Bombshell
From Axalon RPG
Contents |
Basic Info
- Created By: Tarantulas
- Boards Active: Predacon Base RPG
- Aliases: Blunt Force Trauma, Bombshelter, The Amazin’ Amazon, Grace Under Fire, Nurse
- Faction: Predacon
- Subgroup: Predacon Naval Fleet
- Primary Function: Air Support
- Secondary Function: Field Medic
- Type: Beast Warrior (Spear-nosed Bat)
- Gender: Female
- Size: Small, 6ft
- Theme Song: The Trashmen - Bird Is The Word
Statistics
- Strength 8
- Stamina 8
- Speed 7
- Skill 4
- Firepower 10
- Aim 10
- Intelligence 6
- Discipline 6
- Luck 4
Total 63.
Specialties
- Flight: Natural
- Physician: Field Medic
- Firearms, Autofire Weapons, Archery
- Tactics
- History: Military
Noted Quotes
- "Sir yes sir, Sir! Unit Bombshell reporting for duty, SIR!"
- “Oh, yeah. Feel the love.” (Typically said before hitting somebody. Hard.)
- “If you can’t think on your feet, someone’s liable to cut them out from under you. Right, Sir?”
- “...You better not start spilling any philosophical pseudo-heroic mumbo-jumbo my way, or I swear, so help me, I will stick my hands inside your head and pull your eyeballs right out your ears.”
- (helping dole out reprimand) “Permission to speak freely? I’m sure it’s nothing a quick beating won’t cure. Sir. Please, allow me.”
- “Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. When you're good, it’s your first or second or something. Isn’t that it, Sir?”
Physical Description
Beast Mode
Spear-nosed Bat. Her beast mode is albino, with a glossy white fur coat and bright red eyes--which she has dulled with soot, to better suit her purposes on the battlefield. She has a flap on the tip of her nose, called a nose-leaf. It is roughly diamond-shaped and comes to a sharply pointed tip. She has long, broad ears extending from the sides of her head. Her ears tend to oscillate back and forth constantly, picking up every little nuance around her. Her mouth is lined with needle-sharp teeth, all gleaming white and perfect; she literally has a nearly ear-to-ear grin. Bombshell’s wings appear quite delicate, connected to her legs and tail by thin membranes of skin. A network of tiny blood vessels is visible in her wings. She has a wingspan of almost three times her height. Each of her fingers is exceptionally long and tipped with narrow, sharp claws. She has long prehensile feet with four grasping toes and long, wickedly curved claws.
Robot Mode
Bombshell's shell is mostly gray, notably lacking in any bright colours or shiny metal. The red cross on the side of her neck is a very dim shade of crimson, barely visible. Her chest-plate is gunmetal, unadorned. Her abdomen is surrounded in a rubbery black material that looks like chain-link mail, but which stops low-powered energy weapons. Her shoulders and upper legs are covered with fur, naturally white but covered in ash. From the knee and elbow down, Bombshell is dark blue, except for a raised semicircle on the back of her right hand. Embossed on top is a red and gold Predacon symbol, nonreflective, which doubles as his commlink. She ripped out her internal comms in a short-lived fugue state ("Get outta my HEAD!")
Bombshell has a slick, black, round-topped metal helmet. Her optics are small and round, set far back into her head, with deep, black circles under them. The circles are formed from panels of the same light-absorbing material that covers his midsection, so that her optics look like a pair of dull gray nickels in a shady puddle. She has two round, tapering tubes near the back of her head, shaped almost like ears, and she usually has a stick of smoldering orange charcoal held between her lips, like a cigarette. Every time she inhales, plumes of glittering gold smoke rush out her ears.
Her pistol spends most of its time being spun around and flipped into the air.
On the outer edge of both optics, she can activate light panels that act as headlights, for the benefit of others who lack night-vision, or to direct attention by flashing them at a specific spot. Bombshell sees near-perfectly in total darkness, but these also assist by performing infrared sweeps, monitoring radiation levels and detecting peripheral motion. Also, her headlights also consume next to zero energy as compared to more powerful (and usually stealthier) optic modes.
Personality
'Blunt Force Trauma', or Bombshell, is the new, debatably improved outward persona of the shell-shocked Predacon combat medic once known as Trauma. Poor Trauma, whose fragile psyche finally collapsed, giving way to a more forceful, charge-taking, gung-ho soldier-type, who is admittedly perhaps better-equipped to deal with the day-to-day stresses aboard the Storm’s Eye II, ones with which Trauma herself could not cope.
