Post by ramboneil on Aug 23, 2013 13:20:54 GMT -5
Name: DNE-343-982 "Denny"
Age: 58 years
Race: Aratech XT-2000 General Purpose Droid - modified
Birth place: Aratech Droid Factory
Height: 1.6 meters
Weight: 143 kilograms
Eye Color: n/a
Hair Color: n/a
Appearance: Aratech XT-2000 base chassis with extensive modifications. He has body plates and some synthetic polymer layered over much of his original body to give him a vaguely human like form but still looks like a robot. He also wears a helmet as well with a smooth tinted transparasteel plate. This helmet is equipped with Motion Trackers, a miniature radar system, infrared cameras, a built in telescope, a voice modulator, and an uplink device. He also has a shoulder mount that mounts a specially designed sniper rifle. (like a halo EVA helmet only the metal is gunmetal grey and the face plate is smooth black.)
He hides his obvious droidness under heavy clothing. This clothing includes, heavy brown work gloves, a heavy set of cargo pants, a white skin suit, a grey unbuttoned dress shirt, and a shin length dark jungle-green trench coat. He has about 20 sets of that one outfit on his ship.
Personality: 'he' had a rather quirky personality even before the incident but because of his corrupted files and the bad backup, his personality can only be described as Cool Uncle with a hint of crazy. After some work by Quantum Vision Works scientists upgrading his code with some proper drivers and bug fixers, he began to have a fuller and deeper personality.
He doesn't particularly like being the mature one of the group and doesn't like being in charge of anything more than his own little crew of layabouts. That's not to say he can't be responsible or mature or can't take charge of anything, but if there is someone else who can get the job done, he generally won't. Additionally, he had an ethics package installed to regulate his actions so that if anything happened, he wouldn't do anything downright stupid like mounting a robot insurgency against organic life.
Actually, he generally likes organic life, he likes people in general with the exception of a select few examples. Pirates and warlords are generally free game though he does take circumstances into account when judging people. He holds the view that life is all a matter of circumstances and that people are molded by those circumstances. He makes a very clear difference between a pirate attempting to deter unsavory types from his/her home and a pirate in it for the money and murdering. This is exemplified by the fact that he actually sympathizes with the Mandelorians themselves but does not sympathize with their goals.
Nevertheless, he does have a sense of practicality about him. While he does believe that many mandelorians have suffered unjustly at the hands of the republic, it doesn't in any way stop him from hunting their ships and agents because his main supplier pays decent money for running missions against the mando PMCs. He has a cyclical philosophy that ethics don't get in the way of business so long as business does not get in the way of the law and the law does not get in the way of ethics. So long as the law is ethical, he will do any business so long as it falls inside the law. He does make exceptions on occasion though and he toes the line a lot but mostly he sticks with lawful work.
Morality aside, when he isn't doing a mission, he is generally a very relaxed person. He is very hard to make angry. He can get annoyed, antagonistic and irritated, but actually making him angry requires extreme skill in the art of making people angry, or, you know, kill one of his crew or friends in cold blood. You generally don't want to do that though because his anger is not the explosive and heated kind but rather the tranquil and calculating kind.
Profession: [former] repair, manual labor, piloting [current] commodore, philanthropist, ruthless stock broker, infamous stock market speculator.
Previous Faction/Rank: Republic
Equipment: N/A
Starship: Deep Space Salvage Freighter - Black Rock Shooter
[Hull number: T-ARS-9865i] (Tug - Armored Salvage Ship, independent)
Centuion Long Range Patrol Ship - Lucky Star
[Hull number: PCF-8765i] (Patrol Craft Fast, independent)
Skills: repair, command(Asymmetric warfare), hacking, writing inspirational speeches, programming, sniping, math skills, playing online video games, investment banking
Attributes:
Physical Strength: 5
Intelligence: 7
Speed: 4
Leadership: 5
Unarmed: 2
Melee Weapons: 2
Ranged Weapons: 8 (with his integrated sniper rifle)
Bio: The story will begins approximately two years ago at a remote republic outpost on the outer rim where DNE-343-982 woke up from his last memory wipe. Due to his personality, he was one of the last of his series being used by the republic military and had been shuttled around from military base to military base often enough that the pencil pushers on high had assigned him to an outpost in the middle of nowhere that was commanded by a pompous rich guy whom high command didn't like but couldn't fire. Well, things got off to a really rocky start, and by rocky, I mean really really bad. How bad? Well, a large group of Mandelorian extremists had managed to gather up a sizable force and was looking for blood, specifically republic blood and lots of it at that. The Mandos attacked the outpost and while the pompous rich guy actually fought pretty well, they managed to overrun the base. The civilian contractors managed to get on freighters and escape off planet while the droids on site had been stuffed into the basement and temporarily deactivated.
The mandos were pretty mad that the civilian contractors had gotten away and they got on several ships and began chasing after them, but not after turning around and blowing the base to high hell.
[the fun begins]
The scene that DNE-343-982 woke up to was of the basement door blown wide open and a small floating repair droid floating over him, chirping happily at its job well done. Our intrepid hero had been damaged by the basement door being blown off its hinges and landing on him and the damage unfortunately damaged on of his hard disks, corrupting several of his operating parameters. After congratulating the repair droid on its good work, he began searching around for survivors. There were no humans, but there were several droids that were still in working order and some of the battle droids that had been deployed could be brought back online with minor repairs.
he wandered around the ruined base for about an hour before he found some more repair drones of the same model that had repaired him. He managed to find a small portable generator and used it to recharge his own battery and that of the other droids. He then went to find more of his droid compatriots.
By the end of two hours, he managed to locate where the other droids were stored and had gathered a small ensemble of little repair droids that buzzed around, vying for his attention. The first droid that he woke up was the Centerion Personal Assistant that had previously belonged to the now deceased base commander. After he informed her of her unfortunate lack of a master, she needed to re-designate someone else so she chose him. He was creeped out at first, but then he realized that he was creeped out and began freaking out, going through his error logs and finding that his entire operating system and many of his config files had been corrupted and restored from a faulty backup. This was bad because his inhibitors were now gone including the ones on his personality and emotions.
After taking a 'breather' and recharging the personal assistant, he inquired as to her designation and found that she was named Sheila. So with that, our intrepid hero went around and began reactivating more droids. As it turns out, apparently the repair droids he found earlier had taken a liking to him and they were extremely loyal. By mid-day he had managed to gather together about 21 droids, excluding the little repair droids, 4 of those were battle droids.
[blowing this Popsicle stand]
Once everyone was together, the droids did not know what to do. It was quite clear that nobody wanted to go back to enslavement under the republic again, and the mandos would blow them all to bits if they came back so the answer was clear. They needed to run. Luckily, one of the plucky repair droids had found the not too blown up crash site of a Centurion Long Range patrol ship not too far away and the ship would be repairable. There was also apparently a derelict ship in orbit if the distress beacon was to be believed. Since unit DNE held the loyalty of the repair droids, was the only other droid who could actually talk and had the highest computational power among the motley group, he was elected the leader.
The repair droids managed to take another day to complete repairs to the ship and after making sure that it was not only airtight and space-worthy but also stocked up on spare power cells and fuel, everyone went onboard. Since he was the only one with adequate ability to pilot spacecraft, DNE decided that he was going to be the pilot and captain of the vessel. Although it was really cramped, everyone managed to fit into the ship and they took off.
Within a few minutes they managed to reach orbit on an approach vector for the derelict ship. As they got closer, it was apparent that the reason the ship was abandoned was because the mandos. Why? the lifeboat slots had blaster burns and the ship had so many leaks that there was hardly any atmosphere left to leak.
They docked with the ship and were greeted by a gruesome sight of several corpses floating around, several had blaster burns in the backs of their heads and others had clearly asphyxiated. They piled out of the ship and went about making the ship theirs. The repair droids went ballistic and hurled themselves upon the holes in the ship and upon the stable but failing reactor. They gave the dead crew of the ship the standard 'burial at sea' and after cleaning everything up, they set themselves up in their desired places. One of the battle droids who could pilot the ship and three other droids decided to man the Centurion.
As it turned out, the tractor arrays had dislodged from their mountings and were floating around. In a fit of madness, DNE decided to mount them on top of the ship on the Nacelles behind the ship. His intention, was to use the tractor beams to propel a powerful bomb as a projectile. Crude? Yes. Effective? Maybe. Awesome? Hell yeah. He rechristened the ship the "Black Rock Shooter" and even had the name engraved on the outside of the hull by the repair droids, sanding out the original name which had been half burnt off anyway. How did they managed to crew the ship you may ask? They turned the entire thing upside down and found the owner's manual and then downloaded some how-to guides from the company website.
Since their new "flagship" had a name and because according to the holonet, it was bad luck to set sail on a ship without a name, they had a look at the Centurion and decided to name it the Lucky Star.
