#sorry i have no idea how the readmore possibly moved?? sorry for everyone's dash

[a-flickering-soul]

i've been getting into spg for the last few months now, and i'm noticing there's really not much about these characters on the internet. (the spg wiki is Very Short.) you mind unpacking some lore about the bots?

(this is also an invitation to infodump. believe me when i say i Want to hear about these funky little automatons)

Sorry about the two lengthy SPG asks in one day! I'm putting this one below the cut because it is LITERALLY 2.4k man I did NOT come to play with this one! For what it's worth, you may find this ask interesting, as I've linked some good lore sources I frequent a lot :)

Rabbit: The first to be built! She named herself Rabbit after one of the animals in the lab she was built in, which I think is very endearing of her. She's Victorian clockwork/steampunk-inspired, and out of all the automatons is the one to maintain the most of her original vintage workings, which means she's also the one to malfunction the most <3 girl things fr. Rabbit is a wonderful character because she is Bunny Bennett's special special OC and gets to have so so many problems because of it. I am serious when I say most things usually happen to Rabbit. She is the Special Girl of SPG lore. This is NOT my own bias showing up, I PROMISE.

Rabbit has everything bad happen to her. Red Core, which is THEE Rabbit comic and something I read on a semi-regular basis to experience shrimp emotions through, goes through her backstory being trans (this robot is trans) and it peels me every time. I won't recap it but I think everyone who likes trans robots should read it even though it is as of yet incomplete. Lore-wise, it's interesting because it establishes that she was originally meant to look like Delilah Morreo (certainly a choice, Peter Walter I), and was sent to war in an incomplete, half-broken body which I certainly have a lot of thoughts about (it's the lack of AGENCY it's the way she spent the war VOICELESS it's the way she was denied the chance to be finished for a CENTURY it's--). Following that, about half a century later it was her core specifically that was stolen by the Beciles in 1950 in an attempt to replicate her Blue Matter power source. This tinkering inadvertently sent a beam of pure energy ripping through time and space, causing an explosion that claimed the lives of Peter Walter II and Guy Hottie (real name), and injuring Peter Walter III, Ignatius Becile, and Norman Becile. Rabbit, to this day, still blames herself for this because god forbid women have one good day. This also was the point in time that split the events of the Vice Quadrant into Timelines A and B, due to the generative power of Blue Matter, and also maybe created Cosmica? Which begs the question if Rabbit is sort of like Cosmica's mom in a weird way, but that's beside the point. In 2014, her original blueprints were discovered after a series of worsening malfunctions led Peter Walter VI to search for a way to repair or upgrade her, resulting in the confirmation of what Rabbit had known all along--that she was in an unfinished and slipshod chassis, that she was a girl, and she deserved to be recognized as such. Which is cool :') and a really neat way to work in her creator's IRL transition :') and for sure doesn't make me feel things.

Some cool facts I've just gleaned about Rabbit over the past eight-odd months are that she has memory problems, fell in love with a toaster, knows what BDSM is (SWEAR to god this is true), likes feeding ducks, and has a laser cannon in one eye, hence the heterochromia. There also is this cool series of drawings showing Rabbit's evolution drawn by Bunny here, which is really interesting to look at! In case it's not obvious, she's my favorite and I love her and I think about her too much <3

The Spine: The Spine is a special, special old man. With a retro-futuristic aesthetic, he was built with a titanium alloy spine (that's his Back Story), and before he got upgrades in 1955, was fashioned with a high amount of steam vents running up and down his vertebrae that kind of looked like old-fashioned train smokestacks, which is very endearing. In 1955, as I mentioned earlier, he got a ton of upgrades funding exclusively by the US government improving his weaponry, as well as an upgrade to his AI and programming making him much more humanistic, more personable and more able to mimic how humans moved in order to make it easier, once they were inevitably drafted again, for him to take up dangerous military operations without risking human lives. It's to my knowledge unclear if he was built like this or if this was part of that 1955 upgrade, but he is also able to detach his head and spine from his torso and limbs and actually slither around like a snake, which some people think is weird but I think is very endearing and fun! He hangs out a lot in the Hall of Wires since he's one of the few inhabitants of Walter Manor that can actually climb up towards the ceiling and presumably debug or repair the AIs, and also because it's the only room in the entire Manor with a door.

