Character/Race
"I'm about a metre and three quarters tall. But this world has a diameter of twelve thousand kilometres. The star it flies around is about 11 million kilometres. The whole star system is a light year and a bit, and it's part of a 250 thousand light year galaxy, in a supercluster a hundred times that size, among a bunch of them that spans 1.3 billion light years. That's not a billionth of the size of the known universe. But despite my insignificance and the hubris of my existence, I can honestly say that I'm happy to have been born. But no wonder I can't find my keys, huh?"
Name: Auric Oktonia
Age: 19
Gender: Male
Race: Sephyrian Nephalem
Appearance: Due to millenia mingling with humans (and sharing a common ancestor), Nephalem look pretty much like humans with mildly more elf-y-ish ears, and the occasional genetic spasm giving them blue hair or something weird like that.
Culture: The Sephyrians in general are a very logical race. They take comfort in science and sound arguments, and they frigging love the mechas. The few religions they have left don't really worship gods, the deities in question considered simply beings with no physical form, and often they are hand-waved away as a sentient mass of quantum foam. The Nephalem themselves are a hybrid that has formed over the years between the Alther (relatively human-like beings) courting humans. It's almost impossible to discern where the human traits end and the Alther traits begin, but now Nephalem are more populous than their Alther parents (or more accurately, great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents). They do pick up on aspects of the original Alther culture, though: for instance, it is seen as more formal for the males to have very long, straight hair, while the females to have curled or shorter hair. They also like symbolism a lot, too. For instance, grey, to them, is the colour of death, since that's what colour a corpse's skin goes given enough time. But for funerals and such, this means
absolutely nobody dresses that colour, since the dead person is dead and the attendees are decidedly not; it would be disrespectful to the person who's moved on if everyone jumps on the bandwagon, right?
Appearance*: As a Nephalem, Auric is distinguished by his long ears, and has a black iris that would be totally indistinguishable from his pupils if not for a slightly lighter rim around the latter. His face is slim and kind of feminine, but pretty all the same. He is taller than the average adult human, despite looking about 19, though this may have been due to his homeworld's 0.92G. His dark brown hair is tied back in a ponytail, in recognition of sharing ancestry with humans too, who have the opposite custom when it comes to hair. He also likes to wear loose black clothing, though this isn't symbolic, it's just practical.
Personality: Auric is a lateral thinker. He freaking loves puzzles to bits, especially good ones, because they're "funny and smart and then the answer is always oh-my-gosh-awesome and then that one gets old and you want ten more or something", which sums up his attitude towards them relatively well. Because of his love for puzzles, he's become very clever, and he'll pursue anything that takes his curiosity. As a result, he's very good with words; while he may not seem it, he's good at getting a point across, but it's difficult to tell if he's about to say something profound, meaningful, witty, or just plain stupid until he's actually said it: his quote range is anywhere from Gandhi-level wisdom to 5-year-old-level matter-of-factness, and sometimes just a little bit creepy. Because of his outside-the-box thinking, he's also developed an intimate sense of empathy, which in turn he can exploit to make himself more charismatic, though that's probably helped by his sense of morals and believes in just being nice to people in action, even if not in words sometimes.
However, he's extremely stubborn. It takes a lot of evidence to change his mind about something, and he'll still argue his point for weeks on end if he wants to, and boy, can he argue. This is partly down to a hatred for and fear of being wrong: he's smarter than anyone else he knows, so he's often right, and he's very aware that this means he'll be defined more by his intellectual failures than successes. He also has a habit of "stealth insulting" people he doesn't like, because he wants the satisfaction, but not to hurt their feelings. The side effect is that it's often
more hurtful when he is understood.
He has a very specific procedure when it comes to interacting with the real world: if he can see a living thing, then he prioritises its welfare above whatever else is going on. Unfortunately for him, he can't actually see himself without a mirror, and the mirror isn't alive either, so even though if someone else is suffering, he's not backing down, he can be pushed around quite a bit by others if there aren't significant stakes at hand.
Biography: He doesn't really like to open up about it.
Job: He used to be a quantum/theoretical physicist, but he quit working so he could work on controlling time instead. (See Talents for a decrease in the amount of WTF)
Skills: Auric has a honed talent for puzzles, riddles, and problems. He has an advanced knowledge of the sciences, especially physics, and as a result had to learn some pretty advanced math. Also, due to the terrible funding mentioned earlier, he had to learn some software engineering skills so he could program the equipment in the lab (although almost all of his knowledge was gained through trial-and-error, so he's a very messy coder). He can cook a wide variety of relatively basic things, though nothing especially well without treating the food less as food and more as a number: he can't make
anything on intuition alone, and has therefore kept a large portfolio of exactly how to cook things, although it generally assumes he has his old lab equipment on hand. Oh, and he's really, really smart, since he uses what is effectively a homemade dark matter transistor system as a built-in computer for himself.
