Jazz
Jan 3, 2012 19:48:32 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Jan 3, 2012 19:48:32 GMT -5
-Player Info-
Name/Alias: Aster
IM/Email: white.aster at gmail dot com / white.aster on AIM
-Character Info-
Name: Jazz
Age (or human equivalent): oh, that would be telling.... (he's
actually solidly mature, about 30 in human terms)
Gen (or human equivalent):er: mech/male
Species: Cybertronian
Faction: Autobot
Occupation/Specialization: Special Operations (spying/sabotage/security)
Appearance/Altmode: Jazz's altmode is a Fisker's Karma electric sedan.
He looks like so:
media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2011/10/fisker-karma-electric-photo234563.jpg
. He is a smoky gunmetal gray-blue that in mech mode is over a
completely matte black undermesh. He is about the size of the average Eradicon (bit shorter than Ratchet but much spindlier). He is built to be able to wiggle in and out of tight spots, so he has fewer large bits of kibble and many more transformable parts that are very mobile. He has an Autobot-blue visor and a pair of blunt sensory horns on top of his head (a la G1 Jazz).
History:
Jazz was a lower-class streetmech in Kaon before the war. He learned some of his skills on the streets, where he often did whatever needed doing for the right price. He worked on both sides of the law as an entertainer, a fixer, a security expert, a spy, a thief, a thug, a saboteur, an interrogator, and a hired killer. He preferred the jobs in that order, really, but when times were tough, well, morals couldn't keep him or his friends out of stasis. He was caught by the Enforcers a few times and jailed (mostly, he points out, for petty jobs that he did when he was younger and less experienced.) He joined Megatronus' cause because the ex-gladiator seemed to genuinely want change and opportunity for the lower classes, and Jazz was frustrated with the repressive Enforcers, the lack of say in the laws he had to live by, and with the increasingly obvious ways the credits and goods flowed from the hands of the poor to the hands of the rich.
In the Decepticons, Jazz was a fixer, a thief, and a saboteur. He had
many contacts and knew who could get whatever was needed. Caught up for the first time in the fire of a Cause and charmed, as so many were, by Megatron's charisma and sheer certainty, Jazz threw himself into his support of the Decepticons. He helped build the Decepticon funding network, ran weapons, and sabotaged key political and military targets. As the insurgency rose into an outright revolution, then an all-out war, Jazz was always close by, fighting, observing, and supporting. Jazz was talented, smart, and dedicated, which earned him a place in Decepticon Special Operations and generally favorable impressions from his superiors.
There was no one thing that led to Jazz's defection, but many small
things. A bit too much power consolidated in Megatron's hands. A bit too little tolerance for opposing views. A bit too much "with us or
against us". A bit too little compassion for the weak and powerless
who could not fight for themselves. A bit too much desire to raze
everything to the ground, trusting that they would be able to build
again. It seemed an all-or-nothing campaign to Jazz, a grinding,
uncompromising armageddon that would crush everything Jazz had ever known and loved beneath its heels. To a mech who could always see multiple ways to solve any problem, Megatron's absolutist views began to chafe, and Jazz slowly realized that if Megatron had his way, they would all be trading the Council's rule for Megatron's.
It didn't help that Jazz did not like Starscream much at all and the
feeling was entirely mutual. As the war began in earnest, Starscream
saw in Jazz a very observant mech who might one day observe a little too much of his plans. If there was a straw that broke the
robocamel's back, it was a mission where Jazz's comm was
"mysteriously" cut and one of Starscream's seekers "accidentally" blew a building before he could get completely clear. He was merely
singed, but it made him take a long, hard look at what he was doing.
He decided that it was time to leave.
Jazz was not eager to join the Autobots and their Prime (same song,
different key, he figured), but at the same time, he knew that the war would leave Neutrals few places to live in peace. Bitter but
determined to survive at all costs, Jazz defected to the Autobots.
There he eagerly gave up all the intel he had and started working his
way up. He cautiously allowed himself to believe again in the ideals
of equality and freedom for all that Optimus Prime offered, especially
once he was certain the new Prime and his officers understood the
problems with the caste system and had no desire to revive it. Jazz
slowly earned a measure of trust from (most of) the Autobots and found a place in Special Operations.