I love the Spine because I think the evolution of his role in the band is incredibly funny. If you watch the earlier Balboa and Zoo-era performances, he plays the straight man of the band in a stoic, but also kind of dumb way. He doesn't really know what's a bit and what's serious, but it's okay because he's really trying his best. Now, as the straight man of the group, he's so so old and tired. He really just wants to go back home and power off and who can blame him? By dint of the current lineup being a Black robot, a trans gay robot, and a white guy robot, he is now the butt by default of most jokes which is delightful to Me and boy, does he shoulder that weight with begrudging grace. My special, special old man. Watching him get made fun of onstage is kind of like watching someone give a very old and tired dog a pill, and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible.

Cool facts about the Spine include the fact that he's really into cowboys and the Wild West, he has actually never really been in love, he secretly thinks Saturdays are Just Okay, and he actually swears the most out of all of the members of the band (at least as of now).

The Jon: The Jon is an interesting little guy. He has a cool Art Deco style and is known for being a little more whimsical, young, and off-the-cuff as opposed to the others. What's interesting about his backstory is that while Peter Walter I was mucking around with his power core trying to bring him to life, some switch flipped or some level was triggered and a minor explosion occurred. By the time the smoke cleared, the Jon was alive and sentient and there was a void in his chest instead of a power source. Unlike his siblings, he didn't run on clockwork, or hydraulics, or anything of the sort. He appeared to sustain himself on the void sealed in his chassis, which contained only a koi fish and a hot dog floating in space. He tends to have a certain effect on people blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, and odd coincidences seem to follow him like a well-trained dog.

In 1992, the Jon went through his own upgrade--Walter Robotics, always looking for ways to boost their quarterly revenue, signed an ad deal with PepsiCo advertising Crystal Pepsi. The Jon was modified to run solely on Crystal Pepsi, which. . . as you can see by the popularity of Crystal Pepsi right now (sarcasm), it obviously didn't go well. The Jon's efficiency is tied to an out-of-production soda and his machinery refused to be retroactively fitted to water again. To prevent the inevitable from happening, he left around 2012 through one of those Blue Matter portals through to a sister dimension (in fact, the same one Peter Walter I discovered back in 1896) known as Kazooland, where we are assured he now serves as the Mayor of Biscuittown (presumably, it is up to us to determine how much of this is true and how much of it is the Jon trying to sound cool).

Cool facts about the Jon include the fact that he and Zer0 are besties, animals love him, and that the very first show that Steam Powered Giraffe did all the way back in 2009 was about them going back in time to get him more Crystal Pepsi.

Upgrade: I used to be neutral about Upgrade but then I watched all the busking videos and also the 10 year anniversary show and now I love her. She was the Girl Of The Group (TM) all the way back in their busking era in 2009-2010 and her ongoing bit was that she was in love with the Spine and also knew exactly how adorable she was. However, she can be stubborn when she wants to be, and her AI is permanently frozen in the QWERTY 1996 OS because she really just liked the 90s I guess.

I for one am completely fascinated by Upgrade's lore because it's noted that during the Weekend War and WWI, she served in the military presumably doing the same sort of things the other bots were doing, then as a medical nurse in WWII, indicating that the governmental military contract really played fast and loose with whether or not they could enlist woman-coded robots in the war effort. What's notable to me, though, is that during the Vietnam War, Upgrade specifically went on to protest the war with the hippy movement while the others served in the war. How did that happen? Were they just allowed to opt out whenever they wanted? Are these robots really willing Vietnam War vets? Did Upgrade out of all of them just have enough guts to run away? Anyways, she was brought back into the fold about four years after the war ended, just in time to a few decades later get Sharpied with facial hair while the robots trial-ran a boy band concept. She ultimately left to go be a princess and become actual royalty. I swear to god I read somewhere that Upgrade killed Princess Diana but for the life of me I cannot find it. Know that it haunts me.

