Pipette

[Pipette]

PLAYER: River

CHARACTER INFO
Name: Pipette (Pip)
Age: Thirtyish
Gender: Femme
Species: Cybertronian
Faction: Decepticon

Original Occupation: Chemical Engineer

Occupation/Specialization: Chemical Engineer

Appearance: Standing a head shorter than Knock Out at just under six meters, this lanky femme displays very boring semi-gloss greys, silvers, and a smidgen of gold. Most notable is that her plates appear to form a slim dress like structure over her torso and hips. The armor is highly flexible and the flow of plates are designed to repel chemicals and acids rather let them pool on her frame with all the seams and overlaps flowing downward. It possesses a high collar with retractable hood, and ends just above the knee servos. Her shoulders sport sections of her altmode’s front wheels and on her back rests her fake spare wheel. Pip’s fingers are fine and dexterous, tapering to points.

Pip’s lower legs incorporate her alt’s rear wheels, the treads are apparent running the center of the shin with the rims forming her calves. Her feet are small and incorporate rubber soles.

Pipette’s face is normally covered by a gas-mask like faceplate with paired vent filters and goggled optic shields with red lenses. Underneath is a plain and simple silver-white face with magenta optics.

Altmode: Modified 1970 Dodge Challenger.

Pertinent History: Pipette is amongst those cold constructed during the Great War. Put together from largely off-the-shelf components, she was only ever meant to be in a support role for the Decepticon revolution. Here she willingly worked her spark off creating explosive compounds and other useful chemicals to support the efforts of her fellow patriots. When the war spread offworld, Pipette volunteered to go in a science officer role. She was loyal to the Decepticons but not Cybertron itself and she was curious about the sorts of challenges among the stars.

The particular mission that Pipette was a part of ran very quickly into resounding failure. They landed on a planet rich in heavy metals but hadn't noticed the hidden resident sentient race were underground. Skirmishes quickly turned into full war. Within a century, the silicon based natives had turned the atmosphere into deadly sulphuric acid rain. The Decepticon forces were crushed. Pipette and many others adapted themselves to the acidic conditions but were ultimately forced to flee the planet. So much was lost including any hope of navigation, they were astray and scattered.

Over the next two million years, Pipette looked for adventure in her own ways. She in her travels sold her chemistry skills to anyone who would pay, mostly in exchange for energon. But with each alien race she encountered, so did her distaste increase. Everyone communicated in different ways, and had different desires. Her inability to truly understand anyone else let alone connect drove a solid wedge between her and other sentients.

Pipette felt increasingly homesick for the company of her own species. She redoubled her efforts searching the galaxy for other Cybertronians. Without a map of once Cybertronian occupied space to guide her, Pipette instead followed the rumours until she came across a message sent from a small rocky world circling a small yellow star. Following the tried and true cliche of Cybertronians arriving on Earth, her spaceship crashed, she survived and escaped, and the spaceship was subsequently rendered into molten drops of metal with a cataclysmic explosion. She reluctantly sent out a Dececpticon encoded distress signal and was subsequently rescued from nearby her crash site. Following this she was thoroughly interviewed and debriefed, and inducted into the current Decepticon ranks.

Personality: On the surface, Pipette is a workaholic who would rather engage her brain and keep her hands busy. Chemistry is her pride, passion and profession. When not in a lab, she likes to think about chemistry and maybe even talk about it. Pipette also likes most other sciences and is always interested in the frontiers of knowledge. She has an unequivocal preference for the fixed laws of the natural universe that govern chemistry and other physics over the made up laws that govern the actions of people.

Pipette is quite frankly amoral and without much conscience or empathy. She insteads adheres to her own simple desires and basic pragmatism. Anyone she calls friend would have proved their worth to her, and almost always as an equal in intellect. She is capable of forming deep and lasting bonds with others but she has to choose to put in the effort, usually for pragmatic or selfish reasons before her spark will get involved. She does enjoy affectionate attention but does not seek it out. That being said, she is still somewhat inconsiderate even around the people she chooses to care about.

Pip is incredibly direct, her social skills consist of the most direct transfer of information necessary for communication. She is honest and fair to a fault, but so tactless as to be considered rude. This can be turned around by someone simply telling her how they would desire her to talk or act in their presence.

