The Becile Bot Backstory
Feb. 21st, 2015 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snaptrapDespite what history may tell you there were plenty of civilian casualties during Thaddeus Becile’s attack on the Dandy Candy Mines. Many of which are unrecorded.
Three missing mine workers would obviously go unnoticed during the Copper Elephant War.
Brothers Tony and Jack worked in the rock candy dig, sending the money they made back to their family in America. Being Italian immigrants, money was tight for them, especially being around for a generation or so in America. When the opportunity arose to work the mines over in Africa, they gladly took it due to the high pay.
Tony was ambitious. He wanted to really be something, a singer. A crooner. He had the voice, but not the background. He needed to get a kickstart, get his family squared and get enough money to move out to the westcoast. Get found. He wanted to be the protagonist in a success story. Make his own way. No get-rich-quick garbage.
Jack was young and optimistic. A real sunny kid. He kinda got that way on account of Tony’s volatile moods. If Dad and Tony got into an argument or if Tony got into a scrape with any of those nativist jerks in town Jack would be able to cheer him up or calm him down. Jack always wanted to be like his older brother, ever since they were little. The guy was a little rough around the edges, but he was kind and just and moral and inside just the greatest brother a kid could ask for.
The kids worked a lot with Frank, another American. He was from an African-american sharecropping family, and he moved out to the east in hopes of an easier life-style. Unfortunately he didn’t make it as far as he thought he would out there, his race being a bigger issue than he anticipated. He took the same opportunity the brothers did when he had the chance. His father was a beaten down, head bowed type of man. Frank was much too proud for that. The same pride got him into a lot of trouble throughout his adolescence. As a result he’s become a real cynic.
Jack and Tony both liked Frank and vice versa, even if Frank was a bit stand offish. Frank didn’t believe in Tony’s ambitions, thought the kid was getting his hopes up too high. Jack liked Frank for his calm, rational demeanor, something he wasn’t very accustomed too between his brother and father.
During the first attack on the mine, Jack was lost to a cave-in. Tony died much after. He got himself stuck near his brother when trying to tend to him, when the collapsing rock trapped the two inside. Jack was stuck under a large piece of stone, and crushing him over time. Tony stayed by his side, screaming and screaming and screaming for help until he got hoarse, practically inaudible. He suffocated.
Frank died in the industrial workshop attached to the refinery. A fire broke out when an elephant took out one of the smoke stacks and toppled most of the hall. Frank was immolated.
___
Decades after the Copper Elephant War, an elderly Thaddeus Becile went about trying to collect the candy ore needed to fuel his green matter inventions once again, now shrouded in enough obscurity and inactivity that no one was suspect. He was only relatively successful in his last ditch effort, being that the Dandy Candy mine’s had been shutdown due to having been nearly exhausted of their ore. He only had a very small amount of fuel for his plans.
Becile again, out of desperation (he had fallen very ill, and this was his last shot), tried to construct a husk in which Delilah could be resurrected within. (Through unsavory means, he had come into possession of the remains necessary for such an experiment.) With little experience in anthropomorphic automatons, he used a mannequin for the chassis and wedged a Green Matter reactor in the chest.
The result was an abomination.
It was neither Delilah or an individual identity, it was a poor soul ripped from the grave. Half-mad and hysterical, this was not the Delilah he loved. It was a mockery. It screamed and cursed at him, and stayed still for hours, only to wail as soon as he approached. Other times it would coo and cry for him, begging for him to hold it. It would say the old things Delilah would, but it wasn’t her.
He locked it up and away. He didn’t have the heart to deactivate it, he just couldn’t stand to look at the thing.
The illness still plagued him, but the green matter seemed to stave it off as long as he didn’t leave the wealth of it he had at the manor.
When the Steam Man Band became renown for their glorious war effort, Becile decided he couldn’t stand it anymore. He, with the limited knowledge he garnered from trying to revive Delilah, built three nearly identical automatons, for the soul purpose of stealing the notoriety while they were away during war.
He built two from the ore he had extracted from a deep cavern within the abandoned mine, and one from the residue left in the refinery’s furnaces.
Each one was built to resemble it’s counterpart, though Becile had run out of resources/materials when working on the last, unable to give the poor bastard a proper face plate. Corners were cut with all three of them though, some of which created bigger problems than others.
