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character history
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Erika had a normal, unremarkable childhood in Tokyo, with her mother and father and older brother Ryuji, in a world that was also unremarkable except for one thing. That thing was the advancement of networking and virtual reality technology - in our 2010s, fully-immersive VR that interfaced directly with a user's brain was a reality in Erika's world. The heart of this technology was EDEN, a sort of second internet made up of three-dimensional, traversible virtual space instead of pages and hyperlinks. EDEN transformed computer use, and society along with it.
Erika's unremarkable life remained unremarkable until she was involved in a car accident, in which her parents died and she suffered head trauma that caused brain damage. The condition caused by that damage is explained weirdly in canon, but appears as seizures and brain hemorrhage, and was expected to be chronic, degenerative, and terminal.
Courtesy of the corporation that ran EDEN, though, a treatment option was made available. Erika was given her own very private server on EDEN, outfitted with some of the most state-of-the-art technology in existence, which would store and manage her memories. Hooked up to this server 24/7, Erika would essentially outsource parts of her brain function, reducing use of the parts that had been damaged and delaying her deterioration.
The therapy did what it was meant to do, but the change it wrought on Erika's life was massive, bizarre, alienating, and often frightening. She struggled with the existential aspects of being a real-life cyborg, had to drop out of school to keep up with her treatment, and felt her relationship with her brother deteriorate as he took on responsibility for supporting her and dealt with (or failed to deal with) his own grief over her condition and their parents' death.
The hacker team Hudie was the bandage she slapped over those problems to tide them both over until her death. Erika asked Ryuji's friend Chitose to suggest to Ryuji that he form a hacker team, allowing Ryuji to feel as though it were his project to help her. The three of them took on jobs in EDEN as a team, dubiously legal but generally upright endeavors like rooting out identity thieves and scammers, gathering information, testing security, and other things requiring technical prowess. They ran Hudie out of an internet cafe operated by the Mishima siblings, with Erika managing the cafe's fleet of computers and network security.
With all of her attention on Hudie, and her life colored by her condition, Erika became very reclusive, spending all of her time at the cafe and forgoing contact with strangers. She eventually took up near-permanent residence in Hudie, sleeping in her VIP room at the cafe and only rarely returning "home" to the Mishima apartment.
It took the induction of a fourth hacker into Hudie to break that status quo. Keisuke's presence opened up an interpersonal dynamic that had been closed off for years, and brought new energy to the team. Erika gradually came to trust him, and became comfortable involving him in problems she didn't want to drag Ryuji or Chitose into.
After Keisuke's arrival, Erika also met Wormmon, the Digimon that would become her partner, and whose experiences can't be left out of Erika's character history for reasons that will come up soon. Wormmon was born in the Digital World, from an egg as most Digimon are, and lived a simple, rather lonely life. Clumsy, frail, and skittish, she often accidentally provoked stronger and more aggressive Digimon, and was a frequent target for harassment. Even after falling through a hole from the Digital World into EDEN, Wormmon had to be rescued from trouble by Keisuke and Erika, then adopted by Erika for her own safety.
Over the course of weeks into months, Hudie kept up its work, Keisuke grew closer to the team, and Erika mentored Wormmon in hacking. She also gave her access to her memory server, limited at first and more and more as time went on - as she absorbed Erika's memories, Wormmon learned from them, becoming more like her both in ability and character. From Wormmon, Erika learned about the existence of the Digital World, and she developed a strong desire to go to the Digital World that she kept secret out of concern over it being a selfish or ungrateful desire, after her brother had rebuilt his entire life around supporting her.
Switching to bullet points to better outline plot beats as the game gets rolling:
At this point things get KIND OF WEIRD; this chunk of history may or may not have been experienced by Erika as I'm playing her because she becomes several Erikas, each embedded in another entity.....? Whatever app links to this will specify.
Hudiemon and Keisuke destroy Eater Legion, and she bids farewell to the copy of Erika that had been embedded in it. Hudiemon rejoins the rest of the team, and is received with confusion but warmth, which delights her. She assures her brother and friends that she's something new, but at simultaneously is still Erika and Wormmon. Despite Eater Legion's destruction, EDEN continues to disintegrate, data from Erika and Eaters having melded with the cyberspace completely. The remnants of the memory server form the core of one last instance of Erika - one that is mostly Eater - has absorbed reams of memory data left in EDEN by its users, and is wracked with homesickness, an emotion Eaters aren't equipped to process. Hudiemon and her friends/family fight Eater EDEN to destroy and unravel it, sparing it pain. Because [EVENTS FROM GAME THIS GAME IS A SIDEQUEL TO], the Digital World and digitized real worlds reset themselves, winding back the clock to long before they were connected and undoing everything that had been caused by Eaters. Having witnessed pieces of [THOSE EVENTS] via Erika's link to the Eaters, Hudiemon knows of the rest before it happens and is able to make a choice. If she did nothing and allowed the reset to affect her, her evolution would be undone, Erika and Wormmon would never have met, and Erika would live and then die as she would have had her life gone on as normal. Regretting not returning to Hudie and Erika's life, but also feeling that what she wanted most - and what Erika would want most were she still there in original form - is to keep living on and not surrender her memories of the old timeline, Hudiemon waits out the reset in a dimensional gap, choosing to slip away to the Digital World. Keisuke is briefly dragged along with her, and after conversation, he sends his Digimon along with her to live in the Digital World and keep her company. Hudiemon and Keisuke's team leave to go on adventures and protect the Digital World, and Hudiemon resolves to brush up against the real world whenever they can, because the two worlds always were and always will be connected in subtle ways.
