[Mkguild] New Author & Character: Stryker

[Stryker mk]

Hi --

My name is Britt, and after reading all the archived MK stories, I've
decided to give writing some a try. The first character I'd like to
introduce is Stryker (from whence this email address was derived -- I
needed *something* to put into gmail -- but he's not my alter-ego);
who is a shape-shifter automaton. He may not be the one I end up
writing about the most, but he's who I've got the most definition of
right now.

Given that this is my first whack at this, I'm quite open to changing
most of his attributes; so please do mention anything you'd like to
see different about him. Also, I've referenced Raven and Misha by
description towards the end of the intro story, but that could easily
be changed to just about anybody...

Other ideas for characters I'm working on are a female feline
machinist (might be a good source for precision parts for Misha's
clocks, and perhaps some of Drift's inventions); a large dragonfly
outfitted with surgically-integrated side-mounted ballista fired from
a spare muscle (this should be feasible due to his exoskeleton; I
doubt this would work well on a non-insect), and a dragon (I haven't
figured out if it'll be natural or cursed yet).

Oh, and about Drift - I had come up with the idea for Stryker before
reading about Drift ending up in hell (the 6th, IIRC?) in the forum,
but now that I see that, I think he'd make a good companion for the
rescue mission; and a great agent for throwing verbal barbs
back-and-forth between him and the daedra.

Here's what I've got on Stryker so far:

Character Datasheet:
Name: Stryker
Species: Automaton, shape-shifter.
Gender Identity: Male-dominant; with occasional feminine traits showing thru.
Age: over 20,000 years; 99% of which spent unconscious in solar orbit.
Exact date of creation: Unknown.
Height: Variable
Weight: 4000lbs without levitation; but usually
levitates 3800lbs of that to keep from sinking into dirt and wood
floors.

Alignment: Chaotic good (ownership & command binding to daedra was
never performed due to accident during construction resulting in
facility being vaporized and automaton blown into orbit). Souls used
to animate the automaton were good aligned; these characteristics
dominate over the daedric programming & knowledge-base originally laid
into the matrix of the automation.

Appearance: Variable, depending on situation. In the keep, to blend
in, he usually goes by the appearance of an anthropomorphic marten;
likes to wear black cloaks or trench coats and a dark hat that
obscures his face. If need be, he can appear as anything from a volume
of air (i.e, invisible to most eyes; but insect morphs should be able
to feel his presence by infrared and air current disturbances on their
antenna), an inanimate object (rocks, furniture, etc) to any animal
that he knows the appearance of. Has no odor (due to being really
metal, not flesh).

Fighting skills & abilities: Can shape-shift any body part into a
blade. Immune to blades and projectiles (he will just shape-shift
around them). Can channel mana very efficiently; has extensive
knowledge of the 9 hells, their occupants, and how to defeat & control
them (was designed to be an enforcer for a daedra; a sort of
"dominance weapon", much like an F22 is an "air dominance fighter") --
however, is limited by a damaged memory-indexing subsystem; so
sometimes doesn't remember something he should, or remembers the wrong
thing for the context. Capable of extracting and destroying a soul
(either good or daedric, but will not use this against anything that
isn't a particularly nasty demon; and can separate a possessing soul
from a possessed body usually with comparatively little damage to the
proper owner's soul). Can carry a soul from one plane to another by
allowing it to attach to a part of his matrix (kind of like a vulcan
mind meld does, but not quite as tightly "melded").

Limitations: Damaged memory-indexing subsystem. Contact with daedric
magic makes him nauseous; and feels cold, slimy, and gritty.
Reclusive; does not like being drawn into situations that could lead
to having to deal with daedra & associated minions -- in some respects
he's kind of like a nuke in the hands of a peace activist. High-power
magic directed at him can cause damage & drain his resources. Cannot
form projectiles (needs external objects to throw).

Personality: Quiet. Reclusive. Loyal to his friends. Will accept new
friends, but does not seek new friends out. Not easily impressed.
Thinks bluster, bravado, and bullying are character flaws, and thusly
looks down upon those that exhibit those behaviors. Modest to others
(usually by just keeping his mouth shut), but not in his own mind
("just because I am really that good doesn't mean I have to go rubbing
everybody else's nose in it"). Expression tends to be somewhat
enigmatic, but can be very expressive when he wants to be. Composed of
two merged souls, a male marten, and a female elf (who was somewhat
tomboyish); the male characteristics tend to dominate, but not always.
Usually appears as male or somewhat ambiguous. Emotionally conflicted
by what he has become. Hates daedra with a passion. Has a slight
empathic/spiritual connection with The Five Sisters (he can often get
the gist of what one of The Sisters is trying to communicate to him
without needing direct contact), as he is also a sort of conscious
weapon. Relates well with Madog. He respects Omega, but does not seek
Omega's company.

