Aigis

How is my robot girl doing? Please let me know!

♚ OOC
Name: Nina
Age: 23
Contact: ninatherose
Character In-game: N/A

♛ IC
Name: Aigis
Canon: Persona 3
Canon Point: Between Persona 3: The Answer and Persona 4: Arena
Age: Indeterminate. Aigis was first activated approximately 10 years before the events of Persona 3 and spent an unknown period of time in stasis, so the amount of time she has experienced cannot be determined. She is constructed to resemble and behave like a high school student approximately 16 or 17 years old.
Gender: Female
Species: Robot
Appearance: Here!

History/Background: Years before the events of Persona 3, Japanese megacorporation Kirijo (KJ) Group discovered the existence of the beings known as Shadows-- manifestations of the dark wishes and thoughts in a human psyche-- and began to experiment upon them, wondering if their power to manipulate time and space could be utilized and harnessed. While many members of the research team believed that Shadows could be potentially used as a source of infinite energy, the project's leaders had an ulterior motive: They had learned about a prophecy to bring about The Fall, the end of human existence at the hand of the entity from which all shadows originate-- Nyx, the personification of death itself.

However, while this core group of conspirators wanted to bring about The Fall, the project as a whole recognized how dangerous Shadows could be if not properly dealt with. The most effective way to fight Shadows was the power of Persona: An outward manifestations of a human psyche and identity, a mask worn to protect the true self. To that end, KJ Group began constructing a series of Anti-Shadow Suppression Weapons-- androids with a sense of self that would enable them to develop Personas of their own.

Aigis, a seventh-generation Anti-Shadow Suppression Weapon (possibly the only one of her generation), was activated ten years before Persona 3. Shortly after her awakening, KJ Group's Shadow research in the laboratory on Tatsumi Port Island led to disaster: Learning about the Nyx prophecy, one of the scientists destroyed the facilities at the cost of his own life. Unfortunately, this had two unforeseen effects. The first was the creation of the Dark Hour, a secret 25th hour of the day that occurs exactly at the stroke of midnight. Normal humans generally cannot perceive the Dark Hour; only people who have awakened the power of Persona can do so. A human who accidentally finds themselves awake during the Dark Hour will quickly be attacked and overcome by Shadows, destroying their mind and their will and leaving their body a mindless, barely-sentient husk.

The second consequence of the scientist's actions was the unleashing of Death. As all Shadows come from Nyx, they too can merge into Death, her harbinger. Aigis’ first mission was to defeat Death and prevent The Fall. However, she realized that she did not have the power to defeat Death entirely, and instead sealed it inside a young child nearby, the sole survivor of a car accident. Following this, she was deactivated and kept in stasis for ten years, her memories of the incident suppressed.

During Persona 3, Aigis (now the last operational Anti-Shadow Suppression Weapon) awakens in a KJ Group laboratory on the island of Yakushima, where the members of SEES-- a group led by KJ Group heir Mitsuru Kirijo dedicated to fighting Shadows-- are vacationing. She is inexplicably drawn to SEES’ field commander, the game’s player character, and is later assigned to return with SEES to join their high school as an exchange student, so that she may act as the protagonist’s bodyguard.

Over the course of the game, Aigis wrestles with her emerging humanity and her inexplicable connection with the protagonist. She is ultimately reprogrammed by SEES’ traitorous leader, Shuji Ikutsuki, who is part of the original group who wanted to bring about The Fall, and turns against the party. However, she rebels against her programming and does not attack them as ordered. When it is revealed that SEES’ actions have recreated Death, Nyx’s harbinger, Aigis’ memories return and she realizes that the child she sealed Death inside was the protagonist, ten years beforehand.

Ultimately, SEES decides to fight fate and fight Nyx, though their victory comes at the cost of the protagonist’s life, sealing Nyx away inside him/herself. While the rest of SEES forgets what occurred, Aigis does not, and is the sole companion at the side of the protagonist as he/she passes away.

In Persona 3: The Answer, a playable epilogue, Aigis awakens to the same power of the Wild Card that the protagonist had possessed, as SEES finds themselves trapped in their dormitory and reliving the date of March 31st endlessly. She also encounters a mysterious girl named Metis, who claims to be her sister seventh-gen Anti-Shadow weapon.

Aigis, Metis, and the party venture into a new dungeon beneath the dormitory called the Abyss of Time, wherein they learn the truth about the protagonist’s sacrifice and are given the option to go back in time and prevent it, saving his life. While some members of SEES wish to do this, Aigis decides that doing so would doom the world, and that his sacrifice should not be devalued.

