17/30 Cosmic Era NPCs

1. Vaughn

Vaughn is a mixed pedigree European, his father was a German/Federation citizen who served in the military and during a deployment became romantically entangled with Vaughn's mother, an Italian. Vaughn's father was redeployed and Vaughn was left to be raised by a single mother in the Italian block of the Eurasian Alliance. He was raised in ramshackle poverty and grew into a life of petty crime to support his mother and others he cared about. He has been contacted by a recruiter for Armas, a European theatre terrorist group interested in restoring a unified Europe. He supports the idea, but hasn't come around to support Armas' penchant for violence. Vaughn wants to be a pilot, either of a small craft like a fighter, or part of the crew of a ship, anything to run away from all of the problems.

2. Penelopy

Penelopy was orphaned at a young age during a skirmish between Federation troops, Alliance reservists and Armas terrorists. She dislikes the level of carnage and violence that has decimated the part of Italy where she has grown up. She works as a medic and first responder, and has learned a fair bit of hand to hand combat to protect herself. She is a calm and collected voice of reason, drawing on her past experience with the violence and suffering that comes during and after a battle.

3. Gideon St. Barts

Gideon is a private ship captain, charming, quick witted, cocky, self-centered, and a touch world weary and cynical. He is physically lean, but has a larger than appearances charisma that lets him behave as if he were much larger than he is. Gideon has a taste for theatrics, using archaic stage terms in his speaking, and having an eye for entrances, and an impeccable sense of timing. His ship is a light sub-orbital craft capable of long atmospheric flights and short space jaunts, surface to orbit, and back. It lacks the range to reach anything farther away than middle orbit habitats and space stations. He is a smuggler by trade and operates mostly out of New Kashmir.

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5. Landon

Landon is the image of the professional soldier, clean cut hair and a prominent facial scar. He served in the Federation army as both a power armor trooper, and a mech jock. It was in the mech cockpit that he was disgraced, a friendly fire accident, and then having his own machine destroyed in the counter attack. He was court martialed and dishonorable discharged from the military. Landon is now a freelance mercenary and works security details since there aren't any big merc companies that will hire him because of his record. He is being courted by Armas to become one of their pilots/instructors. He has little taste for joining terrorists.

6. Ashe

Ashe is the eldest daughter of a wealthy French nationalist and industrialist. She is headstrong and has a notion for entering politics through force. She hates the distant Federation's meddling in Europe, and the equally distant Alliance for making parts of her homeland into demilitarized zones. She reserves most of her hostility for Armas which has made the situation worse with its constant violence. She has access to a personal cadre of light power armor troop bodyguards as well as a light aerospace personal craft.

7. Vayne

Vayne is the privileged son of a wealthy landowner and corporate magnate, and has lacked for nothing but true power. Vayne left his comfortable home and belongings to travel through wartorn Europe and found interest in the Vatican. Stripped of it's gold and worldly power, relics of the Petroleum Era, the church soldiered on and remained a neutral but influential power. Vayne has the notion of using the Church as a new pillar, harkening back to the glory of the medieval era when it played kingmaker instead of running soup kitchens. He has brought money and allies from the Federation to the Vatican and is working on gaining a leadership role, and has a dream of rolling Armas into the Church as a new Knights Templar.

8. Jay the Bagman

Or just Bagman, Jay is a bounty hunter of the worst sort. He is a walking musuem of genetic augmentations including dermal reinforcement, enhanced senses, increased strength, and a combat aggressor/juicer stimulant system. The only thing that has kept this murdering rapist thief out of jail is that he works for the powers that be because he is willing to do any job, no matter how low or heinous and he's very good at what he does. He is easily recognized for the full torso dragon tattoos he has, and his love for reptiles. The Bagman mostly works out of northern Italy, where he and his crew of juicers can pick up work for all the sides involved in the european zone.

The Combat Aggressor System (CAS) is a body harness and utility pack that contains a biometric monitoring system and a chemical injection system. The chemical injection system can inject stimulants, hormones and other cocktails into a body to keep it running at maximum output for a short duration. This can massively boost, strength, agility, speed, and personal aggression while minimizing pain and other disabling effects. The downside of the CAS is that the body can only handle so much punishment before it starts to give out, plus if the CAS is disable, many 'juicers' find themselves handicapped by their reliance on the technology.

