Rook
Aug 29, 2013 12:26:32 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Aug 29, 2013 12:26:32 GMT -5
-Player Info-
Name/Alias: Rachel, aka Moonmad (or just plain Moon)
IM/Email: tanaigre@hotmail.com
-Character Info-
Name: Rook
Age (or human equivalent): Mentally, 29-ish. If you were to meet him coming down the street, he'd be 30-32
Gender (or human equivalent): Male
Species: Cybertronian
Faction: Autobot
Original Occupation: He's a metallurgist and an inorganic chemical engineer - that is, he fiddles with the basic chemical and ores to create alloys and reagents to be used in specialty industrial interests (such as stronger metal alloys for building, or better cleaning solutions for use in hazardous conditions). Rook was sparked early enough before the war to have started in on his job, but not to be fully established within the field. Which sucks, because he loved it and would have probably made a heck of a metallurgist and chemical engineer. He was sparked by an engineer and didn't even notice the caste issue until he went into the field trying to start his own business… and saw where his ore and chemical samples came from.
Occupation/Specialization: Rook went in as a plain soldier, until it was discovered he can… sorta kinda hit the broad side of the barn every now and again. He’s a mediocre shot, at best, and no amount of training seemed to fix that. What he is good at is infiltrating, assessing, sabotaging and assassinating; he's not an all-around black ops go-to-mech, but he is exceptionally good within his narrow field of work
Appearance/Altmode: He’s about Knockout’s size, though a little lighter overall. His alt-mode is, following the good ol’ tradition of hiding in plain sight with the absolutely showiest thing ever, the 2009 SSC Ultimate Aero TT. He’s heavier than the car, obviously, since he actually has some armor to him, but not by much. The car is dark metallic gray with black accents, their Palladium paint-job, since he scanned their flagship (flagcar?) in Washington state.
When in bipedal mode, he has digitigrades legs; they give him exceptional speed and agility. Both his hands and the soles of his feet are rubberized (by his tire surfaces); originally this was meant to help the fact that he works with both caustic and really, really hot substances, but it also has the added advantage of making him very quiet when he moves. From his hips to his waist he’s lean, much as one would expect of a speedy fighter, and he only broadens fractionally across the shoulders. His arms end in human-style hands. Most of him is armored in dark gray, with flexible black smoothing out any juts and angles. His face is about the only light part of him, light gray like his inside, humanoid and usually wearing a deceptively lazy, mildly friendly expression. His optics are the usual blue, usually dim unless he’s on the job. He lacks any obvious ridge or defining external feature unless you count his few facial features as being what a human would call 'sharp', but that's an aesthetic that doesn't really apply outside humans.
History: Rook was sparked an engineer, designed from sparkling-hood by an engineer and cared for by an engineer. His cohort has pretty much always followed the same pattern: one adult, one sparkling, and they've all been engineers of one sort or another even long before the caste system was so tyrannically in place. Heck, even their designs, when possible, come directly from within the cohort, always seeking to improve not just on function, but on form. While distinguished in their fields, enough to be somewhat wealthy and occasionally sought after, they were not so important, or involved in such ground-breaking research, as to qualify very high up the totem pole: just high enough to have a good life, not so high as to draw attention - or, if you prefer, juuust high enough for a middle-caste to look up to them, juuust low enough for a high-caste to look down at them. Awkward place, unless you're content with it. His sire was… well, he did the whole upbringing thing by the book, and when life, as it so often does, didn't agree with the book, he plowed right on. Rook’s relationship with him was always distant and kind of awkward as a result, and while he holds no bad memories of him, he holds no good memories either. He is, as far as he can tell, all that's left of that cohort; the lack of drive that kept them all content in their jobs did not help them survive.
He did love his calling, though. He was on the way to becoming an exceptional metallurgy and chemical engineer; he hoped to go into business on his own, creating new alloys and reagents for industrial and spacefaring needs. He was not, however, expecting to see the truly atrocious way in which the basic building blocks for his work, ores and chemicals, were acquired, by caste mechs that were treated as little better than the tools they wielded. Perhaps it was the fact that, while not necessarily loved, he had been safe and allowed to pursue his interests; perhaps it was the fact that he'd never had to buck the norm. But to find mechs trapped in a task that did not reward them, did not respect them, and above all, did not let them reach for something greater or even just something else, felt to him as if their society had failed to do what it was supposed to do, and protect the mechs that formed it. He did not buy the whole 'needs-of-the-few-over-needs-of-the-many' thing; at the point where the mechanism fails to protect that many mechs, the mechanism has to go. No matter what it does to the few. He would have preferred to change things in a more peaceful way – surely diplomacy and politics would have worked?
