At a glance, Amelia is a relatively small young woman with a shy posture about her, standing around 5' 5" with a light frame. She has rimless glasses and neat, straight black hair that's usually kept tied back, or straight to frame her hazel eyes. Tends to strike people as the type to hang out in libraries or coffee shops.
Callow's costume is a slightly frilly renaissance-fair plague doctor costume, retailored to be more practical (Read: less poofy, tons of pockets) and the shoes replaced with soft-soled ones to make her footsteps quieter. In addition, she's added a balaclava beneath her mask and taken to wearing black dress gloves in order to completely conceal her features.
Despite modifications, it's really just a costume, and doesn't provide much physical protection.
Equipment and Resources
Costume (See: Appearance)
A Swiss-army knife
A Burner Cell-phone
Small Flashlight
A Set of handcuffs
A small laptop. Has a label on it reading "Do Not Dismantle!" Holds all of Callow's meticulous Tinker notes.
A black glove with patchwork-looking metallic pieces around the wrist and back of the hand and a lining made of insulated cloth. Visible wiring connects the copper-colored contacts on the palm and fingertips to the power supply in the wrist, and a small spike with a retractable barb on the underside.
Abilities
Intention: A glove that delivers an incapacitating electrical shock on contact, or can shoot a barb to shock at a distance like a taser.
Abilities: After being primed by pressing her pinky finger to her thumb, touching something will deliver a high-voltage, low-amperage shock akin to a very powerful stun gun, turning off once removed. A short touch will deliver a painful, distracting shock to someone, and a longer touch could incapacitate them for several minutes or more.
Alternatively, the barb can be fired like a taser, delivering the same shock to a target it embeds in through a connected wire at a maximum range of ~20 feet. The barb retracts and pulls back to the mechanism with a flick of the wrist. Has very little armor piercing capability, and will be stopped by any serious barrier between it and skin.
What Goes Wrong: Prone to electrical failure and wildly overconsumes power (battery needs replaced after 1 use/a few seconds); Emits a blindingly bright light when used, more luminous than a flashbang and can cause permanent damage to the eyes if looking at it when it fires.
Partially inspired by reading about Persephone’s tech online, post-trigger. Made with 4 power cells.
The Plague Doctor mask of Callow’s costume. Upon closer inspection, the mask is air-tight and the back-set lower half has a thin set of small, bar-like filters, largely obscured by the upper part of the mask.
Abilities
The mask passively filters mundane toxins from the air and scrubs CO2 from the environment in the mask, enabling it to be worn for an extended period of time. Mixed effectiveness against tinkertech toxins, working better against more complex, biological agents, since that was what Callow was emphasizing when creating it.
Filters require cleaning and maintenance every two weeks to remain effective, or more often with heavy toxin exposure.
A set of two black-and-silver canisters with pull-rings, resembling smoke grenades.
Abilities
Intention: Produces a biochemical agent in the form of a gas that induces an incapacitating state of euphoria.
Abilities: Spews a grey foam, coating across a 10-ft radius. Smothers flames exceptionally well and is entirely non-flammable. Doesn't interact with people besides being annoyingly sticky and getting everywhere.
What goes wrong: Original intent doesn't work, accidentally creates something that functions differently. See Intention and Abilities.
Sleek, soft-soled black boots that match the rest of her costume and fit Callow well.
Abilities
Abilities: On top of being lined with a vibration-absorbing material, tapping the heels together causes an internal active noise-cancellation system to turn on. While active, her steps are incredibly close to silent.
What goes wrong: Mostly works, but only dampens the sound of louder footsteps like when the wearer is running. Sneaking still just sounds like sneaking would. The firmness of the sole shifts at odd intervals, making them weirdly uncomfortable.
A dual-sided, thin fabric with a dark-gray interior, and a lighter, hexagon-patterned exterior.
Abilities
Thermal weave is a two-layered fabric with microscopic, chemical heatsinks worked into the fiber that transfer energy to regulate the interior temperature and match the exterior temperature with the surroundings. When in the cold, heat is transferred inward so that the exterior matches the ambient temperature, and the interior becomes warmer, and vice versa in the heat.