For reasons undiagnosed, Pipette to some extent enjoys the experience of pain. Though she rarely indulges, what she does leaves no visible marks and never any damage. The few times that pip chooses to relax, she enjoys long slow cruising in her alt. She will often go for a drive with the purpose of clearing her processor if she is facing a particularly challenging chemistry problem.

Likes: Chemistry, chemistry labs, science in general, order, instrumental music, being busy.

Dislikes: Non-cybertronians, disarray, rust, corrosion, contaminants, obtuse people, surprises, confrontation.

Strengths:

Silicon Circuits: Pipette has a brilliant intellect when it comes to chemistry, and she can be fiendishly creative in designing new chemicals to suit a purpose. Maths comes to her easily due to the expensive use in balancing chemical equations and she has some small familiarity in other scientific fields.

Through sheer experience, Pip has a great deal of familiarity and knowledge surrounding large sectors of the galaxy, including aliens, their cultures and technology and general political borders.

Due to her amoral calculating nature, Pipette can also be quite decisive, especially in moral decisions. She often calculates plans of action ahead of time and is rarely caught by surprise in emergencies. Though she lacks much skill in combat, she is level headed and no coward.

Platinum Plating: Pip’s armor is especially chemical and rust resistant. It has been chemically changed to provide such protection, the side effect however is that the composition of her armor is structurally weaker than regular cybertronian metals. This applies to her hood and her dress like plating, not internals or joints or other key structures. Physically it is very light armor.

Her vents and mask provide a high degree of resistance and filtration to inhaled chemicals. Her feet have rubber soles as well just in case of spilled chemicals.

Weapons:

Hydrogen Boom: Pipette was constructed with and still possesses a 16 round rotary drum gun. Each of the rounds the gun can fire is a fragile cartridge containing a particular chemical mixture. The weapon uses magnetic acceleration and spin stabilisation to achieve good distance and accuracy - about one square meter over a 500 meters range. It has an optical sight which connects to Pip’s own sight to help her achieve the accuracy that the weapon is capable of. The gun normally forms a small section on Pip’s back, and uses her fake spare wheel as the drum magazine.

Pipette currently has four rounds of each of the following loaded in her gun and four empty spaces. She has the knowledge and skill to easily manufacture more rounds but does require the material resources and tools.

Explosive: Octanitrocubane; This chemical explodes only when the detonator is triggered by impact. Against a large flat surface like a wall or large opponent, much of the force dissipates outwards and can propel small targets or knock back larger ones. It is capable of fracturing - but not destroying - medium armor in this manner. Its full power is only achievable when released in a small enclosed space. A large room or open space is too big.

Flash Bang: Simple stun grenade, effective on most opponents irrelevant of their physical size and strength. Against a typical vehicon soldier, blindness lasts about four seconds and full disorientation lasts up to ten seconds.

Carbon cable: Expanding cloud of carbon nano-filament cables. Designed to entangle a single target. The cables are incredibly strong for their size but also incredibly fine. A strong enough mech will be able to tear through them if they can get a grip. The carbon cables are vulnerable to energy based weapons however. They will severely lacerate soft targets like a human.

Weaknesses:

Tin Can, Tin Can't: Pipette is small, light, weak, and is not particularly agile either. Her best defense in a fight is not to get into one. She has little armor, no skill to throw a punch and no real strength to even hurt someone her own size physically.

Sodium Socialite: In a social situation, Pipette's particular mental weakness comes to the fore. She is without guile and tact, and somewhat naive. It’s not difficult for someone with cunning to beat her with a silver tongue alone. Unless Pipette is well prepared with the agreed value of services or chemicals, she often gets the raw end of a deal without her ever realising it. She subsists on sheer pragmatism and her paranoia to look for traps in contracts. She is also highly reluctant to call for help and is not a great team player unless a plan is agreed upon beforehand.

Lead Sights: It can take up to six seconds for Pipette to shoot someone with her gun if she decides to, two seconds to draw and shoulder, two seconds to decide and select a round to use, and two more seconds to aim and fire. That six second window is huge for an enemy to abuse. Also Pipette has a very poor ability to track moving targets unless they are running directly to or away from her in a straight line.

Mercurial Pain: For Pipette, being masochistic means she is less adverse to pain than others. While this does have a beneficial impact on her pain threshold, more often this can lead her to take certain risks unusually recklessly for someone of her intelligence, or not tend to injuries as quickly as she should. Debilitating pain or injury is still debilitating.

Special Skills:

Pipette knows more about chemistry and material science engineering than her biographer ever will.