Name: Mirko Mairon Mallory
Aliases: The Artificer, The Mechanic
Sex: Male
Species: Rathi (red fox/rabbit) Hybrid
Age: 33
Place of Birth: Birr, County Offaly, Ireland, Earth-660
Occupation: Freelance “Technical Adviser," Pirate, Supervillain
Legal Status: Wanted
Allegiance: Mallory Family (formerly)
Height: 5'8”
Weight: ~140lbs
Sexuality: Homosexual
Marital Status: Single
Known relatives: Mallory Mallory (mother; deceased), Edvin Mallory (father), Margo Mallory (triplet sister), Morgan Mallory (triplet sister), Mira Jane Mallory (clone of triplet sister), Doc Mallory (half-brother), Rebecca Mallory (niece), Zahra Xerfantes (sister-in-law)
Vehicle of Choice: The Theseus
Weapons of Choice: Tasers, Multiple Snare and Gas traps, Mentally and Remotely Controlled Androids
Creator: Groveclearer
Voiceclaim: Kefin Mahon
Mirko Mallory was born alongside his twin sisters, Margo and Morgan, in the fall of 1989, nineteen years the junior of his older brother Doc Mallory. The trio were fairly rough hybrids, fox and rabbit traits' not exactly having the smoothest blend. Whereas his sisters were far more vulpine, he inherited the brunt of the lapine traits, being almost fully capable of passing for a full-blooded rabbit save for the all-important teeth and eyes. This naturally got him labeled “creepy” by other children, something he's resented the bulk of his life and compensated (many would say overcompensated) for by becoming extremely personable thanks to public speaking and improv courses. He never shuts up, to put a point on it.
Having two twin sisters is a pain, but what's even worse is having two twin sisters with superpowers. Seems that's a common enough thing on Earth-660. Probably has something to do with the widespread use of nuclear energy or that time Zucca vented some “harmless radiation” into the solar system a few centuries ago. Not helping matters was his mother's near veneration of her eldest son, Marion, who'd left home before the triplets were even born and had not contacted the family since. Marion, known better as Doc Mallory, had become a star in the world of wrestling and had seemingly no interest at all in ever sharing his success with the family (or even acknowledging their existence) as they struggled through the slow death of the Irish wrestling scene, having to switch lifestyles towards running a family medical practice with wrestling training on the side. Either way, his sisters and brother won the lottery as far as extraordinary abilities go and he was stuck with the lame consolation prize of being your stereotypical “gifted” kid. Numbers and words just came naturally to him...but his real passion was for engineering. He became fascinated with how systems locked together, particularly how electronics and invisible waves controlled the entire support network of society. It's amazing how something you never see can hold so much power over you.
At age fifteen Mallory Mallory caught him in a...compromised position with one of her wrestling trainees, who was promptly sent packing. She never discussed this with Mirko, seemingly trying to compartmentalize it away as quickly as possible, but the look of disappointment she gave him stuck with him forever.
Shortly thereafter he discovered, through trial and error, that he could psionically manipulate any bit of technology he tinkered with. He couched this information for several years while he fine-tuned his control over it. What better way to show up his siblings than to burst onto the scene as a brand new superhero: The Mechanic! (working title; planning still in process), and steal all the press without them being any the wiser? He'd leave clues as to his identity, sure, but he'd do everything through proxies until eventually his mother, father, and three litter-sisters (he was born with two but now had three – it's a long story) would catch on and be forced to acknowledge him as being a genius who deserved all the praise. Delightfully devilish.
He eventually lost interest in that pie-in-the-sky fantasy as he entered college early and met his first long-term boyfriend and devoted most of his mental energy to either school or romance. He got contact lenses to hide his creepy fox eyes and dental implants to hide his pointy fangs. He started doing talk radio and running improv classes. He got to be student teacher – the kind that everyone loves – and he enjoyed pure, unmolested freedom for the first time in his life. What a hit.
Then he got the best news of all – Marion was dead! Apparently his big, aloof, selfish, millionaire older brother that was oh-so-handsome and a far better man than he'd ever be had just wandered off one Christmas Eve and never came home, leading to a manhunt all over Japan and the eventual determination that he was legally dead. Good stuff! Everything was turning up Mirko!
With Doc Mallory seemingly deceased, his teenage daughter Rebecca was sent over to Ireland to live with her extended family. A shock for all involved as Doc had never enlightened either party about the existence of the other. As if Mirko needed any more reason to hate his brother, this pretty much cemented his legacy as a world class bellend in his mind. Despite this, Rebecca (or Bex, as he called her) got along just fine with the Mallories. Hell, it turned out she even had some crazy reflexes and precision superpowers. It didn't take much sweet-talking to get her to join up with her aunts and form the freelance hero squad the Marvelous Mallories. With the dough rolling in from their mother's clever marketing, Mirko finally pulled the trigger on showing off his own powers to his family and joined Marathon, Multitude, and Markswoman (though Bex preferred the appellation “Pinpoint” in honor of her late father's tailoring career) as The Mechanic. Those four years were the happiest of Mirko's life.