9. Captain Nolan York

York is the image of the Federation ground pounder, with a stern jaw and two days stubble, charming but masculine, likeable but gruff. He is a no-nonsense dyed in the wool Federation Loyalist, and considers anyone not flying the Federation flag to be a possible enemy. He has some experience and is now working in Europe to shore up the crumbling Federation presence in southern France and Spain.

10. Eliza

Often called the Whore, or other slurs, Eliza was a Sexbot before ascending and becoming a sentient Seibertronian. She has since retained her human gender and appearance (a rare occurrence among her kind) but has drastically improved the parameters of her chassis. She is stronger than she appears and is not only a competent fighter, but a solid pilot, gunner, and navigator. She works as a freelancer crewmember and when she isn't home in Sicily, she works out of New Kashmir and other pirate havens. Eliza dislikes humanity and her former role as a sex toy. She is derisive of the sex trade and gladly destroys non-sentient sex bots.

11. Forest

Usually called Red for obscure reasons, Forest is an older man, balding with age. He refusing augments or treatments for his hair loss and generally dislikes the absolute hedonism of the Federation, and the elitism of the Eurasian Alliance. He is a deeply spiritual man, with a stirring of parapsychic ability and a strong sense of moral right and wrong. He is a pirate and merchant by trade, and plies a surface ship most of the time. He has helped Armas in the past with moving good and people, and he has also refused them in the past depending on what and where they are doing. He is something of a slum boss in the ruins of Venice, but his generosity to the people have earned him their great respect and he has some favor with the Vatican.

12. James Tide

James is a professional athlete and plays football (soccer) in the EuroZone league despite being from the Republic of California. He is a good player, and is a demi-celebrity, and when he's not scoring goals, he's playing up the Foreigner in a Foreign country schtick despite having lived in the EuroZone for years and speaking several languages fluently. He supports the notion of a unified Europe and has secretly donated money to Armas, but having lived most of his life in the Gilded Cage of the Federation part of Europe, he doesn't consider them terrorists, but rather proud ethnic revolutionaries.

13. Luna

Luna is a technomancer, a parapsychic who is able to access the CogNet without a physical connection or machine. She is able to ghost hack machines and computers to do what she wants them to do, as well as being a reasonably good gun adept. She favors revealing fashion, has a carefree lifestyle and doesn't acknowledge that she used to be an Atlantic Federation Ghost Op. She lives the life of a permanent beach bum, living in Alliance occupied Cypress, ignoring the goings on at the Cypriot Surface to Orbit spaceport, or Alliance seacology submarine base, and instead freedives and lives from day to day. She still has her guns, ghost suit, and other gear but it is buried in a lead lined case so it can't be found remotely.

14. Orren

Orren was indoctrinated into the military at an early age, and went through a now out of date and no longer used soldier augmentation program. He was a top notch soldier for a while before suffering nerve damage from the treatments. He lived for years as a degenerate, a beggar looking for a place to call his own after falling through the cracks in the system. His left arm is atrophied and he can barely move it, and he doesn't speak often due to his speech being slurred by a degree a facial paralysis. Orren has found a new life as a mentor and instructor for Armas where he is given a steady supply of alcohol, pain medications, and a chance to cause the Federation as much pain and suffering as it has caused him. Orren is a philosopher at heart and knows that Armas isn't on the right track, but doing something wrong is better than doing nothing right, and he seeks to guide them correctly from within. He is a consumate fighter with hyperedge blades, power armor training, and tactics and strategy.

15. Zak

Raised a poor kid, Zak grew into football and menial labor in an era where menial labor was more theory than practice. He is a genuinely positive soul, and has great faith in the Church and plans on becoming a great football player, the best that ever was. He is one terrorist attack or collateral damage incident away from becoming a zealot, or a statistic.

