Ivy

Names:
    “Ivy” is short for “Ivory”, but she’s happy to answer by either. She also answers to “Vee”, and will answer to “Snowflake” (and variations on the theme) if pushed, but dislikes the latter. To quote her full name in Vullish, she is Ivo’Reah Bluefrost, in Kiravai it becomes something close to Iivorii, and in Ondrai’i her name becomes “Raia”.

Appearance:
    Ivy is a roughly four and a half foot tall biped female, with a medium build, short white and greyish-lilac fur, pointed ears, and a digitigrade upright stance. Upon first glance, most take her to be either murine, or else a young one of the few canoid species in Coalition space – her face does look to be rather canine at first glance, although her nose, like many of her shipmates, is soft and rounded with slotted nostrils. Her forward-set blue eyes and pointed ears are fairly large, but her nose is small and dainty – it annoys her in some respects that she looks a little juvenile.
    Again like many Coalition member species, Ivy has a pelt – short, satiny fur covering most of her body, except the palms of her long, slender hands, and the pads of her feet. It is mostly white, but there is a frosting of pale lilac-grey on her back, from her shoulders to her tailtip, on her upper arms and face, and her ears. Her tail is comparatively long and thick-furred, slim for most of its length but widening at the tip. She has longer hair on her head; this is relatively long, and a very intense, glossy black, providing a stark contrast to the pristine white of most of the rest of her fur.

    Note: Her original form was somewhat different to how she looks now. Basically she was just your ordinary little Skelna female, albeit furless with very white skin with grey-blue bars, and shockingly blue eyes. Her voice lacked the nasal quality most Skelna had, though, which always marked her as different even if you didn't realise she was an artificial construct.
    Her new look is courtesy of an encounter with a rare but considerably powerful being that exists on more than one plane of existence, feeding of emotional energy and able to affect the physical form of beings or objects it comes across, provided it has the energy to do so.

Persona:
    Ivy is your stereotypical robot, in many ways – naïve, and (mostly) trusting, almost to the point of complete innocence. She is interested in almost anything – science, popular culture, the arts… – and happy to try her hand at almost anything, at least the once!
    She is happiest when talking about things that do not involve her – she will discuss politics, science, mathematics, the arts, even sport or gardening, so long as the conversation keeps away from discussing herself, something she has a fairly intense dislike of. (Mostly because any discussions usually involves either in-depth and intensely private questions about her capabilities and capacities (you wouldn’t ask anyone else what holding capacity their stomach had or the computing power of their brain, after all), random compliments based solely on the grounds of what she is (making her very uncomfortable), or else sexual demands, based on the assumption she is merely some sort of advanced sex-doll (which might even earn you a slap).)
    She is also easily made uncomfortable when needing to talk emotional matters – mostly due to inexperience. Although she has the mental capacity of an adult, and an intelligence that outstrips most others, her emotional capacity is underdeveloped, leaving her vulnerable, and her emotions – when they show – tend to be fairly “raw”.

    Ivy’s is a quest for acceptance – for who and not what she is. She wants to be liked as a person, not as an oddity, a curiosity, something briefly exciting, and wants any “demerits” to similarly be based on her as a person, not any ideas she is fake, simulated, “un-alive” etc. She has no desire to become anything other than what she is (for instance, she does not want to “become human”, to coin a phrase), and is usually fairly happy being who she is (although that’s not to say it doesn’t also cause its own fair share of “moments of crushing despair”). Above almost all else, she wants to have the same acceptance any biological being has “by birthright”, without having to fight tooth and nail to get it.
    She is a gentle soul, the sort to gladly give all and anything to anyone that asks the right way, but her need for affection has led her into countless unsavoury situations she could have avoided.

    Latterly, she has become fairly “withdrawn” in nature; perhaps she’s just given up trying. Hers isn’t such an “emo” sort of sorrow, however – rather, a quiet, accepting melancholy. She is as smiling and as giving as normal, but… quieter, softer, everything edged with a slow, uncomplaining sadness.

