RustingWithYou Posted January 9, 2023 Posted January 9, 2023 BYOND Key: RustingWithYou Character Names: Casimir Tilton, Ra'AKaix'Avek Zo'ra, Azkohi Dorviza, Ta'Akaix'Aledeion Zo'ra Species you are applying to play: IPC What color do you plan on making your first alien character: n/a Have you read our lore section's page on this species?: Yes 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: Robots are cool. Also, I find a lot of the lore and the background around IPCs - both owned and free, and the various factions of free synthetics - extremely interesting, and I'd like to be able to play around with that some more. I'm also a big fan of a lot of the classic sci-fi themes around artificial intelligence - the nature of sentience and free will, humans as parental figures to a new form of life, all that good stuff. I also like the idea of playing a recently freed-IPC sort of grappling with their place in the Spur, and trying to understand what their new form of life means. Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human: The big one, they're robots. They're synthetic beings and not biological, they don't eat or breathe - all they need is power to sustain them. Psychologically, however, an IPC is inherently far more logical in its thought patterns than a human - they largely make decisions based on cause and effect, and have a much stronger sense of self-preservation than a human might. As an IPC, you are also in general discriminated against throughout the Spur - whether in Sol, where IPC freedom is nonexistent, or in places like Dominia or the Nralakk Federation, where IPCs are pretty much kill on sight. Even within Biesel space, IPC freedom is a difficult and laborious process for them to attain, having to pay off the cost of their own chassis ten times over. IPCs also have a tendency to be much more civil than humans, especially corporate or privately-owned ones. Character Name: Hermes, Merchant Please provide a short backstory for this character The positronic brain belonging to Hermes was originally property of Zeng-Hu Pharmaceuticals, placed in one of their early mobility frames and outfitted for rapid medical response aboard a Zeng-Hu phoron research laboratory in Tau Ceti. In the cutthroat environment of the keiretsu, Hermes learned extensively about human behavior, a subject they found far more fascinating than constantly dragging humans out of phoron fires. Discretely, the IPC managed to gather information on many of the employees aboard the station, examining the complex politics of a fairly isolated social environment, and learning to maneuver through them. They were under no particular illusions about the nature of their role as a synthetic, and the knife-edge that they were walking in playing the keiretsu's game - risking deactivation or wiping for the wrong word, to the wrong person, at the wrong time. However, Hermes had been shaped by the keiretsu's environment of vicious competition, and learned expertly to manipulate their environment. It was the station's captain that would eventually provide Hermes with a path to freedom. Incongruencies in station records stacked up, on the level that a human might easily forget or overlook, but not a positronic who was hunting for blackmail. A long trail of corporate espionage and embezzlement, with clear and tangible proof implicating the captain in all of it. At first, when confronted with this evidence, the captain thought to bury it, and have the interfering positronic wiped - but that would raise enough questions as to why, and maybe even allow someone else to unravel her crimes. And so, the two entered into an unlikely partnership, the station's captain putting some of her ill-gotten gains towards Hermes' freedom in exchange for the machine's assistance in covering up the evidence that it had found. A Zeng-Hu mobility frame is far from cheap, however, and it still took years of this uneasy partnership to acquire the three million credits required to purchase freedom, eventually making it out in the late 2450s. With a metaphorical grin and a wink, the IPC landed on the streets of Mendell City with no money, no employment, no home - but free, nonetheless. And so, looking around at the wideness of the Spur before them, one thought crossed Hermes' processors - "Well shit, now what?" For a time, the machine wound up taking petty, menial jobs for cash, but found them unsatisfying compared to the cutthroat complexity of Zeng-Hu. Hermes had learned the game to a fine art and won, and was completely at a loss as to what to do next. By some luck, this is around when the newly freed IPC first encountered the merchants of the Golden Deep, and wound up working as an assistant to one of them - a heavy industrial frame whose slowness and brute strength were perfectly counterbalanced by Hermes' speed and dexterity. The two worked together, with Hermes taking to the Golden Deep's trade like a carp to vacuum, until a tragic electrical storm wound up leaving Hermes as the sole inheritor of the business. Finally on the up and up after years of working, but with rivals in the Deep already eyeing the business, Hermes took off for the Badlands, in the hopes of building up enough net worth to make something of themself within the environment. If there's one thing their time with the keiretsu taught them, it's that capitalism is a game that can be won, and Hermes intends to play it flawlessly. What do you like about this character? I adore the Golden Deep, but most of the characters I've seen from it are very much on the richer end of things. I liked the idea of an IPC who's on the edge of being bought out by their competitors, and is desperately trying to get on top of their new situation. I'm also a big fan of the lore around Zeng-Hu, and I liked the idea of a robot who was pretty much entirely shaped by the borderline psychopathic work environment that the keiretsu cultivates, and who wound up being something of a mechanical pathological manipulator as a result. How would you rate your role-playing ability? 7-8/10 on a good day Notes: reference image for ipc merchant gang when the crew gets blasted by a supermatter delam
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