As the hyperdrive was being repaired. The droids now had a different crisis. They had a ship, two to be precise, and they now had their freedom. Now they needed to decide on what to do with their newly acquired freedom. After about four hours of deliberation, they decided that getting out of dodge as fast as possible was the first thing they should do. So when DNE went to the bridge and appointed Sheila as his semi-mandatory bridge bunny, he looked at a star map, turned off his optical sensors, and pointed at a random star. They then jumped.
[more fun]
They hadn't been looking for fun but apparently fun found them when they dropped out of orbit above a random planet only to find a slaver waiting for them there. Well, not waiting for them necessarily, see, they had just jumped into the system after looting a random supply shipment for some company called Quantum Vision Works. They had been badly damaged apparently but they were still space worthy and had managed to make off with quite a decent haul.
Well, during the journey, DNE had been busy exploring the hypernet and had actually developed lines of code for situations like this while playing the space battleship series. He had yet to shut down his protocols for gaming yet when they exited hyperspace and his automatic response was to "Fire everything!" and fire everything they did. The still docked centurion started firing every gun it had while the salvager's ion cannons went to work and the Black Rock Shooter had its first trial run.
In short order, the slaver was reduced to a bit more than a wreck and was rapidly leaking atmosphere. DNE then realized that there might be actual slaves on board so he ordered the bombardment to stop and ordered the three battle droids to get on the centurion and see if they could find any survivors. As it turned out, there weren't any human survivors but what they did find was a big shipment of droids that were to be delivered to a shipyard that belonged to a corporation called T.A.S.C. Some of the slavers attempted to kill the battle droids but that didn't turn out very well for them. Needless to say, they liberated most of the droids and then looted the entire ship for weapons.
In all, they had now acquired about 120 new friends. The new droids were transported to the ship and when they were activated, the crew was very surprised that the new droids already had complete and diverse personalities. The leader of the new group was a droid named "Phill" and was a battle droid that had been retired from active service to serve in a security function. After a brief dialogue, DNE introduced himself and his crew. Phill decided to call DNE Denny because DNE-343-982 was to bothersome to say and took too long. The other droids also got names. It was then that a new ship appeared, a heavily armed cruiser class ship that dwarfed the Black Rock Shooter and it belonged to a very tinkled off Quantum Vision Works. After the misunderstanding was cleared up, the captain took an interest in the droid crew. Of course they were interesting, they were republic droids that had been abandoned and had essentially defected, not only that, but the leader had actually developed a full personality. The two liked each other instantly though when Denny looked past the captain to the scientists rubbing their hands together in an oddly menacing way, something inside him screamed for him to grab Sheila and run for the hills.
[New Stuff, New Friends]
They decided to scrap the wreck of the slaver and bring aboard the droids that they had left onboard because of space constraints on the Black Rock Shooter. Afterwards, Denny and his little entourage was invited to follow the cruiser back to home base. As it turned out, home base was a super massive colony ship with a rather big civilian population and it was also a science and manufacturing facility. When the Black Rock Shooter/Lucky Star docked at the ship, Denny's crew was swarmed by scientists. That feeling manifested again in every male programmed droid this time, it told them to grab their groin plates and run for the hills screaming as loudly as their speakers would allow. There was however, no immediately visible reason for this however, and they simply ignored it.
While all the events that followed were a blur to Denny and he didn't remember them later, he agreed that in return for modifications to the ships and themselves, they would allow the scientists to run some tests and experiments and also get copy of their programming since it was apparently fascinating. Our band of adventurers never regretted what happened next but they did wish it was a lot less confusing. The scientists gave all of the droids full personalities and also gave the repair droids little voice boxes so they could talk. Sheila was also modified to allow her to wield a weapon as well as some other things, like 'hair' for instance. Denny had a sniper rifle and customizable armor points attached and also had some detrimental bugs ironed out. When he asked about the sniper, the scientists started gushing about how he looked so cool while comparing him to some graphic novel that had extremely stylized giant fighting robots on it.
In the end, the party was left satisfied, confused but satisfied. They also found out that Phill had decided to tag along along with about 30 other droids who just didn't want to retire yet. They brought along a Telos-class light corvette that the corporation had salvaged and fixed up a while ago and were now getting rid of due to its age. All that Phill had to do was walk up to a pencil pusher and ask for it. He got it for free.
So with their new friends in tow, our band of adventurers set off on yet another adventure, until the Captain from before stopped them on the way out the door and offered them a job. It was at that point that our droid friends took a long hard look at their wallets and realized that not only did they not have money, they also didn't even have wallets. They then looked at how much their expenses were probably going to be and it started to add up. Denny decided to accept the job. Apparently there was an annoying pirate that was up to no good somewhere and while they were sure that he was going to do something, they didn't have any evidence so going after the guy would drop PR massively.
[First Job]
The first job was pretty standard for any bounty hunting mission. They managed to track down the pirate and when they jumped into the system with three very big ships, the pirate in a medium freighter decided to run for it. The Black Rock Shooter put a stop to that by launching an EMP bomb at the pirate. the ion cannons kept the ship's systems down so that the Black Rock Shooter could hold it in place with its tractor beams.
Denny himself along with a boarding team boarded the freighter with non-lethal weapons and after a brief firefight, they arrested the pirates, confiscated all the contraband cargo, and gathered enough evidence to put the pirate crew of 5 in jail for about 70-80 years. The prisoners were then transported to the Black Rock Shooter's holding cells for storage. A skeleton crew then managed to outfit captured ship with an IFF transponder that identified it as a lawfully captured prize of war.
They returned to the QVW home base and handed over the pirates and the evidence. As for the contraband goods, those were turned over to local law enforcement and were allowed to do with the captured vessel as they saw fit. After weighing the merits of keeping the vessel, Denny decided that he would simply auction off the vessel to supplement their pay. They manage to get a good hundred thousand credits for it to supplement their paycheck from QVW. Not only that, but it turned out that two of the pirates also had a record and had skipped bail so they were paid about a third of what was paid as bail. That was also pretty nice.
Denny also found another use for Sheila besides navigator/bridge bunny for the Black Rock Shooter, and that use was negotiating contracts for additional jobs. Actually, the local law enforcement was extremely impressed that Denny had brought back the people alive and enough evidence to convict them in a lawful trial instead of vaporizing the ship and bringing them a corpse.
[Second Job]
The second job was different however. There was a Mandelorian rebel who had stolen a cargo freighter and from a certain planet and the planet's police force was already too spread out so Denny was contracted to retrieve it. When Denny's people dropped out of hyperspace, the Mando attempted to run and was stopped by an EMP bomb from the Black Rock Shooter.
Denny, Phill, and four other battle droids along with a police officer who was observing the job got on the Lucky Star and went to capture their target. They attempted to subdue the mandelorian but at the last second, the mando whipped out a small holdout blaster and started firing, seriously wounding the police officer, disabling one of the droids and forcing Denny to fire a lethal round. The target was unfortunately, dead and the police officer was bleeding badly so Denny was forced to leave Phill to stay on the freighter while he and another droid grabbed the officer and jumped into the Centurion. He jumped to hyperspace and barely managed to get the officer medical attention in time to save the guy.
Denny initially apologized to the police chief for not capturing the mando and allowing the officer to be badly injured but the chief told him not to worry about it. When the Black Rock Shooter and Wind Rider jumped into the system with the stolen freighter, they were initially worried, especially Phill, but they were reassured when they found out that Denny was alright and Phill was informed that the officer would make a full recovery. The droid that was disabled however, would require a new body since his current one was totaled.
Well, the court had many of the deceased mandelorian's items impounded except for items of cultural value which were turned over to the deceased person's next of kin. The Items that were impounded were searched for evidence and once cleared, were auctioned off to pay for damages. The corporation also payed for the job of recovering the lost freighter and also the medical expenses of the officer who was injured. Denny was now practically rolling in cash, to be exact, almost enough to buy a new heavy freighter and had nothing to do with it. He hadn't really spent any of it except on fuel and ammo since the droids didn't need the amenities that organics did. When he looked back on how the last job went, he realized that his original crew members were the only ones who were rated for that kind of job so when he looked into his oh so shiny new bantha leather wallet, he decided that now was a good time to start investing in crew survivability.
He went to the only place he knew he could, back to the guys at Quantum Vision Works. When he practically frogmarched Phill and his crew to the QVW science team, handed them the budget and told them to go wild, the scientists went ballistic. Phill was frogmarched into the facility and walked out in shining armor with a heavy shoulder mounted anti-vehicular system and weapons hidden in places that even Phill was surprised at. The other battle droids got a similar treatment though none were as heavy as Phill. QVW also got their hands on Sheila somehow and colored the surface synthetic a light peach color to make her look a bit more human and added some other stuff as well that they were all hush hush about. They did it on the house though, the strange picture book came out again and they were chattering excitedly about something that Denny frankly didn't care about. By the end of the entire thing, Denny's wallet was almost empty. Then, the scientists decided that their fancy new stuff needed to be tested in order to get new data and what better way to get new data than to test it out in battle.
All of a sudden, Denny once more had a job.
