Braille

From Axalon RPG

Contents 1 Basic Info 2 Quotes 3 Statistics 4 Physical Description 4.1 Beast mode 4.2 Robot Mode 5 Personality 6 Skills 6.1 Combat 6.2 Non-Combat 7 Special Abilities 8 Weapons 9 History 10 Known Acquaintances 11 Commanders Notes

Basic Info

• Aliases: 20-20
• Faction: Maximal
• Serial number: 46O-PLN
• Status: Functional
• Affiliation: Maximal Military
• Beast mode: Serval
• Transformer sex: Female
• Age: 422 stellar cycles
• Height: 10ft

Quotes

//No, Kodian, we can’t kill him. Because he hasn’t attacked us. Because it’s wrong. Kodian, we’re Maximals. Remember?//

“I wouldn’t say we were outnumbered. I would say that we are in a target rich environment.”

Statistics

• Strength: 7
• Speed: 8
• Stamina: 7
• Aim: 10
• Discipline: 7
• Fire Power: 1
• Skill: 10
• Intelligence: 9
• Luck: 4

Physical Description

Beast mode

Braille is a Serval, an African cat with exceptional hearing due to her large, rounded ears. Her fur is a yellowish buff with black spots that look as if they were painted on by someone who couldn’t decide whether he wanted to use a small brush or a big brush. She has stretched blotches on her stomach and little dots on her head and paws.

Her legs are exceptionally long. Her body is about three and a half feet in length and her legs are two feet from shoulder to paw. She has a short, bushy tail, which is tipped with black. She moves lightly and hesitantly, as if always worried that she is about to trip on something.

Robot Mode

The first things most people notice about Braille are her eyes. They don’t glow or give off light as do normal optics. They are bright white and look like swirling cream under glass. She doesn’t change much from beast to robot mode; she looks like a cat who has figured out how to stand up. Her head is feline, complete with huge ears and long whiskers. Her basic features are distorted so that they make her face look more human, transformian, whatever.

When Braille interacts with people, she never looks directly at them, but over their shoulder or at their forehead. However, her ears swivel around and point to indicate the person to whom she is listening. Her voice is gentle. She can listen as if you are the only thing that could possibly interest her right now. She’s very plain, but warm.

Personality

Braille knows the world for the frightening, flawed thing that it is and loves it anyway. She has an instinctive sense for how people work. She doesn’t understand them cognitively; her awareness comes on a more basic level. She can feel the shape of a soul through a conversation like we could try to understand the nature of a covered statue by touching it through the cloth. She can detect how emotions shift and change as others detect the subtleties of flavor on the tongue. She understands people like Mozart understood music. It’s less a skill than a natural ability.

But just because sensitivity comes to her naturally doesn’t mean it can’t be refined. Braille pays attention to people when she talks to them. She thinks about what they’re saying and why they’re saying it. She dislikes conversing while distracted by some other activity because she feels it’s unfair to the other person, though she doesn’t hold others to the same standards. Intrinsic to Braille’s instinctive understanding of people is a feeling of superiority to the creatures she comprehends so completely. This doesn’t manifest itself as arrogance, but as a motherly instinct, to help and nurture the silly things.

Braille is an optimist at heart. She knows how nasty people can be and how flawed they are. She is always intensely aware of the world around her, the physical aspects and the emotional undertones. She can’t help but realize some of those aspects are ugly and a few undertones are cruel, but she tends to view the bad in terms of what mitigates it. Yes it’s dark here, but over there it is light. Yes, he’s bad in this way, but in another way he can be kind. She knows that half the glass is empty, but look! Down there. It’s water.

Sometimes her optimism can skew her precise perceptions. It’s usually a case of half-conscious denial. She knows a case is hopeless but can’t believe it for the sake of the poor people caught inside.

