Armature Noir

The Advertisement

WANTED: the services of several beautiful, elegant, HOT female knights. Must be skilled combat pilots but also graceful, desirable and capable of holding their own at parties as well as in the cockpit of a Armature, and be willing to guard paradise beaches and other hotspots. Interested parties should send a picture of themselves in their interface suit to the reply address to this email.

Compensation is twenty thousand gold etched marks per month, plus a fifty thousand mark sign up bonus.

When you got the proposal, you thought for a moment your agent AI was malfunctioning. On first reading it seemed like one of those jobs where the client tries to pay you in beer or turnips, or actually wants you to act in their film school production. After remonstrating with the AI, it turned out it wasn't bugged out. This was a real job for real badass condottieri like you. The creator, one Domoto Daisuke is an eccentric, Otaku and retardedly rich shut in who owns his own Island in the Argo system. He really can throw twenty K at you like it's pocket change.

On the one hand, your condottieri pride is a bit pricked that he wants something as weird as an all female guard force (I mean seriously is this guy from the 20th century?) on the other hand, twenty thousand is your usual yearly pay, not monthly, and the market for Armature pilots is saturated ever since the end of the third Alpha Centauri War three months ago. There's only so long you can live on pride... and apparently Argo-3 has some pretty amazing beaches.

Besides, it sounds like an easy job. If this playboy was really in danger he wouldn't be looking to drool over his protectors right? It'll be twenty thousand a month for nothing.

Network Era 282

It's two hundred and eighty two years since the network war, when humanity and it's machines rested control of the vast jump web that links the stars together from the alien entities that controlled it. A great era of commerce and expansion has resulted, building from the habitable planets of Sol, Argo, Fallen Reach and Down across a web of stations, rock colonies and less habitable planetary stations.

Unfortunately,(or fortunately if you're a condottieri) this is also an age of conflict. Human settlements, once separated by years of travel through restricted, alien controlled networks have come increasingly into conflict, and Expansion has seen a continual set of changes to the international order, resulting in wars, migrations and skirmishes.

In this era, most weapons are purely machines, controlled by AIs and guided by human hands in shelters behind the line, or in fast moving command vehicles or aboard orbiting space ship. There is only one exception to this rule: the Armature.

Built around a core of retro-engineered plant life taken from the incomprehensibly old and just plain incomprehensible alien Laughers, Armatures need a sapient pilot, human or AI called a user to interface directly with them for control, and even now the bandwidth demands are just too high for teleoperation. The bonus for this system is incredible speed and reflexes, way better even than the best combat drone. The price though is that Armatures almost have to be humanoid, for all the costs that extracts in terms of armouring scheme. At the very least, you need legs.

Your average Armature weighs in at five to eight tons and armed with an array of particle beams and smart missiles which let you knock out a tank drone. They can fight in space, aboard ships or stations or on the ground with equal efficiency. Armature pilots have become a breed apart, romanticized like the fighter pilots and knights of old, with their own pride and code. It was Armatures and their pilots that won the network war two hundred years ago, and you've only got more badass since then.

The most romanticized of all are the condottieri, ronin warriors who fight for pay and for the joy of it.

That would be you.

You

You are a condottieri, a mercenary mecha pilot who controls an Armature, a heavily armed machine built around a core of alien machinery that allows you to fight more skilfully even than the best human combat drone.

In order to get this gig, you have to be female and at least fairly hot.

Making your Character

As amazing as your giant robot is, it's merely an aspect of your soul. You are the user and the primary determinant of victory. You have eight stats, four for inside your Armature, four for outside. You have twelve points to divide between your Armature stats and twelve points to divide between your personal stats.

Stats have a minimum of 1 unless you can give a good reason why (for instance, you might be a bodiless AI with physical 0)

Stats in an Armature

Interface

Your ability to make the Laugher tech inside respond to you. This determines your initiative, spot and your ability to resist shocks from anti-Armature weapons and metric altering devices

Pilot

Your pure piloting ability, also your ability to fight in melee

Gunnery

your ability to shoot a gun.

Electronic Warfare

Your ability to win the electromagnetic battle.

Stats in Person

Physical

How tough and strong you are.

Intelligence

Your smarts and attention to detail, also determines how good at noticing things you are.

Charisma

Your charm and good looks

Resolve

Your ability to mentally tough it out in difficult situations.

Making your Armature

Pick three traits (You can create your own)In general each trait can give you +2 to a roll on a stat or grant a special ability such as greater speed or the ability to evade sensors.