The creations soon became almost like children to him. And they treated him like a father. They were largely successful during the absence of the Steam Man Band, though only because people were under the impression that they were in fact their Walter counterparts. This misconception soon changed after the war. Becile’s boys were attacked for being knock offs while the Walter kids flourished.
The Jack’s insanity was cause by an accident during a busking performance. Trying to impress Hare, Jack went after a rather wealthy looking woman in hopes of conning her out of her genuine pearl necklace. At this point a storm was brewing above and most were getting off the streets. Hare, not paying attention, lost track of Jack when he ran off. The storm hit, and he and the Skull went out looking for him.
They found Jack in a back ally, pearls strewn everywhere. Soot streaked the ground, and Jack lay jerking and twitching and laughing in a smoking heap. He had been struck by lighting. His circuits had blown and rendered him completely insane.
Real trouble started when the law got involved. Green matter had been outlawed due to its volatile and necroreactive properties, making the Becile Bots contraband. They went into hiding, and were rendered unable to leave the manor without being under the cover of night. Any they business they did was shady and illicit.
Becile eventually died when the green matter, (though extending his life far past what was natural) rendered him sickly and weak. He died of something akin to radiation poisoning.
The green matter reactors on which the Becile Bots run are highly volatile, and are liable to essentially melt down at any time. Hare’s right eye is a symptom of this, the optic having blown out due to slowly decaying power source. (Jack and Hare’s eyes are also hidden in correspondence to Jon’s and Rabbit’s blue ones, so that they resembled the two more.)
___
The only members currently living in the dilapidated Becile manor are his robots including what Hare calls Downgrade, Becile’s poor attempt at reviving his lost love. She is difficult to deal with, but Hare knows that out of all four of them, she is a likely candidate for having been dealt the worse hand.
The four of them have only an ex-employee of Becile’s who does maintenance, Mr. Weed. He stays only of his own will, (and perhaps because he is now homeless.) He’s an apathetic, grizzled old drunk, who may or may not have a soft spot for these metallic misfits. He want’s to stick around until he knows they don’t need him anymore.
But being that their core’s are timebombs, he doesn’t know long how that is.
All rights go to neckreductionsurge-ry at tumblr.
Three missing mine workers would obviously go unnoticed during the Copper Elephant War.
Brothers Tony and Jack worked in the rock candy dig, sending the money they made back to their family in America. Being Italian immigrants, money was tight for them, especially being around for a generation or so in America. When the opportunity arose to work the mines over in Africa, they gladly took it due to the high pay.
Tony was ambitious. He wanted to really be something, a singer. A crooner. He had the voice, but not the background. He needed to get a kickstart, get his family squared and get enough money to move out to the westcoast. Get found. He wanted to be the protagonist in a success story. Make his own way. No get-rich-quick garbage.
Jack was young and optimistic. A real sunny kid. He kinda got that way on account of Tony’s volatile moods. If Dad and Tony got into an argument or if Tony got into a scrape with any of those nativist jerks in town Jack would be able to cheer him up or calm him down. Jack always wanted to be like his older brother, ever since they were little. The guy was a little rough around the edges, but he was kind and just and moral and inside just the greatest brother a kid could ask for.
The kids worked a lot with Frank, another American. He was from an African-american sharecropping family, and he moved out to the east in hopes of an easier life-style. Unfortunately he didn’t make it as far as he thought he would out there, his race being a bigger issue than he anticipated. He took the same opportunity the brothers did when he had the chance. His father was a beaten down, head bowed type of man. Frank was much too proud for that. The same pride got him into a lot of trouble throughout his adolescence. As a result he’s become a real cynic.
Jack and Tony both liked Frank and vice versa, even if Frank was a bit stand offish. Frank didn’t believe in Tony’s ambitions, thought the kid was getting his hopes up too high. Jack liked Frank for his calm, rational demeanor, something he wasn’t very accustomed too between his brother and father.
During the first attack on the mine, Jack was lost to a cave-in. Tony died much after. He got himself stuck near his brother when trying to tend to him, when the collapsing rock trapped the two inside. Jack was stuck under a large piece of stone, and crushing him over time. Tony stayed by his side, screaming and screaming and screaming for help until he got hoarse, practically inaudible. He suffocated.