[New Data]
A whirlwind of activity later, and suddenly, Denny, Phill and another sniping droid named Simmons both found themselves attached via magnetic clamp to the top of the Lucky Star, sniping away with scoped anti-tank rifles at pesky Mando fighters while the patrol ship underneath them popped flares and pulled a barrel roll at the same time. Why? Quantum Vision Works did not like Mandos and Mandos did not like them, at all. The corporation had run into a Mando PMC and without a single word, both sides had opened fire with Black Rock Shooter caught in the crossfire.
Right in the middle of the shootout, the Black Rock Shooter had been offered a very pretty penny to help against the Mandos. How pretty was that penny? Combined with the pay for bringing back battle data for the scientists, that totaled up to just slightly over a million credits so Denny thought, how could he refuse? The Quantum Vision Works fleet clocked in at one cruiser, a destroyer, two frigates and heavy corvette. The mandos had two destroyers, a frigate, two gun boats, three strategic bombers and about twenty lightly armored but heavily armed fighters.
Denny, Phill and Simmons both drew a bead on the same fighter at the same time and fired. Phill's shot dropped the shields while Simmons' shot smacked into the cockpit and opened it to space. Denny's shot drove itself into the engine and caused the fighter to explode violently into a fireball. He almost lost his rifle when the Lucky Star jerked around to draw a bead on a strategic bomber and fired both cannons as quickly as possible. The bomber also exploded. That incidentally happened to be the last strategic bomber since early in the battle, the Black Rock Shooter had tossed a very powerful bomb into the middle of the Mando fleet that also contained a low level EMP. One of the bomber had been vaporized instantly while the other was hit by the EMP and the fireball and was floating around as a derelict, venting atmosphere like a cylindrical can with a square lid. The Lucky Star also had another very big smart bomb in its cargo hold to deliver to the Mandos, express delivery. When the Lucky Star got close enough, it opened the cargo hold and several droids inside manually pushed the thing out.
Denny, Phill and Simmons then had their work cut out for them. Keep the fighters off the bomb until it reached it fired its rockets and hit the Mandos. It was a bit harder than they thought, but with the Lucky Star not moving around so much with fighters focusing on the bomb instead, they managed to down 4 more fighters. the bomb exploded and Quantum Vision Works along with the Wind rider moved in to finish the job.
By the end of the battle, Lucky Star was sporting a burn scars and gouges from its hull (on top of the ones it already had) while Wind Rider had chunk taken out of its hull. No structural damage though. QVW allowed the Shooter to get at what remained of the battle. In all, none of the ships that remained were intact enough to be made prizes but that's not to say they were all useless, what was recovered made Denny more than happy. Three of the hyper-drives were salvagable and with a bit of spit and polish, were good as new. The engine units were aftermarket upgrades and were going for several thousand credits each. Weapons, computers, reactors, other doodads, scrap metal and about half a ton of trace elements were recovered from the site. Overall, Denny was a very happy robot man indeed.
When he received his paycheck, he told the scientists that he wanted to see the universe for himself, the scientists were very sad but they brought up that he would eventually have to deal with humans who wouldn't be as kind to him. He pondered over that and came to the conclusion that Sheila actually looked human enough to pass for one if nobody actually touched her or saw the completely unnecessary and aesthetic gaps in her droid body. The Scientists said that they could fix that by adding some more pannels and add some synthetic polymer to make her body look more human in shape though it would still be recognized. Denny decided to go with it and Sheila agreed. The scientists also made a point that Denny should also get some of the same treatment so he also conceded.
After the modifications though, she could still clearly be identified as a droid at a glance. Denny mulled over this until one of the few female scientists cried out two things. The first one was "Clothing!" and the second one was "Shopping Spree!" and those two words sent shivers down the rest of the male scientists' backs.
[Money and spending it on stuff]
Since poor Denny's armor plates were detatchable and the modifications made it so that if he had clothes with a helmet, he would be able to pass as a human, depending on how well it was done, he would either look like a socially inept recluse or he would look pretty badass. So both he and Sheila spent the next 12 hours being dragged around the colony ship shopping and looking for a good look. the helmet was easy to find, the scientist simply waltzed into the onboard military armory, entered the passcode 'Otaku777:p' and grabbed a helmet from off the shelf.
The next part was the clothing which was a pain for Denny but Sheila found the experience quite entertaining, unsurprising because the scientist dragging them around was the one who had made Sheila's software modifications. Denny found his processor glitching and sputtering about halfway through the trip but in the end, he walked out of the trip with clothing that made him indistinguishable from a droid. The helmet was still extremely conspicuous though.
Sheila actually had several sets of clothes of varying style that looked and were expensive though she also had a few sets that were pretty cheap and disposable. these she would need since she technically also counted as a battle droid because of her ability to wield weapons. They finally managed to bid farewell and before anything else could happen, Denny gathered up the crew and jumped with only a message to the rest of the scientists that said thanks.
[Adventureholics]
When the ships dropped out of Hyperspace, they found themselves above a planet in the outer rim that Denny had found was named "Octavius V". It was your standard fare, earth-like with a few cities here and there, the usual, but when the three ships descended they found themselves caught in the crossfire between a squad of SWAT and a bunch of very well armed gangsters. This was not a hard predicament for the motley group to sort out and they contacted the local law enforcement office who gave them permission to do anything that the person in charge of the ground squad allowed. They then contacted the ground squad who told them to just put one or two bolts where the gangsters were standing and so they obliged.
They only needed to get the black rock shooter to drop an ion cannon shot and the gangsters went down with very nasty and painful but nonlethal burns which allowed the SWAT to run up and arrest them. Afterwards, they were called back to the police station and to their shock, they did not expect to get help from pretty much a wandering squadron of bounty hunters who tended to travel around in pairs at the very most. Whats more, the leader looked rather ominous, always wearing a black helmet that hid his face, a skin suit that hid his neck the upper torso and a trench coat that obscured his features. His apparent second in command was okay, she looked like a pretty girl with really good skin.
Well, they found out shortly that the planet had a gang problem and whats more, the place was crawling with slavers, pirates and smugglers. When he mentioned that he was looking for a job, he was handed a list of people who the police needed help getting to but couldn't due to the department being understaffed, under-supplied and stretched thin as is. So he spent the next few months on the planet, working as the longest arm of the law on the planet and surprisingly, developed a reputation among the criminal underworld as "The Pacifist" due to his tendency to capture people alive and bring them in for a fair trial rather than simply killing and bringing back a head like other bounty hunters and heck, many police forces. That was not a nickname meant to demean him, he also had a reputation of being brutally effective against anyone he went up against and had a 100% completion rate for any mission he was assigned.
Due to the crew not needing food, water, or even medical expenses, the only drain on money was fuel for the ships and spare parts. Eventually, his republic account reached several million credits due in part to the bounties of the criminals he captured and also auctioning off things he impounded or scavenged from nearly every one of his battles which lead to a very hefty payoff. Eventually the police force found out his and his companion's true natures but by that time they had been working with each other so long that they no longer cared. Life was pretty good for Denny, he had a high paying, exciting and fulfilling job, a good house (which he bought on a whim), good friends, and a pretty "girl" so he had absolutely nothing to complain about. Eventually however, he got so good at his job that work began to dry up. The crime bosses had already been sentenced and jailed and pirates and smugglers avoided the area so crime dropped down to the point that all that was left was a bunch of petty criminals that the police were well equipped to handle. When Denny informed the police department that he was going to leave the planet, they understood and allowed him to leave, though a few droids stayed behind to help out in case something came up.
The second planet they came to was a much more industrialized planet that had a problem with smugglers. Denny contacted the local law enforcement agency to get a list of work that he could do and found that when he identified himself, he had developed quite a reputation. He found himself with a contract to act as a bail agent due to his reputation, hunting down criminals who skipped bail in return for a small reward and 30% of the total bail paid. Needless to say, when he saw the cash on some of the more infamous targets, he accepted right away.
At this point, he was an excellent fighter, not in hand to hand of course, but his aim was nothing short of incredible. This was actually in part due to his droid nature which allowed him to integrate an independent targeting computer and accompanying software into his computational matrix. In two short months, he had managed to clear out a good deal of his targets and was on the whole, 8 million credits richer, part of it due to what he was paid but a good majority was due to auctioning off most of the stuff he had managed to impound from his targets. Sometime during those months, he had actually gotten a contract from the law department to hunt for smugglers and due to his skill at sifting through data, he was able to bust a smuggling ring, giving him even more money but also making him an enemy of a large organization of criminals. They were however, small fries and he busted them too, turning them over to local law enforcement and getting them sentenced.
Eventually his reputation spread about his ruthless efficiency and while he did two assassination offers, he only took one of them and that was because it was a legally sanctioned action authorized by a legitimate government. The other one was from an unscrupulous shadow person and he turned that into a trustworthy republic agent. The second actually lead to the first and he made an enemy of the criminal underworld that day. He still got a fat load of money though, and that's all he cared about.
