Post by Deleted on Dec 20, 2012 2:54:03 GMT -5
-Player Info-
Name/Alias: Pen
IM/Email: penandpencil42@gmail.com
-Character Info-
Name: Atracchus (QXW-926)
Age: Several millennia.
Gender: Male
Species: Cybertronian
Faction: Vehicon; Decepticon
Original Occupation: Artisan (lower/drone class)
Occupation/Specialization: Energon miner and basic administration duties.
Appearance/Altmode: Vehicon car-based model. Main chassis colour scheme in both robot and alternate mode is a deep purple with black and silver trim. Has a facemask covering the lower half of his face.
History:
There are perhaps more stories about Atracchus’ history than even he has had years to live them all. Atracchus is one of the oldest surviving Vehicons in the Earth’s Decepticon armada, and claims to remember snatches of a sentient life as an artisan before the combustion of the caste system and descent into Cybertron’s hellish, most self-destructive war, but can remember very little else besides. It’s very likely this is the result of his memory data being slowly overwritten to accommodate the need for more space in a factory model with a supposedly limited and expendable run. But Atracchus thinks differently, fights differently, and has memorised the colour wheels from more than five different xenomorphic races. And if you look up QXW-926 in the identification database...well, you can't. There is no such file that exists. Which is more than enough to raise a lot of questions and rumours amongst his fellow Vehicons.
According to them, Atracchus was once a renegade curator, a lowly drone energon miner, a mighty Decepticon warrior, and an artisan in the employ of the High Council on Cybertron. He salvaged and squirrelled away artifacts of priceless cultural significance in Kaon and spoke openly against the caste system in the isolated energon outpost of Kalis. He accomplished feats of extraordinary heroism on the battlefield against the Autobots whilst speaking his quietly speaking his piece on freedom as the right for all as he crafted works of great beauty. And then he was wounded, assaulted, made a political scapegoat, spitefully stripped of his rank by a hated officer whose incompetence he dared to address. And then, as all good stories end, he had his voice-box ripped out and was stuffed unceremoniously into the shell of a drone - a meteoric and humiliating fall from grace.
For the most part, Atracchus greets these tales with a great deal of bemusement. And after vorns of insisting that these alternate lives were highly unlikely to have ever been his, that the lapses in memory are more than likely just an outcome of his limited hardware, and is he really that strange enough to warrant some inexplicably complex backstory involving a three-headed judge and a pit full of Sharkitons? – he’s given up, and will now neither confirm nor deny anything you present to him. The rumor mill rejoiced, and the stories continue. Atracchus thinks of it as something like an office game.
From what Atracchus can remember of his formative years before the war, as far as he knows he was always an artist born and bred. He can recall that he chose the designation ‘Atracchus’ after a philosopher of the same name, but what his namesake argued for and against he cannot remember; searches conducted since for what appears to be a minor figure in history have proved fruitless. He cannot recall the time before his self-awakening, and he can recall little of the art he created before he joined the Decepticon cause. He was swept up in the belief for the equal freedom of all bots, and the recognition of Vehicons as fully-sparked Cybertronians; ideals he still holds close to his spark chamber to this very cycle. His work turned into a mouthpiece for propaganda – very soon, he was whisked from his mine and placed with a team of equally creative Cybertronians, given the full-time directive of extolling the values of the Decepticon cause to the undecided and conveying their idealistic strength and legitimacy to those who were opposed. And, the greatest honour of all, was that they were entrusted to craft works that encapsulated the very glory of the Decepticon cause. The formidable statue of Megatronus at the entrance to Kaon is something that Atracchus either directed, worked on as part of the construction, or completed all on his own.
He cannot remember the actual transition period from propaganda officer back to drone-class miner, but Atracchus assumes that as the war grew increasingly more intense and the planet descended into irreversible ruin, the time for distraction was over, and their division disbanded. Whilst he would prefer to be doing something more creative and fulfilling with his time than shoveling soil and typing an endless amount of reports, there are perks to being a miner class bot. He is amongst his own kin again, for one thing, and energon mines are some of the most fortified and well-defended infrastructures a bot could ever hope to be in. And with a generous application of intellect and a liberal dowsing of luck, that is how you survive a war.
