Lightspeed
From Axalon RPG
Contents |
Summary
Transmetal firefly Predacon, affiliated with Predacon Secret Police. Cold, calculating, controlling, world class bitch on wheels. At first glance Lightspeed is your typical femme fatale, but over several years as my flagship character on several RPGs I like to think she's developed a lot more depth than that. Very powerful in all aspects of radio communication and has a lot of knowledge and experience in espionage and covert ops tactics. Typically employs these skills in team enviroments and because of them often assumes a leadership role-- though her recent promotion on Predacon Base RPG is the first time we've seen her with her own command, and her performance thus far has been a bit rocky. We'll see if she manages to settle in to it before someone knocks her off her pedastal.
Basic Info
- Created by: Riboflavin
- Aliases: L
- Faction: Predacon
- Subgroup: Unicron's Mercs
- Function: Communications and Espionage Coordination
- Type: Transmetal
- Beast Mode: Lightning Bug
- Third Mode: Aerospace cruiser
- Gender: Female
- Size: Medium
- Theme Song: "Wish" -Run Lola Run Soundtrack
Statistics
- Strength: 9
- Stamina: 6
- Speed: 10
- Skill: 9
- Aim: 5
- Firepower: 6
- Intelligence: 8
- Discipline: 6
- Luck: 4
Quotes
"We all lead multiple lives. Some of us even do it for a living."
"Pizzykins! Oh, you're so wizzymatic today! Yes you are!"
"Yeah, yeah, giant cannon in my face. My, how you intimidate me with your large phallic device. Now what do you want already?"
Appearance
Beast Mode
A Transmetal lightning bug. A lightning bug, also known as a firefly, is a medium-sized insect with a long abdomen and opaque wing covers. Its most notable feature is that its abdomen has bioluminescence, that is, it can glow. This is used in a mating ritual in early summer, in which the males fly around close to the ground in early evening, blinking and moving in species-specific patterns. The females stay on the ground, blinking back. When a male sees a female with a matching pattern, it files down to mate. The females of some species, however, will mimic the patterns of others, thus attracting males of these other species, which they then eat.
Lightspeed in this mode is completely metallic, and fades at will between two color schemes. In daylight, she is pale yellow, with red along the edges of her various exoskeleton parts. At night, during missions requiring stealth, "red alert" conditions, or just when she feels like it, she is colored a semi-reflective black, save the tip of the abdomen when it is glowing bright yellow (when not glowing, it's also black, is composed of synthflesh).
Third Mode
For powered flight, back of abdomen opens up, and shoots out highly charged hydrogen ions, which propel her to great speeds (In a vacuum, with a power assist, can reach .99 the speed of light, under normal atmospheric conditions tops out at mach 3). Her legs, wings and antennae to minimize air resistance. Wing covers can do the same, or extend outwards as fixed wings to provide lift, and serve as a weapon due to their sharp edges. When flying in this mode, she appears to the stationary observer as a bright yellow streak of light. While her powered flight is far faster than winged flight, it has almost no maneuverability whatsoever, whereas winged flight tops out at about 40mph+wind, but she can turn on a falling dime.
Robot Mode
Like her beast mode, in this mode she fades between pale yellow with red and black lines, and black with glowing yellow highlights between outer plates (replacing the black lines). Under her outer armor plating is a thin layer of bioluminescent synthflesh, which shows in the spaces between plates. Glowing, which would seem to be a waste of energy, is actually quite effiecient. The biolumenescent molecules are exact duplicates of those found in real fireflies, which are some of the most effiecient lighting devices known. Like in beast mode, she can turn on and off her glow- she will blink sometimes, but often keep the glow always on, because she thinks it looks cool. Also, it can be distracting in battle situations, distracting from the outer lines of her body (much like a zebra) so it is difficult to tell how she is moving. Of course, she turns off when she doesn't want to be seen. Glow becomes brighter when she is happy, pulsates softly when she is contented, blinks erratically when she is angry- like facial expressions, she can control this if she wants to. Glowing lies are in complex patterns that seem to suggest an insectoid dressed in Goth or s&m clothing. Especially dense horizontal bands around stomach that suggest abdominal muscles. Similarly, the panels and lines on her arms and upper body suggest musculature, becoming especially fine on the hands, but her legs take on the look more of knee-high boots and fishnet stockings.
