The probe slowly gathered speed as it began it's long journey. The exhaust from it's massive fusion engine was shrouded by a tail of streamers designed to reduce the probe's signature and to recycle the light the hot gases emitted as power for the probe's many on board systems.

For several days it barely seemed to move but as it dived below the plane of the ecliptic it rapidly shrank to a barely visible dot of light which also disappeared after a week or so when the main engine swung away from Markov. It continued to accelerate inexorably as it slowly curved back up towards Saturn.

Periodically big chunks of the converted proto-comet flaked off under the enormous stress and were quickly left behind in the darkness. Eventually it was pointed almost exactly at Saturn and the giant engine cuts out.

The universe seemed to hold it's breath for what seemed like an age whilst the speck in the dark grew to a spark and then a light and finally the familiar winking eye of the ringed giant. An inflection point is reached as Saturn's huge gravity takes hold and suddenly it is rushing towards the tiny lump of dark rock, filling the whole sky with terrifying rapidity.

In the blink of an eye it is over, a journey that began nearly two months previously, the Hill sphere is pierced and in under an hour Saturn is reached, the proto-comet surrenders to enormous tidal forces by splitting into two unequal parts. The larger slides past the former Deity in under ten seconds and is fired up out of the ecliptic like a baseball from a batting machine. The smaller piece ploughs through the upper atmosphere and bursts out the other side, glowing like a coal, into an orbit that will cause it to drift into one of the many coloured rings as so many millions of it's predecessors have done over the aeons.

Sensor-nets, tweaked by such an unnaturally fast object ploughing through the system, were swift to spot the emergency beacon that began broadcasting as the darkening cinder began to cool. Automated rescue bots performed a graceful slow motion ballet for over an hour.

Eventually the lump of cometary rock was dragged aboard an atmospheric skimmer and medical personnel began to examine this strange visitor. Some tiny change, perhaps atmosphere or temperature triggers a tiny sensor. The rock starts to boil and steam, tiny streams of dust flow from newly apparent cracks in it's surface as nanites dissect it from within to reveal some sort of exotic survival bubble.

Medics cautiously approach, querying medical sensors whose interfaces start to appear in the mesh. An iris opens and the arm and shoulder, dripping with acceleration gel, of a vac-suit flop into view. A head rises and the arm opens the suit's visor to reveal a red-haired human female.

'G'day mates, name's Rebel, I don't feel too good.'

And then she died.

Her memory was badly damaged and the emergency pod had little useful data. The best the Plurality could determine she was hitching a lift on an unusual proto-comet being shipped in-system for research. AGI modelling suggested that combined failures of both navigation and propulsion could have caused the strap on booster to drive the comet through the wrong system at twice it's intended speed. No definite conclusions could be reached and a week later what appeared to be a catastrophic engine failure tore the remains of the proto-comet to pieces.

Her morph spent a month in the tank and her Ego spent a month in and out of an old busted up clank working off her debt to the Plurality.

Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark was apparently a crackerjack Wet-programmer and a wizard at programming nano-fabricators so she did not have any trouble building up a decent Rep but all her skills were worthless in recovering the massive chunks of her identity she had lost. She knew her name and knew that she was a spacer that grew up in the Kuiper Belt but nothing else, not even fragments.

She combed through her own Ego with all the Psychosurgical tools at her disposal and came up blank. The memories weren't damaged, they were just gone.

She did learn a lot about herself though. Her neural tree had been altered by someone even more skilled than herself. Her mental make-up was unique, her mind fragmented into four parts, a Tetrad, four distinct personalities each with their own voice and awareness but all part of the same whole. She could see vague shapes in her mental structures that meant something but she didn't know what. She did know that she was blocked from altering them, in fact she seemed to be unusually resistant to divergence. None of her forks ever displayed any desire to change it's core personality. They got twitchy after four hours without a merge and after a week they were verging on mono-mania.

Whenever her mind wandered her hands were busy making little knick-knacks. She sculpted all sorts of strange stuff which almost always folded or twisted or opened to reveal some sort of useful tool or piece of equipment. Sometimes they didn't do anything until three or four were slotted together in the correct configuration and then suddenly they merged to form some highly complex device.

She has a theory that she has forgotten many things about psychosurgery and nano-fabrication but that the skills remain somehow as an emergent harmonic pattern floating in the gaps in her Ego. She has kept such ridiculous speculation to herself.

