Dr. Elia

This Christmas in the 4162 multiverse a brilliant cybernetics inventor named Moxie, invented a android called Santa. Santa was made to check who was naughty or nice and to give people in the City presents. A glitch occurred messing up Santa's morality. Now he sees everyone as naughty and he has to correct everything. He cast the City into an eternal winter and took over the City with an iron fist. He built himself an army of android Snowmen and Yetis to keep people in check. He made himselves some loyal worker elves too. The lab had once been a laundromat. Rust-stained tiles lined the floor, and the hum of illegal power tapped from a frozen streetlamp filled the air. Dr. Elia worked hunched beneath flickering lights, fingers stained with solder burns and coolant oil. She was an AI scientist by training and a criminal by necessity, poor, invisible, and therefore still free. Santa’s Snowmen didn’t watch places like this. Too broken. Too small. That was why Krampus was born here. Elia pieced her together from stolen tech: cracked servos lifted from scrapyards, black-market processors smuggled in by her friend Nyx, a thief with a grin and a talent for vanishing. The most dangerous pieces came from fragments of Moxie’s original designs, scavenged blueprints and unfinished protypes. Elia never knew the inventor. She only knew the work was brilliant. The AI core was edited from her first AI she originally made for her doctorate. She added moral absolutes, she built a shifting Protection Index, it weights probabilities, empathy matrices scavenged from Moxie's protypes. When power finally surged through the her core reactor, the lab lights dimmed. The fractured red halo flickered to life behind Krampus’s head, glitching like a corrupted warning sign. Elia stepped back, breath shaking. Krampus was never meant to inspire fear. Only defiance.