6ft, attractive though a bit intimidating femmebot. Body is a bit more robust than BW Season 1-2 Blackarachnia, with a slightly less, um, ample chestplate. Wings and wing covers are on back, like an angel or pixie, and each wing is fused to the wing cover when not being used for flight. Wing covers, quite rigid in beast and third modes, are much more flexible in robot mode. This gives more manuevering room for her arms and beast mode legs, which normally stay curled up behind her, but can unfurl for use as machine-guns, or used as extra appendages. It is clear, from the insect eyes where one would expect ears on a human, and the antennae jutting out from her forehead, that Lightspeed's robot head is derived from her beast mode head. The rest of her transformation, however, is hard to follow- her beast mode abdomen pushes into the thorax, splits, and ends up being curved hips and a pair of very long, attractive legs, and her throrax similarly reshapes itself into a shapely upper body and strong arms. The process, though entirely mechanical, has such small shifts and movements, and takes place so much under the flexible synthflesh layer, that it looks almost like BM morphing. Her face is feminine, cold, and sinister, though she occasionally lets some warmth through with a smile.
Eyes are glowing yellow, and are occasionally expressive, though usually if they are, it's "you are nothing to me." Lips are are black in "day mode", soft glowing yellow in "night mode". No real helmet, it is just suggested by the lines around her face. Lines on brow are in the form of actual eyebrows, which tend to be the most expressive part of her face. She can do that raising one eyebrow thing, and does quite often. Her eyebrow movements are mirrored by the movements of the two antennae on her forehead, and vice versa, so if she is trying to move them into an atypical position, her eyebrows can go into some very odd shapes inadvertantly.
Pictures
I'll link these later.
Skills
Non-Combat
- Communications
- Electronic Warfare
- Espionage
- Stealth
On boards without Pred's skill-limit system, add:
- Strategy
- Flight: Winged, Assisted
Combat
- Melee Weapons: Knives
- Hand-to-Hand Combat
Traits/Abilities
- Flight - Her wings work the same in robot mode as they do in beast mode, though less efficiently. Curled up partway into her body when not flying, so on the ground they reach down to hip level, and flying they go down to her knees. High powered, but not very maneuverable, flight also available. Her skill and training in flight lag far behind her physical abilities in this regard, thus she is fine with using flight to get around, but prefers to stay on the ground in battle.
- Night vision - Ability that was developed to its peak by spy training, also useful because she's nearly nocturnal.
- Radio Transceiver - Her most used ability, in fact almost constantly used. Antennae receive and transmit radio to microwave, glowing portions (eyes included- her eye lasers are also a tight band com device) transmit and receive infrared to gamma ray- between the two she's got the whole electromagnetic spectrum covered. Can transmit and receive up to twenty signals at once. Internalization of system means that she doesn't have to talk to send a message- in fact she will often be saying one thing while radioing three others. Extensive knowledge of communications protocols and encryption ensure that messages she sends only get to the right parties, and messages she overhears usually get translated.
- Lighting - Her glowing portions are usually just for effect and confusion, but she can teach or program others to translate her blinking patterns as binary code, which then, provided they have the right encryption key, translates to a message. This gives her another form of communication, useful for when audio and radio silence are a must.
- Mental Multitasking - Appears to most bots to possess average intelligence, but this is deceiving, as she can easily maintain three or more entirely separate trains of thought at once, making her both a good deceptor, presenting different personalities to different parties at the same time, and a good coordinator, able to receive, process, and transmit large amounts of varying data.
- Close Range Fighting -Impressive strength for a bot of her size (say "for a girl" only if you're in the mood for a trip to the CR chamber), as well as almost unmatched speed. Her martial arts skill is very impressive, specializing in the use of daggers but very well rounded overall. Recently she has been complimenting her repetoire with wrestling moves.
