Dreamer's BackStory:<br/><br/>m<a class="postlink" href="https://aryion.com/g3/showitem.php?id=82539">http://aryion.com/g3/showitem.php?id=82539</a>m<br/><br/>...Who, or what, is Dreamer?<br/><br/>With the demise of The Voar, and no further signs of a possible resuscitation for some time now, I confess that I pretty much forgot all about that character.  However today, out of the blue, I had a sudden thought, and wondered about the guy.<br/><br/>I am aware that for a while there were actually people reading the Voar, people not participating but enjoying as the tale played out.  I also have, though I can't quite explain why, the feeling that somehow I was responsible for one participant dropping the tale and leaving everyone else in the lurch.<br/><br/>Anyway, I figure that with it dead now I might as well reveal a few of Dreamer's secrets.  I played him mysterious, revealing bits and pieces of his secrets in his backstory and during the RP but leaving a lot to the reader's imagination.  It's true that he was a super-powered freak physically, but the thing to remember about him is that he was incredibly flawed emotionally.  Therein lay his character: physically strong, even capable of taking bullets, but lost and confused mentally and emotionally.<br/><br/>To help people understand him, I'm going to have to reveal the secrets of his past.  I owe it to anyone who was enjoying the Voar tale, right?<br/><br/>First off, as most of you had probably figured out by now, Dreamer is a cyborg, like Ome's hermaphrodite character introduced near the end of the RP, Mag.  However, whereas Mag (as Borb explained it to me) was used by the Fanged Lady, Alhanda, to test state-of-the art experimental cybernetics on, Dreamer is “Equipped,” for lack of a better term, with ancient technology.  While his cybernetics are extremely advanced, they date back to the Human-Furry war millennia ago.  The technology was lost in the war and the aftermath, and Furries being naturally more inclined to low-tech practices --- hunting, feeding, such --- and naturally powerful, they had less need of the stuff.  Thus, his cybernetics are of a type and sophistication no one today has ever imagined.  That is why the doctors were so shocked and amazed when he was brought to the hospital on the day he was found wandering along the side of a road.<br/><br/>So how did Dreamer get these enhancements?  Why did he appear from seemingly nowhere?  Where did he get his name?  Why are his memories hazy, or is he secretive about what he does remember?<br/><br/>The truth is, he is as old as his technology.  In the last days of the Human-Furry war, the humans started hiding caches of weapons for a resistance.  Their plans collapsed, and they were destroyed, but some of their most secret caches were never found.<br/><br/>Dreamer was a member of a special unit.  They were to be infiltrators, trained to slip in amongst the enslaved humans and foment rebellions.  They were given advanced cybernetics to grant them an edge over humans and many furs, and were to kill furs in positions of authority.  However, their superiors' plans were long-term, to an extreme.  For the infiltrators to operate in an environment not suspicious of them from the start, they were cryo-frozen, to be thawed out decades if not centuries later when the fur invaders had become soft.<br/><br/>With the resistance destroyed, no one ever activated the hidden unit.  Time passed; decades, centuries... millennia.  The secret base, concealed underground, running on a limitless energy source, and self-maintaining via androids and backup systems, was never found.  The cryo-frozen unit slept on, kept in stasis, waiting for mission orders that would never come.  The war created the badlands between Kazmer and the House Blotar territories, and concealed by that extra hazard Dreamer's resting place was never disturbed.<br/><br/>Eventually, however, something triggered the shelter's systems into thawing out its residents.  It could be a pre-set failsafe program, in case the resistance died; it could be analysis of present-day radio chatter that made mention of human resistances.  There's no telling.  All we know is that after millennia the hidden underground base thawed out one of its sheltered soldiers, possibly completely at random.<br/><br/>When he awoke, Dreamer-7 remembered everything.  He remembered his mission, his training, his hatred for the furs that had destroyed everything he had once loved.  