It is later revealed that Metis was not, in fact, another Anti-Shadow weapon, but was a physical manifestation of Aigis’ humanity, which she had rejected in the pain of dealing with the protagonist’s death. Accepting her humanity and the pain that comes with it, Aigis and Metis merge.

Personality: What does it mean to be "human"? What does it mean to “live”?

These are the questions central to Aigis’ character. After all, as she is well aware, she is a machine. She is a weapon, created to battle and destroy Shadows. Her body is steel and wire and ceramic, not flesh, muscle and blood. Yet in order for her to be able to use a Persona, she was created in the image of a human being, to give her a self-image. She was equipped with the Papillion Heart-- essentially two pieces of crystallized Shadow-- to give her a personality. An identity.

Aigis is too much of a machine to be human. Yet she’s too human to be a machine. What is she? Where does she belong?

The course of Aigis’ development over the first part of Persona 3 revolves around finding her humanity. When the party first meets her, she is very obviously a machine and acts thusly. Her speech is robotic and stilted. When asked if she knows what it means to “have fun,” she answers with a dictionary definition. Despite her self-awareness and ability to use a Persona, she is far from human.

Over the course of the game, through her bonds with the player character and the rest of SEES, however, Aigis begins to awaken on a deeper level. She starts attending school with the team, though her behavior still makes her stand out. She suggests cheers after successful missions, and calls dibs on certain pieces of sushi during victory celebrations (despite not eating).

Her nascent humanity is put to the test, however, when SEES chairman Ikutsuki betrays the party and reprograms Aigis to turn on the humans who she has come to see as friends. For the first time, Aigis overcomes her programming and frees SEES instead of killing them as ordered.

In the month following, Aigis continues rapidly developing emotions that she struggles to explain. She is hostile toward the new exchange student, Ryoji (who she subconsciously senses is the incarnation of Death) and finds herself envious of those who “live.” She begins expressing a strong sense of protectiveness towards the main character, she begins feeling uneasy and anxious, she begins questioning what it means to live, to die, and to grieve. Most of all, she begins feeling genuine empathy-- she does not want the people close to her to suffer.

Aigis, suddenly remembering Ryoji’s identity and the events of ten years before, confronts him of her own volition. She attempts to fight him, but is tremendously outclassed and fails a second time. Aigis, despite being a machine who can be repaired and rebuilt, recognizes a new emotion: For the first time, she’s afraid.

Following her repairs, Aigis doubts the purpose of her very existence. What use is a robot who cannot fulfill the singular purpose for which she was created? What use is a weapon that can feel fear? The rest of the team, in supporting her, helps her realize that finding a purpose can be as simple as helping those who are hurting.

Aigis realizes that there is only one person who can give her a real purpose-- herself. Her new purpose, she decides, is to live.

Following this realization, Aigis comes to act more human than ever before. While she still has her moments of bluntness and misunderstanding, her speech is notably less artificial-sounding and she more freely expresses emotion. She also begins to realize the extent of her feelings towards the player character.

In her Social Link, Aigis begins to question what it means to live and be lonely. An old woman asks Aigis and the player character to find her missing cat, and when the two cannot, Aigis confesses some time later that she still thinks about the woman’s cat and wishes to find her. After all, the cat is the only thing the woman has left in the world. Aigis even goes so far as to confront the old woman’s grandson, who she believes is neglecting his bond with his grandmother.

When the old woman later tells Aigis that her cat had gone off again-- to find a place to die-- Aigis desperately tells her that she is not alone in the world, even though she doesn’t understand why. She begins to question the purpose anyone has for living, and the reason life itself exists. Why do people live, only to be forced to part at death?

She begins to realize that she loves the player character (regardless of gender) and that her immortal, mechanical body has one benefit: She will never have to leave them, and will be at their side for the rest of their life. When confessing, she acts more human than she ever has before: She stammers, becomes visibly embarrassed, and finds herself at a loss for words.

Ultimately, her promise to stay with the player until their death is fulfilled, and sadly soon. She is the one member of SEES whose memory is not affected following the battle against Nyx, and lets the player character rest their head in her lap as they fall asleep, never to wake.

The pain of losing the player character is too much for Aigis to bear, and-- as she herself later puts it-- she begs to be a machine again. In The Answer, her rejected humanity takes the form of her “sister” Metis. Despite awakening to the player character’s power of the Wild Card, Aigis is still extremely hesitant to act. As Yukari puts it, she continues to run away rather than face the real source of her problem: her grief at failing to protect the player like she’d promised.

By the final act in The Answer, Aigis finally learns how to take charge of a situation and be decisive, facing the moment the player character sacrificed their life. She realizes that to live is to fight through the pain, to keep going even when it hurts. If the player character gave their life to act as a seal between Nyx and humanity’s collective desire to embrace death, then by helping others change, she can help shoulder their burden, in a way.

