Sombra was transferred from relative to relative then foster home to foster home in an increasingly beleaguered system as each one prove to either be abusive, alcoholic or on the verge of poverty and unable to care for her. Sombra was a consistently perplexed, uncoordinated and emotionally unstable girl-always asking the people around her what was going on since her parents died. For this she was bullied. Throughout her time in school she wore frumpy clothes, consistently suffered poor grades and often complained of feeling sick. Sombra coped by daydreaming. The inspiration to hack came from a last straw, until that point she had felt that something was wrong with her, that she was weak and needed help and didn't understand things, that it wasn't anyone's fault and if anything it was hes for being so ugly, clumsy and stupid. Until that moment she believed it was her responsibility to be liked, to cope with the world and that she had failed to make friends with the people who bullied her.
She was 13, there had been another girl named Maria that had been more patient than any of the others, that didn't pick on her, that treated her like a person and was, in a way, training her how to socialize. So, she finally told her while walking home with adult simplicity: "I love you." It seemed to make sense at the time. The young girl was irked and said, "the truth is I hate you, you're ugly and weird and my other friends don't like you. I only hung out with you because you wanted to. I regret ever meeting you," then walked away.
Sombra's vision blurred as she felt a hotness engulf her brain, she wanted revenge against the people who persecuted her, she wanted to make them feel scared and isolated, she wanted them to feel as bad, she wanted it so badly she felt like the top of her head was coming off. She ran home with tears in her eyes and hid in a corner to sob. She screamed that she hated everyone and wanted to kill them–that they all deserved to suffer. Her body felt electric, she was suffering so badly but she felt pumped with energy the only thing that gave her solace where thoughts of revenge. No real word from the parents, she was just a confused and shy girl. The school found it necessary to pursue psychiatric care and Sombra was soon taking medication for bipolar disorder.
But that was the night she decided to learn how one might hack a social media account, she stayed up all night and stayed home sick the next day working. Her instinct was to simply ask how. This quickly brought her to the darker parts of the internet. As a somewhat vulnerable teenage girl interested in hacking, she got no end of attention and assistance from anonymous communities comprised of people with what might be deemed anti-social personalities. Her judgment was poor but to her they were friends. It wasn't long until she fell under personal tutelage of the most perverse and ruthless of them. Maria and her persecutors would soon find their accounts hacked and their secrets exposed, they faced daily death threats and found every electronic device they owned behaved devilishly. They never knew it was her but understood to leave Sombra alone. Now she wasn't asking everyone what was going on, she knew.
Sombra had been somewhat of an ugly duckling and an awkward child, she slaved away learning the intricacies of hardware and software with the resent that she was a hideous unlikeable person. By 17 she was devastatingly gorgeous and completely maladjusted. Computers had been her obsession for several years now, she had logged thousands of hours alone in the dead of night with her ears buzzing from mood stabilizing medication reading about computer architecture, programming, hacking and cracking.
Then something happened, her grades improved, everything seemed easier than what she was doing with computers.
Things had indeed become easier, people were nice to her for some reason, they found excuses to talk to her, she found she could get them to do things. One day it clicked, I'm hot, she realized looking at her nubile body in the mirror. Sombra's ego inflated, she could blackmail or seduce anyone to get anything she needed, in her mind she was untouchable. Now it seemed like the world was for her so she demanded more from it. After being a well-behaved but depressed loner for four years she now wanted to push the limits on everything. She lost the dreamy dazed look from her eyes, they had become the calculating eyes of an intelligent predator.
There was a sudden need to go out, she felt a draw towards certain people–particularly the dangerous mysterious type–and they were drawn to her. She wanted to be just like them and modeled her behavior like so. People started viewing her as dangerous but desirable: she was consistently in trouble, she brought knives to school, she stopped taking her medication meant to treat her variety of mood disorders, she smoked wherever she wanted and drank in class, she started altercations on a whim but no one dared offend her or not invite her to parties. Her foster parents were powerless to discipline her, if they banned her from her computer she just wouldn't come home, she was already seeing an army of therapists and behavioral specialists.
Maria after all those years had come out as queer and now wore undercut and had a slightly stocky build. Sombra didn't care, she had no sexual politics–she was an opportunist. She learned this then got her to eat her out in the host's bedroom at some Dorado rich kid's party. When she had finished she promptly told Maria that she hated her and hit her across the face. Sombra's sexuality went according to her whim, she had become viciously hyper-sexual and everything and everyone was for her pleasure. She bullied boys into dating her and tossed them away when she was bored, she sexually harassed and intimidated other girls, she stalked people she was jealous of, she tried everything out on everyone and took a special pleasure in ruining relationships.
Maria moved on to attend college at an elite American university and would later become an advocate against domestic violence in the queer community. Sombra, as soon as she legally could, dropped out of school and proceeded to become a menace, moving out from her foster home and becoming a transient alternating between sex-work, unhealthy economically dependent relationships, petty crime and hacking to secure a string of tenuous living arrangements.
