Tosca Volterra

O-2 1st Lieutenan

**Tosca Volterra** is a Bug Bounty Hunter and an operative of Council Recovery Corps..

## Biography

Tosca Volterra was born in a small human colony on Terra Nova in the Exodus Cluster. She was raised by strict but loving parents in accordance to Catholic values. As the oldest of five children, she had to take care of her siblings often as her parents were too busy, a task which she had always hated. While Tosca loved her siblings, they were too young to be interesting company and she was too young and socially inept to command their respect. Instead, she would often tell them made up stories to keep them engaged, or lie about household rules to make them behave.

For a time they believed just about anything she said. Afterwards she started lying to get them out of trouble. Sometimes they would play in the forest even though they were not allowed to go there, sometimes they would just forget their homework. Since it was mostly Tosca’s job to ensure her siblings behaved, lying for them also kept herself from getting scolded by her parents. The older she grew, however, the more she saw her family as a burden that constantly kept her from doing anything meaningful with her life. Every decision she made had to be compatible with her family duties that ate away her free time. Coupled to that was a general lack of perspective that came with colony life. Tosca hated the idea of being stuck on one planet, even though the galaxy was so much bigger than that.

Despite both parents working full-time jobs, money was always tight. To help the family, Tosca started taking odd-jobs around the neighborhood once she turned thirteen. Initially, they mostly involved sporadic deliveries, but when she turned fourteen she started illegally working at Mrs. Bright’s electronics shop. Mrs. Bright was a middle aged electrical engineer who lived on the outskirts of town and was responsible or involved in most technical projects in the colony. She taught Tosca how to do small, routine repairs and how to write simple software tools for existing devices. While Tosca took to programming quickly, she appreciated Mrs. Bright’s patience with her when it came to more manual tasks like soldering or replacing broken wires. Tosca greatly enjoyed both the work and the company.

By the time she was fifteen, Tosca started to go hunting local fauna on the weekends. That way she was able to escape home even on days Mrs. Bright’s shop was closed. Tosca enjoyed the quiet and the time alone, though on a few occasions she allowed her brother to come with her. They had learned how to shoot from their father. While he wasn’t a veteran himself, he would still tell them stories about the First Contact War and insisted that all his children should know how to defend themselves, be it from alien invaders or from the trash-eating pests in their backyard.

Around the same time, Tosca decided that she wanted to complete high school. Her parents, however, urged her to pursue an apprenticeship instead, since that would immediately secure her an income. The conflict continued to brew for about six months and escalated at the turn of the academic year. Tosca threatened her parents to stop working after school altogether if they prevented her from enrolling for another year of high school, while they in turn threatened to kick her out if she did.

The next day Tosca quit work, packed her things and moved out. She lived more or less on the streets for three days and slept in the school building. When the school found out about that, they intervened by contacting her parents. They listened to both sides of the story and through their mediation the situation was resolved within the day. Tosca returned home. She was allowed to finish high school and in turn agreed to keep working in the evenings to support her family. However, both she and her parents held on to their grudges and Tosca barely spoke to anyone at home for the next two years. Her younger brother, who was old enough to understand what had transpired felt betrayed by her selfish behavior. His opinion had a lot of influence on the younger siblings, who started cautiously distancing themselves from her. Tosca did not try to oppose this development, as she knew it was easier for her siblings to just pick a side.

Tosca joined the Alliance the day after her eighteenth birthday. Since then she has not returned once to her home planet. She enlisted in the Alliance’s reserve officer training corps in order to obtain a university degree. In exchange for a full scholarship at Citadel University she committed to six years of military service. The choice to major in computer sciences was an obvious one. While she had a knack for technology, especially software, she felt like she had no idea how any of the tools she and everyone else used on a daily basis actually worked. During her studies Tosca, who grew up speaking Italian, decided to learn English properly, as it is still the basis for most programming languages.

