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[mimidaeia]

Player Information

Name: Star
Age: 23
Contact details: starlitsunset @ plurk
Other characters: N/A

Character Information

Name: SXT-2 (Full serial: SXT-246-029-256-062)
Canon: Original
Canon Point: uh. I like to take my OCs from precanon. At the end of all the history writeups below, that’s the canonpoint.
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OC
Age: The body is physically ~5 years old; but mentally she acts like a young adult, roughly in her early to mid-20s.

Would you perchance have heard of a game called LifeAftr, and within that game, an arc called Umui where there were robots infected by a floral parasite thing? Just putting it out there. This information may be relevant in a moment.

World Information:
Picture an average futuristic city, like the kind you see in Detroit: Become Human. Okay, now picture your average fantasy RPG setting where humanity is under siege by some demon hordes or eldritch abominations. Now for the final step- do both at once. There’s the world for ya.

Because this is an OC and the world was kind of made around her I've collapsed most of the world details with her personal history, please see below!

Personal History:
The year is 21XX. Humanity’s technological progress has reached new heights, finally fulfilling that flying-car, AI-assistant glory we dreamed of in 1900s sci-fi. (Okay the cars only hover because of strict air-traffic laws but that’s still pretty cool.) But at the same time the pressures mankind have been exert on the earth reach a tipping point, and downright apocalyptic stuff starts happening. Some believe the creatures were born from the polluted waste dumped into the wild; others have wilder theories, of deep-sea monsters, cryptids that have been here all along, or the machinations of Satanists / mad scientists / rich assholes. The main point is, all sorts of hellspawn start appearing on the horizon and the usual human defenses fail to keep them out.

Project Mockingbird was one of the many projects created to find solutions to the issue. Mockingbird in particular was interested in reproducing demon-creatures of their own, obedient to human command of course, proving once again Man’s selfish instinct to co-opt any weapon to use against his enemies. (Also, Pacific Rim has taught us that the best way to fight monsters is to make something similarly sized and PvP them. That piece of wisdom is also at work here.) Several captured specimens were examined and dissected, and ultimately the “core” of their corrupted lifeforce could be isolated and implanted into a more controllable body. Organic bodies were used for the first attempts, but the unstable core ended up tearing the bodies apart- the resultant creatures often gave in to the demonic instinct to consume flesh, even their own- so eventually inorganic bodies were tried instead.

By “tried”, I meant “the team took their most expendable assistant droids and chucked them into the test chambers”. It’s fine, androids don’t have rights anyway.

And it really did turn out fine, for a period- the inorganic materials were the first thing that didn’t react with their alien grafts, and somewhat-stable creatures were produced. The things even appeared to retain the faux-intelligence of their neutral nets, though occasionally they would garble something really eldritch and creepy (the jury’s still out on whether the demon-things are sentient.) But by this point the advances in Project Mockingbird were quite futile, as society at large was regularly being menaced by hordes of demons and no method them eradicating them had proven effective. Humanity turned its attention to evacuation, and harnessed its advanced technology into great ships and/or spaceships and/or castles in the sky. The exact method is irrelevant since our OC here has no knowledge of it.

The laboratory was closed and eventually abandoned. One by one, the test subjects broke out- for those that collapsed on themselves, something else would come along and root among the carcass and assimilate what could be assimilated into itself. The demons liked the metal tools. Tools were good and useful and did not hurt. No wonder the humans had so much of it.

SXT-2 escaped too- it had relearned how to interact with the laboratory’s network and its remote door locks, the things the scientist had left in its host body’s memory banks- and went throughout the building looking for a good spot to nest.

Appearance: Refs of partial accuracy: (ref1)

I say “demons” appear in this universe, but several of the creatures- including the one that was used to make SXT-2- bear resemblance to the more eldritch interpretation of “angels”. They have too many wings and too many eyes.

SXT-2 has a largely-intact android body, on which the biggest deformity is the cluster of wings on her back. She has no head; only the processors essential for her survival float above her neck and the support structure around it is now wings and wings and wings, haphazardly feathering out in all directions. If you look closely enough the “eyes” that grow on her wings are made of pieces of metal/glass debris, often misshapen, but still able to move and simulate blinking. She has a habit of slotting pieces of inorganic material into sites of damage, which is taken in by the energy that powers her and becomes stuck on like a scab. Her voicebank is feminine.

Personality:
So this thing is basically a bunch of android parts soldered together by eldritch possession. That’s it, that’s the character.

Okay, let’s unpack what that means. As this is an extremely gimmicky character, I hope you don’t mind the disjointed bullet-point formatting:

A personality? No sir, I traded that in for an extra 420GB of RAM } }

SXT-2 has retained a large part of her host body’s behavioural protocols and thought processes - that of a service android, designed specifically to fill customer service roles and get bullied around the office. This means that she’s generally friendly, willing to help, and takes requests without much fuss. Because this is coding and not nature, the traits above are habits and not nature: the limit to her niceness is a logical one, not a personal one. If you leave her mid-conversation she will just keep standing there until she finds a reason to leave (usually something else to do), and not when she gets frustrated. She doesn’t get “frustrated”. She can get annoyed (organics are so inefficient… organics delay her schedule by 24% on average….), and honestly, having worked with Humans for some time has given her a bit of a smartass attitude- but if she's passive-aggressive to you, it's only because she's realised that passive-aggressive makes you cooperate more than being nice does. The choice is (somewhat) rational and (generally) beyond personal opinions- she's not mad at you, she just wants to help the Train and shaming you into doing your chores is the most effective path. Ten seconds later, should you need help, she will turn right around and be nice assuming that helping you ultimately helps the Train, I hope you're not in the middle of a villain arc.

