Clockwork Maid
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
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| Clockwork Maid | |
| Player: @SPTrashcan | |
| Origin: | Technology |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Scrapper |
| Security Level: | 37 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Clockwork Maid #523 |
| Known Aliases: | None |
| Species: | Clockwork Servant |
| Age: | 743 years 5 months 12 days 11 hours 27 minutes 55 seconds *tik* |
| Height: | 180 cm |
| Weight: | 80 kg |
| Eye Color: | Brass |
| Hair Color: | Brass |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | the Master's Domain, the Never-Never |
| Occupation: | Servant of the Master |
| Place of Birth: | the Tower |
| Base of Operations: | the Tower |
| Marital Status: | Separated |
| Known Relatives: | Clockwork Maids #000-999 |
| Known Powers | |
| Precision blades, Self-repair | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Automatic Domestic | |
| Equipment | |
| Uniform, Knives | |
| No additional information available. | |
Clockwork Maid #523 is one of the many construct servants of the enigmatic Master, who lived in the Tower in the Never-Never (which heroes sometimes call the Spirit Realm). She serves the law-abiding residents of Paragon City while searching for her lost Master, who left the Tower more than four hundred years ago.
Contents |
Affiliations
Clockwork Maid's first and foremost allegiance is to her Master, who is her creator and reason for existence. Beyond this, she has a loose affiliation with the Brigands of Light. She has also invested considerable time and effort into the well being of Fiona Tremaine, aka the Synaesthete. After working with the mechanically-inclined Watchmaker, she agreed to let him study her design "so that the genius of the Master might be more fully understood." What secrets he gleaned from this study, he has thus far kept to himself.
Personality
As befits one created to serve, Clockwork Maid is humble, fastidious, and unfailingly polite. Her first concern is always whether her actions are in accord with the will of her Master; as long as this condition is met she remains happy regardless of adversity. When praised, she deflects the compliment toward her Master, for she is his creation and thus any good she does reflects well upon him; when chided, however, she blames only herself, for failing to rise to the Master's expectations. She has some difficulty with the concept that there exist places outside of her Master's domain, and therefore tends to assume that everywhere she goes is part of that domain and therefore her responsibility to keep neat and ordered. Being accustomed to following orders, she is fairly passive.
Powers
Precision Blades
Among the capabilities which the Master saw fit to endow his creation is the ability to automatically wield a pair of blades with alarming speed and precision. A skill with many domestic uses - chopping vegetables, trimming hedges, cutting cloth for sewing - it can also be turned upon uncouth trespassers in the Master's domain, with shockingly effective results. With the strength and speed of a well-engineered machine, the Clockwork Maid can wield anything from cooking knives to garden shears to broadswords with automatic grace.
Self-Repair
As the Master did not wish to concern himself with the daily maintenance of his servants, he made each one self-repairing. Given a moment, the Clockwork Maid straightens out dents, polishes away scratches, and reassembles broken gearwork. If the damage is too great, she announces her intent to return to the Tower and summarily disappears, returning some time later fully repaired.
Other Powers
Adjusted Timing
By adjusting the tension on her mainspring escapement, the Clockwork Maid can greatly increase the speed of her movements. However, she can sustain this mode of operation for only a limited time as it places considerable strain on her workings.
Self-Winding
Because she can wind her own mainspring, the Clockwork Maid is inexhaustible and can work nearly continuously for any amount of time. This is, of course, a gross violation of the laws of thermodynamics, and thus the nature of the Clockwork Maid's true power source is a subject of debate.
Abilities
Automatic Domestic
Although reasonably effective in combat, the Clockwork Maid's true purpose is clearly domestic service. She possesses a comprehensive array of skills related to household management, from mundane cooking and cleaning all the way up to sophisticated accounting and ergonomics. She can also anticipate the needs of those around her with eerie accuracy, often completing a task just as one thinks to ask her to perform it.
Weaknesses and Limitations
The Clockwork Maid is an excellent servant, but is almost completely lacking in initiative. Without explicit orders from her Master or an honored guest, she becomes uncertain and chooses to do nothing, sometimes for a very long time.
Although she is capable of learning, most of her "skills" are actually automatic routines, performed exactly the same way every time with only minor adjustments. Her ability to improvise is nearly nonexistent. Furthermore, her senses are extremely rudimentary - she cannot smell or taste, her sense of touch is crude, her eyesight is unsophisticated, and her hearing, although sensitive, is not discriminating. As a result, whenever she is placed into a situation where none of her automatic responses apply, she becomes quite clumsy.
Equipment
Uniform
Although as a mechanical doll the Maid has no need for clothing, she prefers to dress in a typical maid's uniform as befits her role.
Knives
When circumstances require, the Clockwork Maid fights with a blade in each hand - whether the halves of a garden shear, a pair of cooking knives, or swords designed for combat.
Character History
The Clockwork Maid was created long ago by the Master, about whom little is known. Clearly a mechanical genius - possibly supernaturally so - he created her as one of a thousand mechanical servants built to attend to his needs and maintain his vast estate. Apparently a benevolent dictator, he brought vast stretches of the Never-Never under his control, but left the residents largely free to do as they pleased, albeit both assisted and policed by his legion of automatons.
For some reason, however, he left his residence, the massive clockwork fortress which the Maid refers to as the Tower, and traveled beyond the Never-Never, presumably into the real world. Although the Clockwork Maid believes that he will return soon, he has been absent for over four hundred years.
The Clockwork Maid was first encountered by heroes battling to control an uprising of Red Caps in the Spirit Realm. She offered them hospitality as honored guests of the Master, and assisted them in subduing the Red Caps. Although she initially planned to continue waiting for her Master as she had before, she was eventually convinced to leave the Never-Never and search for the Master in the real world.
Trivia
- As the Clockwork Maid's speech is driven by her mainspring escapement, she utters precisely two syllables per second.
Quotes
- "*tik tik tik*"
- "Do be care ful Miss Tre maine" -- on too many occasions to count
- "You Do Not De serve To Wear His Face" -- whenever she spots a Fake Nemesis Automaton