...and then Marion came back to life.
Doc Mallory showed up on their doorstep one Christmas morning, exactly four years after going missing, and was absolutely incensed by everything he saw. He'd spent four years in an extra-dimensional time bubble but to him it at only been an hour. He raged at his mother for turning his daughter into a "soldier of fortune,” and the whole thing nearly came to blows before he could be talked down. Doc spent the next several months living with the Mallories while his legal statuses were restored and it became glaringly obvious – at least to Mirko – that he hated them as much as he hated him. Clearly being stressed out by a major traumatic event and missing several years of his daughter's life was just an excuse to express his real feelings of impatience and loathing towards his family. Marion was a selfish bellend and everything was better off when he was dead. Mirko made sure to tell him this, resoundingly, during one tense family dinner. Marion responded in kind by revealing Mirko's homosexuality to his whole family; something that only he and his mother had been abreast of. Clearly this was deliberate. Marion wanted to ruin his life. Marion had always ruined his life, even when he wasn't present. Now Marion had some back from the dead specifically to ruin his life.
It was only through the intercession of fellow dinner guest Zucca Xerfantes that Mirko didn't try to kill his brother back to death right then and there.
Zucca attempted to bond the Mallory family together by taking them aboard his impossibly sized starship, The Cryok. Turns out Zucca was an alien time-traveler from another dimension. Mirko had just assumed he was Marion's under-the-table boyfriend. Most homophobes were closeted, he reckoned. College had taught him that.
Mirko fell in love with the technology of The Cyrok. Hundreds of millions of square miles of civilization all operated with minimal systems, controlled by forces that were largely invisible to the naked eye. It was just like Heaven, if you believed in that sort of thing. He almost forgot his hatred towards his half-brother during the Mallory family's extended stay aboard the ship. They even got to talking a bit and it usually didn't end in arguments. Even when it did it was the kinda half-joking, needling sort you'd expect from an older brother.
Mirko decided he could stay here. Live aboard The Cryok. Learn its systems and improve them if he could (and if Zucca would let him, but that was beside the point – Zucca could hardly be everywhere at once, could he?). To have a whole world at your fingertips, mentally tuning its every facet like some great instrument would be... indescribable.
During this time Bex celebrated her eighteenth birthday along with all the other children that Zucca and Mari-... Doc Mallory had rescued from something called the Fa'tik Empire. It was a large communal ceremony aboard The Cryok with food, live music, and the whole Mallory family in attendance. He amazed whole families, royalty from a dozen different realities, with little technological cantrips he'd learned over the years. Hell, even got to do his stand-up routine in front of everyone. It was the grandest thing Mirko had ever seen. It felt right. It felt like he were at the center of the universe. It felt like H-
Mirko could not recall how the Fa'tik sleeper program had been activated but within a matter of minutes hundreds of people were dead and several more injured. Zucca had been rendered inoperable. Half of his family was missing in the fray. Bex and the other Fa'tik children had gone crazy. She'd leveled a four story building. The last he saw of Doc Mallory, he'd been pushing some green-haired pop singer out of the way before it fell on top of him, crushing him down into the Cryok's undercroft and presumably killing him.
He watched his mother catch a blast to the side of the head and another to the neck before he could get to her. Mirko straddled her and tried to tend to her wounds before it dawned on him he had no idea what he was doing. Knots formed in his throat and his gut. Even if he voice could be heard above the din he would've been incapable of screaming.
Where was his father? Why hadn't he paid closer attention to his first aid lessons? Why wouldn't his hands stop shaking? Why wouldn't the bleeding stop? Where was his toolbox? His automatons? Why couldn't she be made out of metal or plastic or... or something he could fix? Why... why couldn't he fix this?
He held his mother close and pressed on her wounds as much as he could. There was nothing he could do. Nothing he could do. Nothing he could-
“'s'okay,” she muttered weakly. “Did your best. Forgive... you. Everything. Always.... Love you, son. Always love you... Marion.”
She went stiff in his arms. The reek of death overpowered him. He laid on his side and stared at her corpse, for how many hours he'd never know.
It was several months before The Siege of the Cryok was ended. Bex was alive. His father was alive. His sisters were alive.
Marion was somehow alive.
Of course.
Of fucking course.