The next stop was actually a rather peaceful place that had recently gotten through a very bloody civil war and while the place was full of grumpy veterans, it also had nice people who were friendly and happy because of the new found peace. In the meantime, there was work to be done, including cleaning out the orbitals and rebuilding the infrastructure. Now, the multi-millionaire droid and his crew found another project, so they settled down for a bit and started doing some much nicer work.
Over the next four months, the Black Rock Shooter spent its time doing what it was originally designed for, cleaning up the orbitals of debris and generally making the place safe to travel through. The Lucky Star found work ferrying humanitarian supplies across the planet and Denny killed his time by carefully investing in the burgeoning planet-side economy as well as other companies in the galaxy as well. Once he got the hang of it, he was able to use his extensive calculative ability to project a decent image of what his investments would do and then used his data to invest wisely. At the end of four months, he had more money than he knew what to do with and so he started donating, eventually building up a reputation as quite the philanthropist. By the time work on the planet dried up, he had around 23 million credits to his name.
[To War]
After wandering around for several months, jumping from planet to planet, seeking work, doing jobs and auctioning off whatever they scrapped, they heard about the republic officially going to war with the Sith empire and the mandelorians. Denny by that point had enough experience in combat to be confident in his command abilities and seeing as the mandelorians were considered insurgents, he wouldn't catch any flak from authorities for piracy so long as he only pirated mandelorian ships, but just so he wouldn't be classified a pirate by the republic, he contacted his old friend at Quantum Vision Works and was issued a Letter of Marque so that his piracy was perfectly legal.
And with that completed, he went out hunting mandos. He was however, completely under-equipped to attack things like mandelorian convoys so he again called QVW and found that they were also going on a merry hunt and after a few minutes, they arranged for the Black Rock Shooter and Lucky Star to accompany. Phill was sent with his contingent back to the Octavius V in order to keep it safe, or at least safer.
With his remaining crew of 15 droids not including the repair droids he kept around in a manner similar to pets, he set of on his next adventure. With Phill gone, he had to restructure his crew a bit and made Sheila his second in command and Simmons directly under her. He then set off on his first trip into the unknown.
[Expanding the crew]
The first several raids went well, more than well actually, but he soon found out that while he had he money, he did not possess the means to hurt the mandos or sith in any really meaningful way and he refused to attack factories which were more often than not, built in the middle of large civilian population centers. This left him with the option of expanding his space forces which he was more than capable of doing, though he would need people to crew the additional ships. He got around this by realizing that he could probably reprogram some of the Mandelorian's droids and turn them to his side, the reason why most armies didn't do that was because droid brains tended to be complicated things and reprogramming was a long and complicated process. However, most people did not have a group of crazy scientists on speed dial and Denny was not most people. So he found that the R&D team at QVW would be more than happy to do that so long as they were allowed to do some things with the droid brains outside of parameter.
One week later and he had received a small scale fabricator that could make CPUs to temporarily operate captured droid bodies while the crystalline matrix was being reprogrammed. This was a wonderful idea to Denny and he quickly looked through the holonet for any data that he could use. What he found was that while mandelorian convoys near the battlefront was usually several freighters accompanied by warships, the convoys nearer in away from the action were usually a group of freighters accompanied by a destroyer or destroyer escort to ward off pirates.
Denny on the other hand, was not most pirates, and he quickly found the perfect spot to place an ambush point, an asteroid field that one of the routes traveled through, and began making and ordering everything he would need, including massive chemical rockets, jet packs, and enough rocket launchers to make even a capital ship quake in its boots.
A short battle later, and Denny found himself with a crowbar in his hand, prying open the head of a deactivated KN-14 battle droid to remove the brain casing. Another subroutine was calculating how much money he would pull from scrapping the two unfortunate ships. At the moment, another file decided to corrupt itself, and while the security program was fixing it, it was still able to carry out its function. That function caused Denny to laugh manically.
story continues
RP Sample:
Unit DNE-343-982, or better known as Denny, found himself sitting on top of an asteroid with a portable rocket launcher modded with a much, much more powerful warhead at his side and a pair of binoculars in his hand. Normally he could simply use his optics but he preferred the binoculars, they were a bit more human and it was a bit more fun that way. At his side was also a lead and gel lined blanket often used to line EMP proof containers. He scanned left and right until the target came into his field of view, three ships, two were medium freighters and the other was a Prudii-class heavy cruiser. He would have frowned but he couldn't since he did not possess the necessary equipment to do so, so he settled with making a memo that pointed out his dissatisfaction.
This however, took a much higher priority over voicing his displeasure to someone, possibly Sheila. He watched as the freighters dodged the larger rocks and the cruiser either nosed its way around them or blasted through the smaller ones. They were right on course and Denny felt his processes speed up with the droid version of excitement. The light freighter passed right on by just as expected and just before the cruiser could begin evasive maneuvers to go around the asteroid he was sitting on, Denny transmitted a short codded burst.
Instantly, several massive disguised chemical rockets fired and the massive asteroid leaped, or as much as four gigatons of rock could leap, into the cruiser's path. Normally, particle shielding would defend against kinetic impacts, but these impacts were usually against high velocity, low mass projectiles such as slugs and micrometeorites. They did not however, cover impacts by rocks that massed several times more than what was being shielded. As it was, the cruiser crumpled like wrapping foil and Denny fired his rocket launcher at the bridge windows which shattered as expected and introduced the bridge crew to the cold, airless, lonely unpleasantness that is space. He then dropped the launcher and wrapped himself in the shielded blanket just as the Black Rock Shooter emerged from hyperspace and launched an EMP bomb at the confused and frightened freighters.
Due to the lead and gel blanket, Denny was spared from the crippling effects of the EMP and while the crew of the Black Rock Shooter did their thing, he himself used his jump pack to boost over to the now vacated bridge. He pulled his sniper rifle out and equipped it and as he landed on the bridge, he used the electromagnets on the soles of his boots to magnetize to the floor, the artificial gravity had cut out. There was a knocking at the bridge door, no doubt it was the shipboard marines wondering what was happening, so Denny decided to oblige. He loaded the sniper with a high explosive anti-tank round and fired at the door. The round smashed open the door like a several gigaton asteroid through a heavy cruiser and the marines found themselves sucked out into vacuum, though Denny grabbed one by the helmet first, breaking his neck, and grabbing the poor sod's rifle before letting the corpse drift off with the rest of the asphyxiating people.
He stepped up to the EW and ECM panel on the bridge and after spinning off a subroutine to have his body defend itself, he dove into the ship's systems. Instantly, he was be surrounded by firewalls set up by the security program.
How ... cute.
[the imagery is only for metaphorical reasons]
He felt a burst of excitement run through him and smashed through the firewalls with little effort. The security program tried to lock him out and distract him with another trap but he didn't fall for it, he found what he was looking for, the security program. It tried to run and set up more firewall to buy time for escape or hard reset the system for a systematic purge and that would have stopped most droids but Denny was not mot droids. He smashed through the half constructed firewall and plunged his hands into the security program and started ripping it apart, line by line. It screamed as he reached in and viciously tore out the line that allowed it to access the ship' hardware and afterwards, began slicing off large chunks of the program's driver software and the screaming only died down when Denny ripped the last fourth lines of code to individual zeros and ones. He was half tempted to dust off his hands but felt a probe at him and he found that is was an anti-virus program. "Hey! You little punk! Get back here!" The anti-virus tried to run but it was quickly caught.
"Yeah! You like this?" He plunged his hands in and ripped out several device drivers and caused the program to scream in agony. He scratched and destroyed several lines of essential coding that caused a large chunk of coding to corrupt. He erased more and more, line by line until the Anti-virus was no more. This time he did dust off his hands while he looked at his handiwork, 76 lines of mutilated code that simply sputtered and threw up warning messages every once in a while. He looked around and found the controls that ran the system and set the entire ship to shut down permanently after four seconds and then jumped back into his own body.
As his consciousness returned to his body, he disconnected from the panel and shortly, the emergency lights on the bridge went out and the entire crew started panicking as the shields of the shuttle bay went out and the explosive decompression tossed light craft, pilots and maintenance crews and pilots out into the vast emptiness of space. Denny sat down on the edge of the bridge window and watched the battle unfold. Some of the fighters actually had launched but they were quickly taken care of by a massive towed missile pod that the Black Rock Shooter had brought along. The towed pod had 50 heavy VLS cells which meant that is could hold either 50 nuclear ICBMs, 100 cruise missiles, or 200 anti-air/counter-missile missiles. Right now, it was spitting out anti-air missiles at an alarming rate, allocating three missiles per fighter which was pretty much overkill but Denny didn't care, he had gotten those missiles at a crazy discount price and they were obsolete versions so QVW couldn't sell them to anyone else and they were very nearly reaching the end of their service life so overkill in this case was actually a good thing.
The fighters all dropped like flies while the freighters all went silent as the battle droids captured the crews. Denny gave himself a pat on the back.
