The Red Baron (W.I.P.)

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IamLEAM1983
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The Red Baron (W.I.P.)

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Name: Major Manfred Von Richthofen, the Red Baron
Age: 133 years old
Gender: male
Species: Automaton, Goliath Aeronautics Alpha Flight model

Strengths: unlike Archie, Manfred has made a conscious effort to stay on the cutting edge. Treating his body the way he used to treat his biplanes, he's constantly welcomed improvement when and if it allowed him to continue doing what he did best – which is dominate the skies. An open proponent of Transhumanism, the only human value that still matters to him is morality in and of itself. Unburdened by notions regarding a fixed physical self, he considers that the only “hardware” that honestly matters is his mind. This allows him to consider tactics most pilots would consider to be suicidal, and to approach them in complete confidence.

His armature is notable not only thanks to its bold red, black and white scheme, but because of its heavy focus on long-distance unassisted flight. His legs house Karthian-designed repulsor engines that allow for vertical take-offs and landings, while his lower limbs lock together in a “tail” configuration once cruising speed is attained. Additional plates shift between the back of his head and the top of his back in the same conditions, giving his profile a greater amount of air penetration. Carbon fiber and titanium plates also swing into position over his arms, locking them in a T-pose and providing him with wings.

For the most part, his personal flying abilities are only to be considered as a form of support or life preservation, as the needs of a shifting gravity center and occasionally swiftly relocated total mass didn't leave much room for weapons. Small holdout lasers are mounted to and within his shoulders but are largely designed to be used when confronted with similarly small aircraft. He couldn't do much damage to a speeding F-18, but can depressurize its cockpit with his on-board weaponry, should he get a decent bead on the enemy plane's pilot.

Rather, this ace pilot's true dogfighting skills come into play when he's allowed to be paired up with his ultramodern hydrogen fusion biplane. With standard 2025 aerial ballistic weapons tightly sandwiched between two pairs of high-resistance meta-material wings, and with on-board stealth capabilities, Manfred is well and fully equipped to brave the danger zone. Subsonic rounds won't so much as make a dent in his Postmodern take on a Fokker, and the designer molecular structures that make up his preferred vehicle's outer plating will at least slow down anyone who happens to be working with something approaching a big game rifle – and moderately vex anyone who brings a Gauss gun to a dogfight.

Interestingly, however, his soberly-titled Flyer has no external controls or recognizable visual aids. The dome of the cockpit is entirely jet-black, which makes it hard for anyone to fire at him from the outside. Anyone else would also have been made as blind as a bat if asked to sit in there, but Richthofen's armature was cunningly designed to directly interface with the plane. The Flyer essentially becomes an extension of Manfred's own body when he occupies it, his eyesight being replicated by a myriad of tiny photo-receptors implanted in various points of interest along the plane's outer surface.

Technically speaking, this means that Richthofen gains a sort of insect-like compound vision when flying his aircraft, albeit in a high-detail and recognizably human form. With time and careful training, he learned to imagine himself facing a wall of screens, and to immediately recognize where and when important situations are occurring.

In essence, as long as Manfred is piloting the Flyer, you can consider that he possesses a sort of hemispherical field of view which he can focus at various points as needed. Some individual details are lost, but movement and threats can still be easily identified.

Similar to the holdout lasers his shoulders can deploy while in flight, the Flyer is able to let two tactical “helodrones” loose during subsonic flight. These automated and battery-operated support units are frail, but they have greater freedom of movement than his main guns. “Snoopy” and “Woodstock” are the only weapons Manfred can't consciously control, as the drones are instead handled by an on-board computer. These tend to be used as a last-ditch support solution, or whenever he is so severely hounded that he can't manage to keep track of all of his opponents, but he can still deploy both on an individual basis and queue into their camera array. This allows him to carry out fairly stealthy surveillance operations or to direct a ground team from afar.

Naturally, the Flyer can also be placed in Autopilot mode, which allows Manfred to drop out of the plane, bomber style.

When land-locked, Manfred reveals himself to be a competent fighter, someone who's kept up with advancements in personal defense since his resurrection and desertion. Between the Royal Air Force and the USAF, he's had access to the Western world's developed firearms and martial techniques for almost a century.

Finally, Manny can also handle a variety of more standard aircraft, from several plane and glider models to private and commercial helicopters. If it's designed to fly in-atmosphere, chances are he'll figure out how to steer it safely within a few minutes.
Weaknesses: running on a comparatively slightly less explosive saltwater engine, Manfred's armature still could stand to dish out a lot of hurt, should it ever be compromised and allowed to explode. There's a lot of meta-materials in his outer plates and even more in his servos and micro-motors, so that means there's a ton of potential shrapnel to expect in that fairly unlikely event. While his chest plates are naturally reinforced, the need to mitigate his overall weight even before mass-altering spells are considered means that he was assembled with almost no weapons whatsoever. Other than his shoulder lasers, Manfred has nothing except whatever it is he'd choose as a sidearm, to protect himself.