Artificial Life-Form
    Ivy's artificial nature has been the root of some of the less pleasant experiences in her life, as well – a lot of the species populating the galaxy seem to have no lost love for machines, especially the sentient variety. Some see them as the product of “people playing god”, others see them as a threat to their society (shades of “robots take over the world”), and others simply dislike them as anyone may dislike anything. Any such prejudice is guaranteed not to be well received.
    Coupled with this there is a great scientific interest in her; by their very nature, Ivy's kind are rare, and a lot of scientific communities consider it the ultimate achievement to create an inorganic life-form capable of self-aware coherent thought. Because of both the increased prejudice against her, and the increased interest from scientific communities, Ivy tries her hardest to keep her non-biological nature hidden unless she absolutely can't help it. While this has caused its own fair share of problems, the benefits outweigh the adverse results, and she's happy to keep it that way.
    At the moment, Ivy still doesn’t know exactly what her body is capable of. She doesn’t have full control over everything, either, although some things she doubts she’ll have control of anyway, like emotion. Sometimes it frustrates her, but other times she is content to just sit and find things out by accident. She also doesn't know how long she's likely to live for, although is guessing it will be some decades – she doesn't like to contemplate the thought of outliving all her friends – who are the closest she has to family.

Internal Details
    First of all it must be pointed out (if you missed it before ) that Ivy is not obviously mechanical – she does not have a metal skin, her voice is not the traditional uninflected “robot voice”, she does not walk stiffly, or show no knowledge of emotional issues. She is a complex synthetic being, crafted by an old creature with many, many years experience and many failed predecessors, but if you didn’t know she was synthetic you would have little reason to suspect it – at first, anyway.

    Ivy’s standard hearing range is similar to the human average – the dishes of her ears allow for directionality - but her range may be improved by increasing the sensitivity of the microphones (when under “sensitised” she loses the ability to demonstrate emotion by way of ear posture). She may also “desensitise” her hearing, but usually only when noises are sufficiently loud they may damage her ears otherwise. Yelling in her ear while she is operating in “sensitised” is not likely to make her your friend.

    As with her hearing, her standard sight range is restricted to “normal” mammalian wavelengths, primarily the visible, but she is capable of “retuning” her range to involve such other wavelengths as the infra-red (helps at night-time, for example) or ultra-violet. Her eyes are sensitive also at night time – although she sees only in black and white then, not the odd green of night-vision goggles. She has the limited ability to use her eyes to detect the more “exotic” EM wavelengths, such as high-frequency waves – she has the ability to sense gamma rays, but only in her radiation-detecting capacity, and uses the function rarely - but she can not see down into the radio-frequency. As with her hearing, shining a torch in her eyes when she is operating in non-standard wavelength pickup is apt to cause a temporary system failure.
    Overload of the eyes and/or ears is likely to leave her at least partially deaf or/and blind for however long it takes them to recalibrate – which in turn depends on the scale of the damage. Auditory overload usually takes a good half-hour to recalibrate at the minimum, optical overload (she calls it “burnout”) usually takes longer, close to an hour for partial sight-loss, two for total loss. In either case she requires access to a computer – usually Dauntless, where her personal standards are stored in the main core – otherwise it takes even longer (one incident left her blind for a day and a half). Whether permanent blindness/deafness could result from such an “accident”, she doesn’t know, and is fairly disinclined to test it.

