Nailah, The Capstone Queen
Medium Hacked
Armor Class: 17 (natural armor)
Hit Points: 135 (18d8+54)
Speed 30 ft.
STR: 11 (+0)
DEX: 16 (+3)
CON: 16 (+3)
INT: 20 (+5)
WIS: 14 (+2)
CHA: 16 (+3)
Saving Throws: CON +10, INT +12, WIS +9
Skills: Technology +19, History +12, Insight 9, Perception +9
Damage Resistances: Cold, Lightning, Entropic
Damage Immunities: Poison; Bludgeoning, Piercing and Slashing from Non-Technical Attacks
Condition Immunities: Charmed, Exhaustion, Frightened, Paralysed, Poisoned
Senses: Truesight 120ft., Passive Perception 19
Proficiency Bonus: +7
Challenge: 21 (33,000 XP)
Legendary Resistance (3/Day): If Nailah fails a saving throw, she can choose to succeed instead.
Rejuvenation: If she has a tesseract, Nailah gains a new body 1d10 days after being destroyed, regaining all her hit points and becoming active again. The new body appears within 5 feet of the tesseract.
Techcasting: Nailah is an 18th-level techcaster. Her techcasting ability is Intelligence (spell save DC 20, +12 to hit with spell attacks). She has the following techwizard techs prepared:
Tricks (at will): hovering helping hand, nanotech twiddling, ice shot
1st level (4 slots): detect anomaly, micro seeker, emergency barrier, shockwave
2nd level (3 slots): acid shot, mind hack, cloaking, holographic duplicates
3rd level (3 slots): activate husk, counter EMP burst, localised EMP, incendiary grenade
4th level (3 slots): organic dissolution, blink
5th level (3 slots): cloudkill, panopticon
6th level (1 slot): deconstruct, barrier
7th level (1 slot): biomechanical seize, 'net shift
8th level (1 slot): dominate, pause
9th level (1 slot): destruction malware
Hacked Nature: Nailah doesn't require air, food, drink or sleep.
Turn Resistance: Nailah has advantage on saving throws against any effect that turns hacked.
Paralyzing Touch.
Melee Tech Attack: +12 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. Hit: 10 (3d6) cold damage. The target must succeed on a DC 18 Constitution saving throw or be paralyzed for 1 minute. The target can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns, ending the effect on itself on a success.
Nailah can take 3 legendary actions, choosing from the options below. Only one legendary action option can be used at a time and only at the end of another creature's turn. Nailah regains spent legendary actions at the start of her turn.
Trick: Nailah casts a cantrip.
Paralyzing Touch (Costs 2 Actions): Nailah uses har Paralyzing Touch.
Frightening Gaze (Costs 2 Actions): Nailah fixes her gaze on one creature she can see within 10 feet of her. The target must succeed on a DC 18 Wisdom saving throw against this technology or become frightened for 1 minute. The frightened target can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns, ending the effect on itself on a success. If a target's saving throw is successful or the effect ends for it, the target is immune to Nailah's gaze for the next 24 hours.
Disruption Field (Costs 3 Actions): Each non-hacked creature within 20 feet of Nailah must make a DC 18 Constitution saving throw against this technology, taking 21 (6d6) entropic damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
Nailah conducts her operations from within the bunker where she converted her workforce into drones. It is a pitch-black maze of meticulously cut hallways, cavernous warehouses, and cluttered factories. Behind it's walls lie incomprehensible tangles of ducts, lines and vents that feed the enormous network of resource-hungry machinery that keeps the bunker running.
As the Queen of the compound, Nailah has perfect and instant recollection of the facility's layout down to the millimetre, and can assume command over many useful functions when within its bounds.
Not only does her lair contain her life's work, but also hordes of hacked that roam its corridors on unending patrols.
When encountered within her lair, Nailah has a challenge rating of 23 (50,000 XP).
If her children are not dead or reforming and are present within the bunker, she can network with them to maintain concentration on one additional tech per child that meets these conditions.
If she fails a concentration saving throw, one concentration tech of her choice ends.
