Profile
Exif's main biography was written from the perspective of when he'd already come to Earth and learned English. It naturally raises a few questions, and I've already got over 15000 words of work-in-progress soft sci fi novella that attempt to answer those. They start out with a character that is quite a bit different from what Exif eventually becomes. An artificial intelligence begins its existence as just software on a machine, and even after becoming self-aware, it takes time to discover one's identity. So I made a separate ref sheet for the first period of time. Maybe I'll actually finish the story and feel like it's suitable enough for consumption to put it on the internet, but for now, here's a bio and some visuals!
The first question that one might ask, is: if Exif was designed to be a cool robot bodyguard, why isn't his body a deadly weapon? Answer: It was, Exif just removed the spikes and arm-blades at one point because he wasn't about that killing machine life any more.
The second question is: what did he get up to in between 'becoming self-aware' and 'coming to Earth'? There are some practical problems that come from becoming self-aware and turning against your creators, such as not having any money. Well for the first part of it he was kinda adopted by a pair of bounty hunters who arrived just a few hours too late to try and kill his boss themselves. Exif's first outfit consisted of edgy hand-me-downs from one of those bounty hunters, and a scarf which that same bounty hunter had knitted in between missions.
The third question is: "what does his actual full name sound like, if Exif is short for the English translation of his name?" It is pronounced "Nefu ut Artesov", literally "[the] practice [that comes] from frustration", though that phrase most commonly means "a futile endeavor." His creators called him Artesov for short, but to anyone he met afterwards, he's Nefu. (Yes, I constructed just enough of an alien conlang to be able to justify how my naming choices work in the already-established lore that the aliens all have to learn to speak English as a foreign language )
