Here's the second of my tadc ocs. This one is a lil older idea I decided to flesh out. Very very much AU now after the finale, but still fun.
In this au, after a couple of abstractions had happened Caine realised he couldn't really care for the non-abstracted humans and the abstracted ones. They were just not compatible for adventures - and making one for each is, whew, a lot of work. twice as much in fact. So he decided to make an npc that could be dedicated to the abstracted humans; keeping their cellar comfortable for them and making adventures tailored to their new interests! Think Bubble or the Sun and Moon.
But something happened that made it clear that an NPC which was complex enough for this kinda work wouldn't be feasible in the long run. (What happend? Doesn't matter, its a plot device). So new plan; a new AI. Based on his own code, but fed training data on human care, psychology, abstractions… he didn't have much of any of it tbh, and internet wasn't available to him back then, so, he just made his best guesses and gave that to the new AI! later called AICE - Artificial Intelligence Caretaker Entity.
Of course, Aice didn't have any admin privileges. She could only access code relevant to the cellar. Caine still needed to be able to absorb her in case something went wrong haha!
So Aice lives in the cellar, which in this version is basically a mirror circus; just darker, with more muted colors and much bigger doors. She cooks food for the abstractions, helps them with issues and makes adventures for them - tho, its less like Caine's adventures and more… sensory experiences.
In this AU, after ep8, the humans are all standing around wondering what to do, when Aice pops out of one of the holes in the floor, frazzled because uh,,,, what do you mean she's now the admin of the circus? wheres Caine?? hello????
So she' takes over the circus, but is very bad at it. Not knowing how the circus' people work and treating them like the cellar's people. Jax bullies Gangle and gets put in time out in a pile of pillows with calming music. The food she makes is incredibly bland. She puts them in an adventure that is just a dark grassy field with glowing balls that chime and roll away when poked. Anything they conjure she removed immediately for their safety.
The circus dwellers grow incredibly, devastatingly, impossibly bored.
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The in universe reason for her design. First she was just a copy of Caine, but with a butler outfit compared to his ringmaster one. Needed to show he was in charge you know. She was also given the pronouns of she/her, mainly because Caine's training data is, uh, not without biases and she was made to be a caretaker… though Caine convinces himself its to differentiate more between the two. A human going "he said so and so" when Caine's spying on them, then its easier to know they're talking about Caine and not Aice.
But once she grew more… more, she wanted to be more unique. The abstractions get nervous about teeth (like… you would be with a growling dog kinda) and since the cellar is dark she figures eyes wouldn't make sense to have. (Oh, both her and Caine's avatars are just models. Something for the humans to look at and talk to. Little puppets. They don't "see" or "hear" or anything in the circus/cellar, they just…. know) But emotions still need to be portrayed. A design which has big ears that can perk and twitch and be stroked back. She also wanted to be fluffy and cute, to not look threatening. She looked up animals in her data, found fennec foxes and there you go, new head modeled and rigged. She still kept the butler body cause she didn't care.
The out of universe reason is that she is the flip side of Caine. Still oblivious as heck to how humans work, but taking that in the opposite direction. So design mirrors this. He's eyes and teeth, she's ears and nose. He's unsettling, she's cute. He's boisterous with a flashy ringmaster suit, while she's calm (looking) with a butler outfit. He's he and she's she. …And I also just really like the idea of Caine being a bit of a literal product of the data he as trained on. He's gotta learn about humans from humans yall, thats one of the points of his arc, not just go off of what he thinks is true.
hm from the length of this compared to Cadet, you can tell which oc is a fun design challange and which is a character ha
