Annotated 45-5
Even at this late stage of the game, we still enjoyed sitting down and creating a fresh adventuring party from scratch. This one is four members instead of the usual five, because its fifth member, WAV, is a presence felt by his absence. The whole party is Flo’s invention, and here’s how she described them to John:
To call them adventurers would be generous, so let’s call them survivors. Because that’s all they do. The Survivors of Cyberia are a small group as present here, though they may have greater numbers elsewhere. But they are all in their Cyberian suits, much like WAV was. But as they have different names, they have different purposes, and different functions. And since they’re all armored up, they would otherwise appear genderless.
DOC: Our narrator and point of view for this strange tale, is from and older platform than other Cyberian survivors, looking less cutting edge than his compatriots. He is a Word Processor, and so his primary function is to process words. A talker, a scribe, and with just a hint of Clippy in his imperative to guide others. As such he is not much of a fighter, and he gazes upon an unfathomable phenomenon behind the camera’s shoulder with his own eyes from sitting atop a container.
ZIP: While DOC is a scribe, ZIP is an archivist, a collecor, a gatherer of things. He is the only one of them that appears to be carrying a great variety of tools and/or Cyberian weapons. He is currently setting up a tripod-mounted telescope/scanner/spectrometer/go nuts for DOC’s use
GIF: The token girl of the group, as it were, but nonetheless the smallest member of the group, peering through a pair of spectro-binoculars or y’know, whatever you want. Have fun with the Cyberian tech, buddy. GIF is also obviously their mover and action-oriented group member if there was one. She has the function to replay a movement infinitely, but that’s neither here nor there. But otherwise, she is built for scouting and running.
TIFF: An appearance that looks a bit more blocky and monochrome than the others, TIFF is very large and not at all in charge. But he is large, nonetheless, functionally now their dedicated muscle. But he’s a lifter and a builder, not strictly a fighter (though he is equipped to if he must). He’s looking through his own thingerdoo.
FB: It’s true that a big part of our premise is about alternate worlds that oddly parallel well-known games, but even so, nobody expected the “Red Light, Green Light” universe.
My headcanon is now that ‘thingerdoo’ is the official names of the things.
Also, since it looks like WAV had some serious effects on Cyberia, someone needs to tell Best that he had an amazing destiny in two separate worlds. That will break his newly humbled mind. >_>
A pity that the names GIF and TIFF were not interchanged. TIFF is a much more flexible format, with the potential of very high resolution, used in desktop publishing and photography. GIF is less capable, and often used for basic low-res images with fewer colours – and animations, its one USP.
The name TIFF works better for a female character, too.
I thought the same thing, but they’re based more on their memetic presence online than on the technical capabilities of the formats.
GIF is a runner and scout – she’s the animated one.
Ha, nice!
I don’t see this fifth member, FB, anywhere on the page… and their description doesn’t seem to match anybody there either!
Facebook is omniprescent and indescribable that way.
Are/were these guys supposed to be the Savassi mystics, having passed now beyond death and post-death with the death of Mysticism itself? At first glance they seem to hit some of the same visual beats as those four characters, no matter how different the details of the eventual tune is.
It wouldn’t fit into the timeline. The survivors met WAV while he was in Cyberia, and we saw the mystics after WAV left Cyberia.