    “Lung” function is reserved almost exclusively for temperature maintenance, inhaled air acting as an additional heat exchange mechanism in ambient room temperatures; the only “non temperature” aspects are for vocal modulation and simulated breathing. She is capable of withstanding extremes of temperature (within reasonable limits – blue flames and liquid nitrogen, for instance, are a little too extreme), but prefers not to need to, as non-ambient temperatures are always potentially damaging. She can operate well enough in total vacuum, and has through necessity worked unprotected in interstellar space, maintaining internal heat by increasing electrical resistance in her core, but the potential for damage in this sort of activity makes her reluctant to have to do so regularly. Plus, cold causes the sophisticated lubricant oils keeping her mobile to set and makes her joints stiff; extended periods in the cold of space could theoretically set her joints solid, but she has no desire to test this, either.
    Excess heat, by contrast, tends to slow down her mental and “neuronal” functioning, and to melt and damage delicate components. Given a choice, she would usually opt for cold, since she can always warm herself up – shedding excess heat is a lot more difficult. She has a sophisticated internal coolant system designed to maintain an optimal core temperature – the coolant runs from processors to the lungs, where heat is exchanged with the environment, but the system is at times inefficient because she is physically quite small. Air is cooled before entering the lungs by way of a mesh lining to the upper “windpipe”.

    Her speech processors are located in her throat, like with the average mammalian humanoid. She can speak without lung function, like if she were to close her “lungs” off to keep noxious gases out, but it sounds a lot more organic when she uses her lungs. Her voice has a very slight synthetic edge to it when speaks without her lungs, although it is barely noticeable unless you were looking for it.

    Her strength is considerable, but not boundless – she is capable of lifting masses of several times her body weight, but has yet had the need to determine any maximum limit. Her muscles are linked in to her skeletal structure, and work by a system of microhydraulics as well as tensile polymers. Her ability to lift is of course limited to the strength of her skeletal structure – it is a strong, lightweight carbo-polymer-composite, but not indestructible, and like organic bone is comparatively weak to crosswise blows. They can withstand more than the average organic bone, but repairing breaks to her skeletal structure is difficult since it is so highly linked to the musculature.
    While she is strong enough to take care of herself, she has a few little additions that she uses for defensive purposes that she added in herself. Beneath the claw/nail of the index-finger of her right hand is located a tiny hypodermic needle, sheathed within the “bone” itself if not needed, with a small reservoir loaded with a sedative/hypnotic; the nail itself is pulled back to get it out of the way when she uses it. While theoretically the reservoir could be loaded with poisons, she prefers to use it strictly to “stun” any assailant. Her claws are otherwise used almost exclusively for traction – and when those on her feet are not in use they are retracted, as a cats, with a mobile sheath protecting them. She rarely uses her teeth for defence – a hangover from what she picked up from the native Skelna that lived around her home, who saw it as highly rude to bite people, even in self-defence.
    Her other means of “defence” is a rather more dangerous one to herself as well as any assailant – she is capable of generating and storing a higher-than-normal electrical charge in nonessential areas of her body, which she can discharge in one go, the resulting effect a little like a small lightning-strike. It is poorly directional, and in spite of the fact her own systems are extensively shielded and protected it typically knocks her out cold at the same time as any assailant, so she usually has to have friends on hand – and warned – to get her away afterwards.
    It must be mentioned that this latter defensive action she has found another use for – although no less taxing, and potentially damaging to her, she has turned herself into a mobile defibrillator when the situation demanded. She builds the charge in her hands, places her palms on the chest, and releases a jolt of electricity as accurate as any defibrillation kit; she successfully resuscitated Ren in this way once before.

    Every so often she must correct the internal electrolyte balance of her carrier fluids – she has a “blood supply” which her body utilises for repairs and keeping her joints lubricated, and this system runs tandem with her coolant system. Her “blood” carries tiny nanites/cellular machines, which are able to perform repairs to small-scale damage such as breaks in the skin and sensor-mesh of the substructure – this system is relatively autonomous, and approximates a biological immune system. The nanites seek out and repair physical damage, although they themselves will wear out with use and require replacing.
    Components of her “blood” can also be used to approximate certain biological fluids, such as tears, and are involved in the chemical analysis of ingested compounds – her “gastric juices” if you like. The fluid must occasionally be topped up; she can either do this directly, with a drip feed into a special port under the skin of her wrist, or else indirectly by way of ingestion of foodstuffs. She prefers the second as it is less obviously a mechanical process, and of course she enjoys the social side of it – a drink or a bite to “eat” with friends. This second does require egestion of the waste, since not all chemicals in a given foodstuff can be utilised (for instance, carbohydrates and proteins are unlikely to be needed), but this is more by “regurgitation” of the unneeded components (similar to an “owl pellet”) than by excretion via the anus (indeed, she lacks the latter).

