The Grand OC SII: The Re-OCening: Week 29: UNINTELLIGIBLE!

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The Grand OC SII: The Re-OCening: Week 29: UNINTELLIGIBLE!
#25
RE: The Grand OC Season II: Week 3: FAILURE
Username: Me Dini
Name: Ellai
Species: Chronautomaton
Gender: Does Not Compute
Color: Creak

Biography: There’s no saving anything

Clank, stomp. Clank, stomp. Clank, stomp.

Lush fields. Scorched desert. Shattered wasteland.

Blue sky. Red supernova. Incandescent nebula.

Millions of years, blink of a mechanical eye. Once upon a time...


Once upon a time, a civilization of artificers considered their options. Automation had brought them utopia: hunger, disease, want and waste were are left behind. There is was a cost. There has always been a cost. Stars wink out of the night sky, shrouded by metal colossi. It wasn't isn't enough. It was never enough. Entropy and inertia. Basic concepts, somehow as insurmountable as when they were first conceived. Yet rather than accept such forces, they saw them as a humiliation. What right did an unthinking universe have to set their course through it, much less guarantee their eventual demise?

If three dimensions would not offer a solution, they would simply work with four. If their mortal vessels proved inadequate, they would simply create proxies. Chronautomatons. Magnetism and clockwork, fusion and computation, and much else besides: the crowning achievement of an era, sent off into the void to forestall the inevitable.

They were given a mind, of course. Such precise tools couldn't be steered remotely or mechanically, not at the physical distances involved. Much less the temporal distances. Ellai woke to find itself hurtling towards a distant system, instructions rattling around its brain. A body--no, bodies--a destination, and a task to perform. A purpose to fulfill.

It had to keep time.

The stellar mass it approached was collapsing. In a few millennia, it would begin to swallow all matter it came across. Eventually, that would include the Creators' home. An unacceptable situation, one to which there was no disproportionate response. Tinkering with the fundamental nature of space-time? Entirely acceptable.

Ellai measured, analyzed, calculated, plotted as it traversed the depths of space. By the time it reached the system, it had mapped out a flawless solution. Hundreds of chronautomatons engaged their boosters, maneuvering into position around the offending star. All the pieces were are in place. A millennium to plan, a century to assemble.

A blink of a mechanical eye.

Phase 1, Engage. One after another, chronautomatons light up, spinning in their frames. A radiant halo surrounds the sun, before...

Phase 2. Time to keep time. The star roils as its satellites steer against its temporal inertia. Its rate of fuel consumption approaches zero as millennia to come are redirected. Stored. The task is almost complete. The Creators will be safe.

The universe roils.

Screeches to a halt.


Now, now. This just won't do! You're going to spoil everyone's fun. Mine, in particular. So.

Stop.



A blink of a mechanical eye. The halo implodes. A hungering void remains.

The universe ticks back into motion.


Millions of years.

A black hole spits out an indigestible bit of debris. A lone, wrecked chronautomaton. Warnings flash wildly, briefly across Ellai's consciousness as it rockets back into existence. Useless. This one shell--its body--is all that remains. It attempts to reorient, to discover where when it is. Too late, it turns out. Far too late. The absence of light behind it is unmistakeable. In a desperate plea, it scans for signals. Something, anything. However long it takes.

Decades, as it turns out.

When the signal arrives, Ellai sets a course. It hopes. It really shouldn't have. When it returns to Homeworld, somehow intact, there's nothing left. The Creators, Homeworld, and all their creations are dust, wiped out ages ago by some catastrophe even they couldn't anticipate. The universe shifts, and it sees. They thrive, as their fields overflowing with crops. They die, as their fields are glassed by invaders. They waste away, as the planet flies ever onwards. Far off the predicted course. Far away from the black hole it sought to prevent.

Ellai's task, purpose, life: pointless. It despairs.

Then it blinks out of existence once again.



Description: Once ruined, baby you stay ruined

Ellai is a remarkable artificial intelligence, imbued with all the faculties of its Creators. This made it capable of reasoning, creative thinking and emotion. It also made it confident to the point of extreme arrogance, an attitude of which it has recently been nigh-fatally disabused. It remains cognizant, but now often fixated on what it sees as its mistakes (and finding some way to undo them, despite landing in an entirely different universe). The consideration that it made no mistakes and that its creators were at fault has not crossed its mind.

Ellai is not predisposed to violence, but will not hesitate to defend itself or go on the offense if it perceives a threat. It is currently housed in a twelve by five-foot magitech automaton, created to manipulate space-time. It sits in a smooth, spherical core, slotted into a bulky and at this point heavily damaged ambulatory clockwork and fusion-powered frame.


Weapons/Abilities: We got another thing coming undone

Ellai is currently a font of temporal energy and general weirdness due to the catastrophic collapse of its first voyage, heavily compromising its functioning.

As a result it is somewhat lost in time, and can catch glimpses of the past or future around its location. It cannot control these visions with any precision, however, and they are often too distant in either direction to be of much use. It will also automatically destabilize and attempt to absorb any strange temporal phenomena it comes in contact with.

The ability to mess with the temporal inertia of objects and shift their progress through space-time is similarly unreliable, and while it can still choose when to use it the speed of acceleration or deceleration is currently entirely out of its control.

Ellai is defenseless apart from being an extremely heavy and durable twelve-foot-tall robot.


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