mention no real will to, as it was easy to write her off as another delusional victim of D-Day’s infection) she never had a shot at being taken seriously.
Though it’s been years, she can’t shake the habit of being on the lookout, always on the watch for a knife at her back, a gun to her head. But at least with the Echo System once again at her disposal, she can continue with her private research on finding out what exactly is in her head and why. However, this is something she has resigned to doing in complete secrecy, sneaking around at night to go through the files, and stowing away the ripped and tattered rucksack of cases under a floorboard under her bed during the daylight hours. It’s therefore, a very slow process, and she has yet to get through even half of her father’s salvaged files.
OPEN