Personality:
Atracchus is considered to be somewhat of an affable oddball: a Vehicon with a quiet, yet approachable nature, and harbours strange hobbies and even stranger ideas. He privately considers himself a Vehicon first and a Decepticon second. He’s a compassionate bot at spark, and tends to assist others for the very sake of it rather than to simply hold one over them. Another thing Atracchus is also is a bot of few words; partly for the loss of his vocaliser, but he would still rather deliver his point with a simple, directed clarity than rabbit on into indolence. Even speaking in crude Cybertronian Basic, he gives the impression that he considers and conserves his words as though the very bytes used to encode them were precious.
He has an insatiable curiosity for art and culture, particularly the former, which has followed him from Cybertron to all the other exoplanets he has been assigned since. There are very few bots he encounters in his designation that nurse the same sort of love for artwork, and who could look at three different Impressionist interpretations of the same scene and marvel on the dramatic shifts in mood a mere difference in the colour palette can create, instead of thinking about something more pressing and substantial – like lunch. And while he holds a great appreciation for paintings, his own area of artistic expertise is crafting works in the three dimensions. Sculpting is Atracchus’ favourite technique, though he is also quite proficient at carving reliefs, or data shelves, or a statue of Megatronus at the entrance to Kaon. And with over four million years’ worth of practice, he is very, very good.
It may have been this very exposure, or drive, towards art that has, in turn, sculpted Atracchus’ own intellect into such a highly unique form. Atracchus’ sentience is especially uncanny for a Vehicon. One point that can be agreed upon is that his self-awareness must have been achieved before the war had even begun: after all, it is far beyond the capacity of drone AI to think imaginatively, let alone create works of propagantic art as he did towards the end of the Golden Age. While he has made no effort to hide his awareness from enlisted Decepticons or his fellow Vehicons, he has equally shown no untoward ambition and made no means to assert himself beyond his own station. Atracchus is a reliable and hard-working Vehicon who is – or has maybe been made – humble in his demeanor towards others, particularly those of a higher rank.
Likes: Camaraderie, with both Vehicons and Decepticons alike, but especially with the former; art; culture; reading; music; common sense; a job well done; Earth’s majestic scenery; a peaceful drive.
Dislikes: Disruptions to life on the Nemesis; wanton and treacherous ambition (see first dislike); poor decisions from commanding officers; particular dislike for wasted life, which perhaps stems from a weariness for the fodder-like loss of Vehicon life.
Strengths/Weapons:
Weaknesses:
Special skills: Creating artworks, particularly sculpting and carving. Xenocultural awareness. Watching Antiques Roadshow with a compelled interest.
Extra Info: His favourite sculpting medium is clay. He rarely has many artworks on display simply due to the lack of space to store them all, which means that when he finishes a new piece he often just squashes it back down into a ball and starts again.
Sample RP:
Atracchus had a headache. Their supervising officer had just come down from the surface to find out exactly why the energon supply was suddenly drying up, and his vocaliser carried an especially unpleasant screech when he was upset.
‘…Now somebody tell me why, when our base defenses are sore strugglin’ from attack after attack this joor and we’re THIS far behind on quota,’ he slapped the data pad for effect. ‘You slaggin’ no-good sparkless spawn o’ glitches won’t go down that shaft when it’s full of perfectly good energon!’
‘But-but sir,’ one of the bots stuttered. ‘It’s not safe! We still need to set up the additional supports so we can get the equipment in and energon out.’
Atracchus turned around. He’s right, he told the officer. That the shaft was in real and immediate danger of collapsing. That they would need two days for the struts to come in so they could ensure the shaft was secure for mining and the energon could be transported.
The officer gave him a sick smile, not even bothering to pretend he took this crude Basic speaker seriously. Atracchus quietly turned back to his desk before he overstepped his bounds. He kept his expression factory-model neutral (not a hard thing to do when you’re a Vehicon) and his servos tapping on the command board in front of him as the officer continued to blast the unfortunate group of Eradicons he would condemn to certain death, and who were becoming more and more skittish under the crony’s optics.
He was an aerial commander, no less, and from the overbearing vitriol in his glyphs, and a healthy streak of paranoia in his EMF, Atracchus guessed he was a mid-ranking officer, under pressure from his peers and upper management to have the quotas exceeded in this crisis. His promotion, or his pistons, were about to be handed to someone on a silicon platter.
