Emanon
From Axalon RPG
Contents |
Basic Info
- Played By: Catifsh
- Aliases: Rat, Rat-boy, Nonny, Subject 7713
- Faction: Predacon
- Type: Beast Warrior
- Beast Mode: Rat
- Size: Medium 7 ft
- Gender: Male
- Primary Function: Stealth Operative
- Secondary Function: Musician
- Theme Song: “You Get What You Give” – New Radicals
Quotes
“What are you?”
“Emanon,” Emanon said. “Um, rat. Transformer. Robot. Me.”
“You’re the babysitter?”
“Well, assistant babysitter,” Emanon said. “And a professional victim of circumstance. Emanon.”
“There are usually swords all AROUND me,” Emanon grumbled, pawing through the closet. “I usually can’t turn around without bumping into a sword. Why can’t I find one now?”
“Not actually no, not, noing not no likely not no no not no,”
(On meeting Sphinx.)
“We were put in the same cell in a Maximal brig. I don’t think either of us meet a lot of people normally. It’s all guys who happen to jump behind the same piece of cover while something’s exploding or duck into the same alley. Me at least. She meets people while hitting them with swords.”
“That’s right.” Emanon craned his head back to look at Sphinx. “I’m just an innocent bystander she’s victimizing for her amusement.”
“Nonsense. I am victimizing you for entirely practical purposes.”
“Oh. That’s fine then.”
Statistics
- Strength: 7
- Stamina: 7
- Emanon doesn’t have a lot of armor, but he can take a lot of damage before going down. His body’s adapted to his lifestyle; he absorbs damage like a sponge and keeps getting up. He doesn’t always work properly, but he keeps moving. It’s half this and half his
- Speed: 10
- Skill: 9
- Firepower: 4
- Aim: 10
- I’m taking Aim to mean coordination as well, since otherwise it’s borderline useless to non-gun-toting characters. Emanon is very fast and very precise. He can sprint along wires and keep his balance on flagpoles during earthquakes.
- Intelligence: 7
- Discipline: 10
- Luck: 4
Skills
Combat
- Melee Weapon: Claws
- Melee Weapon: Staff
Non-Combat
- Athletics: Acrobatics
- Emanon has to move a lot and has gotten very good at it. He likes cities because they have lots of protruding bits that he can jump to and swing off of.
- Music: Saxophone, Singing, Composition
- Emanon loves music. He used to play saxophone, but he found it hard hanging on to an object, so he’s taken up singing. He has soft, clear singing voice that sounds very different from the one he speaks with. It loses a lot of tension. He’s recently started trying to make his own music and songs and considers him self pretty good, though he shares what he creates with no one. Except sometimes Riff.
- Security
- Emanon can pick locks with his claws. He can do handcuffs, doors, and even cars, though once he’s hotwired them he doesn’t actually know how to drive them.
- Piloting: Deep Space
- Emanon learned to pilot a space ship by trial and error. He’s passable, good even, when he’s being chased. His landings need work, though.
- Awareness
- Endurance
- Stealth
Physical Description
Beast Mode
Emanon is a three foot long black rat. He’s long and thin and doesn’t like a normal rat. His movements are very fluid, like a skunk’s. He looks like a black dollop of water going down a wall when he runs. He usually looks dingy.
Robot Mode
In robot mode, Emanon looks like a giant humanoid rat. He keeps his Beast Mode head, which gives him binocular vision. He’s hard to sneak up on and often turns his head to get a better look at people. He lacks conventional features, but his whiskers and ears are very expressive and after spending a little time with him it’s easy to figure out what his face says he’s feeling. The learning curve is a little steeper for transformers with no beast mode and non-existent for other rodents.
Emanon’s body is a patchwork of black fur and black metal. It’s hard to tell the difference between the metal and organic since the metal isn’t shiny and his fur is flat. He is thin and long. His feet are taken from his beast mode and since rats don’t have heels he naturally stands on his tiptoes. His legs taper back slightly before coming forward to knee joints, forming a Z shape. He has a long, pink rat tail, capable of picking small objects up and manipulating them, like a third arm with one finger.
