I might make a better post when I am awake for real but off the top of my head, tonight’s roulette wheel of Beau’s issues included:
1) Her will negated
2) Being overpowered and swallowed
3) Having a heal bomb used on her
4) Very nearly admitting she’s NOT okay (”ye- ye- yeah”)
5) Actually admitting she’s questioning her usefulness
6) “Veth wants Caduceus”/”Why doesn’t she want us?”
7) Which led to throwing herself blind down a tree just to do something.
Some of this is regular Beau but like...regular Beau still struggles with feeling useful. And damn, she had a rough night of it.
I wanted to see what AI Portraits would make of the Mighty Nein, and I thought I’d share the results:
Beauregard:
This one came out very nice. It lightened her skin a little, which is disappointing, but she’s still clearly South Asian and stylistically the drawing is very nice. It’s the sort of thing I could see Beau’s mother commissioning and hanging in the living room. (Beau hates it because sitting still for that long suuuuuuuuucks.)
Caleb:
Well, it ages him quite a bit, and that mustache is, um, something, but it’s still clear enough that it’s him. The nose isn’t quite right, but who knows—maybe Caleb would want it that way, so there was less chance of someone seeing the portrait and recognizing him as Bren. IDK. Maybe don’t make this your Tinder profile pic, Widogast.
Yasha (still human-looking. still throwing soft balls.):
The portrait looks ten times creepier than the actual Yasha, and for some reason they flipped her eyes, but fair enough. The nose and chin are much more accurate here than they were with Caleb. Still, this is the portrait of someone who takes picnics in the cemetary, and I don’t think that’s a vibe Yasha is trying to put off.
Jester (getting a little harder):
Not bad! The details are a little muted, but it’s very definitely Jester! I could see Jester drawing something like this as a self-portrait, and Marion hanging it up in her private chambers.
Mollymauk:
Okay. Let’s take a deep breath here and focus on the positives: the face shape is pretty accurate, and it did its best with the eyes. That said, it’s a little bit horrifying and I don’t think I could identify it as Molly if I didn’t already know that’s who it was.
Caduceus (upping the difficulty a little more):
I mean. It’s Caduceus, but like... if they left him out in the sun and he melted a little. The hair looks pretty great, though. I’ve got to give it that. And I do appreciate that they honored Caduceus’ sharp-enough-to-cut-man cheekbones.
Fjord:
No tusk = no mouth, I guess. Blurry as Hell, but hey, this thing wasn’t intended for orcs! It sort of feels like it got halfway done with this one and then just got bored and called it good.
Nott (nightmare mode):
ANDMEMKKSMES NSMSMSMWNSNSNSNS
What can I even say about that? A face even Yezza couldn’t love. I think there is a strong possibility that this portrait is cursed to show all of Nott’s sins. 0/10. I do not recommend AI Portrait’s services to goblins.
This thought occurred to me the other day after hearing Amaranthe’s song “Digital World”, and I spent yesterday’s downtime at work working on it in tidbits, and here it is! Mostly put under a Read More, cause there’s A Lot!
(Tagging @criticalrolo, who let me randomly blurt the parts out at her over the day!)
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Consider, if you will, an Exandria very akin to the one shown in the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 game; very post-transhumanism world, cybernetic augments are beyond accepted, they're virtually expected.
It's a world of corporations, where The Company is all, and the little guys either work with them or get ground up in the gears. The most powerful one is the Rexxentrum Assembly. They've stood solid For decades, having fingers in every profitable venture imaginable.
The only ones to oppose them are the Xhorhasian Conglomerate, a collection of smaller corporations who've banded together to survive, and possibly someday defeat, the mega-corp that is Rexxentrum.
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Beau works for the Cobalt Soul, an ancient order of hackers that have existed since before the transhumanism event began, keeping their eyes in every corner of the web. They used to be activists, but these days, they're largely archivists and data/info brokers. Beau thinks they should return to their roots and join with the Conglomerate against the Assembly, and is actively working to that end.
Like much of the party, she's an expert hacker, specializing in getting access through stolen info. Physically, she is the least augmented of the party, save for a few tweaks to make her blows a bit faster, and an analysis system to be better able to determine weak points and the "stats" of her enemies.
Her hacking signature is the sigil of the Cobalt Soul, positioned in front of a pair of wrapped fists crossed at the wrist as though over a chest.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jester Lavorre is a young and fresh hacker. Daughter of the owner of that digital and physical smut empire, known only as The Ruby, and heir to the vast network of anything one could want in that arena. After inadvertently destroying the career of a local prominent politician with a cyber-prank, it was decided that she needed to get out and experience more of the world.
As a hacker, she predominantly focuses on digging up embarrassing secrets of high-level individuals, and then broadcasting them on the web, in her signature saccharine pink and unicorn-decorated infodumps. In the real world, she does her best to make sure her team is in the best shape they can be, getting supplies to help with that whenever she can.
As mentioned, her trademark is the infodump, usually in the form of a bullet-pointed video, coated in sickly sweet pinks, with unicorns and the like dancing in the background.
Aside from the usual strength and endurance mods that basically everyone has, she also has a mod in her skin that lets her shift colors and patterns to almost anything. It's usually not good enough for any proper stealth, but it's fun as hell!