The freedom of student life suited Tosca. For the first time in her life she had a room of her own and on top of that she had the whole Citadel to explore. However, she found her background education lacking and often struggled to keep up with the other students. She found a group of friends, but since she still worked most evenings she would often miss their study sessions. After almost failing her first exams she cut back on all extracurricular activities and reduced her work hours, knowing that she would lose her scholarship if she ever failed. She also returned to her study group. With the sword of Damocles constantly looming over her head she powered through her undergraduate years surviving mostly on coffee and ramen.

After the first year only a couple of people from her initial friend group remained, while the others had dropped out or changed their major. The lingering fear of failure had become her constant companion and did no longer keep her awake at night. Towards the end she even started to like the thrill of exams. With good grades she also acquired a spiteful pride. Tosca knew on an objective level that better grades did not automatically make her a better computer scientist than some of her peers, but on a subjective level the illusion helped her justify all the hard work.

The atmosphere at university crucially formed her world view. Combative students shared their political opinions freely, especially when it came to issues that touched computer science. Even disillusioned Professors occasionally shared their very strong opinions on open source software and cyber security. The more Tosca’s understanding of the software world grew, the more she found herself distrusting technological solutions and the more alienated she became by the industry. Instead she found herself drawn to liberal and anti-authoritarian sentiments that were especially present in hacking cultures. She noticed that her looming military career was often seen with suspicion. While joining the military wasn’t her idea of a dream job, she became defensive about it. She even lost a very good and extremely principled friend over it. In order to prevent kicking off political discussions in which she was constantly outnumbered, she stopped telling people about it and started keeping them at a distance.

After completing her studies in 2178 she begrudgingly started military training. Tosca had never held any particular interest in joining the military and had only used the scholarship from the Alliance as a stepping stone to a higher education. She dreaded the authoritarian environment and felt it would surely clash with her own personality. Initially, her distinct lack of enthusiasm for running and gunning irritated her comrades and superiors. However, much to her annoyance, she found that a part of her actually enjoyed the simplicity of military life. It was a pleasant change of pace, especially when compared to the constant stress from her time at university. For the first time in her life, Tosca had her evenings completely to herself. No family to look after, no second job to keep herself from starving and no guilt lingering in the back of her mind, reminding her that she should be studying instead. She had actual free time, and she chose to spend it in front of the computer, honing her hacking skills and becoming active in the community.

The anti-authoritarian, government-distrusting influences of her time at university and of the hacking community were what drove her to specifically not opt for a desk job after her training. While her initial aversion to military life was fading rapidly, she still felt uncomfortable about lending her computer skills to the Alliance. She did not want to be the person who endangered personal information of millions of people by withholding critical exploits for military use and she did not want to develop hacking tools that would later on surely end up being used not just on military targets, but also for indiscriminately snooping on civilians. She decided to serve on an Alliance ship, never telling a soul about her reservations. Instead she isolated herself further, not only from her Alliance comrades, but also from the hacking community, never letting them know who she worked for.

Shortly after boot camp, she took part in a 12-month training program with the 43rd Turian Marine Division. Her reasons for enlisting were both genuine curiosity and to get some distance from her current squad. Always the outsider, she had found it difficult to make friends in the Alliance. Most soldiers were not so different from the people back home and Tosca shared very little interests with them. On top of that her experience at university had developed her analytic but not her social skills. Even her daily vocabulary now contained borrowed expressions from maths and computer science that made it harder for her to communicate normally with other people and instead just made her look extremely arrogant. During that time she made a lot of casual enemies, some of which were determined to make her life as unpleasant as allowed by regulations.

When she joined the turian training program she fully expected her new colleagues to be just as alienated from her behaviour as anyone else. However, after a long initial period of distrust, she found her alien teammates to be somewhat less fundamentally bothered by her quirks than their human counterparts. This was likely due to the fact that turians have a harder time reading human facial expressions and could therefore not have been intimidated by Tosca’ accidentally evil looks.

In the first months Tosca had worked hard to become a better sniper. She inadvertently kicked off a sort of competition between her and two turian team members. While she couldn’t compete with their marksmanship, her technical skills were solid and her boldness and unconventional thinking sometimes gave her an unexpected edge. Over the course of the program the competition became less vicious and more cautiously friendly. In the end she lost by a substantial margin, but on the day they earned their marksmanship badge the turian team went out for drinks and dragged Tosca along. Since they were currently training on one of the larger turian colonies where offworld visitors aren’t a rarity, they managed to find a bar that offered a limited selection of levo-drinks as well. Not much detail is remembered from that night, but Tosca Volterra was declared “pretty ok, for a human”.