Sometimes, arcs of green energy leap over his body.
Personality
Emanon is kind. He is not nice. Being nice is being polite. It is following a code of conduct because society tells you that’s the right thing to do. Emanon does good things because his soul moves him to. He is instinctively good. He cares about people so much it hurts. He’s a compulsive idealist. For years he tried to be a cynic in a vain effort to stop the pain, to callous over the grief and concern and stop loving people so easily and hurting so much every time they got killed or left. He wanted to be as cold and as numb as everyone around him seemed to be. It didn’t work.
So now, Emanon is learning to approach life in a new way. He’s balancing his survival instincts with his impulses to help people. He’s figuring out where he stands and what he can do and what he should do. For the first time in his life he’s making choices about where he wants to go, instead of letting life drag him along. He’s not sure what he wants to do, but it’s exciting to be able to decide.
Emanon tends to run away from conflict. He is not afraid of pain or death, in fact he faces them with the serenity of someone who knows nothing worse can happen to him than what already has. He just dislikes fighting and will always take the path that will get the fewest people killed. He only submits to it when cornered or when other people’s lives depend on it.
Emanon doesn’t respond to straight pain. He’s been hurt so much, so often, and by such experts, it’s stopped affecting him. Only truly skilled torturers willing to invest vast amounts of time in the project can make him respond. He does, however, become very agitated when sexuality is mixed with pain. It reminds him of his time with Scalene and terrifies him. Women, in general, make Emanon nervous. He stays calm by ignoring gender entirely. This can make him tactless.
Emanon loves making music. Listening to it is fun too, but making it is best. He’s deeply creative, and that medium is his favorite vent. It’s an entirely private thing, done for himself and never to perform. He becomes embarrassed when people discover him singing or playing the saxophone.
Equipment
None.
Traits
- Spark Infection
- The Viridae or “Pot Luck Virus” was artificially developed for the purpose of testing Emanon’s enhanced immune system. It infects the victim with random symptoms, from convolutions to sore throats, until it hits a deadly symptom and the subject dies. Viridae is hard to cure because it can adapt to and infect any part of the body as it flees from incoming white blood cells. It can even digitize itself and cause computer errors. Cells infected by this disease glow green—a mark the scientists used while studying it.
- Emanon is not infected with the Viridae. He is it. The virus inhabits his spark and uses it as a home base for reproducing. Since he essentially is part of the virus he is not affected by the symptoms, but he is open to another danger. The virus replicates itself by infecting cells, which split into more infected cells and eventually the split apart and become many new infected cells. Since Emanon’s immune system doesn’t recognize Viridae as an enemy, it won’t do anything about it. Eventually there wouldn’t be enough non-viral cells left to continue vital life functions and Emanon would and die.
- Emanon needs to regularly eject the virus to keep it from overwhelming him. He usually goes out to some random, abandoned place, drives his claws into the ground, and pumps it out of him until he’s removed all of them but the ones in his spark. He forces the virions (baby viruses) out of the cells they inhabit and then forces them out of his body. He an also just exude Viridae out of his skin and just explode with virus and let the stuff die in the air, but that’s as noticeable as fireworks and dangerous to people around him. Afterward, his virus related abilities are weak for a period.
- If the virus builds up too much Emanon will start glowing like a Christmas light. Eventually, Emanon will collapse and start convulsing on the floor and the virus will overflow and start leaking out of his claws, eyes, mouth and all exposed skin in a stream of green energy. This is dangerous to everyone in the vicinity; the green energy is a chaotic jumble of all Emanon’s virus given powers and can have the affect of any of them.
- Digital Invisibility
- Emanon doesn’t show up on scanners. Or rather, he doesn’t show up as a transformer. Most scanners made by transformers detect spark signatures, and Emanon’s spark is a computer virus, so scanners register it as an error. You can tell Emanon is in a building if its monitoring systems are on the blink.
