Kraken
From Axalon RPG
Contents |
Basic Info
- Aliases: Cranky, Crackerjack, Leviathan
- Faction: Predacon
- Rank: Warlord of the Mob Profunda
- Primary Function: Heavy Assault
- Secondary Function: Deep Sea Recon
- Type: Transmetal (giant squid/submarine)
- Size: X-Large
- Gender: X-Male
- Theme Music: Creaking, claustrophobic noise, like you'd find at the bottom of an ocean liner, or crashing heavy metal with indistinct screaming vocals. See also Queens of the Stone Age – Six Shooter, Gorillaz - Punk.
- Voice Actor: Christopher Lloyd(?)
Statistics
- Strength: 10
- Stamina: 10
- Speed: 6
- Skill: 3
- Firepower: 10
- Aim: 7
- Intelligence: 5
- Discipline: 7
- Luck: s’got nothing to do with it.
Skills
- Heavy Weapons
- Autofire Weapons
- Gunnery
- Shiphandling: Astral, Aquatic
- Survival
- Squad Tactics
Noted Quotes
“Less talk, more KILL.”
("Are you afraid to die?") “Fear is WEAKNESS. The weak do not DESERVE life.”
Appearance
Robot Mode
Kraken is *built*, no two ways about it. As if standing thirteen feet at the shoulder wasn't bad enough, he's broad, with the heavy kind of musculature that no human has ever had. His arms are as thick as his legs, which rival good-sized tree-trunks and dwarf the average telegraph pole. He has transmetal pecs and abs spread across a chest about as wide as the front end of a Cadillac, and which is only slightly shorter in cross-section. He has a slightly tapered waist, but not by much. It's more noticeable from the side.
His heavily armoured superstructure has many swoops and points, overlapping like the shell of a crab. His joints are prominent and have a highly mechanical look to them, visibly interlocking and reinforced by redundant external pistons and servoes. His shoulder-plates are enormous, extending straight up and comprised of his squid mode's huge staring eyes and smooth, pointed head. Crusty barnacles sprinkle his upper chest and back, even along the mass of ten thick transmetal tentacles that sprout between his shoulders, dotted with magnetic suckers and small spikes. Kraken looks old and worn, not shiny like most transmetals, his thick armour pitted and warped from many war wounds that have never seen the inside of a C/R vat.
Kraken is primarily blue across his chest, shoulders and thighs, and red on his gauntlets, feet, back and midsection. He has faded yellow lightning on his shoulders and feet, and traces of blue-green that wash all over his body.
He has a disproportionately short, thick neck and smallish head that hunches forward slightly. His light blue face is dominated by baleful, glaring yellow optics, pushed up directly below a bone-white helmet plate shaped like a stingray. Purple ridges like gills ripple along the sides of gaunt "cheeks". Kraken has no nose and instead of a mouth he has an irising multi-part siphon, also yellow but much duller than his eyes. Hoses and pipes run out the sides of his head and into his neck.
Beast Mode
Kraken's squid mode is still massive, but looks deceptively small by comparison to his robot mode. Its main colour is blue with a red blotch at the top of its arrow shaped head, greenish-silver tentacles and a purple beak. Its saucer-sized eyes are amber with bloody red specks in the irids.
Kraken moves heavily and sulkily, but not slowly. Kraken seems anything but lazy. He's never at ease, although he's never really at attention. Kraken's not a soldier so much as he is a predator, always poised and ready to attack. His fists clench and unclench readily (when they aren't occupied by his guns, which isn't often) and his tentacles snarl and unknot themselves, looking frustrated that they aren't actively tearing enemies limb from limb. Which is sadly, far too often, since most enemies these days require Kraken to keep his gatling laser close at hand.
His voice varies between a low, hissing rasp and a loud, grating screech that he uses for emphasis on certain WORDS.
Third Mode
A submarine. (To be completed.)
Personality
Kraken is filled with rage and hatred, to the point where anger becomes meaningless. Anger is his neutral state, the fundamental level from which he interacts. He does not allow his anger to control him, or if he does, it controls him so consistently as to make no difference to outsiders. He never stops being angry and nothing ever makes him happy, at least not in the sense of the normal conception of happiness. He has no friends and needs none.
In the words of a wise man (okay, okay, it's Psyckogod), "If he were a statuette, he'd be standing on a pedestal, holding his arms out wide, and the pedestal would read: 'I hate you THIS much'."
You might colour Kraken as a dumbed-down Nietzchean. He believes in survival of the fittest, that the strong should dominate and the weak deserve to be crushed. He does not believe that violence is the only way to solve problems, but he believes it is the best way, the way of the strong. There is weakness inherent in kindness, politeness, affection, and basic humanity. Love is a lie. These seem to him to be manipulations to trick others into doing your bidding. Kraken despises manipulations and lies of all kinds, which unfortunately run rampant in Predacon ranks, further justifying his general hatred for the system and fueling his malaise of loathing and fury.
