[b]The Gadgeteer[/b]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/HNkjlXB.png[/img]
Home Timeline: 10810 (The "Gadget Heir" Timeline)
[i][b]Biography:[/b][/i]
[i]On October 10th, 2010 a set of high-tech armor was fused to a child inside a life support tank, a boy believed to be the son of Werner Scribe, the patriarch of the Scribe industrial empire. The head engineer, Martin Zehn, believed he had lost his own son in the incident which injured the child, and quietly thought "Happy birthday, son" as the armor was attached piece by piece. Then a lot of information was streamed from the quantum computer to the brain of the patient, creating 10 years worth of a false life.

The problem, or rather solution, was that Martin Zehn knew what life as part of the Scribe dynasty that employed him would do to a child's outlook, and instead had created a fictional family that was relatively well-off but humble to be the simulation environment.

The other, actual problem was that the quantum computer had analyzed the DNA of the patient and supposed parent, and determined that the person the suit had fused with was in fact Oliver Zehn, not Mr. Scribe's son.

The OTHER, other actual problem was that all the vast technological advancements that Scribe & Co. had distributed throughout their world over the past 10 years was derived from the same source as Oliver's armor, and they had not realized that the boy opening his eyes for the first time had permanent administrator access on the newly activated device, meaning that every electronic or quantum device on the planet was under his command. And when Oliver saw all the suffering and pain, much of which was caused by the Scribe dynasty's industrial empire...

Oliver made it clear that he knew he was not Werner Scribe's son, apologized to Mr. Zehn for doing the terrible act he was about to do... and riddled Werner Scribe with laser gatling fire. He then marched out of the laboratory, and once outside, sent a goodbye message to his father. Then he activated the temporal singularizer, a part of the project Mr. Scribe wanted kept secret but was left wide open to administrator access, and shifted to a timeline unknown.[/i]

[i][b]Travel Method:[/b][/i]
[i]The cybernetic suit known simply as the[/i] Mk.II[i], despite its Victorian appearance, is extremely advanced, and contains a Singularizer for cross-timeline travel. The suit's quantum computer is wired directly to the Gadgeteer's brain, allowing him to understand languages never before encountered provided he can get enough samples of analog wireless transmissions or good ol' human speech. The suit is essentially part of his body and cannot be removed, having replaced skin that was originally heavily burnt and being wired directly into the cerebellum.

It recharges via a "backpack" built-in to the suit, powered by a pair of mysterious crystals. Dubbed the Symmetricite Crystals, they were impervious to all attempts to take samples of the material, and produce massive amounts of electricity when placed between four and five inches from each other, no more, no less. The crystals power the suit, but also simultaneously charge a set of carbon nanotube capacitors that are used to timeskip, and it takes between 24 and 25 hours for the capacitors to recharge.

A laser gatling system is built into each of the Gadgeteer's wrists, where it is normally retracted beneath protective panels.

The two pouches on his hips are only as big as they appear, but they are protected by locks that only open when he gives a neural command to the pouch he wants to open. He uses them to store any small objects such as a game console he picked up on his travels or his Psychic Wallet.

His face is always covered by a breathing apparatus which is powerful enough to let him breathe underwater or in toxic gasses, but useless if there is no atmosphere. It has a thermoacoustic outer membrane which acts as a speaker, and the speech synthesizer is good enough that his speech sounds entirely natural for his age yet will translate to other languages if required.

Finally, because the suit stands out so much in nearly any timeline, it has an active camouflage system. The camouflage can disguise him in the garments and ancestry (skin color, etc.) of a local[/i] human [i]individual about the same age as himself. However, any sufficient impact such as from a melee weapon or a heavy or fast-traveling projectile will disrupt the system, leaving his true form plainly visible.[/i]

[b]Timeline 10810[/b]
[i]A "YeAST" (Yet Another Steampunk Timeline) to the end, Timeline 10810 was held back thanks to a prolonged Great War (World War I) that lasted until the 1960s. Europe was left picking up the pieces for far longer than anything seen in Timeline 1, and the United States entered a second civil war that left the country split into three vertical strips. By 1980 the world leaders in technology were, in order, the Japanese Empire, the Soviet Union, Canada, South Africa and Brazil, but this quickly changed when Japan and the Soviets entered a nuclear exchange which destroyed their major population centers and left both countries poor, without allies and suffering from severe epidemics of radiation poisoning.

Canada took the lead over the next several years, pushing the last few limits of steam-driven machinery by powering them using nuclear reactors. During this time the nation slipped into the same kind of dog-eat-dog attitude that befell the United Kingdom a century earlier.

In the year 2000, an explosion rocked a factory complex in Vancouver owned by the wealthy businessman Werner Scribe, who had been visiting the factory with his infant son. At the time, Oliver Zehn, son of the Scribe family business' head engineer, was in his mother's arms as she brought the baby's father a forgotten lunch, when the incident occurred.

Werner Scribe survived the event, but it took hours to clear the rubble and find the infant believed to be his son. However, the baby's body and face were so badly injured that he was put on life support. The body of Oliver Zehn was seemingly never found. Mr. Zehn, the head engineer, was devastated by the loss of his son and wife, but when he was asked to engage in a secret "company project" to save Werner's son he agreed to prevent the loss of another life.

The project turned out to be the reverse engineering of an advanced suit of high-tech armor that had been found in the rubble, its origin unknown. It had seemingly fused to the corpse of the person who was wearing it, but most of the technology was explainable by their scientific knowledge. The child was kept barely alive in a tank of nutrients, and they were going to save him by turning him into a cyborg. The project took ten years and became the sole focus of the Scribe family's wealth and industrial empire, and during that period the amount of technological advancement outpaced aesthetic design by so much that television and video games were commonplace by the end, and quantum computers, augmented reality, virtual reality and fast-breeder nuclear reactors became a cutting edge available only to governments, corporations and the mega-wealthy, yet all encased in brass, iron and hardwood.[/i]