Upgrade facts include the fact that she is an actual princess, her makeup out of all of them is most inspired by classic vaudeville, and it was her and Rabbit's roles during their busking era to banter with the audience while the Spine and the Jon tuned their guitars.

Hatchworth: Hatchworth was built in the frantic few months before Peter Walter I had to face Thaddeus Becile in battle and presumably the poor man was turning anything metal into a robot. Hence, Hatchworth's design--he was initially constructed out of an old-fashioned bronze wood stove. Walter chose this robot to experiment with his Blue Matter levels, and with one tiny change in concentration he accidentally created a Blue Portal into another dimension in his hatch. This was incredibly useful in battle, as almost any weapon could be summoned through the hatch--after the war, it was used to summon sandwiches for the growing Walter family. All was well and good, until an as-of-yet unnoticed hairline fracture in his core began making the portal act unstable, coming to a peak in 1938. After accidentally summoning a pack (herd? flock?) of badgers into the middle of a tea party he was serving, he was determined too damaged to fix for now by anyone other than an ailing Peter Walter I, and locked in a lead vault deep below the manor while Peter Walters II and III tried to find a fix. Decades later, he was found hallucinating and lonely by our boy Peter Walter VI, who was stricken with his own Blue Matter mishap and had an inkling of how to fix the old robot. One thing led to another, and now thankfully we are all 99.9% Hatchworth acclimated!

Hatchworth facts….he left the band to go Gold Fishing (with some degree of success), he has incredibly fancy shoes that are also inexplicably tiny sometimes, he has a Hello Kitty cell phone, he does know how to cross himself, and Zer0 tried to microwave his head once.

Zer0: Myyyyyy sweetest and most special boy Zer0. Zer0 was actually technicallyyyyy the first one built, since he originated from three separate rudimentary prototypes Peter Walter I fused together after testing out various weapon designs. As a result, he's incredibly robust, very powerful, and has a cobbled-together patchwork appearance. Unfortunately, as he didn't have much by way of singing at the time, he fell to the wayside after the Weekend War and was forgotten down in the basements and testing labs sealed miles below Walter Manor. In 1992, the AI Beebop found him while archiving documents and turned him on. Zer0, enamored with the evolution of music over the past century, taught himself how to sing exclusively from the old Motown records in the basement with him. Peter Walter V, upon hearing his voice, was so awestruck that he immediately repaired him and Zer0 became the face of the band (#Zer0OurShiningStar). Zer0 then absolutely skyrocketed in popularity, signed with a TV show, and subsequently became so famous Walter Robotics had to erase all content of him from their market because they lost the rights to his appearance and voice. Sadly, our sweet boy invested all his money in "the abstract concept of love", lost all his money, sold one single copy of a bad autobiography, and came back home to Walter Manor with naught but a yacht to his name. He very graciously returned to performing in Steam Powered Giraffe, where his lovely vocals can be heard to this day.

Zer0 facts include the fact that he got a brand deal to sell his own kind of overly sugary cereal, he fell in love with a "large-chested lamppost" once, he likes possums, he would collect worms on strings if he could, and his defining characteristic is joy <3

I hope this was somewhat readable and comprehensive! I think…..I covered everyone out of the automatons, unless there is another member about to crawl out of the woodwork somewhere. Best of luck in your lore-hunting! I hope this helped :)

[brawltogethernow]

Neutral Element - I Am Well

Installment Masterlist/what am I looking at here || Relationships: FINALLY; Characters: Tarvek and Gil, Agatha; Length: 2k; Content notes: Just when including this section was starting to feel overly precious - Medical stuff! Dissociation! Flashbacks! Body horror? Aaronev Wilhelm leaving sticky residue on things that persists after his death. All conveyed through experimental formatting. This segment was fun. Readmores are still broken on mobile and I’m still sorry.