Frank died in the industrial workshop attached to the refinery. A fire broke out when an elephant took out one of the smoke stacks and toppled most of the hall. Frank was immolated.
___
Decades after the Copper Elephant War, an elderly Thaddeus Becile went about trying to collect the candy ore needed to fuel his green matter inventions once again, now shrouded in enough obscurity and inactivity that no one was suspect. He was only relatively successful in his last ditch effort, being that the Dandy Candy mine’s had been shutdown due to having been nearly exhausted of their ore. He only had a very small amount of fuel for his plans.
Becile again, out of desperation (he had fallen very ill, and this was his last shot), tried to construct a husk in which Delilah could be resurrected within. (Through unsavory means, he had come into possession of the remains necessary for such an experiment.) With little experience in anthropomorphic automatons, he used a mannequin for the chassis and wedged a Green Matter reactor in the chest.
The result was an abomination.
It was neither Delilah or an individual identity, it was a poor soul ripped from the grave. Half-mad and hysterical, this was not the Delilah he loved. It was a mockery. It screamed and cursed at him, and stayed still for hours, only to wail as soon as he approached. Other times it would coo and cry for him, begging for him to hold it. It would say the old things Delilah would, but it wasn’t her.
He locked it up and away. He didn’t have the heart to deactivate it, he just couldn’t stand to look at the thing.
The illness still plagued him, but the green matter seemed to stave it off as long as he didn’t leave the wealth of it he had at the manor.
When the Steam Man Band became renown for their glorious war effort, Becile decided he couldn’t stand it anymore. He, with the limited knowledge he garnered from trying to revive Delilah, built three nearly identical automatons, for the soul purpose of stealing the notoriety while they were away during war.
He built two from the ore he had extracted from a deep cavern within the abandoned mine, and one from the residue left in the refinery’s furnaces.
Each one was built to resemble it’s counterpart, though Becile had run out of resources/materials when working on the last, unable to give the poor bastard a proper face plate. Corners were cut with all three of them though, some of which created bigger problems than others.
The creations soon became almost like children to him. And they treated him like a father. They were largely successful during the absence of the Steam Man Band, though only because people were under the impression that they were in fact their Walter counterparts. This misconception soon changed after the war. Becile’s boys were attacked for being knock offs while the Walter kids flourished.
The Jack’s insanity was cause by an accident during a busking performance. Trying to impress Hare, Jack went after a rather wealthy looking woman in hopes of conning her out of her genuine pearl necklace. At this point a storm was brewing above and most were getting off the streets. Hare, not paying attention, lost track of Jack when he ran off. The storm hit, and he and the Skull went out looking for him.
They found Jack in a back ally, pearls strewn everywhere. Soot streaked the ground, and Jack lay jerking and twitching and laughing in a smoking heap. He had been struck by lighting. His circuits had blown and rendered him completely insane.
Real trouble started when the law got involved. Green matter had been outlawed due to its volatile and necroreactive properties, making the Becile Bots contraband. They went into hiding, and were rendered unable to leave the manor without being under the cover of night. Any they business they did was shady and illicit.
Becile eventually died when the green matter, (though extending his life far past what was natural) rendered him sickly and weak. He died of something akin to radiation poisoning.
The green matter reactors on which the Becile Bots run are highly volatile, and are liable to essentially melt down at any time. Hare’s right eye is a symptom of this, the optic having blown out due to slowly decaying power source. (Jack and Hare’s eyes are also hidden in correspondence to Jon’s and Rabbit’s blue ones, so that they resembled the two more.)
___
The only members currently living in the dilapidated Becile manor are his robots including what Hare calls Downgrade, Becile’s poor attempt at reviving his lost love. She is difficult to deal with, but Hare knows that out of all four of them, she is a likely candidate for having been dealt the worse hand.
The four of them have only an ex-employee of Becile’s who does maintenance, Mr. Weed. He stays only of his own will, (and perhaps because he is now homeless.) He’s an apathetic, grizzled old drunk, who may or may not have a soft spot for these metallic misfits. He want’s to stick around until he knows they don’t need him anymore.
But being that their core’s are timebombs, he doesn’t know long how that is.
All rights go to neckreductionsurge-ry at tumblr.
