Diva
From Axalon RPG
DIVA
Contents |
Basic Info
- Created By: Tarantulas
- Aliases: D, Queen, Prince
- Faction: Predacon
- Primary Function: Demagogue (Artist!)
- Secondary Function: Strategist
- Type: Beast Warrior
- Beast Mode: Stingray
- Gender: Dubious
- Size: Medium, 7ft
- Subgroup: Darkmount Nobility
- Theme Song: Cake - I Will Survive
Statistics
Total 63
- Strength 8
- Stamina 8
- Speed 8
- Skill 7
- Firepower 6
- Aim 5
- Intelligence 10
- Discipline 3
- Luck 8
Specialties
- Firearms
- Melee: Fencing
- Strategy & Tactics
- Leadership
- Persuasion
- Diplomacy
- History: Military
- Expert: Business
- Expert: Performance
- Expert: Visual Arts
Noted Quotes
"Oh, curse it all, where'd I put that last mimosa...?"
"Oh, look! Another masterpiece created by me."
"Danke shoen, darling, danke shoen... Thank you for all the joy and pain."
"Oh, sugar, you are too much! Here, let me assuage the thousandfold worries that weigh above that much-furrowed brow and hunt the peace that lingers in your spark..."
"Precious sweet creature, know that I have long for you from afar, lo these many nights. I pray you, do not send me away, not yet, not now that we are so near..."
"...Yeah, you BETTER keep your mucky paws off my stash or I'm gonna EAT your skull, your damn SKULL, YOU HEAR ME??"
"Oh, curse it all, where'd I put that last contingent of plasma grenadiers...?"
Physical Description
Beast Mode
Stingray. Diva's flatfish form is plate-shaped, about eight feet across, dark green on one side and tan on the other. A pair of purple eyes sit like buttons on top of its head, directly across the plate from a long, whip-like tail, fortified with several stinging barbs. While swimming, the ray's whole body ripples like a flag. While in this mode, Diva is fond of covering smaller animals with her body, smothering his prey's cries whilst stinging them and eating them alive. It's probably a metaphor for something.
Robot Mode
Diva is slender and androgynous, with curves and angles in all the proper places. She is perfectly proportionate, and moves like a dancer; every movement given purpose and grace. His slim face is flawlessly smooth, with prominent high cheekbones, a small chin, delicate jaw-line, slightly upturned nose, large burgundy optics, the colour of deep red wine... Ahem. Beautiful though he (or she) is, nothing about her gives away whether Diva is a male or female, and the honest truth is that no one really knows, and as for Diva, she (or he) isn't telling.
Diva's body is dark green-blue along the back, shoulders and lower legs. A creamy tan covers the chest, arms and upper legs, with darker highlights of orange. Silver filigree appears around his joints and across her shoulders and hips, studded (tastefully) with purple gemstones. There is a purple Predacon insignia on the upper right of the slight, sleek chest, most of which obscured by a draping shawl, formed by the fins of his/her stingray beast mode. A bronze tiara wraps around his face and head, twisting into little spirals and devil horns at her temples.
Diva has a low, sultry voice, and a breathless way of speaking that leaves little uncertainty about how he-or-she feels...although it's still no help when it comes to what it is.
Personality
A primadonna, and prone to theatrics, Diva is lazy and selfish, and will usually charm others in to doing tasks assigned to him. This is somewhat fitting, as in his work, she was most often in charge of the coordination of missions, and the analysis of intercepted enemy communiqués. He (she?) is a lofty, holier-than-thou celebrity among Predacons, spoiled by success, grown accustomed to luxury and getting her (his?) own way. She is known to throw tantrums, to sulk and carry out petty vendettas against imaginary slights. Her emotions are volatile, going from smiling, almost comatose calm to shrieking, vibrato fury, sometimes seemingly for no reason at all, for the most minuscule annoyances. Chalk it up to an 'artistic temperament'...or else maybe a 'mental deficiency'.
