Loosely based on one of my OC’s, Bobby (from transt universe. I recycled the character for another story… but this is the first iteration).
He is put into an asylum after hurting a number of people with his surprising and inexplicable super-strength. He was born an orphan and has abandonment issues, anger issues, but really doesn’t mean to hurt anyone. He is afraid to get close to anyone because he is afraid of hurting them. He has red eyes, and appeared at the orphanage under mysterious circumstances.
The strange thing about Bobby is that no medications work on him. You can inject him with the strongest tranquilizer, but it won’t weaken him at all. So hospital staff was forced to use mechanical restraints on him, which made his behavior worse.
After every psychologist failed to break through to him, finally the administrator of the hospital took him as her only patient.
She took a much rougher approach– where the others had been afraid of Bobby or tried to be gentle and coddling, she treated him with curtness and made him earn her respect. Bobby was so used to being feared that he was taken back by this bold woman, and over time, he finally opened up to her and they formed a proper doctor-patient relationship.
The Doctor’s son had turned out to be a nitwit, and as she grew to care for Bobby, she treated him as her son.
Knowing that Bobby was an orphan, and disliking the life trajectory of her own bratty, ill-disposed child, she wrote Bobby as the sole heir to her fortune and estate, planning to support Bobby after he was released from the asylum.
Unfortunately, days before he was to be released and she was going to reveal his new fortune, she died in a car accident.
Bobby was heartbroken and went into full relapse of all his bad behavior, hurting hospital staff, trying to run away, throwing a nonstop tantrum.
The Doctor’s son found out about how Bobby was named heir in her will, and furious, he went to see Bobby in the asylum, planning to beat him up.
When he arrived, Bobby had no idea about the will, and when the guy attacked him, he fought back easily (even though he was in a straitjacket) and knocked the guy out.
The guy sued the hospital for his head injury. Even though another head psychologist, Nera, had witnessed the guy attack Bobby first, she was considered biased because she was one of Bobby’s long-time caretakers.
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Bobby escapes the asylum and is able to travel across the universe using his inheritance.
By chance, he meets a former fellow inmate, Ryan Rivington, and they become room mates.
Ryan’s friend, Jason Gingko recognizes Bobby’s abilities as those of a Ki-Knight, or kinetic psychic. The Ki-Knights were a legendary group of warriors who escorted the first empress to the 6th dimension, where she and her entourage were bestowed with special psychic abilities to protect their galaxy from transgressors.
Over thousands of years and many generations, the abilities were recessive… although with the right genetic lineup, you could get a child who could actually use some of their psychic powers.
Jason Gingko (Jigen Gingko) is from an extremely wealthy family that is kinda like the Illuminati.
For years, the family tradition has been to amass the recessive genes that allow people to use their psychic powers, from levitation to super strength, energy manifestation, etc.
There is a coalition of psychics called Leviathan that locates and trains psychics as well, but they don’t touch the Gingkos because the family has their own traditions and training.
Children born with red eyes and red hair are considered most likely to exhibit psychic powers, so the Gingkos every ten years send the children of the family with these two traits to train in a secret location. They study martial arts and what would be considered “eastern” concepts of spirituality in order to hone their abilities and use them.
After training is complete, the kids fight each other in duels, and the one who is considered strongest is set for life. They are automatically guaranteed a powerful seat as a board member for the company and have the potential for becoming president of Gingko & Gingko Corp.
Anyway.
So Jason had gone through the training, and recognized Bobby’s abilities immediately– Bobby had red eyes and Ryan described to him Bobby’s super strength.
They also bring him to James Veinard… who is the family physician and also a super intelligent bio-mechanical engineer who escaped from Basilisk, the primary “villains” in the transt universe…
James realizes during his initial examination of Bobby that Bobby is a cyborg, or at least partially. His brain is intertwined with mechanisms that explain not only how he was able to escape the asylum by disabling the security doors, but how he was able to access his inheritance and use it while traveling across the universe, since all of the Doctor’s assets had been frozen after her son disputed the will.
