Big Thanks To @tgirlblogger Who Reminded Me With A Like To Post This Today This Morning Like I Planned.

Big thanks to @tgirlblogger who reminded me with a like to post this today this morning like I planned.

TORTUGA

Tinker 8 - All-in-one Mech, redundancy/life support tinker.

Citadel Architect, or Conglomerate Architect from the weaverdice document fit best here. Everything she makes feeds into her Mech, her magnum opus, a career spanning megaproject that is constantly 'unfinished' but still capable of combat. Much of her tinker methodology is inventing something and then discovering how it fits into the design of her machine. She believes her power is 'alive' and whispering the secrets of the universe to her, but she alternates between truly treating her power like it's alive and thinking it's just her subconscious needing a rubber duck to let itself out. (It's both, her shard is exactly like her only with a blue-orange mentality from being a giant space world-machine.)

She also has some extremely sophisticated parahuman scanning equipment built into her sensors and her quasi-AI computer co-pilot she's built to handle the automatic functions of her Mech. Her best work is made this way; scan parahumans (more in-depth scans are better but she's still taking passive scans of everyone she comes in contact with), create equipment inspired by parahumans, plug that component into the machine, the machine's secrets are revealed a little more and the puzzle is growing complete, iterate on new inspirations driven from the new tech's installation to upgrade previous tech until new well of inspiration is expended, repeat.

The consequence of this is that though her Mech is one of the most intensely iterated pieces of tinkertech in the world, she herself doesn't have much in the way of portable technology.

Glasses that record what she sees and hears with rear view cameras built into the frames that hang over her ears.

A pilot's plugsuit that is durable and temperature controlled and wicks away sweat and grime so she can wear it indefinitely.

A helmet much like a fighter pilot's that allows her to have a HUD and aim/control the mech manually via remote.

All of these things are mundane enough that they could be made without tinkertech, but customized to work with her Mech in a way no mundane tech could.

I'm not too sure on her trauma or how to make it fit. It could be that we simply don't cover it in the scope of the story. I feel like her self induced isolation within her Mech is part of it. She can't sleep comfortably outside of it, and even then for barely an hour. She'll start to become restless and hyper-vigilant while outside of it for any extended period of time. It's her safe space in a thousand different little ways. She's lost her Mech once before and had to rebuild it from damaged parts, almost from scratch, though she hasn't lost anything in terms of progress or discoveries. Tortuga Mk2 is a much more successful version of her initial machine.

Her specialty as a redundancy and life support tinker is best shown in how many backups she has for her technology. Chemical thrusters as backup for her anti-grav. Viewports as backup for cameras which are interchangeable with lidar, sonar, radar and gravity sensors to detect strangers, all within a camera drone net. Anti-thinker tech. Multiple shielding barriers, some based on slowing projectiles, others based on resisting them as hard as possible, then reactive armor behind them, then ceramics, soft armor, hard armor, etc. while a point defense system watches over all of it. The idea is that her Mech should resemble some of the most intense combined arms technology possible, while her inner sanctum exists to keep the VIP (her) as alive as possible. I may have to read up a little more on Lancer to get more inspiration. Hyper reflex mode, the deck-sweeper automatic shotgun (I intend to have it as a belt-fed gatling shotgun), Watchdog Co-pilot, all awesome things that inspired the character.

This didn't end up being the character bio I hoped for, but it's the one I'm posting. I'll probably end up expanding here later. Her history in central america will require some research I think, and some extrapolation on the kind of conflicts around Eidolon's zone of influence in Texas down towards Mexico and South America. Earth Bet's USA feels a bit isolationist in foreign policy to me, especially as Endbringers started cropping up, and Leviathan started crippling international shipping, and the Simurgh makes air travel daunting. I wonder what kind of influence Earth Bet's USA holds over Haiti, the Dominican Republic, or Mexico, all historically within the USA's zone of influence.

