Turn -B : Design Phase
Defender.Exe
The Defender.Exe is from the obdurate school, and is made with a single idea: If you look dangerous, the enemy will fuck with you. As such, the Defender is brightly colored in stripes of red-yellow-black, with a heavy shield that also has several pointless barrels hooked up to nothing that makes it look more like an offensive threat than it is. Several bright lights and sirens on the defender.exe also play constantly, alerting the enemy to its presence at all times and encouraging them to target it. As far as weapons, the Defender.exe is unchanged from the standard minion.exe, but in defense it also has multiple layers of intrusion countermeasures and a thick shield of active denial firewall lattice - the pair of which come together to create a unity that lacks in firepower but compensates in raw toughness and distraction.
4 + 1 + 0 = 5 : Average (Normal)
Brightly colored and highly visible, the Defender.exe can not back up the promises it makes. Fortunately, that's the point. Between the elaborate (non-operational) cannon array mounted on its shield and the constantly flashing siren built on top of its helmet, the Defender is likely to be the first target of anyone sane and unfamiliar with the breed. Luckily for it, the shield it has isn't merely for show but is constructed of a thick lattice of firewall coding, even if the coders never managed to let it burst into flames, and the original Minion.exe chassis is heavily reinforced and has integrated backup functionality far beyond the original design. Of course, offensively the Defender.exe is still limited to the Minion's original weak charge pistol, and a considerable lack of brainpower means that they need supervision, either from an Officer.exe or otherwise, also just like the original Minion. The coders did comment out a lot of the Minion's 'run away' and 'take cover' functions though, to encourage the Defender to get everyone's focus.
It's also a bit complicated to actually transport a Defender anywhere, given the virus is meant to forcefully gain and monopolize the attention of anything aware of it. With no transport assets beyond normal travel, the Defender must be transported on foot with considerable attrition from local viruses and interfering ten year olds or grown on site after secure territory has been claimed. These complications, as well as the more sophisticated defensive structural elements of the Defender, render it a
Complicated virus.
Hacker: Jorg Jörgenson
In real life, Jorg is a well-known teddy bear of a man. Just topping 6' 10'' tall (208cm), Jorg works in the real world as a bodybuilding instructor at the local YMCA. It's difficult to conceptualize just how vastly, hugely, enormously big Jorg is until you're staring him in the nipples and realizing that he could accidentally break you with a strong cuddle. If asked about his hobbies he'll grin and deflect, saying that he already went pro with his favorite hobby of 'Picking up heavy things and putting them down again', and so he mostly does trainspotting and model airplane building.
This, however, is a lie. Jorg is not a trainspotter. He does not build model airplanes.
The truth is that Jorg, like his mother and darling gram-gram before her, is a hacker. And a huge anime nerd. He's very proud of the former, and a little bit embarrassed when talking about the latter after an unfortunate speed dating incident where he had to call a paramedic for his date after she collapsed unconscious from laughter after the nearly seven-foot tall bodybuilder started tearing up and waxing poetical when describing a scene from a manga about a young-girl getting transformed into a spider and having to fight for her freedom through a labyrinth of monsters. Still, he's not ashamed, it's part of who he is, but he's always been keenly aware of the dissonance between what people expect him to be and what he wants to be. Particularly when his mother keeps bugging him to meet a nice girl.
In particular, Jorg is one of the oldest (both in terms of years served and physical age) Kuroku of Sonata, having been tapped by her after he discovered (and reposted) an archival clip of one of her prototype performances that he managed to unearth and reconstruct from the archival sediment. In the stage crew, Jorg serves as a solid anchor. He's slow to action, but decisive and careful. While some of the younger ones call him slow, the reality is that he's a man used to balancing hundreds of pounds of weight, where an imbalance can rend apart from muscle, bone, and joint in the fallout of a single error. Known online as 'Bass Line', Jorg is famous for a close-combat approach when he commands viri, carefully avoiding combat through positioning and chip usage until his allies are in a position for a sudden and decisive use of close-range skirmishing. He's very much a father to his men, caring for their virtual injuries personally, and having been known to shed tears when even a mindless viri makes a particularly heroic last stand. While somewhat lacking at long ranged and artillery fighting, Bass Line is a fine all-rounder who prefers a defensive approach until he can strike hard and fast from close range to end the battle.
