Techspeaker "Mercury" 33-7158-9427

Also known as Treasure, this is a player character used by Primitive Polygon.

33-7158-9427 YE 46
Other Names:	Treasure, Three Three, Trinket, “that spidery thing”.
Species:	Voidborn
Gender:	Female
Age:	22
Height:	4“4 ft
Weight:	140 kg
Occupation:	None
Current Placement:	None

Build and Skin Color: Treasure is best described as a small fluff-ball-thing with too many limbs by far. There is a fey and pale woman buried somewhere under the pile of cybernetics, only really distinguishable from a robot by a long cascade of curly silver hair and a pair of wide mismatched eyes peering out from underneath. Everything else is either obscured by sky blue robes, or is straight up an industrial-style gripper or some kind of tool-limb.

The lower half of their face is often covered by a stern metallic grill, part of a semi-attached mask which also covers both ears with rounded metallic audio sensors. Recently they have had a lot of organic re-engineering done to stave off Voidborn accellerated aging sickness- But it's still not clear if they actually have a fleshy mouth and nose under the mask.

For a very long time they prefered a six-legged arrangement, giving them amazing mobility both on land and in zero G, but their current setup is more humanoid.

Their arms remain modular and robotic, commonly mounting heavy griping vice-claws, built-in tools, grappling hooks or robust heavyweight manipulators. Their artificial left eye allows them to observe the infra-red spectrum, but only with a low refresh rate (It's better for tracking down power sources). A Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator is grafted directly onto her upper back, between the shoulder blades, now covered by a lead-lined anti-radiation pod. Optional limb hardpoints on their shoulder blades can mount welding torches, power charger/tasers, or a miniature extending fibre optic camera.

When not in pressure suits, they like to wear ritual robes, with strange plastic, metal and bone talismans, and what most people would consider pyjamas.

Personality: Offputtingly warm, welcoming, and with little concept of personal space, Mercury has a really weird and esoteric way of communicating that can make her very difficult to talk to. Having been born into a very small and insular community, her slang and idioms can be very confusing to outsiders, and their strange apparently quasi-religious appreciation of technology (and human-forms relation to it) can be practically incomprehensible.

Something as obtuse as the phrase “mother will watch us” might not just be referring to their mothership, for instance, but also the active mental makeup of the crew and how they can be relied upon to make certain decisions. The same can be taken in reverse, wherein she often fails to understand the actions of more individually-minded others.

Altogether, she is a humble soul with a great appreciation for the lives of those she sees as friends, but can also be a little too quick to take drastic and overly practical actions, such unscrewing a door from its hinges rather than just opening it, unplugging something directly instead of turning it off, or failing to understand the difference between power tools and medical equipment. Frighteningly pragmatic is probably the best way to describe such an off-kilter but dementedly predictable demeanour.

• Likes: Hiding on the ceiling, cute objects, “unintended presents”, electronic music, repairing old things, mechanical technology generally.
• Dislikes: Bright lights, large crowds, anywhere too clinical or clean.
• Goals: Build her own ship out of scrap and fill it full of unloved, discarded items.

The mothership “Silent Sun”, within the former fleet “Celestial Circus”.

Where as Freespacers with the title of “Gearheads” are created to service machines and keep them operational, “Trashheads” are rather more designed for recycling and salvaging the discarded or needlessly abandoned parts of other race's ships. Most other species might consider looting the aftermath of a battlefield or large scale shipping disaster to be parasitic behaviour, but given traumatic downfall of the Free State in recent years, it has simply become a fact of life for many.

The creature formerly known as 'Treasure' is a creation made for specifically this type of lifestyle, and it shows both mentally and physically. One of dozens of similar drones in an interlinked team, their lot was simple, unglamorous and highly dangerous. It wasn't as if they were personally disrespected, but nobody really expected them to survive long enough to bother building long-standing relationships with them either. It was one thing to talk about them as a paragon for the Free State's selfless traditional values, and quite another to sit down and make friends with one. A type-three mecha-druid gave them the nickname Treasure as a sort of pun for their job description, plus the concept of them being much too pretty for the job, but Three-Three herself never really cottoned on to the joke, and kept using it even after receiving massively more cybernetic hardware. At the time, her world was just too small for her to know any better.

