Hex Mutations

I'm assuming at this point that in-universe mutating forms is kosher, so Arch is getting in on the fun too.

Old Arch
Name: Archibald Voldt ['Arch']
Age: 31
Gender: Male
Appearance:
Physically speaking, Arch can roughly be summed as the epitome of the Netopian everyman, boiled down into a single human being. His features are all properly in place - straight teeth, brown eyes, generic dark straight hair, and all of it almost predisposed to being forgotten, or at least mixed in with the myriad faces people see from day to day. He stands of average build, perhaps a little taller than most and a tad overweight, and seems to wear nothing but jeans and button-down shirts in various shades, possibly with a windbreaker hastily thrown on overtop. The only constant features to him are the leather satchel permanently at his side (at least, whenever he chooses to leave his apartment), which is ostensibly for carrying his laptop but tends to wind up holding a bit of everything, and the huge, bulky headphones that never seem to come off his ears.

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Personality:
Arch is, above all else, a bit of a misanthrope. This reflects on just about everything about him: his anonymous job as a Net architect, his solitary lifestyle and resulting shut-case apartment, his perpetual headphones, etc. He tends to come off as outright rude around others; in truth, human interaction alternatively scares and disturbs him, depending on what mood he's in. He makes an exception with Hex, if simply because the Navi's demeanor is so obviously artificial that it doesn't hit any of the usual triggers. He's fond of a couple certain chemical vices, which do generally alter his behaviour to make him a little easier to be around, but given his tendency to reserve this to his apartment (and his reluctance to leave), this is rarely witnessed.

PET Modifications:
Arch's PET is a battered old thing that he quite literally picked up off the street one day. The original casing has obviously been removed, replaced with a reinforced titanium body that's nonetheless dented in a few places. So far as Arch can tell, all of the original functions still work: full media capability, holographic interface both for access and manifesting a 3D image of Hex, etc, but the little device has a few unexplainable quirks and hiccups just like the contained Navi. There was no identification or name listed when Arch originally found it, and the only decoration is a series of binary code streams stenciled in black onto the back casing; he has no idea if it's actually Hex's original PET or just a bizarre coincidence, and tries not to think too hard about it.


New Arch
Name: Archibald Voldt ['Arch']
Age: 31
Gender: Male
Appearance:
Arch resembles, if anything, a character creator's default model, before any customisation or personality is added by the player. A Netopian everyman if ever there was one, he stands 180 cm (5'11"), weighing in at a slightly paunchy 85 kg (187 lbs). His features have the roundness of a previously-sharp jawline that has smoothed over with apathy and takeout; his voice is deep and rusty from disuse, his skin a ghastly milk-white. He stands ramrod straight, eyes forward in an omnipresent hollow stare that slides off other people like they don't exist.

To clothe himself, Arch keeps a breeding colony of button-down shirts and denim jeans somewhere in the darkness of his bedroom (he certainly never seems to run out). A bulky pair of headphones take up permanent residence over his ears, as does a leather satchel on the rare occasions he ventures outside. These occasions have only gotten rarer with the advent of door-to-door delivery couriers, allowing Arch to create a self-sustaining habitat in his apartment.

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Personality:
Despite being a qualified shut-in, Arch is meticulous by nature, and it shines through only in the parts of his life he cares about. A curious soul would need look no further than his shuttered apartment, eternally spotless thanks to the power of midnight recycling runs and lots of free time, and to his drafting computer and the impossible-looking architecture shining in his workroom, built from holographic wireframes like magnificent three-dimensional puzzles. He enjoys reading enough to keep a library of books in his study, ranging in flavour from case studies of non-Euclidean physics to detective novels. All of his hobbies, in fact, are alike in their solitude and their silence; even his eponymous headphones let no sound in or out.

Outside his apartment, Arch could barely be said to exist. He has no friends, nor family. He has not made eye contact with another human being in years. In the tiny interactions he has with his deliverymen, he is unfailingly caustic and rude; otherwise, he barely speaks at all. Some part of him is aware that humans are meant to be social creatures and his mentality isn't exactly healthy, but at no point has he ever taken steps to address this. The one exception was a brief interest he had in Navis, which led him to create a slew of failed created life projects that were ultimately abandoned. The cannabis he is so fond of doesn't help, keeping any introspection in a near-permanent haze. His acuity of mind remains sharp regardless; the pot just takes him away from himself, which he sees more as a bothersome machine than anything.

PET Modifications:
Arch's PET is a battered old thing that he quite literally picked up off the street one day. The original casing has obviously been removed, replaced with a reinforced titanium body that's nonetheless dented in a few places. The screen has gone dark, and the few buttons scattered around the case no longer work, including the power switch. The software within has been wholly consumed by Hex, effectively making the PET a physical extension of his body into the real world. It can interface with the PET through Egomorph to communicate with Arch, but rarely chooses to do so unless requesting data to be fed.


