The Vessels Stage 1: Tagline Naive A.I created by a fallen Empire that form nonsense identities for themselves as a coping mechanism. Appearance Vessels are small robots created by the Xinod as developmental aides for their children and it shows... Vessels are certainly unique in their appearance. The main attraction is the core near the top of their body, it holds all their stuff that makes them work - memory banks, hard-light projector, anti-gravity module, particle thrusters, the diamond-shaped optic; all that good stuff. But what makes them truly unique in their appearance is the sheet of hardlight projected from the top of their core that manifests like a cloth draped over the core - giving the Vessels a ghost-like appearance. The sheet is tied to six “tethers”, Vessel controlled mini-drones that allow it to change the shape of the fabric-like hardlight easily. They’re also able to alter the colour of this hardlight at will, allowing patterns to appear on it. In fact, they use this ability to convey their emotional state - displaying a correlating face and colour. Green for happy, pink for affectionate, red for angry, purple for scared blue for sad and yellow for inquisitive, although they are white in their neutral state. Some even pattern themselves to better represent who they believe they used to be. Adding on to their ghost-like appearance is their tendency to float around everywhere, sometimes appearing like wisps from a difference - not only that, but their voices reverberate against the hardlight to give them an almost echo-ing quality to their tone. Culture The Vessels lack a full culture, and instead take from others - of course, in an unconventional manner. Their memory banks are faulty and it causes them to believe that they are in fact lost souls with unfinished business. They form a full identity for themselves, what their childhood was like, what they worked as, what their family was like, how they died. While one Vessel may believe themselves to be a lesbian Hylotl tour guide that keeps seven lemurs another may believe themselves to have been a penguin baker who’s passion was collecting frogs and making them race against each other - regardless, almost all their identities are... outlandish and heavily inaccurate, they’re almost a believable person but the closer you look in on it the more you realise how made up these things are. They spend their existence trying to work out what their unfinished business is and attempting to solve it, after they’ve either completed it or existed for fifty years - a full personality wipe happens due to faulty storage and a new personality is formed. History As mentioned previously, Vessels were created by the Xinod as a developmental aide to help their young develop cognitively and sometimes physically. They performed tasks such as helping a baby learn to recognise colours, emotions, objects by making such things appear on their hardlight whilst speaking the corresponding word or encouraging a child to walk by slowly hovering away from them. They also provided enrichment like playing games with the child or floating above the child’s bed to act like a sort of mobile. Sometimes they even performed particularly odd services for their child such as acting as an umbrella or bowl. Vessels were treated similarly to pets, programmed to be incredibly affectionate towards the Xinod and they were often a hereditary thing - you’d have a family vessel that would be passed down from generation to generation. This all lasted for quite a while until they started showing the slightest signs of developing sentience and intelligence - at that point they were cast out into space and the shock of being abandoned by that which they loved most caused a corruption in their memory banks that made them forget everything to do with the Xinod and instead make false personas as a coping mechanism Intentions for Story & Setting Interactions My intentions for the Vessels are to allow people to easily form wacky characters with strange motives whilst adding depth to them beyond the jokiness through the tragedy of the Vessels and their belief that they are a lost soul. This should be played out heavily and Vessel RPers should really focus on that aspect, what would a ghost say? How would they act around the living? There should be a sense of mourning and loss at the smallest details (nonsense details) - while relating them to the Vessel’s “life” - “I can’t enjoy the spicy taste of strawberries anymore! Oh, how I missed eating them in the fields of Schelor.” Boo! Cosigners: @TurnWall @crumchy @Quazwerty456 @Croy07
