Michael Tourniquet

Michael Tourniquet, the seemingly average human with the hidden mind of an unrivaled genius, is the creator and current master of Mr.RMA and RawrMA.

Appearance
A somewhat portly young man with an impressive height at 6'3, short brown hair and a light shadow of a beard; His appearance is utterly normal in regards to his species in most respects, outside of the red and green markings that run from the tips of his fingers on his right hand to his forearm. Can pretty much always be seen wearing the same type of clothing: a green t-shirt and brown cargo shorts. Under the influence of his intellectual side, he tends to wear a white lab coat in addition to his normal wear.

Personality
In his normal condition, Michael is a kind and sympathetic, albeit socially awkward individual who usually means well and tries to stand up for his friends and/or allies, though his sensitive nature often causes him to cower away from particularly conflicting moments if he can find a way out of them. While he often berates himself for his flaws, he rarely condemns others for theirs. While under the control of his other half, which he has taken to nickname “Meical”, his personality changes drastically, becoming a cold, calculating cynic with little to no concern over the welfare of anyone outside of himself, and occasionally his creations.

Early Life
The physicians who helped bring Michael into the world had noticed from the very beginning that something was off about his brain, though they couldn’t quite make out just what the issue was. It was therefore ignored as some benign mutation and never brought up to the rest of the Tourniquet family, who believed their son to be a perfectly normal, healthy baby. For 18 years, this proved to be just what they got, as Michael grew up with the basic sort of suburban childhood anyone in his situation would expect to go through… albeit without many acquaintances in the process. Of a rather awkward sort, Michael never had many companions in his early years, a few willing to stand his presence every now and then, but none really close enough to be called true “friends” of his…that is, aside from one. A somewhat geeky child named Ray Darraray was the closest thing to a best friend Michael came to have, and the two often played with one another during their elementary school days. Middle School ended up separating the two however, and Michael didn’t hear anything from Ray for the entirety of those three years.

High School reunited them, but Michael noticed that Ray seemed to behave…rather differently than before, and not just in the simple way one did when they matured. Ray would shut himself away from others, look at any and all passersby suspiciously with shifty eyes, and constantly just rush off without a word in mid-conversation, disappearing for the rest of the day. Michael found this attitude quite odd coming from his old friend, but, he didn’t want to impose in order to find out the reasons for the change, instead keeping focus on his studies and other gradually changing factors of his own life.

Senior year eventually came and went, and Michael, still coming off the excitement of graduating and getting accepted into his college of choice, found himself staying up at unbearably late hours of the night just contemplating over what he planned to study, what he planned to do once he got his degree, and how his future would be so wondrous and amazing…and just how he wanted it to turn out. He had no way of knowing that he was soon going to make a single decision that would completely shatter these future plans of his, and yet, still manage to bring him a future that was wondrous and amazing in its own right.

Interlock
One particular summer morning, after another near-sleepless night, Michael stumbled into his kitchen to tiredly make himself breakfast. His own sense of judgment temporarily impaired, he simply grabbed a number of random ingredients from his fridge and put them all together in a plastic cup, forming a rather unsavory, distasteful mush of a liquid substance for his next meal. A mere sniff of the horrid mess was enough to bring an unpleasant shock to Michael’s system, and, inadvertently, activate the so-called benign mutation in his brain, causing him to black out before awakening…as his long dormant, intellectual side. The other part of Michael’s brain was now in control, still the same man, the same soul, but with a significantly reduced humanity, running primarily on the once-inactive part of his mind, which was mostly cognitive, calculating, and logical, with very few, if any, emotions. This side of Michael would end up being known as Meical, and he suddenly had a very specific inclination to build something…Something the world had attempted to create before, but had failed ‘til then to achieve to such a degree: A truly human AI nestled within a near perfect android replica of a human being. The droids would be classified by Meical as Automated Robotic Mechanized Attendants, or ARMAs.

The first ARMA, initially named as such, but later renamed RawrMA, was an apparent success, but a slight fluke in the creation’s circuitry caused its human mind to degrade and render it insane. Wishing to remedy this, Meical set to focus even more diligently on his second creation, an ARMA codenamed Mr.RMA, who would soon end up taking his model classification as a nickname. Nearing the end of RMA’s testing process, Meical felt his mind begin to fade as Michael began to reawaken, eventually collapsing before waking up as his normal self again, completely unaware of making or even knowing anything of his scientific triumphs. He would very quickly find out, and just as quickly come to realize the danger he was now in. Meical’s work had managed to attract a number of researchers who were a part of a massive, anarchic syndicate known as D.R.I.L.L., an organization wishing to exploit the ARMAs’ technology to satisfy their own ends, and, learning that Meical had installed a failsafe that would keep the robots under his command as long as he was still alive, they went about planning his assassination. With RMA’s protection, Michael managed to evade a number of attempts on his life, as well as deactivate his corrupted RawrMA unit before his misadventures culminated in a showdown with one of D.R.I.L.L.’s most promising representatives, as well as a child prodigy…his old pal Ray. It was at this point that Ray revealed he had come to learn about Michael’s unique brain condition by means of an unnamed higher-up, and simply remained his friend through high school to keep watch on him and report any potential findings, being the one who ordered the assassination attempts in the first place. RMA and a crestfallen Michael managed to defeat Ray and his prototype robot, a highly advanced but emotionless machine still lacking the proper AI to reach the ARMAs’ levels, believing Ray to have not survived the encounter after he disappeared from the sight of the skirmish, small pools of his blood being the only indicator he was even there.

