Here is the official list of positions.If you'd still like to join, it is possible at this point or I can work you into it at some point soon.
Captain: James Kurader
Name: James Kurader
Species: Human, and handsome, too.
Job: Captain
Backstory: Jimmy doesn't remember his parents. He grew up fending for himself in the big city, and learned many a valuable lesson from his life on the streets. He was a common vagabond for much of his early life, but he's grown wiser as he has gotten on in years. Eventually he started saving money, and he eventually bought his own starship. He's still hung onto his old starfighter, from the days when a small ship that was fast enough, and lucky enough, could beat a spread of missiles.
Special Talents: He's got more charm than a snakeman, and old-fashioned gunslinging is his passion. He's ambidextrous and has very quick fingers. All of these abilities tend to get him out of as much trouble as they get him into. It meshes perfectly with his philosophy: "things always find a way of working themselves out." He's not particularly good at it, but he can fly a ship in a pinch. The smaller the better.
Other Things: Has a radical but slightly old starfighter. It's small, but it's his baby. His newer ship is called the Lion's Pride. More than anything else, it's got space, and very advanced computers, but the engine and armament are lacking. Thus it acts as a sort of mothership. He carries far too many guns by force of habit. Four six-shooters with wooden handles. One on his chest, another on his lower back, and two on either hip. He keeps a short-barreled automatic shotgun strapped on the outside of his thigh, and a small semiautomatic handgun that fits in his boot for emergencies. He's got lots of trick shells for the shotgun. He has a short memory, so he tends to write clever names on the sides of the cartridges.
Muscle: Rro
Name: Rro
Species: Humanoid Alien. Furry, tall and strong, with small horns on his knuckles.
Job: Hunter, Mercenary, Bouncer
Backstory: Was born on a frontier world, into a primitive warrior culture. Was captured as a slave, and after acquiring his freedom engaged in different criminal and legitimate activities across the galaxy, usually working for someone else.
Special talents: Exceptional fighting skills, both with primitive and advanced weapons. Expertise in wilderness survival in earthlike planets.
Other things: Can speak many languages, none of them well. Has trouble with gadgets and tools with complicated interfaces.
Mechanic: Swee
Name: Sweejezus (Swee, for short)
Species: Non-humanoid Aberration. See Attached File.
Job: Mechanist, Bio-Sculptor
Backstory: Sweejezus, named for the sound made by the would-be space marine who initially encountered him, is... eccentric. He was created on a black market clone tissue farm bootstrapped to a backwater asteroid. The farm was designed to supply replacement limbs to blood mages, a lucrative business when one considers the prodigious rate that blood mages use up limbs. The owners of the farm attempted to further increase their profits by dodging the flesh tariff and passing off the cryo-frozen crates of transplant ready appendages as class A meat popsicles. Unfortunately, a random inspection found that the limbs were 16% too low in sugar to be packaged as class A meat popsicles, and would have to be resold as class B product. The ensuing audit revealed the lack of tariff markings on the official ledgers, and the space federales subsequently raided the smuggler's main base of operations with high-powered weapons and a squadron of fairies with exo-suits and breaching charges.
Unfortunately, while several other clone farms were seized and repurposed as government assets*, the location of the farm that Sweejezus would be born on was lost in a tragic filing accident which claimed the lives of three bagels, half a jar of lox, and a law-enforcement mug full of extremely hot coffee. This left the cloning vats to languish without additional commands for several years. Most of the cloning vats generated hypergrowth tumors which destabilized their micro-biomes and subsequently died horribly. Swee's tank, however, became something unique. The clone tissue grew inside of the cloning vat itself, forcing itself inside microscopic fissures and bonding to the innards of the tank system. The cloning vat's suite of self-repair nanites were unable to remove the fleshy growths, and eventually grew so fed up with the thankless work that they began to integrate with the tissue instead of destroying it. Thus, Swee was born. Swee was not a hybrid of mechanical and organic, rather he was composed of system of growable organic components and a system of growable mechanical components, a symbiosis.