Jazz was separated from the rest of the Autobots, however, during the flight from Cybertron. He had been on a spying mission in a
Decepticon ship when it had suddenly and unexpectedly been called
elsewhere. Jazz, unable to escape it before it took off, was trapped
and had no choice but to go with the ship. Later he managed to escape and tried desperately both to survive and to get back to the Autobots, but found it harder and harder as both Autobots and Decepticons scattered to the stars in search of energy and supplies. Instead Jazz returned, ironically, to his early days of scraping by on what he could beg, borrow, trade for, or steal. He aided Autobots and sabotaged Decepticons he came across on his search for his broken chain of command.
Then, one cycle, he heard a rumor of a half-remembered comm message from the Decepticon flagship giving the location of an Autobot resistance cell on a small, waterlogged organic planet called
Earth....
Personality:
Casual observation will show that Jazz is an easy-going, good-humored, can-do kind of mech. He always seems to know when others need a pick-me-up and often takes it upon himself to keep morale high whether that be by joking, pranking, entertaining, or just lending a sympathetic ear. He likes hanging out with his friends and is very social. He can get along with nearly anyone if he puts his mind to it, but he's smart enough to notice if someone really wants to be left alone. Professionally, he is extremely competent and good at what he does. He's cool under pressure, can come up with Plans C through X on the spot when Plans A and B go belly up, and is almost creepily observant. He is also extremely loyal to Optimus Prime, personally. He came to the Autobots a bitter and untrusting defector, and Optimus gave him a leader he could believe in and reason to hope again. He will always feel indebted to Prime for that, and he will pay that debt by doing whatever needs to be done: fight, lie, kill, steal, or die. Recognizing that others haven't been knocked around as much as he has, Jazz will try to protect the younger bots a bit by taking the truly dangerous and...well...blackest of black ops missions for himself. He is very good at what he does, but he sees himself as a cog in the greater machine: he is, ultimately, expendable.
In truth, Jazz is a chameleon to a fault. His cheerful personality is
a (mostly enjoyable) mask he wears, a legacy of the street, when the
best way to keep himself alive was to keep the bigger mechs happy.
One of the first things he'll try to learn about a mech is what that
mech might want from him and how he might give it to them. Thus he can be (nearly) everyone's friend, and they will (hopefully) watch out for him. Friendship is a mutually beneficial exchange of support,
safety, time, happy feelings, and things that you might want, in
Jazz's eyes.
Jazz derives great pleasure from the rhythms and harmonies of language and music and has used his finely-tuned aural sensors for not only enjoyment but to gather information. He has very acute hearing and can analyze and replicate audio samples with fine precison with his own vocalizer. This makes him a wonderful singer and musician, but he also uses it to put on accents, voices, and verbal mannerisms at the drop of a hat. He'll do this for laughs, to entertain, and to distract.
Likes: music, hanging out with friends, meeting new people and befriending them, new languages, verbal sparring, enemies underestimating him, winning/surviving
Dislikes: bullies, being alone too much, sensory deprivation, being trapped, people trying to kill him, starving, Starscream.
Strengths/Weapons:
Weaknesses:
Special skills (that are not weapon related):
Extra Info:[/u]
Sample RP:
Jazz heard the seeker (what was his name? Airbreak? Windbreaker?) starting his approach much too low, much too soon. He cursed, shoving the last of the skill chips into his subspace and pelting back the way he came. He vaulted over the prone body of the guard he'd knocked out earlier, skidding down the hall and running full tilt for the outer door as the jet's engines grew to a roar, underscored by four high-pitched whines....
Jazz slammed a hand on the door controls, mentally promising himself that if he survived this he was going to KILL Starscream. Slowly. Painfully. Getting rid of the traitorous glitch would be a fragging PUBLIC SERVICE.
Between his first step out the door and the second, the missiles
struck the building. The explosions were close enough that Jazz was
carried along on the concussion wave, lifted off his feet and almost
impaled on a bit of exposed girder on the warehouse across the street. Jazz, luckily, hit a rusted and weakened section of wall. The impact made warnings flash across his HUD but didn't severely damage him as he went through the wall and still flew nearly all the way through the building, coming up against the far wall with another burst of damage readings.
Jazz stared up at the warehouse ceiling and was suddenly very, very
tired. Time slowed, and a very small voice in the back of his
processor, the same one that had been there in the square, at the
creche, at the last planning meeting, the one that had gotten louder
and louder with every repetition, spoke up: What in the Pit am I
doing here? Why am I doing this?
::Strike to Ghost, you still alive?::
Time sped up again. Oh, Jazz thought, he was going to kill that
fragger too, for that extra note of smug in his glyphs. Jazz picked
himself up, smashing out the window next to him so he could get a
clear line of sight out. He looked up and caught the trail of the
seeker coming around close for another pass. Probably looking to
finish Jazz off, but at the wrong angle to see him immediately.
