I Wanna Be the Toaster

[NotASpider]

BYOND Key: Cooleosis

Character Names: Sil Aclipsa, ANTI, Nova Swift

Species you are applying to play: IPC

What color do you plan on making your first alien character: Plastic, heh.

Have you read our lore section's page on this species?: Yuh.

 

Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph format. One paragraph minimum per question.

Why do you wish to play this specific race:

We must purge the weak, hated flesh and replace it with the purity of the blessed machine. Robots fall into my standard assortment of cool fantasy stuff; vampires, zombies, elves, superheroes, robots. All of the above are cool to me because of how similar they are to regular humans. Similar enough to be familiar, but just different enough to be something exciting and thrilling if they were real. Bots are also my favorite from other franchises. 40k, Star Wars, Star Trek. All of which have robots very similar to IPCs in that they’re very close to humies but just off enough to be distinguishable. Really, if playing AI and borg has taught me anything, it's that I'm a synthetic boi through and through.

Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human:

All my meatbag characters have themes and traits to them, which I always determine before creating them and always keep in mind when playing them. Synthetics are much the same, they just get a wider variety of traits to play around with. For this character’s traits, which I’m sure you can get a feel for below in the backstory, a lot of them wouldn’t apply at all to dirty humies. In addition to character themes, I also apply hard and fast rules to my synthetics that can’t be broken no matter what, things literally hard coded into them. A human may have a strong moral stance on not harming people, for example, but may go against that if the situation is dire enough or they are under enough duress. With stationbounds these rules are easy, those being the laws, but for an IPC I get to make up my own. Lastly, and what I’m most looking forward to, a lot of the different RP will come from the way other characters view and interact with IPCs differently than they would with humans or other races.

In a roundabout way playing an IPC is like removing a layer from RPing, because RPing is already something like pretending to be a person, which IPCs do all the time.

 

Character Name: Trill

Please provide a short backstory for this character.

Mars’ south pole wasn't called the 'Metal Dunes' for nothing. You couldn't go ten minutes without crossing at least three open dumps filled to the brim with old machines that didn't make it. It was a common sight to see disenfranchised IPCs roaming these areas, those worth less than they would cost to repair searching tirelessly for replacement parts. Hoping beyond hope that some of the still wriggling automated machinery or discarded ten generations old frames would be compatible with their decaying chassis.

It’s here, in a small workshop hidden in a shipping container buried under some rubble, that our story begins. What better place for some shady bot dealings? After all, any IPC desperate enough to be here wouldn’t be missed. In fact, most corporations would be more than happy to conduct some less than legal business in order to collect insurance money on missing or destroyed bots. After that, the positronic is wiped (don’t want them being traced back home, would we?) to the best of the salvagers’ abilities, the best parts cobbled together, and a ‘new’ bot is ready to be smuggled off world.

Trill, a shell, was one such bot. She has no idea what she was before and now never will, owing to her birthplace being very close to ground zero of the whole planet burning down, just a smoothed-over slate headed for Biesel. Once there, she was advertised as ‘lightly’ used by a less-than-reputable resale shop in Mendell City. Despite her questionable origins and legality, her staggeringly low price caught the eye of an upper-level manager at NanoTrasen who wanted a new toy to keep his young daughter distracted/entertained/nannied for as many hours of the day as possible. He never planned to have her last as long as she did, but his daughter ended up getting very attached and frequently begged him to get her fixed. And what kind of father could say no to his daughter? As the years ticked by and she grew up, she eventually started contributing her own money to Trill’s maintenance and repairs.

Alas, no good thing can last forever. The man’s daughter eventually moved out, and no longer being financially supported by her father, wasn’t making enough to support private ownership of an IPC. Maybe a newer model, but by this point Trill was getting to be quite old. All of her parts had been replaced at least once already, most twice, and it was almost time she returned to the landfill from whence she came. Not ready to let go, the now young woman asked her father for one more kindness towards Trill. Give her a place in NanoTrasen, at least for a little while longer.

He agreed. A few strings were pulled, and soon enough, Trill found herself donated to the NSS Aurora to work in the service department. Normally the company wouldn’t take on such an old bot, but at the low cost of ‘free’ and with a robotics division present on-station ensuring very little downtime, the accounting worked out in Trill’s favor. Or at least it would for a few years.

What do you like about this character?