He awakened, “spoke” with the master computer of the base, and discovered how very long he had been asleep... and that humans, even after all this time, were still slaves to the furs.<br/><br/>Determined to see his mission through, the man pulled some weapons out of storage and headed to the surface.  He was just a grunt, a lesser member of the unit, so he chose to scout the world above and report before thawing out the rest of his team.  Were the situation beyond whatever his team could hope to gain control of, the rest of his team could simply keep sleeping until a better time came.<br/><br/>However, Dreamer-7 had neglected to consider possible side effects of his long cryo-stasis.  He thawed out one day, and the next headed across the badlands toward Blotar lands, trusting his cybernetic enhancements to get him across them quickly and safely.  Instead, his body had an adverse reaction to the massive heat he now faced, sending him into a delirious state, his long-sleeping mind overwhelmed by the sudden extreme changes.  By the time he was found wandering alongside the road by Officer Lakran Hereford and his partner Heifa, Dreamer-7 had forgotten almost everything he'd ever known... including his own name.  All he would remember from that day on was “Dreamer.”<br/><br/>Dreamer carried weapons from his time, also sophisticated and the types of which the world wouldn't recognize.  While Maeve Blotar would recognize one of his firearms as an “antique,” neither of them would have ever before seen the likes of the green-alloy, energy-pack-powered “laser knife.”<br/><br/>Anyway, as a result of his delirium, Dreamer forgot many things, including his mission.  Maeve Blotar took him in, and cared for him, in part out of curiosity as anything else.  Well treated and increasingly aware that humans in Blotar lands were fortunate, Dreamer adapted well.<br/><br/>It should be noted that before his war, Dreamer did not hate the furs.  For a time furs and humans had shared lands; some of his best friends had been furs.  However when the invasion came, he witnessed the rape and eventual eating of his entire family, and as a youngster he was cast into slavery alive.  He developed that hatred of furs on that day, but of canine furs in particular.  His life as a fur-killer came from that hatred, and when he joined the human resistance it was simply to kill more of them.<br/><br/>However Dreamer wasn't a bad person, before the war.  Quite the opposite, he was raised to be respectful and kind; his was one of the few families that had no prejudices whatsoever toward the few fur families living amongst them.  With his memories missing, and being well treated, Dreamer's good nature took over, and while he spent much of his free time researching ancient Hujin --- the city he had once been based in, but barely remembered --- he no longer hated furs.  His good nature even made him throw himself into the jaws of a machine to save a young fur child.<br/><br/>Slowly his memories came back, in bits and pieces, not fully but enough to know what he was supposed to be doing, and why: killing furs, to avenge himself.  However, treated well and fairly, having lived happily enough, and having even loved Maeve Blotar more than most humans could believe possible, Dreamer chose to throw aside his past.  He chose to live in the present.<br/><br/>Besides, he had forgotten how to get back to the ancient compound anyway.<img alt="^^;" src="./images/smilies/sweatdrop.gif" title="Sweat drop"/><br/><br/>Still, this explains his anger and his confusion.  He remembers that he slaughtered furs, and remembers why.  He remembers a lot of his training.  However his old hatred is at odds with his overall nature and his newfound trust in the Blotars, especially Maeve.  That Maeve told him, before letting him leave on a journey (just as the rebellion was about to start, unfortunately for her), that she wanted him to lead humans to peaceful equality with the furs, was that much more important.<br/><br/>By the time the Voar “ceased,” Dreamer was determined to save Maeve and Feldana first, and then to return to House Blotar lands to kill the tyrant human leader, Shark.  Why?  Because at that point, Dreamer could no longer stand the violence.  After hating Furs for so long because of the evils they had committed, he had now seen humans doing the same to the furs.  He no longer wanted human domination: evil was still evil.  He now wanted coexistence instead.<br/><br/>THE TECHNOLOGIES<br/><br/>I actually made a character sheet for Dreamer some time back, when Saiai posted such for his characters in an attempt to keep the Voar alive.  