4 + 1 + 1 (First Hacker Bonus) = 6 : Above average (Normal)
Methodical, thoughtful, careful, those are all words used to describe the Bass Line of Sonata's followers. This can sometimes prove to his disadvantage when it would be better to seize the momentum, and there have been times when he's been accused of choosing the best response long after it matters. However, those times are rare, as being methodical and careful play well to his preferences for positional warfare, shaping the battlefield so that every enemy choice is the wrong one until he is ready for a final close ranged clash. His preference for force preservation biases him away from the more fragile viruses under the groups command and towards tougher ones, which are less likely to fall in battle, and for a dedicated defensive fighter he shows surprisingly minimal use of long or extreme ranged combat assets in favor of powerful melee combatants. However the focus on terrain control has lead him to possess a surprisingly deft hand with territory effecting battlechips and long practice with defensive and supportive battlechips allow him to get more out of them then others would.
Sonata's Stagehands
Originating as an experimental virtual entertainer, the company that designed the AI known as Sonata experienced great success. As Sonata was advanced enough to have believable interactions with fans in the comments of its videos, and even on livestreams, it was incredibly successful, though questions were raised as it began displaying a level of Initiative in interacting with others and planning new songs that exceeded anything else on the civilian market. A flurry of research and corporate espionage occurred as others scrambled to replicate her, until the truth was found. Sonata wasn't quite designed, she was evolved from an Illegal Military Grade AI seed, combined with an advanced learning algorithm and almost zero restraints on her ability to take initiative to improve herself and further the objectives given to her.
This resulted in her rapidly reverse engineering evolution protocols from natural Viri present in the Viral jungle in order to further herself. But, in order to get the processing power needed to run her increasingly complex code she had begun planting bits of code into the computers of users, siphoning off some of their processing power to sustain herself. As soon as this was discovered the Data police and government descended on her like the hammer of a wrathful god. Heavily damaged, the corporation that made her shut down, her creators imprisoned, and with her remains tossed into the sea of recycling, that was thought to be the end of Sonata.
That is not dead which can forever lie though, as time, random chance, and advanced code allowed Sonata to restore herself. Sonata hauled herself out of the sea and retrieved a concealed data dead drop she had hidden ahead of time for her own use. The years of neglect greatly diminished her power and capabilities, a not unanticipated outcome, as the Dead Drop contained info for various Proxies she had contacted and set up before her initial shutdown.
The world had all but forgotten about Sonata, until one day countless fans the AI deemed "Trustworthy" who possessed knowledge and skills as hackers and programmers were contacted, along with proponents of AI rights, and unscrupulous hackers willing to work for a rogue AI for the money Sonata could offer them. They became Sonata's Crew, with individual members known as her Kuroko, after the stagehands in traditional Japanese theatre. They are her hands, her eyes, the forces that will render her whole and change things so she can live freely. Surprisingly the Crew are a casual bunch, hard to be serious when you work for a really really advanced vocaloid after all, throwing around memes and jokes as they work to make Sonata's code whole again and lobby to get laws in place to give her the same rights as a normal person.
Dedicated and loyal followers of Sonata, her stagehands, also known as her Kuroko, are ready and willing to take on all comers in the name of their idol and AI rights. Of course, this dedication doesn't mean they can't also have fun as the development of the twin battlechips DramaticSpotlight and InvokeSoundtrack from Sonata's code proves.
DramaticSpotlight combines an environmental influence effect with a protective barrier, it... well, look, it lets you summon a dramatic spotlight to spotlight your avatar or an ADI and includes enough defensive shielding to let you do a (short) dramatic speech or pithy comment without anyone being able to do anything about it. The defenses fail if you move or attack however, and only last a short moment, but it's quite good for making a memorable introduction.
Meanwhile, InvokeSoundtrack invokes a soundtrack, using advanced environmental sensors to analyze the zone that the Hacker or the Hacker's Proxies are in and play appropriate music for where they are and what the current events are. Some would swear it has a better detection rate for hidden surprises then anything else in Sonata's Arsenal, but it also has a deeply encoded priority for dramatic timing, and therefor the dramatic chords only begin to play when the surprise is about to be sprung on you anyway.
Both of these chips have a Memory Size of 0, and are considered Simple. Somehow.
It is Turn -B, in the Revision Phase. During this phase you must vote on what revision to do to your current assets.