Mirko discharged himself from the hospital with the help of an EMP grenade he'd whipped together from miscellaneous parts. The localized blackout it created caused a power failure leading to several patients in intensive care to pass away. Sadly none of them were Marion. Hijacking the nearest shuttlecraft he could, Mirko left The Cryok's orbit and entered free space. And there, alone in the unrestrained beauty of a cold cosmos, he wept; a little bit for his family, but mostly for himself.
Five months later, the first of many ship disappearances was logged by the local authorities. Entire vehicles vanishing; their transponders disabled and their crews found floating dead in the orbit of local planetoids. As if the ships themselves had come alive and thrown them out into the void before scrubbing itself on sensor readings. It started slowly. First a couple pirate ships which few wept over. Then a peacekeeper vessel. Finally, an entire industrial cargo ship owned by Lelantos Labs. That one turned a lot of heads. Finally, the broadcasts began. Intrusive, infrequent, immutable broadcasts that overwrote the programming on subspace radio frequencies. Most of them sounded something like this:
“Hoiya, folks! It's yer old pal The Artificer! Which Artificer? The. As in me. Lovely stuff ya got in this sector. Truly lovely. Lotsa nice, usable technowhatzit. I still dunno what half of it does but that's the fun! If ya don't wanna end up like them poor sods aboard The Pedestro, I'd suggest stayin' outta the curly bit at the end'a the Rhimar fer the next... month or so. And whatever ya do, please don't send more securidrones my way. The last ones were just... tooooo... sweeeet!”
STRENGTHS
- Omega level technokinesis / mechanokinesis: The Artificer has complete psionic control over any bit of technology he creates or improves. If that sounds like a vague, drastically overpowered superhuman lottery winning ability... that's because it is. He doesn't even really understand the limitations of it himself, and he's a genius. There seems to be no upper limit to the physical size or quantity of the devices he can control at a given time, and the definition of “technology” seems to be extremely generous, apparently covering any crafted object with one or more moving parts. The only hard limitations he's discovered thus far are that:
1) He has to be conscious to affect his devices.
2) Without the aid of a pscionic amplifier his range is restricted to a roughly 500 foot bubble around himself.
3) The ability is systemic – the more complex the technology, the more tinkering he has to do on it to control it. Say he replaces the cover on a light switch. He can now remotely flip that switch on and off. Say he rotated the tires on your car. He can now cause them to spin and turn the driveshaft. If he wanted to engage the ignition and drive the car mentally, he'd have to tinker with those as well...
- Cascade Effect: ...or build a device to do it for him. Because his ability also has an exponential cascade effect in play. Say he builds a robot. He now has control over that robot. Say he programs that robot to build another robot. He now has control over two robots. Anything that he controls can be instructed to build or modify something that he will also control in turn. And once touched by him, it's always susceptible to his will. In this sense he is a one-man technological virus; capable of spreading his domination over entire ships, stations, and even planetoids if given enough time and resources.
- Personable: A very nice, chummy guy. Assuming you don't have something he wants. Or happen to be named Marion. In which case, he's faux affably evil.
WEAKNESSES
- Insecure: Despite being a charismatic, adorkably square genius who could realistically excel at most anything he puts his mind to, Mirko simply feels that he isn't as good as his siblings or parents. More than anything, he craves validation and tangible assurance of his worth. As good as he is at cajoling folks, he's easy to manipulate if you know how to push him.
- Duplicitous: The Artificer has exactly two goals in life – accumulate as much technological power as possible...and kill Marion. He'll stab anyone in the back as long as it serves one of those two goals. He's gotten on the bad side of a lot of powerful people as a result.
- Indirect Combatant: Mirko's an average physical specimen with very little real combat training and your average Joe on the street could feasibly take him in a fistfight. His power also requires a lot of prep time. As such he's only as good in a fight as whatever gimmick he's got on his person or within psionic reach at the time. Strip away all the accouterments and he's a fairly average, unathletic guy who could realistically be taken down by anyone who can throw a solid punch.
- Creatively Lazy: While a genius in his own right, Mirko more often than not just mashes together existing tech (usually stolen from other geniuses: JAQ/L, the Fa'Tik Empire, and Kristie Sparks are not fans of his) for a quick fix. His original designs tend to be rudimentary and far less sturdy compared to his peers in the tech genius game. His personal transportation, the Theseus, is a customized pirate ship created from several different cruisers and trade vessels crudely smashed together. Craftsmanship is ironically the first thing to go once the ability to completely control everything you build is an option.
- Cowardly: His plans usually involve one big shock-and-awe ploy... that invariably end with him turning tail and running at the first sign of failure.
POWER GRID
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Bio by Groveclearer
Image 1 by Pyrodox
