InsaneJournal

b a s i c s

name: Francesca DiGiovanni
age: 26
birthdate: October 28, 1983
family: Father - Giacomo DiGiovanni, mother - Jing-Wei DiGiovanni
hometown: Venice, Italy, most recently San Francisco, CA
career: Security consultant specializing in corporate and electronic data storage.

p a s s e n g e r

traveling with: Herself
contest entry: She was entered by her assistant as a joke, but when she was contacted as a winner, she decided she might as well. The HR department was insisting she use some of the massive amounts of vacation time she had stored up (because she never takes a day off), and this was as good a reason as any.
room: I DECK - 1055 - Calliope's Epics

This room is pretty, well, epic. Every room of the suite tells a story, starting immediately upon entry into the sitting room. The walls appear to be a rosy marble, though touch reveals it to be a clever painting trick. Lining every inch of the walls are glyphs that tell the story of Achilles. The furniture all appears antique, down to the chandelier hanging in the room - with dangling figures made out of glass that match the pictures on the wall. There is a loveseat and two chairs, a flat big screen TV, and DVD player.

The bathroom, being smaller, tells a much shorter story - that of Adonis. The sea-green tiles on the counter-tops tell the story, along with a mosaic of a scene from the myth on the floor. There is a shower stall that doubles as a steam room, spa tub, and of course toilet and sink.

The bedroom tells the story of - who else - Hercules! Its scheme very much matches the outer sitting room, though the colors are all of a deeper, warmer tone. Its walls tell the tale while managing not to be too loud and distract from the bed, which is kind of epic in itself. Its queen size frame appears to be gold, and very old, museum quality. The bedding is all in a creamy tone, matching the upholstery of the chair at the desk.

p h y s i c a l i t y

blood type: B-
sexuality: Straight
appearance: Born to an Italian father and Chinese mother, Francesca has striking looks - she's only 5'6", but has long hair so dark brown it's nearly black, with a pale gold, clear complexion. Her eyes are unusual - pale green bordered by a thin ring of dark forest green, lined with thick, dark lashes. She's typically dressed professionally but stylishly - suits or slacks and blouses, dark colors emphasized with pops of color. Shoes are her one weakness, and she's always got an eye open for cute new styles. She usually keeps her hair up, pulled back in chignons and twists to project as professional an appearance as possible - she knows she's young to hold the position she does, and she's just as determined not to let anyone's preconceived notions hold her back or impact her business. When she's not working, she favors a mixture of comfort and style - dark jeans, layered tops, blazers. Her hair is cut in myriad layers, giving it a small tendency to produce flyaways when in a breeze, but use of good styling product usually helps cut this down when she needs to.

p e r s o n a l i t y

behavior: Francesca is a highly intelligent woman with a passion for learning and discovery, though such high intelligence usually comes at the expense of social skills. She's the type who can be content with spending the entire day somewhere secluded with a stack of books. As a child, she was constantly demanding stories and always asking 'why'; as she grew, her desire to know about the world around her grew with her. She lives very much in her head - even as a child, she never had much use for other people, and could easily go several days without speaking a single word. It made her seem very standoffish and cold as she grew older - something she didn't particularly mind, as she's never cared what others think of her in a social sense - and had her parents taking her to a doctor fearing she was autistic (something she minded very much, thank you.)

She's extremely driven and intense, constantly wanting to better herself and reach higher goals; she frequently seems much older than she is. She goes full-out on any project she undertakes with almost frightening efficiency, wanting to be the best in what she does at all times. No resting on laurels for this one, no sir. In public, she's polite but slightly standoffish, keeping a professional distance at all times. When it comes to making decisions in business or protecting what's hers, she can be quite ruthless, with a temper that can be frightening if she lets slip her usually strict control. She was quite prone to tantrums as a child, but has thankfully learned to redirect that into more productive channels.

In private, she's loyal and her cool demeanor warms up considerably around anyone whose managed to ignore the ice queen front long enough to become a trusted friend. She doesn't have many close friends; most find it too hard to get through to her. If one does manage it, however, they'll find a friend for life.) She loves her family and is on good terms with her parents, and despite her cool manner, she's almost always willing to lend assistance when requested (and sometimes when it's not requested, to some people's irritation.)

Francesca has a moderate touch of OCD, manifesting itself in a need for order and organization - she likes to alphabetize, color-code, stack and file... anything that makes things look neat and easy to find. Things that are out of place irritate her. She's also very protective of her privacy - her home is her sanctuary, and not too many people beyond her closest friends are welcome there - and them not even for long periods. Despite her penchant for strict organization, she's actually a fairly creative mind. She enjoys experimenting in the kitchen and is a talented classical pianist, though she really plays only recreationally.
special skills: Fluent in English and Italian, plays classical piano, absolute mad skills when it comes to writing software programs, hacking into security systems, designing hack-proof systems of her own, and after a run-in with an overzealous suitor that could have turned out much worse, a frequent practitioner of krav maga. She likes it because it's efficient, without any frills or unnecessary rituals to observe. Get in, kick ass, get out.
strengths: Genius: No really, it's documented. With an IQ over 160, Francesca's a certified genius according to just about every test and organization in the world. Her ability to learn, assimilate, and use information she picks up is incredible. Give her enough learning material (books, demonstrations, lessons), and she can pick up nearly anything.

