Post by Ninmast on Aug 28, 2019 0:59:55 GMT -5
Name: Alexander III of Macedon
Alias: Alexander the Great, Soldier 0Mega, Soldier OO
Age: 17 (when first meeting Brad Mayson), 32 (final meeting with Brad Mayson)
Gender: Male
Race: Demigod (fathered by Zeus with a mortal woman)
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Power Level: Low-tier Medium (4)
Timeline: 339 - 323 BCE (After this, the 0Mega armor is taken to present day and curated in his honor by Brad Mayson)
Appearance: Alexander was by all accounts a beautiful man, graceful and strong of body, with thick, curled hair and dressed as a ruler of his age ought. He was of fair complexion, kept himself clean-shaven and possessed a natural effeminancy to his appearance, most notably in his dewy, captivating eyes that stood out further due to his heterochromia iridium, with one eye a rich brown and the other a baby blue.
Unlike other Soldier armors, 0Mega does not fold down into wearable storage, instead attaching by semi-modular components to a rigging endoskeleton occupied by the pilot, as it has more in common with a mechanized exo-rig than a powered suit. The massive armor stands over ten feet tall, mostly to accommodate the intricate network of pulleys and gears within its hull. Armored with the finest bronze plates the greatest smiths in Greece were able to smith, then glazed with gold, it stands out on any battlefield, even against Persian war elephants, and resembles a massive, golden warrior straight from the mind of Archimedes, sporting most notably a muscle cuirass and a Corinthian helmet, making it distinctly Greek in appearance. It is equipped with a massive kopis to utilize its superior strength and leverage and a bronze tower shield to further increase its incredible defensive prowess. On its left shoulder is a massive crossbow-style launcher, and attached to its right underarm is a tube that dispenses greek fire. Fans protected by bronze vents are primarily on joints and around the back to provide air flow and to keep the occupant from overheating. The interior of the armor is padded and insulated with leather and gambeson to increase comfort of the pilot and decrease the kinetic impact being relayed from blows both dealt and received.
Personality: Alexander was defined by an extremely driven personality and sense of destiny, never doubting or wavering in his expectation that he would conquer the Persian Empire. Known as much for a fiery temper and reckless, impulsive nature as much as a highly rational, perceptive and calculating counterpart, he was an eccentric and brilliant mind who loved to learn, and patronized both arts and sciences. He was also extremely charismatic, being outgoing and beloved by nearly all that encountered him. He also loved many of them in turn, figuratively and literally, gathering a literal harem of women who sincerely loved him but he never forced himself on, and he often seemed to blur the line of platonic love embraced by Greece between a much smaller number of men. Despite this, he was lauded for his great restraint against overindulging in pleasures of the body, but was overly fond of alcohol, giving him a retrospective characterization in modern day as something of a frat boy or surfer dude.
History: The legacy of Alexander the Great is known, at least by jist, by anyone who has ever opened a history book. To avoid filling a book, this section will focus as much as possible exclusively on the temporal manipulations and his interactions with Brad Mayson, Soldier 01 and engineer from the early 21st century.
Alexander was still fresh to his father's Macedonian throne when he had to first begin to deal with the scheming Persians, and soon after when a man from the future found his way to his court with the aid of a local seeress and informed him this wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Not that it mattered to the young ruler whether the Persians had made pacts with Titans, underworld spirits or, as the newcomer suggested, humans from a more advanced future. His victory was decreed by the gods, and they couldn't rival his own divine blood no matter their heresy.
He was incredibly fascinated by what this newcomer brought to him, however, and respected the man's mind. He was certain it wasn't superior to his, but ability could easily be overcome with knowledge, and the greatest minds of Greece couldn't have rivaled the engineering and physics that seemed basic to the mysterious figure. So much was this the case that he was able to lay out revolutionary designs and schematics that he claimed Alexander, himself, was to one day develop off the top of his head with all the ease of planning a goblet. There would be no shame to admit that he coveted him, but his people were in greater need.
Such that it was that Alexander spent many hours conversing with the man in the hopes of ferreting out greater insights, and eventually hit success. It wasn't that he couldn't understand Mayson's concern; the whole reason the Persians were endangering his people was because someone had played the part of Prometheus and brought them fire they were unworthy of wielding. He convinced himself that this was all for the sake of evening the already corrupted playing field.
