#what if i'm not efficient enough and get Talked To abt my performance

[wormwizerd]

everyone acts as if getting a new job will fix my problems but ngl i'm pretty sure the source of a lot of my problems is that i have to have a job at all

[skepsys]

Hi, nice ask headline! Aand even finer gallery might I add. My favourite is your oc assassin pair Saint and Maverick, you have really picked my interest with them. I'm pretty curious about their history (their origins, how they met, their dynamics, relationship). If you have a detailed story about them and you are willing to share, would you treat us with it? :)

thank you i had to make my askbox title that when i said an anime character was transgender and some people went rabid and dumped radioactive waste into my inbox for like 3 days straight for some reason 

(ALSO TY FOR THE KIND WORDS!!!)

im gonna link THIS ASK i answered a while ago cause tbh its still pretty accurate despite being 2 months old!! shocking since i have a chronic habit of retconing and rewriting stuff ALLL the damn time

THEIR INDIVIDUAL ORIGINS IS SOMETHING I HAVENT TALKED ABT THO I JUST REALIZED.....! besides vague stuff on toyhouse, preemptive readmore because i can and will go off the shits when asked abt my ocs

SAINT was originally part of a project called Titan which had the goal of creating EXTREMELY high-efficiency, cutting edge combat AI.  Titan was built out of the failure of a different project called Attica which was supposed to be an advanced learning medical AI to be installed in poorer and more dangerous districts across Novus (the city-world the story takes place on).  Attica went under from lack of funding and it was found by the project’s overseers that a combat AI would be more profitable, so.  yeah, Titan.  

over the course of a year after gaining proper consciousness, SAINT observed and learned a lot from his creators, even more than they really though he was.  ultimately, he decided that he didn’t want to be a tool, nor did he want to be mass-produced; it didnt help that he also learned, through his snooping, that he himself was probably gonna be disassembled/deleted once Titan was properly market-ready, since he was deemed to be a little TOO smart and observant.  the copies made to be sold would be dumbed down a bit, and hed just be done away with.  

SOOOO he goes rogue, kills everyone working on the project, destroys all the copies of Titan that he can find, pretty much everything else relating that he can find in the facility where he was created just so that theres NO chance of any pieces of Titan being recovered. he then steals a protoype body from a neighboring project, called a Black-Sabre, and escapes out into the world.  takes up the name SAINT, modifies his new body extensively to try and avoid any possibility of being recognized, eventually picks up the assassin thing bc...well, despite everything he IS still a combat AI and its what he know how to do.  

and Maverick..... oo boy . growing up hes a pretty normal kid, pretty rowdy, but yknow, thats normal.  he’s got his older sister, Jamie, and two parents who are scientists, his father being into hydroponics and biology, and his mother being a mechanical engineer.  stuff is good.  UNTILLLL his parents “disappear” and their research is “misplaced”.  Maverick and Jamie are left with pretty much nothing in the wake of everything bc somehow, everyone they go to to try and get any help or justice or ANYTHING shuts them out.  

theyre forced to stick it out with what little they can scrounge up on their own.  when hes about 16-17, however, Maverick has decided hes had ENOUGH; he wants answers, he wants revenge, he wants reparations, everything.  though its tough at first bc hes just some punk who doesnt know exactly what hes doing, hes still extremely smart and he gets an in with lots of different, less than savory groups and people, all for the sake of finding answers.  he knows at this point he cant go through official channels or rely on proper authorities to help him, so he does what he has to.

this leads him to two paths: augmenting his mind and body to perform all these things hes doing that much better, and becoming an assassin.  turns out hes pretty good at it even without augments, with a natural talent for stealth and subterfuge, and the more heavily augmented he becomes, he just gets better and better.  

it takes a few very frustrating years before he starts to get any proper leads, but once he does, he sticks to it like nothing else, and by the current point of the story, he’s already finished up and got his ‘revenge’.  he learns that his parents arent just ‘disappeared’ but they were killed, which he already knew in a way but finding it out for sure it.  oof.  he learns it was so hard to even GET here bc the people responsible has a lot of money to throw around to block any official investigations and destroy any evidence.  everyone responsible is dead now tho so he takes like...a modicum of solace in that, but mostly he just bottles it up tightly and throws it to the back of his skull (uh oh, classic smarmy confident dickhead act covering up the trauma and how terrified he is of losing ppl he cares about AGAIN....almost like thats also why hell so gladly almost get himself killed just to help ppl he likes)

Maverick keeps on with the assassin thing after the fact just cuz hes good at it and hes long since learned that sometimes you gotta take things into your own hands, and some people are better off ham-stringed if not dead before they can bring harm to all sorts of innocents

i detailed how they met in that ask i linked but also worth mentioning it think is that a lot of the story honestly is about how SAINT is acclimating to being a person.  its not exactly a “robot identity crisis” type thing but like, he took his freedom, his sentience into his own hands and he doesnt know what exactly to do with it.  its a lot of his grappling with “life is meaningless, i was created for no purpose other than to destroy, why did i even do this?”.  eventually he learns that YEA life is meaningless but that just means its yours to do what you want with.  you can do what you want, for better or worse, which is very scary! with no outlines or instructions theres a very wide margin for mistakes, but thats just what makes succeeding that much more fulfilling; even more so if you open yourself up to people that you care about and who care about you.  

in a way SAINT kind of starts to look up to Maverick because he’s just living his life and doing what he wants, no holds barred, unapologetically.  he follows his own code of morals and justice and doesnt let what other people tell him what he should or shouldnt be bother him.  this sort of admiration? i guess? just gets turned up to 11 when Maverick nearly kills himself trying to save him.  he believed so strongly that despite, quote, “being a pain in the ass,” SAINT didn’t deserve to be dissected and tortured, that he put his own life on the line to get him free, even though to that point theyd done little more than insult and try to kill each other... needless to say SAINT is vry confused for a vry long time lmao