Kraken hates his onetime commander, Mandate, but Mandate always took this in stride, since Kraken seems to hate everyone. Mandate has in fact come to truly represent everything Kraken hates, and Kraken would kill the commander if he thought A) that he could get away with it, and B) only if the commander no longer served a purpose. Much though he hates to admit it, Kraken relies on Mandate’s superior intellect to coordinate battle plans. Contrary to making Kraken grateful, this makes him even more resentful, since Mandate is the one who has led him into his current straits.
He detests so-called civilization, overly fraught with needless complications. He sees no value in it and yearns to destroy it all, to return to a simpler life – nasty, brutish and short, as nature intended. If it were within his power, Kraken would see all Cybertronians, and in fact all technology, banished from the universe. If he could retreat to a world where he was the only power, where he was not only strong but unchallenged, then there he would live out his days contentedly. Kraken cares for no one but himself. He does not long for love or companionship of any kind. All he really wants in the universe is an open ocean to dominate, and the nourishment to survive.
Kraken is a simple creature, but he is not stupid. He lacks book-learning but makes up for it in animal cunning. Kraken can be endlessly patient, though naturally it angers him to do so. He has an unusual ability to remain perfectly still for days or weeks on end, sometimes longer, yet returns to full functioning in an instant. Like his legendary namesake, he waits, sleepwalking through life, waiting for those times of destruction when his rage can at last go unfettered.
If he must die, then at least let it be in battle. Let it be in a lake of blood and mech-fluid. Let them lie broken underneath him. If he may not have his one desire, let his death be at the end of all things. Let none other have their wish if he cannot.
Armament
- Gatling Laser-
This powerful weapon rarely leaves Kraken’s grasp. Six smoking barrels fire blazing laser-death at a rate of several thousand per minute. It does not require reloading, running off Kraken’s own internal power via cables running up his arm. Because of his immense strength, Kraken has very fine control over the weapon. He could paint his name on the wall, though the assumption goes that he would not know how to spell it. This assumption is actually wrong, but a wise man wouldn’t ask Kraken to prove it.
- Hydrocannon-
Although a double-handed weapon in the hands of most others, Kraken has the strength, size and leverage to hold it in one massive fist. In one mode, it fires massive forceful streams that knock foes down with fire-hose effect. In its secondary mode, a water-based railgun, the water molecules are super-accelerated and separate into hydrogen and oxygen, creating an explosive reaction. As with himself, Kraken’s arsenal has a tendency to overheat. The cannon rests on his back while not in use.
- Torpedoes-
They are painted to resemble sharks, with eyes, teeth, gills and three rear fins. Two modes: Hammerheads explode on impact like an ordinary torpedo, usable only in vehicle mode and underwater; Hooks impale the enemy and inflict prolonged agony, and can also be fired from shoulder launchers in robot mode.
- Diffusion Ink-
Caustic, blinds optics and sensors, highly sticky in open air, spreads out in a flash underwater; works in all modes.
- Trait: Waterlogged-
Having Kraken around is like having one giant canteen, or water cooler, or aquarium, or hot tub. He contains a volume of seawater equivalent to his own mass within a subspace pocket. His systems are capable of filtering pure water out of chlorinated and salt water. He can also perform the same procedure in reverse. Either way, this only takes a few moments.
History
All Kraken ever wanted was to be a god. A humble wish, to be sure.
Millennia before the Ark arrived on Earth, Kraken came online on a remote alien world, with no idea of who or what he was. He awakened at the bottom of the ocean as a titanic metal squid, and subsequently terrorized the primitive land-dwellers of that world. As the ages passed, they came to revere the furious sea monster as a patron deity, the way volcanoes are sometimes worshipped. The beast was to be appeased by offerings, and as Kraken came to realize that the people feared him, and eventually to see that they worshipped him in some way, he came to accept his place as their holy destroyer.
Then the others came. Other giants, made of metal like himself, though still much smaller. Through mass tactics, stealth and ambush, they eventually captured him, forcing Kraken to accept the fact that he was not a god, but instead, a [[[Decepticon]] triple-changer: squid, submarine-ship and robot; and he was needed in the War. Needless to say, this was nothing but a disappointment to Kraken. At first he resisted, but he could not hold off the giants for long, and he was too huge to hide among the deeps. They took him out of his home. They robbed the indigenous tribes of their god. They stripped him of his divinity, his unadulterated savagery, and they made him a slave.
Kraken was rehabilitated, as far as Decepticons are interested in such things; he learned how to use guns instead of raw force, and then he was made to fight in the endless wars of Cybertron. Resentment festered. His hatred grew, but he did as he was told. There was no escape for Kraken, and he hoped for nothing. His only concern was survival.
