The Kallen Series (Binding Universe)

Hi. The author is really sorry this is so late, so maybe he'll actually schedule the next one the day before. He hopes.

Appearance

Four legs, each connected to the circular center piece.

Feet not separate from lower half of legs, predominant red coloring*.

Legs are twin rectangles connected by the same type of joint as the shoulder, the two halves are interchangeable.

All other factors vary with model.

Movement

Generally slow, although progressively faster over most of the successive iterations.

Walking (All versions)

Jumping (Model Six and derivatives only. Quite limited.)

Skating (Model Eight and above.)

Flight (With rocket modules. Model Nine and above.)

Loadout

Standard:

Flare Lense

Shovel claws*

Rocket tubing (Model 10 and above, double as leg mounted blowtorches)

Optional:

Extra leg joint (all models)

External radar array (all models)

Torso mounted missile pods (all models)

Railgun mortar (Model 8 and above)

Version History

Model 1: Initial release. Slow, not terribly popular, quickly phased out.

Model 2: Reworked legs, significantly faster. Production ceased when a structural weakness is discovered in the new joint.

Model 3: Legs are reworked again, now resemble originals. Faster than the original, but not as much as the Model Two. Used for several years, phased out for Model Four.

Model 4: Addition of telescoping legs improves speed beyond that of Model Two, improves shock bracing. Very popular, responsible for more than twice the sales of any other model, but actually had a fairly short production run, due to the release of the Model Five.

Model 5: General performance upgrade. Somewhat popular, but not as much as it’s predecessor, resulting in reduced sales despite more than twice the production time. Production ends with the unwelcome arrival of the Model Six.

Model 6: Stripped down armor to reduce weight and profile, nearly doubled range of telescoping legs, color scheme changed to dark blue. Changes are almost universally criticised, production halted. Design is renamed the Kallen Type B, gets an updated release alongside all future models, becomes reasonably popular in it’s own right.

Model 7: Rushed to production in light of the Model Six’s failure, acts like a heavier duty version of the Model Six. Reasonably well received, but suffers limited sales due to previously alienated customer base.

Model 8: General systems upgrade. Central body reworked to allow mounting of heavier missile pods and sensors, legs reworked to allow wheels. Gets marketed for military use rather than civilian, enjoys moderate success.

Model 9: Balance and power supply upgrades, rocket module made feasible for legs. Very popular among civilian enthusiasts, but suffers limited sales among them due to cost.

Model 10: Minor overhaul. Many systems streamlined, rockets now included by default. Sells reasonably well, but not exceptionally so.

Model 11: General systems upgrade. More emphasis placed on distinction between civilian and military modules. Networking between autopilots refined significantly.

Model 12: Networking further refined. Letheium core made legal with licence.

*Exception: Model Six and derivatives.

Vanka (Observed Universe)

Hi. Maybe this scheduling thing will become a regular thing? Hmm. Anyway, sorry for the nonexistent editing, I don't have time to fix it at the moment.

Vanka was from a poor-but-honest family, and didn’t have a sufficient means of support upon leaving it. Lacking a job, and with no better options, she signed up for the military. She was acceptable in boot camp, but certainly not exceptional enough to qualify for sniper training or officer pay, which she needed if she wanted more than the barest necessities, let alone to help her family. So when she was offered the option to sign up for experimental Power testing, she happily accepted, on the premise that it would be fairly simple, reasonably nondangerous, and not require surgery, as well as provide Special Operations pay and benefits. All of this was technically true. Technically.

In the deeply classified comedy of errors that followed, she was subjected to an attempt to exploit Self Observation as a Power source while still allowing adaptive thought, thereby removing the primary problem with that ritual. To this end they split her mind into Phantoms, with the instances identical save for being about half a second off from each other, and set them to take turns between controlling her body and Observing it. This produced rather less impressive power levels than hoped, and introduced a very slight pause time as the personas shifted roles. They attempted to solve these by adding more iterations, the latest of which would always shift from power generation to movement modeling right before it took control, allowing optimized, graceful movement.

This was a mistake.

Vanka is now host to more than twenty copies of herself, incredibly graceful and fluid in her movements, and utterly incapable of aiming guns at combat ranges. Her Grace lets her see and use the best future muscle movements for a task, but makes her sight a number of successive viewpoints, all from slightly different positions, and slightly different points in time, rendering it impossible to accurately aim at any moving target smaller than a shed. In response, she has been equipped with a few homing attacks, and a heavy melee Power loadout, although they’ve skimped a bit on the defense aspect due to her Grace doubling as a way to assist dodging, by allowing her to choose the movements that minimize wounds.

She was then handed to Akabane’s squad, as part of the ongoing project there, and so far, she seems to be doing quite well, although they haven’t been able to attract any long term Observers--current speculation is that they need at least one more member, if they’re following the old conventions, and for best results they want someone with a fair bit of power but not much experience with it.

