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rekindledtitanThe Basics:
Bold, impulsive and often reckless, Blaze faces every challenge head-on, sometimes literally. Her default tactic in battle is to hit hard, hit fast, and aim to scatter the enemy and/or take down the most dangerous target. She exults in the fight, win or lose and regardless of what damage she takes. Some of this is practical thinking- as a Striker Titan, it’s her job to break enemy lines and draw their fire from her comrades, and with her armor and durability she’s better equipped than most to take the heat. On the other hand, she’s constantly pushing her luck and prone to overstepping the limits of what she can handle; when that happens, Blaze trusts in her own resilience and close-quarters firepower to get her out of the resulting scrapes.
She aspires hard to heroic virtues of honor, valor, self-sacrifice and compassion - all the more because she knows how easy they are to lose in the grim realities of war... and because she strongly suspects she wasn't particularly one of the good guys in her previous life. For a Guardian, resurrected with no memory of her past life, the tales of heroic forebears past and present help ground her in tradition and give her something to reach for. Blaze is only too willing to take the clean slate she's been given.
Typically cheerful and gung-ho, Blaze also considers part of her calling to be safeguarding the Light in others. Physical protection might be her real forte, but she has genuine joy and enthusiasm for celebrating their accomplishments and creations - everything the Darkness has tried to take from them for centuries. Plus, she’s effectively only a few years old and she’s spent most of her time on battlefields, so many things are still novel and delightful to her. If she can drag her shy Ghost into them, that’s a bonus.
Practical crafts, especially the creation and maintenance of weapons and armor, are prized traditions for her people - Titans in particular are associated with forgecraft and fortification building, having raised the wall around the Last City and shouldering responsibility for its upkeep. Blaze herself is no smith yet, but she retains her technical skills from her previous life and spends a lot of time tinkering with improving or experimenting on her gear.
She’s deliberately forthright and honest and expects the same from others, less out of a moral aversion to lying than lacking the bandwidth to do so. Repeated memory wipes and lingering trauma scars have left her with Baggage she doesn’t have much way to handle, so she has no interest in making the here and now more complicated than it needs to be. This can make her more trusting than she should be, especially toward people she’s already decided are All Right. She secretly harbors a deep fear of resetting again: she’s well aware that on iteration 37 her mind is probably held together with Light and duct tape, and she has no idea if being a Guardian actually protects her from resetting in the long run. She really doesn’t want to lose herself this time.
She’s not very good at things like diplomacy or tact. Blaze says what she feels (and what she’s thinking, if that word applies). She tends to the noisy and confrontational approach in a disagreement, and may need to be yelled at or smacked with a differing viewpoint to make her stop and think it through, but she won’t hold a grudge afterward.
When she does encounter a (personal) problem she can’t immediately fix or fistfight, her response tends to be self-destructive. She’s disturbed by what she’s learned about her origins, so she ignores it; she exacerbates her own dysphoria by neglecting her physical needs; she finds her dreams distressing so she avoids sleep. Her tendency to bury herself in immediate conflict and/or physical activity becomes a way to avoid dwelling on uncomfortable thoughts or intrusive memories. Her strategy is to burn the bridges, sever the ties, walk away and don’t look back. In a universe where the past literally won't stay buried, this isn't the wisest strategy. Since she took up the hammer of a Sunbreaker, her Ghost has started encouraging her towards a more sustainable approach. Time will tell how that pans out.
Physically:
She’s a few inches over six feet in full armor, varying a little depending on what gear she’s sporting currently (she’d love to get one of those helmets with a crest on the top, but no luck yet). Said armor is a set of futuristic plate (typically colored white on black) with environmental seals and a bunch of inbuilt systems powered by her own Light. Armor and attitude tend to make her seem bigger than she is, and it does a pretty good job of masking her actual frame. She is usually in the company of around three variously-sized guns and always in that of the palm-sized floating lightbulb that is her Ghost. He materialises from her systems when it suits him and is responsible for all matters technical, from watching her back to decrypting communications to reviving her from death. It happens.
