Post by Owl on Sept 11, 2018 9:03:47 GMT
Designation: Dust-7
Gender: Physically sexless, defaults to male pronouns
Species: Exo
Age: Unknown, at least several hundred years; 24 post-resurrection
Class: Hunter, arcstrider subclass
Appearance
Dust is 5’10” of gleaming copper and complicated machinery. His overall body layout is quite human: two legs, two arms, a torso and a head all right where they ought to be, just... made out of high-tech alloys rather than flesh. His ‘skin’ is copper, each individual plate limned with patina, while his optics glow a faintly blue-tinted green. Larger patches of the same tarnished color splash over his left optic and across his hairless head. While he doesn’t technically have ears, his audio sensors affix right where ears would, and they’re just a smidge too elongated to pass for a human’s. Said sensors tend to move in response to sound or strong emotional stimuli.
Dust dresses practically, favoring durability and comfort over aesthetic appeal. While off-duty he’s usually spotted in long sleeves and heavy jeans, typically paired with battered combat boots and oversized jackets. In combat situations he dons an eclectic mix of armor: plasteel chestpiece, close-fitting pauldrons, armored gauntlets, greaves, hooded cloak, and aquiline mask. His kit is dyed in variegated shades of grey, tan and olive, a combination hunters refer to as ‘desert matte’. This pattern distorts his outline and renders him nearly invisible in most terrain.
Though his weaponry is rarely visible, Dust is always armed. His typical loadout includes a knife in a hip sheath, a hand cannon in a holster at his lower back, and a scout rifle mag-clipped between his shoulders under his cloak.
Since bonding to the Honor gryphon Zavala, a glowing blue sigil has appeared on Dust's left shoulder.
Personality
Dust is a cipher even to himself. He’s been eight people over the course of his thousand-odd years of existence, and he can’t remember a damn thing about the first seven of them. Odds are good that at least one of his ‘past lives’ was some kind of monster. On the other hand, he isn’t that person anymore, and that knowledge is freeing and frightening by turns. At base Dust is still a man trying to find himself, still grappling with the twin burdens of duty and desire, and Traveler only knows where he’ll land in the end.
The past twenty-odd years have nevertheless brought a few fixed constants to the fore: curiosity, kindness, determination, a deep need for purpose and belonging. Dust craves knowledge the way a man dying of thirst craves water, and pursues its acquisition with the same single-minded intensity. He loves reading, adores exploring, can while away countless hours puzzling out the inner workings of Golden Age tech, and spent a truly impressive amount of time trawling the City’s extranet before arriving on Planet. His rabid curiosity is somewhat tempered by basic, fundamental decency. Dust cares about people, wants nothing but the best for them, and retains a startling naivety when it comes to seeing the best in others. A dyed-in-the-wool optimist, he can find the silver lining in any stormcloud, and he’s so damn earnest about it it’s hard to stay annoyed with his enthusiasm for long. The exo who trained him described him as ‘relentlessly cheerful’, and come right to it ‘relentless’ is a pretty good word for everything he is. Once Dust settles on a path he follows it to its end, and nothing short of the end of the world will sway him from his task.
Every Guardian suffers some degree of trauma, though, and Dust is no exception. His sunny demeanor hides a gaping pit of insecurity and doubt. The ghosts of who and what he might have been haunt him, and no amount of good deeds will ever fully absolve him of his imagined sins. He wants desperately to be liked, to be useful, but hasn’t the faintest idea how to do that in this brave and frightening new world. He keeps trying, always trying, and doesn’t always realize when his efforts cross the line. He can be too loud, too excited, too anxious, simply too much, and while he knows this he’s at a loss to change it. With time and structure (and a very good therapist) he’ll come to grips with his traumas, but he’s got a long road ahead of him yet.
History
The history of any exo is one of cyclical death and rebirth. Dust is no exception to this rule.
In his first life he was Damien Miles, an unremarkable man from an unremarkable colony built during humanity’s Golden Age. Damien spent his life learning all he could of humanity’s history. The task dragged him from one end of the Sol system to the other and back again, and never once did his boundless curiosity wane. Alas, Damien’s mind outlasted his body; he was diagnosed with an ultimately fatal disease long before he could finish his self-appointed task. Rather than letting the discovery destroy him, Damien turned to technology in a last-ditch effort to continue his work. Desperation led him to the Clovis Bray corporation, a biomedical group experimenting with cybernetics on a scale once thought impossible. Damien poured his life’s meager savings into the project, and in the end got his wish. His consciousness and memories- his soul, if you believe in such things- was uploaded into a mechanical body that would withstand the vagaries of time.
