Appearance

Physical Description

Lainn is beautiful, even by elven standards, as a matter of simple, objective fact. Tall, willowy, with thick pale-gold hair down to her waist, dark, sea blue eyes and sculpted, elegant features, she looks like she could have stepped off of the set of a political Trid, playing the role of the savvy staffer with an answer to every problem or the idealistic junior representative with ambitions of higher office.
 
She looks to be in her mid twenties, has looked that age for about ten years, and will probably keep looking that age for another century or more. Elf genetics.

Apparel & Accessories

Since joining the ZDF, her wardrobe has shifted, from tailored, flattering suits and cocktail dresses to more practical garb, just like its purpose has pivoted from facilitating corporate espionage to surviving more... direct threats. Namely, this means the addition of armor that is more robust and less subtle, which she facilitates with the addition of the ubiquitous black Runner's trenchoat - calf-length, high-collared, and proofed against just about every kind of dangerous substance.

Mentality

Personal history

Elaine Ceallaigh grew up as a poster child for Tir Tairngire's image of Elf Life (TM). Tall, elegant, graceful, wealthy and well-spoken, she was everything that the Tir tries to tell people that they are, except perhaps Awakened. Instead of magic, Elaine focussed on the technology of the Sixth world, managing to become a competent, and largely self-taught software engineer by the time she finished high school. Of course, that was the year Crash 2.0 hit, and Elaine was one of the millions effected.
 
But, once again - wealth and privilege has its perks, and after a two weeks in one of Portland's top hospitals, Elaine was conscious and apparently none the worse for wear. Her side effects settled in slower, over the next few years. At first, she thought that the whispers she heard from areas of heavy matrix traffic were symptoms of delayed-onset AIPS, and did everything she could to hide it - her parents, a little paranoid after their daughter had spent a week and a half in a coma, were adamant that she have as little to do with the Matrix as possible, and Elaine was fairly confident that if they knew that she was experiencing long-term side effects, they'd fly completely off the handle. But those whispers were still compelling, so Elaine began finding ways around her parent's restrictions - frequenting internet cafes and spam zones, and slowly meandering away from the polished, privileged life she'd grown up in, teaching herself to hack just like she'd taught herself to code, and chasing down ghosts and rumours. Her search for an answer culminated on the 24th of November, 2068 - at 11:43pm, to be precise - when she Compiled her first Sprite - a Data Sprite that she pulled out of a whisper in the Matrix that had been following her for days.
 
After that, Elaine became more determined than ever to understand what had happened to her during the Crash, and she realised that she didn't need a deck, or even a commlink to do it. So while her parents worried about finding an appropriate, politically advantageous match for her, or what subjects she should pursue in her delayed higher education - and when exactly she would begin said higher education, because even though the Crash had been so traumatic, it had been five years, and maybe she should take her life off hold now - Elaine surfed the 'Net, honing her skills while pretending to read and nod along.
 
Of course, just when she was getting confident in her abilities, Technomancers were thrust into the public eye in the worst way possible. As the media coverage mounted, and buzzwords started getting thrown around, Elaine quietly packed up her life and left the Tir. To say that leaving her privileged, sheltered bubble was a shock is to grossly understate the truth, but she had enough credits in the bank to tide her over while she found her feet in Seattle, and learned to navigate a world where it was no longer the case that every non-elf was assumed to be somehow just a little bit less for some ephemeral reason that certainly had nothing to do with the entrenched discrimination that other Metatypes face in the Tir, or the expression of their metagenetics.
 
She laid low through the worst of the Technomancer Hunts, building up layers of false identities, and a bit of a reputation as a freelance IT specialist and hacker, paddling in the edges of the world of Shadows. Publically, Elaine was a gorgeous, well-spoken and enigmatic young Elf, known as Léanan Cailey - a commodity in high demand as arm candy for a variety of corporate hobknobbing events. Privately, Elaine used her looks and charm to get access to her targets, using her Sprites to steal access codes, copy data or corrupt security systems while she flirted and sweet-talked. She mostly dealt in low-level executives and low-level secrets, the kind of thing whose theft was unlikely to be traced back to any one individual, and supplemented the mediocre income she garnered for selling these secrets with the lavish gifts from her besotted targets, which kept her clad and styled in the latest fashions. She even enjoyed the work - if you're willing to look past the complete moral bankruptcy, the people who make it up the corporate ladder can't afford to be anything other than attractive and charming, so the social side of it wasn't particularly onerous.
 