Talents: Auric has a natural aptitude for his matter conversion craft (see below) and is working out how to alter the flow of time with it. It's taking some time to do, however (read: it's ludicrously hard), but he and a few others he's working with over the internet are slowly making their way there, being able to slow the rate of time to about 0.2 s/s, but he doubts he'll ever be able to travel back and forth through it. Not to mention, slowing time puts more stress on the user the faster they go, so unless he really is in a life-threatening situation and he doesn't have adrenaline to back him up, 250% speed is really his limit.
Power: "AMC" or Alternate Matter Conversion, otherwise known as conversion of dark matter into normal matter and back, obviously with all the energy required for it to not destroy the world whenever it's used, as well as being able to reconfigure properties as needed while the stuff comes through. Nephalem have also evolved to convert harmful things to dark matter or send energy to the non-baryonic side of the universe via reflex action.
Equipment: A short, but pointy, carved stick (which is made of metal BTW), as standard issue for those who use AMC. It helps to have a small point to focus on when processing alternating matter, and it's good when you don't accidentally merge that block of glass you're forming with your finger.
Theme Song:
Because it fits him and the title made me laugh.
*I can draw him if need be, but it'll take a few days/weeks to get to a reasonable standard. _XD
Planet
Name: Sephyria
Hours/Day: 26.4
Environment:
Cold as all hell. Sephyria's ice caps extend almost as far as where Norway is on Earth. Around the equator, it's as close as one would ever get to a rainforest there: a slightly humid temperate one. Due to this, there really isn't a lot of life, and the animals outweigh the plants by a rough factor of 3. As a result, there is still some pollution damage from when the sapient races of the world were using fossil fuels, but not as much as you might expect, since a life meant a lack of fossils to burn. The animals there are mostly large, fluffy mammals, due to the cold climate, so one wouldn't have to look hard to find what is basically a herbivorous bear or some such creature that can climb the trees. Unfortunately, this means that the predators are fuck-off massive.
The planet orbits on the outer edge of the Goldilocks zone of a blue star a bit bigger than the size of Pollux, named Ciester, and it's orbited by two moons. The larger red one, with a surface of iron oxide dust, is named Dymo, and the other has a surface of copper oxide, named Zagerie.
Civilisation:
The Sephyrians, as mentioned above, are a scientific, logical race, who constantly demand proof. This means, of course, that they know next to everything about their own planet. They've been around for a while, but only have recently developed the unity to become a reasonable major force, and they still divide themselves into nations like primitives. Jeez, what kind of population would categorise themselves based on what landmass they hang out on? Douchebags. The population in question is pretty thin, but growing quite quickly now that they are a real space-faring presence and can move to other worlds if needs be. There are several races that live more or less kind of a bit in harmony, in that they'll tolerate each other: humans (special Sephyrian variant, nothing that just tall), Alther, and Yuters, who are all noticably different variations of humans.
Government:
The Sephyrians love social hierarchies. Mostly, dictatorships, but there is a recently formed union between countries that allows the planet to be treated as an actual civilised planet. So, democracy, but a democracy of dictators. At least it's a start.
Dominant race:
Nephalem, assuming you count them as a race and not just an amalgamation of the others. Otherwise, count the almost two-metre tall ones going walk-about as the in-charge guys.
Mech
Name: Achron
Type: Type-Ace
Size: About 19-20 feet
Weight: Light-mid weight, due to purpose.
Appearance:
Attached is close enough.
Weaponry: Twelve hypersonic missles, a machine-gun about where the wrist is, containing a maximum of 6k rounds, aaaand... that's it. Huh. There's gotta be some more weapons around here somewhere...
Special Features: Ah, here they are. Achron's name isn't a misspelled version of archon: it literally is Greek for "without time". In other words, Achron was built with combined efforts of a handful engineers and physicists (and some Internet-goers) specifically with AMC in mind. More accurately, AMC used not only for firing dark matter, which is its primary form of offense, but also it is unaffected by time alteration. This gives it a considerable combat advantage while the pilot's mental stamina remains.
In addition, Achron has a few Type-Spatial elements, so it could survive a few minutes in orbit before being totally pummeled by micrometeors.
There is a fatal weakness though: if the pilot is mentally exhausted or cannot use AMC for whatever reason, Achron goes down like a rock.
~~~
Stats
Armor Strength: Medium
Shielding Strength: High
Horizontal Speed: Medium
Vertical Speed: Medium
Energy Efficiency: Medium, High if you factor in usage of AMC to make fuel (though this obviously is very difficult to do mid-flight)
Intelligence: High - It'll need it if it wants to be able to properly incorporate AMC into the design.