Eliza Teak is a vampire and teacher at the Offetstine Secondary School. She is somewhat infamed for her eccentric, megalomaniacal personality, and often views herself as akin to a military general. Attributed to her vampirism and under the control of the magical energy she harbors, she believes her destiny is to colonize the Moon and establish herself as the ruler of the land she claims. To that extent, she sometimes refers to herself as the Empress of Fidelia.
In addition to her role as a schoolteacher, Teak is a somewhat reputed and published mathematician with studies primarily in discrete mathematics, such as set theory and category theory. In addition to her involvement in the pure mathematics, she is also involved in the sciences and is a staunch magical epistemologist.
As her plans to colonize and inhabit the Moon depend on a means of efficient space travel, she has extensively studied the field of astrophysics and has developed numerous computer simulations to help herself and her team of astrophysicists, enlisted primarily through compulsion, understand the necessary concerns, develop models and facilitate space travel. In the process, Teak developed SophOS DCS, then known as the Lunar Research Framework, as a private supercomputer architecture to facilitate efficient work-stealing parallelism necessary for physics simulations. Eventually, to fund her research, she began to distribute SophOS mainframes, servers and workstations to small businesses.
History
Teak was born as a human on 4 November 1965 in Offetstine. From a young age, Teak was deeply fascinated with mathematics, throughout her enrollment in Offetstine Secondary School. Despite this, she noted an overwhelming frustration with the way it was often taught, claiming it was too dry to genuinely teach students. When she graduated, she attended Cedar Crest University in Winthorpe to formally study mathematics and education. She graduated with high recommendations for her diligent and motivated style, and her high level of synergy with students.
Teak eventually reapplied to Offetstine Secondary School as a teacher. Even as a human, Teak notes that she was motivated by a fiercely competitive, though usually lighthearted, nature, though this trait grew more pronounced since she became a vampire. To this extent, she often lightly skirmished with other teachers in the department, especially her own former teachers, to demonstrate to them she could teach the same classes with comparatively less friction. Teak maintained pride in her teaching style, focused on the assumption of good faith in students, and the heavy use of projects and real-world analogy.
Even during this stage in her life, Teak was occasionally infamed for minor altercations with other staff in trying to effect policy changes. Despite her fiery nature, she was generally a well-appreciated teacher and saw minor acclaim from her colleagues and students. She further remained involved in the mathematical community outside of pedagogy. While her scope as a teacher primarily encapsulated early secondary school affairs such as algebra and geometry, Teak studied set theory and category theory in further detail during this period.
Vampirism
On Thursday 31 October 1996, Teak called in to school reporting her inability to come, citing an extreme headache. Later that evening, she paid visit to the Offetstine Castle. She explains that she was guided to the location by an ethereal energy, and that her judgement was clouded at the time. She was led to the location herself, though finding herself unable to gather the will to leave, she remained on premises for a period of time. She eventually wandered to the uppermost floor, an observatory with a glass-paneled ceiling, against her better judgement.
Teak does not recall the exact circumstances of her experience, though she notes that her transformation could probably be attributed to some celestial event ("I don't know of any local happenings, but stuff happens in space every day"), that she felt a shock of magical energy surge through her and that the transformation into a vampire was instantaneous. She explains she took the next day off, and did not recover until the following Monday. She notes that this period is when she came to terms with her newfound nature, including her imperative to feed on blood and to colonize the Moon, and her eccentric personality. She continued her work as a teacher, though without much regard to her appearance, and grew even more poorly reputed for her conduct.
All the while, she began her study of astrophysics, under the presumption that the foremost goal in colonizing the Moon would be to establish an efficient means of travel to the Moon and back. As a magical epistemologist, she made it a practice of augmenting traditional scientific discoveries with her magic, and developed a rigorous understanding of the mechanisms of her magic. Her temper was also the least stable during this period, often finding trouble in her eccentric manner of feeding. In one particularly notable case, on 12 December 1996, in a failed attempt to evade police after a botched attempt at feeding, she took the form of the officer who tried to apprehend her, and wrecked multiple police cars before being arrested under the officer's identity.