Everything. First of all she’s a robot, which are extremely fun to play every single time. She’s kind of loosely inspired by IG-11 from the Mandalorian, which was my favorite character from that series. This is basically the only of my characters I can realistically antag on and have a lot of fun gimmicks built up. I like that she’s getting old and run down, so a lot of robotics/science rp, which I’ve tried to do before but just with prosthetics. I like how she’s nostalgic over having an owner that actually cares about her, and the ways she’ll react to being treated crappily. I’m looking forward to having a regular service character, which usually interacts with the most people and is pretty chill compared to the rest of the station roles. Of course, theorycrafting a character really only takes you so far. So I also like that I’m this excited about playing a new character, knowing full well that she’s going to experience a trial by fire and go through some changes as I play her.

How would you rate your role-playing ability?

8 outta 10. I’m pretty good at making and writing characters, but in a realtime situation like SS13 I tend to think less about how characters would act when in stressful or actioney situations. The solution for me is to get so accustomed to the character that their quirks and mannerisms become second nature, which I’m steadily getting closer to. It’s also why I have so few characters.

 

Notes: Nada

Edited May 9, 2021 by NotASpider

[niennab]

Hello,

Thank you for applying. Are you able to greatly expand on the question of how IPCs differ from humans? Consider the social, hierarchical and specific things to Aurora lore.

Moreover what do you mean by this?

On 08/05/2021 at 12:05, NotASpider said:

In a roundabout way playing an IPC is like removing a layer from RPing, because RPing is already something like pretending to be a person, which IPCs do all the time.

In terms of the backstory, I'm not sure I follow the origin on Mars. She was made here? Assembled from parts? Was she dumped here? If so, why did the original company dump her over selling her? Especially considering the value of a shell chassis and positronic brain. Why would the father choose to donate Trill over selling her to NT, or continue to own her while leasing her to the company? How old is Trill?

[NotASpider]

Sure!

 

I'll start with backstory because that's the easiest.

Yes, she was assembled from parts. I imagine in 2449/2450 when shells were brand new, they were valuable enough for salvagers to take the risk to procure parts for them, legally or otherwise, to build a functional-enough IPC. Likely with a lot of fakes, synthskin just stretched over a skeleton torso where clothes would cover up anyway. As for her positronic, who knows? Maybe some asshole teenagers stole her to torment her, damaged her too much, and dumped her to hopefully avoid consequences. Maybe the factory she was assigned to blew up and she crawled to freedom after already being written off by her owner’s insurance. Maybe she just ran away, or it was a loose part tossed away after someone mistakenly thought it was dead. I’m purposely leaving this part of her backstory vague because she herself will never know and it’ll never influence her character or development.

The father donated her to NT for a few reasons. From his perspective, he just wants to be done with Trill. He bought a bargain basement shell and never expected it to last, and more importantly, never expected to spend so much on her maintenance to keep his daughter happy. Getting into a lease agreement would just be a huge pain. Rental and leasing contracts also usually work out so that the owner and not the renter/lessee pays for repairs and handles grievances, which he absolutely does not want to do for how often he’s dealt with that in the past. There’s almost certainly a bit of corporate politics at work here as well, where he’d think that donating an IPC will get him goodie boy points with the right people in NT. Lastly is the issue of money. NT will have certainly asked for her maintenance history, and after seeing how much work she had done, wouldn't have wanted her for anything other than free.

Her positronic was wiped in 2450, putting the age of her current personality, life, experience, whatever you want to call it, at 13. Even though inspecting her brain would reveal a chronological age of closer to 40.

 

Onto the quote and human/IPC differences.

“In a roundabout way playing an IPC is like removing a layer from RPing, because RPing is already something like pretending to be a person, which IPCs do all the time.“

The way I RP is by first removing myself as much as possible from what’s happening. Because it’s not happening to me, it’s happening to a character. After that I mull over the situation, think up a response to the situation, and go over a few quick ‘drafts’ in my head for what would happen. The way chess computers lower their difficulty is by looking shorter and shorter distances into the future, the same principle goes for RPing. If I consciously do fewer editing passes the result is noticeably jankier and choppier writing. This is mostly just for writing dialogue, which I have a feeling I’ll do a lot of in service.

