Ran Severn

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Ran Severn
Ran Severn crop.jpg
Nationality'Scure
Other namesUran
EthnicityJapanese
Height175 cm


Primary Writer: User:Ace Dreamer


Also see Uran.

Appearance and Personality

Ran is allegedly the 1.75m tall early 30s year-old daughter of Brian Severn's (unnamed) elder brother, who currently lives with his family in New Zealand. Hence, she is Brains niece. This is, in fact, a lie, as she's really Uran, a robot "little sister" built by Brains, in a 'squish-bot' body impersonating a human.

While Brains brother doesn't even have a daughter who's name could be shortened to 'Ran', or who has that as a nick-name, her identity seems reasonably solid. She has a UK passport, a bank account, and a drivers licence; Ran thinks Emily or one of her 'friends' may be something to do with this, and she hasn't bothered Brains with the details. Incidentally, all the money in the bank account is real, and wasn't stolen from elsewhere or hacked-out of thin cyberspace.

Ran is allegedly living somewhere in England, and comes to visit 'Uncle Brian' at his Middle England village cottage once or twice a week. She drives her uncle's refurbished old Bedford van. This is in fact all faked, and she arrives as Uran invisible from her Moon home, parks the ship over the cottage, then flies in and turns into Ran. Ran then uses Brains-supplied gadgets to fly invisible to where the van is hidden, then drives back as if this was her real arrival. Later she 'leaves', drives the van back to its hiding place, and flies back to the cottage to revert to Uran, to take her true invisible leave.

The weekly 'home visits' are not the only reason Ran is on Mundane Earth. Her first trip was in a different-looking (squish-bot) body to get urgently needed medical supplies. She has poked-around the UK as a tourist, going places for the joy of travel, and visiting art shows. Europe and further abroad, some time. No second-hand bookshop is safe when she visits!

Brains isn't too happy about Ran wandering-about, as he considers her as a human to be too fragile, but he isn't going to get in the way of her enjoying herself. He considered, even with his attitude to violence, equipping her with defensive weapons, like a handwaved taser. But, she refused, saying her kung fu and ninjitsu were good enough to defend herself.


Notable Mundane Attributes

Ran can drive a car and fly a plane or a spaceship; she's also skilled about picking-up information about travel problems, her destination, and navigating there. She enjoys travelling, seeing new places, meeting new people, though she likes to have family, friends, and a home to go back to.

She's skilled with martial arts in the form of kung fu (sub-black belt), and sometimes claims to be skilled in ninjitsu; certainly she's good at sneaking around. She's some basic proficiency with martial arts weapons, but is not at expert level. She doesn't 'do' guns. Ran is perceptive enough to notice that she's being followed by all but the most expert (or a well-organised group), and to loose her tail. She's a skilled and perceptive conversationalist, but no orator or persuader. As an artist she's good at quick character-capturing sketches, and enjoys painting water colours of travel scenes. She makes quite good humorous animations, which can touch emotions quite deeply.

A skilled mechanical and electrical engineer she's also a proficient programmer. She's also good at the interpretation of complex sensor information, particularly in space travel, though she likes to have a direct view as well.

Ran is smart (a genius?), and can learn the basics of most things she turns her hand to. She is a competent linguist, with fluent Japanese, and (potentially) five other world languages. She's building up an impressive knowledge of fantasy and science fiction, in multiple media, including manga and anime. In what some might consider an act of revenge she sometimes writes mostly harmless fanfics about Fen, under several pseudonyms.

Note that the above is her full skill set, which she's still developing, and she's unlikely to level-off until some time in 2011-2013.


'Wavium Abilities

Backed Up: Ran's half of Uran, and as Uran she has full backups of any experiences. The two halves are connected by entangled particles which while they don't allow FTL information exchange allows the original Uran to know if something really nasty has happened to Ran (or visa versa). Even if Ran was killed she could be restored from her last backup, only loosing her experiences since then. Someone who's mystical might be very doubtful about the 'entangled particles' bit, and say that what's going on is that Ran and Uran 'share the same soul'.

Distributed: Ran is Uran's 'twin', and while she is wandering around Uran is fully active, typically at their home on the Moon. Note that while separated like this neither 'twin' can take backups, or re-synchronise, which could cause problems if divided for more than about three days. Unless one twin voluntarily goes into a coma-like state. If Ran went missing then Uran might be obliged to do this until she returns.


Quirks

I Need A Hero: if Ran goes out to somewhere new, and there is anything that might require heroic action going on, she'll at least find out about it, even if she isn't sucked right into the middle. This is scaled to her current capabilities, so as she's effectively human, this will almost certainly be human-level stuff.

Hubris or Murphy Blessed: sometimes someone says "It's quiet, too quiet", or "Nothing can possibly go wrong", or "It couldn't get any worse". This is a really bad idea around Ran, Dramatic Necessity will bite you somewhere painful. And, Ran will probably have to try save you. "My Perfect Plan Cannot Fail!" might be really, really, bad...

Still Not Human: though using a 'squish-bot' this is far better hidden. She's restricted to little more than Mundane Abilities but is almost impossible to tell from a human, unless you carve-out some of her bone and start doing micro analysis for handwavium. She also believes something really nasty will happen if she's Ran for more than about three days – this isn't strictly true. Killing her would probably leave a salty-water-filled plastic doll behind, with a lump of strange (dead) technology in a pouch in its belly, but the more she is Ran as time goes on, the more likely that killing her would leave a normal dead human body behind. And a very annoyed Uran.

Faction

'Scure

Known Associates

Brains

Preferred Transport

Anything that will take her places.

Trivia

Stories

Notes