Goals: Avoiding daedra. Destroying daedra when he is confronted by
them. Staying out of trouble (which, much to his chagrin, seldom seems
to work out).


************************************************************************************************************************************
Intro Story:

Broken Arrow

Pt. 1: Hide and Seek.


Slowly sliding his head up over the boulder he was crouched behind,
the mage surveyed the clearing before him. A slight rustling in the
bushes ahead and just off to the left of him caught his attention.
'Yes... yes, you'll do nicely little one' he thought.

Carefully so as not to alarm the creature, he circled out from behind
the boulder and moved along the edge of the clearing; making sure to
stay downwind from the animal. Nearing the bush from whence the
rustling had come, he quietly dropped down to the ground and peered
in; and laid eyes upon the visage of a Great Irombi Marten trying his
best to stay hidden behind the thick mass of leaves.

'How did she catch up to me so fast?' the marten thought, and turned
his head to look in the direction of his pursuer - only to have his
eyes widen in shock as he realized that the person just outside of the
bush where he was hiding was not the girl he had been playing
hide-and-seek with.

Seeing his eyes widen, the mage knew he had been spotted and had to
act fast. With a snap of his wrist, he threw a stunning spell at the
animal; which hit with a soft fizzling sound, knocking the marten
unconscious.

Reaching into the bush, he grabbed his quarry by the scruff of the
neck and dragged him out into the clearing. "Ugh... heaver than it
looks," muttered the mage. After pausing a moment, he made a complex
gesture over the unconscious form at his feet, and then gestured
upwards. The marten slowly floated up before the mage, who then turned
and started off in the direction he had come from; the marten floating
behind him, occasionally bumping into the odd bush or tree as it
followed.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

"Ready or not, here I come!" shouted the girl, rising from her
position seated under a tree. Looking down, she could see the tracks
her pet had left in the leaves that littered the forest floor.
Glancing forwards again, she began to follow the trail as it lead
towards the mountains.

After about two hours of tracking (and chasing a few false trails),
she came upon the clearing. Frowning, she sniffed the air - yes, her
pet had been here... but there was something else. Looking down again,
she carefully examined the area surrounding the clearing... and then
stopped suddenly, a chill creeping up her spine.

These were not the tracks of a marten.

Whatever had left them was clearly a biped; and wore boots, too.

Closing her eyes, she shifted to true-sight, allowing her mind to take
in the scene around her. An inky black trail emanated from one of the
bushes near the other biped's tracks... and in this bush, her pet's
tracks on the ground stopped, but her pet wasn't there. Looking out
from the bush, she followed a trail of drag marks into the clearing,
to the spot where they ended. There, she found a slight magical
afterglow, clear sign that some spell had been cast here recently.

Turning about, she cast here true-sight further afield; and spotted
more black marks on the trees, heading towards the mountains. The bile
rising in her throat, she began to charge towards them, ducking
through the bushes and brambles that got in her way. Whatever had
happened to her pet here, it couldn't have been good...

_________________________________________________________________________________________

It had taken the mage three days to make it back to his lair in the
mountains, and the crossing was not easy. But, then again, the mage
reflected, that was by design - he really didn't like unexpected
guests. The guest he was entertaining now, however; was most
definitely not unexpected, nor unwelcome.

"Yes, my Lord... I now have all the requisite materials. I shall begin
the procedure forthwith." the mage said to the shrouded inky black
figure in the corner.

Nodding once, the figure responded in a soft hissing voice "Proceed. I
will return for the final binding stage." -- and with that, vanished
in a swirl of darkness.

Behind the mage stood a large metal structure; it's pillars covered
with runes. Spanning the pillars about five feet above the floor was a
lattice of wire, and floating under it was a silvery liquid torus
three feet across. Reflected in the surface of the torus the mage
could see the face of a marten, caught up in the wires above.

Turning fully to face the structure, the mage began chanting quietly;
attuning the molten alloy to the animal suspended above it, it's
surface slightly rippling as he did so.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Exhausted from days of tracking, the girl slumped down at the base of
a gnarled, twisted tree. She knew that if she had any hope of seeing
her pet again, she couldn't afford to sleep; but she desperately
needed to rest, if only for a few minutes.

