Alphys

PLAYER

NAME: Swirl
CONTACT: PM
OVER 18? Yeah
CURRENT CHARACTER: n/a

CHARACTER

NAME: Alphys
CANON: Undertale
CANON POINT: Queen Alphys ending (failed geno run)
AGE: Unspecified, but she's "Doctor" Alphys - I assume she's in the equivalent of early 30s
SPECIES: Monster (lizard)
INFORMATION: Wiki page

CHARACTER PITCH:
Nerd scientist with self-worth issues and more crushes than she knows what to do with. Genuinely skilled mechanic and electrician, able to upgrade a phone with features like texting and a jetpack in seconds. Discounts her actual skills and accomplishments, but desperately wants the approval of others - to the point of claiming to be what she thinks they want. Falsifies an accomplishment to gain a royal position, continues the lie to the point of sabotaging her other relationships. In another timeline, she would have pressured her it's complicated friend into playacting the villain for her to live out a fantasy of being the hero and friend to the human.

POWERS:
Like all Undertale monsters, Alphys can express her feelings through magic - mostly depicted as projectiles of thematic shapes with relevant powers (fireballs can cook, guns can shoot, vegetables can heal, etc). Alphys's demonstrated magic is a mix of electrical bolts, featureless blocks, small explosive bombs with fuses, and miniature models of Mettaton that float on umbrellas and toss small heart-shaped projectiles of their own. Each of these attacks are also used by Mettaton, which - given that his body is a mix of metal and electrical magic - implies that most of those attacks are physical objects that Alphys constructed and then summons in battle for use. (Another monster in the game fires their attacks from employment and then borrows robots from somewhere else, and Alphys has spear-repair kits for Undyne to use on her magically-summoned spears - they're a mix of conjured and constructed magical abilities).

Beyond outright magic, Alphys is a mechanic and engineer, able to read unfamiliar blueprints and construction functional machinery from it, as well as rapidly install pre-built upgrades for a phone, including things like a small hammerspace application and an expandable jetpack of limited fuel.

QUESTIONNAIRE

What is the worst or most malicious thing your character has ever done? How do they feel about it now? Was this sort of action typical of them?
Not as much malicious as panicked avoidance of responsibility, Alphys kept a number of monsters effectively locked up in her basement, feeding them dog food after an experiment went very, very wrong. On the king's orders she had gathered comatose people to try extracting their souls to accumulate the power to unlock the barrier trapping monsters underground. The method she used accidentally caused them to revive - and then melt together, and become effectively immortal. She panicked, dodging all communications about the matter, hiding them in her basement and separating the keys to the elevator so they wouldn't leave. It was, unfortunately, very typical of her - Alphys hates giving bad news, preferring to tell people what she thinks they want to hear, and tends to continue the lies far past the best time to confess. Without feeling like there's people backing her, she struggles to ever own up to her mistakes.

What is the most altruistic or selfless thing your character has ever done? How do they feel about it now? Was this sort of action typical of them?
As a murderous human's rampage through the outer edges of the underground approached her lab, Alphys organized the ongoing evacuation of fleeing monsters into the safety of her secret lab. This meant inviting them to the place of her greatest shame, where she had panicked in experimental studies and accidentally mutated a number of monsters - and had been keeping them semi-captive since. She still can't believe that people didn't blame her for the failures or hate her for the lying, let alone that they were grateful enough to crown her queen for her efforts. Left to her own devices, she wouldn't have acted - but Undyne had called her and pushed her to do what she could, and for Undyne's sake she could.

What do they desire above all else? How far would they go to accomplish their goals or fulfill those desires? Do they have lines they wouldn't cross?
Alphys wants to be liked, to feel that she's someone worth caring about. She defaults to trying to give people information and gifts, whether it's things she thinks they want or things she can shape the situation into being about. As queen, she's reached the point of willingness to kill - to stop a danger before they can hurt the people she cares about. She's still reluctant to do so, and it takes a lot before she's willing to put people into notable harm, let alone murder.

GAME DETAILS

LEGACY: Lover. Alphys is the character with all the crushes, whose main hobbies are power-of-friendship media. Despite her actual technical skills, she lied her way appointment as Royal Scientist - in hopes of impressing King Asgore. It's part of a pattern with her - she uses her position to build a better body for her friend Mettaton, to forge a giant sword and gather various gifts for her crush Undyne, and in another timeline would use it as the basis of a friendship with the human Frisk. What pushes her to action is her connections to other people - left to her own devices, Alphys spends her days in pajamas and snacks while watching TV. Celebrant could be a close second, but even when spending her days on TV and games, she does so to live vicariously through the shows' depictions of friendships and romance, to have feelings about those relationships even when she's not up to interacting with people for real.
INTRODUCTORY SECT: Kenoma. I want to explore Alphys's feelings of being an inadequate, imposter ruler. She became queen after organizing an evacuation and sheltering of a good number of monsters along the human's murderous path, but she hasn't managed to shed the sense that it's only because she seemed in control of things then. Privately, she had been in a self-loathing, near-suicidal spiral, almost hoping that the human would kill her along the way. She's still insecure about whether her policies were doing any good, grieving the loss of a lot of people important to her, and most significantly she's recently arrived at the conclusion that she should have acted more decisively earlier on - more lethally. That willingness to destroy to improve things seems on brand for the Kenoma, and it helps that it's based in the more technologically and artistically active communities would suit Alphys better.
SUITABILITY: I'm interested in exploring Alphys's mix of getting caught up in her interests and passions to the neglect of her responsibilities, and her willingness to do things for others even if not for herself. With the Kenoma, she'll want to help reset the universe in hopes that a better version of her would be able to help keep Mettaton, Asgore, Undyne and others alive - but she'll also be reluctant to get her hands dirty, and want to hide away in hobbies instead of seeing people fearful or frustrated with the Regent's policies. I'd also like her getting invested in the other player characters, and building up a sense that she was doing a good job as queen, as various things about the empire rub her the wrong way. Her proclivities towards self-loathing and suicidal ideation (she abruptly disappears in most of the canon neutral endings, and met Undyne when Alphys was staring down the edge of a cliff) fit with the existential despair of the Kenoma... But, that said, Undertale is a game with an ideal ending very much about renewing the hopes and dreams of the various despairing monsters, pushing them to again help each other and make things better. She'd be one of the Kenoma characters in it for the promise of the better world, bittersweet rather than wholeheartedly loyal, and I would eventually want opportunities for a team swap. However, if the balance is skewing too far to the Kenoma side, I'm also down for playing Pleroma from the get-go!

SAMPLES:
SAMPLE 1 - Aion TDM
SAMPLE 2 - texting meme