Unambitious and apparently a veteran of numerous conflicts, including ones that Trauma repressed entirely, Bombshell is a violent, heavily armed idiot. She is happy with that description. She wrote that description. It was on her revised resume, in fact, when she requested a codename change back with the Pred Military Tribunal. In her own words, she is the consummate grunt. She forms few opinions, and is content following orders- she might mock her superior officers in private, but she lacks the imagination to actively defy orders. What would be the point? She enjoys her work, and military regulations don’t often prevent her from doing anything she wants to do. A bit weird for a Pred, Bombshell actively dislikes the idea of being in power- being directly responsible for anything other than the suffering of others is well beyond her depth, and those murky deeps she does not care to plumb.
Bombshell invents pet names for everyone, though she'll only use them when she's sure the person in question is out of earshot. To their faces, she'll refer to anyone and everyone as 'sir'. Meanwhile, Prism is Flattop or Blockhead, Sphinx is Sparky, Pestilence is too easy, Mindfield is ‘that Skellington’, Ifrit is Iffy, Delilah is Miz Tragicomedy, Sin is Cinderelly, Lightspeed is the Hotel El or the tried and true 'Legspread'. The old Trauma is called Nurse, and spoken of in tones of casual contempt. Bombshell will sometimes call Nurse to the fore when a cooler head needs to prevail. All the same, Bombshell is willing and eager to force her more feminine side back into the shadows ASAP.
Marginally more stable now, Bombshell is not in peril of succumbing to any 'red mists' or 'berserk rages'--mainly because she goes through them all the time, every moment of the day, but she's far better at directing hers toward real goals than Trauma ever was. She doesn't let the pressure build and build, mounting until the dams burst and there can be but one release... Anyway. Bombshell doesn't have that problem. On the downside, she is subject to flashbacks and hallucinations dating back to Trauma's original self, prior to her first mental break. Bombshell does generally realize when this is happening, and can distinguish illusions from reality, though it can interfere severely during normal conversations or in the heat of combat.
Being stable does not mean 'sane', however. She has a three-pronged fetish matched set, for fire, explosions and slasher movies. She is to small arms what Sphinx is to bladed weapons. Bombshell collects guns and constantly rattles with an arsenal of handguns, some exotic, some antique, all in pristine working order, though that may not be enough. Many alien weapons after all were not made to stand up against modern Cybertronian armour alloys, which renders much of Bombshell’s collection worse than useless. Nevertheless, the guns have sentimental value and she is not eager to part with any single one of them.
She appears to believe strongly in reincarnation, but is tight-lipped with details beyond that.
Armament
The better part of Bombshell’s effective arsenal is described here. As mentioned, she has many fairly weak sidearms in subspace, but they rarely see use.
- Dual Fully Auto Dueling Repeater Rifles - Long skinny guns with telescopic barrels and wide stocks, grafted to her right and left arms. Their stocks are tooled with various Predacon, mercenary and paramilitary designs, and noticeably charred and blackened around the edges. Not nearly as flimsy as they look, they commonly become striking weapons if Trauma is ever engaged at close range. Launching a plasmatic payload at a rate of two every second, with no noticeable kick or resultant loss of accuracy, these guns devour heavy armour in no time flat. At the same time, they heat up very quickly indeed, and can take up to five seconds to cool down between six-second bursts.
- Grenade Belts - Three times 1.5 feet of incendiary handbombs, five per belt, all stowed in subspace. Can be pulled and thrown individually or left on a timer to take out walls; also come attached with a nonstandard sonar-based proximity tripwire that typical optic scanners frequently neglect. Also held in that same subspace pocket: scrambler grenades (x2) that knock out most appliance-created (i.e. cameras, tracers, audio bugs, unprotected optic sensors) data signals on a temporary, ten-minute basis; selective acid globes (x2) for those pesky break-proof glass and plastic replacements; and lastly (x3), a magnetizing shrapnel fragmentation grenade, which means the shrapnel not only embeds itself in an unfortunate bystander, the fragments are actually attracted to one another, tearing wires and snapping cables as they seek to be near one another.