I also haven't yet thought of a name for her since I also don't know in my mind where she's from. There's this murky idea of a shaved head and pale skin and sunken eyes with bags under them, but an overall chipper attitude in private (within the comfort of her mech) and a terse mercenary facade when she puts on for her client or 'co-workers' whoever they end up being. I'm thinking something voiced by Jennifer Hale in that icy renegade Sheppard style. She's constantly got her tinker on a leash anytime she speaks to people, but would rapidly open up and turn into a motormouth if she's being encouraged and feels safe to unleash her thoughts and interests on others. Turtles are a big non-tinker special interest I think. I may have to do research on Turtles. Fuck.

you can use the edge of a countertop. any 90 degree hard surface will do (not a wooden table). one could even use (the blunt edge) of a pocket knife or car keys. grip bottle by the neck, place it against the edge of the countertop and slap down on the lid with your other hand. do not drop bottle on the floor.

if knife, peel it like you're carving an apple, blunt edge towards you, thumb on the lid, other hand holding the neck. most bottle caps are made of plastic or flimsy metal.

picture this, i give you a glass bottle and tell you to open it, but bottle openers are forbidden, how do you do it?

help me come up with a novel way of saying "i'd forgive ward everything if vic and ashley fucked"

What was he doing?  Why was he so focused on getting Bitch to admit it was over? Reputation, yet again.  He needed to salvage this situation, and the surest way to do that, to recoup his losses and come out of this looking okay, would be to get the meanest, toughest, most notorious of us to bend at the knee and concede defeat. He really didn’t know Bitch, though. She pulled her cheap plastic dog mask off and threw it to one side.  It was only a formality, really, since her face and identity were public knowledge.  Her smile, as it spread across her face, wasn’t the most attractive.  Too many teeth showing. “Lung underestimated her, too,” she told him, looking at me.

okay, continued forcing myself to spend time analyzing rachel lindt instead of letting her live in my worm blindspot for no reason. to recap: at this point in the story, she's gone on the ABB raid with rachel & had that gay little moment where rachel gave her her jacket when she was cold walking back home + got so close to taylor to inspect her injuries from lung that taylor thought she was going to kiss her. it had deep connotations of blossoming romance and taylor narrated some shit about still kind of being cold despite the jacket but the warmth in her core keeping her warm all the way back to the loft. now, although taylor is still only consciously ranking rachel at "i don't hate her" in her mind, rachel has now started doing shit like this.

one of the primary rachel/taylor theses is that taylor isn't rachel's dog, rachel is taylor's dog. it's established over the course of the worm that she trusts taylor completely implicitly. there's the part in the behemoth fight where the entire world is falling apart around them and rachel is still smug and happy about taylor having a plan. there's the part at the end that makes all of us want to smash our heads into the wall:

she trusts taylor in the same way a dog would trust their owner even on the table for euthanasia. she sees taylor as smarter than she is not in a self-deprecatory way--there are plenty of people who you might call smarter than rachel that she'll happily call morons--but because consistently, time and time again, taylor goes up against smart pieces of shit who are trying to fuck the undersiders over and figures out what to do about it. and this scene here, where she's responding to armsmaster's attempt to put her down by insisting that he's underestimating taylor, seems to be the first instance of rachel's trust in taylor shining through. in fact, this happens even before taylor considers them to be friends, before they've had any significant bonding. one of the very first positive things rachel feels about taylor--maybe even the first positive thing--is that, when people are putting her and her team down, when odds look grim, taylor can be trusted to solve it. it's actually, like, kind of bonkers compelling that rachel's first seed of positive response to taylor isn't "well, actually, i guess she seems nice" but "my teammate taylor could beat up this dickhole armsmaster."

it's worth explicitly noting, by the way, that rachel interprets smiles as like dog growls. the reason her smile is a little too wide with too many teeth is because it's not actually a proper smile. it's rachel being a growling dog, placing all of her trust in taylor. I Love You Rachel Lindt

So as it turns out James Somerton did in fact fake his suicide note, and did a bunch of other stuff in the meantime

Not a worm post but I had some amazing fucking thai food oh my god.

It was massaman beef curry. slow cooked. coconut sauce. mild spicy and sweet. damn.

people eat this kind of stuff all the time. the world should be a warmer place with this type of food in it. I want to bottle that sauce up and drink it like water.