The New Disasters: The Outsider

Summary

[Long, consonant-free sound], who goes by "Melody" rather than listen to humans butcher their name, is an advance scout for what is absolutely not an invasion fleet. They'll happily explain that humans will, after the fleet arrives, be given a fair and equitable 2% portion of Earth's annual resource production. As they've spent more time on Earth, however, they realize just how many strange and wonderful resources Earth has. Did you know that there is an animal called the "sheep," whose fur can be removed by skilled humans and processed into warm, comforting fabric? The fleet absolutely must preserve some of these "sheep," and a number of appropriately trained humans. Yes, the humans will need to be compensated, but what a small cost for such gains!

Identity

Hero name/"Human" name: Melody

Real name: [Seventeen seconds of singing with no discernible consonants]

Look

• Ambiguous (masculine frame, voice sticks mostly to a feminine register. Uses neutral pronouns personally, though doesn't really care about what pronouns others use to refer to them.)
• Strange body (No hair, skin like nacre)
• Glowing eyes
• Mismatched clothing (Like they're wearing half a thrift store.)
• Their people's uniform (a smooth, matte grey bodysuit)

Abilities:

• Flight
• Superhuman toughness
• Alien weaponry (repurposed exploration/resource-gathering technology)
• Telepathy and mind blasts (mediated/controlled by "singing." This can be done at a pitch outside the range of human hearing, so "sound-based telepathy" isn't quite as useless as it sounds.)

Stats

	Danger	Freak	Savior	Superior	Mundane
Starting	-1	+2	0	+2	0
Current	0	+1	0	+2	0

Current experience: 2

Moves

Belong in two worlds: You have the resources that come with your station. Whenever you contact your people, roll + Superior. On a 10+, hold 3. On a 7-9, hold 2. On a miss, hold 1, but your people make an uncomfortable demand of you. Spend your hold 1 for 1 to:

• receive a useful piece of alien technology that will allow you to use any ability from another playbook once (choose the ability when you spend the hold)
• consult your people’s knowledge to ask the GM a question about the current situation
• clear a condition through the comfort of contact with your home

Alien tech: When you alter a human device with your alien technology, roll + Freak. On a hit, you create a device that can do something impossible once and then fizzle. When you roll a 10+, choose one:

• it works exceptionally well
• you get an additional use out of it

On a miss, the device works, but it has a completely unintended side effect that the GM will reveal when you use it.

The best of them: When you comfort or support someone by telling them how they exemplify the best parts of Earth you can roll + Freak instead of + Mundane.

Backstory

Where did Melody come from? A distant planet. While they're fine with using the name "Melody" for themselves to account for human (in)abilities, they refuse to accept any human names for either their planet or their species. "Your planet" and "your species" has to suffice (and Melody will ignore any nicknames the humans use among themselves).

Why did Melody come to Earth? Melody is here to asses Earth's suitability to be colonized, mined, and otherwise exploited. They'll be much more optimistic in their descriptions, though, emphasizing the "many benefits" available to cooperative indigenous sapients.

Why does Melody want to stay? It's their civic duty to catalog Earth's incredible variety of resources. After all, it'd be a shame if Melody's species were to destroy some of these resources by accident.

Why do Melody's people want them to come home? Their species is unconvinced that all of Earth's resources are valuable. Earth has an extraordinarily complex ecosystem, yes, but this is to its detriment rather than its advantage. If this ecosystem were to be simplified, it would be both more manageable and more useful.

Is your form the default form of your species or have you undergone some sort of process to appear more palatable to humans? Young members of Melody's species are squirmy, amorphous blobs of raw muscle and sensory tissue. The first marker of maturity is when an individual is "shaped," when they grow a smooth, flexible carapace adapted to their assigned role. An individual expected to work in zero-g might have many interchangeable limbs; the rare individual chosen to be a soldier might have heavier armor and natural weapons. Melody got a basic biped shape, to "blend in" with the humans, or at the very least, to avoid being destroyed on sight. When Melody is heavily injured, it's possible to see dark red squirminess between cracks in their "skin." This is both painful and extremely embarrassing.

Does your species have a tragic backstory that explains the reason for their aggressively expansionist activities is it more of a "manifest destiny" sort of situation? Various political/philosophical/religious groups among Melody's species have various explanations, most of which boil down to space manifest destiny. "We are fleeing from an ancient enemy; this is the only way for our species to survive" has had some traction in millennia past, but is nowadays viewed as a historical curiosity the same way the modern mainstream humans might look at Flat Earthers.

What is the expected timeline on the invasion of Earth? Is the fleet expecting to arrive in a few weeks? A few months? Years? Just wondering what the clock is like right at the start of events. If everything goes perfectly according to schedule, the main fleet will arrive in about twenty-five to thirty years. Accounting for the expected delays of space government bureaucracy, the fleet might arrive in forty years and the invasion probably wouldn't start for a couple more. If Melody succeeds beyond their wildest dreams in convincing their superiors of Earth's importance, the invasion might begin in five to seven years. Earth is in the middle of a long, long list of target planets. (There are a few ships nearby, enough to enable the Outsider's Moment of Truth, but nothing compared to the majestic immensity of a full-scale invasion fleet.)

Are you relatively open with your species' motivations with your teammates or are you operating under some sort of cover story? Melody's open about the plan. This includes the timeline, so reactions are probably split between trying to convince Melody that Earth is unsuitable for colonization, trying to convince them that colonization itself is bad, and ignoring it entirely. Seriously, forty years? Who gives a crap. (Though it's up to the other players, obviously.)

Have you made your arrival on earth a matter of public record? Are you something of a celebrity who got to shake the president's hand or did you sneak across the space border under cover of space night*? Or something in the middle, where relevant authorities are aware of you and your (cover)mission but it wasn't made super big news? Melody's single-seater sleeper-pod crashed into a park in the suburbs about a year ago, then Melody hopped out and started scouting. The government's definitely aware of them and their mission, but it's fairly low priority considering the other threats Halcyon City faces (as well as the pressures of not-space government bureaucracy). Occasionally an agent will show up and ask Melody a few pointed questions, which they answer guilelessly before returning to their latest investigation of the organism known as Yeast.

Describe a piece of your alien tech, please. I'll even describe two, in order to make sure that Belong in Two Worlds actually makes sense.

• The drop-pod, a simpler version of the already simple sleeper-pod Melody arrived in. A heavily shielded box about 2'x2'x4', the drop-pod transports an item about the size of a loaf of bread across the galaxy in a matter of hours. It accelerates faster than light by rapidly phasing between dimensions. When it nears its destination, it bleeds excess speed into other dimensions before firmly materializing in this one. Usually arrives harmlessly, occasionally smashes a giant hole through someone's roof.
• Sculpt-slime. This brown, smoky-smelling paste, when spread on stone or metal, reduces it to the consistency of soft clay within seconds. Exposure to a strong source of UV light re-hardens the material, allowing workers to quickly tunnel through otherwise troublesome materials.

The species' tech is mostly adapted to exploration and resource exploitation, with very few outright weapons.

Relationships

Melody's been learning about humanity by spending time with Nyx.

Melody has a crush on Seed, but keeps it under wraps.

Influence

Everyone in the New Disasters (Trigger, Hellion, Seed, and Nyx) currently has Influence over Melody.