- Bow & Arrow - High-accuracy, long-range composite bow, collapsible into a nearly invisible thigh compartment. Lightweight alloy arrows held in the opposite thigh. Comes in very useful when enemies lockdown conventional weapons systems and subspace pockets. Accurate over one kilometer. Special catches on the arrows allow them to carry grenades over a quarter of that distance. The bow itself is made out of translucent, unbreakable animal talons long, five of them hooked together over a metal frame. They make a passable curved sword in times of need. Similarly, the bowstring's tensile strength is very high, and can be used as a saw, or garrote, when detached. Both bow and string have locking handgrips to prevent injury, though the neophyte to the bow is likely to cut himself at some point. Bombshell is no neophyte.
- Called Shot - Sniper attack. Takes five seconds to load out of subspace, taking the form of a much shorter, silvery, shell-tipped arrow - although fast as it flies, it's almost impossible to see when in flight. The shell hits with sufficient force to pierce any level of Cybertronian armour; this causes heat and friction damage as well as hairline cracks, rendering the same armour highly vulnerable to further attack. The tip also contains a high-frequency ultrasonic charge, and a localized minor EMP pulse. Thus, one of Trauma's Called Shots can shatter, crack and disrupt major circuitry, bringing about instant stasis lock if it hits in or near the neural net core or spark chamber. If all that weren't enough, even if it misses a major target (some cautious bots don't keep their sparks or NNs in their heads or chests) it will still cause numbness and lack of response for many crucial seconds (the lower the target's Stamina, the longer the effects last), leaving limbs and sensors temporarily useless.
- Stealth Carbine - A silenced submachinegun with armour-piercing metal rounds. Sleek and streamlined in its highly contoured, ergonomic design, it is something akin to the iPod of firearms. iGun, if you will. Shiny black, smooth and plastic, in Bombshell's opinion it is barely a weapon at all, more like something you'd see on a coffee table somewhere. Still, results gotta take precedent. Best used at relatively close quarters, where its low-power-but-high-penetration, rapid-fire rounds can do the most damage in a concentrated area. Definitely handy for when she is forced into melee range.
- Mini-Gatler - Optic-mounted multilaser attack. This easily portable gatling laser is mounted behind Trauma's left optic, the lens of which rolls to one side, allowing the four cute li'l barrels to extend and administer blazing hot pain to anyone within a meter or so. Scatter is high beyond that range. The Gatler is best used to blind an opponent, then take them off guard.
- Homing Darts - Fired from each of the four fingertips of her bat-mode wings, these tiny red-finned white darts will try to plant themselves in the nearest heat signal, though they are not overly maneuverable and can sometimes be lost around corners. Victims struck around electronic components will suffer temporary loss of feeling and coordination in the affected areas (9 minutes minus the victim's Stamina score).
- Live Ammunition - Cyberbats. Small, flying devices, about the size and shape of a badminton shuttlecock or birdie, and launched along either of Bombshell's rifles. Made of lightweight plastics, translucent and nonreflective, as close to invisible as possible without actually being there. Containing basic scanners and low-powered transmitters, they do not show Bombshell much per se, but they do give her the basic lay of the land. Are programmed to scout ahead in a single wide pass, then return, where they usually to be sent out in another direction. They are dangerous in that they allow her to fire on targets she cannot actually see, though the weak scanners are of no avail against cloaking devices or signature dampers. They can, however, be remotely directed to gently alight on an enemy and act as a homing device. Furthermore, they can be installed with mind-affecting devices, causing suggestive effects on the weak-willed, heightening emotions or inducing new sensations, not only fear or hate, but euphoria, confusion and exhaustion. Unfortunately Bombshell lacks the training to produce these herself, and she must seek out real engineers to build them for her.
- Surgical Talons - The claws on her right hand (beast mode right foot) are clear and unbreakable. They can cut through nearly anything, given the time. Trauma only attacks using her claws if she is forced into a corner. Her fingers are dexterous enough that the claws can be used as competent surgical implements. Reservoirs in the tips allow them to function as hypodermic syringes.
- Medkit - The tools of her (other) trade. Everything she could need to...well, you know. There's nothing I could tell you that wouldn't sound paltry by comparison to the veritable armoury she's got up there. The doctor here will be right with you when she's done filling the Endless full of lead, okay? Do No Harm is pretty much gone out the window here; Bombshell by name, Bombshell by nature. Anyway. Bombshell rarely uses these tools herself--they mainly see use only when Nurse can be coaxed to the fore. There are laser-scalpels and robot bandaids in there, most likely. It's a small square pack mounted between her shoulderblades.