- Immune System
- Emanon is immune to every kind of disease, physical or digital. His immune system eradicates them all.
- Evasiveness
- Fighting Emanon is a very frustrating ordeal. The rat is an expert at dodging and sidestepping. His normal style of fighting is to duck, dodge and weave around his opponent, evading attacks while covering his enemy with scratches.
Weapons and Special Abilities
- Staff
- A simple, metal staff. Emanon can fight with it, but her really likes using it to turn his surroundings into impromptu jungle gyms.
- Claws
- Five inch long, black, sharp claws. Green electricity runs up and down between them and they glow more brightly then the rest of his body. When in battle Emanon pushes a large amount of the virus into his claws. This makes them light up a bright green. The infected claws don’t cause more damage, but the damage they do cause is very painful. The wounds made with them burn and ache until treated.
- Bite
- Emanon bites his victims to spread his disease. Emanon’s head snaps over like a scorpion tail and make nasty, raking holes in the neck. This ability is the reason he keeps his rat head in robot mode. The bot infected will quickly develop a random symptom of Viridae, which is anything from a cough to spark convulsions.
- Previously, Emanon didn’t like this ability, since he could easily transmit something deadly, and only used it when panicking. But he’s been infected for a very long time and he’s slowly realized that the virus is a part of him, and has learned to flex it like a limb. Now he can determine what symptom he want to infect people with. He has to decide before biting and it takes a bit of concentration to pull together to proper composition of virus for, say, a headache, so he usually sits down before combat to set the disease. It looks like meditation.
- By default, Emanon’s bite causes sleep. He needs to get a nice, sold bite and a few seconds of contact to transmit the virus successfully, but after that his victim will instantly fall unconscious. Large bots take longer to fall asleep and if the virus isn’t properly transmitted, it will only make the victim sleepy. He can also cause paralyzation, blindness, rashes, nausea, chills, swelling, exhaustion, uncontrollable sneezing, coughing, diarrhea, or any other common side effect of an illness.
- This doesn’t work on purely mechanical bots, but since Emanon knows he can infect them with anything deadly, be doesn’t control himself when biting them and they take potluck. They find that a part of their body is malfunctioning, or that their vision is slowly being eaten up by a worm, or data files in their memory have been corrupted. Emanon can also bite machines to infect them with viruses. He can bring computer networks to their knees by sinking his teeth into a hard drive’s shell and just pumping viruses directly into the system.
- Viral Art
- Emanon’s sickness is a part of his spark and he is approaching complete control over it. He can push it to any part of his body or trap it in his spark to be normal for a while, but if he does this for too long his spark explodes. He can also push it out of his body. The virus dies quickly when away from a host, but Emanon can create temporary lightshows of dancing green energy with his claws, leave glowing green footprints, or juggle with tiny green balls. He needs to have contact with these green objects to give them form and control their motions, but that contact can be as slight as a slender, barely noticeable green string. Objects made of viral energy are not solid and tend to spark and arch like electricity. If you touch them, you get a jolt like touching an exposed wire, and they tend to leave pale malaise in their wake that passed quickly. Emanon usually utilizes this for prestidigitation and illustrating points.
History
Emanon started his life as a lab rat. Scientists installed new, virus fighting software on him and injected him with diseases and watched him fight them off. It’s where he laid the foundations for his amazing tolerance for pain and ability to survive. Eventually, they found a virus that managed to elude the new software by merging with his spark and becoming part of him. They went back to the drawing board to revamp the design and Emanon managed to escape before they killed him by taking risks he wouldn’t normally and overloading machinery with shots of viral energy.
He spent the next twenty years on the run from hit men hired to put down the escaped, deadly-plague-carrying rat. He spent most of his time off Cybertron on obscure planets, trying to survive and hide. Unfortunately, he was compulsively noble and had a habit of landing himself in dangerous situations when he tried to help things. This attracted attention and then he had to leave planet.