Underneath the armor she’s a much less bulky robot with feminine proportions. Like all Exos, she’s a ridiculously human robot in the sense that she has all the same emotions and drives as a human - she can eat and drink organic as well as inorganic substances and has an internal bioreactor to process anything that can be converted to energy/internal repair materials. This doesn’t come up too often in her normal timeline because eating human foods gives her some distressing sensory flashbacks, and so Blaze usually just implies Exos can’t eat when asked by anyone who doesn’t know better. She does like to get buzzed off Exo cocktails, or more often by ‘drinking’ batteries through the contacts inside her mouth which is probably the Exo equivalent of drinking rubbing alcohol.
She does need to sleep for normal functioning, ideally on a roughly daily schedule, although she can tolerate several weeks of deprivation… and does, because like most Exos she’s a chronic insomniac. She can experience physical attraction, but tries to ignore it because personal relationships are complicated and scary enough even if she remembered how they even work for Exos. She has excellent senses of taste and touch- her tactile sensors are a little too sensitive, if anything, especially on her hands and antennae. As a result she prefers wearing her gauntlets under most circumstances. Unmediated touch gets a bit too distracting (and intimate). Her pain receptors are not as sensitive - she can experience physical pain as intensely as a human, but her threshold is higher and it doesn’t incapacitate her by itself. Most humans can’t simply choose to override pain for the sake of mission objectives, after all.
The History:
What she knows:
Born into a utopian Golden Age of humanity, Blaze-37 was a machine soldier built to defend Earth and its colonies, until their civilization collapsed under assault from a mysterious cosmic enemy called the Darkness. Since then, humanity has slowly rebuilt a home beneath the light of their own mysterious patron- the Traveler, a machine god from the stars left crippled in its battle with the Darkness.
Now, resurrected from her grave on an ancient battlefield, Blaze is a Guardian, a warrior empowered to channel the Traveler’s Light against humanity’s enemies. With no memory of her previous life beyond distressing (and sometimes intrusive) fragments, she quickly embraced this new identity and purpose in a war she could devote herself to fully. Guided back to the city by an Awoken Hunter called Kaolin Sorn, she gladly took up the mantle of a Titan and threw herself into honing her abilities, eager to live up to the heroic tales of Guardians past. It’s a better life than anything she can see behind her.
What she mostly doesn’t know:
Bryn Marshall was born and raised in the shadow of the famed Ishtar Academy, in the Ishtar Sink on Venus. In this timeline, the arrival of the Traveler had sparked a utopian Golden Age of scientific and cultural advancement, and the Ishtar colony was a hub for academics and artists from around the system. Measuring herself against this environment growing up, Bryn came to feel out of place; partly on impulse, she joined up with the system military, reasoning that if she couldn’t be a researcher or a brilliant engineer, she needed some other way to fulfill her dreams of helping humanity push the frontier.
Her career path is uncertain, but after a few decades she had the experience to leave in search of work with a security contractor. She wound up working for Clovis Bray, a technological R&D company powerful enough to turn the planet Mars into their own company town… and with a knack for covering up their more unethical steps in advancing the bounds of human possibility.
Through some combination of genuine incentives with financial and psychological manipulation, Marshall would eventually take a transfer to Clovis Bray’s personal research colony on Europa, and soon thereafter to the Exo programme. She probably did volunteer for this (albeit with Braycorp encouragement); however, she certainly wasn’t informed about everything it would entail, or the whole truth about why Clovis Bray was creating himself an army of robots. Regardless, her mind was scanned to an Exo body and her memory wiped, leading to her first rebirth as Blaze-1.
She continued to serve in security and exploration functions as an Exo, assisting with research into the Vex where human staff would succumb to infection or worse. She underwent numerous reboots/memory wipes during this period, many more than typical. It’s unclear how many of these were intended to stave off the lethal dysphoria that plagued Exos (especially the earlier models), how many to purge Vex contamination from dangerous levels of exposure, or even how many were due to general trauma or noncompliance with company orders - turning employees into robots was among the least horrifying of Clovis’s activities on Europa. It’s also likely that she took part in Clovis-1/Banshee’s final battle to shut down the Europan portal to the Vex homeworld, preventing a full invasion of the system at the cost of many lives and repeated reboots for the surviving Exos.