Dropping her head to her knees, she closed her eyes, and reached out
with her mind...  and nearly threw up as the sheer malevolence of the
place hit her. Jerking her head upright again, she realized that
everything around her was diseased, and the air was dead silent.

Rising from the tree with a fresh pang of fear spreading across her
chest, she turned back to the direction the tracks lead towards; and
gazed up at the forbidding face of the dark mountain, it's peak
disappearing in the dingy grey mists of the leaden sky above. Steeling
herself against this sight, she began to head up the slope again; the
only sound meeting her ears was the sound of her own heartbeat
thudding in her chest.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Finishing the final words in the sequence, the mage looked up again
and saw that his master had returned. "My lord." he said, bowing in
supplication before the mass of darkness before him.

"Rise..." the shrouded figure intoned in the same quiet hissing voice
as before. "You have finished the preparations." - a statement, not a
question.

"Yes, my lord. All that remains is the soul binding, and the mark of
ownership." the mage replied.

From within the shroud that the dark figure wore, a sheathed dagger
appeared, held by a withered, almost skeletal, blackened hand. The
mage extended his hand, and his master placed the object in it,
feeling the dagger hum has he received the unholy object.

Turning towards the structure again, the mage unsheathed the dagger;
and approached the creature that was suspended in midair, tightly
caught up in the wires.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Blood. Pausing a moment, she leaned forwards to examine the side of a
large rock outcropping. Though it had dried hours before, it bore an
aura that was, for her, unmistakable -- they had passed by here
recently, and judging by the small patch of fur embedded in the streak
of blood, run into this rock with some degree of force.

Continuing past the outcropping, she saw a hole in the ground, just
big enough to walk into. Peering into the darkness, she realized it
was the mouth of a tunnel leading into the mountain. Knowing that she
was going to regret doing this -- but also knowing that she would
regret not doing this more -- she started down the tunnel, trying to
be as silent as possible.

After half an hour of walking like this, she reached a corner, with a
sickly dim green light coming from the chamber just beyond. Pausing
again, she could hear soft voices, one hissing, the other smooth and
almost velvety.

Peering around the corner, she saw a sight that made her blood turn to
ice -- her beloved pet, strung up and hanging from three pillars; a
man with his arms raised above it, dagger in hand. As she came around
the corner, the man muttered something, and the floor under the
pillars opened in three pieces like a mechanical iris, exposing a
bright green flickering glow to the room.

Her hesitation lasted only a moment, though -- seeing what was about
to happen, she screamed and lunged towards the man, crossing the
distance between them before he realized what was happening. The
shrouded figure across from them was not so slow, however -- but,
being on the wrong side of the pillars, did not dare to throw a spell
at her; as the magical items between them were far to powerful and
unstable to risk it. Seeing what was about to happen, the dark figure
did the only thing left available to him; and vanished in a swirl of
black that seemed to suck the light out of the room.

The mage became aware of her presence as she arrived at his side, but
it was too late; his arms were already moving swiftly towards the
chest of the marten, driven on by the urges of the dagger itself. As
the tip pierced the animal's skin, her hands closed around the blade.

It was at this point that everything went...  sideways.



_________________________________________________________________________________________
=========================================================================================





Pt 2: Three Shakes

The fluid floating between the three pillars was an alloy of gallium,
indium, tin, germanium, and mithril. This alloy has several unusual
properties; it has an extremely low melting point, makes an excellent
substrate for soul-binding, and can pass easily across astral plane
boundaries. However, perhaps the most unusual property that it
exhibits is that it is realistically possible to force it's entropy
level low enough that it becomes a superconductor for mana.

Life and death are polar with respect to entropy; life reducing it,
death increasing it -- and thus life and death aspect mana have the
respective effect on the entropy of that which they flow through. The
soul-binding procedure creates a surge of mana; death-aspect in the
body from whence the soul came; and life-aspect flowing thru the
object that the soul is being bound to. Consequently, when the mage
plunged the binding dagger into the heart of the marten, driving the
animal's soul out along the length of the blade and into the alloy
below, the entropy level in the liquified metal plummeted as the
higher order of life filled it -- and had things been going according
to plan, that's all that would have happened, for the mage had
carefully "pre-cooled" the alloy to a level of entropy optimum for
accepting the soul of the animal, but no more.

Unfortunately for the mage, things were not going according to plan;
for now there was a girl clinging firmly to the blade, her blood
mixing with the marten's as the razor edges sliced deep into her
palms. It is the nature of such a blade to draw out the soul of any
who's blood touches it and expel it down it's length; and true to it's
nature, it pulled both the souls that it was in contact with out and
cast them into the alloy floating below it. The resultant excess
life-aspect mana shot through the metal like a lightning bolt; it's
entropy levels dropping far below what either the mage or his master
had intended. As the entropy level fell, the alloy began to crystalize
into a superconductor.