A piece of clothing lined with it can maintain a comfortable interior temperature in environments from -128° C(-200° F) to 93° C(200° F), and renders the wearer nearly indistinguishable from the environment to thermal cameras and heat-based vision.
The fabric is durable enough to prevent a normal knife or blade from penetrating, but not enough to stop a bullet.
What goes wrong: Works As Intended (Actually ended up with a wider temperature range than the original concept)
A set of small white canisters with a rough-welded texture. Each has a pull-ring and lever like a grenade, and a set of several perpendicular metallic rings running down the body.
Abilities
Intention: Grenades that blast a fine powder that rapidly degrades and crumbles iron/iron-based alloys in the vicinity.
Abilities: 5 seconds after releasing the lever, the metallic rings open, pneumatically blasting a black powder containing a semi-organic enzyme across a 10ft-radius area. When it comes into contact with a specific material (specified at the time of creation), it is rapidly degraded as bonds in the material are ripped apart, causing it to fall away into a fine dust.
The powder can shave away about 4 inches of material from the origin of the blast before it becomes inert, and loses potency after about 10 seconds of air contact.
Otherwise, the powder is biologically inert and harmless to organic matter besides slight abrasions that might result from being caught in the blast.
What goes wrong: Construction and utilization is successful, but is unfortunately limited in what materials it can be used on, namely stone, concrete, asphalt, Sand, Dirt, but leaves metallic and organic substances intact. Each grenade needs to be programmed for a specific type of material (from the list above), rather than a one-size-fits-all device.
Callow will be creating a small stockpile of varieties to shear away concrete, limestone, clay brick, mortar, asphalt, and glass, taking a few of what she needs when going out in costume.
A set of two clear lenses of Callow’s prescription that fit into her mask.
Abilities
When exposed to bright light, the lenses instantly and reactively blur/darken proportionally to the light to protect the wearer’s eyes. Function as sunglasses and welding goggles.
Will protect the eyes from a flashbang, or a taser glove that happens to glow as bright as one, but will go incredibly blurry and dim, only allowing the wearer to pick out general shapes for a couple of seconds.
What goes wrong: Works more or less as intended. Dims less than the original concept and instead also blurs, still impacting sight but allowing a bit of vision in ultra-bright conditions.
A bulky, roughly 1m x 1m x 1.5m installation of welded scrap metal hooked into distributed pipes that spread across several rooms, whirring for a few minutes every hour or so.
Abilities
Essentially just a bunch of air pumps hooked into a bulked up version of Callow’s tinkertech filters (used in her gasmask). Can consistently filter out a wide variety of toxins and contaminants from an area it is set up in. Altered to be less harsh on some forms of bacteria so as to not kill the local microbiome.
What goes wrong: Works as intended.
To be set up in the area of the Brule River Power Plant Callow has recently claimed.
A thin, needle-like dagger made of a silvery-white metal with a short crossguard. It is incredibly sharp with a concave edge, the metal of the blade itself is oddly pristine and unblemished, especially compared to the welded look of the hilt. A small rectangular button is present on the middle of the crossguard.
Abilities
Intention: A knife that can effortlessly glide through organic matter, splitting it at a cellular level.
Abilities: When the blade is activated it begins to emit a low hum, the blade oscillating at a microscopic level hundreds of times a second. Additionally, a Metallo-organic enzyme made to shear apart material bonds adheres to the edge of the blade.
The bio-thorn can glide through plant and fungal material incredibly cleanly and efficiently, similar to soft butter and regardless of hardness as it rips apart the connective proteins between cells. The knife can also carve through animal matter or even inorganic material, but with detrimental side-effects and diminishing returns (See: What Goes Wrong).
May have inconsistent effects on powered or non-standard material.
What goes wrong: When used against non-plant/-fungal mass, which the enzyme isn't specialized for, it tries to physically rip apart the bonds between material instead of simply denaturing connective proteins which rapidly degrades it and clogs the channels, requiring intensive maintenance to fix.
