Steve Jackson Games GURPS – Generic Universal RolePlaying System

Selene Holmes (B)

TL11 Corporate Founder & Electronics Expert

Total: 256.5
[Created & played by milliken@prismnet.com]

Age: 31 years (Born 2/15/124 After Founding). Appearance: white hair, white skin, pink eyes (rarely seen due to wearing silver wrap-around sensor goggles), wears a white biosuit. About five-foot-eleven, slim.

Attributes

(-10) ST 9
(0) DX 10
(45) IQ 14
(0) HT 10
Thrust 1d-2, Swing 1d-1, Speed 5, Move 5

Advantages (140 points):

Eidetic Memory 2 (60 points), Status +2, Multimillionaire +1, Attractive, Sparrial reactions: +2.

Also, some Acquired Favors (including blackmail over the New Garavaran Gene-Banks, and a favor from Kevin Dexter, for aid in fixing a dreamgame bug that'd trapped his son in VR; ?? points)

[[House Rule: Eidetic memory gives a +2/+4 bonus to all IQ-based skills - even defaults - and the memory tricks (as listed in the Basic Set). It doubles/quadruples Time Use, but does not have the doubling/quadrupuling of points as listed in Basic Set. (This Selene was converted from Old EM to New EM, and is actually 209.5 points, with a -47 point balance from the conversion.)]]

Disadvantages (-40 points):

Absent-mindedness, Albinism, Fear of Monsters (mild, -15 points).

Also, Various Acquired Enemies (including an Aspect Power 30 megalomaniac, a Kaa drug-lord, and a corrupt admin-type; -?? points), some Acquired Secrets (owns the only working time-travel devices in the campaign, owns a ship with TL13 sensors and stealth system, owns an instantaneous-jump hyperdrive, can lay hands on a TL13 Kintaran battlesuit with DR 100 force screen, possesses a "liberated" TL12 hypnogogic projector, and lots more information of the sort that PCs horde away from the rest of the universe . . . )

Quirks (-5 points):

Minor Delusion (that she's descended from Sherlock Holmes & Irene Adler); Dislikes dirt; Curious; Likes gadgets; Normally wears display goggles (silver wrap-around sensor-visor that gives her 360 degree vision (should she choose to give herself a minor headache that way) and incorporates a multiscanner. It can also be used as a sort of HUD, though she doesn't link it to any weapons).

Languages

New Garavaran-18, Thral (common race, M/A)-16 (0.5), Unar (common race, M/A)-16 (0.5)

Skills

Accounting-13, Administration-15, Area Knowledge (Byte Central)-14, Area Knowledge (New Garavar)-14, Area Knowledge (sector 000)-17 (0.5), Astrogation (Hyperdrive)-18 (2), Astrogation (Warp Drive)-20 (6), Astronomy/TL11-16 (1), Beam Weapons (sonic)/TL11-11 (0.5), Chemistry/TL11-15 (0.5), Computer Hacking/TL11-20, Computer Operation/TL11-17 (0.5), Computer Programming/TL9-21 (0.5), Computer Programming/TL11-24 (16), Computer Programming/TL12-23 (8), Criminology/TL11-16 (0.5), Economics-12, El. Ops. (Sensors)/TL11-24 (6), El. Ops. (Sensors)/TL12-23 (6), Electronics (Communications)/TL11-21 (2), Electronics (Computers)/TL11-24 (16), Electronics (Computers)/TL12-23 (8), Electronics (Holographics)/TL11-20, Electronics (Med:Neural)/TL11-19:25 (0.5), Electronics (Security Systems)/TL11-22 (4), Electronics (Sensors)/TL11-24 (8), Electronics (Sensors)/TL12-23 (8), Engineer (Robotics)/TL11-20 (8), Engineer (Robotics)/TL12-21 (10), Forensics/TL11-12, Free Fall/TL11-9 (1), History-12, Law-12, Literature-12, Mathematics-15 (0.5), Mechanic (Robotics)/TL11-16 Merchant-18 (2), Musical Instr. (Violin)-15 (0.5), Nuclear Physics/TL11-14 (0.5), Photography/TL11-13, Physics/TL11-15 (0.5), Planetology (Earthlike)/TL11-20 (6), Psychology: AIs-11:17, Research-16 (0.5), Shipbuilding (Starship)*/TL11-17 (1), Strategy (Space)-12, Tactics (Space)-12, Vacc Suit/TL11-16 (0.5)

[*Some of her ships (among others) are in my Ships-list.]

Conversions:

Fantasy

Merchant-18 is not shabby, and could form the core of a R&D/Merchant house in a low-tech world. Replace all skills with equivalent ones (Navigation, Survival, etc.), and her Fear of Monsters no longer applies to common animals (horses, etc.), though dragons and other big and/or "unnatural" animals will drive her nuts. Drop her wealth to a mere Filthy Rich and give her some Magery and make her an Enchantment mage - she's researching ways to create "auto-enchant" items, and other ways to make the magical-items production-line feasible. (Put the wand in the Magic Chest for three days, and take out a fire-starter, etc.)

Modern

Selene owns a "garage company" which is doing pretty well, if not spectacularly. It would probably do real well if she'd put the stock on the open market, but she'd rather hold onto her business totally. More of her business has to do with computer programs than hardware, probably, but there may be interesting things in her basement . . . Consider dropping her Wealth, depending on how big a company you want her to be in charge of. Maybe she's on the verge of inventing real, sentient AIs!