She has fitted right into Titanian culture. Her Rep has rocketed in various fields, she's the go-to gal if you need your Ego tweaked or Mental Trauma eased. She has released dozens of blueprints into the Open Source community under her moniker Rebel. Advanced Protean Swarms that whip up General Hives, Neutrino Transceivers, Multi-channel Qubit Reservoirs, Ego Bridges or Healing Vats that all bear her iconic swooping 'R' logo.

A number of unsigned designs that might be useful for darkcasting operations have built her a solid Rep amongst less salubrious elements and her Psychosurgical skills have drawn attention from the Pax Familiae. While she could make use of the favours this earns her she rarely does. She has no idea of how to deal with people of that persuasion and fears opening a door she can never shut. Any dealings she has with such groups are through forks she has amped with implanted skills and courage.

Her involvement with Firewall is recent. She was contracted to repair a number of badly fractured Egos that had suffered sanity shattering mental traumas. Her limited success in recovering crucial data led to her recruitment as an Agent. She mostly performs after action psychosurgery on more hands on Agents. Infomorphs are Ego-cast to her, treated in accelerated simulspace and ego-cast back to their home habitats ready to return to operational status.

The profits from her activities have allowed her to pursue her own long term goals. Her repaired Morph has been substantially augmented and she uses it to explore the alterations to her own Ego. She can easily be running six or more Forks simultaneously which are constantly being re-merged back into each other. The old battered clank that the Plurality lent her has been purchased outright. It's limited intellect makes alterations to her own Ego substantially easier to perform and she occasionally uses it with exceptionally resistant patients. She also has a couple of flats in hibernation for emergency use.

----

Meanwhile in the depths of space, one hundred million clicks from the ecliptic, dozens of anonymous chunks of proto-comet are slowly transforming under the direction of millions of pre-programmed nanites.

Background: Original Spacer
Faction: Argonaut


Primary Morph: Remade






Active Skills:

Hardware (Electronics) 55, Hardware (Robotics) 55, Infosec 55, Interfacing 55, Networking (Autonomists) 85, Networking (Scientists) 85, Programming 100, Psychosurgery [Accelerated] 85

Knowledge Skills:

Academics (Nanotechnology) 70, Academics (Psychology) 70, Art (Sculpture)[Hidden Nano] 65, Profession (Psychotherapy) 70

Language Skills:

English (Native) 95, Cantonese 65, Spanish 65, French 65, Others (the 30 next most common) 26


Reputation:

@-Rep 80, F-Rep 30, G-Rep 80, I-Rep 30, R-Rep 80


Traits:

Ego: Psi Defence II, Expert (Programming), Exceptional Aptitude (WIL), Edited Memories, Modified Behaviour III

Morph (Case): Addiction (XP feed) III


Implants:

Remade: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Emergency Farcaster, Direction Sense, Echolocation, Enhanced Hearing, Enhanced Smell, Enhanced Vision, Eidetic Memory, Hyper Linguist, Math Boost, (3x) Multiple Personalities, Bioweave Armor (light), Circadian Regulation, Clean Metabolism, Enhanced Respiration, Gills, Grip Pads, Hibernation, Skin Pocket, Temperature Tolerance, Toxin Filters, Vacuum Sealing, Anti-Glare, Electrical Sense, Radiation Sense, T-Ray Emitter, Access Jacks, Ghostrider Module, Mnemonic Augmentation, Medichines, Nanophage, Oracle, Respirocytes, Skillware, Skinlink, Wrist-Mounted Tools, Bodysculpting

Case: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Mnemonic Augmentation

Flats: Cortical Stack, Hibernation, Skin Pocket, Mnemonic Augmentation, Medichines


Gear:

(2x) Miniature Radio Farcaster, (2x) Portable QE Comm, (5x) Specialized Hive (Guardians, (4x) Proteans: General Hive, Neutrino Transceiver, Ego-bridge, Large Qbit Reservoir), Blueprint: Spec' Hive, Blueprint: QE comm, Blueprint: Farcaster, Simulspace Subscription, Skillsoft: Palming

Remade Morph, Case Morph, (2x) Flat Morph

Background: Original Spacer
Faction: Argonaut


Primary Morph: Remade






Active Skills:

Hardware (Electronics) 55, Hardware (Robotics) 55, Infosec 55, Interfacing 55, Networking (Autonomists) 85, Networking (Scientists) 85, Programming 100, Psychosurgery [Accelerated] 85

Knowledge Skills:

Academics (Nanotechnology) 90, Academics (Psychology) 90, Art (Sculpture)[Hidden Nano] 85, Profession (Psychotherapy) 85


Reputation:

@-Rep 80, F-Rep 30, G-Rep 80, I-Rep 30, R-Rep 80


Traits:

Ego: Psi Defence II, Expert (Programming), Exceptional Aptitude (WIL), Edited Memories, Modified Behaviour III

Morph (Case): Addiction (XP feed) III


Implants:

Remade: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Emergency Farcaster, Direction Sense, Echolocation, Enhanced Hearing, Enhanced Smell, Enhanced Vision, Eidetic Memory, Hyper Linguist, Math Boost, (3x) Multiple Personalities, Bioweave Armor (light), Circadian Regulation, Clean Metabolism, Enhanced Respiration, Gills, Grip Pads, Hibernation, Skin Pocket, Temperature Tolerance, Toxin Filters, Vacuum Sealing, Anti-Glare, Electrical Sense, Radiation Sense, T-Ray Emitter, Access Jacks, Ghostrider Module, Mnemonic Augmentation, Medichines, Nanophage, Oracle, Respirocytes, Skillware, Skinlink, Wrist-Mounted Tools, Bodysculpting

Case: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Mnemonic Augmentation

Flats: Cortical Stack, Hibernation, Skin Pocket, Mnemonic Augmentation, Medichines


Gear:

(2x) Miniature Radio Farcaster, (2x) Portable QE Comm, (5x) Specialized Hive (Guardians, (4x) Proteans: General Hive, Neutrino Transceiver, Ego-bridge, Large Qbit Reservoir), Blueprint: Spec' Hive, Blueprint: QE comm, Blueprint: Farcaster, Simulspace Subscription, Skillsoft: Palming

Remade Morph, Case Morph, (2x) Flat Morph

Charm is one of several Elizabeth Mudlark LP's (limited personalities). Conceived as a method of dealing with criminal elements she is an Alpha Fork that is regularly patched with a number of Beta Forks using a process Rebel calls Back Forking. Several Beta Forks of Charm were Psychosurgically altered to possess useful skills like Networking (Criminal) and then merged back into each other to create a skills template which is kept in cold storage. Every morning Rebel creates an Alpha Fork of Charm and overlays the skills template onto it, this usually involves memory loss and some stress to the Alpha Fork. Rebel then Merges this Alpha Fork back into Charm to create a seamless personality that, after a couple of hours meditating in simulspace, has a great many useful skills for dealing with the criminal underground.

Charm is a familiar and well liked personality on Phelan's Recourse due to all of her personality elements having been roaring drunk at the time of their creation. She is occasionally let loose on the Realized world in one of the Flats that rebel keeps for emergencies. Havoc often ensues.

A gatecrasher, who came back from an expedition "changed" - now an async, whose mind has been rewired to facilitate an eerie understanding of mathematics and linguistics, he began also working for Firewall as an expert in xenolinguistics and xenobiology. Based on the Xenoarcheologist premade, but less of an adventurer, and more of a scientist.

Doctor Mathew Esterly had always been fascinated by the stars, and the possibilities they held. As a young scientist, he joined the original space colonists, and traveled outward from Earth as humanity pushed the edge of its outposts further and further away from their home world. When the Fall came, Mathew was far far away - and while the near-extinction of humanity still touched his life, it was the subsequent discovery of the Pandora Gates and the arrival of the Factors that changed it, most noticeably.

The discovery of wormhole gateways, and the arrival of true intelligent alien life renewed his belief that there must be more in the universe than humanity. He didn't return to the outer-rim space colonies, and instead joined a number of Gatecrashing crews - excited to see places in the universe he would never reach, otherwise, and new forms of life. However, after a gate-jump anomaly, Dr. Esterly was changed, forever. At first, he didn't realize what had happened. He felt strange, like there was a presence with him, even when he was alone and, throughout the mission, he was exhausted, but his mind was racing. He didn't sleep often or well, and spent most of his free time scribbling down notes and equations, that only seemed to make sense to him, as though he thought they might slip from his mind as mysteriously as they had entered it. His behavior alerted the rest of his crew, who kept him under observation but didn't think he was dangerous - on the contrary, despite a few fits where he was nearly incomprehensible, his insights and analysis of the strange world seemed sharper than ever. Upon returning through the Gate, they insisted he undergo a psychosurgical examination. This was when he discovered he had been somehow infected by the Watts-MacLeod strain of the Exsurgent Virus.

