Lara hunched over her laptop in her cramped dorm room, the clock on her screen reading 1:47 AM. The room was a typical college disaster, with textbooks stacked like unstable towers on her desk, empty energy drink cans scattered across the floor, and a tangle of charging cables snaking from every outlet.
She was deep into debugging a particularly stubborn algorithm for her advanced data structures class, her fingers dancing across the keyboard with speed. Her oversized glasses kept slipping down the bridge of her nose, and she pushed them back up absentmindedly, her messy ponytail bobbing with each frustrated sigh.
She was the classic nerd, through and through. Baggy hoodies, faded jeans, and zero social life outside of online forums and Discord servers where she geeked out over coding c