Either way, Blaze-37 made it off Europa and made her way to Earth during the Collapse, as the Darkness and its armies closed in on the system. By this point she wouldn’t have been in great shape: Bray research indicates that 20 wipes was the typical limit an Exo could survive, and three dozen reboots in, she must have been feeling the effects. She died fighting in the defense effort on the Indian coast, to be found by her Ghost about 1600 years later in the remains of an old ship-breaking yard.
Nexus continuity: she got tossed into the Nexus a few years back, and has helped defend it from demon invasions, superpowered augments, the spirit of Winter, and a faction of House Winter Eliksni who seem to have used her to find their way in. Thanks to a de-ageing incident, she gained a partial insight into her origin, though how she became an Exo is still a mystery she’d like to believe has a happy answer. She’d like to, but she doesn’t.
Through a combination of circumstances, Blaze managed to find first the Sunbreaker Liu Feng and then the Sunbreaker’s Forge on Mercury, surviving their trial and reforging her Light to channel solar fire as well as the arc. She still has questions about the exiled Sunbreaker Order, but her headstrong approach to finding them against Commander Zavala’s cautions has left her on uneasy ground with a mentor to whom she’d held unquestioning loyalty. He might be right that their aggressive, hard-line attitudes are fuel on a dangerous fire for her- but on the other hand, her reforged Light is also the main reason she feels something akin to stable these days.
During the aforementioned demon invasion, she helped break free a bound angel who later accepted the name Nike and fights alongside her in battle. Recently, she and her Ghost helped to resurrect their good friend Steve Rogers after he died in his universe’s final battle with Thanos. Enlisting Thor’s help, they retrieved his body and placed it in their Tower, where his Ghost later found and raised him. Both Blaze and her Ghost have sworn to train and watch over the reborn Steve, making him the final member of Blaze’s newly formalized fireteam.
Bold, impulsive and often reckless, Blaze faces every challenge head-on, sometimes literally. Her default tactic in battle is to hit hard, hit fast, and aim to scatter the enemy and/or take down the most dangerous target. She exults in the fight, win or lose and regardless of what damage she takes. Some of this is practical thinking- as a Striker Titan, it’s her job to break enemy lines and draw their fire from her comrades, and with her armor and durability she’s better equipped than most to take the heat. On the other hand, she’s constantly pushing her luck and prone to overstepping the limits of what she can handle; when that happens, Blaze trusts in her own resilience and close-quarters firepower to get her out of the resulting scrapes.
She aspires hard to heroic virtues of honor, valor, self-sacrifice and compassion - all the more because she knows how easy they are to lose in the grim realities of war... and because she strongly suspects she wasn't particularly one of the good guys in her previous life. For a Guardian, resurrected with no memory of her past life, the tales of heroic forebears past and present help ground her in tradition and give her something to reach for. Blaze is only too willing to take the clean slate she's been given.
Typically cheerful and gung-ho, Blaze also considers part of her calling to be safeguarding the Light in others. Physical protection might be her real forte, but she has genuine joy and enthusiasm for celebrating their accomplishments and creations - everything the Darkness has tried to take from them for centuries. Plus, she’s effectively only a few years old and she’s spent most of her time on battlefields, so many things are still novel and delightful to her. If she can drag her shy Ghost into them, that’s a bonus.
Practical crafts, especially the creation and maintenance of weapons and armor, are prized traditions for her people - Titans in particular are associated with forgecraft and fortification building, having raised the wall around the Last City and shouldering responsibility for its upkeep. Blaze herself is no smith yet, but she retains her technical skills from her previous life and spends a lot of time tinkering with improving or experimenting on her gear.