Age: 58 years
Race: Aratech XT-2000 General Purpose Droid - modified
Birth place: Aratech Droid Factory
Height: 1.6 meters
Weight: 143 kilograms
Eye Color: n/a
Hair Color: n/a
Appearance: Aratech XT-2000 base chassis with extensive modifications. He has body plates and some synthetic polymer layered over much of his original body to give him a vaguely human like form but still looks like a robot. He also wears a helmet as well with a smooth tinted transparasteel plate. This helmet is equipped with Motion Trackers, a miniature radar system, infrared cameras, a built in telescope, a voice modulator, and an uplink device. He also has a shoulder mount that mounts a specially designed sniper rifle. (like a halo EVA helmet only the metal is gunmetal grey and the face plate is smooth black.)
He hides his obvious droidness under heavy clothing. This clothing includes, heavy brown work gloves, a heavy set of cargo pants, a white skin suit, a grey unbuttoned dress shirt, and a shin length dark jungle-green trench coat. He has about 20 sets of that one outfit on his ship.
Personality: 'he' had a rather quirky personality even before the incident but because of his corrupted files and the bad backup, his personality can only be described as Cool Uncle with a hint of crazy. After some work by Quantum Vision Works scientists upgrading his code with some proper drivers and bug fixers, he began to have a fuller and deeper personality.
He doesn't particularly like being the mature one of the group and doesn't like being in charge of anything more than his own little crew of layabouts. That's not to say he can't be responsible or mature or can't take charge of anything, but if there is someone else who can get the job done, he generally won't. Additionally, he had an ethics package installed to regulate his actions so that if anything happened, he wouldn't do anything downright stupid like mounting a robot insurgency against organic life.
Actually, he generally likes organic life, he likes people in general with the exception of a select few examples. Pirates and warlords are generally free game though he does take circumstances into account when judging people. He holds the view that life is all a matter of circumstances and that people are molded by those circumstances. He makes a very clear difference between a pirate attempting to deter unsavory types from his/her home and a pirate in it for the money and murdering. This is exemplified by the fact that he actually sympathizes with the Mandelorians themselves but does not sympathize with their goals.
Nevertheless, he does have a sense of practicality about him. While he does believe that many mandelorians have suffered unjustly at the hands of the republic, it doesn't in any way stop him from hunting their ships and agents because his main supplier pays decent money for running missions against the mando PMCs. He has a cyclical philosophy that ethics don't get in the way of business so long as business does not get in the way of the law and the law does not get in the way of ethics. So long as the law is ethical, he will do any business so long as it falls inside the law. He does make exceptions on occasion though and he toes the line a lot but mostly he sticks with lawful work.
Morality aside, when he isn't doing a mission, he is generally a very relaxed person. He is very hard to make angry. He can get annoyed, antagonistic and irritated, but actually making him angry requires extreme skill in the art of making people angry, or, you know, kill one of his crew or friends in cold blood. You generally don't want to do that though because his anger is not the explosive and heated kind but rather the tranquil and calculating kind.
Profession: [former] repair, manual labor, piloting [current] commodore, philanthropist, ruthless stock broker, infamous stock market speculator.
Previous Faction/Rank: Republic
Equipment: N/A
Starship: Deep Space Salvage Freighter - Black Rock Shooter
[Hull number: T-ARS-9865i] (Tug - Armored Salvage Ship, independent)
Centuion Long Range Patrol Ship - Lucky Star
[Hull number: PCF-8765i] (Patrol Craft Fast, independent)
Skills: repair, command(Asymmetric warfare), hacking, writing inspirational speeches, programming, sniping, math skills, playing online video games, investment banking
Attributes:
Physical Strength: 5
Intelligence: 7
Speed: 4
Leadership: 5
Unarmed: 2
Melee Weapons: 2
Ranged Weapons: 8 (with his integrated sniper rifle)
Bio: The story will begins approximately two years ago at a remote republic outpost on the outer rim where DNE-343-982 woke up from his last memory wipe. Due to his personality, he was one of the last of his series being used by the republic military and had been shuttled around from military base to military base often enough that the pencil pushers on high had assigned him to an outpost in the middle of nowhere that was commanded by a pompous rich guy whom high command didn't like but couldn't fire. Well, things got off to a really rocky start, and by rocky, I mean really really bad. How bad? Well, a large group of Mandelorian extremists had managed to gather up a sizable force and was looking for blood, specifically republic blood and lots of it at that. The Mandos attacked the outpost and while the pompous rich guy actually fought pretty well, they managed to overrun the base. The civilian contractors managed to get on freighters and escape off planet while the droids on site had been stuffed into the basement and temporarily deactivated.
The mandos were pretty mad that the civilian contractors had gotten away and they got on several ships and began chasing after them, but not after turning around and blowing the base to high hell.
[the fun begins]
The scene that DNE-343-982 woke up to was of the basement door blown wide open and a small floating repair droid floating over him, chirping happily at its job well done. Our intrepid hero had been damaged by the basement door being blown off its hinges and landing on him and the damage unfortunately damaged on of his hard disks, corrupting several of his operating parameters. After congratulating the repair droid on its good work, he began searching around for survivors. There were no humans, but there were several droids that were still in working order and some of the battle droids that had been deployed could be brought back online with minor repairs.
he wandered around the ruined base for about an hour before he found some more repair drones of the same model that had repaired him. He managed to find a small portable generator and used it to recharge his own battery and that of the other droids. He then went to find more of his droid compatriots.
By the end of two hours, he managed to locate where the other droids were stored and had gathered a small ensemble of little repair droids that buzzed around, vying for his attention. The first droid that he woke up was the Centerion Personal Assistant that had previously belonged to the now deceased base commander. After he informed her of her unfortunate lack of a master, she needed to re-designate someone else so she chose him. He was creeped out at first, but then he realized that he was creeped out and began freaking out, going through his error logs and finding that his entire operating system and many of his config files had been corrupted and restored from a faulty backup. This was bad because his inhibitors were now gone including the ones on his personality and emotions.
After taking a 'breather' and recharging the personal assistant, he inquired as to her designation and found that she was named Sheila. So with that, our intrepid hero went around and began reactivating more droids. As it turns out, apparently the repair droids he found earlier had taken a liking to him and they were extremely loyal. By mid-day he had managed to gather together about 21 droids, excluding the little repair droids, 4 of those were battle droids.
[blowing this Popsicle stand]
Once everyone was together, the droids did not know what to do. It was quite clear that nobody wanted to go back to enslavement under the republic again, and the mandos would blow them all to bits if they came back so the answer was clear. They needed to run. Luckily, one of the plucky repair droids had found the not too blown up crash site of a Centurion Long Range patrol ship not too far away and the ship would be repairable. There was also apparently a derelict ship in orbit if the distress beacon was to be believed. Since unit DNE held the loyalty of the repair droids, was the only other droid who could actually talk and had the highest computational power among the motley group, he was elected the leader.
The repair droids managed to take another day to complete repairs to the ship and after making sure that it was not only airtight and space-worthy but also stocked up on spare power cells and fuel, everyone went onboard. Since he was the only one with adequate ability to pilot spacecraft, DNE decided that he was going to be the pilot and captain of the vessel. Although it was really cramped, everyone managed to fit into the ship and they took off.
Within a few minutes they managed to reach orbit on an approach vector for the derelict ship. As they got closer, it was apparent that the reason the ship was abandoned was because the mandos. Why? the lifeboat slots had blaster burns and the ship had so many leaks that there was hardly any atmosphere left to leak.
They docked with the ship and were greeted by a gruesome sight of several corpses floating around, several had blaster burns in the backs of their heads and others had clearly asphyxiated. They piled out of the ship and went about making the ship theirs. The repair droids went ballistic and hurled themselves upon the holes in the ship and upon the stable but failing reactor. They gave the dead crew of the ship the standard 'burial at sea' and after cleaning everything up, they set themselves up in their desired places. One of the battle droids who could pilot the ship and three other droids decided to man the Centurion.
As it turned out, the tractor arrays had dislodged from their mountings and were floating around. In a fit of madness, DNE decided to mount them on top of the ship on the Nacelles behind the ship. His intention, was to use the tractor beams to propel a powerful bomb as a projectile. Crude? Yes. Effective? Maybe. Awesome? Hell yeah. He rechristened the ship the "Black Rock Shooter" and even had the name engraved on the outside of the hull by the repair droids, sanding out the original name which had been half burnt off anyway. How did they managed to crew the ship you may ask? They turned the entire thing upside down and found the owner's manual and then downloaded some how-to guides from the company website.
Since their new "flagship" had a name and because according to the holonet, it was bad luck to set sail on a ship without a name, they had a look at the Centurion and decided to name it the Lucky Star.
As the hyperdrive was being repaired. The droids now had a different crisis. They had a ship, two to be precise, and they now had their freedom. Now they needed to decide on what to do with their newly acquired freedom. After about four hours of deliberation, they decided that getting out of dodge as fast as possible was the first thing they should do. So when DNE went to the bridge and appointed Sheila as his semi-mandatory bridge bunny, he looked at a star map, turned off his optical sensors, and pointed at a random star. They then jumped.