Archibald Drevinthraxx the God-Blooded** was the one to accidentally find, name, and release Swee. Archibald was (and perhaps still is) a gnome with severe delusions of grandeur, a tenuous link to reality, a love of action movies described as 'clinically obsessed' by his psychiatrist, and a trust fund capable of buying a small moon and painting it with orange polka-dots without batting an eyelash. Archibald, flying the closest thing to a space fighter the authorities would allow someone with his mental stability to purchase, and wearing the closest thing to military grade power armor that black market contacts would sell, stumbled upon the secluded bootstrap facility and promptly attempted to claim it as his own fortress. Unfortunately, Archibald found the quivering mess of infantile flesh and circuitry that would eventually become Swee and promptly proceeded to simultaneously swear and become quite sick inside his power armor. The sound, the only voice that Sweejezus had ever heard, was enough of an attraction that Swee enveloped the convulsing Archibald.
Had Archibald not purchased a black market suit of power armor complete with a neural interlock to a black box, things might have gone very differently. As it was, the nanotech in Swee ate into Archibald's armor, and the biological components began constructing an interface between the exposed electronics and Swee's central nervous cluster. The result was that Swee tapped into the terrified and very, very regretful Archibald. The result was the beginnings of sentience. Swee was not Archibald, but it felt the same things he did. Swee felt sickened, Swee felt scared, Swee felt alone, and most of all Swee wanted to get out of this place and go back to its shuttle, snuggle its sheets up to its chin, and watch episodes of Antagorean SiegeBreaker until he fell asleep. This was, in essence, what Swee did. Archibald, having had several hundred small nervous breakdowns at this point, and at least two or three large ones, hardly objected. This set the pattern for the next three decades.
Archibald gibbered insanely within Swee. Swee sat in Archibald's spaceship and watched hundreds upon hundreds of hours of action films filled with enormous explosions, hideous alien entities, screaming maidens in perilous situations and equally perilous clothing, and literally millions of commercials for every product imaginable. This was how Swee learned of the world. Action movies had been pivotally to Archibald life, but they were the only thing Swee knew about life besides the vague flashes of insane feelings and emotions that still floated across the neural link. Archibald's 'fighter' was eventually found by the Pernicious Elk*** a group of devoted paramilitary eco-groupies who believed that all life was sacred, and that anyone who believed otherwise should be killed and raised as a grotesque example of their hubris.**** The rest, as Swee is fond of saying in various heroic accents, is history.
Special talents: Biological Interface: Can devour and redesign biological/mechnical objects, creating symbiotic systems of flesh and metal that serve the same function as they did before, but are much more susceptible to Swee's influence. Particularly good with ship systems.
Other things: Impossibly bad at combat, driving, romance, or anything commonly depicted in action movies. When given weapons, Swee will attempt to grow enough appendages to operate them all at once, and will insist upon firing them all simultaneously from the hip. He will often do so while jumping through the air, standing on top of perfectly good cover, or in an effort to destroy some explosive terrain object. Swee is also sexually attracted to engines.
Lifeform studies: Firewatch
Name: Firewatch
Species: Manitari
Job: 'Diplomat', 'Explorer', 'Scientist' (at least, as far as her race is concerned, she's these things. More advanced races would probably consider her a bit of a dangerous doofus)
Backstory: A youngish Manitarin who is slightly more civilized than many of her race - which means she doesn't try to kill and eat most lifeforms she runs into immediately. She first made it into the stars by accidentally launching a ship that had been abandoned (the owner was eaten) on her homeworld, and she spent almost a year figuring out how to operate the thing. In fact, she's actually pretty intelligent for her species and taught herself many things, including figuring out how to read and speak some languages from materials on-board the ship. (Admittedly this was eased by the fact these materials had been brought in an attempt to teach her primitive race and so had many pictures and were easy to understand, but nevertheless.)
As for her appearance, her skin is a light blue fibrous material similar to the outer skin of tough jungle vines, and her 'hair' is a purple mushroom cap with light yellow dots from which several red fronds hang down to her shoulders. Similar fronds hang down around her shoulders and arms down to her wrists, forming a sort of capelet. Her eyes are a pure red with no distinguishable pupil, iris, or sclera. She generally leaves her torso bare so as not to smush her fronds and instead just wears pants, shorts, or a skirt of some sort. She likes bracelets, necklaces, anklets, and other shiny things.