Things might have continued in that way until she got bored, slowly working her way up the corporate ladder to bigger and bigger scores, if she hadn't made a mistake. One of Elaine's sprites was compromised, and she was exposed - as a Technomancer, a corporate spy, and an individual currently in possession of tens of thousands of nuyen worth of data and software stolen from Aztechnology. In the interests of not being murdered for that little indiscretion, Elaine fled, vanishing back into the Tir and dropping off the grid for about a year before resurfacing in Denver under the name of Lainn and with a letter of reccommendation from Hestaby, requesting a job from Ghostwalker: offering her skills and services in exchange for keeping the Azzies off her back.

Failures & Embarrassments

Impaired Attribute: Strength Lainn is just not built for strength. Whether through some quirk of metabolism, or just because she doesn't have any room for it on her frame, she really struggles to put on or keep muscle mass, and will never be an impressive physical specimen - or most likely, even an average one - in that arena.
 
Stolen Goods: There is only one reason that Lainn is in Denver, and that is because, out of everywhere in the world, Denver is the one place where Aztechnology definitively isn't. Except for that one part of the city where they are. Either way - Ghostwalker's influence is enough to hamsstring Azzie influence within the city, and keep the corporate headhunters mostly off her back, which is lucky, since Lainn isn't even in possession of the paydata they want her for.

Intellectual Characteristics

Analytical Mind: Lainn has always had a knack for numbers and patterns, and finds the logical ordered patterns of programming languages almost as intuitive as her native language.
 
Exceptional Attribute: Logic Some people are simply geniuses, with no further explanation or justification needed. Lainn is one of those people. It is annoying.

Focussed Concentration: Lainn's hacking has always been done under the cover of doing something completely different in the physical world - she had to learn to be good at effectively dividing her attention.

Morality & Philosophy

Code of Honour: White Hat Hacker Lainn pursues her art in accordance with the hacker ethics of the late 20th century. Most of the paydata she got her hands on during the previous phase of her career is available in some form or another on the Net, although typically after a few weeks delay so that the theft wouldn't be obviously linked to the posting. In fact, this principle is partly why she's in so much trouble with Aztechnology in the first place - she ruined a product launch by posting code for a new Commlink OS before the patent was finalised. She also has a deep hatred of GOD and anyone that runs black IC on their systems - technology was meant to make people's lives better and more connected, and instead the Grid Overwatch has strangled any innovation on the Matrix, while the Megacorps murder people for looking at their files wrong. She understands that sometimes her line of work results in casualties, but she does what she can to limit it in meatspace, and refuses to even entertain the notion of honing her Technomantic abilities to a killing edge.

Personality

Motivation

Cynical and aloof, Lainn tends to keep others at arms length, leaning into her high-class manners and other people's stereotypes about elves to keep people from digging too deep, where they might run the risk of uncovering her secrets. Underneath that portective layer of etiquette and arrogance, Lainn has spent the last ten years almost entirely isolated in order to protect that secret - sure, she talks to everyone; a consummate professional, cultivating contacts and indulging dalliances left and right, but no real personality ever made it through the facade. Instead, she lives as herself online, keeping her Matrix persona isolated from her real one with careful layers of anonymity. She's active on the Hacker Havens and various other online communities for Shadowrunners and... data specialists under the name Foxglove, offering a sharp wit, honest curiosity and a pragmatic, wry insight to those who care to listen, as well as a keen, competitive spirit. She might not have all the tech advantages a decker can pull out of their ass, but she can, and will, give most of them a run for their money.
 