History
Bombshell isn't under orders to disclose anything personal about herself, but if she was, she'd have this to say:
Bombshell, then Trauma, was activated, down to within seconds of the official recognition of the Pax Cybertronia, on Pralss, a Predacon military research installation in the Anchorum Sector. Hidden out past the Styx Nebula, the purpose of any operations has been kept top secret, even today. So top secret, in fact, that the research scientists were all preprogrammed protoforms which were reformatted at the end of every stellar cycle. Expensive, but it was a guarantee against leaks. The whole sector was a war zone, with colonies such as Pralss and its neighbors caught between the crossfire of impinging marauders and the native Mining Corps of Orrock. Pralss’ tactical coordinator had convinced the Corps to stay off Pralss, but no such treaty could be reached with the invaders. Raiders had to be repelled by the installation’s defenses on a weekly basis. Attempts by Pralss to combat these forces sustained surprisingly heavy casualties, and reinforcements were hard to come by.
Trauma’s programming dictated her career, and she excelled in the medical field. The glitch that had altered her schematics made her perfectly suited to her duties. Her speed and strength allowed her to drag fallen soldiers out of harm’s way and tend to them quite efficiently. Her talents did not go unnoticed, and she was the obvious choice for promotion when the incumbent chief surgeon had his head pulled off by an Anguradsi spy. Trauma’s ruthless efficiency was able to increase the effectiveness of Pralss’ troops tenfold. It looked as though things were turning around for the base, with a fleet of ships en route to rout the marauders’ well-documented foothold in the sector.
Such a seemingly small force doing what the raiders had done seemed impossible. Their control of the sector was absolute. It had been pondered as to why this was. As it turned out, no small force could have accomplished the feat; it was part of another, massive force, one that attacked one night, taking Pralss completely by surprise. The whole operation was wiped out almost overnight, helped along by fail-safes intended to prevent the research from falling into enemy hands. The base’s top brass saved what little they could, then self-destructed the entire facility, burying it in rubble.
Trauma happened to be one of those left behind, though there were many. The base fell down around her. The roof caved in and she became trapped in the subterranean levels of the base. In the carnage, the life-support systems for the patients had failed, as those healthy enough to flee did so. So Trauma was left alone, with nothing but corpses as company. There was no way to radio for help. There were no other survivors. What there was, was a generator to provide auxiliary power, enough energon rations to last her for millennia and a bunch of lifeless husks that had once been her comrades in arms.
Trauma remained in the bowels of Pralss for close to fifty stellar cycles. At the end of those 46 cycles, she had made some very close friends, all of which she now knew very well. All of them were, technically, clinically dead, but she was having trouble telling the difference by this point.
Predacons excavating the site came upon her as they investigated the merits of reconstructing the base on Pralss. After being forcibly detained and subjected to extensive psychiatric evaluation, Trauma was somehow deemed fit to serve in the Predacon Military as a field medic. She was shunted around for some time, gathering some notoriety. After some of the stunts that were pulled on the Myrmidion, it’s a wonder she wasn’t executed, let alone reassigned.
Surrounded by death and nothingness in the pocket dimension of Delerium Nocturnum, between the universes, she once again grew isolated, this time presented with more death than her poor brain could hope to repress. Thus confronted, Trauma retreated yet again--and this time, her breakdown was an opportunity for the latent split personality of Bombshell to emerge. Taking control of Trauma's body, the reborn combat medic set about making a few...changes. Utilizing the severed components of various Purification drones scattered about the ship, she revised her shell into the one she currently sports. It is apparent from the drastic changes to her appearance that this is not Trauma's original identity resurfacing, and in spite of her namesake, she does not seem to believe the original Insecticon was one of her past lives.
Incarnations
Bombshell has only ever been played on the Predacon Base RPG. However, she was originally the shy, retiring, delusional medic Trauma. Trauma's bedside manner, and her whole career as a Predacon, was somewhat hampered by the fact that she repressed any evidence of the existence of death that she came across. This proved to be more of an emotional problem than a practical one, however, as she would occasionally lapse into fugue states during which she would kill and maim indiscriminately, then come to with no recollection of any such fit. Trauma liked to raise plants (although raise is not the best word), chat with her patients (most of whom were in fact long dead and incapable of answering in voices anyone other than Trauma might hear) and doodle badly proportioned unicorns absentmindedly on the walls and floors.
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