Humanity’s Golden Age had been built upon the power of the Traveler, an extraterrestrial being that had chosen to make its home in the Sol system. Sol was not its first home, however, nor was humanity the first race it had enlightened. It had tried countless times before, its every attempt confounded by a force colloquially known as the Darkness. It was only a matter of time before that equal but opposite found Sol, and a scant few years after Damien’s upload the inevitable came to pass.
The mass extinction that followed was later termed the Collapse.
Almost overnight humanity fell into ruin. Colonies burned. Space stations went dark. The entire exo race glitched their way into stasis, cascade failures erasing the humans they had once been. The few humans lucky enough to escape with their lives fled until they had nowhere left to run. On Earth, its cradle, mankind made a last desperate stand-
And the Traveler, unfathomable as ever, stood with them.
The next dawn broke over a changed world. The Darkness was gone, driven back into the void between stars, but the Traveler had paid a terrible price. Mankind’s guardian hung still and silent over the battlefield, its gleaming surface marred by ghastly wounds. Shell-shocked survivors massed in its shadow, hoping against hope that their eyes deceived them.
They were met by tiny fragments of the Traveler fairly blazing with Light. These were the first Ghosts, and they swore to help humanity do what their creator no longer could. Together survivors and Ghosts alike began to rebuild in the shadow of the Traveler, creating Earth’s Last (and perhaps greatest) City.
In the decades that followed everything changed for humanity. Ghosts began to resurrect the dead, imbuing their chosen heroes with the same Light they themselves wielded. Stranger still, mechanical marvels began to shamble into the City of their own volition. They called themselves exos, claimed they had been built for a war now forgotten, called themselves Cayde and Eriana and Banshee. One of them called himself Dust, and thus Damien’s second life began.
Little is known about Dusts 1-5. It’s generally assumed they led quiet lives as archivists or cryptarchs, content to be forgotten when the next hard reboot erased them. Dust-6 was equally nondescript right up until the day of his death. While the precise circumstances of his demise are unknown, records indicate he sustained fatal damage whilst evacuating a civilian shelter on Pluto.
Dust-6’s story continued several centuries later. He was resurrected on the same frigid iceball he’d died on, dragged from his grave by a cuboid synthetic practically vibrating with glee. The Ghost- for he was a Ghost- proclaimed Dust his Chosen, his Guardian, and... promptly made the kind of rookie mistake that gets Guardians killed. In his excitement the little Ghost had resurrected his newfound Guardian right into the teeth of a Plutonian storm. Mechanical construct or no, Dust wasn’t prepared for temperatures a few degrees above 0 Kelvin. He made it perhaps half a mile towards an evac site before succumbing to the bitter cold.
His Ghost resurrected him, of course. He had to. And when Dust died the second, third, ninth time, he resurrected him again. By the time outside aid arrived Dust-6 was simply gone, his persona and memories erased in what exos termed a ‘hard reboot’.
Dust-7- the Dust of today- came online in the Last City. His Ghost, eventually named Crow, had the unenviable task of bringing his newly-amnesiac Guardian up to speed. Dust took the news... about as well as could be expected, really, and promptly asked for a leave of absence to ‘get his head on straight’. The Vanguard granted his request without a second thought. Ghost and Guardian alike dropped off the radar for nearly six months. They returned from the wilds a cohesive unit, ready and eager to take on whatever the Vanguard could throw at them.
The newly-minted pair were assigned to the very exo who’d saved them from Pluto’s icy clutches. Sparhawk-16, grizzled veteran of a thousand battles, was able to chip away some of the hesitance and uncertainty that defined his reluctant student. Under his expert tutelage Dust grew into his newfound role rapidly, graduating to fireteam operations some three years after his arrival to the City.
Dust served as a scout and field operative for nearly two decades before his world turned on its audio.
The City had ever been a beacon for invading forces, and at first the Red Legion’s attack seemed no different. Then the Cabal unveiled a new weapon, a ‘sun eater’, and aimed it at the shattered shell of the Traveler. Whatever the device was, it cut every Guardian alive off from the Light that powered them. Untold thousands died in the following rout, Sparhawk among them, and even Dust barely escaped with his life.