When war started, he couldn't help but see the brutality of the Decepticons as an atrocity. He joined the Autobots in an attempt to stop that kind of thing, and promptly proved less than useful as a soldier. He can shoot, he just doesn't hit his target very often. It didn't take long, however, until someone noticed just how easily he made friends, how quickly he found himself the confidante of mechs that otherwise kept their secrets close, and how damn good he was at getting up close and personal, inside the reach of a gun, where aim was moot.
He was trained and deployed under the command of a mech named Wildcard, a sturdy, unobtrusive mech, the very kind of miner Rook once meant to help free from the caste system. Wildcard himself used his unassuming appearance and seemingly uneducated upbringing to do the very same things Rook was taught to do: cozy up to people, sneak into places he shouldn't be, do his damage very quietly, and leave before ever being noticed. The problem with guns, Wildcard taught him, is that they're noisy, they draw attention, and by the time you drag it out you've already failed the mission. He trained Rook into his strengths, putting little focus on his weaknesses - yes, it made him a very specialized black ops, but better that than no black ops at all.
His new job was… difficult to do, but in the end he figured better one mech dead quietly than the ten or twenty or hundred more that mech might later kill. Rook's doing a job that he knows does not yield obvious results - he doesn't snipe generals on the battlefield, he doesn't blow up fuel depots or scythe his way through the ranks; nonetheless, he can see the results of what he does: the mind that once chased down potential chemical and metallurgical formulas can follow the effect of any one of his quiet kills as it expands through chains of command and efficiency, like a new element spreading through the chemical structure of a compound, eating it away from the inside. He does the job because it needs doing, but he’s a long way from the carefree, excited little engineer he once was, but he takes pride in knowing, if only to himself, that the job brings the end of death one sliver closer each time.
He’s used to being deployed on very long term assignments, and used to going solo and incommunicated for a very long time. His arrival on Earth was something of an accident: he was looking for signs of life so he could hitch a ride somewhere even remotely civilized. Unfortunately, Earth’s signs-of-life were not of the useful kind, and the vague hints of mechs on youtube only give him the barest of hopes.
Personality: Outwardly, Rook is calm, sedate, mildly friendly though he’s more the kind that listens to you venting than the kind that’ll say anything about himself. He’ll even buy you a drink or three to help you feel better about your woes. Inwardly, Rook’s mind never stops calculating, looking for angles, weighing in words and actions. He has no friends, no matter how much others might think he is one: he merely has debts to be paid one way or the other, and perhaps the most powerful commitment someone can get out of him are three words, ‘I owe you’.
On the job, he’s incredibly focused, and somewhat more alive than usual. He despises getting other people involved, and will do what he can to protect them – again, he does the job so no one else has to get hurt doing it, so having anyone else involved kinda makes things moot.
Likes: In the rare occasion when he gets the time, he does like tinkering with metallurgic and chemical formulas, even if it’s just on writing. He also likes music, with a distinct preference for trance, metal and classical. Not that anyone would ever see him doing so, but he also likes to dance. If he can do nothing else, he’ll race, either as a mech, or as car (he doesn't race for pinks, though, that’s just asking for trouble).
Dislikes: Rook rarely if ever lets show any emotion as strong as hate, but he does have a few things he loathes. He hates noisy, overly chipper, overly idealistic mechs – he has to resist the urge to mentally shake some reality into them, sometimes. He hates being cooped up with idle time – he will find something to do with it, or he’ll start going slightly weird, perching-on-piping-and-stalking-his-own-team-for-fun-weird. Likely his worst issue is that he hates medbays – not medics, and not their care, he hates the room itself; it’s a little too reminiscent of interrogation rooms for him to not want to get-the-frag-out of one as fast as he can, injuries or not, and if push comes to shove he can and will enforce his paranoid stupidity with sharp pointy things. For all intents and purposes if he’s medic’d somewhere other than a medbay he’s a perfectly agreeable and polite patient.