But rocks didn’t care a glyph about the panicky officer. The flow of energon to the surface could only mirror what stocks remained in the mines, and they were being rapidly depleted. Another mine should have been sanctioned a decacycle ago, to cover flow problems such as these. But the beurocracy, in their infinite wisdom, had left a wing commander to oversee a hole in the ground, and he was disinterested enough in rocks and subterranean things not to realise the energon was on its way out until the first cubes had been brought up dry. It wasn’t as if enough reports hadn’t been filed about the mine’s decreasing activity. Now he knew the blame rested squarely on his shoulders, and the knowledge threated to crush more than just his career.
Atracchus could have almost felt sorry for him, if he wasn’t such an overbearing aft trying to pack his kin down a doomed foxhole.
‘I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR PETTY EXCUSES!’ he shrieked. ‘I NEED YOU TO GET YOUR AFTS IN THERE RIGHT NOW –’
BDDDDDDDDMMPHHHHHHHTT-TMP.
…
…
…
PWHOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM-MM-MM-MM-MM-MM-MM-MM
There was shale, dust and panic everywhere as bots scrambled left and right for cover. Atracchus clung to his workstation and flinched as debris rained down on his back and a fist-sized stone hit him squarely on the shoulder. When the activity died down, and bots began to slowly come out of their hiding places, there was no open mineshaft any longer.
The officer was spluttering obscenities from behind the pair of Eradicons he ducked behind for cover, before transforming and jetting back up to the surface without so much as a by-your-leave. That he wouldn’t have anything favourable to report to his superiors today would be an understatement.
The Eradicons, as usual, dusted themselves and each other off, and got right back to work. Some started preliminary assessments or scattered to collect the required equipment, or file initial reports. Atracchus suspended the work on his own screen and opened another, more relevant file. This incident was going to require a lot of docwork.
One of the Eradicons walked up to Atracchus’ desk and stood, surveying the frantic scene around them.
‘This lot’s going to set us back two joors,’ she said. ‘Maybe three. A fine mess it is for all of us.’
Atracchus pinged several glyphs of agreement as he started typing again.
‘But still,’ she leaned back and vented her plates, ‘Far better that it collapsed now, with no-one inside, than with a whole team of ours and only a trickle of energon to account for their lives. It’s a miracle, really.’
He sent the equivalent of smile at her across their fields, the only way an Eradicon knows how. But this smile contained an undeniable glyph of knowing. The typing stopped as Atracchus reached under his desk for something, and held it out to her in his hand. She examined the object briefly before her optics widened, and she looked at him with a sudden conspirational understanding. She chuckled.
‘A remote for a driller. I presume the driller in question is buried under about a tonne of rubble right about now?’
Atracchus crushed the device in his hand and placed it next to his command board.
<< Far better a single officer be gently reprimanded by his superiors, >> he clicked and booped in Basic << Than for honest sparks to be sacrificed for his gross mismanagement. >>
‘From my initial assessment, it looks like it’ll be four joors, then. I hope the station can take the hits.’
<< Unlike our distraught officer, I hardly believe that this is the only operational energon mine in the whole of this galaxy. >> he commented dryly. << We will persevere. >>
The other Eradicon took the shattered remote and sent a wave of thanks and shared mischief to Atracchus. She made her way through the bustling throng to her own duties, while he turned to look back at the rapidly accumulating alerts on his screen. There was a lot of raw data that’d been pulled already and needed to be sorted. And with a few strokes of his servos, Atracchus was back to work.
Name/Alias: Pen
IM/Email: penandpencil42@gmail.com
-Character Info-
Name: Atracchus (QXW-926)
Age: Several millennia.
Gender: Male
Species: Cybertronian
Faction: Vehicon; Decepticon
Original Occupation: Artisan (lower/drone class)
Occupation/Specialization: Energon miner and basic administration duties.
Appearance/Altmode: Vehicon car-based model. Main chassis colour scheme in both robot and alternate mode is a deep purple with black and silver trim. Has a facemask covering the lower half of his face.