And of course there's zombie-ing to be done, so without further ado:

Old Hex
Name: Hexadecimal.EXE ['Hex']
Gender: N/A
Element: Null
Subtype: Bug
-Passive: Contagious
-Active: Hack
Appearance: Hex's body appears to be comprised of a mishmash of an innumerable number of Navis, smushed together Frankenstein-style in a veritable freak show of mismatched limbs and pieces. It can potentially have any number of arms, legs, heads...even torsos at once, but there are two defining features no matter what body parts it's using. The first is the general look of decay and deterioration to it; humanoid parts will look a bit...dead, maybe even rotted, whereas more robotic, Navi-esque armour will invariably be cracked or broken in places. The second is the matter holding its parts all together: a translucent, gelatinous white protoplasm with nigh-endless morphing capabilities, filled with tiny moving ones and zeroes that swim erratically. This is in fact Hex's true body, which is present both anchoring each part of its ramshackle body to another another, and seeping from every crack or hole in its body. They can form into long tendrils protruding from the core body, spread across the surface of its armour like parasitic growth, or simply pool at its feet. The pool displays a slight wormhole effect; Hex can, at any time, add or replace parts of its body with 'new' (but similarly damaged like the rest of it) pieces, which emerge from the pool at its feet and are rapidly integrated into its body.

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Personality: Hex can't be said to have much of a personality, owing partially to Arch's utter lack of skill in Navi programming and partially to its own origins: an inexplicably intelligent mass of glitched data that infested the 'junk-heap' of Arch's many, many failed Navi projects, and somehow gained a semblance of sentience. Its voice is clunky, robotic, and tends to glitch at random, keeping in line with Hex's buggy code that never fails to resist deletion and potential patch-fixes alike. However, emotion is not unknown to it, as it has been known to exemplify the odd trait that can't be explained away as anything but an emotional reaction, such as sudden panic or fear. These tend to happen extremely quickly, and may very well simply be more bugs in the glitch hot-pot that is Hex's code.

Custom Weapon: Hex Buster
Hex's array of body parts includes a veritable arsenal of ranged weaponry, though of course every last one of them is defunct. Instead, it can simply funnel a bit of its own protoplasm through the barrel, and fire it in a reasonable facsimile of a normal buster; Hex's glitch-ridden code tends to disagree with physical contact. It can also produce a melee attack in a similar manner, using either protoplasm-tipped melee weapons or simply attacking with a sharp tendril.

Charge Shot: Expunge
Hex corrupts the target with a powerful attack from his nigh-endless arsenal.


New Hex
Name: Hexadecimal.EXE ['Hex']
Gender: N/A
Element: Null
Subtype: Bug [Contagious/Glitch Eater]

Appearance:
Hexadecimal (Hex to its Operator) is less of a being than it is a place. Its main 'body', if it could be said to have one, is a plane somewhere behind the proverbial curtain, wherein it occupies, even comprises all conceivable space. To enter the true Net, it finds a region to occupy and opens a window, which consumes a point in space and begins growing its body into the virtual world. It manifests as a dingy, translucent protoplasm, unevenly grey-white like dirty ice, shot through with clusters of ropey black veins formed from viral remains. The main body's connection to the Net constitutes its measurable vitalities; tendrils can be mass-produced and shed as necessary without harming the greater whole. It has no eyes, no ears, nothing equivalent to a central processor even. Its body is homogenous, every cubic inch containing the same information repeated ad infinitum.

While climbing tentacles are Hex's primary means of constructing bodies, the main body is used solely for infecting and digesting new data, and converting the slurry into more of itself. To arm and armour its projections, it keeps a husk of every being it consumes. They are gathered into a small planetoid behind its window, decayed and gnawed hollow. Shells are generally formed from multiple bodies' worth of components, crushed or otherwise mangled into shape around a projected form of protoplasm. The veins within Hex's body add solid physicality to its form, which functions mostly as rigid shells around a liquid core. They exist as a circulatory system for information within Hex; when projected through its window, they perform the role of sutures, sewing and holding its shells together until their components disintegrate.

Picture (Outdated)

Personality:
Hex does not think in a traditional sense. Its main body feels the density of data clustering above and around it as a topographic map, and finds an entry point where the amount of data to chew through is thinnest. Projected bodies can consume ambient virtual noise through their protoplasm, creating an impression of movement within a general region. This functions something like scent in a biological brain; Hex can identify the signatures of Navis and other virtual creations after a fashion. Its body itself has a strong tactile sense, essentially a self-sustaining liquid that can feel, and map out optimal immobilizations of whatever it has snared. Everything in what pass for its directives, be it forming shells as lures or reaching out in constricting tentacles, is geared towards finding new data to assimilate.

Custom Weapon:
Hex's array of body parts includes a veritable arsenal of ranged weaponry, though of course every last one of them is defunct. Instead, it can simply funnel a bit of its own protoplasm through the barrel, and fire it in a reasonable facsimile of a normal buster; Hex's glitch-ridden code tends to disagree with physical contact. It can also produce a melee attack in a similar manner, using either protoplasm-tipped melee weapons or simply attacking with a sharp tendril. A charged attack gathers a significant amount more of its mass to attack with.
Approved Hex'd mutation and Arch's weed.
Adding Hex's current appearance to its profile.

Mild NSFW: butt
I feel like that's missing a NSFL instead, lol; approved nonetheless (with the respective warning tag).