Armament
- Eye Lasers - About the same strength as, say, Dinobot's, (Just about pierces medium armor) but she has a bit more control over them. By focusing or unfocusing her optics she can widen and narrow the beam (from eye width to flashlight) and by blinking repeatedly she can create a rapid-fire, rather than constant beam shot. Rapid-fire (20 shots/sec, 1 mile range) has slightly more powerful shots that do more damage to armor, whereas constant beam (recharge time is same as shot time at max. power, 2 mile range) is less powerful but can get through to a bot's internals. Wide beam is mainly useful for blinding opponents, lighting the way, or signaling. Uses lasers for cutting, heating, lighting, welding, etc. as much or more than she uses them for offense, and also used quite often for focused high frequency transmissions.
- Leg machine-guns - Pretty much the same as BA's and Tarantulas', except there are six of them instead of eight. High rate of fire, but have small bullets. Good for softening up an opponent, or keeping them pinned, but not much stopping power.
- Twin daggers - Two ten inch daggers with micro-serrated edges. Made with your standard super-tough alloy, they can cut through almost anything. Very well crafted and well taken care of, weight is balanced for throwing (though she prefers not to throw for risk of losing one). She prefers to use these, or just punches and kicks, in most situations, saving the lasers and machine-guns for when she's in a large-scale combat situation (which she tends to avoid) or if she's really in a jam or a hurry.
- Bladed wing covers - Edges of wing covers are extremely sharp. In robot mode, the wind covers are flexible and can be whipped around at an opponent. In beast or third mode they are rigid, and extended out to her sides while she flies, quite effective for cutting down a stationary target. Don't cut far below the surface in robot mode, but in other modes can cut, say, a human in half easily if she's got enough speed and a clean shot.
- Interstellar Travel Module - A shell her alternate mode fits inside that provides shielding from the elements and a potentially huge power reserve that she can use to propel herself at near light speed. Includes small versions of most common shuttlecraft systems: life support, sensors, navigation computer, etc. Is a huge power hog and tends to be high maintenance, but she still prefers it to relying on someone else's shuttle. Too large to carry around on missions most of the time, usually stays in her quarters until needed.
- Glow pellets - Small devices that attach to a surface, and wave around plastic wires that contain the biolumenescent compount in Lightspeed's body. Turn off and on by radio command. The point? a cheap decoy, of course. Not especially convincing, especially under decent lighting conditions, but in the dark can get someone's attention for that crucial nanoclick.
- Tracers - Little tiny radio tracking devices she can plant on bots or things. Short range (planetary scale) and long range (galactic scale) versions, but long range ones are somewhat bigger, and put out a strong subspace signal so they can be found more easily. Neither registers on standard scanning techniques, though.
Twin Laser Rapiers
On Predacon Base RPG, the position of mercenary team leader, as opposed to spy, placed her in a lot more open combat, and so Lightspeed has sought to add to her arsenal accordingly. Her most glaring combat weaknesses were a lack of reach with her daggers, which put her at a disadvantage against most other melee weapons, and a total reliance on dodging and agility for defense. With a fighting style that goes into the fray and gets up close and personal, those weaknesses were bound to get her into trouble sooner or later. Convienient, then, that the DTC's gifts to Unicron's Mercs included a pair of laser rapiers.
Theses swords are actually much closer in design to the Chinese [Jian] than a European [rapier]. At five feet long the blades are much longer than either Earth analogue, but since energy blades are weightless the weapons can be handled with even greater swiftness. The hilt has a small T gaurd and they can be used for slashing as well as thrusting attacks. Like a Star Wars lightsabre, the blade is activated from the hilt. The swords have two modes: Laser and Force Field. The modes are for pure offense and defense, respecitively. Switching between modes requires deactivating one blade and activating the other, which takes about 1.5 seconds and renders the weapon nearly useless in the interim.
Laser mode is about what you would expect: a concentrated cutting laser beam blade, yellow in color. It behaves like a normal laser, in that if it can't cut through something it offers no resistance. The object simply blocks the beam as the blade swings by it. Still, lasers can cut through a lot of things, and if the weapon thrusts rather than slashes it delivers a high powered, focused beam akin to being shot at close range by a powerful, focused laser rifle. Many bots are shielded well against energy weapons though, as is nearly every Cybertronian melee weapon. Laser mode cannot parry any other weapon, nor can it be parried in the traditional sense, but it can be blocked.
