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[promisedotexe]

OOC

Name: Jay
Age: over 18
Contact: fakealchemist on plurk or discord
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IC

Character Name: LSTR-512 ("Elster")

Canon: Signalis

Canon Point: "Promise" ending

Character Age: The timeline of Signalis is intentionally difficult to unpack; the most accurate thing we can say about Elster's age is that she is a robot built as an adult, whose mind was copied from an adult war veteran's body. She's also past the expected operational lifetime of an LSTR unit in so many ways. I would treat her as somewhere over 18.

History: To start, take a future of our solar system where humanity has colonized six planets or moons and splintered into two factions: the authoritarian Eusan Nation and the Eusan Empire. Everything has been carefully redefined, from planet names to how people are referred to. There are no humans, there are Gestalts. Robots are Replikas, a biomechanical construct whose mind was copied from a body that the Nation keeps preserved in a facility using via "bioresonance," which is a nebulous psychic power. The people who are selected to be the base neural imprint for Replika models are deleted from history, with all records the nation can find of that person censored. The memories of that person are suppressed in the Replika; the aim is to take someone who was exceptional at a particular thing, and then eliminate their personality in the Replika to create docile and controllable tools with the specialties of the original. Manuals for each model identify triggers that can cause their original Gestalt's memories to resurface, and explains habits and objects that each model should be allowed to indulge in order to keep their persona stable without resurfacing memories or developing into personhood again. The LSTR model is based off of a war veteran's mind, considered a stoic loner who needs no special habits or objects to remain stable - instead, the important things to avoid causing the Gestalt's memories to resurface are to not expose the LSTR unit to media, especially music, movies, or photographs relating to the military or war.

For this LSTR unit's history in particular: the Eusan Nation used a mass driver to launch a series of ships out of the solar system ostensibly to search the Oort Cloud for planets to colonize or for new resources. It's more likely this was a propaganda operation, but let's not worry about that. These ships are crewed by a single Gestalt and an LSTR Replika unit. On the Penrose-512, LSTR-512 "Elster" and her Gestalt pilot Ariane Yeoung fall in love and spend eight years happy together. Elster tirelessly maintains the ship and cares for Ariane, and Ariane exposes her to art, media, and teaches her to dance. Basically, whether Ariane realized it or not, she did all of the things that would cause Elster to develop back towards personhood, that the Nation does not want in their Replikas.

After eight years together, the ship receives a transmission notifying them of the final phase of their mission. If they had not found somewhere suitable to land at this point, it was time to accept they would not. The ship's rations and spare parts should be running out soon, and the ship's reactor will start to leak radiation. The Gestalt pilot is advised not to attempt prolonging their life by stretching rations and recycling spent parts; rather, they should either ask their LSTR to spare their suffering with a swift death while the LSTR unit is still operational, or to enter a permanent sleep in the ship's cryochamber.

Unfortunately, they're deeply in love, so faced with the end...Ariane and Elster try to buy themselves as much time together as they can, managing to scrape together many more years together. But...despite Elster's best efforts, Ariane's health declines the entire time and the ship falls into disrepair. In the end they make a promise to each other, and Elster places Ariane in the cryochamber. Elster's body fails before she can fulfill the promise.