Erika had a normal, unremarkable childhood in Tokyo, with her mother and father and older brother Ryuji, in a world that was also unremarkable except for one thing. That thing was the advancement of networking and virtual reality technology - in our 2010s, fully-immersive VR that interfaced directly with a user's brain was a reality in Erika's world. The heart of this technology was EDEN, a sort of second internet made up of three-dimensional, traversible virtual space instead of pages and hyperlinks. EDEN transformed computer use, and society along with it.
Erika's unremarkable life remained unremarkable until she was involved in a car accident, in which her parents died and she suffered head trauma that caused brain damage. The condition caused by that damage is explained weirdly in canon, but appears as seizures and brain hemorrhage, and was expected to be chronic, degenerative, and terminal.
Courtesy of the corporation that ran EDEN, though, a treatment option was made available. Erika was given her own very private server on EDEN, outfitted with some of the most state-of-the-art technology in existence, which would store and manage her memories. Hooked up to this server 24/7, Erika would essentially outsource parts of her brain function, reducing use of the parts that had been damaged and delaying her deterioration.
The therapy did what it was meant to do, but the change it wrought on Erika's life was massive, bizarre, alienating, and often frightening. She struggled with the existential aspects of being a real-life cyborg, had to drop out of school to keep up with her treatment, and felt her relationship with her brother deteriorate as he took on responsibility for supporting her and dealt with (or failed to deal with) his own grief over her condition and their parents' death.
The hacker team Hudie was the bandage she slapped over those problems to tide them both over until her death. Erika asked Ryuji's friend Chitose to suggest to Ryuji that he form a hacker team, allowing Ryuji to feel as though it were his project to help her. The three of them took on jobs in EDEN as a team, dubiously legal but generally upright endeavors like rooting out identity thieves and scammers, gathering information, testing security, and other things requiring technical prowess. They ran Hudie out of an internet cafe operated by the Mishima siblings, with Erika managing the cafe's fleet of computers and network security.
With all of her attention on Hudie, and her life colored by her condition, Erika became very reclusive, spending all of her time at the cafe and forgoing contact with strangers. She eventually took up near-permanent residence in Hudie, sleeping in her VIP room at the cafe and only rarely returning "home" to the Mishima apartment.
It took the induction of a fourth hacker into Hudie to break that status quo. Keisuke's presence opened up an interpersonal dynamic that had been closed off for years, and brought new energy to the team. Erika gradually came to trust him, and became comfortable involving him in problems she didn't want to drag Ryuji or Chitose into.
After Keisuke's arrival, Erika also met Wormmon, the Digimon that would become her partner, and whose experiences can't be left out of Erika's character history for reasons that will come up soon. Wormmon was born in the Digital World, from an egg as most Digimon are, and lived a simple, rather lonely life. Clumsy, frail, and skittish, she often accidentally provoked stronger and more aggressive Digimon, and was a frequent target for harassment. Even after falling through a hole from the Digital World into EDEN, Wormmon had to be rescued from trouble by Keisuke and Erika, then adopted by Erika for her own safety.
Over the course of weeks into months, Hudie kept up its work, Keisuke grew closer to the team, and Erika mentored Wormmon in hacking. She also gave her access to her memory server, limited at first and more and more as time went on - as she absorbed Erika's memories, Wormmon learned from them, becoming more like her both in ability and character. From Wormmon, Erika learned about the existence of the Digital World, and she developed a strong desire to go to the Digital World that she kept secret out of concern over it being a selfish or ungrateful desire, after her brother had rebuilt his entire life around supporting her.
Switching to bullet points to better outline plot beats as the game gets rolling:
- Hudie takes on various Keisuke-centric and filler-mission jobs, over the course of which Erika opens up, Wormmon becomes steadily more capable and starts acting as a proxy actor for Erika while she's busy with her own work, Erika has an episode and is hospitalized, Ryuji forbids her from exerting herself, everything becomes tense and everyone is unhappy.
- Everyone becomes even more unhappy when Ryuji starts being especially cagey and then they find out that he's been doing shady garbage on behalf of the corrupt Kamishiro executive Rie Kishibe in secret, for years, because Kishibe made it a condition of Erika receiving treatment.
- Ryuji gets his insecurities all over the rest of Hudie's objection to his sneaking around, is forced to sabotage a large-scale hacker community operation, and gets very mad at Chitose and Keisuke's opposition, since Erika's life is at stake. Erika is hospitalized again and sends Wormmon along with Keisuke to stop Ryuji and get Hudie back together because she really hates being the epicenter of reasons Ryuji's life is bad and his self-destructive nonsense isn't helping.