Yet Diva also is (was?) one of the Preds' foremost military minds, and past successes have afforded the ex-soldier some real star treatment, at least up until recently falling from grace. She can be quite charming, and knows it, shamelessly using it to his-or-her personal advantage. Because he defies categorization by gender, she can be an indiscriminate flirt as well. Diva, for the most part, seems completely disinterested in enlightening anyone else as to which is more accurate-- technically, being machines her people cannot really be classified either way. However, discretion necessitates a certain nun-like aesthetic for Diva, if she is to maintain his ambivalence.
All faults aside, Diva has (or had) a brilliant strategic intellect, and has been the difference between failure and victory in a number of campaigns down the years. This is particularly true on alien worlds, where his mercenary services have been in various states of demand for several years now. Of course, true to the Predacon way, she does nothing if he cannot see an immediate benefit to herself, and has to be bribed, rewarded and praised all on a regular basis by her superiors, or else he gets bored, and petulant. Diva's ego and certainty of her own importance negates his fear, and she will not be intimidated; although it must be said that her threshold for pain is quite low, and she always puts her own interests first. He sacrifices nothing of his own.
As his namesake suggests, Diva thrives in the spotlight. She lives on attention and always needs to be where the action is - not the danger, per se, but action, definitely - which has led him, in recent years, to a career in upending the establishment with a series emotionally charged one-(wo)man shows, which have run the gamut of different media. He has been a media darling, crooned over as being as talented a designer, director and author as she was singer, dancer and speaker, soldier and general. Of course, the public is fickle, especially one as prone to copycatting as Cybertron, and a decade later Diva's reputation had lapsed into utter obscurity, making him bitter and envious, addled by overindulgence and romanticizing endlessly over the past.
On what limited funds remain available to him through pawning off the remains of his former glory, Diva still enjoys the finer things life has to offer, and is a connoisseur of many things: art, music, food, literature. Even when she knows little about a subject, she can be quite definite about what he does and doesn't like. He tends not to hold back when giving her opinion.
Regardless of Diva's undulating state of mind, there is still a remarkable, almost savant-like intellect underneath it all. If nothing else, she has kept himself financially afloat, in roughly the style to which he had grown accustomed, through wheeling-and-dealing investments and a series of carefully managed properties and businesses. Of course, the way Diva spends money means that in spite of the large sums involved, her existence is still precariously hand-to-mouth, and even now, he may be near the end of his proverbial tether.
She makes an alright secretary. She's better at organizing other people's affairs than she is at his own.
She's also an excellent diversion, very visible, very AUDIBLE. In terms of serving the Underground, he is good at drawing attention TO the cause, while simultaneously directing attention AWAY from its activities.
Armament
- Sting Ray - A barbed wand, nearly a sword, almost a mace, formed by Diva's stinger. She is fond of tapping people and objects with it, in both cases to get the former's attention. It fires cybervenoms bolts over a medium range, but is not terribly accurate and has a three-second cooldown between shots. Diva's venom bolts causes laboured breathing in organics and slowed processing time in bots, and excruciating pain in both. For bots the pain only lasts a few seconds at most, but that can be enough time for Diva to close in, and the effects of the venom are much greater at close range. A stabbing at close proximity to the spark or neural net has been known to be lethal.
- Ablative Cape - Her soft, flowing cape absorbs heat and resists kinetic damage - it performs as the majority of her armour, meaning everything underneath it is considerably more vulnerable without it.