Also, when RPing, every single action of your character is (ideally) a conscious decision that you make. If someone tells a funny joke your character doesn’t smile or laugh unless you make them, and only if you think they should. IPCs are always doing this. They have no automatic reactions, not even at an extremely basic level like breathing or blinking, everything they do is a choice that they process and decide to do or not. Emotions included.  Just like your 2d spehssman, IPCs don’t /actually/ feel anything, they just pretend to if it’s decided that they should. TL;DR it’s almost like IPCs are roleplaying as humans.

That was way more rambly and obtuse than I originally intended when making that analogy, but I think I conveyed what I meant well enough.

There’s also the differences that I have much less to say about. Like how rights for IPCs are granted and never assumed, they’re built for purpose, they’re considered property legally and usually societally, everything about them down to their continued existence is determined by economics, their #1 priority is survival at all costs, how so many people think they shouldn’t even exist.

 

I think that covered what you asked for? If there’s anything specific I missed or something you want me to expand on, lemme know.

[niennab]

Thank you for the clarifications and expansions. In regards to her positronic as well as the 40 years she would have been alive, I will need those details. The whitelist application is a way of proving that you have read and understood the lore and so with that comes the downside that an application cannot be particularly vague or open ended that a character, made after getting the application, can.

How has her experiences shaped her perspective, ideals or outlook? How does she feel about freedom? Thirteen years is a long time. Does she keep in contact with the daughter still? Where does she live?

[NotASpider]

Alright.

 

The OPP designation of Xion Industrial IPCs were purchased by the Olympia arcology almost as soon as they were released. Named after the Mars Opportunity rover, the ability of these models to EVA freely meant that they could handle the thin Martian atmosphere with incredible ease and efficiency compared to any other model or human worker. Through a combination of optimal cooling and aftermarket installation of extended-capacity batteries these IPCs could be relied on to travel up to a destination 45km away and back, fully loaded, on a single charge. Olympia had decided that instead of replacing all the expensive equipment necessary to support a human workforce on the surface, they would instead gradually switch over by buying one new IPC for each replacement required.

OPP-621 was one such IPC, purchased midway during the transition in 2424. At this time freedom was a distant thought for it, being fully content with its current position. Most of the tasks asked of it were simple, not exceedingly dangerous, and its efforts were usually only required due to logistical problems of human workers. The loyalty programming also helped.

All was going well until one day in 2445. Some work was necessary out on one of the massive lengths of aboveground piping which fed the arcology's ever growing water demand. OPP-621 was dispatched as well as one of the last few human workers required to accompany it for legal reasons. Along the catwalk they went, inspecting the pipe even as the red sand beneath them gave way to gently lapping waves a few meters below their feet. The pair were almost at the pump tower when it happened. The man, certainly disgruntled with the synthetics about to take his job, shoved the bot over the railing of the catwalk and sent it crashing into the water below.

Being made for such a low pressure environment, the IPC's components rapidly began to crumple and break as it sank deeper underwater. All except the enclosed, stainless steel capsule containing the positronic. A safety feature designed to protect the most valuable part of the machine was doing its job. The man was later charged with felony destruction of property, although no recovery efforts were ever made. Four years after that event happened, a rusted-out head with a fully intact positronic was found washed up hundreds of miles away on the southern beaches of that very lake.

 

Trill is nostalgic, in a sense, in regards to her time with her previous owner. She is completely aware that the daughter (who I'm naming Kelsie) is the single biggest reason that she hasn’t been scrapped yet, and obviously being owned by a family that at least partially cares about her is much better than a corporation owning her. Being owned by that family resulted in her completely buying into humans’ method of survival, namely how they’re a social species that relies on cooperation. Between that and spending the vast majority of her time with a sweet young girl, she believes that making as many friends as possible is the best way to keep herself going.

Homemaking is all she’s ever really done and so thinks continuing that is her best option, which would almost certainly entail continuing to be owned. She does still want to earn her freedom from NT for the sole reason of returning to Kelsie when she’s advanced her career some (her father is a higher-up in the company, it’s only a matter of time). But both are a long way off. The two do still keep in contact, with Trill going down to Mendell to visit when she rarely gets the chance to. Also, I can only imagine her living in company store-style housing on Odin that’s nothing but a few dozen square feet storage locker with a charging outlet for her and her personal effects.

[niennab]

Thank you for the additions! Your application offers an understanding of IPCs. Accepted.