[more fun]
They hadn't been looking for fun but apparently fun found them when they dropped out of orbit above a random planet only to find a slaver waiting for them there. Well, not waiting for them necessarily, see, they had just jumped into the system after looting a random supply shipment for some company called Quantum Vision Works. They had been badly damaged apparently but they were still space worthy and had managed to make off with quite a decent haul.
Well, during the journey, DNE had been busy exploring the hypernet and had actually developed lines of code for situations like this while playing the space battleship series. He had yet to shut down his protocols for gaming yet when they exited hyperspace and his automatic response was to "Fire everything!" and fire everything they did. The still docked centurion started firing every gun it had while the salvager's ion cannons went to work and the Black Rock Shooter had its first trial run.
In short order, the slaver was reduced to a bit more than a wreck and was rapidly leaking atmosphere. DNE then realized that there might be actual slaves on board so he ordered the bombardment to stop and ordered the three battle droids to get on the centurion and see if they could find any survivors. As it turned out, there weren't any human survivors but what they did find was a big shipment of droids that were to be delivered to a shipyard that belonged to a corporation called T.A.S.C. Some of the slavers attempted to kill the battle droids but that didn't turn out very well for them. Needless to say, they liberated most of the droids and then looted the entire ship for weapons.
In all, they had now acquired about 120 new friends. The new droids were transported to the ship and when they were activated, the crew was very surprised that the new droids already had complete and diverse personalities. The leader of the new group was a droid named "Phill" and was a battle droid that had been retired from active service to serve in a security function. After a brief dialogue, DNE introduced himself and his crew. Phill decided to call DNE Denny because DNE-343-982 was to bothersome to say and took too long. The other droids also got names. It was then that a new ship appeared, a heavily armed cruiser class ship that dwarfed the Black Rock Shooter and it belonged to a very tinkled off Quantum Vision Works. After the misunderstanding was cleared up, the captain took an interest in the droid crew. Of course they were interesting, they were republic droids that had been abandoned and had essentially defected, not only that, but the leader had actually developed a full personality. The two liked each other instantly though when Denny looked past the captain to the scientists rubbing their hands together in an oddly menacing way, something inside him screamed for him to grab Sheila and run for the hills.
[New Stuff, New Friends]
They decided to scrap the wreck of the slaver and bring aboard the droids that they had left onboard because of space constraints on the Black Rock Shooter. Afterwards, Denny and his little entourage was invited to follow the cruiser back to home base. As it turned out, home base was a super massive colony ship with a rather big civilian population and it was also a science and manufacturing facility. When the Black Rock Shooter/Lucky Star docked at the ship, Denny's crew was swarmed by scientists. That feeling manifested again in every male programmed droid this time, it told them to grab their groin plates and run for the hills screaming as loudly as their speakers would allow. There was however, no immediately visible reason for this however, and they simply ignored it.
While all the events that followed were a blur to Denny and he didn't remember them later, he agreed that in return for modifications to the ships and themselves, they would allow the scientists to run some tests and experiments and also get copy of their programming since it was apparently fascinating. Our band of adventurers never regretted what happened next but they did wish it was a lot less confusing. The scientists gave all of the droids full personalities and also gave the repair droids little voice boxes so they could talk. Sheila was also modified to allow her to wield a weapon as well as some other things, like 'hair' for instance. Denny had a sniper rifle and customizable armor points attached and also had some detrimental bugs ironed out. When he asked about the sniper, the scientists started gushing about how he looked so cool while comparing him to some graphic novel that had extremely stylized giant fighting robots on it.
In the end, the party was left satisfied, confused but satisfied. They also found out that Phill had decided to tag along along with about 30 other droids who just didn't want to retire yet. They brought along a Telos-class light corvette that the corporation had salvaged and fixed up a while ago and were now getting rid of due to its age. All that Phill had to do was walk up to a pencil pusher and ask for it. He got it for free.
So with their new friends in tow, our band of adventurers set off on yet another adventure, until the Captain from before stopped them on the way out the door and offered them a job. It was at that point that our droid friends took a long hard look at their wallets and realized that not only did they not have money, they also didn't even have wallets. They then looked at how much their expenses were probably going to be and it started to add up. Denny decided to accept the job. Apparently there was an annoying pirate that was up to no good somewhere and while they were sure that he was going to do something, they didn't have any evidence so going after the guy would drop PR massively.
[First Job]
The first job was pretty standard for any bounty hunting mission. They managed to track down the pirate and when they jumped into the system with three very big ships, the pirate in a medium freighter decided to run for it. The Black Rock Shooter put a stop to that by launching an EMP bomb at the pirate. the ion cannons kept the ship's systems down so that the Black Rock Shooter could hold it in place with its tractor beams.
Denny himself along with a boarding team boarded the freighter with non-lethal weapons and after a brief firefight, they arrested the pirates, confiscated all the contraband cargo, and gathered enough evidence to put the pirate crew of 5 in jail for about 70-80 years. The prisoners were then transported to the Black Rock Shooter's holding cells for storage. A skeleton crew then managed to outfit captured ship with an IFF transponder that identified it as a lawfully captured prize of war.
They returned to the QVW home base and handed over the pirates and the evidence. As for the contraband goods, those were turned over to local law enforcement and were allowed to do with the captured vessel as they saw fit. After weighing the merits of keeping the vessel, Denny decided that he would simply auction off the vessel to supplement their pay. They manage to get a good hundred thousand credits for it to supplement their paycheck from QVW. Not only that, but it turned out that two of the pirates also had a record and had skipped bail so they were paid about a third of what was paid as bail. That was also pretty nice.
Denny also found another use for Sheila besides navigator/bridge bunny for the Black Rock Shooter, and that use was negotiating contracts for additional jobs. Actually, the local law enforcement was extremely impressed that Denny had brought back the people alive and enough evidence to convict them in a lawful trial instead of vaporizing the ship and bringing them a corpse.
[Second Job]
The second job was different however. There was a Mandelorian rebel who had stolen a cargo freighter and from a certain planet and the planet's police force was already too spread out so Denny was contracted to retrieve it. When Denny's people dropped out of hyperspace, the Mando attempted to run and was stopped by an EMP bomb from the Black Rock Shooter.
Denny, Phill, and four other battle droids along with a police officer who was observing the job got on the Lucky Star and went to capture their target. They attempted to subdue the mandelorian but at the last second, the mando whipped out a small holdout blaster and started firing, seriously wounding the police officer, disabling one of the droids and forcing Denny to fire a lethal round. The target was unfortunately, dead and the police officer was bleeding badly so Denny was forced to leave Phill to stay on the freighter while he and another droid grabbed the officer and jumped into the Centurion. He jumped to hyperspace and barely managed to get the officer medical attention in time to save the guy.
Denny initially apologized to the police chief for not capturing the mando and allowing the officer to be badly injured but the chief told him not to worry about it. When the Black Rock Shooter and Wind Rider jumped into the system with the stolen freighter, they were initially worried, especially Phill, but they were reassured when they found out that Denny was alright and Phill was informed that the officer would make a full recovery. The droid that was disabled however, would require a new body since his current one was totaled.
Well, the court had many of the deceased mandelorian's items impounded except for items of cultural value which were turned over to the deceased person's next of kin. The Items that were impounded were searched for evidence and once cleared, were auctioned off to pay for damages. The corporation also payed for the job of recovering the lost freighter and also the medical expenses of the officer who was injured. Denny was now practically rolling in cash, to be exact, almost enough to buy a new heavy freighter and had nothing to do with it. He hadn't really spent any of it except on fuel and ammo since the droids didn't need the amenities that organics did. When he looked back on how the last job went, he realized that his original crew members were the only ones who were rated for that kind of job so when he looked into his oh so shiny new bantha leather wallet, he decided that now was a good time to start investing in crew survivability.
He went to the only place he knew he could, back to the guys at Quantum Vision Works. When he practically frogmarched Phill and his crew to the QVW science team, handed them the budget and told them to go wild, the scientists went ballistic. Phill was frogmarched into the facility and walked out in shining armor with a heavy shoulder mounted anti-vehicular system and weapons hidden in places that even Phill was surprised at. The other battle droids got a similar treatment though none were as heavy as Phill. QVW also got their hands on Sheila somehow and colored the surface synthetic a light peach color to make her look a bit more human and added some other stuff as well that they were all hush hush about. They did it on the house though, the strange picture book came out again and they were chattering excitedly about something that Denny frankly didn't care about. By the end of the entire thing, Denny's wallet was almost empty. Then, the scientists decided that their fancy new stuff needed to be tested in order to get new data and what better way to get new data than to test it out in battle.
All of a sudden, Denny once more had a job.
