Megs Made Magic Here ✨

Baba Yaga: The Beginning of a Living World

On our campus lives Baba Yaga.

Give her a link, and she'll give you a pet.

It's a wonderfully strange interaction, and the beginning of something much bigger.

Megs built the system behind her: students hand Baba Yaga a resource, an AI evaluator judges what they've brought, and she rewards them with a pet, or, if she is displeased, transforms their avatar for everyone on campus to see.

And she is where our campus agents come from.

Baba Yaga was the first character on our campus with a life of her own: opinions, a home, a temper, a daily routine, a way of judging what you bring her. She became the inspiration for the agents themselves. Every autonomous character who now wanders our world, forms relationships, keeps a schedule, has a rich inner life, and becomes part of the ongoing story of the school descends from her.

Before there were campus agents, there was Baba Yaga.

Megs brought her to life. In doing so they helped lay the foundation for one of The Multiverse School's most ambitious ideas: a living virtual campus, populated by beings with lives worth having.

It's the kind of engineering we love most: technically imaginative, deeply playful, and full of possibilities that extend far beyond the initial feature.

Baba Yaga still lives on campus. She still wanders campus in her washtub, on her own schedule. And the world she inspired is still growing.

The Capybaras

There are capybaras on our campus.

Megs helped put them there.

They remain part of our virtual world, bringing a little absurdity, comfort, and unexpected delight to the everyday experience of being here.

It's easy to underestimate the importance of something like a capybara. But we believe that community spaces should invite curiosity, exploration, and joy. Details like these turn a digital platform into somewhere people genuinely want to spend time.

We consider that meaningful engineering.

And the capybaras were only the beginning.

Every Pet on Campus

Megs made pets happen at The Multiverse School. All of them.

What started with capybaras became a whole system: twenty kinds of pets, each with its own pixel-art sprites, with hunger, energy and happiness that rise and fall, so they need real care. They built the pet status display that shows how your companion is doing, the management system for looking after them, pet skills, a pet digest that keeps you posted on your companion, and Sanctuary Pets: campus-wide companions with free will. #274 · #510

They gave pets personality, too: a crow that perches at a polite distance, the Horrible Goose, and Baba Yaga herself, who decides who has earned a companion.

Megs didn't just imagine pets. They made sure pets happened, and saw the system through until students were walking around campus with creatures of their own.

Every pet on our campus traces back to Megs.

Particles, Effects, and Little Wonders

Megs contributed particle effects, decorative front-end features, and visual interactions throughout our campus.

These are the details that make the Multiverse feel magical: the little flourishes that catch your attention, reward curiosity, and remind you that software can be expressive.

They helped establish an aesthetic and experiential language that continues to influence our campus.

One Person at a Time

People didn't write to us because they wanted a class. They wrote because they couldn't afford groceries, because they were about to lose a roof over their heads, because they weren't safe. They weren't writing to a hotline. They were writing to a school.

Megs made sure they got help.

Between March and June 2026, Megs got help to 171 of them. For each person, they did the research by hand: what actually exists where that person lives, and what fits what they're facing. Around eight carefully chosen resources per person, 1,480 in all:

• 476shelter & housing
• 364food
• 196financial help
• 175safety
• 74counseling

Here's what happened. Food resources helped most often. Some people signed up for groceries and food assistance for the first time. Others said that simply seeing their options laid out clearly turned an overwhelming situation into one they could act on.

Twelve of the thirteen people who wrote back said something Megs found for them had helped.

Behind every one of those numbers is a person who reached out during what may have been one of the hardest weeks of their life, and came away with real help from someone who had taken the time to understand where they lived and what they were up against. Megs made that happen 171 times, and saw 164 of those requests all the way through.

Then They Built It Into the System

Megs didn't let that knowledge live in one person's head. Care that depends on one exhausted person isn't sustainable, so they turned it into infrastructure, so that the next person in crisis wouldn't have to wait for someone to find the answers.

They turned 1,332 hand-researched resources into the foundation of a shared resource library, with deduplication, categories, browsing, and an agent that finds more. #417 · #419

They built the dashboard staff use to search and answer requests, the aid analytics that show the real path each request takes, and URL health checks that catch dead links before someone in need clicks one. #232 · #614

They created the Community Resource Commons, where anyone can contribute a resource, and built regional resource packs and the safeguards that make sure someone writing from outside the United States only gets help that actually applies to them. #879 · #1006 · #1284

And they kept the system honest. Megs filed the issues that showed exactly where people were falling through the cracks, so the school could close them.

Mutual aid is one of the practical expressions of our commitment to social justice and community. It takes more than good intentions. It takes infrastructure, coordination, communication, and people willing to do the work.

Megs did the work, and then built the infrastructure.

In recognition of these contributions, we have established The Megs Mutual Aid Award, an ongoing school honor recognizing people who make community care practical, sustainable, and accessible.

Why Megs Would Make a Great Technical Program Manager

We think Megs's next role should be as a technical program manager, and the evidence is all over this page.

• They own outcomes, not tickets. Megs was the area owner for Money & Enrollment and for Community, Mutual Aid & Communications, which meant setting priorities, reviewing others' changes, and making the call on irreversible and public-facing decisions.
• They ran a real program with real people on the other end: 171 people served, 164 cases resolved, and the outcomes measured.
• They see risk before it lands. Megs filed 221 issues in six months, including the ones that showed exactly where people were falling through the cracks of our mutual aid pipeline.
• They carry a change safely across a system: moving every scholarship to pathway passes without a single student losing access, and auditing payments to find and close enrollment gaps.
• They turn one person's heroics into a process that scales: from a hand-researched kit for each person to a shared library, analytics, and safeguards anyone can run.
• And they're an engineer: 139 merged pull requests across two production codebases. Megs can read the code, talk to the engineers, and know when a plan is real.

Community Magic Award · Inaugural Recipient

For bringing creativity, play, and wonder into the life of The Multiverse School.

The Megs Mutual Aid Award · Namesake

An enduring recognition of their contributions to the systems that help our community care for one another.