Considering his anatomy, Richthofen is also forced to negotiate missions while technically naked. Should the Flyer ever be blown out of the sky and its countermeasures fail, he couldn't be expected to shift to his personal flight systems if the fairings and bolts designed to fasten his legs together can't be allowed to couple adequately. Pants would get in the way, and anything resembling a coat of some kind would prevent his deployable wing parts from sliding into place. Vulnerability is both his asset – as it allows for speed and faster reaction times – and also his largest inconvenience.

Unsurprisingly, this is a cause of psychological stress. While he handles it all fairly well, being trusted to handle fairly deadly engagements without a parachute terrifies the part of him that's still resolutely human. He's had to silence it to keep doing what he loves, but it's still there. Being forced to prep while in the nude always comes with some jeers from squadron newbies, but he's also learned to cope with that. It doesn't change the fact that particularly mouthy hotshots can get him fairly riled up.

Insofar, depersonalization doesn't seem to be that much of a problem. Rather, slightly aggressive cultural pride is what surfaces when he's tested. He's buffed that contempt away in most cases, but morons can bring out the self-righteous Prussian nobleman in him.

It also doesn't help that no matter how often he tries to differentiate between his involvement in World War One and his defection from the German military in World War Two, some idiots will always be ready and willing to call him a Nazi. If you couldn't call Marty McFly a wuss, you can't call Baron Manfred Von Richthofen a Nazi and expect to come out of the ensuing debate without a black eye or a solid Clank fist-assisted bruise.

Appearance: if Michael Phelps were an Automaton that could sprout bladed wings, you'd have at least something approaching Manfred's vague silhouette. Average in size, the former aristocrat packs as much of a V shape as you could imagine while remaining on the svelte side of things, with a few physical adaptations that add a few borderline avian features to his appearance. Being a bit of a casual gamer, he's also come to understand why people briefly called him “the Turian” in the early two-thousands... With his dramatic leg joints and slightly flaring anchor points along his inner thighs and calves, there's something slightly alien to the way his frame looks – as if you were looking at a wild bird twisted into a humanoid configuration rather than at a bird anthro. While his arms and hands are fairly recognizable in their shape, size and dexterity, his head is the second most striking part of his anatomy.

Looked at from up front, Manfred looks as though he'd a red-and-black modern Clank wearing a hood of sorts, some sort of extra head covering that'd be made out of additional plating. While laid bare, his face can be seen as packing the most advance micro-servos and drivers available – essentially pushing the concept of Archie's facial plates two centuries ahead. Sliding over a protective black silicon mesh, his red plates are so motile and so precise as to allow for immediately recognizable pouts, smiles, smirks, grins or frowns, among many other emotional markers. They move silently and rearrange themselves seamlessly, rendering the fear of someone waiting for the right eyebrow twitch to jam a sharp object in-between two mechanisms absolutely moot. Human features are still recognizable despite his high-tech trappings, reproducing the Baron's rather plain traits as closely as possible. If anything, he looks almost exactly the way he used to, except for the part where his eyes are twin ultra-high-definition optic sensors that add their own reddish glare to the dominant color scheme. Stripes of white add some race car-worthy dynamism to his arms and chest – with reproduced decorations being notably absent. Being careful to avoid ruffling the sensibilities of the more ignorant numbers amongst his sponsors, he hasn't publicly exhibited the Iron Cross motif in decades.

When allowed to dress, Manfred tends to pick surprisingly casual attire. People tend to get stuck on the fact that he was canonically referred to as the Red Baron, and expect some sort of extreme focus on male haberdashery. This isn't the case. Having always preferred to be considered as just another one of the boys, pants and shirts he can quickly shuck off are part of his modus operandi, along with a fairly frequent cigarette. Tabi-esque Parkour sneakers are also favored for the same reason – not because he expects to go about free-running at any moment, but because he needs to stick to shoes he can more or less throw off at a moment's notice. Currently, USAF standard-issue tee-shirts and old RAF tees tend to make up his typical wardrobe, along with Army-issue khakis and a squadron leader's lightly spangled bomber jacket.

