PAW Collab

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This page contains the entire setup and story for a collaboration/round-robin story set in the Pig and Whistle universe. As much as Little Things is the opening story in the universe, this is intended to fill in some details of the universe and as the "opening salvo" - ie: it's what is intended to introduce Pig and Whistle to TSA-Talk. The participants are Devin Hallsworth, ShadowWolf, Michael Bard, Felix and Cubist.

Characters

Susanna Douglas

(Devin's character)

• Age: 26
• Species: Human

Susanna Douglas or 'Sue' as she prefers to be called is a student and part time tutor at a dance studio in town. This fact is not unusual in itself until you consider that at the age of seventeen when riding home from a party with her friends she lost her legs in a car crash.

Her injuries required a transfemoral amputation of both legs,(cut above the knees) but left the rest of her body intact. Before the turn of the century or even at the very beginning of it such an injury would have left her wheelchair bound for the rest of her life but with the middle east and post collapse wars of the time came a new wave of investment and research into the field of prosthetics. Today thanks to advances in elastomers capable of matching the performance of organic muscle tissue and small yet highly advanced computers that can predict what motions the user will be going through and compensate Sue isn't just able to walk, she has competed in at least three dance tournaments.

After a few years of getting used to the human model and realizing that she needed a bit more stable of an income Sue got in with a local prosthetics company to test out a transfemoral prosthesis for Teefers as the company had been unable to find any transfemoral Teefer amputees to test their designs with. Her current prosthesis is based on a common leg design that occurs in many mammal Teefers http://deer.transform.to/SL/FullFox.jpg with the exception that she is unguligrade instead of digitigrade. As the prosthesis she is currently using have not yet been refined for commercial use they do not have a synthetic skin over top the actual leg and resemble similar prototype prosthesis from the beginning of the century instead of an actual furred leg as they will when they are put on the market. http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/24/festos-fluidic-muscles-make-us-all-look-weak/

Scott Summers Jameson

(ShadowWolf's character)

• Age: 35
• Species: Wolf
• Fur: Black
• Powers: Slow aging, creation and projection of balls of plasma

About 2 meters tall with matte black fur (a true black - it doesn't show up dark purple under any light like most does) he was employed by PPL (Pennsylvania Power and Light) as a lineman before the collapse. Six months into the collapse he was admitted into the hospital in the opening stages of blowtorch fever. Leaving the hospital after the completion of his change he joined the Pennsylvania National Guard and was rapidly promoted to Sergeant and transferred into their new special operations unit. When the Canadian Army invaded his unit did a lot of damage before receiving orders to stand down, because the 'Commonwealth of Pennsylvania' was joining Canada.

Alexander Henninger

(Cubist's character)

• Age: 37
• Species: Altered human
• TFOR-derived traits: TFOR seems to have inflicted on Alex many of the metabolic quirks of an exceptionally high-temperature-tolerant extremophile. As a result of these changes, Alex has a stable body temperature of a bit over 190° Fahrenheit. It is unclear whether or not Alex still ages in the usual manner.
• Appearance: Alex is a 5'11" tall humanoid; he weighs 425 lbs, but given his overall body type/build, he looks like he's not an ounce over 180 lbs. His skin is not unlike solidified slag; it's rough, craggy, and black. That's chromatic-black, not skin-tone-black. He has no hair. His eyes are solid red, and they can be seen to glow faintly when the ambient lighting is sufficiently weak.

Alex was an undistinguished hardware specialist when he came down with a case of 'the torch'. Unlike most victims of blowtorch fever, Alex never cooled down; rather, over a period of two weeks his temperature just kept climbing until it leveled off at 193 degrees. Alex must now wear an insulated body suit at all times. This suit serves two purposes: First, it prevents him from causing second-degree-burns to any normal person who inadvertently comes in contact with him. Second, the body suit ensures that Alex does not freeze to death in what others regard as normal temperature.
Alex's condition can be considered helpful to his profession, inasmuch as he can melt solder in his bare hands; by the same token, however, he must be careful about where he touches circuit boards and such.

"Skunk"

(Bard's character)

• Age: Unknown
• Species: Female skunk (non-morphic, normal sized)/organized colony of non-differentiated cells (think "The Thing")
• Powers: After consuming 100 grams or so of a creature, can form a cocoon and grow into a duplicate as long as it is roughly the same mass, or smaller. If not, will need time to get the mass. The cocoon lasts from 2-8 weeks. Cannot be killed unless ALL cells are destroyed (fire, electricity, acid, some poisons). Losing cells causes some loss of memory/knowledge as information is stored in various cells with various levels of duplication depending on importance. This power is NOT generally known.

Looks very disreputable and battered. Fur is scruffy, some is missing, very thin and malnourished, wild look in her eyes. She doesn't talk much about the details of her past. Something occurred that haunts her, and she wants to forget but can't (alcohol doesn't affect her).

She's a regular at the bar. Nobody knows where she lives, speculation is under the roof or some other appropriately small lair. She seems to have access to various coins and money as required. Note that she does not spread around the fact that she has powers, though she has been different species once or twice, staying so for a long time. She's been a skunk for the last five years.

The Story

Call me crazy, if you want. Here I am wearing a full fur coat during one of the hottest summers since the Collapse. But I can't just take it off - that fur coat is part of me, just as the muzzle and ears are part of me. Yep, I'm a teefer - one of the numerous sufferers of the disease known as "Transformative Failure of Ontogenetic Regulation". In this case the transformation left me with a matte-black fur coat and all kinds of other features normally only found on a member of Canis Lupis or Canis Familiaris.

Sure, it's made me immortal - I haven't aged a day since the aptly named "blowtorch fever" progressed into TFOR and left me the walking, talking fur-coat I am today. Sure, it's a hard life, I changed during the height of the collapse, before Canada invaded, so I've had a long time to get over any mental problems I may have had. Yeah, that did take a long time.

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I opened the door to the "Pig and Whistle" and waved to Gordy as I crossed the floor, heading for my normal table. There was one figure seated already - and the insulating suit was the only thing I needed to know who it was.

"Hey Hephy! Wish I'd had you on site today. Idiot I was working with seemed to barely know which end of the torch to point at the wires." His name's Alex, but there are so many nicknames that have gotten attached to him its pitiful.

"Your usual, Scott?" Gordies almost subsonic bass rumbled across the room to me.

"You know it!" I yelled back as I took a seat across the table from Alex.

Story Snippets (to add in where appropriate)

Told by Skunk:

Yea, flying has its moments. But then, everybody knows about the freedom, the power. What was that book somebody wrote-- A Gull's Life-- Anyway, there are other things.

I'm sure you've ran into them. Stupid bastards so full of their own importance that they're always right. And then there are those who's care has to always be perfect. Spotless. Absolutely pristine.

Ran into one of those idiots when I was a raven. Brought back too many memories of minimum wage crap jobs. Especially those involving gas pumping and spending half an hour scrubbing the bird crap off a window because the idiot is too cheap to pay a car wash to do it.

The skunkess clasped her paws together.

Too long a life, too many bad memories. But leading an entire flock, technically an unkindness, and painting the bastards car white was priceless.

He just got caught in the fallout you might say.