The incident drew the attention of the Coalition, who until then had ignored Teak for her chiefly innocuous nature. She was interviewed and harshly reprimanded by Modeste Daniau, a high-ranking Coalition member then responsible for investigating incidents which threatened the Masquerade, in particular those involving violence and attempted feeding. Daniau managed to have Teak released, though not within the auspices of the police station, and the framed officer was forced to flee Offetstine, as she was wanted for Teak's crimes under her identity. Understanding her eccentric nature was growing untenable, and in a somewhat strange turn of events, Teak opted to enlist a human servant named Krystal, who was initially to guide her in managing her nature and controlling her bloodlust. As Teak's attitude eventually mellowed, Krystal continued to serve her as her right hand to the throne of her lunar colony, which she dubbed Fidelia.
Ventures
Lunar colonialism
Main article: Fidelia
Since becoming a vampire, Teak has claimed an incontestable imperative to colonize the Moon and establish herself as the monarch of the nation she founds. In recent months, she notes she somewhat laments this imperative, but notes she lacks the power to contest it. To this extent, she has, through the years, developed numerous computer simulations to help herself and her team of astrophysicists, enlisted through compulsion, understand the necessary concerns, develop models and facilitate space travel. In the process, she developed SophOS DCS, then known as the Lunar Research Framework, as a private supercomputer architecture to facilitate efficient parallel programming.
Teak refers to her prospective nation as Fidelia. While she suggests she wishes to rule over it as a military dictator, she explains she feels a significant responsibility to her citizens and intends to still set up democratic infrastructure. Despite this, she fervently denies all claims that she intends to establish a democracy. She frequently refers to Fidelian government architecture with military terminology, identifying her prospective cabinet members as "generals". She intends to remain the sole "empress" of the nation for the span of her life, and is immortal as a vampire. Despite this, she refuses any government responsibilities besides diplomacy, instead delegating it to her cabinets. Due to her background as a mathematician and teacher, she explains, she finds it hard to disregard the genuine needs of her citizens even though she is "supposed to be evil".
While Teak is keen on the use of her magical power to ease engineering constraints, and is personally heavily involved in research considerations, her research often struggles from budget constraints. As many of her team, despite being compelled to serve her, does not maintain any other job, she is unable to pay for their living expenses solely though her own job as a teacher, let alone equipment for her research. To this extent, she has attempted multiple business ventures in parallel with her teaching job.
Teak Industries
Teak's first, and patently short-lived, attempt to fund her research was Teak Industries, a chemical supplier company headquartered in Offetstine. She used her magic to streamline the process of purifying and distributing chemical samples competitively with large firms, though this proved largely ineffective. She saw very little business, and eventually closed Teak Industries after the success of a parallel business venture of hers, Sophos International.
Sophos International
Teak's second attempt to fund her research was Sophos International, a technology company targeting enterprise users and marketing a family of workstations built on SophOS DCS, an in-house operating system developed by Teak for efficient parallel processing, and Virtua, a custom ISA designed with efficient multicore and instruction pipelining in mind. While SophOS workstations and servers remained a small portion of even the local market, many customers did report a significant uplift in performance compared to other contemporary offerings.
Despite the overwhelming majority of the market at the time advocating the use of UNIX-like "open" systems, including their use being codified in certain government regulations, Sophos actively estranged their use in favor of the novel DCS standard, which was declared free for use by other companies. Despite this, SophOS DCS remains the only implementation compatible with the standard. Teak maintains the Sophos brand and handles most financial affairs of the company, though most hardware and software engineering has been maintained primarily by the rest of her team in recent months.
While Teak Industries struggled with Teak's poor management skills and a lack of market penetration, Sophos International proved far more successful. Teak eventually sold her assets in Teak Industries, allowing her to focus primarily on her job as a teacher and as the head of Sophos International. Despite Sophos's comparatively small market share, especially compared to rising open-source offerings, Teak explains she does not see any threat from them, as the goal of Sophos is to provide for people who already know what they stand to gain from a bespoke computing architecture, and furthermore, that Sophos's salesfront is second to its role as the software and hardware behind Teak's lunar colonialism endeavors.