Virtual Adepts

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts."

– William Gibson, Neuromancer

"The grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day... I got in."

– Kevin Flynn, Tron Legacy

The Mage: The Ascension equivalent of Anonymous. The Virtual Adepts are breakaways from the Technocrats that see Magic as coding for reality. Plants, trees, trains, that lamp in the corner of the room; find the code behind it, and you can alter and bend reality however you wish. As such, they spend a large amount of time in the virtual world doing their techno-magic hackery.

History

While the very basic concepts of the Adepts are often rooted in the beginnings of mathematics, the Virtual Adepts have their origins in the 19th Technocracy, as one of their many conventions called the Difference Engineers; a group of Electrodyne Engineers who developed their own understanding of reality that was rooted in Correspondence, Entropy, and Pattern, and were obsessed with what could be done with the first electronic communications, and their ideas metastasized into a discovery of what the fuller implications of Correspondence could be; understanding it as a way to manipulate space and the things traveling along it. The telephone actually opened up what they understood as "Virtual Space" for the first time, and once they could connect to it, they went chasing it for the rest of time, becoming the Virtual Adepts in the process.

Of course, with their understanding of what is now an extremely fast-moving way of understanding and changing reality, the Technocrats, the Electrodyne Engineers, and the Virtual Adepts were becoming more and more distant on each other's goals. Namely, the Electrodyne Engineers fucked off to become the Sons of Ether, and the Adepts were quickly becoming extremely frustrated with the lack of progress on information technology that would help them understand the Net, as it had become known, better. Without the Sons of Ether, they really couldn't build much if they didn't have any concrete knowledge of how to build shit already, and worse, they had unintentionally helped the allies win WWI against orders, so now they had the Technocracy breathing down their necks.

The final straws came in the 30's, with the Stock Market Crash being predicted ahead of time by probability-minded Adepts who benignly suggested that a world economy could alleviate any such thing from happening again...and what the Technocracy did with that suggestion was decide that fucking Hitler of all people was the guy to back early on. The camel's back was broken when Alan Turing's daring within the realm of computing was cut short by what in the World of Darkness universe was just an outright murder by Technocratic agents rather than a suicide, which incensed the Adepts so badly they took every last scrap of data they could find and then fucked off onto the net and joined the Traditions for good, but not before getting a nasty mnemonic virus from the Technocracy that severed their understanding of super-match and theoretical physics, which took decades to unfuck and set their work back generations...and then the Avatar Storm happened.

Cyberpunks of Darkness

The Virtual Adepts' reality paradigm is tricky to understand, because it requires more technical knowledge than the average Tradition. The basics are that they see reality itself as a massive computer full of programs and operative software that can be edited, re-written, deleted and replaced if necessary, and you need only access to the source code in order to do so, and they want that information in every last person's hands. As such, they spend all day on their computers trying to break down the base secrets of correspondence through sheer shitposting, and took up the seat of Correspondence among the Traditions without much incident, all from behind carefully chosen usernames to preserve their anonymity.

The Adepts are also the most open about their distrust and active work against the Technocracy; spending the most effort in fighting them through information warfare, cyber-wizardry, and of course some good old fashioned trolling. They do this because they see the Technocratic understanding of information as being inherently bad for everyone and understand from first-hand experience that the Technocracy will usually go way overboard in trying to establish their New World Order. As such, they tend to be the hacktivists and cyberterrorists of Mages.

Within the Traditions, they really only get along with the Cult of Ecstasy (for obvious reasons) and the Sons of Ether due to their shared hobby of building computers that do way more than the average computer should be able to, the rest they are either looked down on as brats who understand nothing of their centuries old suffering, or as blasphemers of an order that's otherwise kept a fragile balance. In fairness, they're a VERY difficult bunch to deal with off the bat, being every bit fueled by 80's and 90's-era "stick it to the MAN" personalities that can put Sleepers and the Awakened off, even if they have nothing but humanity's best interests at heart.

Virtual Adepts with Pattern avatars are moderates of Stasis, whereas their extremist analogues are the Threat Null Technocrats.