She has a similar mod on her horns, but stronger, where she can brighten them and basically become a living rave lighting system. The tips of her horns can also become the most literal version of "headlights" ever.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fjord is one of the more interesting party members. Heavily augmented, he once followed the orders of his patron, an entity named Uk'otoa who he only had contact with through the deep web. This entity led him to great troves of augmentations, each with a nugget that Uka'toa itself desired. These troves helped to find the efforts of the party, leading to at least tolerate the presence of the outside force.
Recently, however, his new circle of friends led him to realize that Uk'otoa was, in fact, an incredibly malicious AI from beyond The Walls. With effort and some excising hacks from his friends, he cut off his ties with Uk'otoa. Unfortunately, many of his augments required an external AI to continue to function, and so he let himself be connected to another AI, dubbed the Wildmother by another of his party, one with a far more gentle motivation.
Fjord remains the least hack-savvy member, preferring reality to anything cyberspace can offer. Among his augments, he can deploy a macro-molecular bladed sword seemingly out of thin air, sharp enough to slide between the molecules of most materials, neatly slicing them.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Caleb's story is simple enough. He was a Company Man. See, though, the thing about being a Company Man, is you can't ever really stop being a Company Man. Especially when that Company is the Assembly.
After one of his tests to enter the upper ranks resulted in the immolation of his family, he snapped. Gathering what he needed, he disappeared, a truly impressive feat in such an interconnected world, and doubly so when not even the Assembly could find him again. Now, he seeks a way to burn them down from the inside out.
Caleb's hacking signature has been dubbed "Scorched Earth", because when he's finished getting what he needs from a target, if he so chooses, he will burn them down, leaving them nothing behind, right down to the system files, and even the hardware itself if he can swing it.
Physically, his augmentations reside chiefly in his arms and his head. Highly experimental neuromods that boosts his already almost eidetic memory, letting him pick out any memory since installation and recall it in perfect clarity, and even overlay filters to uncover further information. Additionally, mini-producers across his body and microjets imbedded in his forearms allow access to his secret weapons: nanites and plain ol' fire.
The micro-producers scattered across his body can generate a cloud of nanites under his control, allowing him much of his near-magical feats. As a way to maintain an at-hand supply of them, he usually forms them into the form of a small animal, granting a measure of hivemind capabilities to allow it to impersonate said creature.
The microjets allow him to be as near to a pyromancer as he can without using actual magic.
Additionally, he has two small computers, resting in holsters under his arms, that together hold enough power to brute force hack into nearly any system he needs to.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Where Caleb's story is one of the simpler ones, Nott's can be argued to be the most tragic. On the face of it, she appears to be a Goblin, a faction of heavy augmenters who actively renounce form over function, and typically change their bodies as far from conventionally attractive as they can. Sure, the way Nott openly despises other Goblins is a bit odd, but who's to say what that kind of modding does to ones brain?
Except. She isn't a Goblin by choice. Due to some unknown reason, perhaps for an experiment, or as recompense for some perceived slight, Nott's original form was destroyed, and her brain and mind supplanted and locked into this Goblin form. Now, she follows Caleb, in the hopes that someday, he can learn how to let her leave this body behind and return to one more like her original.
Not to say this form is without it's pros, of course. An enhanced stealth suite and active targeting means that when she hits you, you won't have a clue where it came from.
Typically, Nott doesn't do much hacking, favoring the real world and protecting Caleb (and eventually, the rest of the party) as they do their deep dive hacks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Molly and Yasha were strangers, drifting in from another distant city, claiming to be entertainers, but far more capable at defending themselves online and off. The pair came together and bonded over their lost histories. Yasha, having had a section of hers stolen and sealed away, unsure what she was or did during that time. Molly, having no recollection at all before waking up in that shallow grave.
Molly's mods were as flashy as the man, able to produce holographic fancies from his fingertips on command, making for a handy show (and distraction) as needed.
When he fell, on a mission to rescue their fellows, it nearly broke the team apart.
Yasha's mods were more straightforward; she relied largely on brute strength to overcome her foes, both in reality and in the web.
Nobody cheered when her memories were finally unlocked, as they changed her, turned her on them. The team still hopes that, someday, they might bring her back from that dark place she found herself sucked into, but they know, that day may well be far off.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Caduceus was something of an enigma. Where Beau was one of the most human of the group, Cad was very much the most inhuman. Not even he was entirely sure how much of himself was still organic, but he doubted it was even near 15%. He spent nearly all of his time plugged into the web in some capacity, resulting in a more distracted and absent-minded demeanor than the others were used to.
Nobody was quite sure what all his mods could do. One thing that they were (relatively??) sure about, was that he had a direct line to some powerful AI, one that he called the Wildmother. She seemed to have good intentions for those who followed her, but the party was still wary. They'd been burned before, with Uk'otoa.
Cad's hacking signature was... Well, actually, nobody was quite sure what his signature was. Every now and then, he'd take credit for some random hack, usually one that someone else also claimed shortly after, and always it turned out to have farther reaching implications than anyone else thought it might have.
