Soundwave
Apr 6, 2014 23:16:16 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Apr 6, 2014 23:16:16 GMT -5
-Player Info-
Name/Alias: Rachel, aka Moon
IM/Email: tanaigre@hotmail.com
Where did you find us?: LJ Advertising community, I think.
-Character Info-
Name: Soundwave
Age (or human equivalent): If he were human, late-thirties, early forties.
Gender (or human equivalent): Male.
Species: Cybertronian
Faction: Decepticon
Original Occupation: Communications, data handling and archiving. (Yes, he was someone’s secretary, if you wanna be dull about it.)
Occupation/Specialization: Decepticon Head of Communications. (aka, Chief Spy.)
Appearance/Altmode: Soundwave’s shorter than Megatron and a bare fraction of the Decepticon leader’s mass. Even among Cybertronians, his looks tend to make half the company wary; his silence makes the rest of them nervous. His arms are exceptionally long and flat, looking more like blades than proper limbs, the shoulder attachment almost completely hidden under the shadow of his forearm; his fingers are needle-like and terrifyingly dexterous. His legs are perhaps the most solid-seeming part of him, digitigrade and ending in somewhat pointed pedes with back-facing ‘dewclaws’. His torso is an elegant, if complex, delta of angles that makes it veeery easy to hide extra kibble in it – like, say, Laserbeak, his Minicon. The one thing he seems to lack overall is armor, making him look very exposed until you try to make it past the barricade of those arms.
His face, or lack thereof, is an unsettling and rather advantageous characteristic that makes him recognizable to almost any member of the Decepticon army. There is only the smooth wedge of a blank screen, and no one is entirely sure whether that’s his face or a battle-mask that he’s just never without. That unfathomable wedge can be made to project anything: every bit of treachery, every idle and ill-conceived moment of failure to the Decepticon cause. There are markings around it that mimic facial features, but they’re just that, markings; between those and his sharp, narrow crests, he can look vaguely insect-like to human perceptions.
Perhaps most noteworthy is what you don’t see: his hacking tentacles. Soundwave possesses two very long tentacles tipped with deft claws that allow him hacking, fine manipulation, and even combat. They are armed with basic sensors, stun defensive capabilities (electric) and basic plasma weaponry. His alt-mode is that of an MQ-9 Reaper, very dark gray with violet highlights. While the Reaper format is capable of carrying weaponry (mostly Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs) Soundwave himself has no such ordnance.
History: (Basic data added as per the TF: P Wiki) Originally sparked directly into adulthood to be someone’s secretary, Soundwave found himself serving among the Tower-dwelling elite of Cybertron; by necessity, he also found himself in dire need of eavesdropping on those he served – to be able to anticipate their whims he had to know their preferences, their likes and dislikes.
He found out he rather liked knowing such things. Simple observation evolved into outright snooping. It wasn’t long until he found himself looking to break into data storage, the better to know what his employers thought of him… or what they thought of one another. He got caught, of course; he got caught a few times, mostly for confiding on those he shouldn’t; his punishments were usually elegant, purely psychological and exquisitely cruel. What to do, then, when the things you know can betray you if someone you are bound to obey whoever commands you to speak them? You take refuge in the last haven left to the underclass – cling to the old philosophies and take an oath that must be respected, by you as well as by them.
Of course an oath of silence made their pet butler/spy slightly less entertaining. The thing is… he was[/s] useful. He was a disposable proxy whose ability to hack and snoop was escalating exponentially with barely a need to be nudged in the right direction, or taught the occasional trick – a perfect pawn to use in the endless shadow squabbles between the nobility he served. If he were caught, he could be thrown under the proverbial bus without further repercussion than having to online and train another butler.
It was something of a trial by fire, every day of service. And Soundwave loved it. He learned not just to get in, but to cover his tracks, to misdirect as well as to steal, to copy and edit instead of removing. Those who had encouraged his snooping, those who had given him leave to practice his hacking, gradually found out what happens when you teach your pet to hack, data-mine and hoard information he shouldn’t have: he uses it. Think of him as the butler that knows a little bit of everything, and uses it in that subtle, evil, inescapable fashion. He’d been too smart for the job from the beginning, his mind seeking something to occupy it beyond endlessly bowing and offering chilled drinks, and it had found it in the abstract war between security systems and his own intrusions, in the acquisition of dirty secrets and their potential applications.
Eventually, someone decided they had more to lose by remaining under the butler’s thumb. The betrayal was swift, and relied on one of Soundwave’s downfalls: he didn’t believe any of his employers capable of hiding information from him. Before he knew it, found it out or otherwise managed to change it, the paperwork to reassign him to the lower-most gladiatorial pits had gone through.
