#Operatives

[theoperativeif]

The First Generation

The First Generation of Operatives... (Would love to hear your thoughts on this list ;) )

001 "The First"

Redacted

002 "The Second"

Redacted

003 "Hex"

Cheerful and hyper-violent 003, or Hex, as her siblings have named her is a master of deception. Utilizing a mix of traps, holograms, and stealth armor, she has already shown herself as a dangerous foe, even against her siblings. One of the oldest Operatives, she has also adopted a big sister role to some of her more outcast kin. She displays affection by utilizing ambush hugs and gift-giving.

004 "Shrike"

Unlike most of his siblings, 004 was nicknamed Shrike by the staff here at the lab for his propensity to impale his opponents on premade hooks and left to die or decompose slowly. Competitive and energetic, he has developed a friendly rivalry with 003, whom he always seeks to upstage and harass at every opportunity.

005 "Ari"

Redacted

006 "Mamba"

Smaller and much shyer, similar to his younger sister 013, "Mamba" earned his name from his siblings much later than the others. Weaker and less adept at combat than his siblings, 006 was assigned to frontline duty, hoping to become a good soldier. On the frontlines, sporting light operative combat armor Mamba began using various poisons along with his weapons, earning him a reputation similar to his more prominent and more adept kin.

007 "Stalker"

A hunter, first and foremost, 007 is an expert tracker, often paired with the Heartbreaker Agency and assigned to hunt down their targets. Cautious and slow to trust, he mostly keeps to himself, though he has often been seen spending time with 008. He was last seen nine months after the disaster at Paradise, attempting to track down an unknown target in Commonwealth space...

008 "Nightingale"

Loyal to a fault, 008 has shown herself to be as talented at saving lives as taking them. Always carrying around a medical kit, 008 is constantly on the alert to help her fellow soldiers. Her dedication to those around her has come at a cost, as she will throw herself between those she cares about and danger. She is littered with old scars, including a robotic leg and metal plating in her back. Devastated at the loss she experienced on Paradise, Nightingale or Gale has become a shallow husk of her former self, shutting herself off from others, including her close friend 007.

Currently under observation at the lab.

009 "Mad Dog/ Maximillian"

One would not expect the words of a gentleman to fit the large and equally terrifying Operative. But 009, despite being an expert in messy close-quarters combat, is similarly interested in reading and studying the arts. Assigned as Prince Vasily's guard, the two are unusually close.

010 "Nyx"

Redacted

011 "Ceto"

011 or Ceto, is an expert in aquatic warfare, sporting a unique bright blue combat suit capable of diving into the depths of the galaxy's most dangerous water environments. Relatively friendly and calm, Ceto is loyal to the people of the Empire, above all else. She always professionally presents herself, making it easy for her to integrate with military personnel.

012 "Griffin"

Charismatic and manipulative, Griffin is as power-hungry as he is cruel. Appearing as an average human, 012 has shown themselves capable of manipulating those around him. A smooth voice and innocent smile have earned him many allies in the military, with most viewing him as a grand hero of the Empire. His siblings and those at the lab know the true face hidden behind his hero façade.

013 "The Doll/Little sister"

One of the smaller Operatives, 013, is a proficient hunter and tracker, preferring to let the enemy come to her. She sets traps and carefully scouts positions to fight in. Sporting an oddly flashy personality despite being one of few words she does like to show off when her older brothers and sisters are around, as well as collecting pieces of armor to add to her own, giving off a strange mix of color and armor types. Her armor possesses a form of audio mimicry, allowing her to mimic the voices of her opponents.

014 "The General"

Towering over most on the battlefield, 014 appears as a large shining knight with bulky, heavy armor and a large sword. Charismatic and friendly, this honorable knight has been given the rare honor of receiving an official rank within the army. He has an odd friendship with 015.

015 "Wendigo"

Seeking to finally create a true equal to 001 and 002, the Emperor forced 'Mother' to recreate the original recipe used on the first two. The result was 015. Sporting advanced close-quarter combat armor, this Operative was given the callsign Wendigo by the military and deployed to areas devoid of friendly forces. 015 has exhibited concerning tendencies. When first deployed, they modified their armors mask to have a sort of robotic jaw, which they use to 'consume' their victims ritualistically.