Strengths/Weapons: Rook is pretty damn deadly at point-blank range. In bare-handed combat he is very good at going for joint strikes, exposed lines, soft spots and fluid lines, and his light build and leg structure mean he’s fast and agile enough to close the distance and make such strikes count. He is truly lethal, however, when you put a short blade in his hand.
He also tends to pick up sharp, pointy things from his opponents, up to and including the armor spikes and ridges so common to Decepticon anatomy; he’ll snap those off and put them somewhere they ought not to go, a lot. After a while of doing that kind of thing, he tends to have said sharp, pointy things hiding all over his frame, and since they’re mech bits half the time, they’re not readily detectable to sensors. At the moment, however, he’s running on empty.
As a black ops, Rook's job isn't to gather information - he's no hacker, or data wrangler, unless you're looking for data he saw, he touched, he was there for, not files and documents on a terminal. He certainly doesn't go looking for fights if he can at all avoid them. What he does is get in, undetected, and once inside he either does damage to what's there (cutting lines, backing up engines, damaging fluid systems - if his background as a chemist or a metallurgist can ID, he will do things to it. Bad things.) or gets close to mechs that should have been kept away from Autobots with sharp things and clear directives. He is an assassin first and foremost, a saboteur in a pinch, and nothing else - limited, but useful.
Weaknesses: Rook may not be built like the tissue-paper car he mimics, but his armor is pretty damn slender. Speed and agility are his main protection; one good solid hit, or getting caught in a good area effect, is likely to make his day a whole lot less pleasant. He’s also a mediocre shot by the most generous of description. This isn't a bad thing if he’s just, say, laying cover fire (since that’s just a point-and-shoot-lots for a general area), but hitting a target, particularly a moving target, is not something you should expect from him. I mean, he does have a blaster! But he’s more likely to hand it over to someone in need of a weapon (so generous of him) than to use it himself.
Emotionally, the mech is so unavailable it’s a non-issue. He makes no friends, because of the slim chance they may go rogue and he may have to kill them. He doesn't do favors, he takes debts. More than anything, he’s fine with this, and he means to stay that way, at least until (and if) the war ends.
Special skills (that are not weapon related): He is a metallurgist, and an inorganic chemist: he likes to tinker, come up with new alloy and reagent ideas. In the old days, he would have synthesized those formulas and, if successful, he would have tried to sell them to industrial and shipyard concerns, or to other manufacturing interests.
Extra Info: In the discharge of his duties, Rook has been caught twice. He was held for a week the first time, and for five days the latter. Both times he killed a guard under dubious circumstances and escaped before interrogation could break much of importance out of him; however, that does mean the Decepticons may or may not have his wetworks status on file.
Having landed in WA state, Rook picked up the soft speaking burr of the region. His voice is very quiet, a pleasant tenor.
Sample RP (only for first accepted characters):
Rook found himself rather liking the planet as he drove through the one tiny sliver of it. The deep woods where he’d landed had given him cover generously; they were vast, the trees tremendously large, and water so ever-present that fog cover had been pretty much a given. The road was a dream, and at the wee hour of the morning he had it all to himself, the native authorities giving themselves away loudly on the local radio channels so far in advance they could be easily avoided. So far, it sure as slag beat being stuck in a service shaft barely wider than his shoulders for who knew how long. And when the landscape shifted to vast, endless emptiness, cold desert and giant jutting rocks, the sight of the stars and all that empty space felt almost as good as a good shower and a soft bed.
It didn't make him forget, of course, that he was following a whisper and a prayer rather than solid Autobot tracks. He would have preferred a more reliable source of news that screeching natives posting blurry videos, but then again, he’d gone out on even less solid intel every now and again. Truly, the only thing he minded of the planet so far was the natives. They were so… abundant, it made things awkward every now and again. They did make some killer music, though. He was rolling through Nevada blaring Eisbrecher and Beethoven by turns, with an occasional bit of trance thrown in every now and again. The music made it easy to stay focused, and his new alt-mode had cut a ten-hour trip into something almost like half that. However, it was getting to the point where he was hungry, he was tired, and he was finding it very difficult to ignore either anymore.
“Where are you, guys…” Risky as it was, his sensors were open wide. All he needed was one blip. One signal. “Don’t tell me I’m stranded on this jigsaw puzzle of a place alone.”