"Organization"

The Adepts? Don't make me laugh.

The Adepts don't really have that, only really having two separate kinds of Virtual Adept: Kibos, and Hackers. The Kibos are the information brokers and cyphers of the Adepts; filtering terabytes of information and keeping the best stuff for themselves, particularly when it comes to Technocratic tactical info or secrets. The Hackers are those who act on the Kibo's information, attempting to do the impossible with nothing more than a little extra code.

What they do have, is reputation, and that can change a lot about you. What you've done matters a lot to the Adepts, who's punk attitude towards nearly everything means you have to earn their respect. They go as follows:

• Lames: Anyone who isn't them or is a Sleeper; it's also your base-level internet insult that refers to poor skills and recently recruited Mages. Everybody starts here and many are still in some way Lame, but most Adepts do not like being called Newfags.
• Elites: The base-level awakened Adepts, but also a challenge. If you're an Elite, you gotta prove you're Elite or otherwise you might get called Lame and then you'll probably have a heated Mage moment. They begrudgingly admit that some members of other Traditions are in fact capable of getting here, and respect the hell out of them if they do. It takes a lot of work to do that, however.
• Adepts: Purely a ceremonial title taken from the game's ranking system because they thought it was funny.
• Wired: The Mods. You're a master of Correspondence here, but also the person usually tasked with cleaning up the user's bullshit.
• Jobes: You have permanently connected yourself to the Net and therefor the entire world, and can do the craziest possible stuff. If they show up, do whatever they ask. Anybody who can send your ass to space in seconds without you realizing it is not someone you should be fucking with.

The Myriad Discord Channels

Where organization fails, the Adepts do tend to congregate together in different groups called "Alts" to perform their hackerman wizardry. It should be noted that unlike a lot of other traditions, most Alts actively encourage working together as they swing either towards the Kibo or the Hacker side of their Tradition

• Cyberpunks: Wake up, Samurai. We have a Technocracy to burn. These guys are hardcore collectivist frontliners against the Technocracy and probably the first thing you think of when you think of the Virtual Adepts; script kiddies fighting the man using technomagic and giving each other pats on the ass for doing so. Unfortunately, they're also far and away the least concerned with the Sleeping World, and so Cyberpunks unfortunately end up known to them as domestic/international terrorists due to their disregard for "buildings needing to stay up" or "fires set in houses tend to burn the whole place down"
• Cypherpunks: More hacker than man, the Cypherpunks were the ones who figured out that the Technocracy had memed on them so hard they forgot hyperphysics, and cleansed the virus from their systems, reigniting hatred in the Technocracy (as if it needed any). The Cypherpunks nowadays are now a hyper-powered wikileaks dedicated to ensuring Adepts get the info they need, and blocking the Conventions from learning of their whereabouts.
• Chaoticians: Obsessed with numbers, advanced mathematics, probabilities, and chaos systems. They are the most rigidly structured of all the Alts, but paradoxically the most confusing to the outsider's eye. The Chaoticians meet based on specific number patterns, the weather, you name it, it probably factors in, and offer a dizzying array of ways to end a meeting in seconds. Due to their precise understanding of Entropy and Time, Chaoticians act as master strategists for the entire Tradition and pretty much every planned raid or operation is encouraged to go through them first.
• Reality Coder: Adepts obsessed with finding the "Source Code" of the universe and remaking it in their image as "Reality 2.0" and acclimate Sleepers to the ideas of the Adepts bit by bit, usually through surreptitious introduction via VR and video games. A small and largely Kibo-based Alt with Hackers primarily existing as the QA team for their new reality. Ambitious, but often victims of bad paradox backlashes due to the inherent Vulgarity of their craft. Work closely with the Nexplorers.
• Nexplorers: The Virtual World's denizens. They go into Virtual Reality and the Web at large to explore it's depths, understand it's secrets, protect and expand it's borders from incursion, and try to fix things when sleeper script kiddies fuck things up. They're closely working with the Reality Coders to bring the Virtual World into everyday life, but often suffer similar paradox problems, and a notorious level of Quiet that effectively just means becoming Terminally Online.