Flowing inside the mountain that the mage had constructed the chamber
in was a dark nexus; it's magic flows peaking in intensity a few
hundred feet below the floor, which was now open exposing the sickly
green glow of the nexus. Nanoseconds after the crystallization had
reached the surface of the metal, the mana from the nexus below began
to surge through the super-conducting metal, it's flux rising
uncontrolled as the metal put forth no resistance to the flow.

But this was a dark nexus, and the energies surging through the area
were very death-aligned; and just as the flow in the super-conducting
alloy was reaching it's saturation point, the death-aspect mana drove
the entropy level back over the point of criticality, slamming shut in
a nanosecond the path the mana was flowing through.

With the full force of the nexus behind it, the mana - with nowhere
else to go - arced over the surface of the alloy and began to spread
outwards. Being death-aspected, the mana drove the entropy level in
the surrounding space so high that atoms themselves were torn apart;
and in the few hundred-thousandths of an inch in the direct path of
the arc, mass itself was reduced to a burst of randomized energy
radiating outwards into the surrounding rock at the speed of light.

Then, the surge spent, the arc-over collapsed; mana flows rebounding
back down to the center of the nexus where they originated. But all
was not over yet; as the energy released had vaporized most of the
rock of the mountain, causing the mountain to explode outwards and
sending material many hundreds of miles up into the sky.

And the object in the center of it all was propelled far higher than
the surrounding rock...

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Looking out from the top of a distant mountain, the shrouded figure
let out a long hissing sigh, a sound swallowed up in the chaos of the
scene before him - where there had only moments before been a mountain
range, there was now a valley; rising from it a huge pillar of ash and
smoke, the upper ranges of it beginning to choke off the sunlight. The
ground in the distance was glowing a deep red, as lava was stripped
bare of the soil and rock that had covered it for millions of years;
and the air even this far away was beginning to smell of sulphur.
Shaking his head slowly, he vanished almost as quickly as he had come;
oblivious to the true nature of the creature he had wrought that
day...

The Ice Age from the fallout would last for over five thousand years.



_________________________________________________________________________________________
=========================================================================================





Pt. 3: A sort of homecoming.

There... in the distance. Something familiar; something the creature
had felt before. As consciousness slowly began to seep back into the
entity, it realized what it was that had awoken it.

Mana flux.

Tenuous and faint, to be sure; but present -- and as the hours went
by, it was getting stronger. Instinctively reaching out through the
cold vacuum of interplanetary space, it began to draw the energies
towards it; and allowing the flow to pull it in.

Ever so slowly, it's orbit began to tighten. It didn't take much,
though; and this time it looked like it was finally getting to where
it had tried to go all those many times before. Reaching out again to
the flux, the creature noticed that it's orbit had bent far enough to
be captured by the gravity of the moon, and it was now on a parabolic
trajectory that took it only a few tens of miles from the surface.

Eventually, the creature had gathered together enough energy to form
eyes, and when it did so, the view was breathtaking. Starlight shown
down on the night side of the lunar surface streaking by below the
creature, dimly illuminating the craters and mountains against the
star-strewn black of the space beyond.

And then it crossed the terminator; the sun now visible in all it's
glory. Long shadows trailed behind the stark grey peaks that slid past
it below, stretching out away from the lunar dawn.

Looking forwards again across the horizon, a small blue and white disc
slid up into view, gaining height as the creatures path brought it
further around and away from the moon.

Fifty hours later the creature reached the outer fringes of the atmosphere.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Looking out over the northern wall, the wolf reflected on the scene
before her. This place really was beautiful, especially now in the
pre-dawn hours; the moonlight shining down on the valley.

Turning back to the keep behind her, she was somewhat surprised to see
a new light in the southern sky; but as it moved she thought 'Ahh... a
shooting star.'

Turning her head to track it as the point of light streaked overhead,
she was startled by a loud double crack shattering the still air;
powerful enough that she felt it resonate through her chest. Moments
later, just after the point of light fell to the ground to the north;
there was another loud boom, but this time not so sharp.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

The afternoon light filtered down through the trees, falling on the
face of a fox; who stood leaning on the handle of a five foot long axe
with his head resting against the top of the pitch-black blade, eyes
wide at the empty smoking crater before him.

With a growing sense of uneasiness, he turned and headed back south,
the suspicion firmly planted in his mind that he was missing
something...