::Ghost? Location?::
Jazz's rifle fell into his hand from his subspace. He raised it to
his optics, processor going cold as he lined up the seeker's turbines
in his sight. "Right here," he whispered, pulling the trigger.
Name/Alias: Aster
IM/Email: white.aster at gmail dot com / white.aster on AIM
-Character Info-
Name: Jazz
Age (or human equivalent): oh, that would be telling.... (he's
actually solidly mature, about 30 in human terms)
Gen (or human equivalent):er: mech/male
Species: Cybertronian
Faction: Autobot
Occupation/Specialization: Special Operations (spying/sabotage/security)
Appearance/Altmode: Jazz's altmode is a Fisker's Karma electric sedan.
He looks like so:
media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2011/10/fisker-karma-electric-photo234563.jpg
. He is a smoky gunmetal gray-blue that in mech mode is over a
completely matte black undermesh. He is about the size of the average Eradicon (bit shorter than Ratchet but much spindlier). He is built to be able to wiggle in and out of tight spots, so he has fewer large bits of kibble and many more transformable parts that are very mobile. He has an Autobot-blue visor and a pair of blunt sensory horns on top of his head (a la G1 Jazz).
History:
Jazz was a lower-class streetmech in Kaon before the war. He learned some of his skills on the streets, where he often did whatever needed doing for the right price. He worked on both sides of the law as an entertainer, a fixer, a security expert, a spy, a thief, a thug, a saboteur, an interrogator, and a hired killer. He preferred the jobs in that order, really, but when times were tough, well, morals couldn't keep him or his friends out of stasis. He was caught by the Enforcers a few times and jailed (mostly, he points out, for petty jobs that he did when he was younger and less experienced.) He joined Megatronus' cause because the ex-gladiator seemed to genuinely want change and opportunity for the lower classes, and Jazz was frustrated with the repressive Enforcers, the lack of say in the laws he had to live by, and with the increasingly obvious ways the credits and goods flowed from the hands of the poor to the hands of the rich.
In the Decepticons, Jazz was a fixer, a thief, and a saboteur. He had
many contacts and knew who could get whatever was needed. Caught up for the first time in the fire of a Cause and charmed, as so many were, by Megatron's charisma and sheer certainty, Jazz threw himself into his support of the Decepticons. He helped build the Decepticon funding network, ran weapons, and sabotaged key political and military targets. As the insurgency rose into an outright revolution, then an all-out war, Jazz was always close by, fighting, observing, and supporting. Jazz was talented, smart, and dedicated, which earned him a place in Decepticon Special Operations and generally favorable impressions from his superiors.
There was no one thing that led to Jazz's defection, but many small
things. A bit too much power consolidated in Megatron's hands. A bit too little tolerance for opposing views. A bit too much "with us or
against us". A bit too little compassion for the weak and powerless
who could not fight for themselves. A bit too much desire to raze
everything to the ground, trusting that they would be able to build
again. It seemed an all-or-nothing campaign to Jazz, a grinding,
uncompromising armageddon that would crush everything Jazz had ever known and loved beneath its heels. To a mech who could always see multiple ways to solve any problem, Megatron's absolutist views began to chafe, and Jazz slowly realized that if Megatron had his way, they would all be trading the Council's rule for Megatron's.
It didn't help that Jazz did not like Starscream much at all and the
feeling was entirely mutual. As the war began in earnest, Starscream
saw in Jazz a very observant mech who might one day observe a little too much of his plans. If there was a straw that broke the
robocamel's back, it was a mission where Jazz's comm was
"mysteriously" cut and one of Starscream's seekers "accidentally" blew a building before he could get completely clear. He was merely
singed, but it made him take a long, hard look at what he was doing.
He decided that it was time to leave.
Jazz was not eager to join the Autobots and their Prime (same song,
different key, he figured), but at the same time, he knew that the war would leave Neutrals few places to live in peace. Bitter but
determined to survive at all costs, Jazz defected to the Autobots.
There he eagerly gave up all the intel he had and started working his
way up. He cautiously allowed himself to believe again in the ideals
of equality and freedom for all that Optimus Prime offered, especially
once he was certain the new Prime and his officers understood the
problems with the caste system and had no desire to revive it. Jazz
slowly earned a measure of trust from (most of) the Autobots and found a place in Special Operations.
