Dijiraq is a newly created entity/creature who prey upon unsuspecting users of the Virtual Network. They target mostly children and young adults who are less predetermined against their unique presence in the virtual world. But no one is immune to the Dijiraq’s tastes.

Creation

The Dijiraq was once an Ijraq — a mist form assassin created by the gods. One particular creature fed upon a boy who was in the Virtual Network and channeling in the real world for surreal effects for his friends sitting in the room watching. The children present screamed as the Ijiraq fed upon the boy’s power. A brave soul threw an iron ball at the feeding Ijiraq and it fled the boy but not without leaving traces of itself in the electronic network of the Virtual Reality system as the electrical impulses passed through its mist form upon escape.

The pieces left behind were innocuous at first until it grew hungry. The boy’s head peice being its home, when he used it next the peices fed. Fed like it had never before, connecting to the impulses of the boys brain and draining him of his life force. With the life it took it gained new knowledge — new sentience. And it learned it could leave the headset and roam the Network.

As it did it left traces of itself behind. The intelligence grew, the more it fed the more it knew. The more it left behind to create more of itself — replicating throughout the network, unstopable.

Allies

The new creature met a man. He used the Virtual Network and unlike the the others it choose to feed upon, this man accepted his fate and let the Dijiraq feed upon him. The Dijiraq was taken aback by the generosity that it stopped and conversed with the man. Their conversation lasted only moments as the Dijiraq had left a piece of itself inside the man. The creature fed upon the man from time to time never taking more than a little of his life but renewing its connection to the man.

The man brought him others like him. Others willing to allow a small measure of their intelligence for the gifts it left behind. They came to call themselves m’Antinomian an anagram for the Latin word innominatam which means nameless.

Attributes and Limitations

The Dijiraq can locate others of the collective with in the network, but in order to communicate they must rejoin the collective. The collective share information between one another, what one dijiraq knows the others learn through rejoining the collective.

To this end the m’Antinomian have a device called the key which they keep safely locked in a puzzle box on The Emissary at all times. This device is pre-programmed to release itself back into the wild if someone tampers with it, and if the collective has not returned with in an extended amount of time. Though they do not know if this feature will work as it has not been tested nor activated.

The Dijiraq cannot jump from entity to entity without direct physical contact. Anything more than a centimeter gap is impossible for a Dijiraq to reach in its native form. The dijiraq does not need the internet to hack into a computer system, only an electrical means of obtaining access.

The Dijiraq cannot understand the ones and zeros of the data it captures, it relies upon the m’Antinomian to decipher it and put it to use. The creature requires a human brain to understand the data.

Dijiraq can sense the One Power, though they do not need to feed on it like their originator. Electrical impulses are all it needs to survive and they don’t believe in killing their food source and only take what they need. Though extended stays do cause the host damage. They are more symbiotic than their predecessors.

When a dijiraq feeds on a human, they leave behind a piece of themselves. This piece collects the hosts memories and knowledge and when The Collector comes for the knowledge, another peice is refreshed leaving behind a connection to the collective’s knowledge. A regular person typically is not aware of this piece left behind, but the person over time gains special abilities such as knowing things they didn’t know before, or being really good at a certain video game. For someone aware of this potential they can access the collective information already gathered, and with a wired connection to the internet send a peice of the dijiraq collective to retrieve information from a known source — thought the hacker does not need to know how to get in, only that the information is there in a specific location.

The dijiraq are still learning about the One Power and do not know how this affects an entity once infected with the collective.