James hasn’t seen a cyborg of this complexity since his days as a member of Basilisk, and calls upon a former assistant and fellow bio-mechanical engineer to examine Bobby… who happens to be Nera, who worked at the hospital where Bobby was locked up before (but James doesn’t know that).
Nera was a young medical prodigy who was making a name for herself in black market cybernetics when she was kidnapped by Mephisto. Mephisto is a cybernetic super soldier created by Basilisk. When Mephisto escaped Basilisk, he was wounded and needed maintenance, so that’s why he contacted Nera. He established himself as an outer-Atlas gang lord, a front so that he could explore ways to combat Basilisk should they come looking for him.
Mephisto came upon Peregrine Jeckyll when walking around the city. Pip (Peregrine) pick pocketed him, and Mephis immediately recognized that Pip was a special alien (he has cat-like ears and a tail) that was designed by one of the most brilliant bio-engineers in Basilisk. He “collected” (kidnapped) Pip and made him his slave/ the gang’s book keeper.
Well, after a few years, Basilisk figures out where Mephis is hiding and attacks his headquarters, nearly killing Mephis. Everyone from the gang is scattered. Pip runs away.
Meanwhile. James and his own super soldier/experiment named Seth crash land their starship in a forest on the outskirts of Atlas.
They salvage what they can and manage to pay for a small ramshackle apartment in the projects, where Seth regularly goes out hunting for scrap metal at the local dump to sell.
While perusing the dump on a hoverboard of James’ design, he finds Pip, who is crying inconsolably and still shaken up from the attack. Seth is fascinated by this creature, and takes him back to their apartment.
Antics follow, I’ll really have to do a proper write up, because this is supposed to be about Bobby!
Okay, getting back to him–
So Pip essentially brings Nera and Mephis and James together, and that’s how James got to have Nera as his assistant while he took over maintenance of Mephis’ cybernetic body.
After a while, Nera set out to have a “normal” life and put cybernetics behind her to study psychology.
That’s when she started working at the asylum where Bobby was kept.
Okay.
So before Nera shows up, Jason and James have already trained Bobby so he can take full advantage of both his psychic and cybernetic abilties.
Ryan is the son of a physicist working for the royal military, and is able to get Bobby a job working for them as a computer/network technician. James and Bobby institute a new and much more organic/efficient structure to the communications center of Centuri, the empire’s main city.
Everything is going well until Nera shows up and reveals Bobby’s past as a runaway inmate who is being convicted for assault/battery back in Atlas, the city he came from across the universe.
He has to go back to the institution, which technically still has custody over him since he was never deemed to be cured of his anger and aggression issues.
He has to endure the humiliation of being treated like and inmate again after being free so long, and finally living his own life for once.
He also endures the casual sadism of an orderly there who he hurt during his escape. The orderly finds every excuse possible to make Bobby’s life more difficult and revoke his privileges. In a staggering show of patience, Bobby accepts the abuse and doesn’t tell anyone about it.
During his trial, the prosecutor shows extreme skill in destroying the defense, making even the most experienced doctors look unreliable. The prosecution is moving to have Bobby become a permanent ward of the state, which would have him moved into a more prison-like asylum for the rest of his life, when the defense finally calls a sensational character witness to the stand– the empress herself.
The empress personally assesses every member of her court, and telepathy is well known to run in the royal family.
The empress not only asserts that Bobby is a good person, but claims that when she met him the first time, she could see into his past and saw that he was innocent of the present crime.
Considering this witness indisputable, the judge sides with the defense and Bobby is freed.
On his last day in Atlas before he goes back to Centuri, Bobby says good bye to the old hospital staff and to a girl he met while there. He waits outside for the orderly who tormented him to leave, then uses his cybernetic powers to hack the guy’s car and all his credit cards, draining him of all his assets and putting his personal information online in public for anyone to steal. He leaves calmly, knowing that by the time the guy realizes what happened, it will be way too late for him to do anything about it.
Back on Centuri, James consults with the Empress about her decision to participate in the court hearing. She says that after Bobby left, there were so many system errors that the other engineers couldn’t keep up with fixing them all, throwing the administration into a state of panic. She admitted it must be a fragile system to break when just one person left, but said that they had always had technical trouble like that. Bobby was like a godsend to them, and she needed him there.