Joke’s on them all, he did just as well there as he did in the quiet, elegant offices of the higher class.
In fact, he’s the only one who came anywhere near close to defeating the reigning champion. He didn’t, but he did get close enough to earn that self-same’s champion’s respect, which led to the two of them becoming better acquainted with one another. He has remained by Megatron’s side ever since, through the turbulent disputes against the caste system that eventually became all-out war. He has never faltered, never quit, and never failed to uphold Megatron’s leadership, by force if necessary. That has never changed, and it never will.
Personality: While not quite up to par with Shockwave’s cold, emotionless logic as a guiding principle, Soundwave keeps his emotions hidden behind his facial screen. As he chooses not to speak, tone and context give no clues as to what, if anything, he may be feeling or thinking. His body language will occasionally betray him, but not often.
And he rather likes it that way. Soundwave might not be emotionless, but he is incredibly calculating. Nothing is ever done without weighing cause-and-effect to its most minute possibility. No risk is taken unless careful planning against every eventuality has turned it into not a risk at all. There is hardly any surprising or angering him, because he’s already figured out the most stupid or irksome idiocy someone can throw at him; there is no cheering him up when his mind is already trying to cope with the next potential problem. There is no convincing him of the good nature of those around him, when he knows their darkest, their smallest secrets. In between his keenly calculating nature and his penchant for eavesdropping on everyone, there’s hardly any chance to startle emotions out of him; it’s no wonder everyone thinks he’s emotionless.
It is that very same calculating nature that makes him follow Megatron with absolute devotion, to be swayed by nothing and no one. He was there at the beginning; he knows the truth behind Megatron’s every action, the goal to which their leader drives; he believes in that goal with utmost devotion and he knows no one will get them there but the one that started it all.
There is only one blind spot to Soundwave’s seeming lack of feelings, and that’s his Minicon, Laserbeak. For his safety, he will make minor sacrifices to a mission as long as the mission itself can be considered complete, and larger sacrifices to his personal goals without a second thought.
Likes: Order and obedience. Satellites. Information streams. Space and groundbridges
Dislikes: Stupidity. Resource waste. Humans, damned underfoot things that they are.
Strengths/Weapons:
Now you see me…: Off the battlefield, as befits the Deception Head of Intelligence, Soundwave’s hacking skills (both remote and physical) are without par. There’s almost no system he can’t get into, no firewall that can keep him out for long, no tidbit of information, however seemingly inane, that he can’t get his hands on, and likely put together with a hundred other equally inane tidbits to reveal the greater whole. He covets and hoards information like a miser hoards gold. He will share it when it is most advantageous, or damaging.
As a particular of his having interacted with the ‘Nemesis’ system so long and so deeply, Soundwave can use the ship’s systems to open groundbridges remotely and almost on the instant. The farther he opens them the longer it takes him, but when you’re taking about seconds the difference is really moot. However, no matter what it looks like he’s not actually doing it himself – he’s using the ‘Nemesis’ for it, and without the warship he cannot pull his famous “moving” trick.
Now you wish you didn’t: As with Megatron, Soundwave is an exceptional unarmed combatant. Unlike him, he relies on speed, agility, the fact he actually brings six limbs to the fray, and his tremendous skill in calculating moves and countermoves. It’s very hard to surprise him in combat, particularly if he’s had a chance to watch the mech he’s fighting beforehand; he will rarely launch the first blow, preferring to rely on counter-strike techniques.
Adding Insult to Injury: Soundwave is hardly ever alone – he has Laserbeak. Usually disappearing within the edges and angles of his chest, the Minicon can be deployed as a surveillance drone, or to provide a fraction of cover fire. In a pinch, he is even capable of backing up his master’s hard drives and restoring him (provided Soundwave is physically unharmed). Think of him as a flying, laser-equipped, high-capacity USB drive. With a camera.
Weaknesses:
Halp, I’m Naked!: Soundwave is so unarmored that it’s not even funny. You can see most of the mech’s inner component lights. His arms, his agility and his tentacles provide the only protection he really gets, but if someone lands a blow anywhere else, it’ll count for keeps. This isn’t just a combat weakness – the mech is just as badly insulated when it comes to extremes of cold temperature or power surges.
