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Voidtreckers App
Player Information
Name: bii
Age: 38
Contact details:
Other characters: nobody right now, but I played Thorne.tcai for a few months last year
Character Information
Name: Tomas Torres Durante-Gavras/"Frankie Bacon"
Canon: Isekai/Online
Canon Point: close to the same time the main characters have their climactic final battle
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OU
Age: 31
World Information: We still don’t have that wiki up, unfortunately, so I’ll just repost Talia’s blurb from the I/O discord:
IRL, it is the Virtual 2040's. Life went back to a new normal in America - restaurants reopening, people meeting IRL, work on seawalls and at nanoscale manufactories and in space - but the scars left by the pandemic of 2020 caused social distancing tools to blast into the market like an ortillery strike.
Some examples of these technologies include: holocasting, ubiquitous holotag overlays of city streets and mapping technology via infoglasses, cell phones or smartwatches; fleets of drone and remotely-piloted robot deliveries; and food-grade home 3d printing technology (although this last one, unless you're very skilled at molecular gastronomy or don't try to print out meals rather than ingredients, can result in a gross paste that has been nicknamed 'strew' by those who've tried it - a portmanteu of "stew" and "extruded." Desserts fare better, and these are universally "strudel" regardless of form factor).
No social distancing technology took off quite like the Neurohelm™. Allowing for full 6-sense™ immersion into virtual spaces, Neurohelms™ were first developed by DARPA for use by the Army - before the entertainment industry crafted new kinds of experiences with them.
Enter the Other Worlds Tourism Bureau, LTD. A startup staffed from the ranks of game companies, futurists, and ex-DARPA Neurohelm engineers, OWTB Ltd.'s second game released was the world's first, best VRMMO: Another World Online: Mundane Fantasy Historia, a sword-and-sorcery adventure informed by the real-world European Renaissance. (Their first was Orbital Knights, a MVBA featuring daring mecha, starfighter, and tank pilots trying to liberate the planets of Epsilon Eridani from the literally, and literally, Draconian Empire of Sigma Draconis.)
Personal History:
Right so! While I’m staying away from the Deepest Spoilers for I/O in this app, Bacon’s personal history will involve some spoilers learnt at the end of S1/as part of the game demo. For simplicity’s sake, we’re going with a bulletpoint list for this:
-- born ‘Tomas Torres’ in 2016 to a single mother of Afro-Latino descent, who worked the receptions desk at the local CBS station in San Diego, California and was soon nicknamed ‘Tommy’
-- the pandemic of 2020 hit like a motherfucker and Susana Torres lost her life to it, but while she still had time, she asked one of her coworkers and his husband to adopt her child
-- said coworker was Steven Durante (‘Dad’), one of the station’s news anchors, and his husband Thain Gavras (‘Papa’), was a veteran community organizer (and military veteran)
--both men were eager to be parents and had recently started talking about perhaps adopting; little Tommy was unexpected but very much appreciated
-- Tommy was an energetic child and highly distractible; a child psychologist diagnosed them with ADHD when they were seven or so
-- Tommy was homeschooled (mainly by Thain) for their elementary school years, entering public school as a middle-schooler and attending a magnet school centering around science for their high school years
-- a childhood Zoobooks subscription and family membership to the Zoo inspired a lifelong fascination with animals and their biology
-- shortly before starting high school, Tommy realized that they weren’t actually a boy, but nonbinary, with he/they pronouns, and started spelling their nickname as ‘Tommie’; they decided not to change their legal name from the one their mother had chosen, as they wanted to keep the connection to her
-- meanwhile, Tommie’s aunt (Dr Charlene Durante, who they called ‘Tia Charley’) was busy revolutionizing the field of artificial intelligence, including heading the team that developed the Turing Complete Artificial Intelligence, and working for DARPA; this will be important later on
-- given proper medication and accommodations, Tommie ended up excelling at school and was accepted into university, where they initially majored in zoology and minored in computer science, before turning said minor into a second major
-- during the summers they worked an internship at the Other World Tourism Bureau, the game design company Tommie’s aunt and her team had formed after publicly splitting with DARPA, which they were using to raise funds for projects they’d been unable to get grants for from more conventional sources, such as terraforming and colonizing other planets
-- Tommie also ended up signing a binding non-disclosure agreement at this time, which will also be important later on
-- once they graduated university, they were hired on at OWTB specifically for the Another World Online project, which was heralded as the world’s first VRMMO, with the agreement that OWTB would pay for their graduate degree in zoology in the process
-- Tommie was part of the team designing and programming the life-cycles for the various fauna that was to inhabit Mundus, the world created for AWO, something their dual majors prepared them well for