Powerset Analysis

Title: Special Commando Vanka Kavusa

Roles: Defective Supersoldier, Team Girl, Melee Specialist (Martial Arts Chick), Supporting Family Back Home

System: Reformed Timed Boundary (Maxwell Variant)

Estimated Level: 35

Boundary Strength: 1100

Boundary Cycle Speed: 120

Strength: 180

Sight: 10-90(special)

Base Resilience: 90(total: 140-200)

Power Capacity: 60

Power Generation: 50 per Cycle

Ability Focus: 5

Preferred Range: Melee

Special Traits: Self Possession x23 (Instinctive Grace, Inhibited Aim, Rapid Movement, True Seer, Automatic Evade, Power Well, Phantom Aura x23)

Active Abilities: Phantom Shield, Winter Missile, Burst Strike, Demonhammer, Legion Breaker(charge dependant, 3-7 cycles)

Other Forms

Vanka Natural: A bonus boss, Vanka manages to deactivate her Phantoms, allowing much better aim and the benefits of her manual levelling. Mid level, more of a miniboss than a standard bonus boss.

Vanka Actual: Another bonus boss, Vanka reactivates her Selfpossession, and becomes significantly stronger. Acts as a stronger version of her from her mandatory fight, in the same vein as Akabane Reload. Vanka Actual, Kurlin Rave, and Akabane Reload are also a bonus boss together, and provide one of the most difficult fights in the game.

Commando Akabane (Observed Universe)

Hi. Apologies again, for the vary late update. I hope you enjoy it anyway - I know I like this guy.


Special Commando Akabane is very difficult to amuse, and is something of a gamebreaker. He developed a simple, fairly powerful ability called One-Shot, which he made his signature move. It allows him to fire any single, once, and hit his target, so long as it is physically possible. He can use it up to four times in rapid succession, after which he must pause, but unlike the majority of active abilities he can recharge it in the same action as reloading.
He has decided to exploit this with a custom four chambered revolver, and uses the freed room to load rounds traditionally reserved for Anti-Tank rifles. It is still quite large, but can at least fit in a handgun holster. He uses the Timed Shield system, like most of his country in his time, and chose his ability at least partially to take advantage of it.

His attitude is of someone who has seen many interesting things, Observed or not, and mostly just shot them in vital areas. He is a midgame boss, and is actually dangerous enough to qualify on his own, but has backup from his teammates Vanka and Kurlin, who are each only slightly weaker, making one of the most difficult fights in the game, to the point that it may be possible to lose and keep playing with a significantly altered storyline. Either way, both he and his team survive the experience.
He shows up again quite a bit later, as Akabane Reload. In this form, he is slightly less deliberately plain, doesn’t conceal his armor quite as much, and still carries his signature handgun. His major difference is in choice of ammunition; he now carries high explosive rounds as well as his standard armor piercing. The second appearance may or may not be as a bonus boss, but is almost certain to have some actual effect on the story beyond allowing access to the armory.

Character Bio: Riot (Awesome Normal Universe)

Hi. Sorry this is so late, this took a long time to edit. And is still a rather rushed job. It was actually two documents, now spliced together, that I'd found in my Google Docs.
I hope you like it anyway.


The Person:

Emily Pembrook technically does have a conscience, it’s just a rare, first edition version that only seems to work in certain circumstances. Said circumstances don’t seem to include any time she is bankrupt, highly upset, in obvious danger, or hungry.

It also seems particularly fuzzy on the subject of avoiding potentially lethal fights, especially when she appears to have the advantage - after killing her first four people, she briefly panicked, but seems to have been primarily concerned with police investigation. Following this, she assumed the persona of Riot quite rapidly and with very few reservations.

As Riot, her modus operandi was to find two armed opposing groups, often both criminal in nature, wait for or cause a confrontation, and proceed to raid both sides’ less guarded bases. As a strategy it worked remarkably well, leaving her alive and unmaimed after at least seven attempts.


The Story:

Riot was a fairly good case study for why young women shouldn’t attempt to pay their way through college by becoming mercenaries. While there are worse ideas for handling the situation, there don’t appear to be many.

She began her career shortly after her third year of college, a reasonable engineer and an excellent mechanic, but sorely lacking skill in accounting, and as a result, she was unable to continue paying her tuition. In response, she attempted to pay off her student loans with the extra credit hours from building a working suit of power armor. This backfired spectacularly, as she had forgotten to take licensing costs into account, and landed her quite deep in debt.

With her available resources amounting to a few textbooks, a dorm room she’d soon be evicted from, an old desktop computer, and a partially licensed suit of power armor, she made the eminently reasonable decision to become a private security contractor, taking her powersuit and auditioning for a short term, high paying job that she believed to be, at worst, running security for bootleggers.

It turned out to much, much more impressive. A new drug lord was moving in, and she had been hired as an enforcer. By the time she figured this out, the warehouse she was guarding was in the middle of a raid by one of the local gangs, and she ended up shooting several of them in self defense.
She then panicked and ran, hid out for several days, and eventually calmed down and hid the armor before returning to school. Any thoughts of turning to the police were quashed when she saw the news story about the incident, and found that whoever killed four minors with an RPG launcher was being painted in about the blackest light the media had available.

Fortunately, no one who’d actually seen her face was still alive, and even the details of her armor were fuzzy at best. She then faced the realization that she’d never gotten more than the down payment, her boss was dead, and she was still in debt.