She still wears the insignia of the 43rd around her neck below her clothes as a reminder of those days, though over the years she slowly lost contact with the friends she made there. Finding peers with whom she could see eye-to-eye and who didn’t much care for her unsociable personality as long as she was a valuable asset to the team boosted her self-confidence and sparked her ambition. Until then she had only stayed in the Alliance due to her contract, despite the recent enjoyment of her work. From there on she felt that she actually wanted to stay in the Alliance, and be really good at what she did on top of it. The opportunity of feeling like an actual part of the team also helped her work on her social skills, showing her that giving strangers the benefit of the doubt instead of needlessly burning bridges, and putting in a little effort to not come off as arrogant can sometimes be worth it.

In the subsequent years she served as an Officer in the Alliance Marines. After the ship she was initially serving on was severely damaged during a pirate attack and grounded for repairs, she was reassigned to the SSV Passchendaele. Due to her very particular skill set, Tosca was sent mostly on sabotage or reconnaissance missions, in small and specialised teams. She quickly built herself a reputation on her ship for being both resourceful and efficient. She also became infamous among the crew for being able to quickly destroy pretty much any system or machine she got her hands on.

From simple toasters to complex security systems with multiple redundancies, she always seemed to know exactly where to poke something to break it, sometimes using actual computer skills and, at other times, resorting to well-placed brute force. Despite the fact that most of the time she didn’t destroy objects she was trying to repair, her colleagues stopped going to her for help with their computer problems and just went straight to the designated IT expert. Stories about her unlikely encounter with both kitchen appliances and enemy hardware quickly spread on the ship and would sometimes get warped and exaggerated for entertainment purposes. They even earned her the title ‘Lord of Calamity’ with some of her friends, a name which she later adopted as a nickname in the extranet.

Tosca was actually happy serving on the Passchendaele. Her Commanding Officer, Captain Hilbert, was a veteran of the First Contact War and had an excellent knowledge of human nature, a skill for which Tosca respected him. He tried to help his subordinates along without trying to change them. Despite seeing the potential in Tosca’s IT skills he never pressured her to leave the ship and seek a job in R&D. Instead, he encouraged her to take occasional extranet courses to sharpen her skills. Under his influence Tosca slowly learned to understand herself and her coworkers a bit better. Though she still alienated some of her colleagues with her obvious lies, she became generally inoffensive enough for most others to slowly get used to her.

After the truce of 2187 the SSV Passchendaele was involved in a couple of scouting missions in the Outer Council Space. She was eventually sent to Invictus where the crew tightly cooperated with the Turians and helped sabotage and delay the Reaper ground forces long enough for the local population to be evacuated. Tosca and her squad would booby trap just about everything that could reasonably be expected to explode. They also destroyed bridges, locked down city areas and repaired the occasional com tower. Tosca’s resilience and resistance to stress came in handy during that time. Since she lacks the ability to empathise with strangers she was less affected by civilian casualties, and she was able to deploy the same kind of tunnel vision she had used while studying for exams to carry her through the downtimes.

After the first couple of days on the ground the team was tasked with repairing a set of flaks that had gone offline. Within the first hours after they headed out, they ran into an ambush by the reapers. They managed to retreat and escape through the tunnels, but Commander Hilbert was killed in the firefight. As the highest ranking remaining officer, command of the mission fell to Tosca. Despite knowing that she wasn’t exactly the charismatic type, she managed to keep the team together. She guessed correctly that, as long as she didn’t question herself, her crew members would mostly just be glad that somebody other than them was responsible. Had she worked with a team that didn’t know her so well it likely wouldn’t have worked. They managed to sneak their way into enemy territory, clear out the reaper forces near the guns and reboot the gun controls, completing the mission but losing half the squad in the process.