Name/Alias: Rachel, aka Moonmad (or just plain Moon)
IM/Email: tanaigre@hotmail.com
-Character Info-
Name: Rook
Age (or human equivalent): Mentally, 29-ish. If you were to meet him coming down the street, he'd be 30-32
Gender (or human equivalent): Male
Species: Cybertronian
Faction: Autobot
Original Occupation: He's a metallurgist and an inorganic chemical engineer - that is, he fiddles with the basic chemical and ores to create alloys and reagents to be used in specialty industrial interests (such as stronger metal alloys for building, or better cleaning solutions for use in hazardous conditions). Rook was sparked early enough before the war to have started in on his job, but not to be fully established within the field. Which sucks, because he loved it and would have probably made a heck of a metallurgist and chemical engineer. He was sparked by an engineer and didn't even notice the caste issue until he went into the field trying to start his own business… and saw where his ore and chemical samples came from.
Occupation/Specialization: Rook went in as a plain soldier, until it was discovered he can… sorta kinda hit the broad side of the barn every now and again. He’s a mediocre shot, at best, and no amount of training seemed to fix that. What he is good at is infiltrating, assessing, sabotaging and assassinating; he's not an all-around black ops go-to-mech, but he is exceptionally good within his narrow field of work
Appearance/Altmode: He’s about Knockout’s size, though a little lighter overall. His alt-mode is, following the good ol’ tradition of hiding in plain sight with the absolutely showiest thing ever, the 2009 SSC Ultimate Aero TT. He’s heavier than the car, obviously, since he actually has some armor to him, but not by much. The car is dark metallic gray with black accents, their Palladium paint-job, since he scanned their flagship (flagcar?) in Washington state.
When in bipedal mode, he has digitigrades legs; they give him exceptional speed and agility. Both his hands and the soles of his feet are rubberized (by his tire surfaces); originally this was meant to help the fact that he works with both caustic and really, really hot substances, but it also has the added advantage of making him very quiet when he moves. From his hips to his waist he’s lean, much as one would expect of a speedy fighter, and he only broadens fractionally across the shoulders. His arms end in human-style hands. Most of him is armored in dark gray, with flexible black smoothing out any juts and angles. His face is about the only light part of him, light gray like his inside, humanoid and usually wearing a deceptively lazy, mildly friendly expression. His optics are the usual blue, usually dim unless he’s on the job. He lacks any obvious ridge or defining external feature unless you count his few facial features as being what a human would call 'sharp', but that's an aesthetic that doesn't really apply outside humans.
History: Rook was sparked an engineer, designed from sparkling-hood by an engineer and cared for by an engineer. His cohort has pretty much always followed the same pattern: one adult, one sparkling, and they've all been engineers of one sort or another even long before the caste system was so tyrannically in place. Heck, even their designs, when possible, come directly from within the cohort, always seeking to improve not just on function, but on form. While distinguished in their fields, enough to be somewhat wealthy and occasionally sought after, they were not so important, or involved in such ground-breaking research, as to qualify very high up the totem pole: just high enough to have a good life, not so high as to draw attention - or, if you prefer, juuust high enough for a middle-caste to look up to them, juuust low enough for a high-caste to look down at them. Awkward place, unless you're content with it. His sire was… well, he did the whole upbringing thing by the book, and when life, as it so often does, didn't agree with the book, he plowed right on. Rook’s relationship with him was always distant and kind of awkward as a result, and while he holds no bad memories of him, he holds no good memories either. He is, as far as he can tell, all that's left of that cohort; the lack of drive that kept them all content in their jobs did not help them survive.
He did love his calling, though. He was on the way to becoming an exceptional metallurgy and chemical engineer; he hoped to go into business on his own, creating new alloys and reagents for industrial and spacefaring needs. He was not, however, expecting to see the truly atrocious way in which the basic building blocks for his work, ores and chemicals, were acquired, by caste mechs that were treated as little better than the tools they wielded. Perhaps it was the fact that, while not necessarily loved, he had been safe and allowed to pursue his interests; perhaps it was the fact that he'd never had to buck the norm. But to find mechs trapped in a task that did not reward them, did not respect them, and above all, did not let them reach for something greater or even just something else, felt to him as if their society had failed to do what it was supposed to do, and protect the mechs that formed it. He did not buy the whole 'needs-of-the-few-over-needs-of-the-many' thing; at the point where the mechanism fails to protect that many mechs, the mechanism has to go. No matter what it does to the few. He would have preferred to change things in a more peaceful way – surely diplomacy and politics would have worked?