A war followed, the Red War, and Dust played a comparatively minor role. Other Guardians carried the day. They freed the Traveler, restored the Light, took back the Last City- and when the Red Legion finally fled from Earth, Dust was among the first to begin rebuilding.
A scant few months later a jumpship malfunction sent him spiraling sideways through realities. He landed on Teragaia and the rest, as they say, is history.
Powers and Abilities:
Undying - Guardians are notoriously bad at staying dead. Should Dust suffer lethal damage from any source he’ll resurrect in perfect condition a few seconds later.
Gunslinger - Exo were originally forged for war, and on some level Dust remembers this fact. He can produce reliably devastating results with just about any projectile-based weapon.
Light-Touched - The Light manifests as elemental abilities similar to magic. For Dust this means an ability to wield lightning- and fire-based ‘spells’. (Spoilers, he’s not very good at them.)
Scout - Dust was trained by one of the City’s finest scouts. While he’s not on Sparhawk’s level, he’s nevertheless an excellent tracker and hunter who excels at surviving ‘off the grid’.
Crow
Crow is Dust’s Ghost, a roughly cuboid synthetic the size of a human fist. When he deems the coast clear he can be found hovering above Dust's shoulder in a blur of coppery-tan plates and vibrant blue light. The rest of the time he de-mats, phasing his physical body out of existence lest it be damaged. Ghost and Guardian share a quantum bond that lets the communicate instantly no matter the distance between them. This same bond allows them to share thoughts, emotions and even memories. While Crow is capable of speaking aloud in any number of languages, he typically chooses to speak in other humanoids' heads via limited telepathy.
Crow is the brains of this operation. He’s been around since the Collapse, aware and taking notes the whole time, and he’s bursting at the seams with knowledge he yearns to share. He’s Dust’s encyclopedia and morality compass, guiding the amnesiac Guardian onto the straight and narrow path whenever he starts to stray. A veritable well of stories, Crow adores tall tales and frequently embellishes he and Dust’s exploits. While the more arrogant of the pair, Crow is nevertheless a good Ghost at heart. He’s also deeply faithful, looking for the Traveler’s plan even as the world crumbles around him. Dust doesn’t share this faith, a fact that’s been a sticking point in the past.
Gender: Physically sexless, defaults to male pronouns
Species: Exo
Age: Unknown, at least several hundred years; 24 post-resurrection
Class: Hunter, arcstrider subclass
Appearance
Dust is 5’10” of gleaming copper and complicated machinery. His overall body layout is quite human: two legs, two arms, a torso and a head all right where they ought to be, just... made out of high-tech alloys rather than flesh. His ‘skin’ is copper, each individual plate limned with patina, while his optics glow a faintly blue-tinted green. Larger patches of the same tarnished color splash over his left optic and across his hairless head. While he doesn’t technically have ears, his audio sensors affix right where ears would, and they’re just a smidge too elongated to pass for a human’s. Said sensors tend to move in response to sound or strong emotional stimuli.
Dust dresses practically, favoring durability and comfort over aesthetic appeal. While off-duty he’s usually spotted in long sleeves and heavy jeans, typically paired with battered combat boots and oversized jackets. In combat situations he dons an eclectic mix of armor: plasteel chestpiece, close-fitting pauldrons, armored gauntlets, greaves, hooded cloak, and aquiline mask. His kit is dyed in variegated shades of grey, tan and olive, a combination hunters refer to as ‘desert matte’. This pattern distorts his outline and renders him nearly invisible in most terrain.
Though his weaponry is rarely visible, Dust is always armed. His typical loadout includes a knife in a hip sheath, a hand cannon in a holster at his lower back, and a scout rifle mag-clipped between his shoulders under his cloak.
Since bonding to the Honor gryphon Zavala, a glowing blue sigil has appeared on Dust's left shoulder.
Personality
Dust is a cipher even to himself. He’s been eight people over the course of his thousand-odd years of existence, and he can’t remember a damn thing about the first seven of them. Odds are good that at least one of his ‘past lives’ was some kind of monster. On the other hand, he isn’t that person anymore, and that knowledge is freeing and frightening by turns. At base Dust is still a man trying to find himself, still grappling with the twin burdens of duty and desire, and Traveler only knows where he’ll land in the end.