Overall, to be a salvage labourer was a subculture in itself, it's workers noble but ill-read, kept simple minded and unmissed by all but each other when their sudden deaths by accidental depressurization, reactor meltdown or alien contamination rapidly came and went.

When the Free State started it's great schism and was forced to disband in droves, however… Everything changed. It's a well reported phenomena that some fleets took to dismantling themselves, and starting up land-based colonies in the vast unclaimed galactic north. The Celestial Circus was one of such fleets. The minority of crew that refused to give up the lifestyle are one drastic end to the spectrum, but there are also those that where physically incapable of it simply because their bodies had been specifically modified for zero-G movement, or were imbued with a specific set of skills at birth that no longer made sense without a space faring or high industrial setting. Surely, it didn't exactly stick to the spirit of the art of never again simply to send all of them to the grinder because of the intentional decisions of a self-preserving majority…

Instead, the divergent overcyberized types, including Treasure, were simply given the bare skeleton of what was left of the fleet, and allowed to make one last desperate pilgrimage back into more populated space before their none-existent supplies ran out. Being bolted into little more than pressurized closet with a dozen others for weeks at a time, nothing to eat, barely any environmental systems or ventilation, it was a situation only a cyborg could just barely survive. But not something the human mind was ever designed for. Polysentience virtual chatrooms helped, but when members would just straight-up disappear periodically, never to return, one's own mindset couldn't really stray too far from how long they had left themselves…

After some months, a slaver ship encountered them. Simple minded and ill-equipped type twos should be easy pickings, right? Not industrially equipped cyborgs, desperate and starving. Firearms dealt with some of their number, but not enough. They ate the slavers, put their own into the grinder, and continued on. Treasure's first encounter with the outside world.

Her ship mates were loosing their minds. Some of them had taken the success of their grizzly victory as a sign they should do it again, intentionally this time. Those that refused outright, including Three-Three, had only survived by eating the slaver ship's actual meagre food stocks, and they were seen as not having earned their keep for doing it. This was not her family anymore. Not her beloved subculture. These were animals.

When they swamped a civilian trading vessel with intention to repeat the acts, Treasure found a malfunctioning escape pod, threw together some desperate repairs, and made a split-second bid to leave it all behind. There wasn't really any rhyme or reason. She wouldn't despair too much if she ran out of vitality here. It was an adequate death. Better than being between the teeth of the others.

Crash landing. Some kind of mining installation affiliated with the cargo vessel, that it was automatically recalled to. Didn't know the name. She couldn't read the display. She survived as an individual from that point, somehow, sneaking from ship to ship, civilian port to crime den, taking only what she needed before scurrying back into the dark. She simply stole and observed for months. Funny what you can learn when nobody thinks you are watching.

It was unintentional, but unsurprising, that they eventually ended up on Dawn Station, seeing as it is one of the biggest free market depots in the northern galactic region. The number of cargo ships that travel to and from there is monumental in scale, and not as risky as stowing away on purely military operations.

At this point… Well, why not try and become employed by Origin Systems? She didn't particularly trust these strange and insidious outsiders, but she was getting tired of hiding. She could forget about the past. Maybe obtain a new subculture. Break free of this limbo that seemed to follow her around wherever she went. Maybe eat actual cooked food again.

As long as the interviewers could look past a reeking bug-eyed arachnid-cyborg and let her demonstrate her abilities just a little, she could manage that, right?… Becoming a faceless contractor was fine. She would examine these overly extravagant, (comparatively) lavish people, and decide just how much she had heard about their selfish capitalist culture on the polysentience was truth, and how much was hyperbole.

They got the job!… But their luck did not exactly improve. The rescue crew they were assigned to was charged with wresting control of a cargo ship, the ISC Sugar Glider, back from pirates. Their skills in patching the ship back together worked okay, but the gunbattle that ensued rather traumatized the small cyborg, and did very little to change their preconceptions about 'planetbound capitalists'. There was one particular pirate that she successfully disarmed, and unintentionally lead to the death of, something which she still feels quite guilty about.

Despite getting along quite well with the Neko veteran Five Ping and seemingly in the good books of the staff because of their fast and efficient repair work, they could never quite get over the bloodbath and found themselves despairing over the idea of returning to combat.