Special talents:
-Pheromones: Firewatch can emit sweet-smelling pheromones that can lull people nearby into an agreeable trance-like state. She can also emit pheromones that can manipulate emotions in other ways, such as increasing aggression or a feeling of exhaustion. These tend to not work so well if people are wearing things like masks or helmets to filter air.
-Melee Combatant: Firewatch is fairly skilled with a number of primitive weapons and weapons that are similar; for example stone swords are somewhat like plasma swords, just heavier.
Other things: Like all Manitari, Firewatch is sexless despite possessing female secondary characteristics. She just noted that female pronouns were generally used in pictures with a body type similar to her own. If she wanted to reproduce she would just kill something and leave spores in it to grow.
Pilot: Feliciti
Name: Feliciti
Species: Nekomata
Job: Pilot, Hacker, Tech Specialist.
Backstory: Gainax IV is home to not one, but four different sentient "shifter" species, along with separate subspecies that still fit into the same categories. The Nekomata, or Cat Shifter, is one such species, along with the Inumata, or Dog Shifter, Kumamata, or Bear Shifter, and the Kitsunemata, or Fox Shifter. Though these species all generally prefer their humanoid form, they have the ability to alter their form to that of an earth-like quadruped. Some, like the Nekomata and even certain subspecies of Inumata, can even adjust their size and mass on command, with certain limits, of course.
In their human form, Nekomata are humanoid, with the exception of digitigrade legs and clawed hands, along with pointed ears atop their heads and a tail whose length depends on the subspecies of Nekomata. Their arms, legs, ears and tail are covered in a thick layer of fur, which matches the natural color of the humanoid hair on their head, while their torsos and faces are mostly devoid of hair. It is extremely rare for a male Nekomata to grow facial hair in his lifetime, though not unheard of.
The Nekomata are, besides the Inumata, among the most technologically advanced civilizations in their home sector, even going so far as to colonize other stars, and blend in with pan-galactic civilization at large. It is not uncommon to see Nekomata wed to other species, and Nekomata culture even encourages inter-species partnerships. However, Nekomata tend to have very short attention spans and lose focus easily. Most have what some humans would call a "form of ADD." This does not stop them from accomplishing incredible achievements in their relatively short 30-40 year lifespan. Most Nekomata are artists and wandering inventors, and will often take several mates before settling down with the one the find most interesting. Polygamy is also greatly encouraged in Nekomata society, whereas Inumata are strictly monogamous.
Feliciti is a relatively young Nekomata at the age of 14, two years above adult age for her species. She has jet black hair and fur, and a long tail, with generally short fur. In her cat form, depending on her preferred size, she resembles either a black housecat, or a cougar. She is generally curious, even for a Nekomata, and enjoys learning new things, which is why she decided to leave her home planet of Gainax II and begin wandering the world. She is fairly laid back, and will often hide at the first sign of trouble to let someone else do the fighting. When she's behind a computer screen or at the helm of a starship, however, she becomes as fearless and bold as any war hero, although much more reckless, as well. She hates clothes, (another trait common to her species) and generally only wears the bare minimum for the purposes of common decency, preferring a tanktop and shorts if she has to wear anything at all. She is currently in love with her ship, The Lion's Pride, and will get pouty if her budget can't cover its usual repairs, which happens often.
Secondary AI: Data Decryption
Name: Data Decryption - Model 3074A (DD-3074A, also known as DeeDee, or DoubleD.)
Species: Artificial Intelligence
Job: Providing Intelligence, processing information, maintaining ship.
Backstory: DD was an artificial intelligence manufactured in sector 13A, just off the star system Fen 5B. The megafactory manufactured no less then several hundreds of thousands of Grade D, thousands of Grade C, hundreds of Grade B, and several Grade A AI's per day equivalent according to the mega corporation's home planet. DD was one of the Grade A AI's, originally meant to be used as a warship AI or for intergalactic subterfuge, he was sent through a star gate, destination Resitan 7H, sector 1F. He served as an informational AI for the first few years of his career, spearheading tactical operations into enemy space and scoring mostly victories, though he has had to make several tactical retreats in his time. He never was congratulated. AI's weren't really counted as part of the war effort.
After approximately 9 revolutions of his manufacturer's planet around their sun, he was moved to policing attempts in space. Controlling a huge cruiser as a head of operations, side-by-side with several other Grade A AI's, he used his processing units scouring space for criminals and weeding out those who he found using the high resolution radio wave scanners mounted in large amount on the ship. Constantly sending out platoons of patrolling battleships, with their accompaniment of small scale fighters to combat crime on an intergalactic level.