-- they also soon got to meet their new ‘cousins,’ the fourteen post-singularity god-AI that Tommie’s aunt and her team had created to administer AWO and be the game’s pantheon, all of which had various capacities related to OWTB’s other, more secret projects
-- Tommie’s fathers volunteered to be part of the small group of initial beta testers for AWO; unfortunately, they were part of the group whose bodies physically died while beta-testing, which is how OWTB learned that if you die while playing the game, your mind lives on within the game, sort of as a ghost within the machine
-- that aspect of those deaths was quietly hushed up when said deaths were announced and Tommie found themselves orphaned for a second time… only not quite, because they could still visit and see their fathers whenever they played AWO on the Chimera server
-- after their fathers’ earthly demise, they ended up moving in with their grandparents in Santa Cruz in order to be closer to them and to Tia Charley’s own home in California (and also because with both grandparents approaching ninety it would probably be better to have someone younger in the house)
-- upon official launch, AWO took the world by storm and made mad bank, bringing in the funding to make Tia Charley’s dreams of FTL travel (among other things) closer to reality
-- Tommie was a regular player, under their persona of Frankie Bacon, Ubasti Alchemist, choosing to roll up as a cat person to mirror their Papa Thain, who was also playing as an Ubastim when his Earthly body died
-- they joined the Rainbow Connection, a large guild for LGBT+ players, and regularly partied with a few other trans players: Dorthy Dawson, Emmalyne Queenskirt, and Alora; the four also befriended a Mundane (game NPC) by the name of Lady Helen who partied up with them
-- three years after the launch of AWO, OWTB launched the Age of Sail expansion, Pepper, Silk, Gunpowder & Rum, and less than a month after, a cyber attack against the North American ‘Chimaera’ server left everyone on that server cut off from the outside world and unable to log out
-- including Tommie or rather Bacon, who'd been adventuring with their usual party at the point the Isekai Incident occurred
-- Tommie/Bacon was convinced that the reason they were trapped was because the end of the world--likely by nuclear holocaust--had occurred while they were playing and they couldn’t return home because their bodies were gone; they were wrong, but they had no way of knowing that
-- given the game servers were stored on a satellite in orbit, their theory was at least plausible?
-- the Main Characters of I/O actually get to learn about Bacon’s theory from their own mouth as part of the full game’s cutscene where you learn about the various factions in I/O: the Returners who want to get home, the Homesteaders who want to make Mundus their new home, and the Mechanists who want to figure out what makes the game tick
-- Bacon, by the way, joins the Homesteader faction directly because they’re convinced that AWO is all that’s left of humanity
-- even when they eventually find out that’s not true, they still stick with the Homesteader faction instead of switching to Mechanist, because having to keep their mouth closed because of the Goddamn NDA as a Mechanist would drive them nuts
-- anyway, they keep adventuring along with their friends from Rainbow Connection because if this is all that’s left, they might as well make the most of it
-- about a month after the Isekai Incident from by AWO internal server time, people from the outside world, sent by DARPA show up in AWO and bring news about what’s been happening outside the game; they get dubbed the Outsiders
-- one of said Outsiders is Ralph/Radulf Kintsugi, friend of the I/O main characters, who’s been deputized by the head of OWTB (Tommie/Bacon’s aunt) with a special mission that he needs to find trustworthy people for
-- the other is Bacon’s uncle, Tia Charley’s partner, who has a special mission of his own
-- during the three concurrent faction plots that then ensue, occupying the main cast, Bacon is busy trying to kickstart the industrial revolution on Mundus with fellow Ubastim player Thom Katt (and Bacon’s uncle is looking for any Griefer agents who’ve infiltrated the Mechanists) and generally serves as what appears to be a background character to the story as a whole, someone who you can optionally talk to in the Homesteader base, but not really all that important to the Homesteader faction plot
--however! after the main characters get back together as a team so they can do Ralph/Radulf’s secret mission, Bacon goes them and tells them about what happened to their parents during the beta test and that while they can’t tell them anything they need to know about the secrets of AWO because of the damn NDA, their parents are no longer bound by it as they’re ghosts in the machine
-- and thus the I/O main characters are sent to get their big lore drop before the final battle, thank you, Frankie Bacon
Personality: Honestly, it’s rather appropriate that Bacon chose to roll up Ubasti when they made their main for AWO, because they really are curious as a cat, at least on their good days. They like knowing how things tick--they like knowing about things in general. Knowing things about a situation usually provides them with a sense of security. Knowing how the Mundi were made and how their cousins (i.e. the fourteen god-AIs) manage and oversee them helped them maintain what presence of mind they could after the Isekai Incident stranded them in the video game they’d spent so much of their adulthood working on.