Whether the virus had lied dormant in him and had been triggered by the anomaly, or whether the anomaly was actually the infection-vector is still unknown. However, his mind underwent a rapid change that altered the way he observed and understood the world around him. The mathematical and linguistic centers of his brain underwent the greatest refactoring, and he developed a low level of telepathy which was consistent with psi-gamma expressions - although he showed a remarkable ability to interact with and communicate with non-sentient minds. He continued to Gatecrash, finding that the Gatekeeper Corporation was suddenly a lot more interested in his findings and new discoveries. Although he built up some relationship with the Gatekeeper Corporation (to facilitate his research), he preferred to operate out of the Fissure Gate whenever possible, so that he would be free to publish his findings and make them available to the scientific community at large. As his understanding of ancient alien structures and languages grew, so did his prominence in the newly created fields of xenolinguistics and xenobiology.

Not long after becoming a recognized expert in these fields, as well as publishing some remarkable new theories in mathematics, Dr. Esterly came to the attention of Firewall, and was recruited when an alien device had been discovered which was releasing small bursts of low-level radiation in sequences which they suspected were not entirely random. They were not random, and Dr. Esterly was critical in assisting a team with identifying the function of the device as well as getting a rudimentary understanding of the meaning encoded in the message it seemed to be broadcasting. Since then, Firewall has found him useful on a number of other assignments, even where there is no evidence of extra-terrestrial involvement. He is a skilled scientist, and lends an unusual perspective to any situation - an eerie creativity that has been useful when a problem needed to be faced with fresh eyes. However, useful though he may be, Firewall requires his services infrequently enough that Doctor Esterly possesses a considerable amount of free-time, which he spends in research or continuing to explore the farthest reaches of this universe on the other side of the Pandora Gates.

Character: Doctor Mathew Esterly
Background: Original Space Colonist (+10 Freefall, +10 Profession [Gatecrasher], +20 Networking: Autonomists)
Faction: Argonaut (+10 to Profession[Gatecrasher], +10 to , +20 to Networking: Scientists)
Gender ID: Male
Motivations: +Alien Discoveries, +Alien Contact, +Research (Mathematics)

Customization Point Breakdown


Aptitudes:

Secondary


Reputation:


Traits:


Psi Slights:


Skills:
- Active

- Knowledge


Morph: Menton

Gear:

A scumborn technical whiz who has tried with all of his might to amount to nothing. He deeply desires to live a bohemian and romantic lifestyle in the way of the great poets and artists of the former earth, but finds himself gifted with an alarming technical aptitude that feels somewhat unnerving. An artist so devoted to futility that he's unwilling to save humanity except under threat of extortion (fortunately for humanity, he caves easily).

Jonah never wanted to be good at anything except maybe poetry. Unfortunately, he's never been gifted with words. As a child he was intensely sucessful in his goal as he was raised in an environmentally ravaged Appalachian slum -- the ever expanding outskirts and sewers of Memphis. He scraped by getting a passable education and gradually growing to hate his surroundings -- an abrasive attitude did nothing to help him fit in.

It was little surprise then that he gleefully signed up for indentured servitude in Martian terraforming. Unbeknownst to him at the time, the fall was looming. Just as his term of service started, the fall ended it rapidly. The Martian habitat he was helping to terraform tore itself apart as devastating infowar viruses tore through the life support and population. Jonah is certain he was exposed to some of these viruses, but made no mention as he escaped in a spaceship which eventually joined a scum barge.

Since the fall he's happily lived as a nomad and failing artist hoping his unfulfilled martian responsibilities won't catch up with him. More worrying is the fear that the infowar viruses may catch his ego -- since his escape from the station he's found that he has an incredible knack for mathematics and construction. He feels compelled to build and repair things and does so with a natural ease he knows he shouldn't have. More mysterious still are the occasional bouts of intense concentration and almost prehuman understanding that don't seem native to his skull. His solution has been self-medication with orbital hash (which does suppress his mental faculties admirably) and diligently attempting not to focus on anything that he's good at leading to a almost phobic inability to concentrate.

In spite of these precautions, a subset Phelan's recourse has figured out that Jonah is an extremely competent technologist and he routinely trades his skills for a continued living. Firewall, too, has gotten wind of his talents and through threats of exposing his indentured servitude, his viral exposure or worse his technical aptitude they have cajoled him into being a sentinel.