Force Field mode, on the other hand, is almost purely for blocking and parrying. It produces a slightly wider, translucent blue force field blade. The force field is very strong and can absorb large amounts of force, such that it can repel the blow of much stronger foes with heavier weapons. It is still a very slim blade however, which can limit its usefulness. It can stop most weapons fire, but you have to be incredibly good at catching to do so. Calling it a blade is a misnomer, actually, because it has no sharp edges, and due to its high shock absorbancy getting hit by it feels like a Nerf bat.
If you read the [Wikipedia Jian] article, you'll notice they mention many times how much skill and dexterity the weapon takes to use. Lightspeed has the dexterity, some swordsmanship training and a lot of carried over skill from her dagger and hand to hand specialties, but she's new with this weapon and so is not nearly an expert with it. She is still a lot better and more comfortable with her daggers, so the swords are largely situational.
Personality
Secretive, as befits a manipulative espionage agent. Usually trustworthy, however, especially if she is committed to a cause. Will make this commitment obvious to those she wants to know. Tends to think practically and strategically, not through an emotional or ideological lens. Information gathering and integrating are her specialties, and she applies this careful, logical, surreptitious approach in all aspects of her life. This tends to make her look like she's "on the fence" a lot, but this apparent indecision, and sometimes outright insubordination in words, is usually counterbalanced by decisive and reliable action. Reacts to adversity with coolness and composure, simultaneously showing a professionalism and a gift for understatement, sarcasm, and dry wit. Violence doesn't really have any emotional effect on her, it's just a part of life (a very large part). Will kill without mercy, but not without reason. Still feels fairly young, though she's been around for a while, mainly because her life has taken many detours, and though she is a high level Secret Police operative, she still feels like an apprentice, as she has reached a level of skill that has just revealed to her how far she has to go to become a master. Can be a little full of herself, however, especially around those she sees as incompetant and Prism (more on him later). She is ambitious in this regard, always wanting more power, but she gains power through perfection of and good use of her skills, not scheming or skidplate kissing. If she sees a peer getting ahead by this methods, she will quickly take it upon herself to put them in their place. Holds Soundwave as the model for her professional life, aspiring to essentially the same role and position, but she likes to think she's a bit more crasamatic than he was. Though dark, she tries to maintain good relations with most bots, other than those she considers contemptible and useless, partially because she's got some goodness deep down, but mostly because its useful for manipulation and gathering information. She has many good acquaintances, but few close friends, and even those she tends to keep at a distance. Her enemies often don't suspect her until its too late, and by that time, she's arranged a slow, painful death for them where no one can hear their screams. For those wondering, yes, she is somewhat of a sadist, prefers rough sex, and has sortof a dominatrix thing going on. Those last two points, however, are not often seen in her, unless she is interrogating, torturing, or with the subject of the next paragraph. In fact, the Predacon board is the only time and place where those things are confirmed to be a large part of her psyche. In other times and places we have seen her, her hormones are much more subdued, and she seems to have a mild attraction for strong leader types, though the dominatix thing is definitely still there. There have even been lesbian undertones now and again, but she will flatly deny this, attributing any such thing to the sick male minds of her writers and readers.
Now, ahem, a note on Prism. Prism, on the Pred board (and in the past on the Vehicon board), is her boyfriend, lover, scapegoat, sex toy, annoyance, verbal sparring partner, and property (she can even produce a copy of the deed. Prism, however, will contest its validity, and rip it up, and then get annoyed when he is told it is only a copy). She talks to him in insults, dirty talk, and cutesy talk almost exculsively, and refers to him as "Prizzy", "Prizzykins", "Prizzy-wizzy", "Prizzy-snookums", and a few other pet names. This, of course, annoys him to no end. She doesn't like him at all as a person, but enjoys using him, particularly for sex, which, by the way, is magnificent. Something about having the same beast mode, perhaps. Independent observers have stated (though not within hearing of either firefly, on fear of death or worse) that Prism and Lightspeed's relationship, while obviously dysfunctional, has begun to grow some emotional depth, having dependency, or perhaps, dare we say it, love. Fourth wall and temporal continuum breaking sources indicate that at some point in the future they will have at least a common law marraige, and a whole buttload of kids. Tell them this, though, and.. just don't tell them, ok?