As chance had it, 3 and a half revolutions later, the ship rolled into an oncoming pirate attack. Somehow the pirates had conjured up a huge cruiser of their own. DD pitted all of his forces against the pirates, who were also sending scrambler waves their way to stop their sensors from tracking them. The battle was finished quite quickly, not even a week from the start. DD ejected most of himself onto a small ship dedicated to his processing core, and left before the cruiser was destroyed.
He crashed onto a planet with, thanks goodness, advanced enough creatures to study and repair his core, before putting him in touch with transporters. He then made a living with information exchange, though handled money awkwardly, not having used it before. He has since then maintained his core and not had too much trouble.
He saved up recently and bought a custom made (and extremely expensive) body made out of the most resilient alloys available on the market, and the most powerful processing core you can fit in there. His capability is still much reduced, but at least he can move without the need to shift some 100's of tons of weight. It is about 2 and a half Earth meters tall, and is humanoid, but is fitted like an Iron Man suit. (still more to come.)
Medicine/Health: Letitia Slaine
Name: Letitia Slaine
Species: Enlightened (Nickname for a human with cybernetic implants or attachments of some kind, from the galaxy's resident 'holier-than-thou' robotic race.
Job: Doctor.
Backstory: Letitia earned a medical degree at a Terran medical school early in her life. Shortly afterward she became Enlightened with a small supercomputer implanted in her brain, allowing her to process information incredibly fast, along with extraordinary memory, reflexes, etc.
Special talents: Medical whoosiwhatsits. Fractures, breaks, abrasions, lacerations, stitches, internal bleeding, ulcers, cancers, amputations... only thing she can't do is decapitations. (Well, she can't undo them.)
Other things: No, she cannot access the internet via her brain.
Chef extraordinaire: Sėle Ceallach
Name: Sėle Ceallach, or more often Sheila Kelly
Species: it's hard to say, but she maintains she's a space elf, albeit a much larger one than usual. Space elves are highly similar to space humans, with the minor differences that a space elf has a slighter build, paler skin, usually fair hair, and the major differences are that they are capable of telepathy and also do not experience old age quite like human beings, in that they don't really physically age. Instead, a space elf grows at a steady rate with age, and never stops doing so. This eventually leads up to a moment where the elf in question grows too large for their body to continue to function (the circulatory system and the bones being the first ones to suffer greatly), and originally this meant that the average space elf would eventually just fall apart more or less spectacularly with age. Now, in our age of space and enlightenment, a space elf has a wider variety of choices on how to preserve themselves well into their second, third, fourth or even umpteenth century (in Earth years for scale - one year on the Planet of the Space Elves (the space elves refuse to tell anyone their name for it, and it's suspected they don't have one, just like they don't have a name for their race) is about five Earth years. These include mechanical augmentation, cerebral transplants to smaller bodies and, of course, a containment chamber to hold their body together and inhibit further growth. Sheila's gone for the latter option after a fashion.
Job: chef extraordinaire, resident telepath, machine operator
Backstory: when asked how she came to be on this ship, Sheila usually brushes it off. For all intents and purposes, she's been here since the beginning, and may in fact be one of the original financiers - she does not hesitate to say that she spent her life savings on this dump, especially her own little galley, which seems to be an expansive chamber filled with some sort of oxygenated, medicated gel that she apparently can dermally absorb oxygen with. The procedures she's used to extend her own life are clearly a bit old, in that the result seems to have been to remove her bones, confine her in a room and redo her circulation to the point where it seems like the gel (which is also apparently what her blood is) does most of the work. This appears to have had the unforeseen side effect of supercharging her growth process as well - might be some of the hormones in the gel, but she hasn't dared to touch the settings much, and nobody else knows enough about the machine to do anything about it. Over the years she's grown to occupy much of the chamber - the majority of it, in fact, to the point where ingredients can't be kept inside of it anymore. Luckily for the crew, however, elf-flesh is one of the more delicious meats in the galaxy, and Sheila's always got plenty of that (a vast surplus, in fact, which consumption only serves to keep at a steady level) as long as base nutrients get pumped into the gel on a regular basis. And she's not one to toot her own horn, but she's probably the foremost (and not the only, she'll then add) authority in the galaxy on cooking elf, having mastered more than seven dishes incorporating it as the main ingredient and occasionally experimenting with a few more ideas in her spare time. In the process, she's also managed to master the operation of robot arms, since both operating the excision machinery and the robot arms doing the actual cooking (which happen to be a repurposed part of the excision machinery in a repurposed, very small, airless part of the waste disposal system), since you really don't want the preservation gel getting into your food.