015 is affectionate to those they deem as worthy while mostly ignoring others as if they don't even exist.

[tempestuous-tempest]

Here's some of my most used operatives in Watch Dogs Legion without explanation minus one:

The last one is a random politician named Edward that I made a member just to dress him up as my character "Edward Porter" as if Eddie was actully in a game and in Legion.

[honourablejester]

Starfinder Character Concept: Aballonian Noir Detective

Continuing our theme of Pact World character concepts. We’re gonna take an odd sidestep and head to Aballon, the heat-blasted metallic machine world closest to the Sun. Because, and I’m not fully sure why, you’d think Absalom Station would be the first choice for a noir detective, but there’s something about a robot noir detective moving through the dark underbelly of a mechanical utopia. Aballon’s undercities and ice wells, the melting-pot mixed-race areas built in the cooler, more sheltered craters while the machine megacities built over top of them, offer some interesting stalking grounds for a noir detective. Aballon’s Insight Array and universal social support (once you accept your assigned role) is also a bit of an interesting backdrop to criminal motivations and investigations. I don’t know. It called to me. So.

Dusty Brown. A rumpled android detective with a gentle mien who moves through the mean streets and high speed magnetic rails of Aballon’s undercities.

Character Concept: Dusty Brown, Aballonian Noir Detective

Name: Dusty Brown

Age: 87

Starting Statistics:

Strength 10, Dexterity 16, Constitution 11, Intelligence 14, Wisdom 14, Charisma 8

Starting Skills:

Ranks in: Acrobatics*, Bluff*, Computers*, Diplomacy, Engineering*, Perception*, Mysticism, Piloting*, Sleight of Hand*, Stealth*

Specialisation Skills (Skill Focus plus auto rank per level): Culture*, Sense Motive*

Race: Android

We’re gonna be a synth detective, doll. Yes, Nick Valentine is a significant chunk of the starting inspiration for this character. Will Flat Affect and a charisma flaw have an impact on our success with social skills and Sense Motive particularly? Possibly. But we’re an operative, so we’ve got the skill ranks to compensate, and I want an android noir detective.

And not just an android. We’re going to be an Aballonian android. We’re gonna be a rumpled android detective working the mean streets and high-speed magnetic rail systems of the machine world’s undercities. Even in a logical utopia where food and lodging are (usually) guaranteed, people still have passions, and ideologies, and desires, and hatreds. No matter where you go, someone there will wind up dead, or something there will wind up taken. There’s all the work in the world for a private detective, even on a world with vast near-omniscient AI running the show. So one day the self-named Dusty Brown stepped off the mag-rail and hung up her shingle as a PI in Striving’s Lors Emphyria undercity. She wasn’t exactly assigned that role, the Insight Array didn’t offer it as a suggestion, but she wound up getting a stipend anyway, so maybe the machine overlords think she’s doing some good.

I think I’ll swap out the android’s Upgrade Slot for the alternate Nanite Upgrade and take Rebooting Nanites. Dusty’s a hard girl to keep down.

Description:

On the shorter side for an android, Dusty Brown is a stocky woman of about 5ft, with grey eyes and dark brown skin with circuit-seams that glow a dull silvery-grey. She tends to wear dark, sensible clothes over light armour, but does allow the small affectation of a nice long trench coat. A girl’s gotta dress for the role, after all. She tends to favour non-lethal weapons, usually keeping a trusty pulsecaster in its holster under her coat.

Theme: Street Rat

I did look at Paranormal Investigator, just to double down on the detective idea, but Dusty’s not really a paranormal sort of girl. Street Rat, with its urban underworld vibes, is more her style. She didn’t start out with a nice stipend from the Insight Array. She’s made her way without a safety net for a long time. So she knows how things roll down here. She’s a noir detective, not a paranormal one. Mean streets are where she lives.

Class: Operative (Detective)

I mean it had to be. Operative has a whole specialisation ready-made for our concept. And I’m not going to say no to a whole bunch of skills, either.

And we are going to be aiming more in a skill-monkey, explorer, truth-seeker sort of direction, more than combat. Dusty prefers to be non-confrontational, non-lethal. The fact that she has the charisma of a brick (or, well, a robot) doesn’t necessarily help in this regard, but she tries. Her streets might be mean, but she doesn’t want to emulate them. She wants to help piece together what’s gone wrong, so that people can start helping fix it. There’s probably a reason the Insight Array was happy enough with the role she picked for herself. She jumped the gun, but it might well have arrived at a similar conclusion itself.