She’s deliberately forthright and honest and expects the same from others, less out of a moral aversion to lying than lacking the bandwidth to do so. Repeated memory wipes and lingering trauma scars have left her with Baggage she doesn’t have much way to handle, so she has no interest in making the here and now more complicated than it needs to be. This can make her more trusting than she should be, especially toward people she’s already decided are All Right. She secretly harbors a deep fear of resetting again: she’s well aware that on iteration 37 her mind is probably held together with Light and duct tape, and she has no idea if being a Guardian actually protects her from resetting in the long run. She really doesn’t want to lose herself this time.
She’s not very good at things like diplomacy or tact. Blaze says what she feels (and what she’s thinking, if that word applies). She tends to the noisy and confrontational approach in a disagreement, and may need to be yelled at or smacked with a differing viewpoint to make her stop and think it through, but she won’t hold a grudge afterward.
When she does encounter a (personal) problem she can’t immediately fix or fistfight, her response tends to be self-destructive. She’s disturbed by what she’s learned about her origins, so she ignores it; she exacerbates her own dysphoria by neglecting her physical needs; she finds her dreams distressing so she avoids sleep. Her tendency to bury herself in immediate conflict and/or physical activity becomes a way to avoid dwelling on uncomfortable thoughts or intrusive memories. Her strategy is to burn the bridges, sever the ties, walk away and don’t look back. In a universe where the past literally won't stay buried, this isn't the wisest strategy. Since she took up the hammer of a Sunbreaker, her Ghost has started encouraging her towards a more sustainable approach. Time will tell how that pans out.
Physically:
She’s a few inches over six feet in full armor, varying a little depending on what gear she’s sporting currently (she’d love to get one of those helmets with a crest on the top, but no luck yet). Said armor is a set of futuristic plate (typically colored white on black) with environmental seals and a bunch of inbuilt systems powered by her own Light. Armor and attitude tend to make her seem bigger than she is, and it does a pretty good job of masking her actual frame. She is usually in the company of around three variously-sized guns and always in that of the palm-sized floating lightbulb that is her Ghost. He materialises from her systems when it suits him and is responsible for all matters technical, from watching her back to decrypting communications to reviving her from death. It happens.
Underneath the armor she’s a much less bulky robot with feminine proportions. Like all Exos, she’s a ridiculously human robot in the sense that she has all the same emotions and drives as a human - she can eat and drink organic as well as inorganic substances and has an internal bioreactor to process anything that can be converted to energy/internal repair materials. This doesn’t come up too often in her normal timeline because eating human foods gives her some distressing sensory flashbacks, and so Blaze usually just implies Exos can’t eat when asked by anyone who doesn’t know better. She does like to get buzzed off Exo cocktails, or more often by ‘drinking’ batteries through the contacts inside her mouth which is probably the Exo equivalent of drinking rubbing alcohol.
She does need to sleep for normal functioning, ideally on a roughly daily schedule, although she can tolerate several weeks of deprivation… and does, because like most Exos she’s a chronic insomniac. She can experience physical attraction, but tries to ignore it because personal relationships are complicated and scary enough even if she remembered how they even work for Exos. She has excellent senses of taste and touch- her tactile sensors are a little too sensitive, if anything, especially on her hands and antennae. As a result she prefers wearing her gauntlets under most circumstances. Unmediated touch gets a bit too distracting (and intimate). Her pain receptors are not as sensitive - she can experience physical pain as intensely as a human, but her threshold is higher and it doesn’t incapacitate her by itself. Most humans can’t simply choose to override pain for the sake of mission objectives, after all.
The History:
What she knows:
Born into a utopian Golden Age of humanity, Blaze-37 was a machine soldier built to defend Earth and its colonies, until their civilization collapsed under assault from a mysterious cosmic enemy called the Darkness. Since then, humanity has slowly rebuilt a home beneath the light of their own mysterious patron- the Traveler, a machine god from the stars left crippled in its battle with the Darkness.
Now, resurrected from her grave on an ancient battlefield, Blaze is a Guardian, a warrior empowered to channel the Traveler’s Light against humanity’s enemies. With no memory of her previous life beyond distressing (and sometimes intrusive) fragments, she quickly embraced this new identity and purpose in a war she could devote herself to fully. Guided back to the city by an Awoken Hunter called Kaolin Sorn, she gladly took up the mantle of a Titan and threw herself into honing her abilities, eager to live up to the heroic tales of Guardians past. It’s a better life than anything she can see behind her.