In the end they barely made it off the planet alive and Tosca spent the rest of the war on medical leave. She still has two long scars across her back where she almost successfully escaped Brute's claws. Through some friends in the Alliance she found out that most of her family had survived the Reaper invasion. However, her younger brother, who had joined the Alliance five years prior, had been on one of the vessels that fought in the battle of Sahrabik and now adorned the Omega 4 relay with its debris. She decided not to attend the funeral. Despite her catholic upbringing, she had not been religious for the past fifteen years, and the prospect of meeting the rest of her family under such depressing circumstances firmly kept her away. Besides, she wasn’t good at consoling people and would probably end up being accidentally insensitive to someone.

She dealt with her experiences on Invictus by returning to active duty in September 2188 and focusing on her work. Under Captain Hilbert, the crew of the Passchendaele had been pretty tight-knit, but after the loss of their captain they scattered quickly and Tosca was reassigned to another frigate. Her solid performance in war had left an impression with her superiors. When she heard that she was supposed to be promoted for it, she decided to quit. She realised that climbing the career ladder might eventually land her in a position of leadership, something she wanted to avoid. While she did not dislike the responsibility of command, she considers herself a barely acceptable leader at best, distinctly lacking in both natural authority and charisma. Her other option - finally accepting a desk job in R&D - was still as unacceptable as it was when she first joined the Alliance.

When her contract expired in August 2189 Tosca left the Alliance and moved to the Citadel. She applied at a couple of system and cyber security companies but her lack of formal qualifications and actual work experience in the field put her at a disadvantage. She ruled out many other career paths on grounds of either acute disinterest or moral objection and tried to earn some money by bug bounty hunting. When the CRC was founded, Tosca offered her expertise as a volunteer IT security consultant. At least at first glance the CRC seems to be a morally alright endeavour and helping to keep their security up to snuff is a way for Tosca to use her skills without a guilty conscience.

At the same time, the long working hours and distinct lack of action she experiences in her daytime job often leaves her restless. Now that her hobby has practically become her job she likes to practice at the shooting range after work, both in order to keep her skills sharp and to blow off some steam.

## Personality

Tosca Volterra is not a people person. While generally helpful, superficially curious, and sometimes friendly, she prefers to keep her emotional distance. As a consequence she has many superficial business connections and almost no dependable friends. She tries to avoid working with people, preferring proper hacking to social engineering, and feels most comfortable alone or in small squads. She will often back out of difficult social situations or avoid them a priori.

Tosca’s outlook on life is that of existential nihilism. She doesn’t need a reason to live and the lack thereof does not make her unhappy. The reason she gets up in the morning is mostly just the joy of being alive and general curiosity. She is neither religious nor spiritual. On a moral level, Tosca is a cynicist. She generally lacks faith in other people’s motives or competence. And even though she acknowledges on an abstract level that morals are mostly baseless, she still has some fairly idealistic views she cannot shake. She strongly values people’s life, privacy and freedom. In practice, these values keep her actions in check. Though what motivates her to adhere to them is less a belief in what is Right (with a capital R) and more a stubborn pride that prevents her from becoming a villain in her own value system.

The persistent indifference she harbours towards strangers has oddly turned her into a very unbiased person. She is generally polite towards strangers, whether they’re aliens or not, will almost always provide help when asked, and seldom judges people for their values. On the other hand, she will judge people swiftly and harshly for incompetence, especially when it comes to her own colleagues in cybersecurity. Tosca does not dislike people easily, but if she does, she will openly avoid their company if possible or, more likely, just outright mock them until they leave. While quick to like someone, Tosca is slow to trust people and therefore seldom makes new friends. She is very loyal to the few friends she does have and will care for them if they are in trouble.

Deep down she is an emotional person with the deeply-rooted belief that no earnest emotions should be dragged into public. She finds openly compassionate people suspicious, either believing them to be phoney or inappropriate. On the other hand she is not above crying during a sad movie, as long as nobody can see her.