He had apparently underestimated the man's own cunning, however, somehow revealing his own discovery so that Mayson arrived the next time clad in something resembling armor, but with a texture like cloth. This mysterious material repelled the blades of his centurions when he moved to pressure the knowledge of firearms from the man without impeding his counterattack like reason said such armor should. In fury, Alexander took a flaming sconce from aside his throne and thrust it like a spear at his ally, but the shaft shattered with his perfect thrust and failed to budge the time traveler, who simply brushed the burning cinders away from his unblemished armor.
It was not often that Alexander found himself stunned by impotence, but he was spared from having to search for an answer on the spot for why his divine might failed so spectacularly against simple armor, even from the far future, by news of a renewed assault by the Persians from a military runner.
In that fight and many more, he had opportunity to observe Mayson's creation in battle, and while many who encountered him attributed his growing arsenal as blessed, Alexander saw an engineer adapting to the field of war. Certainly, the man he came to call brother had much knowledge to apply to the problems before him, but didn't he have great knowledge in him, too? Certainly, it was not encompassing all of the advancements that would be made in the thousands of years after him, but with his greater mind, he could comprehend what he was seeing, and a seed of thought sprouted in him. If he was as great as he proclaimed himself to be, was it not time to stop relying on the knowledge of another and apply that greatness to innovations of his own?
His keen military mind had, after all, noticed a fatal flaw in a great warrior and brilliant mind that was nearly his own equal, a flaw that came with such greatness. Brad Mayson had forgotten that he was not the world's only engineer, or even its greatest. The only question was how far he could go before his brother's morality demanded his end.
Powers: Almost all of his abilities come from the 0Mega Armor. He is physically very fit and mentally sharp, some would even say superhumanly so (he certainly would), but not enough to make him more of a threat than a normal human with his skills. He also benefits from extensive formal training and experience, literally one of the greatest (he would say the greatest) generals to ever live, and a genius engineering mind who excels at thinking outside the box.
Equipment: Incredibly crude by the standards of modern exoskeleton technology, the 0Mega Armor is the core of Alexander's combat abilities when it is in use, but what it has to offer to engineering sciences is more in its utilization of ancient technology rather than any representation of advanced technology. Listed below are its features.
Modular Endoskeletal Frame - Rather than folding away like other Soldier power armors, an impossible feat for his era's technology, Alexander built the 0Mega Armor to be attached manually a component at a time. Each one is independently operational, and that is thanks to the Frame, the suit within the suit. Each individual piece relies on the connections with the frame to function, however, as it is the frame which translates his motions into the pulley system when snapped into the gears within the armor pieces. The frame is also beneficial on its own, helping to absorb impact force and reinforcing him when he lifts so that ten pounds feels like one pound, and he used it extensively for that purpose while building the other components of his armor, but it doesn't actually increase his strength. Of course, this assembly style means that he requires lengthy third-party assistance getting into the 0Mega Armor, slightly longer and more involved than later eras' assistance for full plate armor, but that's what attendants are for.
Hercules Networked Pulley System - Named after the god of strength and heroes, this network of pulleys, precision gears and tension lines is an extremely primitive and ridiculously overcomplex substitute for a proper strength-enhancing hydraulic power suit system. It works by reverse motions causing tiered gears to overwind the tension lines, then releasing the stored kinetic energy on the forward motion. In addition to countless potential points of failure, it limits the user to motions preceded by wind-ups, limiting optimum motions and increasing the ease by which the user's intentions can be read. On the upside, its "power source" is the kinetic energy of the user, eliminating the need to accommodate a standalone power system. The resulting strength enhancement is about five times over the user's base, half that of the Soldier armors constructed by Brad Mayson, but any Greek mind worth the name knows that mass is just as important to the force of a blow as the physical strength accelerating it, and 0Mega has a lot of mass.