In the deeper interstices of the Matrix, she goes by Idiom - a name she's only ever really had opportunity to use with her Sprites, but that might represent the realest version of Elaine Ceallaigh out of all of the personas associated with her long list of pseudonyms. As Idiom, she searches the depths of the Matrix, looking for echoes in the dark, for others like her, for the places where she can share her gift and the wonder she feels every time she uses it without the risk that it will be traced back to her body.
 
Aside from all these competing personas and facets, at the heart of it, Lainn is a young Elf who grew up privileged and isolated, and has spent her life looking for the connections that the real world denied her in the Virtual one - true both before and after Crash 2.0. She has a genuine love of code and everything that can be done with it, and - even though it might be old-fashioned and naive, she genuinely believes in the Hackers Code, and that freedom of information and everything that follows from that central precept will make the sixth world a better place.

Social

Birthplace

Tir Tairngire

Current Residence

Kiowa, Denver

Contacts & Relations

Mitsuri Kaneshiro (C7/L4) (Mid-level EVO Exec with a crush)
Elaine's first first official Johnson, Mitsuri is an elf of Japanese descent, and more than happy with his company's transition from Yamatetsu to Evo. He's a close friend of Elaine's, with benefits both professional and personal on the side. When Elaine was working in Seattle, he regularly hired her - including for that disastrous Aztechnology run - and helped kit her out with the gear she needed to get the job done in payment, which is why most of Elaine's expensive kit is EVO branded. He also provided her with her first class EVO SIN - keyed to her own biometrics, and almost impossible to crack - and a standing offer for a job, and a legitimate Corporate Citizenship if she ever gets tired of the shadows. Elaine might have even taken him up on it after her run on the Azzie's turned sour, if the offer wasn't conditional on an implied marriage proposal. Because even if he's charismatic, and funny, Elaine's not in the market for that kind of business. No matter how good he looks in those damn Armante suits.
 
He is a good friend though, and his offers of a more official sort of relationship, while persistent, have always been good-humoured and without any pressure. Although he will probably find an excuse to get transferred to Denver once he tracks her down to the ZDF.
 
Noise (C5/L2) (Paranoid Technomancer)
Technomancers are a rare breed. Rarer, now, after years of witch hunts and Corporate experiments. Which means that there is exactly one person in Lainn's life who knows the truth about her - Noise, a technomancer who Lainn met online during the height of the Technomancer Hunts. Noise had gotten a much faster start on his Emergence post-crash than she had - she suspects he may have been an Otaku before the Crash. They've never met in person - indeed, Lainn has no idea where Noise operates in the world, what he does, or even what handle he does it under, and he only knows her as Idiom - and from first impressions, you could not imagine two people more different. But, despite being a hyperactive, socially challenged manchild with a foul mouth - compared to Lainn, who he calls a 'tight-arsed corp-wannabe priss-bitch' in return - he is a font of useful knowledge about the goings on in the deeper recesses of the Matrix, and taught Lainn a great deal about Technomancy, hacking and the fine art of paranoia. She's fairly sure he actually knows a lot more than he's ever shared with her - and that she's not the only 'Mancer he's mentored on the subject - but the aforementioned paranoia makes it almost impossible to tease the information out of him.
 
Kotori Locklear (C6/L1) (Tir Tairngire Political Operative)
Elaine's parents are low-level political figures in Tir Tairngire - just influential enough to style themselves as 'Lord and Lady Ó Ceallaigh'. And, honestly, they're kind of racist, Elf Supremacist assholes. Not in the Humanis 'rednecks and violence' way, so much as the cultured, polite 'these folks are poor and dispossessed because they choose it' way associated with America's entrenched upper class in the pre-Awakened world. They made Elaine go to the best schools, take the extracurriculars that expressed and enriched her Elven Heritage (like archery, despite the fact that she struggled to draw even the lightest bow), and befriend all the other, priviliged, rich elf girls of similar or better social status.
 