For that reason, I think I might pick up Scoundrel’s Finesse for her first feat. A noir PI should be able to throw a punch, and she’ll try that well before she graduates to more lethal options. I might also give her a Restraining Spinneret augmentation, give her options to tie people down and try to negotiate where she can. Is she good at negotiating? Not necessarily. But she’s gonna try.

Summary:

Mostly, I just wanted an android noir detective? And then I was noodling around worlds with large android populations, and Aballon caught on things in my brain. Honestly, Aballon would be a fascinating world to run an urban mystery campaign on. I mean, lots of Pact World worlds would be great for that, Verces, Absalom Station, the Sun, but Aballon has an interesting ‘rugged flawed utopia’ sort of angle to it. Machine logic, mining rights, synthetic liberation, organic enclaves, high-speed mag-rail networks (I know I keep mentioning these, but they do a lot for the cyberpunk imagery on Aballon, and that doesn’t hurt the noir vibes at all) … There’s a lot to work with.

So. Dusty Brown. A tired, rumpled, uncharismatic android noir detective who’s just doing her best to help. Heh.

[dndsettingsinfo]

The Operatives by the RPG Guy

[hazemsuhail]

Urgent Help:

Help my family survive and start a new life

Hello everyone, thank you for taking a moment to read our story.

I am Hazem Shawish, and I am trying to save my family from this war.

We live in Gaza, where we face significant challenges due to the current situation.

My family consists of 11 members, including my mother, two daughters, four sons, and three children.

In the shadow of conflict, our family has faced unimaginable hardships. The passing of my father, a victim to the cruel grasp of hunger and inadequate healthcare, left a void in our lives, underscoring the fragility of our existence here. My brother, Samer, battles bipolar disorder, a condition exacerbated by the ongoing war and the severe shortage of essential medications. Without access to the necessary treatment, his life is at risk, and we live in constant fear for his well-being amidst the chaos that surrounds us. These personal tragedies have deepened the urgency of our situation.

Every day is a struggle for survival, and each night is filled with prayers for a brighter tomorrow. We hold onto hope, believing that one day the clouds will dissipate, and we will find the peace we long for.

Our home, which was a sanctuary for us, was destroyed, forcing us to live in a state of uncertainty and fear. We have lost the laughter of our children.

Our entire neighborhood In Gaza Before and after

we had a supermarket that helped as to live and earn money, but it was bombed and we have nothing now, pic of our supermarket

We also face psychological challenges, as we have lost our father, and my brother Samer, who needs expensive medical treatment, is facing imminent danger. My mother, who has endured so much, fears losing another child. We are all suffering from malnutrition and contaminated water.

We dream of moving to Egypt to find safety, where our children can pursue their education.

We seek your support as individuals who understand the value of compassion and community.

Thank you for listening to our story, for your understanding, and for standing with us.

🇵🇸🍉❤️‍🩹🙏

All of our important links are here

vetted and verified by:

@dlxxv-vetted-donations & @a-shade-of-blue (vet)

@gazavetters , my number the list is (#75)

@paliliberation , my number the list is (#171)

[taviamoth]

art by the.gauntlets

gofundme for the family

[miametropolis]

last chance to evacuate

as you may know, israel has begun its ground operation in rafah. they dropped leaflets last night ordering people to evacuate, and bombing in east rafah has already begun.

The border is about to become unreachable.

Rafah is trapped.

We have literal hours until no-one, all the GoFundMe's you've scrolled past, all the people desperately begging on TikTok, will be able to escape.

Give now. Give whatever you can.

I am fundraising for the Odeh family, which is only 3k away from meeting its goal.

you will not get another chance.

GIVE HERE

[sailoreuterpe]

Using the bathroom in general is a human right and should be enshrined as such and I'm not joking. Too many groups of people are denied bathroom breaks or the use of bathrooms entirely--disabled people, blue-collar workers, children, homeless people, prisoners, students, the elderly. I'm surely missing other groups. Not using the bathroom when needed can cause serious, long-term damage, not to mention death. Free, clean, accessible bathrooms should be available everywhere. It's fucking cruel to deny someone the use of the bathroom, regardless of the reasoning. I'd rather every student in the world goof off and every homeless person make a mess and every worker "steal company time" than let one person suffer because they're denied the right to fucking pee in peace.