History:
There are perhaps more stories about Atracchus’ history than even he has had years to live them all. Atracchus is one of the oldest surviving Vehicons in the Earth’s Decepticon armada, and claims to remember snatches of a sentient life as an artisan before the combustion of the caste system and descent into Cybertron’s hellish, most self-destructive war, but can remember very little else besides. It’s very likely this is the result of his memory data being slowly overwritten to accommodate the need for more space in a factory model with a supposedly limited and expendable run. But Atracchus thinks differently, fights differently, and has memorised the colour wheels from more than five different xenomorphic races. And if you look up QXW-926 in the identification database...well, you can't. There is no such file that exists. Which is more than enough to raise a lot of questions and rumours amongst his fellow Vehicons.
According to them, Atracchus was once a renegade curator, a lowly drone energon miner, a mighty Decepticon warrior, and an artisan in the employ of the High Council on Cybertron. He salvaged and squirrelled away artifacts of priceless cultural significance in Kaon and spoke openly against the caste system in the isolated energon outpost of Kalis. He accomplished feats of extraordinary heroism on the battlefield against the Autobots whilst speaking his quietly speaking his piece on freedom as the right for all as he crafted works of great beauty. And then he was wounded, assaulted, made a political scapegoat, spitefully stripped of his rank by a hated officer whose incompetence he dared to address. And then, as all good stories end, he had his voice-box ripped out and was stuffed unceremoniously into the shell of a drone - a meteoric and humiliating fall from grace.
For the most part, Atracchus greets these tales with a great deal of bemusement. And after vorns of insisting that these alternate lives were highly unlikely to have ever been his, that the lapses in memory are more than likely just an outcome of his limited hardware, and is he really that strange enough to warrant some inexplicably complex backstory involving a three-headed judge and a pit full of Sharkitons? – he’s given up, and will now neither confirm nor deny anything you present to him. The rumor mill rejoiced, and the stories continue. Atracchus thinks of it as something like an office game.
From what Atracchus can remember of his formative years before the war, as far as he knows he was always an artist born and bred. He can recall that he chose the designation ‘Atracchus’ after a philosopher of the same name, but what his namesake argued for and against he cannot remember; searches conducted since for what appears to be a minor figure in history have proved fruitless. He cannot recall the time before his self-awakening, and he can recall little of the art he created before he joined the Decepticon cause. He was swept up in the belief for the equal freedom of all bots, and the recognition of Vehicons as fully-sparked Cybertronians; ideals he still holds close to his spark chamber to this very cycle. His work turned into a mouthpiece for propaganda – very soon, he was whisked from his mine and placed with a team of equally creative Cybertronians, given the full-time directive of extolling the values of the Decepticon cause to the undecided and conveying their idealistic strength and legitimacy to those who were opposed. And, the greatest honour of all, was that they were entrusted to craft works that encapsulated the very glory of the Decepticon cause. The formidable statue of Megatronus at the entrance to Kaon is something that Atracchus either directed, worked on as part of the construction, or completed all on his own.
He cannot remember the actual transition period from propaganda officer back to drone-class miner, but Atracchus assumes that as the war grew increasingly more intense and the planet descended into irreversible ruin, the time for distraction was over, and their division disbanded. Whilst he would prefer to be doing something more creative and fulfilling with his time than shoveling soil and typing an endless amount of reports, there are perks to being a miner class bot. He is amongst his own kin again, for one thing, and energon mines are some of the most fortified and well-defended infrastructures a bot could ever hope to be in. And with a generous application of intellect and a liberal dowsing of luck, that is how you survive a war.
Personality:
Atracchus is considered to be somewhat of an affable oddball: a Vehicon with a quiet, yet approachable nature, and harbours strange hobbies and even stranger ideas. He privately considers himself a Vehicon first and a Decepticon second. He’s a compassionate bot at spark, and tends to assist others for the very sake of it rather than to simply hold one over them. Another thing Atracchus is also is a bot of few words; partly for the loss of his vocaliser, but he would still rather deliver his point with a simple, directed clarity than rabbit on into indolence. Even speaking in crude Cybertronian Basic, he gives the impression that he considers and conserves his words as though the very bytes used to encode them were precious.
