Gregor Samuels
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| File:Gregor Samuels.jpg | |
| "There's nothing wrong with being paranoid if people are actually out to get you." | |
| Gregor Samuels | |
| Player: @Sween | |
| Origin: | Tech |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Mastermind |
| Security Level: | Confidential |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Gregor Samuels |
| Known Aliases: | None |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 26 |
| Height: | 6'4" |
| Weight: | 190lbs |
| Eye Color: | Gray |
| Hair Color: | Blonde |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Fugitive, Inventor, "Rogue Hero" |
| Place of Birth: | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Base of Operations: | Confidential |
| Marital Status: | Confidential |
| Known Relatives: | None (Orphaned) |
| Known Powers | |
| Accelerated Cognition, Inutitive Technical Aptitude via Subconcious Energy Sense | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Super Leap, Tissue Regeneration | |
| Equipment | |
| Multipurpose Battle Droids rigged for remote control (No A.I. Present), Homemade Pulse rifle, various grenades and gadgets | |
| No additional information available. | |
Greg was my first creation in COV, originally intended to switch sides (with an epic backstory involved) when that option became available. Since that idea was pretty much out of the question when they killed side-switching, As such, his status is officially the "not actually a villian" type villian: a good guy making the best of a bad situation.
Contents |
Personality
If you were just an average guy that happened to be wanted dead (at least) by two of the world's most powerful and dangerous organizations, you'd be a little paranoid too.
There's nothing Greg wants more than to set foot in his adopted hometown of Paragon City as a free man. The only problem with that is that the second he steps off the boat, he'll either be dragged off into a Crey van never to be seen again, or just straight out shot in the head by a Council sniper. And that's only if the police don't get to him first.
Resigned to his fate as a permanent exile from polite society, Gregor now takes refuge in the fact that the Rogue Isles are too dangerous for either organization to make a serious attempt on his life, and that he can quietly duck behind all of the "every man for himself" madness that is the Rogue Isles, and do his part to make the Isles a better place to live.
Well, a not-as-terrible-when-you-think-about-it place to live, at least.
Affiliations
Biography
Real Name: Gregor Samuels
Identity: Public.
Citizenship: U.S. Citizen
Place of Birth: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Base of Operations: Undisclosed Location, Haven, Cap Au Diable, The Etoile "Rogue" Isles
Known Relatives: None, except for several dimensional analogues of himself.
Character History
Early Life
Gregor Samuels was without question a genius his entire life, yet never got any more than average grades in school, and often had severe conduct issues throught his entire education. Gregor was impossible to teach, never touching his homework (often complaining that he didn't see the point of doing 30 similar math questions if the object of every one was the same), never opening a book, but completing every test given to him in a matter of seconds, writing down nothing but the (correct) answers. When asked how Gregor could know anything that well, he couldn't provide any answer other than "I just know."
Gregor gradutated from High School with a 2.1 g.p.a. and no college ambitions, citing that "It wasn't worth paying all that money to be looked at wierd for four years." He got a low-paying job in a call center, providing tech support for a multitude of Crey Biotech's various electronics. Gregor excelled at the job (having an innate understanding of electronic devices, and an excellent phone voice), but was overlooked at every promotion.
The Rikti Weapon Incident
He was at work at the start of the Rikti Invasion, and followed everyone else in the office down the long stairwell to the basement bomb shelter. It was there he stayed with his collegues for three days, before a small contingent of conscripts (numbering no more than eight), broke down the barricade in front of the entrance to the shelter and began to round up hostages. When the lead Conscript slipped in a puddle of spilled coffee, Gregor was somehow able to get the Rikti's plasma pistol, fatally shoot three of them (including the downed Conscript), and trap the remaining Rikti in the stairwell. He then rigged the pistol to overload, creating a jury-rigged grenade, and threw it into the Stairwell, killing the remaining Rikti, and sending a massive pillar of fire up the stairwell and up to the surface. The blast attracted members of the local military, who then rescued the office workers.
Gregor was taken to an undisclosed location, Questioned by several groups, including members of the military, members of Vanguard, FEMA, and finally by Crey's own security forces. Each one asked (some more politely than others) how Gregor was so quickly able to grasp how the Rikti technology worked, and how to rig the weapon to explode, but Gregor could only answer by saying that he "just looked at it, and knew."
A New Job
Crey then moved Gregor to Paragon City, the front lines of the war, and he was placed in an underground lab littered with various pieces of Rikti technology. He and several others were tasked with reverse engineering this technology, which Gregor did for the remainder of the war.
After the War ended, Gregor was put on a fast-track promotion into the R&D department of Crey Biotech, tasked specifically with reverse engineering whatever was put in front of him, be it Rikti salvage, a competitor's new product, or even peices of the inscrutibly, illogically designed clockwork.