James points out that mind reading hadn’t been a trait of the royal family for generations, implying that the Empress had lied in court, she simply smiled.
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Bobby returned to work at the royal house.
Years later, the Empress is pregnant with her first child by Jason, who by that point had moved up the ranks of the Royal defense force and had been chosen by he Empress as her partner.
Mysterious attacks on the royal starship meant that Bobby was moved from a technical role to defense, using his abilities to pilot a special star-attack ship that escorted and defended the Empress during travel. Jason was also by this time using his psychic abilities to pilot a starship in her defense.
For the past years, Jason and Bobby had become very close through training together. Also, Jason’s best friend Ryan had joined the army as a sniper, so he was busy with his career and had no time for Jason anymore (Ryan and Jason grew up together, they were best buds).
During a particularly large assault on the Empress’ starship, Bobby was suddenly attacked by an onslaught of enemy ships, while the Empress’ ship was also attacked. Jason had to choose between saving the empress or saving Bobby… after giving Jason the go-ahead, Bobby’s ship was totally destroyed.
Jason tried a last minute acceleration to try and save Bobby after saving the Empress, but couldn’t get there in time.
Surprisingly, Bobby’s consciousness had jumped from his destroyed space ship to Jason’s, after Jason got close… which implied that although Bobby’s body was gone, his soul was still there.
Jason took responsibility for Bobby after that, blaming himself for not saving him and attributing Bobby with saving the life of the Empress and his unborn child.
James and Nera made a cybernetic dog and transferred Bobby’s consciousness to it. That way, Bobby had some mobility.
When Bobby wasn’t a dog, he would live inside of the network headquarters, administering fixes and maintaining the system from within.
Jason’s child, Ariaa, grew up with Bobby as the family dog. Bobby would accompany her and watch over her when she went out. She never fully understood that Bobby used to be human, and treated him like a pet.
Years later, when Ariaa turns 17, the planet where Centuri is located is brutally attacked, destroying the entire royal headquarters and dooming most life on the planet.
A select group of warriors and members of the royal house are transferred to an alternate dimension.
The Empress reveals that beings from the 6th dimension have placed them into an alternate time pocket, and that in her dying moments, anyone she thought of who was still on the planet was saved by them (which was this select group).
The assault on the planet had been launched by Basilisk, and for whatever reason, Basilisk’s actions threatened the 6th dimension, which is why the 6th stepped in to help.
HOWEVER, in order to re-establish corporality, it takes a LOT of energy from the 6th, so to make sure they were using it on the right people essentially, they put the gang through a trial,s where they were paired up based on their relationships and all placed in alternate dimensions in scenarios where they were set up to kill each other. Those who caught themselves in time to not kill the other proved that their love and determination to care for each other was strong enough to cross dimensions, and therefore give them a fighting chance against Basilisk.
Because as everyone knows, beings from the 3rd dimension are the only ones whose willpower is strong enough to transcend all other forces, including time.
To everyone’s surprise, Bobby was manifested in this reality in a new body. The 6th could only recreate Bobby’s body from when he was a young child, but hey, it was something (James and Nera had attempted putting Bobby into a full body before, but it always failed).
Jason and Bobby were put into an alternate universe where Bobby was the only son of a rich family, and Jason was a member of a gang who kidnapped him for ransom. Their memories were wiped so that this reality was the only reality they knew.
At a pivotal moment when Bobby escaped and had the opportunity to shoot Jason, and Jason had his gun pointed at the kid as well, they both hesitated and refused to kill each other.
The mirage was lifted, and they passed the test.
After all the tests were finished, everyone who the Empress chose had passed the tests.
As a sort of trade, all of them would be returned to their dimension, while the Empress was to lose her life.
Jason and the Empress (Empress Estella) said their final goodbyes, and the group returned to (the new) Centuri.
Time had moved quickly outside of teh 6th, and by now, Ariaa was well established as the new Empress, and even had her first child with one of the few members of the royal guard who wasn’t killed.
When the group suddenly appeared, Ariaa was the first to sense that her father was there and she ran to him.