- Disaster strikes at the hacker gathering; Chitose is attacked by a creature called an Eater, which consumes his mental data and puts him into a coma, which sends Ryuji into a nasty depressive episode. In his absence, Erika takes command of (what is left of) Hudie to accomplish two things: get revenge on Rie Kishibe, and find a cure for Chitose's situation.
- Erika digs up data on Kishibe's illegal activities and delivers it to the police. Also she chases her to the top of a skyscraper and slaps the shit out of her. Kishibe gets away because she's secretly a very powerful Digimon and Erika is discontent about it.
- Not long after this, plot events from the game this one is a sidequel to cause the real world to merge with cyberspace, causing Digimon to fall into Tokyo from EDEN and the Digital World. This allows Wormmon and other partner Digimon to be physically present in the real world, and also makes Erika's memories of this period particularly wacky, because the AI that manages her memory server to prevent lag starts going for walksies around Tokyo, giving her weird feelings of deja vu and presence in places she didn't physically go to.
- Ryuji copes with his grief by getting possessed by Arcadiamon and running around beating up hackers for, in his mind, being responsible for what happened to Chitose. Stopping him gets moved to the top of Erika's priorities.
- To stop him, Hudie joins forces with one of the hackers he blames most, which backfires because it leads to a confrontation in the cafe itself. In his altered (overly-honest) state, he blames Erika's inability to recover from her terminal condition for his loss and isolation; a fight breaks out that destroys the cafe and hospitalizes Erika yet a g a i n.
- While she's out of it, Wormmon subs in for her, and starts to express new confidence in herself and a desire to do heroic things, conviction to be an equal member of the team, etc.
- Reviving Chitose is shunted back up the priority list, as Erika thinks having him back is more likely to snap Ryuji out of his rampage than any reassurance she can provide. Keisuke and Erika infiltrate the Eater hivemind to recover Chitose's mental data, and succeed, but Wormmon is forced to briefly shut down Erika's memory server to prevent her from being consumed by Eaters herself. The shutdown gives Erika's physical body amnesia. To fix it, Wormmon physically enters her memory server, using her access privileges, to activate a backup. She admits that lately, the memories shared between them have become so entangled that she often can't tell which are hers and which are Erika's; even in her absence, she's so familiar with her experiences that she can intuit what she would want when faced with choices, as though hearing her voice.
- Wormmon, Keisuke, and Chitose chase down and corner Ryuji, who snaps out of it but is then overwhelmed and absorbed by Arcadiamon because he let it evolve too far while it was feeding on his emotions.
- Instead of resting and recovering, Erika spends time modifying an Eater into controllable bits that she plans to use to search for Arcadiamon and Ryuji. Fed up with her lack of care for herself, Wormmon knocks her unconscious, knowing that she's so stubborn that nothing less would stop her from cutting her hospital stay short to go looking for Ryuji (because by this point Wormmon is the same way). Wormmon deploys the Eater bits in her stead.
- Even that wasn't quite enough, apparently, because Erika somehow gets hold of a high dose of ???some kind of medicine???, apparently a usual prescription for her, some kind of painkiller probably with other effects - enough to let her push herself well beyond what's safe in pursuit of Ryuji. She and Wormmon fight, realizing that Erika's desire to save Ryuji and Wormmon's desire to protect Erika are the same hardheaded protective impulse, and Wormmon eventually caves and gives her the information she received from the Eater bits.
- Arcadiamon is found and fought, Ryuji is rescued, and then Erika succumbs again to her condition, losing control over the Eater bits. They attack and assimilate her, becoming Eater Legion. While inside Eater Legion, Erika communicates with the Eaters, and discovers that they want to go to the Digital World, apparently influenced by her own desire. Cut off from the Eater hivemind by Erika's modifications to the bits, Eater Legion's restrictions on growth and action are lifted, and it begins to erode, consume, and assimilate EDEN itself in an attempt to force its way into the Digital World.
- Wormmon and Keisuke go to the memory server to attempt contact with Erika, and find it infested with Eaters. They manage to get through to her briefly, but when Eater Legion starts to consume EDEN, Erika uses her new connection to the cyberspace world to force all users to log out, protecting them.
- Wormmon and the members of Hudie log back into the eroded, Eater-infested EDEN to do what they can for Erika and prevent the erosion from crossing over into the digitized real world. Erika's wandering AI guides them back to the memory server, where they confront Eater Legion in hopes of saving her memories from erosion, to no avail.
- Erika tries to persuade them to leave, convinced that she can prevent the real world from being eroded by fully assimilating with Eater Legion. Wormmon, knowing that she doesn't want to die or vanish and seeing that her body is unrecoverable, does the one thing he can - absorbs a copy of her memories via her server AI and evolves into Hudiemon.
At this point things get KIND OF WEIRD; this chunk of history may or may not have been experienced by Erika as I'm playing her because she becomes several Erikas, each embedded in another entity.....? Whatever app links to this will specify.