Jazz was separated from the rest of the Autobots, however, during the flight from Cybertron. He had been on a spying mission in a
Decepticon ship when it had suddenly and unexpectedly been called
elsewhere. Jazz, unable to escape it before it took off, was trapped
and had no choice but to go with the ship. Later he managed to escape and tried desperately both to survive and to get back to the Autobots, but found it harder and harder as both Autobots and Decepticons scattered to the stars in search of energy and supplies. Instead Jazz returned, ironically, to his early days of scraping by on what he could beg, borrow, trade for, or steal. He aided Autobots and sabotaged Decepticons he came across on his search for his broken chain of command.
Then, one cycle, he heard a rumor of a half-remembered comm message from the Decepticon flagship giving the location of an Autobot resistance cell on a small, waterlogged organic planet called
Earth....
Personality:
Casual observation will show that Jazz is an easy-going, good-humored, can-do kind of mech. He always seems to know when others need a pick-me-up and often takes it upon himself to keep morale high whether that be by joking, pranking, entertaining, or just lending a sympathetic ear. He likes hanging out with his friends and is very social. He can get along with nearly anyone if he puts his mind to it, but he's smart enough to notice if someone really wants to be left alone. Professionally, he is extremely competent and good at what he does. He's cool under pressure, can come up with Plans C through X on the spot when Plans A and B go belly up, and is almost creepily observant. He is also extremely loyal to Optimus Prime, personally. He came to the Autobots a bitter and untrusting defector, and Optimus gave him a leader he could believe in and reason to hope again. He will always feel indebted to Prime for that, and he will pay that debt by doing whatever needs to be done: fight, lie, kill, steal, or die. Recognizing that others haven't been knocked around as much as he has, Jazz will try to protect the younger bots a bit by taking the truly dangerous and...well...blackest of black ops missions for himself. He is very good at what he does, but he sees himself as a cog in the greater machine: he is, ultimately, expendable.
In truth, Jazz is a chameleon to a fault. His cheerful personality is
a (mostly enjoyable) mask he wears, a legacy of the street, when the
best way to keep himself alive was to keep the bigger mechs happy.
One of the first things he'll try to learn about a mech is what that
mech might want from him and how he might give it to them. Thus he can be (nearly) everyone's friend, and they will (hopefully) watch out for him. Friendship is a mutually beneficial exchange of support,
safety, time, happy feelings, and things that you might want, in
Jazz's eyes.
Jazz derives great pleasure from the rhythms and harmonies of language and music and has used his finely-tuned aural sensors for not only enjoyment but to gather information. He has very acute hearing and can analyze and replicate audio samples with fine precison with his own vocalizer. This makes him a wonderful singer and musician, but he also uses it to put on accents, voices, and verbal mannerisms at the drop of a hat. He'll do this for laughs, to entertain, and to distract.
Likes: music, hanging out with friends, meeting new people and befriending them, new languages, verbal sparring, enemies underestimating him, winning/surviving
Dislikes: bullies, being alone too much, sensory deprivation, being trapped, people trying to kill him, starving, Starscream.
Strengths/Weapons:
- Floats Like a Butterfly - Jazz is fast, agile, and precise. His
fighting style is acrobatic and makes good use of the environment. He prefers light weapons rather than heavier weapons that slow him down. - Precision Strike - Jazz is a good shot with a rifle or pistol (which he keeps in his subspace at all times) and has a good knowledge of mech anatomy that allows him to sometimes disable mechs with precision shots to vulnerable components. Jazz knows just where to hit (energon line, sensor cluster, or maybe just the easiest way to shove a blade through your spark casing) to get the result he wants, whether that is disablement or deactivation. Whether he can pull this off depends highly on angles, setup time, mech anatomy, and sheer chance.
- Knife Fighter - Although he does not prefer getting that close to an angry opponent, Jazz is a deadly mech in hand to hand fighting. He has two short, retractable knife-sized blades housed in his forearms and always carries on him several loose knives, both of the energon blade and sharp pointy metal varieties "for emergencies". His fighting style is not always pretty and sometimes betrays his "anything goes" beginnings, but it is effective.
Weaknesses:
- Light-Plated - Jazz is fairly lightly armored to help with his speed, agility, and ability to move silently. He is not a frontliner, and he is at a steep disadvantage if he starts getting beat on. A point-blank shot from a heavy weapon like Megatron's cannon would
likely deactivate him. - What's Over There? - Jazz can sometimes allow himself to get distracted in battle. He is always trying to watch everything, and
this can sometimes lead him to become distracted in large battles
where he is trying to keep tabs on his comrades. - Slow Transformation - Because Jazz's frame has a lot of intricate moving parts, transforming takes longer for him: about 3x longer than most mechs. This can be a real problem if he needs to make a fast getaway.