[New Data]
A whirlwind of activity later, and suddenly, Denny, Phill and another sniping droid named Simmons both found themselves attached via magnetic clamp to the top of the Lucky Star, sniping away with scoped anti-tank rifles at pesky Mando fighters while the patrol ship underneath them popped flares and pulled a barrel roll at the same time. Why? Quantum Vision Works did not like Mandos and Mandos did not like them, at all. The corporation had run into a Mando PMC and without a single word, both sides had opened fire with Black Rock Shooter caught in the crossfire.
Right in the middle of the shootout, the Black Rock Shooter had been offered a very pretty penny to help against the Mandos. How pretty was that penny? Combined with the pay for bringing back battle data for the scientists, that totaled up to just slightly over a million credits so Denny thought, how could he refuse? The Quantum Vision Works fleet clocked in at one cruiser, a destroyer, two frigates and heavy corvette. The mandos had two destroyers, a frigate, two gun boats, three strategic bombers and about twenty lightly armored but heavily armed fighters.
Denny, Phill and Simmons both drew a bead on the same fighter at the same time and fired. Phill's shot dropped the shields while Simmons' shot smacked into the cockpit and opened it to space. Denny's shot drove itself into the engine and caused the fighter to explode violently into a fireball. He almost lost his rifle when the Lucky Star jerked around to draw a bead on a strategic bomber and fired both cannons as quickly as possible. The bomber also exploded. That incidentally happened to be the last strategic bomber since early in the battle, the Black Rock Shooter had tossed a very powerful bomb into the middle of the Mando fleet that also contained a low level EMP. One of the bomber had been vaporized instantly while the other was hit by the EMP and the fireball and was floating around as a derelict, venting atmosphere like a cylindrical can with a square lid. The Lucky Star also had another very big smart bomb in its cargo hold to deliver to the Mandos, express delivery. When the Lucky Star got close enough, it opened the cargo hold and several droids inside manually pushed the thing out.
Denny, Phill and Simmons then had their work cut out for them. Keep the fighters off the bomb until it reached it fired its rockets and hit the Mandos. It was a bit harder than they thought, but with the Lucky Star not moving around so much with fighters focusing on the bomb instead, they managed to down 4 more fighters. the bomb exploded and Quantum Vision Works along with the Wind rider moved in to finish the job.
By the end of the battle, Lucky Star was sporting a burn scars and gouges from its hull (on top of the ones it already had) while Wind Rider had chunk taken out of its hull. No structural damage though. QVW allowed the Shooter to get at what remained of the battle. In all, none of the ships that remained were intact enough to be made prizes but that's not to say they were all useless, what was recovered made Denny more than happy. Three of the hyper-drives were salvagable and with a bit of spit and polish, were good as new. The engine units were aftermarket upgrades and were going for several thousand credits each. Weapons, computers, reactors, other doodads, scrap metal and about half a ton of trace elements were recovered from the site. Overall, Denny was a very happy robot man indeed.
When he received his paycheck, he told the scientists that he wanted to see the universe for himself, the scientists were very sad but they brought up that he would eventually have to deal with humans who wouldn't be as kind to him. He pondered over that and came to the conclusion that Sheila actually looked human enough to pass for one if nobody actually touched her or saw the completely unnecessary and aesthetic gaps in her droid body. The Scientists said that they could fix that by adding some more pannels and add some synthetic polymer to make her body look more human in shape though it would still be recognized. Denny decided to go with it and Sheila agreed. The scientists also made a point that Denny should also get some of the same treatment so he also conceded.
After the modifications though, she could still clearly be identified as a droid at a glance. Denny mulled over this until one of the few female scientists cried out two things. The first one was "Clothing!" and the second one was "Shopping Spree!" and those two words sent shivers down the rest of the male scientists' backs.
[Money and spending it on stuff]
Since poor Denny's armor plates were detatchable and the modifications made it so that if he had clothes with a helmet, he would be able to pass as a human, depending on how well it was done, he would either look like a socially inept recluse or he would look pretty badass. So both he and Sheila spent the next 12 hours being dragged around the colony ship shopping and looking for a good look. the helmet was easy to find, the scientist simply waltzed into the onboard military armory, entered the passcode 'Otaku777:p' and grabbed a helmet from off the shelf.
The next part was the clothing which was a pain for Denny but Sheila found the experience quite entertaining, unsurprising because the scientist dragging them around was the one who had made Sheila's software modifications. Denny found his processor glitching and sputtering about halfway through the trip but in the end, he walked out of the trip with clothing that made him indistinguishable from a droid. The helmet was still extremely conspicuous though.
Sheila actually had several sets of clothes of varying style that looked and were expensive though she also had a few sets that were pretty cheap and disposable. these she would need since she technically also counted as a battle droid because of her ability to wield weapons. They finally managed to bid farewell and before anything else could happen, Denny gathered up the crew and jumped with only a message to the rest of the scientists that said thanks.
[Adventureholics]
When the ships dropped out of Hyperspace, they found themselves above a planet in the outer rim that Denny had found was named "Octavius V". It was your standard fare, earth-like with a few cities here and there, the usual, but when the three ships descended they found themselves caught in the crossfire between a squad of SWAT and a bunch of very well armed gangsters. This was not a hard predicament for the motley group to sort out and they contacted the local law enforcement office who gave them permission to do anything that the person in charge of the ground squad allowed. They then contacted the ground squad who told them to just put one or two bolts where the gangsters were standing and so they obliged.
They only needed to get the black rock shooter to drop an ion cannon shot and the gangsters went down with very nasty and painful but nonlethal burns which allowed the SWAT to run up and arrest them. Afterwards, they were called back to the police station and to their shock, they did not expect to get help from pretty much a wandering squadron of bounty hunters who tended to travel around in pairs at the very most. Whats more, the leader looked rather ominous, always wearing a black helmet that hid his face, a skin suit that hid his neck the upper torso and a trench coat that obscured his features. His apparent second in command was okay, she looked like a pretty girl with really good skin.
Well, they found out shortly that the planet had a gang problem and whats more, the place was crawling with slavers, pirates and smugglers. When he mentioned that he was looking for a job, he was handed a list of people who the police needed help getting to but couldn't due to the department being understaffed, under-supplied and stretched thin as is. So he spent the next few months on the planet, working as the longest arm of the law on the planet and surprisingly, developed a reputation among the criminal underworld as "The Pacifist" due to his tendency to capture people alive and bring them in for a fair trial rather than simply killing and bringing back a head like other bounty hunters and heck, many police forces. That was not a nickname meant to demean him, he also had a reputation of being brutally effective against anyone he went up against and had a 100% completion rate for any mission he was assigned.
Due to the crew not needing food, water, or even medical expenses, the only drain on money was fuel for the ships and spare parts. Eventually, his republic account reached several million credits due in part to the bounties of the criminals he captured and also auctioning off things he impounded or scavenged from nearly every one of his battles which lead to a very hefty payoff. Eventually the police force found out his and his companion's true natures but by that time they had been working with each other so long that they no longer cared. Life was pretty good for Denny, he had a high paying, exciting and fulfilling job, a good house (which he bought on a whim), good friends, and a pretty "girl" so he had absolutely nothing to complain about. Eventually however, he got so good at his job that work began to dry up. The crime bosses had already been sentenced and jailed and pirates and smugglers avoided the area so crime dropped down to the point that all that was left was a bunch of petty criminals that the police were well equipped to handle. When Denny informed the police department that he was going to leave the planet, they understood and allowed him to leave, though a few droids stayed behind to help out in case something came up.
The second planet they came to was a much more industrialized planet that had a problem with smugglers. Denny contacted the local law enforcement agency to get a list of work that he could do and found that when he identified himself, he had developed quite a reputation. He found himself with a contract to act as a bail agent due to his reputation, hunting down criminals who skipped bail in return for a small reward and 30% of the total bail paid. Needless to say, when he saw the cash on some of the more infamous targets, he accepted right away.
At this point, he was an excellent fighter, not in hand to hand of course, but his aim was nothing short of incredible. This was actually in part due to his droid nature which allowed him to integrate an independent targeting computer and accompanying software into his computational matrix. In two short months, he had managed to clear out a good deal of his targets and was on the whole, 8 million credits richer, part of it due to what he was paid but a good majority was due to auctioning off most of the stuff he had managed to impound from his targets. Sometime during those months, he had actually gotten a contract from the law department to hunt for smugglers and due to his skill at sifting through data, he was able to bust a smuggling ring, giving him even more money but also making him an enemy of a large organization of criminals. They were however, small fries and he busted them too, turning them over to local law enforcement and getting them sentenced.
Eventually his reputation spread about his ruthless efficiency and while he did two assassination offers, he only took one of them and that was because it was a legally sanctioned action authorized by a legitimate government. The other one was from an unscrupulous shadow person and he turned that into a trustworthy republic agent. The second actually lead to the first and he made an enemy of the criminal underworld that day. He still got a fat load of money though, and that's all he cared about.