    Her “digestive tract” ends at the stomach; there is no gut past this. Her lower abdomen contains other “organs” not present in an organic creature – while she does have sexual “organs” (courtesy of Neev, who didn’t understand why Ivy was lacking them in the first place), the majority of her “gut” instead consists of pumps and energy-handling systems. The pumps are for her blood – her heart is not in her upper body – and are not continually functioning; they only operate when necessary, when the peripheral sensors signal there is an electrolyte imbalance.

    The fur covering her body, which is soft and silken in texture, is also thin and poorly insulatory – temperature control is a mostly internal operation. She has control over the lay of it, by way of tiny synthetic muscles attached to each hair (another of Neev’s alterations), although she rarely uses this function except for emotional purposes. When scared, she puffs out the fur of her tail, for instance.

    Ivory does share some other biological traits, such as the need to “sleep”, although this is more an operation involved with memory than mental health. Sleeping allows her brain to filter out the “important” from the “unimportant” events from the day, to prevent her memory filling with things she does not need.
    She sleeps also to restore her energy cells – she can keep going almost indefinitely, but this consumes much more energy per unit time than operating with the periodic shutdown. Her energy source itself is complex, involving efficient microcells spread throughout her body, and relies on her ion-rich blood for fuel – sleeping also promotes the restoration of this ion balance, hence “recharging”.

    She also feels pain, although this is another of Neev’s adjustments, and – since she is unable to define it – she does not know if it is like the organic sensations or not. They are the same in that they are unpleasant sensations, however, and she cannot just turn them off given that they are (usually) damage warnings. They only go off when her micro-repair systems have corrected any damage or else disconnected the power to the relevant area. For instance, if she were to lacerate the skin of her palm, she would feel the “pain” sensations until the skin and sensor-mesh was recrystallised. After a crush wound or a break, however, which her body’s systems would be unable to correct on their own, she would gradually lose function in that part of the body – partly to prevent further damage by moving it, particularly if it was a hand or foot. Such damage to a hand would probably result in total paralysis of it in a relatively short space of time – nothing greater than half a day if under autonomous control, and faster if she chooses to do so – with all sensory circuits and motor control systems shutting down until the damage was repaired. There would be a residual reminder of the damage – system alerts, but not painful – but nothing intolerable.

    Unlike many computer-based creatures, she was created with emotions, and a full range thereof – although subtlety is not her forte. Her emotional growth is significant, but she is still rather childlike, prone to neuroses; as such her state of emotional health is a frequent concern for her shipmates. Many Coalition cyberneticists believe that she should never have been “cursed” with the unpredictability of emotions at such a young age, particularly given she has no way to turn them off.

Notes and Alternate Versions:
    Ivy is the creator and unofficial captain-pilot of Dauntless. Dauntless herself was originally "quasi-sentient", not quite capable of thinking on her own but able to make ‘educated judgements’ every once in a while if she came across what she perceived to be a dangerous situation that her crew weren't responding to. Since she was an experimental vessel and suffered a considerable number of “breakdowns” where programming overloaded, leading Ivy to stabilise her with her own programming, she has gradually picked up pockets of other code from her. Dauntless represents her “sentience” as a tall, Kiravai-looking holographic creature that the crew have dubbed “Magpie” (or just Mags), partly because of her colouration, which is mostly black and white, and partly because of her tendency to “chatter” longer than she needs about a subject. She is capable of “leaving” the ship, but only for short periods and currently not any further than a few metres from the hull, since she relies on the on-board holo-emitters.