Tarveka and Gil maintain a careful balance of, ‘Well, it would upset Agatha if something happened to you,’ and not addressing that they can feel each other’s lies of omission.

 *

“We’ve got to put her in a different head,” Agatha declares, staring into the dead eyes of Tarveka’s empty chassis with an air of diagnosis and tsking quietly. “This one’s no good.”

“We can maybe fix up some other things for her, while we’re in there....” adds Gil, pressing close to Agatha to look too.

I will not stand by while you — came the impression of Tarveka in her head, only to pause. Gil was reminded of a finicky bumacat deciding whether to put her paw down after sticking it outside her cave. Hm, that is a good idea. Zengil feels Tarveka shuffling through the half-formed ideas for improvements floating at the top of her mind, which manifests as them rising to precedence without her input. To someone with pretty strong mental control, it’s unusual and somewhat disorienting. Hm, I like that one. Oh, now that is lovely.

Gil wants to tease her for being as vain as a cat too, in this moment where she won’t have to explain the reference and Tarveka will understand and not be able to deny she’s joking, but Tarveka’s appreciation is more that of an enthusiastic connoisseur. Even Tarveka’s interest in clothing that Gil has noted  has surprisingly little of the covetous impulse that Ooh, that would look lovely on me. And Tarveka would know she knew that, and know she knew she knew, and...

Ack.

“Told you,” Gil settles on.

You’re such a mess, impresses Tarveka, plainly referring to the entire train of thought.

 *

I’ll have to commission a whole new wardrobe, of course,” Tarveka coughs. Being able to edit herself to fit clothes could certainly be convenient. The taste alerts her that blood is dripping from her mouth.

Soon she won’t be bothered by concerns like —

Zengil yanks herself out of the blood-red flash of recollection, reeling. Half of her scrambles to place when that happened to her, before it settles in that it never did.

I didn’t see anything?? she thinks at Tarveka, desperate and sheepish.

Tarveka, sick and sulky, doesn’t send more than a mild sense of irritation at Gil, but Zengil still retreats, embarrassed at having accidentally intruded on something so profoundly personal, to lurk sheepishly in the corner of her own head.

 *

Asking me to ride along like this... Tarveka begins eventually, out of the blue and awkward. I would think you of all people...

Gil, for once, is sure of what Tarveka is getting at. She’s kind of cheating right now. “You aren’t like Lucrezia, okay? I invited you in. So stop fretting.”

Gil, mercifully for the both of them, cannot actually see most of Tarveka’s thoughts, but she doesn’t need to to put together stories about Lucrezia with Tarveka’s own manner of conducting herself and see why the clank girl might be uncomfortable, snagged by hooks of misplaced guilt.

Tarveka’s presence retreats into a sulky, defensive ball, trying to shrink into itself and lash out defensively at the same time.

“Of course,” says Gil, voice growing irritated, “you could always just try being a better person instead of a manipulative sneak —”

Oh, don’t you start with me, you brutish, pathetic excuse for a diplomat! You wouldn’t know subtlety if it struck you in the face!

“That wouldn’t be very subtle of it, would it?”

 *

Tarveka considers her body, cracked open on a lab table, for the second time in her existence.

(At this point she isn’t sure she dares call it her life. It almost feels like she’ll jinx herself.)

For the first time, she’s doing so through another’s eyes. The optics of her clank were hers from the start, of course. And the eyes she saw it through were her very own, the originals, slightly myopic and a dull brown color she needs only look at Anevke to see these days, but still somewhat misses.

Her clank body’s first face didn’t move. She just didn’t have the skill or the time, and she would have needed at least one.

Tarveka had already studied the art of dollmaking before she sent her brother for the Muse, and applied those arts when she couldn’t replicate the incredible lifelike quality of Tinka, fighting her own body and racing to beat its inevitable shutdown, damn her father. She made the clank’s face so its expression could seem to change with a tilt of the head, or through association with subtle posture or a tone of voice.

Tinka’s help was invaluable with the more critical problems, before Tarveka’s father broke her too. Aaronev left the world scattered with broken women.