Braille is intelligent. Not book-intelligent, she has the patience to plod through facts and wires, but doesn’t enjoy it. She has a quick mind and absorbs new skills easily. She considers things and notices niceties. She can wrap her mind around a problem and sink into its details. She gets restless in one profession and needs to move often to keep interested in her work. One of the things she finds fantastic about Gigi is the fifany’s ability to stay fascinated in one profession for so long. A while ago, Gigi’s constant busyness tempted Braille into exploring science and engineering as possible lines of work. However, science requires a certain frame of mind. One that can stand endlessly repeating experiments for data collection and accept the fact that research seldom produces final, or even productive results. It was too slow and the rewards weren’t tangible enough for Braille. She did take a certain interest in engineering. It was impersonal, but very practical with obvious results. Unfortunately, she never had time to explore it as she’d like.

One of the things Braille loves about people is that, unlike her jobs, they are endlessly interesting and ever changing. She imagines that the pleasure Gigi derives from understanding the kinks and bolts of complex machines is similar to her delight in understanding the quirks and whims of complex people.

Braille likes doing things. She enjoys the exhilaration of activity, particularly when it’s fun and useful. Braille sees things like games and conversation as useful. She believes the goal of life is to be happy and anything that helps more people achieve that goal is productive, but that’s just a bonus. She takes pleasure in making things and performing jobs well. She gets restless when confined.

Fortunately, Braille is rarely confined. While her disability renders her less mobile than most transformers, her enhanced senses widen her world. While sitting in her room she can listen to a conversation five doors over, feel bots walking through the hall outside, and smell the last five people who stopped in to say hello. She can also ward off restlessness by thinking deeply about the wealth of data she collects about others. These two tactics give her the illusion of patience. While she looks like she’s waiting, she’s actually wandering the halls and analyzing what she finds.

Braille is aware that eavesdropping is immoral, but considers herself exempt. First of all, she can’t help it. She doesn’t intentionally sidle into private conversations. It’s just hard to have them out of her hearing range. However, when she can hear, she doesn’t feel guilty about listening because with understanding comes a feeling of superiority. Braille doesn’t know it, but she looks down on people around her because she knows their natures so well. Her condescension isn’t evident in every day interaction, but it makes her feel fine about listening to the private lives of others in the same way humans feel fine about taking pictures of mating zebras.

Also, because of her feeling of superiority, Braille holds herself to a higher standard than she holds all her teammates. She will forgive flaws in them, blaming it on transformer nature, but the same flaws in her are unacceptable. She should know better. She will gently try to calm Gigi down from a howling tantrum, but sharply reproach herself if she raises her own voice.

Ironically, Braille depends a lot on her teammates to function. Her special skills allow her to sense vibration and movement, but she has a habit of running into stationary objects. Like walls. She enjoys the dependence. It gives her an excuse to get to know people.

Braille enjoys cooking. She’s good enough to appreciate the subtleties, she’s always appreciated the results, and it’s a useful thing that will never stop being so. She particularly likes oatmeal cookies, they’re simple and comforting, and sushi, which is simply good. Braille also loves music, but is loath to listen to it. It occupies one of her most important senses and leaves her vulnerable. She will indulge only if she is certain she is safe. It is a sign of great trust for her to listen to music around others.

Braille is not a pacifist. She appreciates the necessity of violence in some situations. She doesn’t like it on principal or on a personal level; she thinks there should be a better way to resolve conflict and hates to see people suffer. However, she loves the excitement of battle. She is thrilled by the uncertainty of survival and fighting well is as satisfying an execution of skill as any she has found. It’s also a situation in which she doesn’t need to depend on others. When fighting, you usually only worry about the stuff that’s moving. Braille avoids violence when she can and fights to subdue, not to kill. She looks forward to the day when it will be unnecessary, but right now, it’s exciting.

Skills

Combat

• Melee Weapons: Staves
• Hand to Hand Combat

Non-Combat

• Consultation
• Psychology
• Piloting
• Cooking

Special Abilities

• Hand-to-hand fighting

Braille has an established method to winning fights. She never attacks. She waits for her opponent to make the first move, such as jumping at her or swinging a weapon, and reacts to it. She will often be able to predict what an opponent is about to do and can react to his or her move even before it is made. This precognition increases in accuracy alongside her familiarity with her opponent. Strangers are on even ground, but she could pin a close friend in under five seconds. She would be an expert at human sports such as karate or wrestling. She is particularly good at using her opponent’s moves against them.

