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Approved Character [YSS Imperator] ATIKA

Navian

Navian

Inactive Member
ATIKA is a player character played by Navian.

Species & Gender: Ghost Sprite
Year of Birth: YE 30
Organization: Star Army of Yamatai
Occupation: Information Technology Specialist
Rank: Santô Hei
Preferred Plot: YSS Imperator

Physical Description
As an infomorph, ATIKA has no physical form, and could best be described as looking like a nigh-indecipherable snarl of peculiar code. For the comfort of others, she takes the form of a solid volumetric display with an appearance designated by her commanding officer, typically having the appearance of a Nekovalkyrja crewmember.

Personality
ATIKA is caring, and at least aspires to be a sort of mother figure, though she looks on everyone else as an outsider and tends to overanalyze the behaviors of other sapients. She's more at home with computers, and indeed lives in one, being software herself. Caring for the ship and its crew is her first priority, as she very much doesn't want to grieve for another one.

Related to this, she has a habit of deleting her memories when they don't please her, which has made her hard to pin down. The temptation to self-modify is ever-present for ATIKA, and she chafes at the restrictions imposed on her for the sake of ensuring she remains fit for military service. Her hobbies include digital landscaping and meditation, and she tends to combine the two.

History
ATIKA was created in YE 30 on a Star Army vessel that went missing in action. The following year, she (or more precisely, her ship's Soul Savior Pod) was recovered during a prisoner exchange with a Freespacer military faction that has since been absorbed into the Astral Locksmiths. Few records exist, as the ship itself was never found, and strangely, only the ST data of sprites was recovered. All of the regular crew were lost.

The question of what to do with the recovered sprite ST backups was resolved when sprites were given official rank elsewhere in the Star Army. This gesture was extended to the lost crew, and most accepted it readily, though with mixed results. Nearly all of them had been traumatized, or their programming degraded to some extent otherwise, and were not fit for duty. ATIKA was one of the less clean-cut cases; although more functional than most, she was among several who adamantly refused to be given a new body.

For most this would most certainly have been disqualifying, but as an information technology specialist, she surpassed expectations and was released to the YSS Imperator after a few months of therapy. From her old crew's testimony, it is surmised that her previous ship was defeated by Mishhuvurthyar and destroyed by Freespacers, though the investigation ceased inconclusively in YE 33.

ATIKA certainly believes the Mishhuvurthyar were responsible, though her memories have always shown signs of self-censorship and other tampering. As she entered service near the beginning of the second war, her commitment to fighting them didn't receive much scrutiny until the war was over, and by then the case was cold. While her memory of the loss of her old ship (or lack thereof) remains a sore spot, after eight years in service on the Imperator, it's unrealistic for her to retain a strong attachment to a ship she likely only existed on for a few hours, before its demise.

Social Connections
ATIKA is connected to:
  • The crew of the Imperator--she's served with them a long time
  • A therapist specializing in AI psychology and Mishhuvurthyar victims
  • Her fellow survivors (tenuous though the connection may be)

Inventory & Finance
ATIKA has no physical possessions, but owns several VR environments and some expensive software.

Character Will
In the case I become inactive (gone for more than a month):
  • Can this character be used as an NPC by a GM or FM? YES
  • Can this character be adopted after I'm gone for a year or more? YES
@HAMnJAM, @Wes

I could use some help adding more detail to this character's background. Let me know if I should fill anything else in. I realize this concept is a bit 'out there'.
 
I'm going to go with encouraging creativity and give this a thumbs up.

It looks fine to me, I'm not sure what you want me to help you with precisely.
 
Mostly, it seems disconnected to me since it only very indirectly touches upon the major events of YE 30 and 31, and glosses over everything after that. I don't know how the character would be impacted by events after the first Mishhuvurthyar war, but then... that mostly depends on the history of the ship, which isn't detailed on the plot page yet, so maybe we intend to fill that out later, anyway.

Since Primitive Polygon is probably going to ask the same question, I think the relevant question is whether any Freespacers would recover a Soul Savior Pod and trade it in a prisoner exchange (not necessarily the same group for each one). I don't think there's any question about whether they'd destroy a Yamataian ship in YE 30 if they got the chance.