Multilayer Bronze Armor Plating - Alexander's reach and influence is as vast as his available wealth, and all were poured into his ideal designs for this great project. What at first appears to be golden armor is actually only a gold glaze to accomplish this visual effect over bronze plates, in turn reinforced underneath by much stronger steel. This wonder material is incredibly expensive and only produced by secretive masters, but the only obstacle to Alexander's acquiring of it was the effort in finding these masters and negotiating their price. Half again as strong as the best bronze his empire can produce, blades would rebound off of it and spear shafts would snap against it, imagery Alexander has been unable to shake from his mind since Brad Mayson first arrived in his armor. Underneath this mystical metal is then a layer of leather and finally a layer of gambeson to protect the wearer from the jarring force of impacts against metal armor and soften the effect of hard metals against flesh. All four levels contribute in some manner to the resistance of the armor against penetration, while three reduce impact force - the softer bronze working as an initial force sponge before any blow even reaches the steel, while also protecting the steel from corrosion and wear. While collectively too heavy for a normal soldier to wear without the endoskeleton frame, 0Mega's armor can functionally negate all harm from any conventional weapons of Alexander's era, making him a walking tank that soaks tremendous assaults from anything less than a direct shot from the peak of siege weaponry, and would even repel modern day small arms fire without effort. The leather and gambeson help to insulate the user against electricity, which the bronze and steel would normally conduct quite well, but do little to help defend against heat transference and internal heat build-up. Instead, the components use auxillary gears from body motion to turn fans strategically placed around the body, primarily at joints, to vent heat and keep the user relatively cool.
Great Kopis - Alexander's sword of choice is the Greek kopis, a single-bladed sword with a forward-curving edge that excels at chopping much like an axe without losing the ability to thrust. As this also works exceedingly well with 0Mega's motion limitations, it was the obvious choice for the ultimate armor. 0Mega's kopis is sized as if a longsword for the giant, and can be used in one or both hands. Its entire form is crafted from high carbon Tamil steel, an incredibly hard material traded from the far east which would come to be known in far later centuries as the legendary Damascus Steel, while the hilt is formed of pearl around its tang, which emerges from the other end to take an enlarged form of Alexander's own hooked lion pommel. There is no finer blade in all the world of the era, nor one with a sharper edge or that maintains its edge for so long.
Alternately, 0Mega may carry a doru spear of equivalent construction, but the brute style of the armor and the destruction of reinforced targets often required of it tends to make it an inferior choice.
Great Hoplon - A Greek heavy shield scaled up until it is essentially a tower shield, and benefitting from the same layered armor design as 0Mega itself, it is an additional defensive layer that makes the impenetrable war machine that much more impenetrable.
Hard-Mounted Weaponry - In addition to its more traditional armaments, 0Mega has two built-in weapon systems. On its left shoulder is an altered version of the 85-pound ballista utilized by his men in teams in the field. It is self-loading, utilizing a spring and gear system to fire from a preloaded magazine of ten bolts, each one popping in as part of the relaxation phase of the tortion weapon. For aim, it is connected by cams to the turning of 0Mega's head, and is calibrated at out to one hundred meters. It is fired by extending the left arm and then making a precise hand motion to release the gears holding the torque. Though devastating, able to skewer an entire enemy soldier, shield, armor and all, at four times that distance, its slow rate of fire and very limited ammunition makes it reserved for special situations, and its precise method of firing makes it exceedingly difficult to fire at close range.
Under its right forearm is an assembly that propels a very short range froth of Greek Proto-Fire, a mix of sulfur, naphtha and resins which clings to the target and burns extremely hot, not unlike modern napalm. The bellows for it are very similar to the cooling fans for the suit, and it can deploy the material fairly generously given that it feeds from a tank mounted on 0Mega's back aside the armored magazine compartment for the ballista. This makes it a fairly reliable and very dangerous anti-infantry weapon, and also very effective at the destruction of fortifications vulnerable to flame, such as those built from wood, so long as the user doesn't catch himself in any backsplash.
Weakness: While Alexander would consider it debatable that he is a normal human outside of the 0Mega Armor, he does remain vulnerable to all normal ways to kill a normal human, and while a quick thinker and genius tactician, is prone to overestimating himself in the wake of his own greatness. Furthermore, the 0Mega Armor is not environmentally secure and will take on both fluids and gases if so exposed. It also takes an abundantly long time to both don and doff, making for long periods where the user is vulnerable to varying degrees.