- Mirage Sand - Distraction item. With a wave of her hand, Diva can toss fistfuls of glittering, swirling dust that lingers and blinds enemies to his presence-- or sudden absence, for that matter. Fills a 10x10 box in less than a second, and takes twenty seconds to properly disperse. Becomes the powerful sedative known as Halo when smoked or freebased; it is non-active otherwise. The fact that Diva can afford to just throw fistfuls around the place is certainly questionable, but asking him to lay into her stash for carrying-around money is a sure way to send her in to a wild, snarling hissyfit: she NEEDS this stuff, it has to LAST, it's much more important than MONEY, etc. etc. This is likely linked to her consistent use of:
- Pyrexia - It is very possible that Diva's use of Halo is mainly to self-medicate her heavy addiction to the Cybertronian street drug pyrexia. Diva is a heavy user - level IV. She is rarely without a ready supply of tablets, kept in a specially molded dispenser in his right wrist. His shell is, per the symptoms, very hot to the touch, but this is often considered to be part of her attraction. Diva's mood swings are likely a side effect of Pyrexia, and the fact that its rapid rate of decay means she never has a consistent amount in her system at any given time. On the plus side, it has made her considerably stronger and more powerful than she might otherwise be; on the minus, there is always the possibility that she will violently explode, thus cutting short her career as an artiste and a revolutionary, and a revolutionary artiste.
- Screen Saviour - Diva also occasionally carries a dose or so (never more than three) of this little beauty: a Cybertronian hallucinogen of sorts, though it is fairly weak and only affects the visual spectrum. It is likely a simple virus or meme: all it seems to do is replace the affected bot's vision with strange illusions of dancing lines, rippling windows, spinning mazes, bizarre messages repeating endlessly, gigantic slow-motion aquariums and flying toasters... Some believe it has mystical significance, perhaps harking back to some message from Primus Himself, encoded in the first Transformers. Diva just thinks they're kind of pretty. Injected into an opponent in the middle of a fight, however, it makes a dandy distraction, though all it takes to dispel these waking dreams is one good, solid, jarring blow. Of course, sometimes that's all Diva needs. Each dose resembles a railroad spike, and is sharp enough to penetrate even very heavy armour with relative ease. Why even these disposable injectors appear to be weapons, when the drug can just as easily be jacked into any diagnostic port, is another good question, but not one that Diva ever asks.
History
Diva was, and is, Cybertronian aristocracy, every inch bought and paid for by Warlord Hailfire. Brought online as a Predacon officer some fifty-odd stellar cycles ago, Diva quickly discovered his innate talents as a soldier, as well as a liking for the finer things in life. She was involved on any number of missions, a few quite pivotal in the crux of battle in pre-Pax G2 Cybertron, and eventually made her way to considerable rank for her young years. She was subsequently cloistered in the broodhalls of Darkmount, plotting the Predacons' gradual resumption of power, though she was never quite enthralled by the idea. She would eventually desert altogether, going freelance for some time, and aiding in the liberation of several planets from tyranny, gaining something of a reputation in the process. The reasons for this are unclear, but it seems likely that large sums of money were shifted. Where that money went and why he later rejoined a Predacon army of a sort is unknown, but it is possible that coercion may have been involved. Someone may be holding a threat over Diva's pretty little head-- either that, or dangling a fair-sized carrot in front of him. Or her. Whatever.
Growing bored of the military lifestyle, if you could call it that, Diva left active service a second time, though under a more auspicious cloud this time - and retired to the Hailfire Cathedral, to plot and scheme for power with or against his brother and sister nobles. Growing equally bored of that in short order, and rapidly becoming disillusioned with the entire system she had long upheld (well, long for him - okay, twelve stellar cycles), Diva struck out on her own...taking his longtime manservant and lackey, of course.
...Struck out, and immediately hit a home run! (If there is one thing Diva does not understand, it is most certainly sports.) This was her Blue Period, the emotional rollercoaster ride of the budding artiste, which spawned what are considered to be his best and most influential works, when she was riding high in the public eye...followed by a spiraling, inevitable collapse into despondency and reliance on substances bought with royalties and enjoyed in the comfort and relative safety of Daddy's ancestral manse. Then, later, a subsequent phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes...! Or a murder-suicide. One of those.
Unless... Unless he is able to reinvent herself yet again, this time (she thinks) as a political icon, the beating heart and pretty face of a revolution!
But still. She may be getting ahead of himself. Right now, he's just another albeit unbearably stylish spectator at a rather illegal bloodsport event in a bar belonging to some fossilized joke of Decepticon whom Diva nonetheless seems to remember from her preprogrammed lessons in dreary military history.
