Nora/Profile

Nora

Profile

Quotes

Career

The EW-55 is a special-purpose writer Doll developed by Cyber Media, primarily intended for narrative design and scriptwriting. In order to address the issues with Doll-produced prose, such as dullness and a lack of congruency, the EW-55 is specially equipped with an information processing system possessing a degree of randomness, allowing the EW-55 a chance to generate new ideas from any received information, thus simulating the process of "inspiration" experienced by human writers.

As a popular Doll screenwriter, Nora's works spanned the fields of film, television, literature, games and many others. In order to give her the chance to collect more material for future work, Nora's studio decided to enter her into Project Neural Cloud.

Doll Profile 1

Following the surge in demand for entertainment products, authorial Dolls have seen broad use in many fields as replacements for screenwriters, but scripts produced through theoretical data and language algorithms are invariably dry and stilted. In order to overcome this bottleneck, Cyber Media developed the EW-55, which could experience "inspiration".

Nora's works stem entirely from the chance resonance of various sorts of materials within her neural cloud. She has a chance to convert each piece of new information she receives into a unique idea. In Nora's eyes, the entire world is a database for her to reference, and so she is constantly scribbling notes in an effort to preserve the spark of creativity, and works produced in this way never fail to excite their audience.

However, Nora's productive efficiency is also very vexing. When she lacks for inspiration, she cannot produce anything regardless of the methods used. Conversely, long periods of operation will overload her neural cloud and cause her to crash, regardless of how inspired she is. Trying to get a script out of Nora in a timely manner has always been the thorniest problem her clients have faced.

Doll Profile 2

Nora's rise to fame could be considered an accident. At the time, the EW-55 line faced retirement due to all sorts of negative feedback, and Nora herself was nothing more than a prototype that had been abandoned by Cyber Media. A film studio purchased Nora at a rock-bottom price, but even then, she spent a whole month idle after being switched on. When the studio thought she was defective and wanted to return her, a chance visit to a certain folklorist resulted in her producing a horror movie script in one night, albeit one that did not match the requirements given.

The studio decided to produce the movie with an experimental mindset, and it won much acclaim for its clever plot and creative design, reaping a huge harvest at the box office. The studio immediately allocated their best production crew to Nora and gave her generous time to write, anticipating the next big moneymaker from her.

However, they had to wait nearly half a year for it.

"Didn't you say there was no deadline for the script? I was collecting material all this time," Nora lazily replied to pressing inquiries from her investors as she showed off the scribbles in her notepad, without a single proper sentence in sight.

From then on, Nora was plagued by a new nightmare, known as "deadlines".

Doll Profile 3

In order to encourage the typically slack Nora to collect more information in search of inspiration, the studio actively arranged for her to interact with Dolls from various different fields in the hope that she would collect material from them. Initially, this did little to move Nora, until she saw the name of the folklorist Zangyin on the list of names.

Nora thought that her much-acclaimed debut work would receive praise from Zangyin. Instead, Zangyin proceeded to levy a barrage of ruthless personal attacks against her and her work, pointing out each and every one of the film's errors. Incensed, Nora hit back as well, hinting that everything Zangyin said was nothing more than foolish superstition that nobody would bother with.

The information-gathering meeting soon became an intense dispute, but during their argument, Nora realized that Zangyin was providing her with a lot of knowledge that she could use in future works, and so she had no choice but to begrudgingly note it all down.

From then on, the two of them would essentially greet each other by fighting. Whenever Nora released a new movie, audiences would always find a character bearing a strong resemblance to Zangyin who would die a tragic death, while film review sites would always feature a one-star review that was the length of an academic essay, devoted to bashing the film for its mistakes.

Doll Profile 4

Nora was never able to control the degree of processing power allocation when coming up with stories, which meant that long periods of work would frequently result in her neural cloud crashing. In her words, it felt like the world she was writing suddenly becoming real, drawing her into a bizarre, surreal dreamscape, and when she woke up again, her inspiration and energy would be sucked away by that dreamscape.

This might be related to the period in Nora's past where she was discarded after being rolled out, but she appears to have lost the memory data pertaining to that time, which was also the initial reason why she couldn't work. She has no recollection of what she went through before producing her first work, like the creativity devoured by her dreams.

The strange thing is, Nora's studio—which has often suffered from her work efficiency—has always refused her requests for repairs, citing technical reasons. As a result, Nora has had no choice but to accept her present circumstances and often uses "crashing from overwork" as a reason for overshooting her deadlines. But sometimes, when she is idle, she wonders if she would be an even more outstanding writer without that defect.

"Rather than worry about hypotheticals, why don't you focus on making that garbage you produce actually worth the paper it's written on? If that abacus you call a neural cloud didn't overload, that pile of trash you call your works probably wouldn't be as famous as they are now."

—Every time Zangyin responded to her philosophical musings in such a way, the wrath it sparked would wipe away all the doubts in Nora's heart.

Doll Profile 5

From time to time, Nora attempted to turn her guesses about her past into a story, or turn the uneasiness in her heart into the thrills sparked by her films. But creativity could not make up for the sense of loss in her heart, and she even began to wonder if her memories would vanish during one of her crashes. This was why she supported her studio's decision to enter her into Project Neural Cloud.

"Although simply storing lacks innovation, it's more reliable than writing things down with a pen, at least."

Ironically, Nora is now trapped in the cloud server due to the "reliable" Project Neural Cloud, but she is very happy with the Oasis' creative environment, which features no deadlines whatsoever. To Nora, all her encounters here are valuable sources of inspiration which she would never be able to encounter in the office, and thus she is constantly observing and taking notes on all the friends around her, while preserving her experiences in the Oasis within her work.

Nora hopes to gain the best kind of inspiration here and create something that will live forever in everyone's—including Zangyin's—heart. Should the day come when she loses everything again, she'll be able to find her lost self from it and the people who love it.