Alias: Alexander the Great, Soldier 0Mega, Soldier OO
Age: 17 (when first meeting Brad Mayson), 32 (final meeting with Brad Mayson)
Gender: Male
Race: Demigod (fathered by Zeus with a mortal woman)
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Power Level: Low-tier Medium (4)
Timeline: 339 - 323 BCE (After this, the 0Mega armor is taken to present day and curated in his honor by Brad Mayson)
Appearance: Alexander was by all accounts a beautiful man, graceful and strong of body, with thick, curled hair and dressed as a ruler of his age ought. He was of fair complexion, kept himself clean-shaven and possessed a natural effeminancy to his appearance, most notably in his dewy, captivating eyes that stood out further due to his heterochromia iridium, with one eye a rich brown and the other a baby blue.
Unlike other Soldier armors, 0Mega does not fold down into wearable storage, instead attaching by semi-modular components to a rigging endoskeleton occupied by the pilot, as it has more in common with a mechanized exo-rig than a powered suit. The massive armor stands over ten feet tall, mostly to accommodate the intricate network of pulleys and gears within its hull. Armored with the finest bronze plates the greatest smiths in Greece were able to smith, then glazed with gold, it stands out on any battlefield, even against Persian war elephants, and resembles a massive, golden warrior straight from the mind of Archimedes, sporting most notably a muscle cuirass and a Corinthian helmet, making it distinctly Greek in appearance. It is equipped with a massive kopis to utilize its superior strength and leverage and a bronze tower shield to further increase its incredible defensive prowess. On its left shoulder is a massive crossbow-style launcher, and attached to its right underarm is a tube that dispenses greek fire. Fans protected by bronze vents are primarily on joints and around the back to provide air flow and to keep the occupant from overheating. The interior of the armor is padded and insulated with leather and gambeson to increase comfort of the pilot and decrease the kinetic impact being relayed from blows both dealt and received.
Personality: Alexander was defined by an extremely driven personality and sense of destiny, never doubting or wavering in his expectation that he would conquer the Persian Empire. Known as much for a fiery temper and reckless, impulsive nature as much as a highly rational, perceptive and calculating counterpart, he was an eccentric and brilliant mind who loved to learn, and patronized both arts and sciences. He was also extremely charismatic, being outgoing and beloved by nearly all that encountered him. He also loved many of them in turn, figuratively and literally, gathering a literal harem of women who sincerely loved him but he never forced himself on, and he often seemed to blur the line of platonic love embraced by Greece between a much smaller number of men. Despite this, he was lauded for his great restraint against overindulging in pleasures of the body, but was overly fond of alcohol, giving him a retrospective characterization in modern day as something of a frat boy or surfer dude.
History: The legacy of Alexander the Great is known, at least by jist, by anyone who has ever opened a history book. To avoid filling a book, this section will focus as much as possible exclusively on the temporal manipulations and his interactions with Brad Mayson, Soldier 01 and engineer from the early 21st century.
Alexander was still fresh to his father's Macedonian throne when he had to first begin to deal with the scheming Persians, and soon after when a man from the future found his way to his court with the aid of a local seeress and informed him this wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Not that it mattered to the young ruler whether the Persians had made pacts with Titans, underworld spirits or, as the newcomer suggested, humans from a more advanced future. His victory was decreed by the gods, and they couldn't rival his own divine blood no matter their heresy.
He was incredibly fascinated by what this newcomer brought to him, however, and respected the man's mind. He was certain it wasn't superior to his, but ability could easily be overcome with knowledge, and the greatest minds of Greece couldn't have rivaled the engineering and physics that seemed basic to the mysterious figure. So much was this the case that he was able to lay out revolutionary designs and schematics that he claimed Alexander, himself, was to one day develop off the top of his head with all the ease of planning a goblet. There would be no shame to admit that he coveted him, but his people were in greater need.
Such that it was that Alexander spent many hours conversing with the man in the hopes of ferreting out greater insights, and eventually hit success. It wasn't that he couldn't understand Mayson's concern; the whole reason the Persians were endangering his people was because someone had played the part of Prometheus and brought them fire they were unworthy of wielding. He convinced himself that this was all for the sake of evening the already corrupted playing field.
