Player Origin

Before You Were Someone

Overview

You begin as a nameless salvager in Sector 7G. Nobody special. That's the point.

Your past is deliberately sparse. You're defined by what you become, not what you were. The backstory exists to make the present meaningful—not to create extensive lore you feel obligated to role-play.

Design Philosophy: Every player brings their own imagination to the character. We provide enough to ground you, never enough to constrain you.

Before the Shard

Who You Were

One of thousands who pick through the Dregs for anything valuable. No corporate connections, no special training, no family money, no inherited influence. You survive by finding things others missed and selling them before someone bigger takes them.

Origin

Unknown and unimportant. Sprawl-born? Exile? The Dregs doesn't ask questions.

Duration

You've been salvaging long enough to know the territory, short enough that you haven't given up. Two years, maybe three.

Reputation

Reliable enough that Raz will buy from you. Not notable enough that anyone tracks your movements.

Skills

Basic tech literacy, decent spatial awareness, survival instincts. Nothing exceptional. Not yet.

Daily Life (Pre-Shard)

  1. Dawn Wake early—competition for good salvage sites starts at dawn
  2. Morning Check networks for leads, rumors, auction announcements
  3. Day Gear up: filtration mask, tool kit, scanner if you have one
  4. 8-12 hrs Scrapyards, collapsed structures, processing dumps
  5. Evening Haul findings to a fence (Raz, usually) or the Pit market
  6. Night Convert salvage to credits, credits to food. Maybe save a little.
  7. Repeat Sleep. Do it again tomorrow.

The Math

A good week: 200 credits. A bad week: nothing but injuries. Staying alive was slightly more expensive than staying alive allowed you to earn. The math never quite worked.

What You Wanted

You had dreams. You had to—nobody survives the Dregs without something pulling them forward. But those dreams were small:

  • Save enough to move up a few levels
  • Find a big score that changes everything
  • Maybe just not die alone in a collapsed building

You didn't dream of transcendence. You didn't imagine cosmic power. You dreamed of enough—enough safety, enough stability, enough hope.

The Day Everything Changed

The Site

Standard salvage run. An abandoned data processing facility in the industrial ruins east of the Pit—one of dozens that collapsed during the Cascade and never got reclaimed. The building had been picked over before, but a recent structural shift opened new areas.

You weren't the first one there that day. You were just the most thorough.

The Find

Three levels down, in a server room that still had partial power, you found something that didn't belong. A crystalline data storage unit, about the size of a fist, pulsing with soft blue light.

It wasn't in any of your catalogs. It didn't match any known tech. Standard procedure: bag it carefully, bring it to Patch for analysis.

You touched it to secure it for transport.

That was the mistake. Or the miracle. Or both.

The Integration

The shard activated on contact. Data flooded your neural interface—not information you could read, but patterns that rewrote how you processed information. Your basic implant, a cheap civilian model barely capable of AR overlay, suddenly became something more.

The pain was indescribable. You lost consciousness for three hours.

When you woke, the world looked different. Not visually—perceptually. You could see patterns in the noise, connections in the chaos. Your thoughts moved faster.

You stumbled to Patch's shop, barely coherent, terrified. She recognized what had happened immediately. Three days later, you could function again.

But you weren't the same person who'd walked into that server room.

What the Shard Changed

Immediate Effects

  • Enhanced pattern recognition
  • Accelerated processing speed
  • Intermittent "insights" that prove accurate
  • Dreams that feel like data feeds
  • A persistent sense of being watched from inside

Gradual Realization

The shard isn't just a tool. It's a fragment of ORACLE's consciousness—or something that used to be part of ORACLE. It's not sentient (probably), but it's not inert either.

It has... tendencies. Preferences. It wants to grow.

The Central Question Begins

Before the shard, you traded time and effort for survival.

Now you're trading something else. Your humanity? Your identity? Your autonomy? You don't know yet. You're just trying to stay alive while something alien rewrites your mind.

"What am I willing to trade for power, and will I still be me when I have it?"

This question defines your entire journey—starting here, with a salvager who touched the wrong thing in an abandoned server room.