LNH20: Earth-Twenty Roundup Thread And Getting The New Tag In There

[Lalo Martins]

Literally dreamed this one, thought it was too funny not to be an LNH20 
thing.

Introducing: Tori! (Not too sure about the name though.)

Tori is a member of the LNH, a robot, a legal citizen of Japan, a 
millionaire, and a very popular toy franchise.

It was built circa 1981 by Kid Enthusiastic. Maybe it's the only truly 
sentient creation of Kid E, along the lines of “nobody had told him he 
couldn't do it, so he did it”. Mostly, being way too intelligent for his 
own good, young James had no good friends, so he built one.

Tori looks kind of like a 1m-tall, classic-Anime stylized version of the 
Space Shuttle, with somewhat anthropomorphized head, and penguin-like 
flappers on the sides. It looks like that because Kid E read somewhere 
the Shuttle's design was based on a bird, and not having the web around 
to quickly dispel that myth, he was excited by it and his imagination 
came up with a robot. It can walk upright, but also fly; its feet have 
small shuttle-like wings on the sides, and of course, rockets on the 
bottom. When it needs fine manipulation, a pair of cavities open in the 
chest and little robotic manipulators come out. It has human-level 
intelligence, slight above average (or you could say nerd average), and 
speaks perfectly good English and Japanese, with a metallic voice.

Kid Enthusiastic and Tori remained close friends for about 20 years, and 
during the 90s, it was for all practical purposes Kid E's sidekick. Then, 
during the Crossover Crisis that led to the creation of the Killfile, 
things somehow got sour between them, and by the time of the Killfile, 
they went their separate ways.

At some point in the mid-90s, after it had saved the world and 
experienced teenage angst, some of the Saviors campaigned to have its 
rights recognized as a sentient being, and eventually, Japan thought it 
would be a good marketing ploy to go with it, and gave Tori full 
citizenship. Its legal name is Jinkozuno Tori (or Tori Jinkozuno in the 
West) For the select few with working unicode: 人工頭脳鳥.

In a moment of inspiration, it went to Bandai while it was still in the 
public eye, and licensed its image to toys of all kinds, a successful 
series of video games, and an anime, that wasn't commercially very 
successful but became a cult and later had two equally failed, equally 
cultish relaunch attempts (the second one in late 2011). For a self-
respecting young otaku, a plush Tori is about as mandatory as a plush 
Totoro.

So by the time it split up with Kid E, Tori was a very rich robot. It 
went back to Japan and attempted to live a somewhat normal life, although 
the life of a Japanese celebrity is even farther from normal than that of 
an American celebrity. It released a few records, and was a sensation of 
the Japanese convention scene.

Then a little over five years later, the Killfille ended, and LNH Setup 
Kid knocked on its door...

Open questions:

- Why did it never try to reproduce, or even mass-produce itself? Or 
maybe it has, but with the Killfile in place it just couldn't be done?

- Why did the Killfile leave it alone? Maybe it was in space when it 
happened? But then how did it come back and continue to work?

- What is it powered by? Being the 80s, maybe an atomic reactor heart? 
Does that cause it to be less popular these days when atomic energy is 
viewed with suspicion?

- What is their relationship like today, with both in the LNH?

- Do cybernetic birds dream of cloud computing?

-- Lalo “” Martins