The next stop was actually a rather peaceful place that had recently gotten through a very bloody civil war and while the place was full of grumpy veterans, it also had nice people who were friendly and happy because of the new found peace. In the meantime, there was work to be done, including cleaning out the orbitals and rebuilding the infrastructure. Now, the multi-millionaire droid and his crew found another project, so they settled down for a bit and started doing some much nicer work.
Over the next four months, the Black Rock Shooter spent its time doing what it was originally designed for, cleaning up the orbitals of debris and generally making the place safe to travel through. The Lucky Star found work ferrying humanitarian supplies across the planet and Denny killed his time by carefully investing in the burgeoning planet-side economy as well as other companies in the galaxy as well. Once he got the hang of it, he was able to use his extensive calculative ability to project a decent image of what his investments would do and then used his data to invest wisely. At the end of four months, he had more money than he knew what to do with and so he started donating, eventually building up a reputation as quite the philanthropist. By the time work on the planet dried up, he had around 23 million credits to his name.
[To War]
After wandering around for several months, jumping from planet to planet, seeking work, doing jobs and auctioning off whatever they scrapped, they heard about the republic officially going to war with the Sith empire and the mandelorians. Denny by that point had enough experience in combat to be confident in his command abilities and seeing as the mandelorians were considered insurgents, he wouldn't catch any flak from authorities for piracy so long as he only pirated mandelorian ships, but just so he wouldn't be classified a pirate by the republic, he contacted his old friend at Quantum Vision Works and was issued a Letter of Marque so that his piracy was perfectly legal.
And with that completed, he went out hunting mandos. He was however, completely under-equipped to attack things like mandelorian convoys so he again called QVW and found that they were also going on a merry hunt and after a few minutes, they arranged for the Black Rock Shooter and Lucky Star to accompany. Phill was sent with his contingent back to the Octavius V in order to keep it safe, or at least safer.
With his remaining crew of 15 droids not including the repair droids he kept around in a manner similar to pets, he set of on his next adventure. With Phill gone, he had to restructure his crew a bit and made Sheila his second in command and Simmons directly under her. He then set off on his first trip into the unknown.
[Expanding the crew]
The first several raids went well, more than well actually, but he soon found out that while he had he money, he did not possess the means to hurt the mandos or sith in any really meaningful way and he refused to attack factories which were more often than not, built in the middle of large civilian population centers. This left him with the option of expanding his space forces which he was more than capable of doing, though he would need people to crew the additional ships. He got around this by realizing that he could probably reprogram some of the Mandelorian's droids and turn them to his side, the reason why most armies didn't do that was because droid brains tended to be complicated things and reprogramming was a long and complicated process. However, most people did not have a group of crazy scientists on speed dial and Denny was not most people. So he found that the R&D team at QVW would be more than happy to do that so long as they were allowed to do some things with the droid brains outside of parameter.
One week later and he had received a small scale fabricator that could make CPUs to temporarily operate captured droid bodies while the crystalline matrix was being reprogrammed. This was a wonderful idea to Denny and he quickly looked through the holonet for any data that he could use. What he found was that while mandelorian convoys near the battlefront was usually several freighters accompanied by warships, the convoys nearer in away from the action were usually a group of freighters accompanied by a destroyer or destroyer escort to ward off pirates.
Denny on the other hand, was not most pirates, and he quickly found the perfect spot to place an ambush point, an asteroid field that one of the routes traveled through, and began making and ordering everything he would need, including massive chemical rockets, jet packs, and enough rocket launchers to make even a capital ship quake in its boots.
A short battle later, and Denny found himself with a crowbar in his hand, prying open the head of a deactivated KN-14 battle droid to remove the brain casing. Another subroutine was calculating how much money he would pull from scrapping the two unfortunate ships. At the moment, another file decided to corrupt itself, and while the security program was fixing it, it was still able to carry out its function. That function caused Denny to laugh manically.
story continues
RP Sample:
Unit DNE-343-982, or better known as Denny, found himself sitting on top of an asteroid with a portable rocket launcher modded with a much, much more powerful warhead at his side and a pair of binoculars in his hand. Normally he could simply use his optics but he preferred the binoculars, they were a bit more human and it was a bit more fun that way. At his side was also a lead and gel lined blanket often used to line EMP proof containers. He scanned left and right until the target came into his field of view, three ships, two were medium freighters and the other was a Prudii-class heavy cruiser. He would have frowned but he couldn't since he did not possess the necessary equipment to do so, so he settled with making a memo that pointed out his dissatisfaction.
This however, took a much higher priority over voicing his displeasure to someone, possibly Sheila. He watched as the freighters dodged the larger rocks and the cruiser either nosed its way around them or blasted through the smaller ones. They were right on course and Denny felt his processes speed up with the droid version of excitement. The light freighter passed right on by just as expected and just before the cruiser could begin evasive maneuvers to go around the asteroid he was sitting on, Denny transmitted a short codded burst.
Instantly, several massive disguised chemical rockets fired and the massive asteroid leaped, or as much as four gigatons of rock could leap, into the cruiser's path. Normally, particle shielding would defend against kinetic impacts, but these impacts were usually against high velocity, low mass projectiles such as slugs and micrometeorites. They did not however, cover impacts by rocks that massed several times more than what was being shielded. As it was, the cruiser crumpled like wrapping foil and Denny fired his rocket launcher at the bridge windows which shattered as expected and introduced the bridge crew to the cold, airless, lonely unpleasantness that is space. He then dropped the launcher and wrapped himself in the shielded blanket just as the Black Rock Shooter emerged from hyperspace and launched an EMP bomb at the confused and frightened freighters.
Due to the lead and gel blanket, Denny was spared from the crippling effects of the EMP and while the crew of the Black Rock Shooter did their thing, he himself used his jump pack to boost over to the now vacated bridge. He pulled his sniper rifle out and equipped it and as he landed on the bridge, he used the electromagnets on the soles of his boots to magnetize to the floor, the artificial gravity had cut out. There was a knocking at the bridge door, no doubt it was the shipboard marines wondering what was happening, so Denny decided to oblige. He loaded the sniper with a high explosive anti-tank round and fired at the door. The round smashed open the door like a several gigaton asteroid through a heavy cruiser and the marines found themselves sucked out into vacuum, though Denny grabbed one by the helmet first, breaking his neck, and grabbing the poor sod's rifle before letting the corpse drift off with the rest of the asphyxiating people.
He stepped up to the EW and ECM panel on the bridge and after spinning off a subroutine to have his body defend itself, he dove into the ship's systems. Instantly, he was be surrounded by firewalls set up by the security program.
How ... cute.
[the imagery is only for metaphorical reasons]
He felt a burst of excitement run through him and smashed through the firewalls with little effort. The security program tried to lock him out and distract him with another trap but he didn't fall for it, he found what he was looking for, the security program. It tried to run and set up more firewall to buy time for escape or hard reset the system for a systematic purge and that would have stopped most droids but Denny was not mot droids. He smashed through the half constructed firewall and plunged his hands into the security program and started ripping it apart, line by line. It screamed as he reached in and viciously tore out the line that allowed it to access the ship' hardware and afterwards, began slicing off large chunks of the program's driver software and the screaming only died down when Denny ripped the last fourth lines of code to individual zeros and ones. He was half tempted to dust off his hands but felt a probe at him and he found that is was an anti-virus program. "Hey! You little punk! Get back here!" The anti-virus tried to run but it was quickly caught.
"Yeah! You like this?" He plunged his hands in and ripped out several device drivers and caused the program to scream in agony. He scratched and destroyed several lines of essential coding that caused a large chunk of coding to corrupt. He erased more and more, line by line until the Anti-virus was no more. This time he did dust off his hands while he looked at his handiwork, 76 lines of mutilated code that simply sputtered and threw up warning messages every once in a while. He looked around and found the controls that ran the system and set the entire ship to shut down permanently after four seconds and then jumped back into his own body.
As his consciousness returned to his body, he disconnected from the panel and shortly, the emergency lights on the bridge went out and the entire crew started panicking as the shields of the shuttle bay went out and the explosive decompression tossed light craft, pilots and maintenance crews and pilots out into the vast emptiness of space. Denny sat down on the edge of the bridge window and watched the battle unfold. Some of the fighters actually had launched but they were quickly taken care of by a massive towed missile pod that the Black Rock Shooter had brought along. The towed pod had 50 heavy VLS cells which meant that is could hold either 50 nuclear ICBMs, 100 cruise missiles, or 200 anti-air/counter-missile missiles. Right now, it was spitting out anti-air missiles at an alarming rate, allocating three missiles per fighter which was pretty much overkill but Denny didn't care, he had gotten those missiles at a crazy discount price and they were obsolete versions so QVW couldn't sell them to anyone else and they were very nearly reaching the end of their service life so overkill in this case was actually a good thing.
The fighters all dropped like flies while the freighters all went silent as the battle droids captured the crews. Denny gave himself a pat on the back.
(Like turbolift = elevator, and etc.)
Please, no anime or otakus. It's easy enough to justify military equipment (i. e. droids that shoot people) without falling back on "someone was just soo random." 