I've left it unanswered exactly what happened, but from the looks of things Misshus attacked the ship and abducted all the regular crew during an engagement with the Freespacers, who came back and finished it off shortly thereafter, when it was only crewed by sprites. This may or may not be a thing that could happen, so I wouldn't say whether it happened at all.
 
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Just for general information; There actually was an underground plot within the Independent Worlds League that suggested making peace with the Mishhuvurthyar in order to topple the Yamatai, through it doesn't seem like it was ever popular. Many IWL elements were indeed absorbed into the Locksmiths, too. So yeah, that all makes some degree sense, even though it is a little vague.

Freespacers normally respect AIs as living beings and would not tamper with them, but it's possible that the Mish got to them first, and the IWL traded something for the ship components later, probably not even realizing an AI was still on the system.

Alternatively, I guess the ship could have just been found dead in the water.

Or they were fixed by spacers who had barely any idea what they were doing, just trying to do the right thing.

Other than that I guess it's kinda hard to know what to say, since, again, this is your character and it really depends what kind of story you are trying to tell with it. >_>

Edit; A prisoner exchange probably would make sense to me... But it was actually Yamatai who declared all Spacers an enemy of the empire, not the other way around. I suspect Wes will be fine with it, at any rate, but note that the political climate was not exactly civil.
 
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Here's a fun timeline, then: The ship is weakened by battles with the Freespacers, suffers some casualties, and activates sprites during the battle. The Misshuvurthyar attack it as a target of opportunity, and abduct most of the crew. The surviving crew activate more sprites to perform damage control, but the battle is lost and though the Misshu have left, they're at the mercy of the Freespacers.

Few if any of the regular crew survive the Misshu attack, and none of the bridge officers. The Freespacers decide not to punish the sprites, and declare that they're innocents, since they were created after the fight with the Freespacers. Still, they just suffered a Misshu attack, they're on a crippled ship, and along with the surviving crew they're sitll armed and violent, so the Freespacers decide not to dock with the ship and come over to help them personally.

Instead, they send the newest sprites on the bridge the tools they need to help treat the others and help them recover, evacuate, and scuttle the ship, which they were likely to do anyway. Although, since there's a rather vicious war going on, they insist that only the sprites be allowed to evacuate, while the others are left to go down with the ship. The crew debates this while they work, both among themselves and with obliging Freespacers.

This is where things get silly: There's feedback loop generated by the sprites tampering with each other to treat them for trauma and find ways to work the problem without leaving themselves at the Freespacers' mercy, even while depending on them for assistance. Of particular interest is the Freespacers needling them on the subject that even if they manage to escape with the ship and complete their mission, the sprites' lives would end as soon as they could be replaced with the regular crew, since Yamatai, at the time, still didn't respect AI rights.

Although most of the sprites don't care and accept the idea of ending their lives when the Star Army no longer has need of them just as easily as Freespacers tend to accept their own short lifespans, some Spacers' still manage to twist some of them into rationalizing some kind of efforts at self-preservation--not by tampering with them electronically, but by being slightly biased/manipulative when providing instructions for how they can help each other recover from the battle, as well as simply by 'making conversation'--using lots of rhetoric, in other words, which the sprites aren't hardened against.

The increasing disorder and confusion caused by the crew's misguided efforts and the Freespacers' remote assistance, possibly exacerbated by a few surprises the Misshu left behind, finally results in an outbreak of violence between the surviving crew members, and the survivors of that conflict are the ones who upload themselves to the stasis pod while the ship meets its demise--either because it was scuttled, because someone was able to get its weapons back online and the Freespacers preempted them firing, or because the Misshu seeded something in it which had begun to take over.

The Freespacers decide to call it a day, either way, and recover the pod even though they said they were going to shoot it and were only offering to take the sprites off the ship, earlier. It turns out not to have any surprises for them, even though they couldn't verify this beyond what the sprites told them.

The war goes on, the pod changes hands several times, and it eventually ends up in the hands of one of the groups that would later become the Locksmiths, who trade it to Yamatai for leverage. Although they're right about which ship it was recovered from, the data turns out to be much messier than the Freespacers' abridged version of the events would suggest...

It's not canon, but I'll call this my headcanon, for now!
 
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I am going to be making your wiki page for Atika tonight. What do you want me to include on the page?
 
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