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Jason continued to work as a pilot and soldier in the royal guard, watching over his daughter. He began to have more of a diplomatic role in the administration and spent less time in military training.
Because Bobby was stuck in a child’s body, he was pretty much helpless, so Jason and him got an apartment together and fronted as father and child. Bobby always wanted to have a proper childhood, and this gave him a second chance.
He befriended some kids at a local beach, and eventually went to school with them. He had a pretty quiet, ordinary childhood keeping his past and abilities a secret from his new friends, and still works as the royal network administrator after school.
One day, he notices a hack from an internet user named “RedRabbit” on the system that takes advantage of his own personal weaknesses.
A series of violent cyber attacks set off further alarms.
A mysterious tall, lanky clown figure releases a series of red balloons in public places that explode, sending self-replicating nanobots out into the world.
RedRabbit sends a message through the royal system that he is specifically after Bobby, and if Bobby doesn’t show himself for a cyber duel, he will send a signal to all his nanobots to kill everyone on the planet.
At this point, Bobby is freaking out and looking to everyone in Hyacinthe for help (Hyacinthe is the code name for all the members of the transt universe who are working against Basilisk… mostly members from Mephis’ old gang, but includes members of Leviathon and other escaped cyborgs and scientists from Basilisk).
So finally, Mephis steps in.
But not the Mephis everyone knows–
Mephis story:
Mephis is actually two cyborgs sharing one body.
When their generation of cybogs was created, each one was partnered up with another whose abilities would compliment them.
Lucifer, or “Lucy ” as she was commonly called, was the most powerful cyborg. Small stature with long blond hair, she had the ability to assimilate any living or biomechanical organism into her body, increasing her body’s mass and using the new mechanisms to attack or defend (like if she absorbed a gun, then she could shoot that gun).
Her fighting style was full contact, so a partner cyborg was created to compliment her. This new borg was named Mephisto, and he was made with a brain for programming, and potential ability to hack any machine. He attacked using long distance droids, operating hundreds at once to support Lucy in battle from the safety of a bunker far far away.
There were a number of borgs with this situation, and scientists asked the first generation borgs what they wanted in a mate, hoping to foster romances between the two generations and create new borgs that were even more powerful than their parents.
But while the other borgs rejoiced at having partners designed specifically for them and to serve their every need, Lucy didn’t give a fuck.
She was a loner, and the thought of having support in any way hurt her pride. She didn’t need any one to help, she was fine on her own. How dare they insult her capabilities!?
The only preference she made was that she liked the color blue, so they gave the kid blue hair and blue eyes.
While the other borgs nurtured the second gen and treated them like family, Lucy was cold and disdainful toward Mephis. But the scientists had programmed the second gen to adore the first, so he was stuck loving someone who didn’t love him back.
He grew into a handsome young man (the first gen were all made immortal at their prime, so the second gen just had to catch up to them in age), but Lucy still didn’t want anything to do with him.
When she was badly injured in a battle, she demanded that he switch bodies with her so that she could leave the hospital, and that was the first time she’d ever paid him any attention so he obliged.
She would have kept his body if she didn’t miss her powers so much. After her old body was healthy again, she switched back.
Meanwhile, there were grumblings of a coup among the other cyborgs, some of whome were also badly injured in the last battle. At least one of them had lost their life, and since now they were more like a big family, they felt the tragedy in their hearts. They started to question why they were blindly following orders to go into battles to wontonly destroy things until they died.
Lucy was the only one who wasn’t a part of these talks. She was the perfect soldier, the one that Basilisk could always rely on. Mephis believed that she was being used. He thought that maybe if she wasn’t being blinded and lead by Basilisk, then she could see that there was more to life than battles. Maybe she would finally see him, too.
The cyborg rebellion was bloody and treacherous, and in the end, many did not escape alive.
Lucy was badly injured, most of her body totally missing and destroyed, she held on by a thread.
In a surprising show of ability, and against Lucy’s orders, Mephis hacked Lucy’s brain and forced her to use her assimilation abilities to join their bodies and minds together.
This resulted in a male body with only a few of Lucy’s feminine features and hair.