One little hitch. Ariane is bioresonant. In her permanent sleep, her mind dreams, and it can do great things. There's a "song" from a "sleeping god" that calls out. The two women loved each other, yearned for each other; Ariane wanted a release from her suffering, and she wanted to be with her love. And so, wherever the Penrose-512 really ended up out there, Ariane's bioresonance bent space and time so that Elster would always wake up, and set out with the imperative to find the woman she loves...and fulfill her promise. In a way they are locked in a time loop, becoming more nightmarish for everyone involved in this strange reality with each repeat. Elster dies. Elster wakes up. Elster salvages parts from her own bodies. The lovers are locked in an eternal cycle reaching out to each other in their own ways. All of the game's endings are canon because they have all happened, and will happen again. It's revealed that only the original LSTR units were directly copied from that forgotten veteran's mind; after an attack destroyed to location where that veteran's body was preserved, all new LSTR unit were actually a copy of a copy, as the Nation started to copy the mind of a "decomissioned" unit recovered from the Penrose program. Except the Penrose program is a one-way flight...but Ariane has broken time and space and the Leave ending sees Elster overwhelmed with her emotions and walking away to die on a planet surface like one of the Nation's, raising the possibility that this specific loop's Elster became the base for new LSTR units and after a certain point, deep down inside all LSTR units are LSTR-512 carrying around a promise. In particular for her canon point in this application, in the "promise" ending, Elster reaches Ariane once again, and fulfills a promise: she ends Ariane's suffering by strangling her, before succumbing once again to the wounds she's sustained along the way.

Elster will wake up again.

Division: Science & Engineering
LSTR units may be perfectly capable of combat, but the Replika model is designed for scouting and sapper operations (sapper essentially being a way of saying "combat engineer"), including logic programming to improve their ability to adapt to situations and engineer solutions to the problems they may encounter in the field (including such creative repair strategies as taping two items together).

Edict: The Sorrowweld
I MEAN. Elster and her girl locked themselves into an endless cycle with Elster eternally struggling to reunite with her lover to end her suffering while also wishing they didn't have to die and could just have more of those good times together. On top of that, the creation of the LSTR line is itself locking a soldier into eternal service, by using a copy of that soldier’s neural imprint as the base of all LSTR unit’s personalities.

Given the choice, I would prefer to have it that Elster has difficulty understanding the bond. Maybe knowing on one level that the bond is there, but struggling to retain specifics beyond that. Give her a nice, confusing eldritch time with her Edict moments.

Powers:
Biomechanical body: Elster is part biological - there IS a humanoid brain in her head - but her skeleton is made of titanium and the shell of her body is fiber-reinforced polyethylene. All of which is to say she is generally able to be more resilient than a human and push herself past a human's physical limits. However, she is still vulnerable to extreme environments and radiation. Replikas can benefit from medical care because of their biological components, but Elster is also able to perform mechanical repairs on herself, as extreme as replacing entire parts of her body with salvaged pieces from other units.

Radio: She literally has a radio module installed under her left ear, able to receive and play transmissions on a wide range of frequencies.

Eidetic module: she’s replaced her left eye with an eye module capable of saving black-and-white images of whatever she’s looking at. This lets her remember things without taking screenshots -

Flashlight: A flashlight is installed in her right shoulder. It makes light.

Repair Logic Module: Specialized programming that improves her problemsolving and ability to engineer her way to a solution for a problem.

Firearm proficiency: Elster demonstrates proficiency with a number of firearms, including pistols, revolvers, submachine guns, shotguns, adapting a flare gun into a weapon, and even handling what is essentially a souped-up elephant gun.

As the Ascendants deemed your character worthy of being on this exploration voyage, what qualities did they observe in your character that they found appropriate for the mission?
Setting aside the absolute trash fire that Elster and Ariane have made of their timeloop, Elster was made for this kind of mission. This unit was literally commissioned for a deep space exploration mission, and she does as much as she possibly can to fulfill her duties. Although the Penrose program is likely not intended to succeed, at baseline LSTR units are designed to succeed in exploration, and if someone in the Nation needs a strange place to be explored, they’ll requisition one.

One could say that she goes to insane lengths to deliver on her obligations. Elster herself was commissioned as the sole engineer of the Penrose-512, responsible for single-handedly maintaining the ship with limited resources for years. She's expected to keep the ship in good condition for eight years, and she manages to keep it going for at least fifteen. Additionally, once she was in the time loop, Elster had to rely on her scouting capabilities and problem solve her way through a variety of odd obstacles.