It was a difficult choice, but after a year of despairing over the meaning of the uniform, they finally chose to quit the company and run away once more. Back into the wood work, jumping from ship to ship as a simple pilgrim, sometimes part-time repair person, sometimes secret freeloader.

Eventually they ended up in the galactic west, and somehow became the official mechanic that the ISS Dig-It (Plot & Ship Info) desperately needed.

Economic troubles and continuing strife with the Freespacers led her all over the western region for several years, and they had officially disconnected their link to the polysentience by YE39, becoming disillusioned and choosing to live life as a Nepleslian from that point on.

Unfortunately, this still didn't mean they had actual birth records, which made their legal position precarious at best. During YE42, the salvage ship she was working on, the Night Prism, was revoked by the Black Faction, forcing to captain to pay back some old debts… With Treasure still on board.

Having jumped from ship to ship for several years, Treasure commited several hundred petty crimes in order to survive.

This neccessitated the new alias Mercury for when she once again chose to appear in public and join the crew of the ISS Sobek.

Maintenance, Repair, Disassembly: Treasure is extremely adept in working with old and broken down technology, in many cases able to repair most run-of-the-mill spacecraft systems with only the barest of available resources. It can be a little difficult for others to put trust in such precarious jurry-rigging, of course, but the results tend to speak for themselves. This also means that they are especially deft at taking apart machinery without damaging the components, alrough it must be said their skills are really rather more focused on heavy mass-produced objects like mechanical contraptions, electronics and nuclear power systems, not high-science kit like energy manipulating Yamatai military technology.

Engineering: It's not their main focus, but they have a basic knowledge and ability to deal with large scale structures and power systems. Truth be told, their straight-line thinking and lack of appreciation for safety measures make them an excellent technical assistant, but a poor lead engineer.

Communication: Basic trade and Freespacer cognitive machine language vocabularies. As voice modulation hardware is built directly into them, combined with a nigh-infinite backlog of language resources available on the poly sentience, they can translate many languages at least partially. Radio equipment is built directly into her head, so she can use that too, if a little informally.

Cybernetics: Given that they must maintain their own complex body on a daily basis, dealing with the prosthetic components of others is second nature to them. They aren't a real surgeon by any means, however, and have exactly the same disposition towards jury-rigging people as they do machines. Asking her to perform such an operation is a gamble at the best of times.

Starship Operations: They've lived the most part of their lives in or around a great many space fairing vessels, and it kinda rubs off on them. She can fly almost any craft at a poor-to-acceptable standard given enough time to experiment, particularly if they have analog controls. Hell, if the crew stations are close enough together, they are perfectly capable of multitasking using their myriad limbs! Just don't expect anything too fancy, she isn't trained or battle hardened or anything.

Rogue: Small, light footed and flexible, Treasure can be hard to find if she doesn't want to be seen. Climbing up walls, and using her grappling arm to rapidly bolt onto ceilings, greatly helps with this. That said, you can hear her machine bits squeaking and clanking if there isn't enough background engine/civilian noise, so it's kind of situational to densely populated urban settings and spacecraft interiors.

Techspeaker Treasure Three Three 33-7158-9427 has the following items:

• Kevlar-embedded PVC inflatable void suit, beige, with reinforced gloves and four cargo pockets.
• Origin contract worker uniform.
• Her voidsuit, or rather 2/3rds of one. It's a simple red/grey/brown padded thing with just a helmet, torso and one sleeve. She actually wears just the collar by itself almost all the time, since the metal plating both protects her vunerable neck sockets, and prevents others from contracting radiation poisoning from her RTG.
• A big messy ball of assorted raggity clothes. They are badly creased and reek of engine oil.
• A small engineering toolkit, with many small saws, drills, soldering irons, ratchets and power sheers along with several interchangeable head sizes for them. They seem a bit too small at first, until you realize they use her body itself as a plug-in power source.
• A backup memory hard drive, contains The Art of Never Again among other things.
• A huge loom of cables and tubes, kept in a shoddy cardboard box. Apparently one of them is for eating?… Probably best not to ask.
• A plastic cooler full of anti-bacterial injections, food sanitation capsules, and a few small personal spare parts.
• Three spare cybernetics batteries. They have been re-used a little too much over the years, and are starting to warp in shape.

Techspeaker Treasure Three Three 33-7158-9427 has the current funds;