• Senses

To compensate for her handicap of blindness, Braille has super sensitive hearing, smell, and touch. Each one is described in detail below. These can be used collectively and through them she can piece together her surroundings and “see” with more depth than those depending solely on their eyes.

• • Hearing

Her ears swivel around constantly to absorb every wave of sound coming her way. They tend to twist toward a person when he or she is talking. She can identify people by their footfalls and can detect lies in a person’s voice. With a special system installed in her core processor, she can manage every bit of noise she hears separately. This means that, even in the heat of battle, she can sort out where each person else is and what each person is doing, as long as it involves a certain amount of noise.

This also allows her to listen to multiple conversations at one time while completely understanding each one. It’s why she can do anything while giving so much attention to the person she’s talking to.

Disconnecting her audio circuits is the equivalent of blinding her, but to a further extent. She is almost completely cut off from the outside world, relying only on touch and vague messages from her whiskers. Braille has nightmares about this scenario. The very idea frightens her.

• • Whiskers

Braille can feel vibrations in the air around her through her whiskers. This tracks anything that’s moving quickly or constantly. When they are being used to their full extent her whiskers extend completely out to the sides and vibrate. Her whiskers are especially tuned to sense projectile weapons because of their high speeds. Using this ability she can map out the progress of every single laser or bullet moving through the air around her in a millisecond, which is a moderate amount of time when you think of how fast these are moving and how quickly she needs to react in order for it to do her any good. Her sense of hearing and ability to interpret vibrations work together and give her a clear picture of active areas.

• • Smell

Braille’s sense of smell is passive. She can smell strong emotions. A bit like the ability dogs have to smell fear on humans only more refined. She has a limited ability to track people’s scent. Though it’s nowhere near that of a dog’s, she can tell if a specific person has been in an area recently. She’s better at investigating individual people and drawing Holmes-like conclusions about who they are and where they’ve been.

• Aim

Braille has superb aim. She was originally designed to be a fighter pilot and kept a sixth sense for perfect, long-range firing. When flying, she connects directly into the plane and aims using that sixth sense and the constant flow of data she receives. On land, she still has an uncanny ability to hit things. She can use a gun, but doesn’t carry one. She thinks it’s a bit too easy to kill with them.

Weapons

• Wrist Shields

Braille has two small wristwatch type gadgets on her arms fastened directly to her wrists. They are copper in color but much more durable then any earth metal. When she taps them lightly, they unfold into two circular shields. They deflect anything that touches them, from missiles to melee weapons. This isn’t because they’re made of some kind of “ultra-strong super metal” or anything as mundane as that. The shields are actually fans, each of which has twenty thin blades that whirl around at amazing speeds. The blades are shaped in a way so that anything that comes into contact with them is immediately ricocheted away. Touching them in motion won’t hurt you; they will simply force your hand away.

• Staff

A simple long metal stick that Braille sweeps in front of her as she walks to make sure she’s not about to run into anything. It is strapped to her back in the rare instances when she’s not using it. The stick is Braille’s second favorite weapon, used when she’s not in the mood to trounce someone with her bare hands.

• Optical Flare

A blinding flash of light comes from Braille’s eyes, blinding everyone close enough to see it. The light causes a temporary paralysis of the optical circuits. The effect lasts a day or so then vision slowly returns. It takes a lot of power to generate this certain type of light at that intensity and Braille can only do it once a day. Even when able, she is loath to use it and confine others, even enemies, to blindness.

History

Braille came online blind. There was a faulty connection between her processor and her optics and her stasis pod was not equipped for that kind of delicate repair work, so it just sealed off all connections with the organs and rerouted power to her other senses. The alteration happened too early in her development to be repaired. The hardware involved is delicate and rendered even more vulnerable by the fiddling her pod had to do to adjust the rest of her body. Tampering might cut her off from the world entirely. She had been constructed as a fighter pilot, but in light of her defect was declared unfit for service.

