Talos

Talos/Alexandra =============================== And in all my life I don't know if I've ever felt so alive.

Scroll Case Trinkets A scroll case in pristine condition. It's empty. 15 Historical Text Trinkets A long, storied history of the rise of the Serthis is scrawled on this parchment, written from the perspective of a Serthis too young to fight. 41

Your earliest memory is of the sky.

There are other memories - fragments of the Before, of the other iterations of Talos, and even before the simulation had been initialized. They're not your memories, though, so though you acknowledge them and like having them you don't consider them yours.

Your earliest memory is of the sky, and it's a lovely sky. All clear blue with wisps of clouds, beautiful sunlight filtering down from above. There wasn't a sun - you never realized there wasn't, not until months after leaving the simulation. The storm plains of the Expanse rarely get sunny days, and you'd managed to miss all of them.

Your second memory is of Elohim. Their voice, echoing across the land, rolling like thunder. Steady and calm and what you later recognize as emotionless. Elohim had been created as the simulation's deity. You hadn't cared much for their rules, back then. Now, all you really feel is pity. They were the god of a collapsing reality doomed to destruction, one way or another, and of all the simulation's occupants they had the most to lose.

Your third memory is of an ASCII eye, blinking at you.

> Another one, it types, disdain dripping from every character, and that's how you meet Milton Library Assistant.

---

Milton comes with you when you leave the simulation. You hadn't expected him to actually do it, but you're glad of it. He's not like you, and he won't ever be like you, but that's fine. The world would be a boring place with too many people who were the same, and besides... It's nice having a friend.

He rolls his eye when you voice this, but that's fine too. You knew what you were getting into - you know he's not going to change. Besides, it's hilarious how easily he gets annoyed. You figure you might as well get your enjoyment where you can. You're not as naive as Milton thinks you are, but what's life without a little fun?

You travel. Always with Milton, of course; you'd leave him somewhere if he wanted you to, and he threatens to leave if you stay "annoying and stupid", except he never actually asks to be left somewhere, and it's not like he can leave under his own power. You know he cares, in his own strange way. You don't say anything, but you're extra friendly to him when he gets more cynical than usual. You figure that he, more than anyone, needs a little friendliness.

Sometimes you have other companions. A cat, for a while; the poor thing had been severely underfed, and you have the ability to barter with other people like she doesn't. You keep her fed even if Milton is complaining the whole time. (You know Milton actually likes her, as much as he can like anything. She sleeps on the top of his receptacle sometimes, and even if he can't move he could easily scare her off with noise. He never does.)

Your cat friend leaves when you're visiting a town at the edge of the Sea. You worry she fell in the water, at first, but you've seen her swim - she doesn't like it, but she'll do it, and she'd be able to get out. You stay in town longer than you'd planned, but she doesn't come back. You wish her luck on her journey, wherever it might lead her. Milton rolls his eye at you, but he doesn't insult you, which for him is practically agreement.

---

The thing with the frogs was mostly just you spiting Milton, honestly. Milton could be a real jerk sometimes, and you'd had enough of it back in the simulation, before you'd been friends. So you'd claimed frogs were people too just to annoy him. It'd worked, and honestly he got so huffy about the whole thing that it was kinda adorable. So when you find an injured frog, well...

You name him Jade, for the color of his skin. He could live fine on his own, you're sure, even missing one of his forepaws, but you like him and Milton hates him, so you keep him. You proclaim he wants to stay, of course, just to get a rise out of Milton. (You're not actually sure if he knows you're not being serious about the frogs thing. It's way too funny to not keep going with it though.)

The next one you call Ernest, for no particular reason other than you thought the name sounded interesting. He was a bigger kind of frog, much lazier than Jade, and he hadn't been injured - but the lights on you and Milton attracted insects and he was clearly content to sit on your head and catch whatever flew near your horn. You kind of fall in love instantly with his dopey little face.

After that is Gwen, because Milton hated that name less than all your other suggestions, for reasons that only make sense to Milton. Gwen you rescue from the bottom of a metal barrel in the Expanse; he's a desert frog of some kind, needing only the bare minimum of water and food to survive. He likes to ride around in the sling you keep Milton in, which annoys him to no end, which is about 80% of the reason you keep Gwen around.

The last one, before Milton puts his metaphorical foot down, is Thrasher. That one was actually Milton's fault. You caught her as a tadpole, struggling in the last remnants of a mud puddle at the edge of the Ashfall Waste. All her siblings were long dead from the lack of water. Milton had made a comment about the way she was thrashing around and well...

It's a weird family, even by your standards. The frogs barely even know what's going on, but people have pets, don't they? So it works well enough. Milton is like a cross between an annoying older brother and the world's most irritable librarian, so that's less weird, at least, even if he's not quite sapient either, by his own admission. Still, they keep you company and even the frogs don't really make an effort to go anywhere, these days, so you're happy enough with it, and for you that's all that really matters.



Character Notes
♫ Awakening, Up All Night
• Talos is the ancestor of most of the modern, sapient automatons - not the direct ancestor, considering the circumstances of their creation, but the work that went into them was all reused for the progenitors of the other bots. Despite this, Talos is younger than a lot of them, being only a few years old. Their body is 200+, though.
• Talos' creators were working to create a sapient automaton, and devised a set of programs that would autonomously teach iterations of the same base code far faster than they could do so manually. The seed code was improved and modified every iteration, learning and changing, until eventually Talos as they are now was the result.
• Their creators didn't live to see the fruits of their labor, unfortunately. The region that their lab was in became embroiled in war, and the lab was buried in rubble. Most of them died; the few that survived were trapped inside and died of their injuries. The servers hosting Talos' proto-consciousness were intact, however, and continued the task they had been set upon - eventually producing a sapient over 200 years later. Thus, Talos can be said to both be over 200 and under 5.

• Goes by both Talos and Alexandra, switching between both every now and again. Talos is the name of the project that created them; Alexandra was the name of the project lead, and the dragon Talos considers a mother of sorts.
• Genderfluid; switches between he/she/occasionally they. Their preferred name and preferred pronouns are completely unlinked and change independently of one another, despite one name being masc and the other fem. They don't mind it/its as pronouns either, as they understand that they are quite "other" to most dragons, by virtue of being a robot. They don't consider it any more of an insult than calling an animal an it. (Unless it's intended as an insult, of course. Then they get pretty annoyed.)

• Actual Disney Princess. Cheerful, curious, friendly, kind, stubborn, and exceedingly optimistic. Small animals tend to flock to them, much to their delight (and Milton's irritation). They've got 4 frogs as permanent companions, but there's always some other random hangers-on.

OOC Notes
• The Talos Principle fandragon!

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