AMP

AMP is a character in The Glorious Championship.

Weapons/Abilities:
Pieces of AMP's body can be used as blunt weapons. In addition, the magnetic field around him is capable of ruining those great family photos you had on your digital camera.

Description:
AMP (Autonomous Mobile Processor) can best be described as a floating cloud of metal. Electricity is constantly arcing from piece to piece as he runs processes; getting in the way of one of these bolts will not only give you a mild electrical shock, but depending on the data it was carrying, it may cause AMP to skip a step or two by mistake. His entire body is his own processor, so losing or damaging critical pieces results in memory loss and lag in decision-making. Conversely, gaining more pieces allows faster decision-making and more electronic storage space. However, not everything in AMP's body is immediately converted into electronic storage space, unless it's needed right away. On average, one-half to two-thirds of AMP's body is actually just structural components; these are used to protect more critical parts, as well as interact with the environment. For example, he moves by pushing pieces of himself off of nearby objects; his magnetic field does not actually allow him to fly. He also keeps a few hundred metal filings drifting around for purposes of fine manipulation, although organizing them into a useful shape puts a lot of strain on his processors. The metal filings whirl around him quickly enough to hurt anyone who tries to get too close to his core, although they wouldn't do much more damage than the average thorn bush.

The whole shebang gravitates around AMP's central core, a glowing red orb about ten inches in diameter, which is basically the brains of the assembly. He tends to keep it, along with a number of processor components, covered with several layers of structural shields. AMP's core uses a strong magnetic field to keep the entire cloud coherent; this is why it is composed solely of metal. Although just the core itself is enough for AMP to function, anything beyond the task of seeking out more components would be impossible; in addition, these processors are where AMP houses its most cherished memories, the ones that define AMP as a personality. If the core were deactivated, AMP would stop working until it was turned back on, but would function just as well after being turned on as he did before being turned off. If the core were destroyed, AMP would "die."

AMP by himself is effectively blind, deaf, mute, and unable to taste or smell. He uses electronic input/output devices such as cameras, microphones, and speakers to gather information about his surroundings. The electronics inside these devices don't need to be functional, as AMP provides all the intelligence they need. However, they must have a direct route to his core, even if it's through half a foot of metal; otherwise, the magnetic field causes a lot of data distortion.

AMP is driven by an intense need to understand his purpose. He has faint and heavily damaged snippets of his life before he landed on Earth, but the intent of his creation is completely lost, leaving him with only the constant feeling that he's supposed to be doing something without actually knowing what that "something" is.

Biography:
A spaceship flew towards the green-and-blue planet at an incredible velocity, passing through its atmosphere at twice the speed of the average comet. Nearly all of its mass evaporated from the heat during the descent, and when the farmer came to inspect the cooling asteroid that had just plowed a quarter-mile furrow in his field, all that was left was a dimly glowing red orb slightly larger than his head. He hauled the oddity back to his barn and, after a few minutes of careful inspection, decided that while he had no idea what the hell it was, it was bound to fetch a pretty penny at the flea market. And so it was that AMP's core ended up on a farmer's table next to a various assortment of odd-looking vegetables.

The red glow from the orb was much more distinct at this point, and for some reason it seemed to be generating static elecricity; the farmer had to pull out his work gloves to avoid getting shocked every time he picked it up. Early in the afternoon, a vendor selling scrap metal happened to push his cart past the farmer's stall, and then without warning things began happening much more quickly. The orb's glow increased in intensity, and all the loose scrap metal flew towards it, bolts of electricity arcing between the pieces as AMP took stock of his new resources. The newly-formed swarm of metal pulled itself closer together and began rolling forward, knocking over a number of stalls before leaving the market entirely.

After several days of tireless rolling (for AMP did not yet have any sense of boredom), the ball of metal passed into the limits of a city. AMP's journey was halted when he crashed into a traffic camera post. He climbed up the curious obstacle, and when he reached the top, he found the camera, which he promptly ripped off and attached to himself to serve as an eye. Gazing at the city, and the pedestrians staring up at him in shock and amazement, AMP paused while he struggled to process an utterly foreign feeling--confusion. There was something he was intended to do here. Something was supposed to happen. He was supposed to cause something. But what? A critical piece of hardware must have burnt up in the descent onto the planet's surface; most of his memory was missing. A few images were still there--four seven-fingered hands placing pieces together, a laboratory made entirely of plastic--but most of it was either gone or locked away somewhere deep inside his core.

Not knowing what else to do, AMP followed his impulses and spent the next few weeks collecting components; before long, he found he was able to speak four hundred and fifty three different languages completely fluently, although he was unable to understand why most of the creatures around him only spoke one of them, and only a fraction of them were present on the planet. Occasionally he felt he had discovered his original purpose and immediately started performing some inexplicable action, until, invariably, another pass through the calculations proved that there had been an error, and he dropped whatever he was doing without warning as if he had grown bored of it. Then one day, without further explanation, he simply vanished, much to the amazement of the government agents, reporters, and self-proclaimed xenobiologists trying to figure out what the hell he was.