Blinded by the Light: Soundwave has exceptionally keen sensors and senses, both as pertains to the blank screen that serves as his face and the clawed tips of his tentacles. This is, however, a dangerous boon: those same sensors can be momentarily overloaded by an excess of input – overbright flares, excessively loud noises, sudden data bursts. He keeps the sensors on the tentacles dialed down, but he cannot do the same for his main ones, and if he’s caught off-guard, he will probably either go fully on the defensive or lose track of his attack and attempt to retreat until he can recover.
Leap of Faith: Soundwave knows the extent of his abilities, and he also knows the extent of the abilities of most everyone around him… or so he’d like to believe. The master spy tends to be a little too sure of himself, and he has failed to look before he leapt in a number of occasions, leaving him scrambling to compensate. This is particularly obvious when it comes to humans, whom he still tends to disregard and whom he has trouble quantifying.
Special skills (that are not weapon related): Soundwave is what, in human terms, one would call a master of Aristotelian thinking, in particular of causality. He’s capable of taking disseminated facts with seemingly no connection to one another, and seeing any hidden, underlying plans that might either be binding them together, or can be cobbled together.
He also very good at disappearing from plain sight. Perhaps learned from his butler days, the mech can practically disappear into the background of an empty well lit room, both his physical presence and his field as easy to miss as those of a drone.
Extra Info:
Always Superior: The case can be made that Soundwave looks vaguely drone-like… and he does, because he almost is. His creation was barely different from that of a Vehicon; he was, of course, updated to serve the very specific purpose for which he was created. He became something far, far beyond what he was meant to be, however. He does not forget that he was created a servant, and forbidden to be anything else despite being so much better than most above him. And he does not forgive.
Edumacation: Soundwave was butler and secretary (and nursemaid, and Alfred, and Pepper Potts) to some of Cybertron’s wealthiest nobility; he was also thrown to the very bottom of the charnel house and left to die there, he just happened not to die. His education and knowledge are exceptionally vast where it concerns the planet’s pre-War culture, society, arts, and gossip: he knows what operas and artists were ‘in’ before it all went to slag, he knows which fork to use for the seafood-flavored energon, and he most certainly knows who was pawning off the family antiques to pay for gambling debts and using instead clever (and cheap) replicas. But he also knows which one was the recycler where you could stuff a body so it’d never be found, how to tell when a cheap illegal bar has cheaper (but good) booze, and who’s getting shanked in the washracks for breaking one of so very many, many unspoken rules of the low castes. As ever, his ability to listen served him well, even if it’s only for knowledge he’s not likely to use ever again.
Name/Alias: Rachel, aka Moon
IM/Email: tanaigre@hotmail.com
Where did you find us?: LJ Advertising community, I think.
-Character Info-
Name: Soundwave
Age (or human equivalent): If he were human, late-thirties, early forties.
Gender (or human equivalent): Male.
Species: Cybertronian
Faction: Decepticon
Original Occupation: Communications, data handling and archiving. (Yes, he was someone’s secretary, if you wanna be dull about it.)
Occupation/Specialization: Decepticon Head of Communications. (aka, Chief Spy.)
Appearance/Altmode: Soundwave’s shorter than Megatron and a bare fraction of the Decepticon leader’s mass. Even among Cybertronians, his looks tend to make half the company wary; his silence makes the rest of them nervous. His arms are exceptionally long and flat, looking more like blades than proper limbs, the shoulder attachment almost completely hidden under the shadow of his forearm; his fingers are needle-like and terrifyingly dexterous. His legs are perhaps the most solid-seeming part of him, digitigrade and ending in somewhat pointed pedes with back-facing ‘dewclaws’. His torso is an elegant, if complex, delta of angles that makes it veeery easy to hide extra kibble in it – like, say, Laserbeak, his Minicon. The one thing he seems to lack overall is armor, making him look very exposed until you try to make it past the barricade of those arms.
His face, or lack thereof, is an unsettling and rather advantageous characteristic that makes him recognizable to almost any member of the Decepticon army. There is only the smooth wedge of a blank screen, and no one is entirely sure whether that’s his face or a battle-mask that he’s just never without. That unfathomable wedge can be made to project anything: every bit of treachery, every idle and ill-conceived moment of failure to the Decepticon cause. There are markings around it that mimic facial features, but they’re just that, markings; between those and his sharp, narrow crests, he can look vaguely insect-like to human perceptions.
Perhaps most noteworthy is what you don’t see: his hacking tentacles. Soundwave possesses two very long tentacles tipped with deft claws that allow him hacking, fine manipulation, and even combat. They are armed with basic sensors, stun defensive capabilities (electric) and basic plasma weaponry. His alt-mode is that of an MQ-9 Reaper, very dark gray with violet highlights. While the Reaper format is capable of carrying weaponry (mostly Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs) Soundwave himself has no such ordnance.