It is to be noted that I created Dreamer based on an RPG I had been messing around with for years, titled “Operation Suicide.”  The original RPG was a military-type game, in a near future, wherein Players create characters for “Suicide Ops,” an elite, well-paid but high-fatality force assigned all the most deadly missions.  The game was a mishmash of games I'd played, with traces of “CyberPunk” combined with pretty much anything I could snatch of from movies, books, and games.  Thus it was habitual for the soldiers to find themselves facing “Terminators,” “Predators,” and “ED-209s,” as well as passing through “StarGates” or time travelling to Pearl Harbor or ending up in a D&D world facing dragons.  Everything was fair game, based on the DM's discretion.<br/><br/>Anyway, as a near-future setting where characters tended to lose limbs often, cybernetic limbs became common, though the really expensive ones were incredibly powerful.  “Light Sabers” became possible if incredibly pricey, and Laser Knives (such as Dreamers) or Laser Swords were second-rate powered blades.<br/><br/>Humans could only handle so much technology being grafted into their flesh before going insane; if they overdid it, they became deadly, soulless cyborgs desiring nothing more than power of every sort.<br/><br/>Anyway.  Dreamer had the following enhancements, taken straight from “Operation Suicide:”<br/><br/>-Dermal Plating.  Human skin was reinforced against tearing and piercing, in a complex procedure I won't even pretend to explain.  The procedure essentially triples a natural human “To Hit” (the number attacks must come up to to do damage).  Adding body armor on top makes for a hell of a difficult person to kill.  In Dreamer's case, the Dermal Plating is what broke needles in the hospital, and what allowed him to survive being shot by Lanner when he went to rescue Maeve.  Not to mention keeping his flesh relatively intact when he went through a machine to save little Feldana.<br/><br/>-A rank Five-Point-Five combat limb instead of a right arm.  Covered in a regrowth of his own arm's skin.  Capable of extreme feats of strength with that one arm (smashing machines and cars), however as it was experimental it had a tendency to go haywire.  Made of a special reinforced alloy, damn near unbreakable.<br/><br/>-Cybered Spine: created to protect the human spine when performing acts of inhuman strength.  Was discovered to be a good idea when an early test subject, equipped with cyber arms and legs, easily caught a multi-ton weight but his entire torso compacted into the shape of a small tire.<img alt="^^;" src="./images/smilies/sweatdrop.gif" title="Sweat drop"/><br/><br/>-Boosted Reflexes: implants into muscle tissue and nerve endings allowing a human to move extremely fast.  Something also safer to use to full potential with cybernetic back and limb protection.  Otherwise you tear your own muscles and break your own bones from excessive speed.  In game play, it boosted a character's initiative roll from 1D6 to 2D6+2, a substantial difference.<br/><br/>OTHER NOTES<br/><br/>The “Operation Suicide” rules have also been extensively used in the “Survival of the Species” storyline.  ((m<a class="postlink" href="https://aryion.com/g3/showgallery.php?id=70290">http://aryion.com/g3/showgallery.php?id=70290</a>m))  Despite the primitive state humans are in, the story IS set in a far future.  As such readers of that series (all three of you<img alt=":wink:" src="./images/smilies/wink.gif" title="Wink"/>) shouldn't be surprised if certain surprising technologies start popping up.<br/><br/>ADDENDUM: It has occurred to me that Dreamer and Tommy, from my “Survival of the Species” series, are virtually identical.  It wasn't at all an intentional decision; I added Tommy spontaneously when otherwise the entire group in Part 4 would have been wiped out too quickly for me to have a story.  Only today did I realize Tommy and Dreamer share many of the same traits, even beyond the cybernetics: they're both physically powerful, but emotionally unstable.  Both disobeying their orders, as well... both from long-forgotten worlds.  Perhaps I'm giving too much away, but then again it's not like the few people reading SOS will also be reading this...<img alt=":wink:" src="./images/smilies/wink.gif" title="Wink"/>and Tommy's secrets are due to start coming out anyway.<img alt="&gt;.&gt;" src="./images/smilies/shifty.gif" title="Shifty eyes"/>