Terry Telo

Summary

• Name: Terry Anne Telo
• Gender / Species: Female strawberry dart frog
• Height: 4'9"
• Occupation: Mechanist - Combat frame specialist

• Notable traits: Usually not poisonous but is poison resistant / immune. Exothermic.

Basic Description

As a strawberry poison dart frog, Terry has bright orange skin, large expressive eyes, and blue arms and legs. Her posture varies from a crouched, ready to hop stance all the way to a fully upright bipedal posture with the latter usually used when she is interacting with others. Her skin is usually moist, and she has a general aversion for dry places. Because she is an exotherm, she is also cautious about the temperature of her environment as it can greatly affect her ability to think and act.

To combat the issues of dry and and temperature variation, Terry is typically found wearing what looks like a wet suit meant for diving. The snug uniform is black and marked by a broad racing stripe that runs just to the left of center on the front and back of the suit. She dislikes footwear, but she will use it if she thinks she might injure her feet. Her suit helps maintain her body temperature and keeps her skin moist. The left shoulder of her suit bears the image of a heavy mech with four legs and two heavy gun arms. The letters "TAT ENG" are written under the mech as if they were the ground it stands on.

In addition to her uniform, Terry often has her favorite multi-function goggles either on the top of her head or around her neck when not in use. It is not uncommon to see her carrying around a backpack or a toolbox especially when she is out on a job.

Occupation: Mechanist / Engineer

Terry specializes in large, autonomous weapon systems and utility systems meant for defense in hostile environments. Most of these systems are built to defend against non-sentient attackers in large numbers. However, most of her designs are dual mode with combat functions and non-combat utility functions. Many of her systems are deployed on border worlds where they need to function both to protect a homestead and do farm or industrial work. She does not contract out to purely military organizations although many of her designs are suitable for military use.

When not making border-world suitable devices, she works with civilian contractors to make large construction machines necessary to build up towns and industrial complexes.

Outside of machines, she has a strong interesting in animal behavior and xenobiology. She works with Kenneth Kyrie who joined her crew as a fellow xenobiologist that augments here knowledge with his skill in botony.

Personality

Terry is the work hard, play hard sort. She comes from a long line of adventurers and inventors, and her role as a mech engineer tends to sit well with her. Towards her friends and most general people she meets, she can be a little high energy, and she tends to tug out a notebook in the middle of conversations so that she doesn't forget ideas that come to her. She usually takes the higher ground when dealing with rude folks, but if someone really crosses the line, she is not above using one of her own inventions to try and put the fear back into them.

Terry is generally opposed to making weapons for the purpose of killing other sentient beings or just for the sake of making a weapon. Most of her mechs can be used for daily work and then switched over to combat modes. She caters mostly to those who live on the outer edge of exploration who may need a mech just to protect a simple farm or a small town. She loves to make custom rigs, and almost all her designs are unique in some way. She sees making things unique as a way to keep the job fresh and challenge her skills.

Terry will sometimes go out on expeditions with her tools or with a group she has armed.

Terry is also quite used to folks being wary around her because of her coloration and the reputation of her species. However, she rarely east enough to be toxic, and buying such toxins just to keep up her defenses is expensive and difficult. She instead opts to use her colors as a bluff if she has to use them at all.

History

Early Life

Terry was born into a science heavy family with two brothers, a mother serving as a surgeon and a father working in aerospace. Inheriting a keen mind and a hunger for knowledge, she was always at the top of her class. However, she was far from a bookworm, and she spent much of her free time split between being highly social and hiking and camping far from the city lights. She was able to defer compulsory military service during her university training that carried her though a bachelors degree and into a doctorate in cybernetics including the development of mind-machine interfaces of a kind never before seen. Her work had her earmarked for employment at a number of companies, and with her name on a number of patents, she was making income even as she packed her bags for boot camp. With her education complete, she was moved from being trained as a grunt to that of a reserve officer. One thing was certain though: without her service completed, she would never hold a job in her country, and her deferral period was over.

The War

Compulsory service was usually more like national guard work and meant to give everyone a common sense of purpose and a place during an emergency response. Unfortunately, a full war broke out, and everyone was pushed into active duty. Because of her education, Terry served most of her roles in the laboratory designing more effective weapons and learning to counter enemy weapons. As stories of hideous mutilations and mysterious illness spread, she was sent closer to the front lines to examine the possibility of biological weapons, something banned by international treaty. Serving at mobile hospitals, she gained experience in medicine she never planned for in caring for the wounded and tracking down the source of the illness.

It was indeed the effects of a biological weapon that Terry and her team were finally able to confirm as well as create a vaccine for it. The vaccine, however, was never deployed because Terry and her team were eventually struck with the very weapon they sought to defeat. Terry was able to inoculate most of the team, but there wasn't enough left for herself resulting in a sub-optimal dose. While they were extracted, all members of the team suffered severe peripheral nerve damage and in some cases, blistered flesh. The agent was made to damage the skin and allow a retrovirus in that would erode the nervous system slowly until death occurred, only after great resources were spent trying to save the wounded. Terry lost the use of her legs, her left arm, and her right hand and arm were rendered so weak that she could barely handle a computer keyboard or a pencil.

The group's data did make it back with them, and when the international court stepped in at full force of sanctions and military might, the war ended. The use of such weapons cause the near dismantling of that country. Meanwhile, Terry was sent home as a decorated officer confined to a wheel chair.

Post-War

Coming home was difficult for Terry. Amphibians have a good degree of regeneration, but the virus destroyed her chance at a natural recovery. Though her speech was heavily slurred, she was still coherent, and it was evident that while her body was broken, her mind was not. Her family exhausted options available to them, and they kept Terry at home while she tried to think a way around her issues.

While she couldn't get up and do much of anything on her own, she had some money from her patents already, and she had no problems trading stocks. Teaching herself about business and economics more by the day, she turned day trading into a massive cash infusion for the family. Once she has a stable source of hefty income, she told her parents what she planned to do, and she emphasized how much she would need their help.

Terry was the expert of cybernetics in the family. Usually they were only used to augment normal abilities or make useful one form of problem, and even then they were modest in what they could do. Terry and her father laid out the basis for the very first fully remote cyber body from nose to toes while she as her mother delved deep into brain function and machine interfaces The devices they built were kept a family secret, and the concerted effort resulted in a mimic of Terry's body and a special interface transmitter for Terry's organic body. It took months just to get the two sides talking to each other and more to get the new body's memory and processing systems to synchronize with Terry, but on a rather cold, dreary day, Terry's new body stood on its own power, walked, and even spoke.

Another six months of work went into making the remote semi-autonomous so it could act like Terry when communications were lost and then link again to synchronize. It was never given enough processing power to be independent of Terry's body, at least not at that stage, though it was contemplated.

The family started a new factory based on Terry's ideas for new systems based on this work. She also had an idea for how to use all her weapon engineering knowledge and medical experience for something other than war: Terry was going to the outer colonies and beyond as a xenobiologist, a career rare and risky, but one her parents were proud to see her take on.

Independence

Eustace

Eustace is Terry's personal mech. The machine is a biomimetic design with three hard points on the back and one on each arm.

Terry sums up the power of it by stating it could "punt a tank for a field goal." While it can carry missiles, guns, and ammo, it is usually used for demos, scouting, and even build work on other mechs.

In a pinch, Terry will take it into melee, but this usually happens only on the frontier.