She is staring down at her own corpse and thinking, I don’t want to believe that I am dead, but what if —

Gil yanks them away from the memory with increasingly thoughtless ease — more of a nudge than a yank now, really, a gentle redirect — and tries not to mull on how she now knows Tarveka snuck her own body into her family castle’s medical waste.

She wasn’t bragging about knowing mental disciplines, so instead of letting herself start thinking about how she shouldn’t be thinking about things she shouldn’t be thinking about, inevitably defeating the purpose of the whole thing, she starts teaching Tarveka the Skiff alphabet. Then she moves on to their measuring system.

Base 9? thinks Tarveka. Really?

The number was sacred to an ancient simek—

Waͪrͤrͬiͦorˢᵖᵃʳᵏ, conveys the helpful impression Tarveka gets.

— so it’s sort of a thing. Don’t start. You count time by twenty-four. Twenty-four and sixty.

Yes, but that’s...

Normal here? Gil interrupts sarcastically.

Alright, touché.

 *

Gil is stripped open and vulnerable too, like this. There’s a kind of balance to it that settles the part of Tarveka that wants to be defensive. She’s shocked by the open, raw care the other woman feels, and the soft thread of doubt and hurt she put there.

 *

Tubing twists from the palanquin’s molded container like organs spilling from a fresh Coptic jar and isn’t it isn’t she dead so much to do trapped in this castle trapped —

They emerge with a gasp and Gil forces their attention back to the present project, which is strikingly reminiscent but not the same. It’s not you, you’re with me, please, Tarveka. If we don’t focus you will die.

We will die, corrects Tarveka. Suicidal idiot.

 *

Tarveka is getting better at taking the reins from Gil, remembering how to be flesh. Given all the factors, this is probably a bad thing.

 *

Gil fancies that Agatha is like one of her goddessess — a war queen who built herself wings of iron and sunlight, flew to the realm of the gods, and situated herself among them.

That is the best thing I’ve ever seen, says Tarveka. Really? Do you mind if I use that comparison? I’ve thought of her as like the sun before, you know, but we don’t have any sun goddesses.

She was reading associations out of Gil’s mind, then. Sometimes the queen was associated with Ishana, the punishing burning bringer of life.

Do you think —

That the legend could refer to some solar-powered vehicle? finishes Gil. Yes. I’ve incorporated that idea into some of my designs —

It says iron, but —

It must be from some old word that just means metal, I think.

Ah, like the “apple” of knowledge.

The what?

Now, fͭoͪuͤr of the sͫeͦvͬeͤnᶠᵒʳʷᵃʳᵈ ᵗʰᶤᶰᵏᶤᶰᵍ  popes disagree about this strongly, but...

 *

She grips her right hand with her right hand and feels for a pulse and this is the part where her heartrate should kick up but that’s the entire problem isn’t i —

“You two are spacing out again, aren’t you,” says Agatha, grabbing Gil by the chin and forcing them to look her in the eyes.

Focusing on Agatha is easy. “I’m not going to die on you, I — I  promise,” Gil reassures her. Or one of them does.

“Don’t you dare,” Agatha says, uses her grip to tilt Gil’s head, then leans forward and kisses them softly.

Then she bustles back to work. There’s still ever so much of it.

 *

Tarveka resents the ways the project of building a clank to puppet got away from her.

Tarveka has always placed a high value on her control over her own person. It is a representation of her personal strength which she feels, paradoxically, is both a testament to her indomitable will and an absolute lowest-bar basic achievement everyone should be expected to adhere to. After all, she does.

Tarveka administered as close to total control over her body as possible through the teachings of the Way of the Smoke. She controlled her own reactions. She controlled others’ perceptions of her.

But the incident of losing her body was a mad dash wresting control back from where the void devoured it from the very start, and she did not emerge entirely victorious|took heavy losses in her victory. Yes, she built her new body from its gears up, and it’s a masterwork, certainly, but she didn’t make it her new body on purpose. She didn’t mean to give that much to her father in her first move.