Special skills (that are not weapon related):
- Cat's Feet - Jazz is quiet. Very quiet. His frame, by construction, modification, and skill, can be utterly silent when he moves. He uses this skill to get where he needs to be undetected.
- Acute Hearing - Jazz is very good at not only picking up but analyzing sound waves. He can thus identify voices, songs, sounds, etc. For instance, given enough experience with such things, where someone else would hear a car outside or a conversation between two women, Jazz would be able to tell that it's that same modded streetracer that was out last night and that one woman had a Parisian French accent while the other was from a certain part of Wales and was ticked off to boot. This is a variable capability: he can dial his aural sensitivity up or down at will depending on his surroundings.
- Mimic - Jazz's vocalizer has an incredibly good range, all the way below and above human hearing range. Coupled with information gathered by his acute hearing, he can make himself sound like just about anyone or anything. This also goes deeper than merely how he sounds. If he values you enough, Jazz can and will attempt to be whatever you need him to be.
- Pack Rat - Jazz has an amazing array of Stuff in his subspace. A holdover from the streets, where you never knew when something was going to come in handy. Some of the more useful things he carries are extra knives, climbing cables, and several small explosives for creating distractions and destroying doors or computer consoles. These come readily to hand. Less-used things might take some rummaging for among the burnt-out fuses, cracked datapads, and ancient energon goodie wrappers.
Extra Info:[/u]
- Who Am I, Again? - Jazz has a very...fuzzy sense of self. His mimicing abilities let him construct entire personas. He has used such personas and masks for so long that he is no longer entirely sure who he "really" is. He doesn't let it stop him in any way (after all, he knows what he WANTS, which allows him to make decisions just fine). He's just sometimes haunted by the feeling that he is a patchwork of old masks that he's integrated until he can't really remember who he used to be. One area where this particularly bothers him is in the area of his moral code: he is not certain that he has one anymore, particularly after his hardscrabble solo search through space. His sense of right and wrong is, he fears, permanently skewed, and his only compass is the constant asking of "What would Optimus do?" on one end of the spectrum vs. "What would Megatron do?" on the other. This is one of the reasons that he is very, very glad to catch back up with Optimus and a significant cadre of Autobots: it makes him feel like he's got something to judge himself by. Which, he realizes, is part of the problem.
Sample RP:
Jazz heard the seeker (what was his name? Airbreak? Windbreaker?) starting his approach much too low, much too soon. He cursed, shoving the last of the skill chips into his subspace and pelting back the way he came. He vaulted over the prone body of the guard he'd knocked out earlier, skidding down the hall and running full tilt for the outer door as the jet's engines grew to a roar, underscored by four high-pitched whines....
Jazz slammed a hand on the door controls, mentally promising himself that if he survived this he was going to KILL Starscream. Slowly. Painfully. Getting rid of the traitorous glitch would be a fragging PUBLIC SERVICE.
Between his first step out the door and the second, the missiles
struck the building. The explosions were close enough that Jazz was
carried along on the concussion wave, lifted off his feet and almost
impaled on a bit of exposed girder on the warehouse across the street. Jazz, luckily, hit a rusted and weakened section of wall. The impact made warnings flash across his HUD but didn't severely damage him as he went through the wall and still flew nearly all the way through the building, coming up against the far wall with another burst of damage readings.
Jazz stared up at the warehouse ceiling and was suddenly very, very
tired. Time slowed, and a very small voice in the back of his
processor, the same one that had been there in the square, at the
creche, at the last planning meeting, the one that had gotten louder
and louder with every repetition, spoke up: What in the Pit am I
doing here? Why am I doing this?
::Strike to Ghost, you still alive?::
Time sped up again. Oh, Jazz thought, he was going to kill that
fragger too, for that extra note of smug in his glyphs. Jazz picked
himself up, smashing out the window next to him so he could get a
clear line of sight out. He looked up and caught the trail of the
seeker coming around close for another pass. Probably looking to
finish Jazz off, but at the wrong angle to see him immediately.
::Ghost? Location?::
Jazz's rifle fell into his hand from his subspace. He raised it to
his optics, processor going cold as he lined up the seeker's turbines
in his sight. "Right here," he whispered, pulling the trigger.