She accepts Metis back, even though that means once again accepting the grief and pain at the player character’s sacrifice. Rather than returning to the lab, she decides to continue attending school as a human.

“Aigis” is derived from “Aegis,” a shield carried by Athena and Zeus in Greek mythology. Fittingly enough, the personality Aigis finally awakens to is one perhaps defined most heavily by her empathy for, and desire to protect, other people. The purpose the other members of SEES help her find, following her breakdown after her defeat by Death, is to help others, and that is the driving impulse through nearly everything else she does.

When a dog bites her metal hand, her concern is for the dog having hurt itself. She frets over the lost cat’s owner and tries to get the woman’s grandson to take his relationship with her more seriously; when the old woman says the cat likely went off to die, Aigis tries to comfort her directly. She comes to find her meaning in protecting the protagonist, and her despair at failing to do so is what drives the rejection of her humanity in The Answer. Her solution, too, involves taking some of the burden off of the protagonist’s duties as the Great Seal. Above all, Aigis wants to help. She wants to protect. She feels others’ pain and loneliness and wants to do whatever she can to alleviate it.

Later, in Persona 4: Arena, Aigis’ entire motivation relies on trying to find and help her “sister” Labrys, because she realizes the pain Labrys is likely going through and wants to help her. Similarly, the first time in her life she ever feels genuine fury is learning the fate of earlier Anti-Shadow weapons, who had been forced to fight each other to the death and discarded afterwards.

Aigis’ humanity manifests itself in a gentle, kind personality that at first glance seems severely at odds with her being designed as a weapon. While she can be innocently insensitive (as when she bluntly starts discussing Naoto’s-- who presents as male and struggles to accept her femininity-- gender and measurements), she is otherwise extremely polite with everyone she meets, addressing everyone with formal honorifics regardless of how long she has known them.

She is extremely loyal to those she loves-- after all, her first act of genuine humanity was rebelling against her literal programming-- and has demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice herself if needed be (as was the concern she and Metis had in The Answer, that her power of the Wild Card might lead her to death like it had the protagonist). In P4A, she opts to handle an airplane hijacking by herself rather than put any others at potential risk.

While her actions in The Answer demonstrate that Aigis certainly has the capability for leadership and decisiveness, she is far more comfortable taking orders. Even after awakening to a true personality, one of the most common things she says is “understood,” when she’s told to do something. In P4A, she’s given command of an operation given her high rank in the Shadow Operatives (SEES’ successor) and proves extremely competent, only to gladly relinquish it at the first opportunity to the even higher-ranked Mitsuru Kirijo.

Despite being largely mild-mannered, good-natured and polite, in the time period between Persona 3: The Answer and P4A, she also develops at least a mild sense of humor and ability to be sarcastic. What’s more, another character remarks that when Aigis has something sassy to say, her voice returns to the robotic inflection it originally had, as a way of potentially attributing any perceived rudeness to her mechanical nature and letting her get away with it.

Truly, she’s becoming more human all the time.

Carrier: Please randomize! Something cute and furry that she can pet would be nice, or something mechanical like her.
Magic Weapon: Eurydice Drive

The Eurydice Drive is a curious device. A heavy engine of brass and tubing approximately half a foot long, it converts the mana of the one nearest to it into a potent form of raw energy. That energy is then expressed through one of three interchangable weapons systems: An accurate single-shot rifle, a multi-barrel, rapid-fire autocannon, and a powerful cannon.

The amount of uses is inversely proportional to the power of the attached weapons system. Firing the cannon will deplete an average Pawn's mana in five or six shots (though their destructive force is quite high), while the lower-damage autocannon can manage a total of two minutes' firing and the rifle is somewhere in the middle. Given how bulky and heavy each of the three weapons systems is, it is impractical to carry more than one with the user at a time. Furthermore, switching systems out requires time and focus, making it very impractical to do on a battlefield. For this reason, the user of the Eurydice Drive must select his or her equipment carefully for a given mission ahead of time.

It should, in theory, be possible to modify the Eurydice Drive's weapons systems to use conventional ammunition and merely use the bearer's mana as a power source, which would enable it to last much longer. However, this would be an expensive and time-consuming modification and as such is of limited practicality.

While at first Aigis will be limited to holding her Eurydice Drive system like anyone would a normal gun, if she finds a skilled engineer (NPC or PC) she will be able to integrate it with her existing hardware (the weapons port on her wrist, for instance), improving her accuracy and slightly improving mana efficiency.

Alas, all of Aigis' existing weapons systems have not made the journey with her. Very unfortunate.

Sample: http://chessnuts.dreamwidth.org/901.html?thread=777605#cmt777605