[auckie]

https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1765391777580912958?s=20

PLEASE GD IF YOU LOVE AND WANT TRAINS

[tofixtheshadows]

I've been thinking a lot lately about how Kabru deprives himself.

Kabru as a character is intertwined with the idea that sometimes we have to sacrifice the needs of the few for the good of the many. He ultimately subverts this first by sabotaging the Canaries and then by letting Laios go, but in practice he's already been living a life of self-sacrifice.

Saving people, and learning the secrets of the dungeons to seal them, are what's important. Not his own comforts. Not his own desires. He forces them down until he doesn't know they're there, until one of them has to come spilling out during the confession in chapter 76.

Specifically, I think it's very significant, in a story about food and all that it entails, that Kabru is rarely shown eating. He's the deuteragonist of Dungeon Meshi, the cooking manga, but while meals are the anchoring points of Laios's journey, given loving focus, for Kabru, they're ... not.

I'm sure he eats during dungeon expeditions, in the routine way that adventurers must when they sit down to camp. But on the surface, you get the idea that Kabru spends most of his time doing his self-assigned dungeon-related tasks: meeting with people, studying them, putting together that evidence board, researching the dungeon, god knows what else. Feeding himself is secondary.

He's introduced during a meal, eating at a restaurant, just to set up the contrast between his party and Laios's. And it's the last normal meal we see him eating until the communal ending feast (if you consider Falin's dragon parts normal).

First, we get this:

Kabru's response here is such a non-answer, it strongly implies to me that he wasn't thinking about it until Rin brought it up. That he might not even be feeling the hunger signals that he logically knew he should.

They sit down to eat, but Kabru is never drawn reaching for food or eating it like the rest of his party. He only drinks.

It's possible this means nothing, that we can just assume he's putting food in his mouth off-panel, but again, this entire manga is about food. Cooking it, eating it, appreciating it, taking pleasure in it, grounding yourself in the necessary routine of it and affirming your right to live by consuming it. It's given such a huge focus.

We don't see him eat again until the harpy egg.

What a significant question for the protagonist to ask his foil in this story about eating! Aren't you hungry? Aren't you, Kabru?

He was revived only minutes ago after a violent encounter. And then he chokes down food that causes him further harm by triggering him, all because he's so determined to stay in Laios's good graces.

In his flashback, we see Milsiril trying to spoon-feed young Kabru cake that we know he doesn't like. He doesn't want to eat: he wants to be training.

Then with Mithrun, we see him eating the least-monstery monster food he can get his hands on, for the sake of survival- walking mushroom, barometz, an egg. The barometz is his first chance to make something like an a real meal, and he actually seems excited about it because he wants to replicate a lamb dish his mother used to make him!

...but he doesn't get to enjoy it like he wanted to.

Then, when all the Canaries are eating field rations ... Kabru still isn't shown eating. He's only shown giving food to Mithrun.

And of course the next time he eats is the bavarois, which for his sake is at least plant based ... but he still has to use a coping mechanism to get through it.

I don't think Kabru does this all on purpose. I think Kui does this all on purpose. Kabru's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder should be understood as informing his character just as much as Laios's autism informs his. It's another way that Kabru and Laios act as foils: where Laios takes pleasure in meals and approaches food with the excitement of discovery, Kabru's experiences with eating are tainted by his trauma. Laios indulges; Kabru denies himself. Laios is shown enjoying food, Kabru is shown struggling with it.

And I can very easily imagine a reason why Kabru might have a subconscious aversion towards eating.

Meals are the privilege of the living.

[immaculatasknight]

Political assassin in the crosshairs

[389]

Speed Ratliff as the Boom Operator for SAW (2004)

[essektheylyss]

"must a story have conflict?" yes. hope this helps <3

[chronicbitchsyndrome]

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).

it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!

here are my policy focuses:

upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.

enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.

enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.

accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

[taviamoth]

art by the.gauntlets

Dr. Huda Abu Khater's Instagram

gofundme to help them