Inside their brain, Mephis agreed to lay dormant and let Lucy have full consciousness. He was just happy that they were finally together, and happily gave everything he could to her.
Lucy used Mephis name to hide her identity. Mephis had ranked much lower than her, it was better that most people thought she was dead.
Years later, Basilisk revisited Mephis’ DNA and produced a set of twins… one would become Bobby (Robert) and the other Roman (RedRabbit).
The scientist leading this study intended to use the weaker twin, Roman as simply a constant, while training and experimenting on the stronger one, Robert.
But something happened and Robert and the scientist went missing, making Roman the default cyborg to train.
Roman was aware that he was second-place, and always resented it. He was teased by the other cyborgs, and got back at them by doing extreme or extravagant things, behaving in outlandish ways or performing dramatic stunts to make up for his constantly hurt ego. Most people considered him crazy and wanted nothing to do with him.
He was given very low level missions from Basilisk, who really just wanted to keep him as far away from major plans as possible… but the guy was loyal and pleased to do whatever was asked of him. Like other cyborgs, he was made immortal in his prime.
When he discovered that his twin was still alive, he escaped with the sole purpose of destroying him. Someone from Basilisk supported him too, just to send a message to Hyacinthe, specifically Mephis and James.
So that’s when the hacking began, and when he released those nanobots into the world.
Red was caught and his body tortured by Jason, but Red escaped into the royal network’s cyberspace and left his body to die. He really only let himself get caught so he could access the royal net directly and force Bobby to confront him. But what Red didn’t count on was Mephis.
Upon entering cyberspace, Bobby and Red had a bit of a conversation, which confused the fuck out of Bobby. Red was totally insane at this point and babbling, claiming that he WAS Bobby, which made Bobby think that this was some time warp situation and that Red was his future self, not his twin.
But then Mephis revealed himself, and in an altercation that only lasted a nanosecond outside of cyberspace, Red’s existence was deleted and his reign of cyber terror was over.
After that, Mephis volunteered to stay within the royal network and maintain it so that Bobby could live a normal life. This also allowed Lucy to take full control over his body, and he only lived to serve her and make her happy anyway.
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Bobby was so worried about becoming Red that he had Seth put a big tattoo on his neck, wondering if he could break the continuity of time by changing something about his physical appearance. Of course this made no sense, but Bobby wasn’t thinking straight, and he always made rash decisions when he wasn’t thinking.
Even though his body was only that of a 15 year old, he got tattoos covering most of his skin.
Seth– the Cyborg from earlier who travelled with James? Well while they were travelling around outer space, he made a name for himself by tattooing black market cyborgs. Criminals would come to James to get enhancements, and Seth would give them badass tattoos after.
Seth has a rule though– you don’t get to choose your tattoo. He determines what your body needs and he puts it on there. And once he starts, you kind of have to let him finish because the tattoos are so intricate that only he can draw them.
So, Bobby gets all tattooed without Jason’s permission. He gets some piercings, cuts his hair, starts looking really punk. His friends are a little alarmed, but they stand by him.
A construction site stars going up near his school, and the electro magnets they use to build with start messing with Bobby’s brain signals. He gets massive headaches and has to drop out of school.
This all makes him seem like a bad seed– first getting all these tats, then being constantly sick/seemingly hungover and dropping out of school. His friends all assume he was doing drugs, and he couldn’t very well tell them that no, he was just a cyborg who couldn’t handle electro magnets and was having issues dealing with the aftermath of saving the world.
At 17, he found out his long time girlfriend started dating the high school football star and her family didn’t want her around him anymore. He tried for a year to try and see her again, which only upset his old friends, who still thought he was on drugs and was harassing her. Her brother tries to beat him up one day, and Bobby has to really try to put his guard down and not fight back, risking hurting them.
One night after returning home from another failed attempt at seeing Emily, a modeling scout notices his unusual look and invites him on a shoot the next morning. One of their models dropped out last minute and they needed a punk look like his for that shoot.
He didn’t have anything better to do, so he agreed.
The shoot was angel/demon themed, where one gorgeous female model was photographed with different male models, who all had piercings, punk haircuts, tattoos.