Finally, he was captured while stowing away on a Maximal battleship. They didn’t know what he was, so they didn’t kill him, just threw him in the brig. It was the most peaceful time of his life and he decided he quite liked being in jail. Eventually, he became cellmates with Sphinx, a sadomasochist who firmly believed that death was the best thing that could possibly happen to a bot. She tried to kill him a few times, but the Maximals always stopped her, so she eventually settled down and they played twenty questions to pass the time.
They were broken out by a young human girl, and they spent a few years working for her with five other Predacon mercenary runaways. During this time, they pulled a job to have Emanon’s death warrant removed by faking his death.
That made Emanon’s life easier, but by no means easy. He still had an irritating habit of getting himself in trouble no matter how hard he tried not to, which was how he ended up beat up and unconscious in an alley after rescuing a girl from a rhinoceros three times his size. He was found by an interesting psychotic named Scalene who carried him back to her apartment, fixed him up, then trapped him there and tortured him for a month.
Scalene was a brilliant maniac who fucked with peoples minds because it was the most interesting thing to do. Emanon fascinated her. He was so sweet and kind and naïve, even through his rough life. She wanted to see if she could break him. Make a bitter, bastard out of something so noble. Sphinx rescued him before she managed to do that, but Scalene left emotional scars like furrows through his mind.
This event brought on Emanon’s depressed phase, where he was cold and distant because he was tired of being hurt. He was tried of feeling. He tried to switch his emotions off. He avoided his friends because they made him feel. He wanted to be like Sphinx, who was always comfortable and never bothered. Life just hurt too much.
But his nature wouldn’t let him rest and just when he though when he was safe and calloused, care would tear through and he would hurt all over again. He ran away from Cybertron and mainstream transformer society. He ended up on the Rock with a group of Predacons and Maximals. The events there happened in game on the Ultimate Board.
He made two new friends: Threateners, a somewhat pathetic, wisecracking dragonfly, and Dendrite, a similarly moral and muted frog who had grown up in isolation. The three friends stuck together and weathered the strange happenings on the Rock.
The strange events included many fights with the Maximals, encounters with Aliens, the discovery of a religious group of slavers that kidnapped Emanon and tried to evolve him into a higher life form, an excursion into subspace where Emanon meet a good version of himself and an evil version of himself (Alastor), and the slow beginning or a relationship with Riff, a raven with a foul mouth and a punk attitude.
They were led off of the Rock by Ravon, a cynical raven who Emanon can’t stand, and they escaped in a Maximal vessel called the Storm’s Eye II. Emanon spent time on the ship thinking over his life and experimenting with ways to control his virus.
Known Aquaintances
Name: Sphinx
Beast Mode: Siamese/Parrot fuzor
Status: Functional
Relationship: Sphinx is, as Emanon and possibly only Emanon understands it, going through some issues right now. She’s having trouble deciding whether killing people is a bad thing. Emanon says she’s trying to find herself. Sphinx says she knows exactly where she is, she just does not entirely understand the ramifications of that. Emanon says he was speaking metaphorically. Sphinx says she wishes he’d stop doing that. They enjoy each other.
Name: Scalene
Beast Mode: Leopard/Spider Fuzor
Status: Functional
Relationship: Emanon fascinates Scalene. She kind of wants to finish what she started. Scalene terrifies Emanon.
Name: Threatener
Beast Mode: Dragonfly
Status: Functional
Relationship: Threatener was a friend Emanon had during his depressed period. Concern for the dragonfly helped him get over it, as did a desire not to be like the dragonfly.
Name: Dendrite
Beast Mode: Frog
Status: Functional
Relationship: Another friend from Emanon’s depressed period. Dendrite reminded Emanon of himself, quiet, but with morals.
Name: Riff
Beast Mode: Raven
Status: Functional
Relationship: Dating. Slowly.