History
Began life as a typical Predacon bandit and mercenary, serving as a crew member on various pirate ships and such. Then accidentally ran across the body of the an ancient Decepticon, a spy, by the looks of it, in stasis lock- or so she thought. He suddenly came alive, plugged a device into her head, and then died. The device transferred his memories to her, a sort of immortality plan that didn't quite work, as her original personality and memories remained. The implanted memories only served to turn her insane for many years, until she was picked up by the Predacon Secret Police for destroying three Maximal bars in one night on Cybertron. She was locked away in solitary until somehow some high ranking former Decepticons became aware and intrigued by her condition. Through programming and psychology they and a team of doctors were able to get her to purge most of her implanted memories and reform her identity. Meanwhile it was becoming increasingly clear that she was great Secret Police material. Whether the encounter with the Decepticon spy had anything to do with these newly apparent skills, not even she was certain. She enrolled, and became the superior among her peers in most aspects of training, the virtual protégé of more than one experienced agent. She worked her way up the ranks, though she was far more intent on sharpening her skills than political advancement. She simply secured her place by killing anyone of inferior skill that outpoliticked her (completely acceptable in the PSP organization, so long as no evidence could be found and it wasn't a "time of emergency").
--At this point, Ultimate Board Lightspeed's history diverts. She was not given the following mission, and instead later after turning TM was given a really boring routine mission that happened to get her sucked into a wormhole and spit out near the Rock.--
One of her missions involved gleaning information from a Predacon that recently turned up on an outlying colony, stark raving mad. Though she could have gotten things out of his cpu about the activities of certain members of the band of thieves he was formerly a member of by conventional torture and interrogation methods, she took pity on the guy. He reminded her of herself as she had once been. Also, he was hot. She weaned him back to sanity, and slowly discovered just what an egotisitcal nutcase Prism really was. Also, how fun and easy to mentally torture and manipulate, and how absolutely fabulous in bed. She quickly engineered a "relationship" for the two of them, which consisted of him doing whatever she wanted, whether he knew it or not. Prism, not a total fool, tried to get out several times, finally succeeding with an elaborate scheme that totally failed to fool Lightspeed for more than a day or so. Still, that was enough time for him to skip the planet.
Lightspeed's attempts to track Prism got less and less fervent, and she went back to work. Upon reaching Lieutenant 1st Class she was upgraded to a Transmetal body, and was given some choices for a new assignment. One of them happened to be a spot under Unicron's command. Not only was Lightspeed getting tired of the growing do-nothingism of the PSP, a little research on Unicron's crew revealed it to contain Prism! The choice was delightfully obvious, now all she had to do was pick the absolute most annoying time to show up.
Future (Lightspawn and Vehicon)
Lightspeed and Prism may or may not have about a dozen kids known as the Lightspawn, which they train into a black ops mercenary team. It is not known whether the Vehicon Board and Predacon board universes are identical, but the Lightspeeds on both are definitely one and the same. At the beginning of the Beast Machines age she was on Cybertron, and reformatted into a technorganic. She formed a weak alliance with the Vehicon Cyberscream, then escaped the Apocalpyse Storm by stowing away on a Vehicon shuttle- a gambit that resulted in her capture, then re-creation as a Vehicon cassette player and hovercar with Ravage, Laserbeak, and Frenzy (the original G1 cons, now back in bodies closely resembling their G1 selves) as her cassettes. Ravage and Laserbeak, it is worth noting, were two of her mentors in her early PSP days.
Incarnations
Lightspeed has been introduced, in various forms, on like, every TF board, including:
- Predacon Base RPG - Most of the above bio pertains most directly to this board
- Axalon Underground RPG - Here Lightspeed is only a year or two out of the PSP academy, working as a legal secretary as cover. Alternate universe from any other board.
- Ultimate RPG - Totally seperate universe from Pred, at least as far as Lightspeed is concerned, but near identical early history (see above)
- Vehicon RPG - More or less Pred Base Lightspeed, a few hundred years later on.
- Terra Mechanica - Luthanye, alternate universe version, very different in history and appearance. Blacksmith turned Rogue.
- Dark Matter - Echo, physically and mentally broken much older Lightspeed from the Cybertronian Alpha RPG universe.
- Lightspawn - Not an RPG, but a series of stories and interlinkages dealing with the very large family that she and Prism presumably start sometime in the future of Predacon Base.