Every “demon” guy had a scene to shoot with the “angel” girl, as they both modeled different clothes from a high fashion luxury line.
Bobby immediately had a crush on the girl during their shoot, but he figured she was out of his league, so he tried to forget about her after.
A week later, he was riding the bus home late at night and spotted her on the train platform, kicking the ticket machine.
Turned out that someone had stolen her purse, so she was stranded there. She actually remembered who he was, which surprised him. He paid for her ticket, hacked a soda machine and got her a soda, then escorted her home.
They exchanged phone numbers, but he didn’t expect to hear back from her ever again.
But a few months later, he got a phone call from a casting director about being an extra for some TV show. By then, the ad campaign he’d been a part of was up all around town, and was a hit. He was kind of embarrassed to see himself printed so large on a billboard, but he liked the way he and the girl looked together in the picture and would pretend sometimes that they were a couple for real.
Without school or work to occupy his time, Bobby was spending a lot of his days kind of loafing around being a hopeless romantic. So he had ample time to check out this TV thing.
He went for the audition, and to his surprise, the model was there. She had personally given his number to the casting director, and just for showing up, Bobby had a featured extra part.
The role was another demon. The TV show was based on a conspiracy theory about a secret organization of evildoers with soldiers who had superpowers (which sounded exactly like Basilisk to Bobby).
They did minimal makeup for his part, since the tattoos were enough to make him look different. They put him in a red suit, which fit him really well.
The scene was a fight scene, and he surprised the stunt coordinator by showing off some martial arts moves (Jason had trained Bobby in advanced wushu since his childhood so that his body would remain flexible). They decided to give him a more complex part based on his unusual talents, and to his surprise, his extended scene made the final cut of the pilot episode, which included a close up of his face.
When the show was greenlighted for a whole series, the producers got a lot of positive feedback about Bobby’s part and invited him back to try and do a speaking role for future episodes.
In the audition, they gave Bobby the script and simply asked him to read it as though he were the most evil person in Centuri. He immediately thought of Red, and how elegantly irritating that guy was, with his thick L’Arcian accent (mix of French and British English accent… Red sounded Cockney) and extravagant gestures and expressions.
So he read the part like that, channelling his twin, the most evil person he’d ever met. Who thought nothing of killing millions of people and used balloons to attack kids directly.
And the producers loved it.
From then on, he had a secondary speaking part on the show, and his dark yet charming character became popular with the audience, leading to more important roles in the plot.
The series was hailed for its intricate plot and many diverse characters, and really took pop culture by storm unexpectedly.
Soon Bobby’s old friends were seeing him all over the place, and wanting to get in contact with him, but by then he had moved on.
Five or so years later, Emily shows up at his apartment with a little girl– who has black hair and red eyes.
Emily reveals that she cut ties with Bobby after finding out she was pregnant and thinking it was the footballer’s kid.
But when the baby was born, she had red eyes, which everyone knows is a rare recessive trait. That coupled with some other strangeness (Emily knew that Bobby was a cyborg).
Bobby was shocked and angry at Emily, but he wanted to get to know his daughter.
By now, Bobby was in a steady open relationship with the model he met on his first photo shoot.
Bobby and Emily shared visitation for a while, and when Gina (daughter) was older, she preferred staying with her father, since her Dad was more alternative and open minded than her Mom.
Jason, James, and Bobby helped Gina to tap into her cybernetic and psychic abilities, although they were less powerful than Bobby’s. James secretly gave Gina enhancements so that her powers could manifest more thoroughly as she got older.
Media rumors claimed that the model was her mother.
Gina joined her father on-screen when the show released their first feature film. She naturally played the role of Bobby’s character’s daughter. Later on, the model was recruited to portray her mother, to Emily’s chagrin.
Gina and Bobby work as actors for a while longer, but Gina stars considering what she’ll do for a career. Ariaa requests that she become a starship pilot like her father was, and Gina is ecstatic about that idea, but Bobby refuses to let her do it… remembering the moment he almost died.
Bobby’s story is still ongoing, as all of TRANST is. But that’s about where he is in his life now. TBC!!