Braille was raised in a Maximal Clinic for Damaged CPUs, which is one of the most gentle, loving institutions in the reputedly gentle, loving side of the transformer race. Its purpose is to provide care for robots with manufacturing defects, a purely Maximal invention as Predacons just use these creatures as laser cannon fodder.

Cleta, the Clinic’s matron, quickly saw that Braille was misplaced and elevated her from patient to attendant. Braille spent her early years in a very positive environment, learning to be kind and patient for bots who did not process as fast or function as well as she did. Sometimes she feels like she never left the Clinic, but then she quickly reminds herself how many other, good things her teammates can do.

Braille might have grown up pacifistic and naïve if the base hadn’t been taken over by Predacon forces. It was a diplomatic waypoint made for living and had only rudimentary defenses. The Predacons penetrated on the far side of the facility and went through the halls with a fine-toothed and barbed comb, obliterating the workers there but giving those in distant quarters time to prepare.

In addition to being a diplomatic dwelling, the space station was of unique design. It was called the Rubik Delta, designed by Escher Incorporated, a theoretical design being tested for practicality. The station was one large cube. The rooms were all the same shape and size and could slide around inside the larger structure. Plastic corridors could be extended to allow for travel among rooms and detached to allow for restructuring. The goal was to make for easy transport of large objects and investigate the most efficient way to structure a station.

Cleta had the attendants detach the Clinic and they became a nomadic room in hostile territory. They spent most of their time floating as far from the Predacons as they could get, making quiet runs to the mess hall and supply rooms when they needed to. Braille was integral to their survival. She could hear the enemy movements throughout the base and could instruct the room’s navigator as to when and where it was safe to dock. To keep her safe, Cleta taught Braille how to use a staff. There were no terminals for Braille to download the information, but she learned quickly in the old fashioned way.

Eventually, Rubik Delta drifted back into Maximal space and was retaken. The disconnected Clinic was discovered and reinstated. Braille stayed with it long enough for things to settle then, with Cleta’s encouragement, applied for a new assignment. Her programming was reviewed as appropriate for a diplomatic position. She was appointed councilor and greeter for Rubik Delta wherein she provided therapy for survivors of the occupation and interacted with the company facilitating repairs. Once life leveled again Braille found herself bored, looking wistfully back at the life-giving tension of being on her own in hostile territory. She said goodbye to her friends in and out of the Clinic and got herself transferred to a Voyager-esque vessel, scouting out new, inter-galactic markets.

Braille didn’t perform very well as a trade negotiator. She felt too obliged to make sure the opposition went away happy. But while working in that line she found a new calling she’d thought impossible.

Her ship traveled in a fleet that teetered between looking harmless and being defensible. They saved on ships by using the fighter jets as shuttles, transporting diplomats from vessel to vessel. Braille was being shuttled by Kodian, an approaching elderly war veteran developing into a grizzled old war veteran, who resented playing chauffer to some namby-pamby, peace-mongering female. That plane ride was the first time Braille’s calm, pleasant demeanor had failed to produce reciprocal affects and the first time she really lost her temper. The tension exploded halfway through the transfer.

Kodian and Braille disagreed fundamentally on the best approach to life. Braille had spent her early years in a place where violence was simply not an option and her current profession was dedicated to avoiding it. She firmly believed all non-violent solutions should be executed before resorting to force. Kodian felt this was naïve, that all serious conflict inevitably ended in violence, and that by trying to find peaceful solutions, diplomats compromised the element of surprise. Kodian’s job involved that violent eventuality and he only ever saw the problems that ended in fighting. The diplomatic missions were showing him alternate resolutions, which shook his belief and made him doubt his self-worth. It made him defensive and blind in his defense of his beliefs.

Braille went out of her mind talking to him because of what she saw as outright, baseless denial of things she felt were undeniable truths. It ended up with both of them roaring their points at each other with no pause to consider or refute. Kodian got frustrated, he didn’t feel Braille had any right to argue with him, never having been through the battles he’d seen, and decided to let the damn diplomat dock the plane, if she knew so blasted much. Kodian, as Braille witnessed repeatedly, had a tendency to stop functioning and withdraw into a silent funk when threatened. He was safe from all reason there, including the reason that stated that without a pilot, the jet was going to smash into the side of the docking bay and they’d both die in a brilliant blaze of stupidity.