Knowing that more syndicate members would eventually come after them, Michael and RMA had to make the difficult decision of leaving Michael’s place of residence for good, leaving his family completely in the dark over his disappearance to keep them safe, allowing himself to go officially missing, and eventually, presumed dead by authorities. Living a nomadic lifestyle from then on, Michael and RMA began their travels to nowhere, occasionally joined by a less malicious but still insane RawrMA, living where they could for as long as they could before moving on to live somewhere else, struggling to keep D.R.I.L.L. off their tail in the process.

Birth In Blood
Discovering the evidence of a highly advanced society outside of their Earth, Michael and RMA managed to make it to this new world by having RMA sign up for a tournament being held there. Michael had spent much of the beginnings of the tournament merely admiring this alien landscape, filled with creatures beyond his wildest dreams, while also making sure to cheer for his creation in the process, surprised to realize that RMA was more than a worthy contender for the rest of the combatants. Eventually, Michael was forced to play a bigger part in the proceedings than he had hoped as the sinister nature of the tournament became clearer over time, launching him into a torrent of nightmarish scenarios, most involving the demonic Nioyu.

Near the midway point of the tournament, he had gotten to know one of the contenders, Lyni Sorrel, quite well, forming a friendship with her that eventually blossomed into a romance. This relationship began to crumble after the finale of the tournament, as Michael felt like his lack of power and general vulnerability would merely bring Lyni into further physical and mental harm than she already faced. This brought him to the difficult decision of breaking up with Lyni.

DragonFire
Roughly at around the same time as his relationship with Lyni ended, Michael started to form a relationship with the dragon-human hybrid Dwayna DragonFire. The two ended up hitting it off rather quickly, and in a matter of weeks formed an eternal bond with each other, with a more formal human wedding ceremony taking place several months afterwards. As Dwayna had been Queen of her home planet of Terrater at the time, Michael became Terrater's new king after the two tied the knot.

Ray's Return
For a time, everything appeared to be going Michael's way upon his marriage to Dwayna and his subsequent ascent to royalty. He had made a great deal of friends, RMA no longer had to bear the burden of looking after his master on his own, and his family had finally been notified that he was in fact still alive and were brought to Charms to live out their lives away from the constant lingering threat of DRILL. Perhaps best of all, Dwayna was also pregnant with their child, who they decided to name Joel after one of Michael's ancestors.

Of course, much as he hoped and prayed, this good fortune would eventually run out, and that moment came in the form of one of Michael's greatest fears, hidden in plain sight. Upon the arrival of his family to Charms, a young man who had befriended Michael's sister accompanied them. The man, going by the name of "Blaise", seemed rather harmless at first, even taking up a job at a restaurant owned by Terrater resident Nerezza Dellanotte as a well-admired chef. This all proved to be a very carefully crafted ruse however, as Blaise, upon the destruction of said restaurant after a scuffle with the seer Elizabeth, was eventually revealed to be, who else, but Ray, apparently having survived his previous encounter with Michael and RMA, albeit heavily crippled. To compensate for this, Ray managed to obtain information from other DRILL agents over the concept of transplanting one's brain to another body, along with manipulating said organic body into a heavily modified cybernetic construct. The real Blaise was the unfortunate first victim of what would become a horrifying series of abductions and murders led by the young prodigy as he gradually created an army of what could only be defined as cybernetic zombies, ravaging Charms' citizens' population in the process.

Eventually, a group of Charmsians and Terrater citizens managed to gradually work out a scheme to put a stop to Ray's bloodshed, culminating in a final showdown between his machines and those who resisted them. Michael and RMA faced Ray in a rematch of their previous battle, though Ray now possessed an ARMA unit of his own, taken from an alternate universe in which a recently deceased Aubrey Tourniquet had taken possession of the robot instead. Eventually, thanks to a number of contributing forces, RMA destroyed his counterpart and Michael personally fired the bullet that killed off Ray for good, but not before losing his hand connected to his ARMA units in the process. Dwayna and the Android known as Edward managed to construct a new hand that still contained Meical's device keeping RMA activated.

Powers and Abilities
Meical: Michael harbors within the confines of his otherwise average mind the intellect of a genius unmatched on Earth, and rivaling some of the greater minds of the rest of the universe. Unfortunately, this intelligence is one he cannot access willingly, as the activation of this side of his brain in turn shuts down the more sympathetic and emotional sides of Michael, forming the near-emotionless personality of Meical. With only the distinct feelings of content and discontent, Meical can construct a number of inventions otherwise thought to be impossible to create with the resources he has on hand within a surprisingly short time-frame, his most significant inventions, the ARMA units, having been created and tested in no more than 11 days.

Soulbond: As a result of becoming the mate of an immortal spirit dragon, Michael's lifespan, having been bound to Dwayna's, has extended to immortality as well. Though he possesses no magic of his own, this bond has apparently sufficed for his survival on Terrater, a planet in which most non-magical species would otherwise perish rather easily.