He has an insatiable curiosity for art and culture, particularly the former, which has followed him from Cybertron to all the other exoplanets he has been assigned since. There are very few bots he encounters in his designation that nurse the same sort of love for artwork, and who could look at three different Impressionist interpretations of the same scene and marvel on the dramatic shifts in mood a mere difference in the colour palette can create, instead of thinking about something more pressing and substantial – like lunch. And while he holds a great appreciation for paintings, his own area of artistic expertise is crafting works in the three dimensions. Sculpting is Atracchus’ favourite technique, though he is also quite proficient at carving reliefs, or data shelves, or a statue of Megatronus at the entrance to Kaon. And with over four million years’ worth of practice, he is very, very good.
It may have been this very exposure, or drive, towards art that has, in turn, sculpted Atracchus’ own intellect into such a highly unique form. Atracchus’ sentience is especially uncanny for a Vehicon. One point that can be agreed upon is that his self-awareness must have been achieved before the war had even begun: after all, it is far beyond the capacity of drone AI to think imaginatively, let alone create works of propagantic art as he did towards the end of the Golden Age. While he has made no effort to hide his awareness from enlisted Decepticons or his fellow Vehicons, he has equally shown no untoward ambition and made no means to assert himself beyond his own station. Atracchus is a reliable and hard-working Vehicon who is – or has maybe been made – humble in his demeanor towards others, particularly those of a higher rank.
Likes: Camaraderie, with both Vehicons and Decepticons alike, but especially with the former; art; culture; reading; music; common sense; a job well done; Earth’s majestic scenery; a peaceful drive.
Dislikes: Disruptions to life on the Nemesis; wanton and treacherous ambition (see first dislike); poor decisions from commanding officers; particular dislike for wasted life, which perhaps stems from a weariness for the fodder-like loss of Vehicon life.
Strengths/Weapons:
- Atracchus understands his limits as an economic drone model. Perhaps as a result of this, his fighting style is very…unique. Not the near-suicidal straight-up-and-shoot strategy many Vehicons employ if targeted when separated from the unit. His technique is best described as a surprise-based scrappy melee fighter. He works to quickly incapacitate the target by catching them off-guard with quick, devastating strikes, and utilises agile ducks and blocks in an actively planned chassis-preserving stratagem. He doesn’t engage the enemy any longer than he has to in order to escape or hold a more favourable position.
- When it comes to a group task the leadership role tends to default to him, due to his higher-than-average age and intellect, and it’s a role that he often wears rather well.
- He has an exceedingly good visual memory and great attention to detail. And, you know, he’s pretty good at being an artist too.
Weaknesses:
- Low-grade armor that does not hold up well against close or mid-range attacks. Limited weapons, blaster effectiveness decreases beyond mid-range, and only the most basic combat programming. Basically, Atracchus is a mining Eradicon, and fares just as well as every other mining Vehicon in skirmishes against the enemy; which is not very well at all if he’s not exceedingly careful about keeping himself alive. And if he doesn’t bring a bot down or at least make them think twice about taking him on in the first thirty seconds, he can see his own risk of injury or deactivation rising very, very quickly.
- He takes great care to ensure that he’s not considered to be a source of trouble, which often attracts large, regret-free blaster holes in the ‘drone’ class if they irritate the wrong Cybertronian. However, despite his best efforts at anonymity he can occasionally, and accidentally, offer an opinion beyond the status quo a Vehicon is expected to address. With a sharp intellect and much feverent backpedalling, however, he has avoided many a premature smelting for these bouts of outspokeness.
Special skills: Creating artworks, particularly sculpting and carving. Xenocultural awareness. Watching Antiques Roadshow with a compelled interest.
Extra Info: His favourite sculpting medium is clay. He rarely has many artworks on display simply due to the lack of space to store them all, which means that when he finishes a new piece he often just squashes it back down into a ball and starts again.
Sample RP:
Atracchus had a headache. Their supervising officer had just come down from the surface to find out exactly why the energon supply was suddenly drying up, and his vocaliser carried an especially unpleasant screech when he was upset.
‘…Now somebody tell me why, when our base defenses are sore strugglin’ from attack after attack this joor and we’re THIS far behind on quota,’ he slapped the data pad for effect. ‘You slaggin’ no-good sparkless spawn o’ glitches won’t go down that shaft when it’s full of perfectly good energon!’
‘But-but sir,’ one of the bots stuttered. ‘It’s not safe! We still need to set up the additional supports so we can get the equipment in and energon out.’
Atracchus turned around. He’s right, he told the officer. That the shaft was in real and immediate danger of collapsing. That they would need two days for the struts to come in so they could ensure the shaft was secure for mining and the energon could be transported.