When war started, he couldn't help but see the brutality of the Decepticons as an atrocity. He joined the Autobots in an attempt to stop that kind of thing, and promptly proved less than useful as a soldier. He can shoot, he just doesn't hit his target very often. It didn't take long, however, until someone noticed just how easily he made friends, how quickly he found himself the confidante of mechs that otherwise kept their secrets close, and how damn good he was at getting up close and personal, inside the reach of a gun, where aim was moot.
He was trained and deployed under the command of a mech named Wildcard, a sturdy, unobtrusive mech, the very kind of miner Rook once meant to help free from the caste system. Wildcard himself used his unassuming appearance and seemingly uneducated upbringing to do the very same things Rook was taught to do: cozy up to people, sneak into places he shouldn't be, do his damage very quietly, and leave before ever being noticed. The problem with guns, Wildcard taught him, is that they're noisy, they draw attention, and by the time you drag it out you've already failed the mission. He trained Rook into his strengths, putting little focus on his weaknesses - yes, it made him a very specialized black ops, but better that than no black ops at all.
His new job was… difficult to do, but in the end he figured better one mech dead quietly than the ten or twenty or hundred more that mech might later kill. Rook's doing a job that he knows does not yield obvious results - he doesn't snipe generals on the battlefield, he doesn't blow up fuel depots or scythe his way through the ranks; nonetheless, he can see the results of what he does: the mind that once chased down potential chemical and metallurgical formulas can follow the effect of any one of his quiet kills as it expands through chains of command and efficiency, like a new element spreading through the chemical structure of a compound, eating it away from the inside. He does the job because it needs doing, but he’s a long way from the carefree, excited little engineer he once was, but he takes pride in knowing, if only to himself, that the job brings the end of death one sliver closer each time.
He’s used to being deployed on very long term assignments, and used to going solo and incommunicated for a very long time. His arrival on Earth was something of an accident: he was looking for signs of life so he could hitch a ride somewhere even remotely civilized. Unfortunately, Earth’s signs-of-life were not of the useful kind, and the vague hints of mechs on youtube only give him the barest of hopes.
Personality: Outwardly, Rook is calm, sedate, mildly friendly though he’s more the kind that listens to you venting than the kind that’ll say anything about himself. He’ll even buy you a drink or three to help you feel better about your woes. Inwardly, Rook’s mind never stops calculating, looking for angles, weighing in words and actions. He has no friends, no matter how much others might think he is one: he merely has debts to be paid one way or the other, and perhaps the most powerful commitment someone can get out of him are three words, ‘I owe you’.
On the job, he’s incredibly focused, and somewhat more alive than usual. He despises getting other people involved, and will do what he can to protect them – again, he does the job so no one else has to get hurt doing it, so having anyone else involved kinda makes things moot.
Likes: In the rare occasion when he gets the time, he does like tinkering with metallurgic and chemical formulas, even if it’s just on writing. He also likes music, with a distinct preference for trance, metal and classical. Not that anyone would ever see him doing so, but he also likes to dance. If he can do nothing else, he’ll race, either as a mech, or as car (he doesn't race for pinks, though, that’s just asking for trouble).
Dislikes: Rook rarely if ever lets show any emotion as strong as hate, but he does have a few things he loathes. He hates noisy, overly chipper, overly idealistic mechs – he has to resist the urge to mentally shake some reality into them, sometimes. He hates being cooped up with idle time – he will find something to do with it, or he’ll start going slightly weird, perching-on-piping-and-stalking-his-own-team-for-fun-weird. Likely his worst issue is that he hates medbays – not medics, and not their care, he hates the room itself; it’s a little too reminiscent of interrogation rooms for him to not want to get-the-frag-out of one as fast as he can, injuries or not, and if push comes to shove he can and will enforce his paranoid stupidity with sharp pointy things. For all intents and purposes if he’s medic’d somewhere other than a medbay he’s a perfectly agreeable and polite patient.
