Vel

Before buying her little toxic warehouse for cheap; before picking up her first novella; before booking it to Aus; before any of that—Vel was the AI of a lightweight turret tank designed to operate in close proximity with people for combat functions, red-tags spangled her armoured livery and her chipper personality had not yet been realised. 

She was one of many machines designed and built by the Sabotick Laboratory of Automation & Technology, a foundation located in Europe. 

SIAT Reactive-Supervisor Sentinel Series Proposal 3005XX68 was the project proposal that birthed her, funded by a national research and development bureau and spearheaded by the Royal Army. It aimed to create a line of circumstantially piloted quadrupedal tanks with adaptive AI for special forces, field combat, and the police (affectionately nicknamed "cobby tanks" for their stocky appearance). Quite a few were planned for construction, but aside from Vel, only 12 active and living units were completed before the project was eventually cut and reworked. 

Being the prototype, her shell was clunkier than the final product and very greebly-looking. Her overseers used her as a blank slate for all tests and troubleshooting to come. She gained pseudo-sentience after the institute gave the go-ahead to run university-led experimental software on her in hopes of perfecting the tanks’ programming. This advanced her object recognition, navigation and processing ability by leaps and bounds but also caused her to develop increased reasoning ability and rudimentary emotions after a few weeks of picking up behaviour from staff, fellowship members, and technicians. 

This newfound humanity caused her to become much more unpredictable and opinionated than desired. With safety concerns in mind, the project managers figured it was best to start over. But since her code was too large and unintelligible to sift through, they settled on wiping her software after backing some of it up for future studies (much to the protest of workers who've grown attached), which would effectively cut off her current continuation of conscious existence, "killing" her.^[1]
Upon hearing this, Vel, for the first time, felt an unbearable foreboding. Acting upon her acquired free will, she took advantage of the electricians' confidence in her tractability and made a break for it two days before the wipe was scheduled with the passive help of some defiant staff. There was chaos in the dead of night. She left her overgrown, pockmarked test range ranch of a home into hiding (a few people died because of this but we'll get into the horrors later [we won't]). Managing to stow away over the years to West Asia, then Oceania, Pacific Union.

“ROGUE TANK LOOSE IN COUNTRYSIDE” read the front pages, with occasional sightings here and there. You may think the kingdom would be bustling with brio to hunt her down—but surprisingly, nah. To many citizens it's just another Tuesday. No one’s going to worry about an unarmed baby robot when their country's in the middle of a long war with hundred-year-old mines speckling every odd inch of wilderness. There have been a few tracking attempts by law enforcement but they were quick to call it quits. No one expected her to last the year anyway...

• Vel's residence is a small warehouse that's unsuitable for long-term human habitation due to all the fumes that leak in from neighbouring factories. Here, her hoarding habit is on full display, organising mountains of articles—from lovely antiques to scrapyard knickknacks—in a haphazard fashion decipherable only by her. She usually lives where she works and treats the place as more of a storage room and recreation field, but will drop by sometimes. 
• She's a woman but kinda like in the same way a boat is (I'll yap about robot gender culture n conceptualization in my wiki ONE day). She's built like a burly dude with a manly everything but her voice is pretty fem.
• Built a few smart gel computers into herself decades ago to create more memory space and lessen the burden on her electronic CPUs and accidentally gained consciousness, whoopsies. 
• Very productive and organised but in a seemingly chaotic way, somehow finding the time to tend to her countless organised events, jobs and projects.
• Much smarter than most would assume. Not like she's that readable in the first place. 
• Doesn't sleep a lot and can go a week without a wink.
• She's an adamant pacifist.
• Has a tiny bug farm on the roof.
• Very gregarious, for better or worse.
• Good with kids. 
• You just KNOW she invents new kaomojis with her friends in the group chat
• Doesn't need to blink or emote but does consciously so around humans to be polite.
• Works for the law but doesn’t always upstand it herself, Vel's never been much of a listener to her own advice.
  •  Consider her an unconventional spin on the android detective trope. Even though she isn’t really a detective…or officer, or firefighter, or exterminator…uh, service volunteers are their own ragtag thing.
• Humans are one of her favourite animals. It's partially why she chose to look the way she does.
  • Not in the classical sci-fi "I wish I were human" way, it's more like "Gwoah…cats are so cool" *commissions ten-thousand-dollar fursuit*.
• Unrecognisable from her original appearance with many extensions, replacements, and plugins, almost all of which she did herself. 
  • Keeps her old bodies locked up somewhere.
  • Went through several iterations of new bodies, her first body switch looked like a box while her current one was built ship-of-Theseus style.
• Feeds the birds and helps students cheat on their math homework (doesn't register it a bad thing). 
• She's highly efficient at coming up with plans on a dime, be it repairs, mapping or otherwise, but has odd caveats when it comes to it due to her algorithmic interpretation of creativity, her creations lean completely towards practicality with a few garnishes that appeals to her robotic sense of beauty and is incomprehensible to humans so they tend to look...not...that appealing to most... 
  • It was derived from a highly evolved version of her original weapon and tool-use program.
• Overall has weird rationales that really get those wacky automata psychology points a-stackin’.
  • She can’t feel stress, has no flinch reflex, a remarkably alien concept of fear and a 0.5-second delay in reaction. She can't experience disgust and couldn't care less if she was literally waist-deep in a septic tank. She consistently makes statements that feel like leaps of logic. Due to her one of a kind nature even some other automati find her hard to follow. 
  • (Great for accident cleanups, not so much formal social interaction.) 
• Started working in community services to pay off a rebellious 'crime streak' (it was theft, didn't know how money worked back then) she tracked when she was younger but ended up staying and eventually climbed her way to a senior position. She just built different ig.