History: (Basic data added as per the TF: P Wiki) Originally sparked directly into adulthood to be someone’s secretary, Soundwave found himself serving among the Tower-dwelling elite of Cybertron; by necessity, he also found himself in dire need of eavesdropping on those he served – to be able to anticipate their whims he had to know their preferences, their likes and dislikes.
He found out he rather liked knowing such things. Simple observation evolved into outright snooping. It wasn’t long until he found himself looking to break into data storage, the better to know what his employers thought of him… or what they thought of one another. He got caught, of course; he got caught a few times, mostly for confiding on those he shouldn’t; his punishments were usually elegant, purely psychological and exquisitely cruel. What to do, then, when the things you know can betray you if someone you are bound to obey whoever commands you to speak them? You take refuge in the last haven left to the underclass – cling to the old philosophies and take an oath that must be respected, by you as well as by them.
Of course an oath of silence made their pet butler/spy slightly less entertaining. The thing is… he was[/s] useful. He was a disposable proxy whose ability to hack and snoop was escalating exponentially with barely a need to be nudged in the right direction, or taught the occasional trick – a perfect pawn to use in the endless shadow squabbles between the nobility he served. If he were caught, he could be thrown under the proverbial bus without further repercussion than having to online and train another butler.
It was something of a trial by fire, every day of service. And Soundwave loved it. He learned not just to get in, but to cover his tracks, to misdirect as well as to steal, to copy and edit instead of removing. Those who had encouraged his snooping, those who had given him leave to practice his hacking, gradually found out what happens when you teach your pet to hack, data-mine and hoard information he shouldn’t have: he uses it. Think of him as the butler that knows a little bit of everything, and uses it in that subtle, evil, inescapable fashion. He’d been too smart for the job from the beginning, his mind seeking something to occupy it beyond endlessly bowing and offering chilled drinks, and it had found it in the abstract war between security systems and his own intrusions, in the acquisition of dirty secrets and their potential applications.
Eventually, someone decided they had more to lose by remaining under the butler’s thumb. The betrayal was swift, and relied on one of Soundwave’s downfalls: he didn’t believe any of his employers capable of hiding information from him. Before he knew it, found it out or otherwise managed to change it, the paperwork to reassign him to the lower-most gladiatorial pits had gone through.
Joke’s on them all, he did just as well there as he did in the quiet, elegant offices of the higher class.
In fact, he’s the only one who came anywhere near close to defeating the reigning champion. He didn’t, but he did get close enough to earn that self-same’s champion’s respect, which led to the two of them becoming better acquainted with one another. He has remained by Megatron’s side ever since, through the turbulent disputes against the caste system that eventually became all-out war. He has never faltered, never quit, and never failed to uphold Megatron’s leadership, by force if necessary. That has never changed, and it never will.
Personality: While not quite up to par with Shockwave’s cold, emotionless logic as a guiding principle, Soundwave keeps his emotions hidden behind his facial screen. As he chooses not to speak, tone and context give no clues as to what, if anything, he may be feeling or thinking. His body language will occasionally betray him, but not often.
And he rather likes it that way. Soundwave might not be emotionless, but he is incredibly calculating. Nothing is ever done without weighing cause-and-effect to its most minute possibility. No risk is taken unless careful planning against every eventuality has turned it into not a risk at all. There is hardly any surprising or angering him, because he’s already figured out the most stupid or irksome idiocy someone can throw at him; there is no cheering him up when his mind is already trying to cope with the next potential problem. There is no convincing him of the good nature of those around him, when he knows their darkest, their smallest secrets. In between his keenly calculating nature and his penchant for eavesdropping on everyone, there’s hardly any chance to startle emotions out of him; it’s no wonder everyone thinks he’s emotionless.
It is that very same calculating nature that makes him follow Megatron with absolute devotion, to be swayed by nothing and no one. He was there at the beginning; he knows the truth behind Megatron’s every action, the goal to which their leader drives; he believes in that goal with utmost devotion and he knows no one will get them there but the one that started it all.
There is only one blind spot to Soundwave’s seeming lack of feelings, and that’s his Minicon, Laserbeak. For his safety, he will make minor sacrifices to a mission as long as the mission itself can be considered complete, and larger sacrifices to his personal goals without a second thought.
Likes: Order and obedience. Satellites. Information streams. Space and groundbridges
Dislikes: Stupidity. Resource waste. Humans, damned underfoot things that they are.
