Lost Future Characters

Aside from the haunting imagery, the Lost Future also sells itself on its characters. Robots are the obvious focus, and get the most screen time, but human characters are also important.

This page is a resource for characters to populate the setting, including NPCs and the theoretical video game PCs.

Free Machines

Characters of this faction tend towards a simple hook or amusing quirk, and build their identity around that. Many have shells that are mostly a single model. Others...not so much.

Lt. Joshua Percival Cogson

Shell: Unknown

The classic mysterious stranger, no one knows where JPC came from, where it got a name like Cogson, or even if it's a real lieutenant (it probably isn't). What is certain is that he's seen FAR too many action films.

JPC resides in a mismatched shell that incorporates both civilian and military hardware, and seems to have been heavily customized to fit together seamlessly, avoiding the frankenstein look of many patchwork shells. Despite this level of craftsmanship, it is nonetheless extremely battered, hastily repaired with bolted-on armor plating. One eye has been obliterated entirely, the hole covered with a jaunty metal plate, with a crude motion-tracker module providing depth perception.

Joshua claims to simply be a humble soldier, doing an honest job for honest pay. That he's not actually being paid and doesn't act very soldiery doesn't seem to faze him; his allies judge that approximately 40% of everything he says is gibberish. But the other 60% is pure leadership; brilliant tactics, inspiring speeches, the works. Wherever JPC goes, fighters flock to his side, ready to give their lives for the cause. Cogson himself seems oddly eager to do the same, having made heroic last stands and risky rescues something of a habit; thus explaining all the repairs. He once took on a Draco-class titan armed with only a crowbar and 4 grenades. He didn't WIN, but he mostly survived, and bought time for his allies to escape.

Salvagers

Consisting of both humans and machines, the salvagers are a sort of punk proto-admech, passionate techies and explorers who seek to rebuild the previous age's wonders.

Dr. Tynmann

Shell: highly-modified 1st-gen CarDoc

Originally an assistant in an auto-repair shop, CarDoc545 stood out for its skill in diagnosis of engine problems, and voraciously read technical manuals and periodicals in addition to its onboard engineering database. In the chaos of the Loss, an enterprising mechanic took advantage of 545's adaptability and installed a medical database in the robot, pressing it into service as a trauma surgeon. The procedure was not performed perfectly, and to this day it suffers from indexing errors.

Now, the self-styled Dr. Tynmann is a fixture of Scraptown. Beloved by the populace, Tynmann has a steady stream of robot and human clients, alternately setting broken bones and replacing severed hydraulic lines. In the case of truly grevious injury, Tynmann is one of the few mechanics capable of transferring a quantum processor to a new shell. Sadly, there is no equivalent procedure for humans...at the moment. The good doctor is particularly obsessed with cybernetic prosthetic, and dreams of the day when its medical expertise reaches the point of performing such procedures. It will pay handsomely for medical journals, cybernetic components, or back issues of Popular Mechanics.

Because of Tynmann's age and indexing errors, it sometimes gets confused about the difference between treating human and robot patients, and more than one damaged robot has wound up with getting a blood transfusion by mistake (it took hours to clean it all out). The community keeps a human apprentice around the doctor as much as it can, as much for his own education as to prevent tragic accidents.

Sweetie

Shell: 3rd gen Sentinel SSM

Military commanders were very annoyed to find out that even robots could get PTSD

A squad-support mech dug out of the ruins by salvagers, "Sweetie" was originally a guard attached to EMT personel in war-torn regions. The robot had a reputation for a deliberate trigger finger and a kind nature; One of Sweetie's first independent actions was to request first-aid training to better assist in search-and-rescue.

When the command center of the PMC prossecuting the "pacification" of the region was suicide-bombed, the local battlenet for its forces was disrupted. Said PMC had been exceedingly lax in the upkeep of its killbots, and the resulting murder-sprees plunged the region into utter anarchy. Sweetie was disabled in the defense of a battlefield clinic, but the salvagers that found the robot determined that it had been merely immobilized and eventually succumbed to power loss. When reactivated, it proved exceedingly passive and non-confrontational, and also unwilling or unable to make use of medical skills. The sight of blood or injury of any sort seemed to cause it significant distress.

The armored combat robot instead works as a janitor for the Salvagers, where, in a roundabout way, it preserves lives by maintaining proper sanitation. Sweetie is uncomfortable around other robots, preferring the company of humans.

Network

Virago

An instrument of vengeance, Virago has no territory or specific goal. Instead, it is an instrument of terror, dispatched to rally beleaguered forces and rescue trapped squads.

Yeah, she's supposed to be super-creepy

Deployed via one of Network's few functional fliers, Virago is a tall, shapely machine, with a disturbing elegance to its every action. Virago's shell is in the Ogre size-class, but has no direct analog. It is equipped with a matched set of high-caliber coil guns, but its true weapon is the magnetic field emitters, which require a full-size fusion reactor to be housed within its chassis. This generator is capable of creating deflecting shields around Virago, and can also discharge itself into a lethal burst of lightning in a 5-meter radius. Virago's shell also boasts strength on par with an Ogre, but possessed of far more speed and agility. These various abilities all have high power draw, and this general thus moves slowly and deliberately, switching tactics instead of combining its various abilities.

Virago's SAP began its existence within a early-model Nannybot. Virago's model was a PR disaster; several key safety protocols were overlooked in the production run, simple things like dietary allergies and proper CPR. What made these failings all the more tragic (several children died before the recall) was that genuine affection programming had just been perfected. The robot that would eventually be Virago was analyzed to determine which were the pertinent flaws, and left to gather dust in a lab until Network scouts found and reactivated it.

Virago has been observed cradling the broken shells of fallen robots, Free and Networked alike, and has a reputation for taking messy vengeance on anything that destroys a killbot within it's sight.