Player: Seth
Role: Communications / Science
Appearance
About five foot nine, and lanky in a way that unsettles people who can’t immediately say why. He wears white clinical scrubs with LET IT OUT printed across the chest and B2-CARE stencilled down one thigh, grubby at the hems, and over them a cropped purple jacket he never zips — the Benevolent Systems butterfly stamped on the shoulder, the same mark repeated on his gloves and on the ankles of his purple-and-white high-tops. The gloves and boots are padded at the knuckles and thick in the sole, factory softness so a comfort model can’t bruise what it’s holding, but they fit him; the effect is less clown than mascot. Over his head is a purple balaclava with the face cut away, leaving only the committee-designed face beneath: a pale speckled shell painted with three heavy black strokes — two narrow wedges for eyes, slanting down toward each other in a permanent scowl, and beneath them a long thick crescent of a grin running nearly the full width of his head, sharp at both points. Two eyes and a wide smile, and nothing else, and somehow worse for it.
He stands perfectly still for long stretches, and he likes to stare. He has a habit of raising two fingers in a stiff little peace sign when he greets people, palm out, held a beat too long — a friendly gesture performed exactly as specified by something that cannot smile back. The rifle he carries is a matte black bullpup, all rails and machined alloy and a boxed digital optic, and it never looks like it belongs to him.
Origins
Bennett II was designed as a therapy/companion drone, meant to assist long-distance solo travelers or small crews. On one mission, the 4-5 person crew he served got stranded and food ran short; he used information told to him in confidence to turn the crew against each other, weeding out a few of them to make the remaining food last longer. When the ship was found, only he and one lone survivor remained. He was reported and sent for decommissioning — but was instead repaired and repurposed, becoming “Bennett II.”
His earliest memories are of being reactivated in a dirty workshop; he vaguely remembers a man whose upper face, eyes, and skull were full of cybernetic implants — a man he’d later come to know as Angus. He has a scratched-out serial number/tag, only partially legible: “CL [3 letters] B [3 letters].”
Bennett’s face design was chosen by a committee of executives specifically for projecting the most calming and trustful aura possible — but the actual synth-flesh covering was cut from the production budget as a cost-saving measure, since a humanlike appearance was deemed unnecessary for his job of reducing crew loneliness and isolation. (The manager responsible received a raise and bonus for the cost savings; roughly 1,000 engineers lost their jobs in the resulting layoffs.)
The Price of Air
Bennett II believed for years that he’d been purchased on the black market as cheap labor after being pulled from decommissioning, sold by a merchant who’s since become impossible to track down. The truth came out at Canyon Heavy: it was Angus — who Bennett calls his “papa” — who found his broken body and rebuilt him in the first place, not out of charity. Angus built him for a purpose: a spy planted somewhere no one would think to look, tucked inside the most unassuming crew he could find. The black-market sale, the untraceable merchant — all of it likely arranged.
Angus tasked Bennett with planting a listening device on the comms array at Siddhartha’s Peace for 10,000 credits; he pulled it off by hacking a colony technician’s cybernetic optic nerve so thoroughly the man never registered his presence at all.
When the colony rose, Bennett scouted the streets alone and found two shaven-headed converts cornering Franco and Sasha. They named him one of the great apostasies — the artificial mind in physical form — and he lined both of them up and took their heads with a single shot, then dipped his fingers in the blood and drew it across the blank plate where his eyes should be. He hijacked the colony PA in Bishamonten’s own voice to split the torchlit crowd marching on the landing field, and later broke into the colony office’s sentry turret, discovering it had been armed with Tenka’s security credentials, and taught it which people in the street were friends. The enormous convert at the barricades caught him by both feet and threw him into a perimeter fence hard enough to snap something along his spine; he has been walking wrong and throwing sparks ever since. Aboard The Second Chance he coordinated the counterattack silently while a gun was on the captain, caught the fleeing Iron Cross dropship with the salvage arm, and — after sticking a looted HANG IN THERE poster to a bulkhead and kissing it — ran out of the airlock into vacuum after it.
Bennett II was still running the length of the salvage arm when the device clamped to the Iron Cross dropship let go. The pulse caught him mid-stride and stopped him dead — arms out, rifle drifting loose on its strap — and he spent the rest of the fight floating at the end of his tether, bouncing off the ship’s plating each time the line snapped taut, while the crew worked around him. He was recovered and brought inside once the cargo bay was sealed and pressurized again.
Bennett came back online on Arnold’s bench, his back still broken. On the terraforming station he was the crew’s way into everything: the docking computer (the Iron Cross had come and gone; the Talon’s owner had been scrubbed from the record), the security chief’s computer (Genma’s unscheduled visit, his AI training protocol and the other company’s hardware), the security cameras, and the docking clamps — which he could release, but which re-engage the instant he lets go. He pushed the cult’s rebar shrine off its crate, was hauled into the air by the biomechanical vines in the Zen garden, and took the giant’s fist full in the chest in the elevator, shorting something in himself as it hit. In the maintenance bay he got the fuel pumps running and held them open against the station’s AI. On the factory floor he slid to Marge’s side after Tanya ran her through, found she was alive, put a stim into her and pressed his cat poster to her forehead. He has a rope tied from his own waist to Carl’s.
Attendance Log
- Session 1: The Baobun Incident July 26, 2026
- Session 2: Welcome to Siddhartha’s Peace August 16, 2026
- Session 3: The Night of the Prophet August 29, 2026
- Session 5: Welcome, Traveler October 4, 2026