She tried to alter the armor, changing the details she could, and adding new ones. With her limited budget, this didn’t amount to much.
She then decided that the logical path to financing herself was to moonlight as a supervillian, but quickly realized that with her available resources robbing a bank was impractical. Not to be discouraged, she decided to rob one of the local gangs, instead.
This succeeded remarkably well, as she had been able to strike their hideout while most of them were out on a raid. She proceeded to engineer further conflict before robberies, including with the police, which on one, memorable, occasion, led to her stealing a police van sent to collect her.

As an actual career, however, raiding gang hideouts and stealing police hardware paid remarkably badly, all things considered. While this might possibly have been solved with the addition of a competent fencing operation, she had neither the knowledge of how to contact one nor, in all likelihood, the ability to use one if she did, as she’d made enemies of all the local organizations capable of facilitating such.
Just as likely, however, she actually got a fairly reasonable deal for her misbegotten goods, and simply ran afoul of the fact that crime does not pay quite as much as heist movies might have you believe.

In any case, she didn’t make enough to retire in the year she spent at it, and barely made enough to keep herself in college, although she was able to afford a proper workshop. Despite the initial press fury, she never bought actual rocket propelled grenades during her early career, sticking to the much less regulated rubber ammunition and the occasional flashbang. She eventually started making the highly lethal cryonic grenades that became part of her signature, but this was close to the end of her supervillain career.


The Armor:

The Riot armor is large, dark green, and bulky, especially the legs. The front of the helmet has three layers, the innermost one a bubble of bulletproof glass with an autopolarizing coating, followed by two retractable faceplates; the inner is split, retracting to the sides, the outer retracts over the head, and was added later.

The outermost faceplate enfolds two cameras, the feed from which can be projected over the mirrored glass inner layer, creating a somewhat flattened hologram. Said cameras include at least infrared and low light compensation functions, and appear to allow ultraviolet target painting, as well.

The primary engine is located on the lower back, just underneath the ammunition canisters, and what remarkably little noise it does make is suppressed by its casing. The most memorable feature of the armor, however, is the fact that the arms are both grenade launchers, with spiraling ammunition feeder tracks making up the majority of the arms.This naturally makes the suit’s dexterity rather limited, but she has designed the whole setup with sufficient durability that the barrels can be used as reasonable clubs, in line with the initial intention for the suit to be used in actual riot suppression, or at least act as a plausible model of such.

Glass Soldiers (Binding Universe)

Hi. The author is sorry this has barely been edited, it's actually very late as the author is doing this. When this posts, he will likely be unable to access a computer, so he's set it to post automatically.



Sometimes referred to as the Pilgrim’s War, the Holy Settlement Crusade was an attack by the Grand Sanctum, a semireligious state that decided it would be easier to conquer the Fourth Timeline, still recovering from the Dead Messengers, than it would be to actually find and terraform a suitable planet on which to build their empire. Their relative experience with magic allowed them to compensate for much smaller numbers of actual mages, and one of the most important factors in this were the Glass Soldiers.

Glass Soldiers are hard counters to almost all of the widespread Fourth weaponry, being almost completely immune to lasers or electricity, highly resistant to fire, only slightly more vulnerable to cold, impossible to properly target with Bloodforged weaponry, and prone to shattering into fast homing projectiles when actually hit, although they are remarkably durable. They were also impossible to truly kill without destroying both cores, located in the head and chest cavity respectively, which would each repair the other if damaged. Severing the connection between the two (via decapitation) would force them into a dormant state until they reconnected.
Unfortunately, even death will not immediately depower the glass, and will cause the main body to shatter explosively, often killing the one who actually destroyed their cores, considering the ranges generally necessary to do so.

Comet Shards are one of the few things that can consistently destroy them with relative safety, but only individually, in larger groups the splinters often reach sufficient density to penetrate the heat cloak. The other consistently effective weapon is Thunderbrand, which can shatter large groups of Glass Soldiers with single castings, while destroying both cores simultaneously. The large Fuel cost and the chance of collateral damage or friendly fire limit its usage significantly, however, although perhaps not as much as they should.

Lastly, their biggest advantage is likely that they can be mass produced fairly cheaply over a span of hours, including cores, ultimately requiring a bit of sand or glass, found in abundance on beaches or in deserts, a bit of copper, and a bit of iron, both found naturally in dirt, or, if more speed is necessary, the appropriate types of ore. After production, they could be deployed almost instantly by teleportation, and recalled in the same way. Led by mages for fire support and field command, they were very effective, to the point that most of the reason the Sanctum actually lost can be pinned directly in assistance from the Fifth.
With access to an Omnicrafter Ring, Glass Soldiers can be given simple upgrades in the form of eye gems, granting minor supplementary abilities based on the elements the gems are formed from. While the gems were relatively difficult to get ahold of, they could drastically improve effectiveness, such as Steel Gems to make them more durable, or water gems to make them flexible and good at swimming. The gems are interchangeable, allowing excellent versatility, and as a whole Gem Eyed take the role of elite soldiers, albeit expendable ones.