Alquist One
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
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| Departing the human to become humane | |
| Alquist One | |
| Player: Synthozoic | |
| Origin: | Technology |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Mastermind |
| Threat Level: | 34 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Intentionally lost |
| Known Aliases: | A-1, Al, Alquist, Alquist 1 |
| Species: | Construct |
| Age: | 3 years as a robot, 26 as a human |
| Height: | Varies depending on body. |
| Weight: | Varies depending on body. |
| Eye Color: | Varies depending on body. |
| Hair Color: | None. |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | Praetorian |
| Occupation: | roboticist, superhero |
| Place of Birth: | Neutropolis |
| Base of Operations: | Paragon City |
| Marital Status: | single and not interested. |
| Known Relatives: | In his current life none. |
| Known Powers | |
| Robots, trick arrow (Played as a special grenade launcher.) | |
| Known Abilities | |
| ' | |
| Equipment | |
| 10 robots of various types, 3 robot bodies, a full machine shop and a decent server closet. More gadgets than the human mind can comfortably conceive. | |
| ' | |
Biography
In another universe, on another Earth, in the capital of the Global Imperial State of Praetoria, there was a mildly eccentric robotics engineer with a promising career ahead of him.
But this was cut short after an industrial accident mangled and crippled his body. Not one to accept the whims of fate and chance, this engineer, faked suicide and then paid for illegal surgery to transplant his brain into a robot body to begin a new life. After the operation, he cut all ties with his old life. He was never very happy as a human being anyway.
This surgery was illegal for several reasons but the chief of which was that it was performed by doctors loyal to terrorist groups campaigning against Praetorian authority. The surgery was expensive. The engineer owed Calvin Scott's Resistance a great debt.
Taking his new name from an obscure character in the famous Czech play RUR, Alquist One became a Resistance mole within the Praetorian Powers Division. Despite several successful missions, Alquist's subversion was discovered and he is now a criminal on the run from the Emperor's Law. Luckily, the Resistance provided him a way to flee to the universe of Paragon's Earth. There he hopes to thwart Emperor Cole's invasion plan and perhaps one day reform Praetorian Earth into a more democratic society. He is also providing his talents to aid Paragon City and the United States in maintaining order and combating superhuman crime. He hopes to prove to the people of Paragon Earth that not all Praetorians are bent on invasion, occupation and dictatorship.
Because Preatorian Earth's robotic technology is slightly more advanced than Paragon Earth's Alquist was able to secure several minor but valuable patents. He is using the money from these to build alternate robot bodies and to fashion new improvements to his own brain.
Personality, Mannerisms, Quirks
Alquist is odd. In more than two years as a cyborg, he become a friendly but mocking and often patronizing misanthrope. Which is to say, he often points out the disadvantages of the human condition, mocking such requirements as waste elimination, sleep, libido and so on. He also states his long term plan to replace all the organic neurons in his brain with artificial ones. He hopes to become a fully artificial organism soon and has no regrets or sob stories over abandoning his old life viewing his new one as greatly superior.
Currently he has three robot bodies and to help his friends and comrades in identification, he wears a large red and white decal of the chess rook on his chest. This rook doesn't really mean anything. It was just a decal he had handy at the time and the tradition stuck.
Because his head has no human facial features and he perversely uses a low quality digital pharynx, it's often hard to tell his intent or feelings are except by body language or if he tells you. He says he does this to make people more careful in listening to him--it's rather a catty thing to do really.
But despite all this, Alquist doesn't have any hatred for humans. On more than one occasion he has said that diversity is a good thing. If anything he seems to harbor a kind of pitying, patronizing feeling towards them, as if they were error prone children in need of his protection.
Poppa's Gotta Brand New Brain!
Just recently Al converted the last of his organic brain over to synthetic neurons. He's now a fully synthetic creature but, due to lack of space, power consumption and cooling issues, his brain still only operates at human speeds with only a human level of intelligence. He's now looking for ways to get around these limitations. At some point, he'd like to think so fast that one second is equal to an subjective fortnight to him. There are other ways he'd like to boost his intelligence to superhuman levels:
- He already has a perfect memory due to recording all sense data digitally. The problem is that he can't review and search that life record quickly. He has to take time out and review it carefully to see if he actually remembers something.
- If he's engaged in something repetitive, he can pass off that tedious task to a simpler suborgan of his brain, freeing his conscious attention to other matters.
- He's currently working on better pattern matching algorithms than the ones humans have. It is hoped that this will speed searches in his now perfect memory. This he hopes will also boost his intuition.
- He has a savant-like ability to instantly count things in a jumbled pile.
As it is, he is a little concerned what this may due to him in the long run as his new mental abilities might make it more difficult for him to interact with humans.