The past twenty-odd years have nevertheless brought a few fixed constants to the fore: curiosity, kindness, determination, a deep need for purpose and belonging. Dust craves knowledge the way a man dying of thirst craves water, and pursues its acquisition with the same single-minded intensity. He loves reading, adores exploring, can while away countless hours puzzling out the inner workings of Golden Age tech, and spent a truly impressive amount of time trawling the City’s extranet before arriving on Planet. His rabid curiosity is somewhat tempered by basic, fundamental decency. Dust cares about people, wants nothing but the best for them, and retains a startling naivety when it comes to seeing the best in others. A dyed-in-the-wool optimist, he can find the silver lining in any stormcloud, and he’s so damn earnest about it it’s hard to stay annoyed with his enthusiasm for long. The exo who trained him described him as ‘relentlessly cheerful’, and come right to it ‘relentless’ is a pretty good word for everything he is. Once Dust settles on a path he follows it to its end, and nothing short of the end of the world will sway him from his task.
Every Guardian suffers some degree of trauma, though, and Dust is no exception. His sunny demeanor hides a gaping pit of insecurity and doubt. The ghosts of who and what he might have been haunt him, and no amount of good deeds will ever fully absolve him of his imagined sins. He wants desperately to be liked, to be useful, but hasn’t the faintest idea how to do that in this brave and frightening new world. He keeps trying, always trying, and doesn’t always realize when his efforts cross the line. He can be too loud, too excited, too anxious, simply too much, and while he knows this he’s at a loss to change it. With time and structure (and a very good therapist) he’ll come to grips with his traumas, but he’s got a long road ahead of him yet.
History
The history of any exo is one of cyclical death and rebirth. Dust is no exception to this rule.
In his first life he was Damien Miles, an unremarkable man from an unremarkable colony built during humanity’s Golden Age. Damien spent his life learning all he could of humanity’s history. The task dragged him from one end of the Sol system to the other and back again, and never once did his boundless curiosity wane. Alas, Damien’s mind outlasted his body; he was diagnosed with an ultimately fatal disease long before he could finish his self-appointed task. Rather than letting the discovery destroy him, Damien turned to technology in a last-ditch effort to continue his work. Desperation led him to the Clovis Bray corporation, a biomedical group experimenting with cybernetics on a scale once thought impossible. Damien poured his life’s meager savings into the project, and in the end got his wish. His consciousness and memories- his soul, if you believe in such things- was uploaded into a mechanical body that would withstand the vagaries of time.
Humanity’s Golden Age had been built upon the power of the Traveler, an extraterrestrial being that had chosen to make its home in the Sol system. Sol was not its first home, however, nor was humanity the first race it had enlightened. It had tried countless times before, its every attempt confounded by a force colloquially known as the Darkness. It was only a matter of time before that equal but opposite found Sol, and a scant few years after Damien’s upload the inevitable came to pass.
The mass extinction that followed was later termed the Collapse.
Almost overnight humanity fell into ruin. Colonies burned. Space stations went dark. The entire exo race glitched their way into stasis, cascade failures erasing the humans they had once been. The few humans lucky enough to escape with their lives fled until they had nowhere left to run. On Earth, its cradle, mankind made a last desperate stand-
And the Traveler, unfathomable as ever, stood with them.
The next dawn broke over a changed world. The Darkness was gone, driven back into the void between stars, but the Traveler had paid a terrible price. Mankind’s guardian hung still and silent over the battlefield, its gleaming surface marred by ghastly wounds. Shell-shocked survivors massed in its shadow, hoping against hope that their eyes deceived them.
They were met by tiny fragments of the Traveler fairly blazing with Light. These were the first Ghosts, and they swore to help humanity do what their creator no longer could. Together survivors and Ghosts alike began to rebuild in the shadow of the Traveler, creating Earth’s Last (and perhaps greatest) City.
In the decades that followed everything changed for humanity. Ghosts began to resurrect the dead, imbuing their chosen heroes with the same Light they themselves wielded. Stranger still, mechanical marvels began to shamble into the City of their own volition. They called themselves exos, claimed they had been built for a war now forgotten, called themselves Cayde and Eriana and Banshee. One of them called himself Dust, and thus Damien’s second life began.
Little is known about Dusts 1-5. It’s generally assumed they led quiet lives as archivists or cryptarchs, content to be forgotten when the next hard reboot erased them. Dust-6 was equally nondescript right up until the day of his death. While the precise circumstances of his demise are unknown, records indicate he sustained fatal damage whilst evacuating a civilian shelter on Pluto.