LAIR ACTIONS
On initiative count 20 (losing initiative ties), Nailah can take a lair action to cause one of the following effects; she can't use the same effect two rounds in a row:
Deep in the sterile wasteland of the Ur-Um Wines & Spirits desert lies a single block of plascrete no larger than a habi-cube. This block, worn by wind and sand, bears no features or markings of any kind, save for a single rectangular slab of ornate metal recessed into the northern face.
While the structure's appearance is unusual, those who have passed by this sandblasted monument remain blissfully ignorant of the danger that lurks below their very feet.
Mary Williams was once a moderately wealthy business owner of the old world,
Her unique business model allowed her to secretly run companies in two separate and opposing sectors by employing her own son and daughter to act as surrogate CEOs.
Her son (Joseph Williams, now going by Mesen) ran a conglomerate known as TOMB (Ternary Organic Manufacturing and Biochem), which acted as a parent company for various smaller industrial plants that specialised in the chemical synthesis of natural substances.
Her daughter (Susan, now going by Iset) ran various pyramid schemes focused on different "natural" holistic beauty and health products. These MLMs all publicly protested TOMB's practises, but were all secretly supplied by TOMB's own subsidiaries. In return, the leaders of those MLMs fed customer information to TOMB to assist them in forecasting their production.
As time went by and the first thermogenic methane runaway feedback loops bagan to emerge, the world was thrown into a frenzy of preventative measures and experimental treatments. Businesses big and small began to develop and advertise great northward migrations that would supposedly save the people from the disastrous climate. Mary didn't believe any of it for a second, and instead exercised her accrued wealth to preserve herself and her entire workforce in an immeasurably large underground bunker beneath her home. This bunker would store her companies' assets and provide a secure place for them to stay while the world eventually healed.
After the last of the equipment was successfully stored away, she came to her employees with a proposition; they and their families would retreat with her into the bunker and undergo a procedure that would allow them to while away the years untouched by age, and emerge into a new world to start anew. Those who accepted were guided personally into the facility by Mary herself, where they underwent significant skeletal and mental augmentations in order to harden their bodies against the ravages of time.
What they weren't told was that the process that was going to stop them from dying would simultaneously make them entirely subservient to her will, locking them to their preexisting corporate ladders and removing most of their capacity to think freely. As time passed, they were enlisted to tirelessly carry out as much research and development as was possible within the bunker.
As resources dwindled and possibilities ran dry, they finally were sent shambling into stasis chambers to await the time when the planet had recovered from its overheated state.
While this sleep was supposed to last until the estimated time of recovery had passed on the surface, a faulty central chronometer made the underground facility trigger the initiation sequence earlier than planned, awakening her and her workforce centuries ahead of schedule.
According to remote sensors in the Northern Hemisphere, a habitable tropical biosphere, dotted with super-dense population centres, had somehow formed and stabilised.
Over 200 years of stasis had not been kind to Mary's workers.
Many of the base-level pods simply failed to sustain their inhabitants, as evidenced by how their little remaining flesh has gradually sloughed away from their augmentations, leaving them as walking metallic endoskeletons.
Of course, Mary saved the best augments for herself, as well as her two kids and a selection of particularly loyal board members. It would be wasteful to put such capable thinkers in such mindless tasks.
That being said, the pods were an experimental technology at best.
Decades of sleep with their minds linked into the systems of the bunker left patterns and marks in their personalities.
Twisting trains of thought had led to delusional obsessions with the pyramid structure of the company that loomed over them all.
Databases bled together and positions were renamed. Shareholders became generals, workers became peasants and, at the top of it all, were the royalty. Gone were the common names of their old weak bodies.
She was no longer Mary Williams. She was Nailah, The Capstone Queen.
Seeing that the world has settled into a new normal that seems somewhat sustainable, Nailah has decided to take advantage of the utter lack of knowledge pertaining to her existence to create a few small startup businesses to test the waters.
The degree of suspicion and hostility that these have been met with was unexpected, but has so far given her an insight into modern business practices.
As of yet, she has only just begun the process of reinstating TOMB, her son's company.
Her daughter's MLM schemes are yet to be implemented, as more "market research" on modern spending habits and market openings must be conducted before doing so.
This research mostly involves the strategic theft of any and all unrecognised technology that isn't being directly looked at, as well as anyone who happens to catch her minions in the act.