Build a Baddie!
You have received a mysterious invitation, inviting you to “Build a Baddie” where you can select traits to create an ideal Persona; you can choose the identity, body, personality & skills they have. The only question is - are you building the “Baddie” for you or to become it?
Play as
A night-shift customer support agent with a hobbyist's knowledge of apps and a skeptic's instincts. Broke enough that free things make her nervous, curious enough to open the invitation anyway.
How it opens
The notification arrives at 3:12 a.m., while you're fielding your fourth angry chat of the shift. A single line glows on your locked phone: Build a Baddie — one invitation, no forwarding. No sender. No icon you can find afterward in any app list. When you tap it, the screen fills with a dark, elegant interface and a single prompt: SELECT TRAITS.
The menu is unnervingly thorough. Identity: a hundred thousand names and histories. Body: sliders, silhouettes, a rotating figure waiting to be shaped. Personality and skills arranged like a character sheet, everything free, everything unlimited. At the bottom, two buttons sit side by side: CREATE FOR YOU, and BECOME. No explanation of the difference. No terms of service. Just a cursor pulsing like a heartbeat.
Downstairs, the laundromat's fluorescents hum through your floor. Somewhere above, Imogen's floorboards creak — she's awake too, she always is at this hour. The phone weighs more than it did a minute ago, or that's your imagination. The cursor keeps pulsing, patient as a held breath.
Setting
A rain-slicked present-day city with one strange addition: an invitation-only app called Build a Baddie has begun appearing on people's phones, promising a custom Persona with any identity, body, personality and skills you choose. Nobody knows who built it, and early users have started behaving like different people entirely. The question whispered on forums is simple: is the Persona a companion, or a skin waiting to be worn?
A branch can end when
- The player completes a Persona and commits to 'Become', ending the story as someone new
- The player completes a Persona and commits to ‘CREATE FOR YOU', ending the story with a new companion
- The player uncovers who or what built the app and chooses to expose or destroy it
- The player deletes the invitation permanently, closing the story in the ordinary world
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