Name: Della Byron
Nicknames: Del, Mulciberian
Age: 19
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Straight
Personality: Although she’s calmed down since her early misadventures, Del’s still a radical at heart. Never content with the world as it is, Del sees things as they could be and seeks to make them as close to that ideal as possible. To her, a broken society is simply another program in need of repair. She can come on a little strong, but her heart’s in the right place.
Looks: Del stands at a fairly average 5’5, with a wide, stocky build. Unlike most children of Hephaestus, her hands, while still large, are delicate, with long, nimble fingers. She usually wears her black hair back in a ponytail. The parchment color of her skin, as well as her cheekbones and dark, canted eyes, hint at her mixed heritage. Her features are solid, though with an understated quality that can make her easy to overlook at first glance.
Divine Parent: Hephaestus
Powers: Del is a technopath, with the ability to directly interface with any form of digital technology. Unlike most of her siblings, she has no affinity for analog tech whatsoever. She also possesses the standard inventing and creation abilities of a child of Hephaestus, though hers apply to the creation of software and computer hardware more than the mechanical constructs favored by her siblings. Her nanites are the only other substantial piece of technology that she’s designed.
Backstory: Del was born in Sunnyvale, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Her mother was a software developer working on founding a tech startup, SigmaSource Technologies, with some of her friends from college whose elegant coding had caught the eye of the engineer of Olympus. The first few years of Del’s life were uneventful, though she saw relatively little of her mother, who was busy trying to build up SigmaSource. Then, when Del was four, her mother’s business partners stole her work and booted her from the company she had helped create, saying that while she was a good programmer, she was holding back their business. Based on the way SigmaSource exploded over the course of the next few years, it looked like they may have been right, as the tiny startup swiftly grew into a massively profitable tech giant.
After she was ousted, Del’s mother had even less time for her than before, as she divided her time between waging a costly legal battle and working a low-level programming job at Yahoo! to make ends meet. Meanwhile, their living situation deteriorated as more and more money was funneled into paying an endless stream of lawyers. They lost their house within the first two years, their first apartment three years after that, and eventually landed in low-income housing in the bad part of town. As her life fell apart, Del lost herself in ones and zeroes, discovering her own instinctive genius as a programmer. She began distributing some of her programs as open-source freeware, and at age eleven became involved with the burgeoning culture of online hacktivism. She read Cory Doctorow like scripture, and began to fantasize about taking revenge on the people who had ruined her mother’s life.
At age twelve, Del learned that she was a demigod when a leucrocotta attacked her on the way home from school, using its powers of mimicry to lure her into an alley. She was rescued by a satyr, who grew a wooden spear with which Del killed the monster. She was then taken to Camp Half-Blood for her first summer, where she discovered her power to control digital technology and was claimed by Hephaestus.
After returning home, Del began making plans. Before, vengeance against SigmaSource had been an idle fancy, but now Del knew she was a demigod, and that her dreams could become reality. So it was that at thirteen years old, Del broke into SigmaSource, planning to use her powers to hack their secure servers and, if not destroy the company, at least cripple it, releasing as much private data as possible onto the open ‘net. Once inside, however, she learned more that she’d ever dreamed, the secret that had gotten her mother booted from SigmaSource so many years before. In the end, the company’s rise all came down to a massive influx of capital which allowed Del’s mothers visionary work to be distributed on a massive scale. That initial investment had been provided, through a number of fronts and channels, by Mexican drug cartels. In exchange for the money, SigmaSource was smuggling drugs into the US in shipments from their South American manufacturing plants. Del’s mother had been kicked out of the company before the deal had been made because she never would have agreed to it. Del released the damning documents onto the web, along with proof that her mother’s ousting had been illegal and dozens of other sensitive, confidential files.
Del left SigmaSource feeling better than she had in years—and was promptly arrested as the police caught her making her escape. Del’s mistake had been releasing the documents before leaving SigmaSource herself. As soon as the company learned about the leaks, they knew there had to be a break-in and the police were promptly dispatched. She managed to escape custody using her powers and evaded the ensuing manhunt long enough to be picked up and taken to Camp Half-Blood. Chiron was less than happy about harboring a wanted felon, but jail or even juvie would be a death sentence for any demigod, deprived of weapons and forced to wait in one place for the monsters to find them. To avoid being captured or, worse, bringing the mortal authorities down on the camp, Del was forbidden to leave.
Since becoming confined to Camp Half-Blood, Del has left only once, at age 16, when her mother had a scare with cancer. Del managed to make her way across the country, avoiding mortals and monsters alike, to reach her mother in California. It was the first time they two had seen each other in three years. With the evidence Del had brought to light, her mother had managed to take back control of SigmaSource, but she couldn’t afford to appear to condone her daughter’s actions. Even so, she gave Del a thirty-minute head start before she called the police. Even after her mother’s cancer went into remission, Del knew that she would never see her again. Unable to return to camp directly with the authorities on her tail, Del doctored computer records to get herself onto a flight to Indonesia, and from there made her way back to New York the long way around. Since then, she’s never left camp, although she has an active presence in the outside world as an internet hacker by the handle Mulciberian.
Strengths:
- It’s honestly staggering the number of things that run on computer tech, just waiting for Del to control them. She can hack cars, phones, the entire international financial system, and probably your blender.
- Her nanite swarm gives her a great deal of versatility, and can be useful both in and out of combat.
- Having lived at camp year-round for the last six years, Dell knows the place very well and has had time for a great deal of training.
- Possibly because of her focus on software over hardware solutions, Del does better at dealing with other people’s emotions—their “programming”—than most of her siblings.
Weaknesses:
- Demigods using wireless communication tend to attract monsters, and Del is no exception. Using her power to link to any online system causes her to light up like a beacon for any nearby supernatural nasties.
- Outside of camp, Del’s wanted on a number of charges related to her break in and hacking of SigmaSource. As a result, no one outside of camp knows where she is, and she has only physically left once in six years.
- While her powers allow her to interface with digital technology, Del still has to contend with any computer security systems that might be in place, which absorbs most of her concentration.
- Del’s fatal flaw is good old fashioned Hubris; she believes that she should be able to engineer her way around anything.
Weapon: Del’s weapon is a swarm of celestial bronze nanites, tiny computerized automatons. She can order these to form themselves into any shape she can imagine—including many, many deadly ones—or just swarm an enemy as a cloud and tear them to pieces.
Other: Del is ethnically one-quarter Okinawan.
Del attended Camp Half-Blood for one summer before she was confined there permanently.