Generally she tends towards being willing to assist, since that is her model's original purpose. It makes her a great Customer Service person, but in other areas…. well, read on.

+2 INT, -50 WIS } }
Connect her to a network and she can still make excel spreadsheets in a snap, but you know what neither of her parts can do? Socialise. Read physical maps. Recognise a “car” on sight, even though the mechanical half understands cars in theory and the eldritch half knows “large moving thing suspicious? large moving thing danger??” Unfortunately, at this point she’s just as likely to fight the car as get out of the way, but the point is this thing has little to no ability to actually navigate the world as we know it. SXT-2 has some amount of logic, but computer logic is not great in understanding what life is all about- so often she reacts to new things in ways that are unorthodox, if she doesn’t just downright bluescreen from confusion. You could call it naivete. I like to call it stupid.

*extra RAM comes with free demonic possession, no refunds available } }
Moving on to the second half, quite literally, of this character- the “core” or “lifeforce” drained from a demon is what currently powers her, especially at this point when she’s in enough disrepair that living as a pure machine would be unfeasible. Demonic energy is diluted of most of a demon’s monstrous instincts, and for the most part the physical changes are the biggest way possession has affected her (and she was an android before anyway, what’s dysphoria to a computer.) She will just, occasionally, display some animalistic symptoms of grooming her feathers, perching on places humans would not bother with, and switching to an incoherent language when her AI’s language processor cannot keep up with the topic being discussed. Her program isn’t too fussed at sharing space with this new presence- as mentioned before, she lacks desires, tempers, and other things one finds in organics- so aside from a dip in performance speed, where she might zone out for a bit as the two parts attempt to co-ordinate a decision, she is able to continue on quite well for something in her situation.

technically, she can kill things } }
The strong obedience-to-human protocols in her host body’s AI suppresses her more violent instincts ... as far as she’s aware. So it’s all cool. Probably.

in execution, she does the opposite of kill things }}
In a thing with no well-defined personality, its weird internal logic takes the place of emotion and desire. SXT-2 can and will develop preferences, in terms of who treats her well and therefore is someone she wants to be around, or what aligns the best with what limited experience she has (for example: white is her favorite color because all the humans at her workplace wore white coats, nevermind that they literally sacrificed her to a monster). In time, habits become the equivalent of nature. Given the right circumstances she might begin to exhibit something like loyalty; if you see her “motivation” field, she’s motivated by “well, why not.” She just likes to help, she doesn't particularly care what- or rather, she does, but it's easy to convince her that any cause in the world is a legitimate-sounding one. Technically she could also be taught how to be a serial killer if she hangs out with one, but I’m hoping that doesn’t happen.

Key themes:
This OC is an experiment to see how compelling I can make a character… without any of the usual character fields. No personality, no motivations, just the brain of a roomba and the heart of a big, big bird-monster.

With that being said, themes include: the possibility of having personhood without being a person, adaptation in the face of challenge, and open defiance of tropes (as one does, when they are a robot-eldritch-abomination.)]

Main Motivation: No motivation. Rather, SXT-2 lacks the opposite of motivation- there’s no reason why she shouldn’t get on the train, if she’s asked to. She’s half a computer and the world is her oyster. Humans are so complicated.

Skills:

• Cryptid biology: being half mechanical and half undefined-eldritch, SXT-2’s needs are much lower than a human’s- she doesn’t eat food and sleep is optional. The downside to that is she still needs energy to run on, and hasn’t figured out what she eats yet- she can be charged like any electronic device, but her half-demonic mind doesn’t understand that human concept, so she’s been eating battery fluid and live wires.
• Android biology: Her body retains most of the functions of its previous life. The average android is capable of connecting to and accessing most electronics (e.g. computers, personal communications devices, appliances with some wifi/ other access function built in. She could access a smart watch, but not an analog watch.), scan large chunks of data, and check the status / input of devices she’s already connected to while physically somewhere else (probably doesn’t work once she’s off the train). She’s gotten worse at it now that half her instincts are feral, so I’ll RNG for success whenever there’s an attempt.
• [LOCKED SKILL] Combat: Demons are known to be vicious carnivores, adapted to hunting large prey. Their usual targets include livestock animals and, by the late stages of Project Mockingbird, humans. This means that she can fight, if her instincts are triggered by blood or danger or something. But she is essentially a juvenile, and stuck with a physiology that her demonic core isn’t naturally compatible with, so she currently has no idea how to do that. Depending on future development I might unlock this.
  • Even though she can kill, she can’t eat. Her body doesn’t have a way to chew or digest meat.

Item: None. She doesn’t understand the concept of “pockets”.

Sample: [LINK] Sorry for the short length :( let me know if you need more! Additionally, note that at this point I hadn't settled on her name yet so the name referents in this thread are different.

Notes:
Fun fact- she can’t read. Specifically, she’s slow with printed words- and will ask for a digital version to parse if possible- and it’s handwriting that she completely can’t read. Her visual processing is not that good, and now the mutations have blown off most of her head it’s kind of worse. Have mercy.