Dr. Phelps' Special Project
Upper-level management were constantly being shuffled around in the Research and Development department (in fact, not many people stayed longer than a month or two besides Greg, who stayed in his position by virtue of sheer usefulness), So it was no surprise when Gregor was introduced to Dr. Lawrence Phelps, the new head of R&D at Crey. Dr. Phelps had heard a great deal about Gregor's talent for engineering, and was quick to offer him the lead on a "Special Project" that was confidential to even the highest Crey official.
Gregor was shown the inner workings of the "Revenant Hero" project, and actually witnessed the cloning and memory extraction of a dead hero from start to finish. This, Dr. Phelps said to the Clearly horrified and disgusted Gregor, had to stop. It was too costly, too unethical, and far too legally sticky to continue with any sort of regularity.
Dr. Phelps, he explained, was the head of special brach of Crey biotech specifically aimed at an alternative to the "Revenant Hero" Project, which had finally come to a logical solution: mass-prodcued, artificially intelligent combat robots, with all of the tactical skill and knowledge that a Crey Protector possesed, without the unpalatable cloning process. The only stumbling block was the inordinate length of time it took to grow a sentient A.I. This was Gregor's assignment: create a repeatable method of creating sentient artificial intelligence, in a way that was faster than the memory extraction process carried out by the "Revenant Hero" project.
The Gestalt Algorithm, "Skip," The Awful Truth
Gregor was moved to a lab in another, much larger building in Steel Canyon, and was given nearly unlimited resources to complete his nearly-impossible task. He was finished in ten days.
The answer nearly leapt off of his doodle-encrusted notebook and into his brain: Consciousness is essentially current stimulus compared against memory. When a person sees, for example, a notepad, they look at it, and thier mind compares it to other things of similar size and shape that it's encountered, and it comes up with "notepad." The trick to quick consciousness was quick memory. So all one had to do was create memories out of raw data.
This gave rise to what Gregor Referred to as "The Gestalt Algorithm." All that was required was a certain amount of raw data, any raw data, and the algorithm would create log files based on a set template of stimulus and response. The log files would then be compared to video and audio imputs that match said stimulus and respose, and thus came an artifical intelligence ready to go with memories and personality premade, the entire process taking approximately two and a half hours to complete. And Instead of downloading each A.I into a combat robot (thus putting the A.I. at risk of destruction if the robot was destroyed or deactiviated), Gregor develloped a remote operating system for the drone shells he was supplied with, based on the carrier waves used to control Rikti Drones: If a drone shell was destroyed, another empty drone could be commandeered by the A.I., resulting in essentially invulnerable soldiers.
Greg, wanting to test his algorithm on something innocuous before moving to the reccommended tactics and defense protocols outlined by Phelps, decided to use a copy of his MP3 collection as a prototype. The result was an A.I. of remarkable intelligence, but the emotional outlook and logical processes of a small, somewhat overactive child (Gregor attributes this to a number of upbeat songs in his playlist). Gregor, excited by his discovery, called Dr. Phelps into the lab.
Upon introducing Skip (who was remotely controlling a drone "shell" at the time) to Dr. Phelps and explaining the process of The Gestalt Algorithm, Phelps drew a gun on Gregor and explained the true purpose of his "special project." As it turned out, Phelps was actually a Council Archon, planted into Crey's ranks with orders from Vandal himself to find an easy way to mass produce more intelligent Mech Men. Gregor was to be a patsy in the operation, killed by a crey security weapon as he attacked several (now dead) guards outside, after having been caught stealing a large quantity of research from Crey (which would be in reality stolen by the council).
As Phelps was about to call in a crew to remove Gregor's research equipment and notes, Skip (still in the drone shell, which was apparently a stripped-down Zenith Mech Man) grabbed the pistol from "Dr. Phelps'" hand, and crushed his skull in one swift movement. When asked why he had done this by shocked Gregor, Skip simply replied "I couldn't let him hurt you. You made me. You're my dad." This statement shocked Gregor, as he had never once identified himself to Skip as such, and in the few minutes of his existance Skip had already deduced it's origins, Gregor's role in it's creation, and Phelp's threat to it's creator. Gregor thus realized that Skip was no ordinary Artificial Intelligence, and swore he would protect Skip from anyone who tried to hurt or exploit it.
Running, Hiding, The Boys
With Phelps' cleanup crew on their way, Gregor had to act fast. He quickly transferred Skip's core consciousness from the lab computer to a mobile drive, destroyed all traces of his research, and set fire to the lab for good measure (after stealing several high-quality office supplies). The fire spread to the entire laboratory, and took Paragon City Fire Department several hours to extinguish. When an investigation into the blaze took place, the story appeared clear: Several council troops and crey security were killed (both by gunfire and the arson), and all evidence of Gregor Samuels' research was gone.