Eidetic memory: Francesca has the ability to study information - images, sounds, objects, etc - for only a short time and recall them with extreme accuracy and abundant detail. She can play a game of chess entirely in her head, and 30 seconds of staring at a page or image will cement it in her memory - a week later she'll be able to tell you the fifth word of the sixteenth sentence on the eighty-ninth page.
weaknesses: Tactless: Francesca doesn't have the normal filter on her mouth that most people have, so everything that comes out if it is typical nothing less than brutal honesty. While she doesn't go out of her way to insult people (and it's quite often nowhere near her intention), it nonetheless can come out that way - like when she's telling a CEO how utterly incompetent his entire IS department is and how a particularly gifted high schooler could crack his security. It sure as shit hasn't made her any friends.

Socially Inept: Simply put, Francesca sucks at making friends - likely a large part due to the fact that she essentially skipped three years of high school and never attended any typical teen social functions. Her personality sure doesn't draw anyone in, and people who stick around are often insulted by her honesty. She doesn't see the point in small talk, and no one really understands the kinds of things she talks about. All in all, she's typically eating alone at lunch, living alone, the girl standing against the wall all night.

Isolated: Because she has no friends and her parents are still back in New York, Francesca spends long portions of time alone - she has coworkers during the day, but from the moment she leaves work until whenever she gets back in, she has no one. She lives alone, hasn't been on more than a handful of dates in her life, and doesn't even have a cat or a fish for company. She speaks to her parents fairly regularly, but doesn't see them often. If something were to happen, it could be quite a while before anyone noticed.

Unemotional: Because of her highly logical mind, Francesca often finds herself having trouble forming emotional attachments to people or things. She can, it just takes a while and it's usually a tenuous, fragile thing at best. She often has trouble displaying emotion in general (save her temper, when she lets it go), and doesn't like to talk about emotions because she doesn't really understand what she's feeling when she does feel something. She also doesn't often have a lot of patience for dealing with other people's emotions when there are more important things (in her opinion) to do.

b a c k g r o u n d

personal history: Born in Venice to an Italian father and Chinese ex-pat mother, Francesca was an unusual child from the start. She never cried, rarely required much looking after, and was frequently content to amuse herself all day long with only a few toys provided. Her father, the curator of an art gallery, and her mother, a concert violinist, worked constantly to try and coax more normal responses from their infant child. Theories abounded - developmental disorder, autism, any number of things. The truth was, they were merely looking on the wrong end of the spectrum. Testing led to the conclusion that Francesca's IQ was nearly off the charts, something that would bring both joy and resignation to her parents frequently as she grew.

For starters, Francesca never seemed to have the same need for companionship and social interaction as did other children in her age group. She was happy to spend her days off by herself, reading or conducting experiments from whatever scientific books she'd managed to get her hands on - which led to quite a few scoldings on her mother's end, especially the time a stray spark of lit magnesium scorched half the laundry her mother had hung out on the line. She showed an affinity for mechanics early on, and was constantly taking things apart and putting them back together - often better than they had been. At a loss for what to do to keep Francesca constructively entertained, her parents often just sat back and let her do what came naturally. She rarely got herself into trouble, so what was the harm?

When Francesca was thirteen, her father was offered a job as director at the Met in New York City. With several opportunities available for Francesca's mother to find work, the family made the decision to emigrate to America. Francesca, bright as she was, had been speaking english since she was eleven and made the switch with little difficulty. It was hard when she started school, however - not only was she the new foreign girl, she was the new foreign girl who'd skipped four grades and placed directly in her final year of high school. Francesca had no friends, told herself she didn't need friends, and kept her head down that entire year, skipping all senior activities and basically anything else school-sponsored. Her free time was spent reading and studying any number of subjects, though her favorite was the rapidly-growing technological field - computers, anything electronic were fascinating to her.

She graduated high school with honors at fourteen and though she'd been accepted into MIT, her parents insisted she stay at home until she was of legal age. She graduated from Columbia with a B.S. in computer science and a minor in mathematics at eighteen, where she then applied to the computer science doctoral program at MIT and was accepted, specializing in analysis of algorhythms and artificial intelligence. Those were literally the best years of her life, surrounded by those similarly gifted with intelligence and the drive to use it. It was the first time she found herself rather easily opening up to people, able to have hours-long conversations about robotics and real-time AI encryption. It was here that she got into a little bit of trouble - she had an incredible skill for hacking and cracking, and had soon made a name for herself on the corporate circuit advising them of how crappy their security systems and database protections were. When the school learned of her activities, they nearly expelled her, but she'd thankfully impressed enough teachers that their willingness to vouch for her kept her in school.

She made a name for herself with her thesis on a revolutionary, AI-based encryption algorhythm ('An Experimental Schema-Based Approach to Mememetric Password Generation') and graduated at 22 with her Ph.D. She was immediately snapped up as a security analyst with an information security firm in San Francisco and quickly worked her way up through the ranks until she headed up her own team as a security consultant. She and her team analyzed and hacked (or tried to hack) the security and data networks for their clients, comprised mostly of major corporations with a few wealthy paranoid old guys thrown in. Quickly making a name for herself as one of the best in the industry, Francesca was well on her way to earning a promotion when word came down the line that she'd been selected as the recipient of a free cruise. The HR department told her she needed to use some of the vacation time she never used, and she decided she might as well. Packing up, she was off on a plan to Miami almost before she knew it.

a d d i t i o n a l

what's in a name: Francesca is Italian in origin, meaning 'free'.
astrology: Scorpio: The Scorpion. Fixed, water, yin - planetary ruler: Mars and Pluto. Keywords: "I DESIRE."
Positive Traits: ambition, drive, a penetrating mind, curiosity, intensity of focus, consistency, persistence, and willpower.
Negative Traits: selfishness, obsessiveness, vindictiveness, hypersensitivity, ruthlessness, cynicism, and jealousy.

r a n d o m

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c r e d i t s

This is not real.