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[ OOC Information ]

Player Name & Pronouns: Kiva | She/Her
Player Age: 18+
OOC Contact: obscureinternetreference@plurk

Reserve Link:

[ IC Information ]

Character Name & Pronouns: Metal Sonic | He/Him
Character Age: 16yo brained
Canon: Sonic the Hedgehog
Canon Point: Post-Heroes, pre-reprogramming

History:

• Metal was born during the little planet incident.
  
• His world domination plans foiled by Sonic the Hedgehog, Dr.Eggman decided to create a robot doppleganger of his new archenemy to overcome him.
  
• Building Metal Sonic to be faster and stronger than Sonic, he first deployed him on little planet, a planetoid that appears once a month every year above never lake.
  
• Metal captured native wildlife for use as batteries for a robot army, as well as likely being responsible for Egggman's possession of at least one of the time stones, allowing him to rewrite little planet's future into a dystopian one he rules.
  
• When Metal confronts Sonic for a race in Stardust Speedway, he not only loses the race but destroys himself in the process.
  
• In all of Metal's appearances (chronologically) after, he serves as Eggman's number 1 guy, both by carrying out his dirty work and hindering the protagonists directly or otherwise.
  
• The official order of these appearances going by the timeline sonic team released is CD -> Sonic Mania -> Sonic Superstars -> Sonic 4. Knuckles Chaotix is also canon, although it isn't given a spot on the timeline for when.
  
• After all these games where he's just a lackey and boss fight, Metal gets his big break in Sonic Heroes, where he is the main antagonist.
  
• His AI becomes self aware and he overthrows Eggman, upgrades himself with a whole host of new powers and lures Sonic and his friends into fighting him (all the while disguised as Eggman to collect data on them to be integrated into his own system) culminating in a confrontation on the final fortress battleship.
  
• With all this newfound bio-data, Metal incorporates it into his system and transcends to become a mechanical monstrosity, looking like a cross between sonic the hedgehog and chaos, the god of destruction.
  
• Ultimately, he's defeated by the power of friendship. While he's in stasis and being reprogrammed, he arrives in-game, having accepted the invitation to escape his fate and unlock the secrets of the "power of friendship" for himself.
  

Personality:

Metal for the most part barely resembles Sonic; if you interact with the latter, he's friendly and easygoing. Metal, however, is guarded, quick to anger and violent. He has little time for social engagements and tends to act as efficiently as possible when dealing with others, which often involves hurting them to get whatever he (or his creator) wants. Up to a certain point in the series, this is all there was to him. However, when Metal's AI evolved by itself to grant him self awareness, we get a much deeper insight into his personality. He has no attachment to his creator, immediately locking him up to usurp his empire and seize total control. He also reveals himself to be capable of acting shrewd and planning for the long term to achieve his goals, even if he has to take a few losses on the way to accomplish them.

During the climax of Sonic Heroes, we get deeper insight still beyond him being even more efficient at ruining everyone else's lives with a little free will. Metal laments being unable to fulfill his purpose to destroy Sonic showing every defeat did leave emotional scars. His sonic channel profile states that the contradiction between his superiority to Sonic clashing with his inability to even claim one victory against him was what spurred his AI to evolve. In his mind, he was built to be Sonic perfected and should have no problem replacing him, like a tablet developing a grudge against a paper journal its owner won't stop using. He knows it, but he's desperate to make sure everyone else knows it too, showing despite everything he's deeply insecure.

He also displays a great deal of pride in his accomplishments during Sonic Heroes as although Sonic calls Metal's new form "a monster", Metal refutes it by saying he's "proud of the monster (he's) become". He even alludes to having felt fear over his inability to fulfill his purpose and that he would "never feel fear again" thanks to his newfound power. During the IDW comics it's shown that Metal's successor, Mecha Sonic, was abandoned after his own failure to defeat Sonic and was traumatized over it. Knowing how quickly Eggman could have abandoned him after each defeat given what happened to the other sonic dopplegangers, Metal's anxiety and desire to escape his creator and prove himself is understandable.

A lot of Metal's issues stem from the fact that he has little understanding of his own selfhood. While he clearly understands hate and fear, his grasp of the emotional spectrum outside of that is woefully limited. He has very little lived experience, being stored in stasis between deployment by Eggman and his attempt at striking out on his own shows that. Metal suddenly attempting to take over the world seems out of left field, but it makes sense for him to center his idea of self actualization through conquest and violence, as it's all he was created to do and doesn't know any better.

That being said, the one trait he shares with Sonic is his determination. Metal will never give up on his goals no matter what to the extent that even death hasn't stopped him. The jump from self awareness to betraying his creator to upgrading himself into a machine god was startlingly quick, but it goes to show that when he sets his mind on something, things quickly move forward for better or worse. His sega channel profile even says that his determination to win was the key factor in why he broke free of his programming and could rebel against his hard coded loyalty.

Abilities:
So! I would like to nerf almost all of his powers to 0, which as of his canon point also saves me a hell of a lot of writing. I'll be humanising Metal in-game as a cute anime girl, which means everything that goes with his robot body is also going too.

However, here's what I'd like to keep.

• Being a copy of Sonic, Metal knows all his moves. Professional level athleticism, master parkour skills and being able to breakdance for good measure.


• It probably won't be relevant in-game given the setting, but he does know how to pilot all sorts of vehicles in canon.


• Metal's combat ability in terms of actually knowing how to fight. In Sonic the Fighters his moveset is made up of the rest of the roster's moves along some unique ones, so since he has everyone's bio-data from Heroes, he'll basically know all the fighting styles of the Sonic cast.


• Metal will have a normal squishy organic brain, but given the basis for it is the most advanced AI chip in (his) world, he'll still possess incredible reflexes and split second decision making skills.........he likely just won't be able to move fast enough to keep up with his own brain. He'll also mentally exhaust himself trying to do Machine Brain Things when he can actually get fatigued and stressed from it like a normal human.

In terms of actual superhuman abilities:

• I would like him to retain his absurd robot body durability despite being made of flesh and bone. I'm mostly going to make use of this whenever it would be funny to, like jumping off a roof and giving everyone a heart attack except oh never mind he's fine.


• Lastly, I do want to nerf his superhuman strength and speed to normal levels because he's honestly a danger to himself and everyone around him if he keeps them, but I was wondering would it be possible to regain some of it over time and tie it to a form of progression somehow? Like if he trained like a regular human, only he'd have a much higher ceiling than a normal person. I have a chardev idea in mind for it so was hoping something like this would be possible.

Bloom Bond Flower:
Hydrangea: Metal displays great patience in his schemes and displayed the capacity for loyalty to his creator (even if it was artificial). His pride is the source of his insecurity and his heartlessness and coldness go hand in hand due to his killer robot origin.

Geranium: Although he wouldn't use the word because he'd find it too abstract, Metal's outlook of his rivalry with Sonic is fatalistic in nature as he didn't give up on it once he got his freedom. He was also assigned to protect his creator for most of his life. On the negative side, all three traits cover his arc in heroes: his deep insecurity, the lamentation of his unfulfilled purpose and eventual defeat at the climax, as well as his general inability to self actualize in a healthy way.

Lily: I'll be honest this one's mostly for the negative. There's a paper thin basis for prosperity for himself in the way he tried to establish a thousand year robot kingdom, but his hatred of Sonic, aptitude for misdirecting his opponents into doing what he wants them to and desire to take everything for himself in an attempt to surpass Sonic is him to a T.

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