He had apparently underestimated the man's own cunning, however, somehow revealing his own discovery so that Mayson arrived the next time clad in something resembling armor, but with a texture like cloth. This mysterious material repelled the blades of his centurions when he moved to pressure the knowledge of firearms from the man without impeding his counterattack like reason said such armor should. In fury, Alexander took a flaming sconce from aside his throne and thrust it like a spear at his ally, but the shaft shattered with his perfect thrust and failed to budge the time traveler, who simply brushed the burning cinders away from his unblemished armor.
It was not often that Alexander found himself stunned by impotence, but he was spared from having to search for an answer on the spot for why his divine might failed so spectacularly against simple armor, even from the far future, by news of a renewed assault by the Persians from a military runner.
In that fight and many more, he had opportunity to observe Mayson's creation in battle, and while many who encountered him attributed his growing arsenal as blessed, Alexander saw an engineer adapting to the field of war. Certainly, the man he came to call brother had much knowledge to apply to the problems before him, but didn't he have great knowledge in him, too? Certainly, it was not encompassing all of the advancements that would be made in the thousands of years after him, but with his greater mind, he could comprehend what he was seeing, and a seed of thought sprouted in him. If he was as great as he proclaimed himself to be, was it not time to stop relying on the knowledge of another and apply that greatness to innovations of his own?
His keen military mind had, after all, noticed a fatal flaw in a great warrior and brilliant mind that was nearly his own equal, a flaw that came with such greatness. Brad Mayson had forgotten that he was not the world's only engineer, or even its greatest. The only question was how far he could go before his brother's morality demanded his end.
Powers: Almost all of his abilities come from the 0Mega Armor. He is physically very fit and mentally sharp, some would even say superhumanly so (he certainly would), but not enough to make him more of a threat than a normal human with his skills. He also benefits from extensive formal training and experience, literally one of the greatest (he would say the greatest) generals to ever live, and a genius engineering mind who excels at thinking outside the box.
Equipment: Incredibly crude by the standards of modern exoskeleton technology, the 0Mega Armor is the core of Alexander's combat abilities when it is in use, but what it has to offer to engineering sciences is more in its utilization of ancient technology rather than any representation of advanced technology. Listed below are its features.
Modular Endoskeletal Frame - Rather than folding away like other Soldier power armors, an impossible feat for his era's technology, Alexander built the 0Mega Armor to be attached manually a component at a time. Each one is independently operational, and that is thanks to the Frame, the suit within the suit. Each individual piece relies on the connections with the frame to function, however, as it is the frame which translates his motions into the pulley system when snapped into the gears within the armor pieces. The frame is also beneficial on its own, helping to absorb impact force and reinforcing him when he lifts so that ten pounds feels like one pound, and he used it extensively for that purpose while building the other components of his armor, but it doesn't actually increase his strength. Of course, this assembly style means that he requires lengthy third-party assistance getting into the 0Mega Armor, slightly longer and more involved than later eras' assistance for full plate armor, but that's what attendants are for.
Hercules Networked Pulley System - Named after the god of strength and heroes, this network of pulleys, precision gears and tension lines is an extremely primitive and ridiculously overcomplex substitute for a proper strength-enhancing hydraulic power suit system. It works by reverse motions causing tiered gears to overwind the tension lines, then releasing the stored kinetic energy on the forward motion. In addition to countless potential points of failure, it limits the user to motions preceded by wind-ups, limiting optimum motions and increasing the ease by which the user's intentions can be read. On the upside, its "power source" is the kinetic energy of the user, eliminating the need to accommodate a standalone power system. The resulting strength enhancement is about five times over the user's base, half that of the Soldier armors constructed by Brad Mayson, but any Greek mind worth the name knows that mass is just as important to the force of a blow as the physical strength accelerating it, and 0Mega has a lot of mass.