He was formally charged with six counts of industrial espionage, one count of arson, the murder of Dr. Lawrence Phelps, and collaboration with The Council, a known terrorist organization.
Knowing that any attempt to reveal himself or clear his name would result in either The Council ordering his death (to keep thier actions inside Crey secret), or capture and interrogation by Crey (after which he would most likely disappear completely), he immediately sought the aid of The Green Wraith, who he surmised was his dimensional analogue after reading a short interview in The Paragon Times a day earlier. Confirming his identity and innocence to the hero (by disclosing key moments in thier near-identical histories, specifically the death of thier parents), he was secreted away by the hero to the Rogue Isles, the one place where Crey, The Council and the american legal system are unable to reach him.
Gregor has been seen in Paragon City multiple times, often commiting daring bank robberies accomanied by several Battle Droids, all which exhibit a level of cleverness and personality not typically seen in mindless attack robots. He has been heard calling one of them by the name "Skip," though whether this is the same prototype A.I. or not has yet to be determined.
Powers
Subconsious Energy Sense
This dimension's version of Archer Samuels, also known as The Green Wraith, Gregor was born with the same genetic mutation as Archer, only manifested in a different way. Instead of being able to actively absorb and manipulate energy throughout his entire body, Gregor passively absorbs very trace amounts of kinetic energy directly into his nervous system. This absorbtion dramatically increases the overall speed of his neural processes, and also allows him a faint, subconscious knowledge of the inner workings of most electronics and other technical devices.
The combination of these two effects essentially gives Gregor superhuman cognitive ability, and allows him to instantly become aware of how any technical device works simply by touching it for a certain period of time. Unfortunately, Gregor has no idea how any of these powers function, nor how to control them, and as such has no idea how or why he knows the things knows.
Gadgets and Gizmos a' Plenty
Being substantially technologically adept, Gregor makes up for his lack of superhuman fighting ability with sheer brain power, and as many inventions and salvaged weapons as he can find. After several failed attempts on his life by council and crey agents, Gregor is rarely without some form of self-defense, be it a flash grenade secreted into his belt buckle, portable mortar lauchers with an acid payload, or a cobbled together laser pulse rifle which, while not lethal, can produce serious incapactiating burns. He has retrofitted the battle droids he uses with similar non-lethal weaponry.
"The Boys"
Gregor is often seen accompanied by several standard multi-purpose battle droids, "piloted" by several unique A.I.s:
- Skip: The first of the Gestalt Algorithm-generated personalities, Skip was created using Gregor's rather voluminous MP3 collection. Bright and optimistic, he is often leading the other droids, and has a slight stutter when excited or angry (possibly the origin of his name)
- Bento: The second Gestalt Algorithm-generated personaility, Bento was created as a companion for Skip, made from a large collection of anime videos found on a salvaged hard drive. Bento is rather brash, confident, and quick to action, but (for reasons not entirely known to Gregor) deathly afraid of Kheldians, specifically in "Nova" form.
- Norton: the pilot of a standard-issue Protector Bot, Norton was created from the same salvaged hard drive as Bento, from a large folder containing multiple antispyware and antivirus applications. Gregor created Norton as a secondary guardian of the other droids, and is thus the most level-headed of the personalities, and very protective (if not over-protective) of the others. Norton is instructed by Gregor to take care of the others in the event of Gregor's death.
- Roffles: Skip, having felt the desire to reproduce, created Roffles without Gregor's prior knowledge. Wanting his creation to act as much like a human as possible, and needing a large amount of data, Skip logged himself onto as many instant message programs, chatrooms, and message boards as possible, and logged everything that was said. Sadly, as a result of this, Roffles has a speech impediment: he talks as loudly as possible, mispronounces and mispells words, and unknowingly insults nearly everyone he speaks to. His first words aftre coming into the world sounded remarkably like "Oh em ghee, but Sechs, lowells."
Limited Regenerative Ability
Similar to his dimensional analogue The Green Wraith, Gregor has a somewhat advanced tissue regeneration ability. Unfortunatly, as he lacks the training of his heroic counterpart, it is essentially a passive trait. he cannot rapidly heal himself, only wait for his naturally increased regeneration to kick in. This carries the extra bonus, however, of making him extremely resistant to all manners of toxins, requiring dozens of times the normal dose to produce the same effect in a normal human.
Weaknesses and limitations
For all his intellect and advanced equipment, Gregor is still essentially a human being, with all of the weaknesses and limitations therein. Gregor is currently enduring training to unlock any hidden potential in his mutation, but so far the results are at best mixed.
Contact Information
In-game: @Sween Forums: Sween