Cutting other organic materials will cause it to start losing effectiveness after 5 or 6 uses as the device is damaged, and any more risking breaking it entirely. Non-organic materials do this about twice as quickly, allowing just a few uses before only being about as good as a normal knife.
Non-functional Tinkertech:
Hardlight Knife
Skills and Specializations
Speaks English and French fluently.
Was an excellent student, and mostly through an undergraduate degree in biochemistry when she triggered.
Fast learner.
Skilled first aid, was planning to go into med school.
Hobbyist-level skill in sewing and tailoring.
Skilled in slight-of-hand. Likes doing magic tricks.
(Kind of) Passable athleticism. Also quite sneaky.
Science nerd. Has basic/hobbyist knowledge of various disciplines, especially psychology and engineering.
Big fan of the Sci-fi and Fantasy genres, and loves old spy movies.
Mentality
Amelia is, on the surface, a very intelligent and relatively nice girl. Her awkwardness around people and her penchants for overworking herself or self-depreciation can be easily passed off as quirks of her personality. The reality, though, is that she's struggled with mental issues for much of her life, pathological obsession and trouble reading social cues chief among them. These problems have been exacerbated by her shard post-trigger, and are a major source of insecurity.
Her foremost goals are understanding her power—she came to Devilfish because of how many tinkers there are—and distancing her prior life from herself, to the detriment of everything else.
Power
Trigger type: Natural (Liberty x Mad Scientist - Tinker), First-Generation, Single Trigger
Normally, a tinker has some sort of inkling or intuition about the sorts of things that they are capable of building. Maybe they know this inherently, maybe the inspirations that begin to flood their mind have a coherent through-line, or maybe they even have a secondary power that their tinker power is intrinsically connected to.
Callow is unorthodox in that she entirely lacks this luxury. She builds more like a free tinker would—providing ideas to her shard, which then provides a method to achieve it. Unlike a free tinker, however, Callow does have a specialty, and a strong one at that. The catch is that she has absolutely no clue what that specialty is, and the farther the tech she builds is from it, the more likely it is to catastrophically malfunction, leaving her to piece together what her power truly is.
Generally speaking, the more thematically, ideologically, or mechanically removed a specific piece of tech is from her specialty, the more severe unintended drawbacks or malfunctions it has. Maybe they only work in some circumstance, or with some cost, or have some (more related) parts work better than others, etc. Things that are entirely unconnected tend not to function in the first place, or immediately, disastrously break. Some of these might be known, or others may not show themselves until the worst possible moment.
Meta: I, Spectralknight94 (The Player), have no clue what Callow's specialty is. Instead, any prospective piece of tinkertech will be presented to a group on the discord that represents the shard and knows the specialty, before figuring out how well/if it works and giving it back to me, similar to Magnum Opus.
Note: Massive thanks to /u/Magos_Nashoid, /u/Shellmerc, and /u/unknownmercury for running this for me. Wouldn't be possible without y'all.
Backstory
They were amazing. Charismatic, intelligent, popular, nice. You loved everything about them.
You didn't- it wasn't like you wanted to hurt them or anything. That made it better, right? You just wanted to see them, to know about them, and make sure they were okay. Still, you felt guilty; you knew what you were doing wasn't good, wasn't healthy. It ate away at you for a long time. You had doubts, second thoughts, but... you didn't want to stop. They didn't have to know, right? You wouldn't go any farther. It would just be your secret.
Then, you made a mistake. You said something you shouldn't have, something you couldn't have known. You obsessed over it, and decided you should just say you were sorry and leave them alone. They knew now, they had to.
It turns out that they didn't, at least, not until you came to them and apologized for everything.
Word got out, they told everyone. Your school, your parents, the police. Most of your family stopped speaking to you, your scholarship was suspended. Your life was ruined, and they hated you now.
It was then when it dawned on you—or rather, collapsed on you. It was all your fault. Everyone could have been happy if you just kept your fucking mouth shut. You ruined everything.