What she mostly doesn’t know:
Bryn Marshall was born and raised in the shadow of the famed Ishtar Academy, in the Ishtar Sink on Venus. In this timeline, the arrival of the Traveler had sparked a utopian Golden Age of scientific and cultural advancement, and the Ishtar colony was a hub for academics and artists from around the system. Measuring herself against this environment growing up, Bryn came to feel out of place; partly on impulse, she joined up with the system military, reasoning that if she couldn’t be a researcher or a brilliant engineer, she needed some other way to fulfill her dreams of helping humanity push the frontier.
Her career path is uncertain, but after a few decades she had the experience to leave in search of work with a security contractor. She wound up working for Clovis Bray, a technological R&D company powerful enough to turn the planet Mars into their own company town… and with a knack for covering up their more unethical steps in advancing the bounds of human possibility.
Through some combination of genuine incentives with financial and psychological manipulation, Marshall would eventually take a transfer to Clovis Bray’s personal research colony on Europa, and soon thereafter to the Exo programme. She probably did volunteer for this (albeit with Braycorp encouragement); however, she certainly wasn’t informed about everything it would entail, or the whole truth about why Clovis Bray was creating himself an army of robots. Regardless, her mind was scanned to an Exo body and her memory wiped, leading to her first rebirth as Blaze-1.
She continued to serve in security and exploration functions as an Exo, assisting with research into the Vex where human staff would succumb to infection or worse. She underwent numerous reboots/memory wipes during this period, many more than typical. It’s unclear how many of these were intended to stave off the lethal dysphoria that plagued Exos (especially the earlier models), how many to purge Vex contamination from dangerous levels of exposure, or even how many were due to general trauma or noncompliance with company orders - turning employees into robots was among the least horrifying of Clovis’s activities on Europa. It’s also likely that she took part in Clovis-1/Banshee’s final battle to shut down the Europan portal to the Vex homeworld, preventing a full invasion of the system at the cost of many lives and repeated reboots for the surviving Exos.
Either way, Blaze-37 made it off Europa and made her way to Earth during the Collapse, as the Darkness and its armies closed in on the system. By this point she wouldn’t have been in great shape: Bray research indicates that 20 wipes was the typical limit an Exo could survive, and three dozen reboots in, she must have been feeling the effects. She died fighting in the defense effort on the Indian coast, to be found by her Ghost about 1600 years later in the remains of an old ship-breaking yard.
Nexus continuity: she got tossed into the Nexus a few years back, and has helped defend it from demon invasions, superpowered augments, the spirit of Winter, and a faction of House Winter Eliksni who seem to have used her to find their way in. Thanks to a de-ageing incident, she gained a partial insight into her origin, though how she became an Exo is still a mystery she’d like to believe has a happy answer. She’d like to, but she doesn’t.
Through a combination of circumstances, Blaze managed to find first the Sunbreaker Liu Feng and then the Sunbreaker’s Forge on Mercury, surviving their trial and reforging her Light to channel solar fire as well as the arc. She still has questions about the exiled Sunbreaker Order, but her headstrong approach to finding them against Commander Zavala’s cautions has left her on uneasy ground with a mentor to whom she’d held unquestioning loyalty. He might be right that their aggressive, hard-line attitudes are fuel on a dangerous fire for her- but on the other hand, her reforged Light is also the main reason she feels something akin to stable these days.
During the aforementioned demon invasion, she helped break free a bound angel who later accepted the name Nike and fights alongside her in battle. Recently, she and her Ghost helped to resurrect their good friend Steve Rogers after he died in his universe’s final battle with Thanos. Enlisting Thor’s help, they retrieved his body and placed it in their Tower, where his Ghost later found and raised him. Both Blaze and her Ghost have sworn to train and watch over the reborn Steve, making him the final member of Blaze’s newly formalized fireteam.
