Octavarium
Coloration and Cockpit:
Octavarium's body is cool silver, while his armor is pure, pristine white. His blades, wings, claws, joints, horns and pipes are obsidian black and polished to a shine. His optics flicker between orange and blue, blue dominant when the Liger is active, but a kaleidoscope of the two colors when "idle". The energy to the Gungil Horn, XBlade, claws, teeth and wings is the same pale blue, but looking closely at the edges reveals the occasional flicker of orange.
His cockpit is a strange thing to behold. The upholstery is cool, streamlined white leather, buckles and straps of black attached firmly to the pilot's chair. A layer of plush white carpeting covers all surfaces: floor beneath the pedals, walls between sensors and screens - even the ceiling. The control panels, boards, levers and buttons have overrides set into them, clearly labeled in reds and yellows. There are further valves set places, marked things like "shutdown," "abort," "danger," and "emergency." The first few Energy Ligers were mad beasts that ruined and destroyed their masters, and this one has the safety locks and precautions to show for it.
Sensors are handled in a strange way, with the Liger having two banks of four plasma screens each. One bank's screens are active. This bank is on the right side of the cockpit, slightly above shoulder level when seated, and going front to back in this order: the first shows splitscreen images of all four sides of the Liger, the next one shows safeties, the next shows sensors and the last (closest to the pilot's seat) is communications.
The bank to the left is...odd. Less vital seeming: four screens, arranged like the first bank. The first screen shows a diagram of a star inside an octagon; the second has an underwater scene with a strangely marked stop sign and an octopus surrounded by fish; the third has a motionless Newton's Cradle with eight balls superimposed over a green hillside and blue sky, and the last shows a maze inside an octagon that vaguely resembles a Ba Gua symbol. In the center of the maze is a minuscule spider. It occasionally moves its legs, but that's about it.
All screens are sensitive to the touch: the right bank in the obvious ways, and the left bank in less-obvious. Touching the first screen will let the pilot revolve the star; the second sets the fish into motion, though the octopus never moves. Touching the third screen starts the Cradle rocking, but tapping the fourth screen - the one with the spider and the octagon - does nothing.
When Octavarium is idle, all screens go to the image with the spider with the exception of the screen that lists the safety precautions. That screen is constantly active, even when the Liger is completely powered down.
Personality:
Pending
History:
Origins: Unknown
Rental: After Octavarium's creation, things slowed before stalling altogether. The War had just ended - there was no longer any reason to have an Energy Liger that was wild. So the ZBC installed an override program over Octavarium, blocking in the Zoid's personality with a wall that was unbreakable unless you knew how to do it - or got incredibly lucky.
Octavarium was then rented through the ZBC through the use of tournament slips and the like, passing from pilot to pilot and each time being put back in his hanger when they were through with him. Left alone with the thoughts that a sentient, multi-ton metal lion might have, unable to express a word of how he feels at any time...
For years.
Then came the five-year-tournaments. Octavarium was refurbished, all traces of use cleaned away and replaced, down to the carpet in his cockpit, and offered as one of the prizes.
Sophie: Sophie was awarded Octavarium for coming in second in the Five Year Anniversary Free For All. Not reading the fine print on the contest flyer, Sophie didn't know she'd even got a Zoid until about a week and a half after the battle, and after her own personal battle with The Holy Order of the Straight Razor and The Mass.
Nerves on edge, she returned to Ajax's machine shop one evening to find a huge transport trailer marked with ZBC logos and locked tight, the key mailed separately. When she opened the trailer, the nameless - or so it seemed - Energy Liger was inside, shut down, half a dozen failsafes, safeties and overrides active inside its dormant processors.
Sophie managed to get inside after some considerable climbing. What she found was find black screens - black screens with a single word floating on them: Octavarium. The moment she set foot inside the cockpit, all screens changed to the defaults.
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