Strengths/Weapons:
Now you see me…: Off the battlefield, as befits the Deception Head of Intelligence, Soundwave’s hacking skills (both remote and physical) are without par. There’s almost no system he can’t get into, no firewall that can keep him out for long, no tidbit of information, however seemingly inane, that he can’t get his hands on, and likely put together with a hundred other equally inane tidbits to reveal the greater whole. He covets and hoards information like a miser hoards gold. He will share it when it is most advantageous, or damaging.
As a particular of his having interacted with the ‘Nemesis’ system so long and so deeply, Soundwave can use the ship’s systems to open groundbridges remotely and almost on the instant. The farther he opens them the longer it takes him, but when you’re taking about seconds the difference is really moot. However, no matter what it looks like he’s not actually doing it himself – he’s using the ‘Nemesis’ for it, and without the warship he cannot pull his famous “moving” trick.
Now you wish you didn’t: As with Megatron, Soundwave is an exceptional unarmed combatant. Unlike him, he relies on speed, agility, the fact he actually brings six limbs to the fray, and his tremendous skill in calculating moves and countermoves. It’s very hard to surprise him in combat, particularly if he’s had a chance to watch the mech he’s fighting beforehand; he will rarely launch the first blow, preferring to rely on counter-strike techniques.
Adding Insult to Injury: Soundwave is hardly ever alone – he has Laserbeak. Usually disappearing within the edges and angles of his chest, the Minicon can be deployed as a surveillance drone, or to provide a fraction of cover fire. In a pinch, he is even capable of backing up his master’s hard drives and restoring him (provided Soundwave is physically unharmed). Think of him as a flying, laser-equipped, high-capacity USB drive. With a camera.
Weaknesses:
Halp, I’m Naked!: Soundwave is so unarmored that it’s not even funny. You can see most of the mech’s inner component lights. His arms, his agility and his tentacles provide the only protection he really gets, but if someone lands a blow anywhere else, it’ll count for keeps. This isn’t just a combat weakness – the mech is just as badly insulated when it comes to extremes of cold temperature or power surges.
Blinded by the Light: Soundwave has exceptionally keen sensors and senses, both as pertains to the blank screen that serves as his face and the clawed tips of his tentacles. This is, however, a dangerous boon: those same sensors can be momentarily overloaded by an excess of input – overbright flares, excessively loud noises, sudden data bursts. He keeps the sensors on the tentacles dialed down, but he cannot do the same for his main ones, and if he’s caught off-guard, he will probably either go fully on the defensive or lose track of his attack and attempt to retreat until he can recover.
Leap of Faith: Soundwave knows the extent of his abilities, and he also knows the extent of the abilities of most everyone around him… or so he’d like to believe. The master spy tends to be a little too sure of himself, and he has failed to look before he leapt in a number of occasions, leaving him scrambling to compensate. This is particularly obvious when it comes to humans, whom he still tends to disregard and whom he has trouble quantifying.
Special skills (that are not weapon related): Soundwave is what, in human terms, one would call a master of Aristotelian thinking, in particular of causality. He’s capable of taking disseminated facts with seemingly no connection to one another, and seeing any hidden, underlying plans that might either be binding them together, or can be cobbled together.
He also very good at disappearing from plain sight. Perhaps learned from his butler days, the mech can practically disappear into the background of an empty well lit room, both his physical presence and his field as easy to miss as those of a drone.
Extra Info:
Always Superior: The case can be made that Soundwave looks vaguely drone-like… and he does, because he almost is. His creation was barely different from that of a Vehicon; he was, of course, updated to serve the very specific purpose for which he was created. He became something far, far beyond what he was meant to be, however. He does not forget that he was created a servant, and forbidden to be anything else despite being so much better than most above him. And he does not forgive.
Edumacation: Soundwave was butler and secretary (and nursemaid, and Alfred, and Pepper Potts) to some of Cybertron’s wealthiest nobility; he was also thrown to the very bottom of the charnel house and left to die there, he just happened not to die. His education and knowledge are exceptionally vast where it concerns the planet’s pre-War culture, society, arts, and gossip: he knows what operas and artists were ‘in’ before it all went to slag, he knows which fork to use for the seafood-flavored energon, and he most certainly knows who was pawning off the family antiques to pay for gambling debts and using instead clever (and cheap) replicas. But he also knows which one was the recycler where you could stuff a body so it’d never be found, how to tell when a cheap illegal bar has cheaper (but good) booze, and who’s getting shanked in the washracks for breaking one of so very many, many unspoken rules of the low castes. As ever, his ability to listen served him well, even if it’s only for knowledge he’s not likely to use ever again.