Magic World: Gary Abdulla, Gnomish Hacker

What's up everybody?

So I mentioned in my Fantasy Races post that gnomes tended to have some middle eastern background. However these days when someone says "Middle East" here in the US it's automaticaly put in the same catagory as Terrorists, Jihad, Muslims (which ^of course^ equals bad.) Backward uncivilized people living in the desert. But this is not so, even in our own world. Certainly those places and people exist, but there are very civilized places out there, cities and skyscrapers, and modern conveniences like internet, television, air conditioning, and even *gasp* Running Water. Try to contain your surprise.

Actually it's been like this for a very long time, and in fact there was a time that Bhagdad was considered the cultural and scientific capitol of the world, developing many of the scientific principals that we still use today, and creating art, liturature, music, engineering, etc, pretty much everything people think of when they think about civilization.

And today there are a lot of cities there that are pretty great. Dubai in particular is kinda awesome.

And that's where Gary's parents are from. They moved to America for 2 reasons. First, his father's brother was here, and second, cost of living in Dubai had grown to high for them, so rather than move to the desert, they decided to sell everything, cut ties, and move to America, where Gary's father Yamil opened a small grocery store. Gary was born in 1980's-ish and grew up with the small computer that sat in the back of his father's store, which was used for bookkeeping.

By the time he was 13 he was hacking into the computer system of the video store to give himself permission to rent adult videos and setting up free phone service, free dial up service, and a few low limit credit cards, which he could generaly get away with using in non-gnomish stores where they had a hard time telling how old he was. In this way he was able to build himself a new computer by the time he was 16, by which time computer technology was booming.

His fathers business however was failing. A shop owned by a larger corporation was using shady and decietful tactics to try to drive the small grocer out of business. Upset at the injustice Gary hacked the corporate servers and tried for several says to find a vulnerability, in they're overall system. Not just the computer system, but they're entire operation. And eventually after planning and abandoning several different types of attack from brute force to roundabout, but finally he found an opening that would rely on subtlety. 

He found that he was able to edit unread emails on their server, and started leaving little hints and rumors about people being fired, and that the company wouldn't be paying final paychecks, and that some people were taking everything they could and getting out before the mass firings began. 

It worked better than he could ever have anticipated. Not only was the other store cleaned out in a matter of days, the corporation couldn't afford the store with the reputation it had developed, so instead they made his father an offer, and bought the store for far more than it was worth, and offered to pay him to run the place, more than what he made now, and they paid to have the store re-modeled, something it would have taken his father years to afford.

And so Gary learned the value of being able to hack for profit.

His goals and aims though were not malign or hostile in general, and not entirely selfish either. He always made a point to help people who had been wronged by his victims, at least when he could get away with it without exposing himself.

Eventually, after college, (which he attended for free,) he formed an internet startup company who's job it was to test different servers, and websites and such. Eventually it got to be so easy, he was able to code bots and scripts with smart algorithms that figured out the systems nearly as fast as he could. And so he started getting bored.

That was about the time that one of the companies he was actively hacking, seeking more vulnerabilities, gave his business card to some weird old guy who called himself a Magic Engineer. This guy wanted him to hack a virtually impossible system, backed up by a team of hackers.

Gary didn't try to take them head on, he harassed and cajoled them, using bots to lay false trails, and working cracks in the security. Eventually he found a vulnerability, and sent a bunch of drones...

Okay it's been a long night, I'm tired. The rest of the story is pretty much what you might expect.  Gary has an exciting hacking adventure, that in his head was full of adventure and exitement, but to a casual observer just looked like a guy in a chair staring at the screen.

So when the dot com bubble burst and his company went down in flames rather than take his profits and rebuild, he became a mercenary hacker for hire, having gotten the taste for adventure.

Shortly later the old magic engineer died and Gary made it his job to find out how and why.

Okay, I'm done, I have have a headache, and blah blah blah. Comments. Suggestions. Welcome.

Thanks for Reading!