Near Future

Most of the same changes as Modern - Selene's company may be a subsidary of a larger corp., or a totally independant one. (Add Politics: Corporate, to assist this independance.) She's undoubtedly invented a way to consistantly get stable, friendly (to her, at least) AIs, though whether she's announced this is up to the GM.


This is, obviously, a variant of the XenoSolutions' Selene Holmes (TL10) - except this one got played for a while. This is actually the second variant - after the first one (Selene Holmes, TL12 Sensor and Computer Goddess) went and invented TL13 Living Metal in a TL12-verging-on-13 universe, we had to blow her up in a time-travel expedition that resulted in a TL11-verging-on-12 universe, and a generally better scene. (No Great Thral-Unar War, for instance.)

Selene Holmes (timeline B, TL11 version) is the founder and president of Artemis Enterprises, a small corporation that produces cutting edge tech in a few areas - TL12 minifacs, TL12 computers, TL12 sensors, TL12 communications and TL12 stealth systems (both military grade and non-military grade - optical-jamming-only can be sold to various people, but the full stealth system can only be sold to the New Garavaran military; her own ship(s) have the military version, though it's never ["well, hardly ever"] used in the New Garavar system itself.). She also has three ships (The Bat, the Hell, and Diana's Bow), a couple of shuttles (maybe 3 by now; the A Handbasket/"Handy", the Arrow/"Ari", ??), and more (indentured) AI-probes than you want to shake a stick at ("BSI probes").

Selene also designs various ships - usually research craft, to take advantage of the company's superior sensors and computers, but also some personal designs, just because it's fun.

Artemis Enterprises is a "closed corporation" - the only people who own stock are the three entities who started it (herself, with over 50%, Sapient Diana (free AI) and Sapient Watson (free AI), with smaller amounts (around 10% each)) and employees. Employees must offer stock to members of the company before selling it to anyone outside Artemis Enterprises. This means that AE doesn't grow very quickly, but Selene retains control of it and can finance her pet projects as she sees fit. (And we don't have to explain ourselves to stockholders, either, which is Very Good.)

Due to the interesting colorations of some of her employees (the white, pink-eyed Sparrial, Miralooar, the similarly-colored Kintaran, Embereyes, and the blue-eyed white Kintaran, Moonfur) - as well as her own - it is said of Artemis Enterprises that "You don't have to be albino to work there, but it helps." She also employs a number of AIs, including Sapient Diana (aka Diana Falkayne, when she's "passing for human" (in her "Diana the Wonder-'Bot" body)), Sapient Watson, Mycroft, and all those aforementioned probe-ships - called the "Baker Street Irregulars" and given kid-names. (Suzy, Arther, Zoe, Joey, Georgie, etc.)

[[ One of my PCs nearly had a heart-attack when she was summoned into Ms. Holmes' presence - she walked through the door into apparent vacuum. Selene (and Diana) like to play with the holowalls that are on every flat surface of Selene's flagship, Diana's Bow, and they're sadists (don't believe Selene when she denies it). ]]

Selene was born on Byte, and grew up there - causing her to consider any animal larger than a lab-rat to be a "dangerous creature that's going to bite me isn't it?????" Obvious house-pets can be tolerated, but are usually viewed with suspicion. A horse would send her into fits. You can see that she doesn't leave her ship much . . .

Much to Selene's disgust, the gene-sample that she'd donated at age 15 to the New Garavaran Gene-Banks got stolen by Sparrials en-route from station to planet. That gene-sample, plus an appropriate one from some as-yet unknown male human, were used to conceive Aralanoomi Moriarity (her Sparrial father made some money re-writing the Sherlock Holmes canon from the Master-Criminal's viewpoint). Selene's other family include a disliked older sister, Minerva Holmes, and her ignored-whenever-she-can-get-away-with-it parents, Dr. Bradford Holmes (scout) and Dr. Circe Jones (Nobel-Prize-winning genetic engineer who invented TL12 Panimmunity, and Power 15 Psionic Healer). Unfortunately for Selene, Circe insists on calling up every now and then to urge her to "do her genetic duty" and have kids. Circe'll be happy to do the genework on her grandkids.

[[My aforementioned PC thought that it explained much about Selene, that her mother is a gengineer . . . ]]

The TL9 Computer Programming skill is from a game where she had to deal with "Terminator times twenty" or so . . . She actually managed to salvage most of the obnoxious AIs, tweaking their personality programs so that they weren't compelled to be genocidal to anything biological. (Some of them still aren't very nice, but then neither are some biologicals!) Anyway, that gave her a crash course in TL9 programming.

[Note: Selene's name is pronounced: "SEH-leh-nee", not "Se-LEEN", or the probably more proper "Seh-LEH-neh." Her last name is pronounced "Homes", as in the Great Detective . . . ]

Selene guest-stars in a couple of my Pawprints stories.

Typical Quotes:

[To threats against her:] "That would be unwise."

[After a long side-digression, full of technobabble:] "Watson, what was I talking about? Oh, yes. The on-switch is right here."

[To Moonfur, or Diana (!!), when either of those comments on an attractive male:] "Shoreleave on your own time."


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