Envoy

Envoy is a character in Petty Squabble.

Weapons
Currently unarmed, but for maintenance and self-preservation purposes, Envoy was built for superior physical strength, and its chest can unfold into two extra arms. The Uae metal is basically unbreakable, but sustaining damage may cause other side effects, such as further data loss.

Abilities
Envoy can physically encode information into the Uae metal lining the majority of its body. The COFCA is uncertain of what this will actually do, but most importantly, it means Envoy might very well know where the Uae homeworld is. This also means that Envoy is highly adaptive, and able to receive just about any kind of upgrade.

Since Envoy is obviously not equipped to handle this sort of... excursion, COFCA will offer any support they can, from planning and background research of the current environment up to and including using airdrops and teleporters to keep Envoy properly equipped - but at the moment, all Envoy has is a set of rocket boosters, enabling it to fly if needed.

Description
Envoy is, as previously stated, a robot cobbled together from the parts of an alien space probe, with human-built parts to fill in the blanks. Like any good robotic human ambassador, Envoy is built to roughly resemble a human's proportions, with some subtle revisions here and there: Namely, it stands at a bit over six feet tall with broad metallic shoulders, and the extra arms folded into its torso make it rather look like its chest is perpetually puffed up heroically. Its face, upper body, shins and primary forearms are made of sleek red Uae parts that are darkened and weathered, but otherwise completely seamless. The rest of its body – most noticeably, its bulky hands and feet and its spindly thighs and upper arms – are made of the best human technology and materials that don't exist unless you can afford for them to.

The Uae parts are sleek and organic, and the human parts are bulky and unwieldy. Its “face” is little more than a curved sheet of Uae metal that resembles the contours of a human head, with some human circuitry and sensors filling in the hollow interior and two blank circles where the eyes might be. It has three bulky (but surprisingly dexterous) fingers to a hand, and rather compact rocket thrusters built into the soles of its feet and on its upper back.

Biography
In a future vaguely analogous to our own, an unmanned alien space exploration probe crashed somewhere on a planet very similar to ours, and very nearly destroyed itself on impact. A lot of people in a world government very similar to Earth's were very excited about this, so they declared war, covered up the incident and then decided what to do. Once they realized they had just narrowly missed what definitely would have been first contact, they decided to do the next best thing and find out whatever they could from it. The Unmanned Alien Exploration vessel (or UAE vessel for short) was combed for any possible information on where it had come from, or what had sent it, but no one could come up with so much as a picture of two naked people and a hydrogen molecule, let alone a gold-plated phonograph record with whale sounds on it.

Actually, no one could figure out anything until someone asked a silly question: How did anyone manage to build this probe? The metal was tough enough to handle years of sustained spaceflight, atmospheric entry and uncontrolled impact with the Earth's crust – and it was still intact. Seamless, even. How had anyone crafted anything out of it?

After a lot of testing and a few fortunate accidents, researchers eventually figured out there was indeed a way to alter the shape of the metal: The probe's strange alien electronics were wired directly into the metal, and they reacted with each other. Not only had the metal beenprogrammed into the shapes that made up the probe, but apparently, the probe had been encoding information directly into the molecular structure of the metal it was made out of, allowing it to store its findings indefinitely, even if it sustained damage or ran out of power. But unfortunately, during the crash, the metal took heavy damage, and the metal reverted to the shapes that made up the probe, erasing just about all of the data contained on it. There seemed to be just a fraction of data left, but no one had any idea how to read it, let alone extract it. Presumably, the data would include something like home coordinates, but that was as far as anyone could get.

The logical conclusion? Attach the highly adaptive Uae parts that they couldn't use to a robot that they did know how to use, and send it into space to follow the unreadable coordinates back to the aliens that sent it, where it could make first contact.

The result was Envoy, a robotic ambassador to the Uae homeworld, and a bizarre hybrid of the technologies of two vastly different worlds.

But there was still a problem – who owned it? Who got to operate it? Envoy had been a collaboration of various scientific institutes, governments and megacoporations – not to mention aliens. It was quite possibly the most valuable thing that the human race ever came into contact with – a machine that was more than capable of drastically changing the future of the human race. (Not to mention, it was made of the only known samples of Uae metal.)

The (debatably) logical conclusion? Everyone made a piece. Everyone gets to run it.

Envoy was sent into space under the command of the Council of First Contact Ambassadors (COFCA) [pronounced “Kafka”] – a committee of business leaders, corrupt government officials and lead scientists – only to be lost a few uneventful weeks of spaceflight later.