The officer gave him a sick smile, not even bothering to pretend he took this crude Basic speaker seriously. Atracchus quietly turned back to his desk before he overstepped his bounds. He kept his expression factory-model neutral (not a hard thing to do when you’re a Vehicon) and his servos tapping on the command board in front of him as the officer continued to blast the unfortunate group of Eradicons he would condemn to certain death, and who were becoming more and more skittish under the crony’s optics.
He was an aerial commander, no less, and from the overbearing vitriol in his glyphs, and a healthy streak of paranoia in his EMF, Atracchus guessed he was a mid-ranking officer, under pressure from his peers and upper management to have the quotas exceeded in this crisis. His promotion, or his pistons, were about to be handed to someone on a silicon platter.
But rocks didn’t care a glyph about the panicky officer. The flow of energon to the surface could only mirror what stocks remained in the mines, and they were being rapidly depleted. Another mine should have been sanctioned a decacycle ago, to cover flow problems such as these. But the beurocracy, in their infinite wisdom, had left a wing commander to oversee a hole in the ground, and he was disinterested enough in rocks and subterranean things not to realise the energon was on its way out until the first cubes had been brought up dry. It wasn’t as if enough reports hadn’t been filed about the mine’s decreasing activity. Now he knew the blame rested squarely on his shoulders, and the knowledge threated to crush more than just his career.
Atracchus could have almost felt sorry for him, if he wasn’t such an overbearing aft trying to pack his kin down a doomed foxhole.
‘I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR PETTY EXCUSES!’ he shrieked. ‘I NEED YOU TO GET YOUR AFTS IN THERE RIGHT NOW –’
BDDDDDDDDMMPHHHHHHHTT-TMP.
…
…
…
PWHOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM-MM-MM-MM-MM-MM-MM-MM
There was shale, dust and panic everywhere as bots scrambled left and right for cover. Atracchus clung to his workstation and flinched as debris rained down on his back and a fist-sized stone hit him squarely on the shoulder. When the activity died down, and bots began to slowly come out of their hiding places, there was no open mineshaft any longer.
The officer was spluttering obscenities from behind the pair of Eradicons he ducked behind for cover, before transforming and jetting back up to the surface without so much as a by-your-leave. That he wouldn’t have anything favourable to report to his superiors today would be an understatement.
The Eradicons, as usual, dusted themselves and each other off, and got right back to work. Some started preliminary assessments or scattered to collect the required equipment, or file initial reports. Atracchus suspended the work on his own screen and opened another, more relevant file. This incident was going to require a lot of docwork.
One of the Eradicons walked up to Atracchus’ desk and stood, surveying the frantic scene around them.
‘This lot’s going to set us back two joors,’ she said. ‘Maybe three. A fine mess it is for all of us.’
Atracchus pinged several glyphs of agreement as he started typing again.
‘But still,’ she leaned back and vented her plates, ‘Far better that it collapsed now, with no-one inside, than with a whole team of ours and only a trickle of energon to account for their lives. It’s a miracle, really.’
He sent the equivalent of smile at her across their fields, the only way an Eradicon knows how. But this smile contained an undeniable glyph of knowing. The typing stopped as Atracchus reached under his desk for something, and held it out to her in his hand. She examined the object briefly before her optics widened, and she looked at him with a sudden conspirational understanding. She chuckled.
‘A remote for a driller. I presume the driller in question is buried under about a tonne of rubble right about now?’
Atracchus crushed the device in his hand and placed it next to his command board.
<< Far better a single officer be gently reprimanded by his superiors, >> he clicked and booped in Basic << Than for honest sparks to be sacrificed for his gross mismanagement. >>
‘From my initial assessment, it looks like it’ll be four joors, then. I hope the station can take the hits.’
<< Unlike our distraught officer, I hardly believe that this is the only operational energon mine in the whole of this galaxy. >> he commented dryly. << We will persevere. >>
The other Eradicon took the shattered remote and sent a wave of thanks and shared mischief to Atracchus. She made her way through the bustling throng to her own duties, while he turned to look back at the rapidly accumulating alerts on his screen. There was a lot of raw data that’d been pulled already and needed to be sorted. And with a few strokes of his servos, Atracchus was back to work.