15. Ria Black

Ria Black is half caucasian half latin woman, her mother traveled abroad to South America where she got pregnant and brought the unborn daughter home to be born in the elite circles of the Eurasian Alliance. Ria was somewhat of an outcaste due to her 'mongrel' pedigree and was attended a status slightly higher than clones and household staff. She grew up in the shadows and became accustomed to secrecy and veils and rather naturally joined the intelligence and spy community. She now works as a spy/saboteur/assassin for the Eurasian Alliance, and for the last two years has been working in the DMZ that stretches across Europe. Black has made some progress with charting pirates and smugglers, but not as much in penetrating the secrecy of Armas, and it's supply networks. She has had an easy time outing and eliminating her Federation counterparts.

16. Tara

Tara is a Codex series clone mass produced in the Eurasian Alliance to bolster it's anemic population. She is small and slight, to reduce the amount of room and food required to support her, and she has a dynamic personality to ensure that she is a good and productive worker. She broke out of the conditioning mold and escaped the factory city she was living in and seeks to escape the Alliance for it's subhuman treatment of clones. She dresses outlandishly and has her own flair for doing things. She is a technological savant and is able to fix and maintain complicated machinery on an almost maternal level. She wants to have children, but secretly fears that if she does they will only be more clones of herself.

17. Alezander

A Spaniard by birth, Alezander has long since lost his sanity. He is an arcanotech engineer and routinely works on the alien devices that power and sustain the Cosmic era, such as Dimensional engines, thermal sinks, and the insides of plasma magnetic bottles. He now is a nihilist, but is able to hide his emotions after a psychotic breakdown several years ago lead to his nerve stapling treatment. Divested of hormone induced emotion and other bioelectric responses, Alezander was freed to go back to work keeping the alien turbines turning. Should the stapling and conditioning come undone, the soft spoken engineer could very easily cause a dimensional engine failure so large as to cause a storm rift, filling the immediate area with mathematical uncertainty and releasing things that should not be.

Nerve Stapling: The Nerve Stapling procedure is a invasive medical treatment one step below partial brain transplant. The brain of the patient is exposed and several arcane metallic staples are places into the brain, grounding out and suppressing the frontal lobes, which in turn functionally lobotomizes the patient without the messy side effects and lessened social stigma. It is a barbaric process and generally only done on the worst of criminals and arcanotech specialists who have extensive knowledge, but have been altered and left demented by their work. Stapling can come 'undone' on rare occasions, typically involving strong blows to the head, or strong near lethal electrical shocks

Storm Rift: A storm rift is the event that occurs when an arcanotech device that operates in more than one dimension suffers a failure. Dimensional Engines, batteries and heat sinks are complicated machines that protrude into dimensions beyond the three physical ones. A failure can cause the 'rift' that is contained within the device to rapidly expand and created a contaminated zone around it relative to the size of the original rift. Organic life within the rift zone is subject to biological and parapsychic mutation, and non-corporeal energy patterns can emerge and take on physical forms, aka things that should not be. These defy logical explanation and were previously known on very small scale as haunted locations or the sighting areas of cryptozoological creatures. Major rifts are contained by the military and sanitized with explosives, fire saturation, and high energy weapons discharges until the rift seals and the storm 'blows out'. Storm Rifts are almost always accompanied by bizarre weather, extreme weather, or very out of season weather.

18. Zedric

Zedric was born in space, and never thought that in his entire life that he would be marooned on one of the dirty mudballs. His shuttle was crossing above the Atlantic when it suffered a hit by space debris and was forced to make an emergency landing on Earth before it vented all of it's atmosphere. Zedric passed out, thinking this was the end. He later woke up in a cheap hospital camp in North Africa. The shuttle went down in the Mediterranean and he survived the impact and subsequent break up of the craft. Devoid of identification, money, or even his wristcom he had since childhood, he was completely cut off from the space world above him. Zedric was reduced to begging for food, and then joining a traveling carnival troop to entertain people too poor to own holovid or CogNet viewers. He dreams of escaping Earth and getting back to his stars, but the cost of a ticket is only dwarfed by his lost ID. Unbeknownst to him, Zedric has been listed as deceased since the day the shuttle went down.

19. 66

66 is a work and utility mechanoid