Kotori is a Sinsearch elf who was one of those other girls, back in the day, and is a shining example of what those girls were meant to turn into. She's a secretary working in the offices of Prince Hestaby, which puts her fingers in a lot of pies in Tir Tairngire, and is also how Elaine finagled her letter of reccommendation from the Great Dragon herself. She's savvy, ambitious and laser-focussed on her professional agenda, but she's also less of an absolute drekhead than most of Elaine's adolescent social circle. There might even be a little bit of personal affection between the two, but due to Elaine's long leave of absence from the Tir, and thus her utter lack of political capital, Kotori won't allow their relationship to be leveraged one iota more than just business.
 
Amber Tanna (C7/L1) (SK-Denver's chief Spider)
Amber Tanner is not a woman anyone with a Jack wants to get on the wrong side of, and lately, it seems like everyone is on her wrong side. She's been cutting a swathe through Denver's decker population, and a whole lot of people are scared of her. Lainn kind of wishes she'd looked up the local rumours before she set about getting in touch - her newsfeed had covered Tanna's appointment as SK's Cybersecurity Head in Denver, along with enough details for Lainn to peg her as a fellow 'Mancer and pique her curiosity, but apparently all the murdered hackers didn't make it onto the news. Lainn left some breadcrumbs around the SK data fortress when she got into town and waited to see if the other Technomancer would bite, hoping to establish a cordial relationship as one technomancer to another, independant of the fact that their respective employment would inevitably put them at odds professionally.
 
However, considering Lainn's personal feelings on using the Matrix to kill (and to a lesser extent, killing in general), she has mixed feelings about her newest contact. A part of her wants to make excuses for Amber because she's a Technomancer - blame the deaths on Lofwyr forcing her hand or something - but another part of her thinks that being a Technomancer makes what she's doing worse.
 
Lucy Xeno (C4/L1) (Part-time Go-Ganger)
Stuffer Shack employee by day, semi-pro combat biker by night, Lucy is Lainn's new downstairs neighbour. She's got an ear to the ground on Denver's street-level gangs and goings on that Lainn, with her appearance and upbringing will probably never be able to match, and is happy enough to keep her new neighbour informed of such comings and goings - at least, when that new neighbour is willing and able to fix Lucy's perpetually smashed bikes at cost. Her status on the Combat Bike circuit means that she's got a little bit of celebrity going for her, keeping her - and her team - involved in the local gang scene without being a card carrying member of any major faction, although most of her fans are Cutters. She's also the one who hooked Lainn up with her Falcon on the cheap when she got into town and needed a way to get around better than public transit, mainly, because Lainn's offhand comment about intending to just buy a Dodge Scoot offended her all the way down to her soul. Although... the jury is still out on whether or not that counts as a favour in either party's column, considering that Lainn is an abysmal driver, and just loaded the thing with an Autosoft, anyway.
 
Either way, it's a mutually beneficial arrangement that is still definitely not worth the ragers Lucy throws when her team wins on the Circuit.
 
Tanisha Williams (C3/L1) (Ancients Razorgirl)
Tanisha is a member of the Ancients who shows up around Lainn's apartment occasionally. As far as Lainn has been able to ascertain, her motive is a fairly even mixture between having caught word of a new Elf in the neighbourhood, and so wanting to sound her out for recruitment, making sure Lucy doesn't poach her into the Cutters or something (although how that would work given the Cutter's opinion of 'daisy-eaters', and the fact that Lucy isn't actually a member thereof, is an open question), and that she definitely has a thing for the biker, and this gives her an excuse to ply the object of her forbidden affections with glares and threats. Such, it seems, are the joys of living in the gang-riddled slums that consist of the majority of the Sixth World's residential real estate.
 
But - terrible attempts at flirting aside - Tanisha is a fairly influential member of the local chapter of the Ancients - maybe not quite enough to qualify as Omen's inner circle, but enough that when she gets orders, she gets them personally from him.

Hobbies & Pets

Lainn personifies her Sprites more than most hackers, and the set of Sprites that she typically compiles are all possessed of names and personalities.

Speech

Lainn is practised at shifting registers in her speech. She was taught to speak very formally, both in English and Sperethiel, but a decade of running shadows has trained her in the unique slang of the streets, as well as giving her a broad technical proficiency with the specialised lingo of hackers and deckers around the world.