Overplayed her hand.

This single error is representative of a veritable cascade of them. She’s different, now, in ways she’s still only cataloguing. She was never as comfortable around biomatter as some sparks, but she finds she’s less fussed about it now. It took her months to connect that to a new aversive reaction to gutted machines and rust on old wires it takes a light fugue to push away.

Like many things, it’s nothing she ever constructed, not something she programmed. She’d very much like to put on airs and compare herself to Van Rijn with his famous bafflement at his own marvelous creations, but she would be more comfortable with this if she hadn’t created herself.

Is she even still herself?

“Did you know the fundamental components of an organic body experience a massive turnover rate?” says Gil.

“What?” snaps Tarveka, grabbing control of Gil’s own mouth to do it, which is becoming easier the longer she has to grow used to not being in a clank. She isn’t in the mood for a biology lesson.

“You know, the primary building components, uh, they’re round in animals and square in plants —”

“I know what cells are, Zengil.”

Instead of acting called out for being a patronizing know-it-all, Gil snaps her fingers and says, “Right, that’s what it is. Like little rooms. Thank you. I haven’t had reason to brush up on all the basic terminology in the local language. Didn’t usually have anyone to talk to about it, for one thing. Anyway, hundreds of millions —” She picks a flitting thought from Tarveka carelessly “— billions, thank you — of cells die off in a healthy person every day. On purpose! It’s great, really.” She finishes with a bit of the telltale distraction of a spark espousing on their specialty.

“...They do not,” says Tarveka.

“Well,” says Gil, “only some of them.” Tarveka gets a ghost impression, a diagram of the human body forged through in-depth understanding picked out in hot and cold spots. “We’re never the same for long, even if we’re sitting still. We’re not supposed to be. That’s what being alive is!”

Tarveka thinks about this. “Are you talking about necrosis?”

“I’m talking about apoptosis, you morbid little tit.”

“Seriously? You forgot ‘cell’, but you know that word?”

Gil mutters, but the impression Tarveka gets — a stack of secondhand books, at once familiar and foreign and exciting, stacked on a rock in an empty waste — is much more indicative than the actual words, which include “dare defy me”, “show them all”, and “then they’ll see, they’ll all see”, in an impressive but pat three-for-three.

Tarveka chews on a response. “If this is a clumsy attempt to make me feel better —”

“Who, me?” says Zengil. “Be nice to you? Never.”

“— Then it’s working,” finishes Tarveka. “But only a little. ...Shut up, don’t —” stare at me like that? No, that’s not right. This is getting very confusing. “Stop — stop having feelings at me, get back to work.”

“You’re not actually the boss of me, Sturm —”

“If you don’t connect that octave coupler it’s going to catch fire.”

“Ack!”

 *

“Do they realize how weird that looks?” asks Violetta, watching what appears to be Zengil talking to herself while they wait for someone madder than they are to hand them another task.

“They’re sparks,” says Moloch, shrugging. “Do they care?”

*

For a week Tarveka maintains the frequency of checking on her body she had when she’d thought something was wrong. (She’d been right.) She doesn’t have the opportunity to miss her heart pounding and her breath coming fast as she carries on the deception, because her gears whir and grind, and her vision shifts too amber, then too blue.

She goes through the motions of her normal routines, paring them down slowly. She doesn’t really know why she’s bothering when her audience is mostly the palanquin’s bearers. (Pallbearers.) She could order them away for maintenance and only seem like a snappish spark — she could bite, It’s a spark thing, get lost! when she doesn’t open the container, when she drops off the frequency of all her biological maintenance to a dead stop. But they avert their eyes and she doesn’t ever need to.

 *

Agatha grips them by the chin again but this time she just stares them in the eyes, whips out a flashlight and stares more, then says, “You’re integrating too strongly. You two can’t even be trusted to stay fighting?” She tsks. “Incredible.” Then she wanders off and begins writing out papers. They will only find out what’s on them later.

Si vales valeo is an abbreviation of si vales bene est ego valeo, which means “If you are well, I am well.”