Dust-6’s story continued several centuries later. He was resurrected on the same frigid iceball he’d died on, dragged from his grave by a cuboid synthetic practically vibrating with glee. The Ghost- for he was a Ghost- proclaimed Dust his Chosen, his Guardian, and... promptly made the kind of rookie mistake that gets Guardians killed. In his excitement the little Ghost had resurrected his newfound Guardian right into the teeth of a Plutonian storm. Mechanical construct or no, Dust wasn’t prepared for temperatures a few degrees above 0 Kelvin. He made it perhaps half a mile towards an evac site before succumbing to the bitter cold.
His Ghost resurrected him, of course. He had to. And when Dust died the second, third, ninth time, he resurrected him again. By the time outside aid arrived Dust-6 was simply gone, his persona and memories erased in what exos termed a ‘hard reboot’.
Dust-7- the Dust of today- came online in the Last City. His Ghost, eventually named Crow, had the unenviable task of bringing his newly-amnesiac Guardian up to speed. Dust took the news... about as well as could be expected, really, and promptly asked for a leave of absence to ‘get his head on straight’. The Vanguard granted his request without a second thought. Ghost and Guardian alike dropped off the radar for nearly six months. They returned from the wilds a cohesive unit, ready and eager to take on whatever the Vanguard could throw at them.
The newly-minted pair were assigned to the very exo who’d saved them from Pluto’s icy clutches. Sparhawk-16, grizzled veteran of a thousand battles, was able to chip away some of the hesitance and uncertainty that defined his reluctant student. Under his expert tutelage Dust grew into his newfound role rapidly, graduating to fireteam operations some three years after his arrival to the City.
Dust served as a scout and field operative for nearly two decades before his world turned on its audio.
The City had ever been a beacon for invading forces, and at first the Red Legion’s attack seemed no different. Then the Cabal unveiled a new weapon, a ‘sun eater’, and aimed it at the shattered shell of the Traveler. Whatever the device was, it cut every Guardian alive off from the Light that powered them. Untold thousands died in the following rout, Sparhawk among them, and even Dust barely escaped with his life.
A war followed, the Red War, and Dust played a comparatively minor role. Other Guardians carried the day. They freed the Traveler, restored the Light, took back the Last City- and when the Red Legion finally fled from Earth, Dust was among the first to begin rebuilding.
A scant few months later a jumpship malfunction sent him spiraling sideways through realities. He landed on Teragaia and the rest, as they say, is history.
Powers and Abilities:
Undying - Guardians are notoriously bad at staying dead. Should Dust suffer lethal damage from any source he’ll resurrect in perfect condition a few seconds later.
Gunslinger - Exo were originally forged for war, and on some level Dust remembers this fact. He can produce reliably devastating results with just about any projectile-based weapon.
Light-Touched - The Light manifests as elemental abilities similar to magic. For Dust this means an ability to wield lightning- and fire-based ‘spells’. (Spoilers, he’s not very good at them.)
Scout - Dust was trained by one of the City’s finest scouts. While he’s not on Sparhawk’s level, he’s nevertheless an excellent tracker and hunter who excels at surviving ‘off the grid’.
Crow
Crow is Dust’s Ghost, a roughly cuboid synthetic the size of a human fist. When he deems the coast clear he can be found hovering above Dust's shoulder in a blur of coppery-tan plates and vibrant blue light. The rest of the time he de-mats, phasing his physical body out of existence lest it be damaged. Ghost and Guardian share a quantum bond that lets the communicate instantly no matter the distance between them. This same bond allows them to share thoughts, emotions and even memories. While Crow is capable of speaking aloud in any number of languages, he typically chooses to speak in other humanoids' heads via limited telepathy.
Crow is the brains of this operation. He’s been around since the Collapse, aware and taking notes the whole time, and he’s bursting at the seams with knowledge he yearns to share. He’s Dust’s encyclopedia and morality compass, guiding the amnesiac Guardian onto the straight and narrow path whenever he starts to stray. A veritable well of stories, Crow adores tall tales and frequently embellishes he and Dust’s exploits. While the more arrogant of the pair, Crow is nevertheless a good Ghost at heart. He’s also deeply faithful, looking for the Traveler’s plan even as the world crumbles around him. Dust doesn’t share this faith, a fact that’s been a sticking point in the past.