Special talents: Sheila has had quite a lot of practice at cooking (mostly elf-flesh, but sometimes other things in very small quantities), and also operating robotic arms. She is something of a talented and self-taught telepath, able to communicate within the ship's boundaries, and perhaps slightly beyond as well, though not at all familiar with any telepathic combat techniques that, say, a space elf military operative would know, or at best superficially familiar with them. The rest of her skills, if she indeed had any before getting on this ship, are lost to time.
Other things: Her room is a sealed-off 45 cubic meter galley, of which her body takes up about thirty seven. Thanks to her bonelessness, she can fit in just fine and leave some room for the control consoles she uses to cook, excise and adjust her painkiller supply in case of need. She doesn't really have any personal possessions on her, either, since the chamber doesn't allow for them.
Narrator Informant: JVZ (Jeevs)
Name: Jvz
Species: A sentient manifestation of a dimensional anomaly maintained partially within a pocket universe.
Job: Whatever he feels like
Backstory: Jeevz came into being when a small part of the main universe folded over and rubbed against itself. The friction caused universal swelling and a dimensional cyst formed. As a result, the universe formed a double membrane around the cyst, which eventually collapsed in on itself. This however left a bubble universe floating within the main universe. This happens occasionally, and normally the pressure of the universe would press the pocket universe until it reconverged with the main universe or faded into nothingness. But in this case, the universal cyst that collapsed in on itself spontaneously gained sentience. Seeing the pressure of the universe crushin its home, it pushed back and stabilized its pocket universe. With its home firmly established as it's own dimension, the sentience peeped out into the main universe. Almost immediately it was run over by a space ship. The ambient sentience was forced to manifest partially in and partially out of the pocket dimension and thus Jvz took the form it has now.
Jvz looks like a humanoid shape composed of whatever is at hand. Jeevs has found that, by all known measuring devices, he does not exist. As a result, he normally inhabits a body made out of materials that do exist. More often than not, it's the ship. However, Jeevs is very capable of manifesting in multiple places. He can manifest both as physical objects and as data of various sorts. As a result, if Jeez is paying attention he could speak out of nearby technology or compose a speaking orifice out of matter. However, Jeevs likely isn't paying attention. Jeeves is mostly disinterested in the main universe and devotes most of his processing power and potential to his private universe.
As a result, he mainly leaves the ship AI to DD and the piloting to Feliciti, but has been known to tamper with both of these. There was one time in the Magnizon Glaxay where the ship was stranded without fuel, but Jvz moved the entire ship to avoid a crash anyways. When asked why he doesn't just fly the ship without fuel all the time Jeevs simply stated that it would "Tire me out." Its theorized that Jeevs actually likes the ship and its crew, as he wont let Swee "mate" with any part of the ship and occasionally helps the crew out on their ridiculous missions, but this can likely never be proven.
Despite his general laziness and disinterest in the physical world, he has been known to provide almost unknowable information that has proven very helpful and lucrative in the past.
Jeevs got his name when Captain Kurader was scamming hosting some esteemed guests in his home. One of the the guests politely asked his butler for a glass of water, but as the butler had become temporarily unconscious Jvz got the water instead. The gentleman said "Thank you Jeeves" and the name just sorta stuck. While Jeeves doesn't particularly care for the way he gained his name, he seems to rather like it now.
Jeevs throws parties in his universe on friday nights. You have never been invited.
I couldn't find the name of the ship, but it is owned by one of the players (I don't remember who it ended up being). However, most decisions should be democratic in some way. Once we have a ship description/design, then we can start the game. It has to be big enough for all of these people to do their job, but not so big that they can do it perfectly. Everything should be a bit cramped.
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Topic: Universal Menagerie (~/5) (Read 7040 times)