They don’t regret it, either, even as AWO took away their fathers’ earthly lives, even though they ended up stranded on Mundus, stuck in the body of their game avatar, with their earthly body on life-support. They believe in what Tia Charley is trying to do with AWO, in the projects she’s trying to fund with it. And they believe that the world that OWTB created in Mundus is something special, something impressive.
In general, Bacon believes in the power of science--not just that technology and progress can be harnessed for good, but also that the scientific method is probably one of the best tools we have for understanding reality.
Ever since they were small, Bacon has held a fascination for the ways that biology can work--and especially the way animals work. Not that human biology isn’t cool in its own way, of course, but there are so many strange and interesting ways that non-human creatures are built to work within their environment. Maybe it was the Zoobooks subscription, maybe it was all those trips to the San Diego Zoo, maybe it was that anime they watched with their dads the first winter after their adoption, about God outsourcing the creation of Earth’s animals. Maybe it was all three. Whatever it was that sparked the special interest, it’s been an enduring one.
And one that’s served them well with OWTB too, through both their summers as an intern and years as a fully integrated part of the project. Modeling fantasy animals and figuring out how to best simulate their life-cycles isn’t how they expected to spend their adulthood, but it’s very rewarding. That said, Bacon is very much aware about how incredibly lucky they are to have intellectually stimulating work tangentially related to their field, something that is rarely the case for anyone in the cyberpunk future they live in. And Bacon is very aware that the main reason they are this lucky in the first place is nepotism pure and simple. There are numerous other people who could do what Bacon does, just as well as they do, but Tia Charley hired them because they were her nibling and she trusted them.
And they kind of get that, honestly. Family’s important. They’re your people. Blood ties don’t matter, but the people you’ve decided are your people should have your consideration, your protection, and your trust. It’s always been something that’s been in the back of their mind, but losing their fathers during the beta test--even with them turning out to be ghosts in the machine--really put that into perspective. And Bacon feels much the same when it comes to their friends as well--they’re very protective of Emmalyne, Dorthy, Alora and Lady Helen. (Possibly the most protective of Emma, but she’s… special.)
Bacon has the tendency to talk about famous, powerful and significant individuals in a very casual way, which is probably what happens when your silly aunt who takes you out for bowling and to amusement parks is also the person who revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence and is the sixth woman to win the Turing Prize. They’re even worse about the fourteen gods of Mundus, who they usually just refer to as their ‘cousins.’ To them, Delvar is less Dragon of the Vault Below and more their irritatingly high-strung cousin who won’t shut up about how Alora seduced their high priestess.
They’re extremely frustrated that they can’t tell people about the inner workings of AWO, not only because of the NDA they signed, but also because if the people who caused the Isekai Incident learn enough of what they actually did, it could possibly spell doom for everyone. Bacon knows so many things that could help solve the problem of being stuck in the video game--but if they tell these things to the wrong person, it could very well spell game over for everyone in Chimaera server. Going to the main characters and sending them onward to learn the rest was a huge leap of faith and one they wouldn’t have made if they hadn’t trusted Tia Charley’s judgement in choosing Ralph/Radulf and Ralph’s own judgement in choosing his friends.
