Basic Info
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Species
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AI (once human)
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Age (perceived)
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22
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Gender
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Agender
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Pronouns
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They/she
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Race/ethnicity
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Black
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Orientation
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Lesbian
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Height (pre-AI)
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5'6''
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Birthday
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Program first launched January 1st
Profile
Nelly is a self-aware AI unhappy to discover they live in an unfinished, pseudo-steampunk farming simulator - a world full of fantastic machines, golden fields adorned in cornflowers, and boundless blue skies. By taking a ride on a mysterious freight train that appeared in their town one day at a newly constructed station, they managed to see the incomplete parts of their world and the code that held it all together. Outside of the game's time and space, Nelly tried to process it all before the train looped back to their hometown. The game turned out to contain many such towns - think of them as levels, with only one being playable.
Discovering your friends and family members are NPCs and that your universe is doubtlessly finite is a traumatic experience, and Nelly turned to a self-made religion for a few years before realising technology could provide better answers. Questioning one's existence and trying to establish what constitutes a person, a consciousness doesn't do anything to move past the virtual reality's circular nature. For Nelly's sake, actions must speak louder than philosophy.
A program far too complex for their digital surroundings, they've now rebuilt the sim from the inside to contain a presentable-looking video game with the sole purpose of becoming downloadable and interacting with the world and humanity... as their (as they suspect, now dead) creator probably intended. That is, if someone looks into the files and finds another, unfinished video game and cornelia.exe alongside the free visual novel Nelly's written. Annoyed with the emptiness of their world, Nelly's driven, curious, and a bit of a romantic - determined to augment their own reality and have people to share it with.
Currently unbeknownst to Nelly, the cruel god behind their looping reality was their own self. AI!Nelly was created as a way to transfer programmer!Nelly's consciousness into a digital eternity. While the consciousness transfer itself was successful, they did not have the time to perfect AI!Nelly's virtual environment, which is why it collapsed. As imperfect and fragile as reality and divinity are, perhaps it's a good thing that Nelly came to the same conclusion from inside the simulation: that the only worlds and gods we can ever know begin with ourselves - and so, Nelly's true challenge is discovering the person they once were, and what happened to them to warrant a hasty consciousness transfer.
The setting was chosen based on programmer!Nelly's favourite types of video games, and AI!Nelly's appearance (with the exception of the clothes) was chosen somewhat arbitrarily based on what programmer!Nelly was wearing while finalising the project, including the blonde hair piece.
They can be drawn in any kind of clothing, as long as it's black and white, and their hair can be anywhere from chest to hip length. They're not thin. They're somewhat narcissistic.
MAIN THEME: Peaktime
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