Strengths/Weapons: Rook is pretty damn deadly at point-blank range. In bare-handed combat he is very good at going for joint strikes, exposed lines, soft spots and fluid lines, and his light build and leg structure mean he’s fast and agile enough to close the distance and make such strikes count. He is truly lethal, however, when you put a short blade in his hand.
He also tends to pick up sharp, pointy things from his opponents, up to and including the armor spikes and ridges so common to Decepticon anatomy; he’ll snap those off and put them somewhere they ought not to go, a lot. After a while of doing that kind of thing, he tends to have said sharp, pointy things hiding all over his frame, and since they’re mech bits half the time, they’re not readily detectable to sensors. At the moment, however, he’s running on empty.
As a black ops, Rook's job isn't to gather information - he's no hacker, or data wrangler, unless you're looking for data he saw, he touched, he was there for, not files and documents on a terminal. He certainly doesn't go looking for fights if he can at all avoid them. What he does is get in, undetected, and once inside he either does damage to what's there (cutting lines, backing up engines, damaging fluid systems - if his background as a chemist or a metallurgist can ID, he will do things to it. Bad things.) or gets close to mechs that should have been kept away from Autobots with sharp things and clear directives. He is an assassin first and foremost, a saboteur in a pinch, and nothing else - limited, but useful.
Weaknesses: Rook may not be built like the tissue-paper car he mimics, but his armor is pretty damn slender. Speed and agility are his main protection; one good solid hit, or getting caught in a good area effect, is likely to make his day a whole lot less pleasant. He’s also a mediocre shot by the most generous of description. This isn't a bad thing if he’s just, say, laying cover fire (since that’s just a point-and-shoot-lots for a general area), but hitting a target, particularly a moving target, is not something you should expect from him. I mean, he does have a blaster! But he’s more likely to hand it over to someone in need of a weapon (so generous of him) than to use it himself.
Emotionally, the mech is so unavailable it’s a non-issue. He makes no friends, because of the slim chance they may go rogue and he may have to kill them. He doesn't do favors, he takes debts. More than anything, he’s fine with this, and he means to stay that way, at least until (and if) the war ends.
Special skills (that are not weapon related): He is a metallurgist, and an inorganic chemist: he likes to tinker, come up with new alloy and reagent ideas. In the old days, he would have synthesized those formulas and, if successful, he would have tried to sell them to industrial and shipyard concerns, or to other manufacturing interests.
Extra Info: In the discharge of his duties, Rook has been caught twice. He was held for a week the first time, and for five days the latter. Both times he killed a guard under dubious circumstances and escaped before interrogation could break much of importance out of him; however, that does mean the Decepticons may or may not have his wetworks status on file.
Having landed in WA state, Rook picked up the soft speaking burr of the region. His voice is very quiet, a pleasant tenor.
Sample RP (only for first accepted characters):
Rook found himself rather liking the planet as he drove through the one tiny sliver of it. The deep woods where he’d landed had given him cover generously; they were vast, the trees tremendously large, and water so ever-present that fog cover had been pretty much a given. The road was a dream, and at the wee hour of the morning he had it all to himself, the native authorities giving themselves away loudly on the local radio channels so far in advance they could be easily avoided. So far, it sure as slag beat being stuck in a service shaft barely wider than his shoulders for who knew how long. And when the landscape shifted to vast, endless emptiness, cold desert and giant jutting rocks, the sight of the stars and all that empty space felt almost as good as a good shower and a soft bed.
It didn't make him forget, of course, that he was following a whisper and a prayer rather than solid Autobot tracks. He would have preferred a more reliable source of news that screeching natives posting blurry videos, but then again, he’d gone out on even less solid intel every now and again. Truly, the only thing he minded of the planet so far was the natives. They were so… abundant, it made things awkward every now and again. They did make some killer music, though. He was rolling through Nevada blaring Eisbrecher and Beethoven by turns, with an occasional bit of trance thrown in every now and again. The music made it easy to stay focused, and his new alt-mode had cut a ten-hour trip into something almost like half that. However, it was getting to the point where he was hungry, he was tired, and he was finding it very difficult to ignore either anymore.
“Where are you, guys…” Risky as it was, his sensors were open wide. All he needed was one blip. One signal. “Don’t tell me I’m stranded on this jigsaw puzzle of a place alone.”