Multilayer Bronze Armor Plating - Alexander's reach and influence is as vast as his available wealth, and all were poured into his ideal designs for this great project. What at first appears to be golden armor is actually only a gold glaze to accomplish this visual effect over bronze plates, in turn reinforced underneath by much stronger steel. This wonder material is incredibly expensive and only produced by secretive masters, but the only obstacle to Alexander's acquiring of it was the effort in finding these masters and negotiating their price. Half again as strong as the best bronze his empire can produce, blades would rebound off of it and spear shafts would snap against it, imagery Alexander has been unable to shake from his mind since Brad Mayson first arrived in his armor. Underneath this mystical metal is then a layer of leather and finally a layer of gambeson to protect the wearer from the jarring force of impacts against metal armor and soften the effect of hard metals against flesh. All four levels contribute in some manner to the resistance of the armor against penetration, while three reduce impact force - the softer bronze working as an initial force sponge before any blow even reaches the steel, while also protecting the steel from corrosion and wear. While collectively too heavy for a normal soldier to wear without the endoskeleton frame, 0Mega's armor can functionally negate all harm from any conventional weapons of Alexander's era, making him a walking tank that soaks tremendous assaults from anything less than a direct shot from the peak of siege weaponry, and would even repel modern day small arms fire without effort. The leather and gambeson help to insulate the user against electricity, which the bronze and steel would normally conduct quite well, but do little to help defend against heat transference and internal heat build-up. Instead, the components use auxillary gears from body motion to turn fans strategically placed around the body, primarily at joints, to vent heat and keep the user relatively cool.
Great Kopis - Alexander's sword of choice is the Greek kopis, a single-bladed sword with a forward-curving edge that excels at chopping much like an axe without losing the ability to thrust. As this also works exceedingly well with 0Mega's motion limitations, it was the obvious choice for the ultimate armor. 0Mega's kopis is sized as if a longsword for the giant, and can be used in one or both hands. Its entire form is crafted from high carbon Tamil steel, an incredibly hard material traded from the far east which would come to be known in far later centuries as the legendary Damascus Steel, while the hilt is formed of pearl around its tang, which emerges from the other end to take an enlarged form of Alexander's own hooked lion pommel. There is no finer blade in all the world of the era, nor one with a sharper edge or that maintains its edge for so long.
Alternately, 0Mega may carry a doru spear of equivalent construction, but the brute style of the armor and the destruction of reinforced targets often required of it tends to make it an inferior choice.
Great Hoplon - A Greek heavy shield scaled up until it is essentially a tower shield, and benefitting from the same layered armor design as 0Mega itself, it is an additional defensive layer that makes the impenetrable war machine that much more impenetrable.
Hard-Mounted Weaponry - In addition to its more traditional armaments, 0Mega has two built-in weapon systems. On its left shoulder is an altered version of the 85-pound ballista utilized by his men in teams in the field. It is self-loading, utilizing a spring and gear system to fire from a preloaded magazine of ten bolts, each one popping in as part of the relaxation phase of the tortion weapon. For aim, it is connected by cams to the turning of 0Mega's head, and is calibrated at out to one hundred meters. It is fired by extending the left arm and then making a precise hand motion to release the gears holding the torque. Though devastating, able to skewer an entire enemy soldier, shield, armor and all, at four times that distance, its slow rate of fire and very limited ammunition makes it reserved for special situations, and its precise method of firing makes it exceedingly difficult to fire at close range.
Under its right forearm is an assembly that propels a very short range froth of Greek Proto-Fire, a mix of sulfur, naphtha and resins which clings to the target and burns extremely hot, not unlike modern napalm. The bellows for it are very similar to the cooling fans for the suit, and it can deploy the material fairly generously given that it feeds from a tank mounted on 0Mega's back aside the armored magazine compartment for the ballista. This makes it a fairly reliable and very dangerous anti-infantry weapon, and also very effective at the destruction of fortifications vulnerable to flame, such as those built from wood, so long as the user doesn't catch himself in any backsplash.
Weakness: While Alexander would consider it debatable that he is a normal human outside of the 0Mega Armor, he does remain vulnerable to all normal ways to kill a normal human, and while a quick thinker and genius tactician, is prone to overestimating himself in the wake of his own greatness. Furthermore, the 0Mega Armor is not environmentally secure and will take on both fluids and gases if so exposed. It also takes an abundantly long time to both don and doff, making for long periods where the user is vulnerable to varying degrees.
