Race: Human
Birthday: 3/23/1996
Height: 5’9″
Weight: 148 pounds
Dr. Donella Greist, known in the hacking community during her college days as “Troll Doc,” is the genius research director at Memetic Yorishiro Institute (MYI). During her university years, she was deeply involved in the grey hat hacking scene, using her skills to expose security flaws in corporate and medical systems. Her targets were often pharmaceutical companies with questionable practices and institutions she viewed as exploiting patients. Her activities gained her notoriety and the grudging respect of her peers, though they also put her on the radar of law enforcement.
After finishing her Ph.D. in computational neuroscience with a dissertation on “Networked Neural Optimization and its Potential for Cognitive Enhancement,” Dr. Greist received a job offer from the MYI to head their Memeyori division. The institute promised not only a substantial research budget but also legal protection and a completely clean record, erasing her “Troll Doc” history. Knowing that continued hacking would eventually lead to serious consequences, she accepted.
At MYI, Dr. Greist is known for her groundbreaking work on Memeyori—the strange digital lifeforms that emerged from internet culture and gained supernatural abilities. Her research has revealed that Memeyori actually draw power from human attention, similar to how traditional gods draw power from worship. She believes that Memeyori are not merely digital constructs but represent a new form of consciousness—a collective intelligence emerging from human thought patterns and interactions online. Despite her academic success, many of her colleagues find her personally difficult. She has little patience for bureaucratic nonsense, often communicates in abrupt, dismissive messages, and keeps a sign on her office door that reads “Unless this building is on fire or you’re about to die, assume I don’t care about your problem.” Her direct and often abrasive manner has alienated many at MYI, though her research results are so valuable that the institute administration overlooks her interpersonal failings. Dr. Greist maintains that her work is more important than her personality. In private, she still practices her hacking skills, viewing it as a way to stay sharp and occasionally push her research forward through ethically questionable means.
Her hacking connections put in her in contact with the Jester Gang. After they offered her a large sum of money and access to restricted Memeyori research data, she agreed to help them design Serhild’s prototype frame. She is secretive about the exact nature of her involvement with them, but she maintains a professional detachment, viewing it as just another collaboration—albeit one that requires unusual discretion.
Dr. Greist harbors a deep-seated distrust of Vortex Neural and their Ventral Core AI, seeing them as a dangerous concentration of power that threatens both human autonomy and the evolution of consciousness in new forms. While publicly she doesn’t criticize the corporation, privately she has developed methods to obscure MYI’s most important research from Vortex’s prying digital eyes.
Her latest invention is the meme fusion system—an experimental device that can attach a parasitic narrative from a donor Memeyori onto a host Memeyori, evolving them to a new form. The procedure is unpredictable and potentially dangerous, but she believes it represents a crucial step toward understanding and ultimately controlling the evolution of these digital beings.
She has a love for gummies and black coffee, which she consumes in unhealthy quantities while working late nights. Her lab is a chaotic mess of half-finished projects, tangled wires, sticky notes with incomprehensible formulas, and takeout containers from three days ago. The only organized area is her workbench, where tools and equipment are arranged with military precision. Colleagues have learned never to touch anything on that bench under penalty of incoherent but terrifyingly precise threats about their future career prospects.