Unable to coax the actual pilot out of the back, which made her feel even more frustrated and useless as she could usually convince anyone to be reasonable, Braille attacked the controls with a similarly senseless viciousness. She was surprised how easily they came to her and her newfound control eased her savaged self-worth enough so that she was able to calm down and figure out how to setup the controls for a handicapped helmsman. She put all the status updates on audio, plugged her CPU into the scanners, and landed using echolocation. She didn’t find the radio until after having docked.

She didn’t leave for a while after having docked. Kodian emerged from his funk after realizing they had landed and his surprise left him vulnerable to conversation. Braille had regained some of her composure and, more importantly, Kodian’s respect and they had a far more reasonable conversation about their different opinions until the docking crew pried open the hatch and asked what on Cybertron was going on with this jet.

Inspired by Kodian’s views on the necessity of violence, Braille changed professions to achieve perspective. She took advantage of her piloting programming, dormant all these years, and shifted from participating in the diplomatic service to protecting it. Braille flew by plugging herself directly into the cockpit. She was built to sort stimulation and could make sense of the deluge of information that came from the ships sensors. Pilots spoke of being one with their ships. Braille could feel the asteroids ricocheting off her wings.

Braille and Kodian continued to disagree about how life worked, but Braille conceded Kodian had a point and Kodian didn’t officially concede anything, but listened to Braille when she thought a tactical strike was a little too preemptive.

Braille met Gigi, a small, short-tempered Maximal technician, when Gigi was assigned to maintain Braille's jet. Gigi and Braille became close friends. Braille managed to pierce Gigi’s prickly exterior and slip inside her defenses. She became the exception to Gigi’s rule against intimacy. No one was allowed into Gigi’s lab while she was working and no one could talk to Gigi about relationships or singing, except for Braille because she was Braille.

Gigi worked with Braille’s team longer than she needed to, but was eventually tempted away by a new development on another vessel. Braille went back to flying. She was assigned to the Argos back when it was assumed a fighter pilot would be necessary. Upon entering the ship she promptly took a wrong turn and fell down an open hatchway. She ended up trapped in the bowels of the ship for their entire flight and crash to the Rock.

On the rock Braille developed deep friendships with Shellshock and Solo. She met Gigi again. She found and adopted a child named Bambi. Bambi’s spark was stolen and his shell left for dead, which twitched Braille’s sanity. She recovered, met Wraith and Stripe and witnessed Gigi’s death, which dissolved her sanity. She spent a mission in a coma until waking up in order to strangle the bot she thought responsible for Gigi’s death. She didn’t kill him, which was fortunate as Gigi was taking up half his brain, and recovered both her best friend and her child. The sudden deprivation and reinstatement left her uncertain and angry, a condition aggravated by learning her fiancée had recently been killed back on Cybertron. To round out her soap opera of an experience, she has recently been inflicted with amnesia, probably by an attack from a mysterious creature in the catacombs of their base. This regressed her personality back into the middle of the jet pilot days with Gigi.

After re-learning what was going on, Braille continued on with the crew as they were rescued by the Storm's Eye II. She's currently one of the ship's two pilots and a friend of almost everyone on board.

Known Acquaintances

Name: Korbian
Relationship: Commander/Friend
Beast Mode: TM2 Bear
Status: Functional

Name: Cleta
Relationship: Maternal on Cleta’s side
Beast Mode: Cow
Status: Functional

Name: Shellshock
Relationship: Close Friends
Beast Mode: Alligator Turtle
Status: Functional

Name: Bambi
Relationship: Maternal on Braille's side
Beast Mode: Alien Deer
Status: Functional

Commanders Notes

Matron Cleta: “Braille is wise, but sometimes chooses not to take advantage of that. I expect age will mediate her rashness. In the meantime, she is a kind, intelligent girl.”

Captain Kodian: “Good shot. Barmy ideas, but a good shot.”