Of course, he does have a few items he can shuck on for more glamorous occasions – including a few things designed to pander to the Red Baron fanboys, if and when he really can't escape them. His reproduced German Army Air Service cap is an occasional standard and is bizarrely tolerable with a tuxedo, but he tends not to really advertise himself. He's learned from his own fame and has come to resent the general public's ignorance – especially when asked why he doesn't have the usual Totenkopf design on his cap's front brim.

In fact, he'd say he gets to be at his showiest when onboard the Flyer. Things that shine bright red in the sky tend to attract the attention of manual gunners and missile users still caught up in target acquisition procedures, this rather tactically-mandated sacrifice allowing the rest of his squad members to swoop in from cloud cover.

Obviously, Manfred sometimes looks to Archie with a bit of an envious twinkle in his eye, as he does come from an era in which dressing up was still sometimes mandatory. Logistics be damned, he does secretly wish he'd be able to find enough off-duty time to get himself a nice suit and treat a nice girl out to dinner.
Behavior: long before his death, Von Richthofen was already a fairly rough customer. Born into nobility but refusing the coddling realms of high-government wartime work, he'd started out as an honest believer in Germany's right to expand her reach in the early days of the twentieth century. To achieve that, elbow grease would be needed in far greater quantities than preening noblemen discussing politics while cradling champagne glasses. He had some class, sure enough, but packed even more guts. All the same, he was born on the outskirts of Germany, a country that had as much influence in his limelight as New York would eventually gain in the decades to come. Berlin was a cultural and political hub of irrepressible force, one of the numerous gateways into the modern age.

What it wasn't, and what might in some sense act as the spark that lit the fuse of Serbian revolt, was a world power. Manfred was like many people born and raised in this decidedly young nation that had just been born; in that he was idealistic and rather hopeful. What he saw in Germany's future, he'd always hoped the Kaiser would achieve peacefully. Never in his darkest nightmares would have World War One been foreseeable – much less the decline of German National Socialism into the bloodthirsty fiend that wouldn't hesitate to desecrate his grave to further its own ends.

Some people have obviously compared the Baron to Archie, but despite the both of them having been noblemen, their temperaments wildly differ. The fact that he only began to speak English in 1943 might explain his simple and effective delivery in Shakespeare's tongue, as well as his rather thick Austrian accent. Sounding like he could be voice-acted by a softer-voiced Arnold Schwarzenegger, he owes part of his blunt and fairly casual delivery to the fact that he's roughed it out during his uncertain days as a foot soldier and that he learned to give quick and concise briefs to his squadron before each mission. Speaking, much like moving around, is more a tool to be used than an instrument to fine-tune, as far as he's concerned. He doesn't pack Aldergard's malapropisms and occasionally mangled grammar, but has clearly become enamored of contractions and colloquialisms. Anything that helps him get to the point – even when at his most charming and casual – works. It helps that English is even more fond of effectiveness than German can be. He might earn Matthias' slight displeasure if he should state that he doesn't like reading or speaking French, for instance, but that wouldn't be a marker of Teutonic superiority. If anything, it would have to be understood to be the kind of opinion anyone who's alive in the golden age of instant messaging is likely to endorse.

He still does have a slumbering aristocrat hidden somewhere in his servos... If linguistic propriety isn't his forté, then social graces do still come to him rather easily. If he has the verbal subtlety of a sledgehammer and the kind of bluntness the local selkies could relate with, he does know to kiss the local Summer Lady's hand or bow before the local White dragon. He pulls these situations off flawlessly as long as he isn't asked to speak. He feels that wrapping his opinions into court-compatible speech is a headache-inducing process and has always preferred to ruffle feathers and suffer the consequences than to bite down on his inner voice to avoid offending this or that blueblood.

Otherwise, to work with him is to work with a gaggle of four or five men with slightly juvenile tendencies, leanings towards crude humor and rather wild in-mission banter. It takes a special kind of combination between guts and tactical coordination to land a seat in with the Red Baron's currently American squad, at which point you realize you're looking at a fire-forged cluster that's very reminiscent of Holden Hall's own sets of in-jokes and workplace mouth-flapping. If you can't meld yourself in with the squad – even as a guest – chances are the more serious aspects of the proceedings won't be as smooth as you'd have expected.

In any case, Quonset Point's Crimson Devils come with a rather loaded reputation. They'll back your guys up or get the job done – and they've done precisely that since the Battle of Hope. They alone are the reason why this particular base remains active, to the point where it's developed a rather particular culture amongst the other Air Force bases. The staffers play it fast and loose like you'd expect out of a foreign outpost put on hold, and protocol is largely nonexistent. Things always “strangely” straighten out before inspections, but the long months that precede that usually leave visitors with the impression that their tax dollars are funding a career-spanning frat house.

Goals:

History:
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