And the centuries drained away like rain into an ocean.
Until came the day when Kraken escaped, and fled, hoping to shake off the shackles that had bound him for so long. He took a ship and flew as fast and as far as he could. And so Kraken eventually came to the backwater of Earth, at the height of the dominance for the tyrant lizards. He was ignorant of the Autobot Ark, but eager for a planet to conquer. Knowing as we do how things worked out with the Ark, it becomes a question of what happened to Kraken for the duration.
As it turned out, he had come to Earth, but was not alone. He had been followed, by others who would have the enormous marine triple-changer for their own. It was really just as well when the meteor struck.
Kraken survived, but not unscathed. The damage he took plunged him into stasis lock for aeons to come.
He was discovered in present-day Norway near the beginning of the first millennium AD, half-exhumed in a glacier. The Norsemen wondered if he might be some manner of frost giant, and the matter faded into legend as that glacier broke off for a bit of world-traveling as an iceberg. His eventual, and somewhat miraculous, arrival on the shores of a small island in Polynesia prompted no small alarm. How he was revived was always something of a mystery. It had to have been the most amazing coincidence to have a human having clapped eyes on energon then somehow stumbling upon how to replenish Kraken's fuel supply. The world may never know; Kraken certainly doesn’t, and nor does he much care. Kraken was always a little cranky when he wakes up/any time, and any human would have had no chance against a monstrosity such as he.
Weakened by his inability to locate much useful energon on his own, a greatly diminished Kraken explored his new home in secret, scrounging what little fuel he came upon, terrorizing small island tribes, razing port towns and harassing trade routes, as well as fighting Vikings and Cossacks and Mongol Hordes. He ventured, on sporadic occasions, onto land, and left footprints across the Russian Steppes, in the Sahara and the Himalayas - but this was no Yeti, for at this time Kraken was vastly larger than he is today. He left no witnesses alive if he could help it, so that none would regard his presence with much suspicion. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Kraken sensed danger, and eventually made his way to Antarctica, concealing himself below the ice shelves for some three-hundred years, with only penguins for company.
He was discovered, and to his great surprise, subdued by human soldiers in the year 1928, and held in secret for inspection by one Adolf Hitler. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Interestingly enough, Kraken wasn't actually named Kraken until his rediscovery in the 20th Century, but it's possible that, in fact, Kraken may be part of the inspiration for the "mythical" beast for which he was named. Up until this point his fellow Decepticons didn't consider him worth naming, and he had never spent enough time around humans to have any one consistent moniker.
After changing hands, from the Axis to the Allies to the Soviets in the space of twenty short years, Kraken found himself first refitted as a Nazi U-boat fighting in what he considered a paltry, pathetic war, then he came very close to being a role model and mascot for the US Army, then he was mothballed and hidden in a hangar in remote Siberia, held in reserve as a secret weapon by a communist Russia that worried about escalating things with an America that their spies had suggested was constructing multiple one-man humanoid fighting machines...
Kraken waited, under threat of destruction, for decades, through the crumbling of the Soviet Empire, through more than ten years further of hearing nothing, until finally, in the year 200X AD, it was revealed that the Decepticons, had, in fact, conquered the Earth. Whereupon Kraken was brought out of retirement and returned to the fold by a certain rogue general called Vicious.
Time went by. The Great War resumed. Kraken fought, returning at long last, to Cybertron. He hadn't missed it, not really, but it was where the action was, in a way, which was better than Siberia. Kraken fought, achieving some small notoriety for himself. Then, just like that, the War ended. The Pax Cybertronia was signed. The second generation came into full bloom. Kraken was, reluctantly, reformatted. An uneasy peace settled over the planet. And so, with little further ado, Kraken escaped once again.
This time he found a good world, very similar to his first. He wasn't as large as he had been, but he didn't have to be to control one backward alien planet. He had them quickly under his thumb this time, having become a little wiser in the ways by which power is shown and kept. Everything was going swimmingly, until...
The Kismet
Bested by the Predacon commander Mandate in battle, Kraken had little choice other than to join Captain Feint's crew aboard the warship Kismet. It wasn't long before an...accident claimed the good captain, and Mandate took over in his absence. Mandate kept a firm grip over his command, and that included Kraken. Kraken served as loyally as he was able, grudging though it was. He and the crew of the Kismet, including Flare, went through thick and thin, and eventually those left alive came to respect their laconic lieutenant. Mandate and Kraken even bonded a little, when a transwarp meltdown had the unexpected effect of rendering both of them newly Transmetal, which at least for Kraken brought back a few memories of his old G1 submarine mode. That was far from the worst of it, however, but those are each another story.
...which was told, by and large, within the scope of the Ultimate RPG
Kraken, in accordance with his lonely nature, chose to remain hidden beneath the Rock’s ocean depths after the defeat of the Enclave.