Additionally, sprinkling in that she was both created with bioresonance, and is tied up in a bioresonance phenomena. Canon describes bioresonance as “A song that we all dance to, but few can hear. This deep vibration of the cosmos can not just be heard and felt.” The mission is to search for a mysterious Song? Elster has experienced a strange call, herself.

What is your character's best quality, what is their worst, and how do these two qualities affect each other?
Elster's best quality is her dedication. Aside from harping on her promise again, it has to be pointed out that Elster is someone who is simply determined to get things done. The human her mind was copied from served her nation both in life and death. Elster may privately feel no loyalty to nation or ideologies, but she will always do what she has to. Even if it requires a great personal cost, even if she has to Ship of Theseus herself along the way. Even if she loses the context of why she's doing it, as sometimes she mixes up if she's looking for Ariane, or if she's looking for Alina Seo, the partner of the soldier her mind was originally copied from. Elster almost certainly has trauma from her originator's mind and she'll try to push herself through it for someone if she thinks it is necessary. Point Elster in a direction and give her a reason to do it, and she will throw herself at it until she's broken herself on it, and then some.

Elster's worst quality is her selfishness. She is accurately called out on this by a Replika who becomes aware of the loop. Elster is motivated by a desire for something that in canon she can never have again, and she doesn't really care what the consequences of pursuing it might be for anyone around her. Elster is varying degrees of aware that her actions are having consequences, as she actually apologizes to one person as they die - but she's still doing it. Elster is still going to say she can't stop now.

These two qualities come together in a pretty bad way. Elster's dedicated service is great, but only as long as what she wants doesn't conflict with what's good for everyone else. It may be important to keep her focused on a challenge in front of her, rather than letting her dwell on her past. If she starts looking for a missing woman...well, good luck.

Your character's Edict appears in front of them, and agrees to grant them one wish: what does your character wish for?
Elster wishes to be happy with Ariane forever.

The “Promise” ending and a lot of Ariane’s notes indicate that if it came down to it, Elster promised to end her suffering. But other things suggest that wasn’t their only promise. They almost certainly made another romantic promise when they were informed their ship was expected to become unlivable shorter after eight years. They almost certainly promised at some point to be together forever.

Elster knows that she can’t just wish for Ariane to live again. As she wanders through the cycles, there is musing on life and death littered throughout the environment; biblical references evoke the notion of seeking death and finding none. Sequences exploring the time when they were able to be happy with each other come at a time when Elster’s body is failing, and if you turn on her radio during this the signal she receives is "wake up," before Elster revives. One extremely hard to discover ending depicts the couple reunited as ghostly figures to simply continue dancing together in the ruins of their ship.

Basically, there’s a level on which Elster knows both of their bodies can deteriorate. The cryopod can make it so that Ariane never dies, but it just means the woman is eternally suffering. But if Elster could ask for anything...why not keep the eternal part, and eliminate the suffering?

The Theorem has broken down, and is drifting toward a black hole. There is very little hope of outside rescue. What does your character do?
Elster will not try to help with managing the people on the ship; corralling people in a crisis is not part of her problem-solving process. The person who provided her neural imprint wasn’t chosen for her people skills, and LSTR units aren’t well prepared for teamwork. She'd focus on identifying a ship system that she can fix that may alter the ship's course, even if she has to take other systems offline in the process. How long will the ship need life support systems if the ship is getting spaghettified by a black hole? Take parts from them to fix the engines, and those can just go on the list to be fixed next. Assuming this gets the ship away from the black hole, they can pull parts out of another system to fix the life support.

She can be talked into other things, but anyone trying to sell an euthanasia type of answer to a doomed situation will find that she puts this as an absolute last resort. She’ll do it if it has to be done, but years of stringing the Penrose along has its effect, too. Always keep cannibalizing components. Just string things along on the hope they can reach somewhere they can change their circumstances.

Writing Samples:
-TDM top-level (Noctis, Jiaoqiu, Ariane, Reze, Castiel).
-Two depressed robots vibing about their hopeless cycles.