    Like the male crew of Dauntless, Ivy has a number of parallel universe duplicates, the main one of whom calls herself “Nova”. Originally she did also go by “Ivy”, but certain fairly traumatic events in her life (the death of Ito, for instance, and the brutal manner in which a lot of Coalition cyberneticists tended to treat her) led to a desire to leave her life behind entirely, and start afresh. Choosing the name Nova, she simply took Dauntless, chose a direction, and set out, hoping to find a better life and perhaps even similar creatures to herself. Where she currently is, even she does not really know; at time of writing, she is “hibernating”, symbiosed with the ship’s computer core, and relying on Dauntless to wake her when/if a set of conditions are met.
    There is also a second duplicate I’ve written about, but physically and emotionally she is drastically different – closer to Ren’s build, she was designed and built to be a fighter, and has a bullish, bad-tempered mindset. (See the “Mirrored” sequence – currently #1 Mirrored, #2 Reflections, and #3 Ripples)

First met in: #1 “Ride the Avocet”

Art and references

References:
Pelt reference - although a photograph of a pelt of a (sadly) farmed fox, the colour is fairly similar to how I see her in my mind's eye (even if she always ends up blue in the art, no matter what I do. Bah.)

Art:
(Roughly oldest to newest)
There are SOME other older images available, but I've since moved them to the archive to keep the pages fractionally less cluttered. Click to visit.
Onyx and Ivory - the very, very first picture of the pair, that started it all off.
Clipboard - an image I used on the "Science" section of my very first website. And yes, she's a peculiar grey shade - I think because I wanted to make the distinction between HER and a friend's albino character, as otherwise they looked fairly similar (especially since her eyes are closed). The thing on the face was partly a "dust mask" and partly a "do not want to draw those damn fingers again".
Simply Ballroom - "I look like a walking hazard warning sign..." Ivy and Onyx.
Old Profile - an old profile image; Ivy, as she looked accompanying Ral to the opera. It's not entirely accurate, but it's not especially wrong either.
Bug-Ivy - inspired by the "Random Dragon Creator" (whose link I have lost but eh). Ivy as a dragon. The plot point this involved has since been scrapped, but the picture itself isn't bad.
Dragonfly - working image. Dragonfly fairy?
Ivy, oldstyle - how she used to look. I've since begun top revamp the look of the Skelna, and they have trunks instead of the "Cthulhu-esque" tentacles/fingers, small ears, and some have hair.
"Please remember to keep your arms and legs inside the car at all times..." - aka, "Reprogramming's a bitch!" (or should that be "reprogramming THE bitch"?) Anyway. When you start to fiddle with things you don't understand, sometimes things go wrong...
Two Ivies - as a Drakkic (top) and Silmor (bottom). From another old, defunct plot.
"Damaged Goods" - from the period around when "I, Robot" was released. I loved that film. (This didn't scan as well as I'd hoped - it looks a lot more grainy on here than it does in real life.)
"IVORY! WHERE ARE YA THIS TIME?!" - note: when your staff are sensitive to changes in their environment, don't go shouting in their ears.
Fembot - ...hey, SOMEbody had to do it.
Hairbrush Popstars - NOT "Hairbrush Poptarts", because they're something COMPLETELY different.
Weapons of Mass Distraction - for all the luck she has in love, why NOT invest in some "WMD" and see if it gets you more noticed? Okay, so I went back in time a bit for this one. I wanted to scare the people on OWF (and succeeded).
Sergeant Major - Terrahawks rocked my toesocks. And for once this one's pretty accurate as to how I see her.
Ivy Rose? - or, as one of my friends put it, "f**k, thorns!" I forget my exact reason for drawing it, or why I did her as a quadruped, but anyway. The colours are accurate, at least.
Five - Ivy as an Electronic Alien (which are © Sunny Colaneri). More details
Alternative Angel - a "re-imagining" of an image I did way back when I was still at University (an image I was never happy with, as it really didn't turn out the way I wanted). A little composite I did for comparison's sake; I prefer the "wreath" on the older image, annoyingly, and the face is a bit "off" on the new image, but nyeh. There's more details on each page in the gallery; colour, inks and sketchwork.
Iivorii - I forget my exact reasons for this, but anyway. I think she looks rather stylish as a Kiravai.