Tosca is a masterful liar but only when absolutely nothing is at stake, being able to deliver everything from the smallest little lies to the most absurd stories with a straight face. She does that exclusively for her own amusement, or sometimes to save her the trouble of having an honest conversation. Despite this she would make a bad undercover agent. Her stories and impressions are often hit-or-miss, more histrionic than believable, and she has an aversion to lying with the expressed purpose of being convincing. Tosca is fully aware that her random dishonesty irritates people, especially since her more absurd lies often give her away, but she doesn’t seem to be bothered by it, often aggressively provoking someone she doesn’t like, or subtly messing with them. This has sometimes led to her escalating initially banale situations into violence, and while she always tries to stand her ground, she is not above running away if she finds herself in over her head. The only situations in which she can be trusted to always tell the truth are work-related or in earnest conversations among close friends.

Although she is often considered a nuisance by the people around her, Tosca takes great care to never cross certain lines in terms of cruelty. She doesn’t beat someone who’s already down and she takes no pleasure in killing, even though she prides herself in the clean and surgical execution of her work. Even in combat situations she will opt for non-lethal solutions if viable. Despite this, Tosca is pragmatic enough to be able to rationalise all her killings, as well as those of her enemies. While deplorable, killing people can be part of the job for both sides, and as long as everyone involved knows what they’re getting into, she can handle that part reasonably well. Tosca has often a neutral approach to political conflicts, striving to understand both sides and often finding herself in the position of the advocatus diaboli. While she will often have an opinion on a controversial topic she is more likely to look for compromises and common ground rather than dismiss the opposing side entirely. She has a certain respect for machiavellian politics, but since practical examples of this are so very few and far between that her respect is often limited to the abstract concept. Ultimately, though, most of her political opinions are informed by a single mantra: That people should leave each other alone as much as possible.

Tosca really shines when put under pressure. She loves the thrill of having to tackle difficult problems with limited resources, especially when the stakes are high. She is very stress resistant and keeps her focus even when something goes wrong. In combat her enthusiasm can border on recklessness. Most of her plans don’t survive first enemy contact, but her nonlinear thinking allows her to constantly adapt to evolving situations. This has led to tensions in the past when she first worked under someone else’s command, though she would never actually disobey her superiors.

### Exceptional Skills

* **Classicist:** In the absence of social obligations, Tosca has spent a lot of her free time reading italian literature, which she first came into contact with at school. She also branches off into roman or classical turian literature on occasion, generally preferring historical accounts or prose to poetry. **Hackerman:** Tosca is an active member of the white hat hacking community, even though she can’t dedicate as much time to it as she’d like. She feels like it is an obligation that comes with her skills, believing that it is part of her responsibility to find and publish whatever bugs she finds. She is known by the community under the nickname ‘Lord of Calamity’. Another side effect of her hacking skills is the worrying nonchalance with which she commits what technically amounts to low-key cybercrimes. She might download music that isn’t for sale anymore or just straight up pirate proprietary software she needs. Sometimes she will hack poorly protected household devices to low-key harass people she doesn’t like. While she understands the tools she uses, she has only ever written one herself. In her opinion, bad cybersecurity is the digital equivalent of leaving one’s front door open, so people shouldn’t really get upset if she just wanders in. However, she still takes great care not to overdo it and risk getting caught, being fully aware that law enforcement doesn’t share views.

## Physical Description

Barely anything regarding Tosca’s physical appearance stands out at first glance. She has the lean and wiry figure of a dancer. Her black hair reaches below her shoulder blades, but is almost always kept in a bun, held together by two steel pins. Her chiselled features and slightly asymmetrical eyebrows gives her a permanently contemptuous face. When she has been alone for prolonged periods of time she will often forget to smile in conversations.

She carries herself with a sense of ease. The fluidity of her movements betrays her martial arts training and her posture is always slightly better for it, even when she is just lurking on the couch. Though she is somewhat stronger than civilians, due to her low weight compared to many of her opponents she still relies on speed more than brute force.

Her civilian clothes are chosen for comfort and pockets. She wears mostly black and never more than two colours simultaneously.

### Armament

* M-92 Mantis
* M-6 Carnifex

### Abilities:

* Sabotage
* Decryption
* Overload
* Tactical Cloak