(That said, it is emotionally exhausting keeping so many secrets--not just about the inner workings of AWO, but also what happened in the beta test gone wrong. It’s going to be a great relief when they don’t have to anymore.)
Now that they’re in their early thirties, Bacon is pretty decent at keeping on an even emotional keel most of the time, but when bad moods occur they come on pretty fast and pretty strong and until they can managed to get distracted out of them in some way, those bad states of mind are pretty overpowering, like a never-ending feedback loop of Feels Bad. They’re also fairly sensitive to rejection and tend to dwell on why. They also need a fairly constant amount of stimulation, as boredom and under-stimulation in general tends to have an effect on their emotions that’s far too close to depression.
(A note on gender: while Bacon is nonbinary both in their everyday life as Tomas Durante-Gavras and as Frankie Bacon in AWO, they are perhaps more strongly nonbinary as Bacon, rather than Tommie. Tommie was more or less a he/they kind of person, but Bacon is more straight up they/them.)
Key themes: Sometimes the people who seem like they might just be background characters have a lot more going on in their lives than you might guess.
Main Motivation: Originally their main motivation was the same as most people working on AWO, to make an interesting and engaging game that OWTB could use to fund their more experimental projects without needing to worry about grant money. However, after spending a month convinced that the rest of humanity outside AWO had been obliterated in World War III, even if that belief was proven false… well, they’re a little bit obsessed with the continued survival of humanity now, thanks trauma. They also really want whoever attacked the Chimaera server to get caught and exposed, hopefully without accidentally starting WWIII in the process.
Skills: Frankie Bacon was made by Tommie in the AWO character creator as an Alchemist. As per Talia:
Alchemists can prime and bottle spellbombs that no one else can, as well as having access to better healing and buffing potions. Any idiot can mix a potion or smoke bomb, but these guys get access to elixers and bottled lightning at high levels and can make stuff that mostly consists of their own Breath (though proper ingredients really help.)
They can also enchant magic bullets for guns or slings.
They're an offensive support; they lay down fields that allies want to stay in and enemies want to get out of. (Fields of volatile alchemical chemicals and vapours.)
Thanks to picking ‘Flamma’ as their chosen deity during character creation, Bacon also has poison resistance and the ability to hold their liquor very well. At higher levels, they’ll also have mind-control resistance.
Since playing AWO, they’ve also acquired a familiar ‘pet’ named Sal, who’s a lesser incarnation of Flamma’s own Divine Beast Salamander. (Sal mostly just crawls around on their shoulders and occasionally alerts them to things they should be noticing.)
Bacon’s more mundane skills include computer programming, baking, and having a really firm foundation in nanobiology. They’re a talented bowler.
Item: lizard sized version of the Leonan Divine Beast Salamander, which is one, hereby referred to as ‘Sal’
Sample:
TFLN meme with a canonmate
Voidtrekker’s 22nd Test Drive meme
Notes: Isekai/Online is a canon still in development, of which I am a writer and collaborator on. Some minor spoilers will be in this app, especially in the history/personality sections, and there’s every chance that some of the things in this app may shift on their way to the final product. Talia, I/O’s creator, helped me with the power blurb for AWO alchemists. (Also, I should admit that as well as being a quest-giving and lore-dropping character in I/O itself, Bacon is also my PC in an I/O based tabletop campaign that Talia’s GMing, which is partly how they’ve got enough history/personality to be appable.)
History Addendum - A List of Things Which Have Shifted
-- They're already partied up with Alora, Emmalyne, and Dorothy, but Lady Helen is back in Viacruz because as a mudane adventurer, she did not get nerfed
-- Bacon fights against the pirates (and griefers) at the battle at the fort
-- After which, during the victory feast, they finally get the chance to stop and think things through and comes to the realization that WWIII probably happened etc etc
-- Spends the rest of the evening freaking out and when Sekhmet asks them if they want to come along to hunt down the griefers, they're too freaked out to go
-- Gives Sekh some potions anyway
-- Bacon ends up going up to Deedee to apologize for not going with them, knowing Deedee got hurt hunting griefers, and ends up blurting out the whole WWIII theory
-- Deedee has really good advice for them, mostly to take it a day at a time and do what they can do and not try to solve everything themself
-- (Deedee may also overhear them yelling at Flamma in the temple district)