The Roboticist
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Contents
Tabitha Hodges
Born November 1, 1990, in Paragon City, Rhode Island, Tabitha was the daughter of Technophile and Cybele, both retired heroes and members of the Midnighter Club. Technophile, her father, was a mad scientist, and Cybele, her mother, was a sorceress. Tabitha inherited abilities from both her parents, and was building her own robots and personal computers before she was 14. Taking advantage of accelerated admission to Paragon City University, she pursued a dual major in computer engineering and robotics engineering, and had completed her PhDs by the time she was 20.
On her 21st birthday, Tabitha was arrested for the murder of a former girlfriend by a robot she hadn't completed yet. The prosecution was carried out by a corrupt assistant district attorney, with the help of a psy-ops division of Longbow. Because Tabitha had been raised to believe that truth and justice would always triumph, her conviction for a crime she had not committed shattered her. She was sentenced to the Zig as a murderer, and on her first day there she was thrown to the mercy of the criminals, while the guards placed bets on whether she would survive the abuse the prisoners put her through.
Her body survived the torture, but her mind shattered. Tabitha became the Robot Menace, and took advantage of being hauled out of prison by Arachnos to begin hunting corrupt law enforcement personnel, with a special emphasis on Longbow. Her hunt continued until the day that dimension collapsed.
When she learned the dimension was going to collapse, Tabitha used emergency medical teleport units to cobble together a system that she hoped would transport her to a new dimension before the end of her universe. The transport system worked - sort of. Instead of physically transporting her into a new universe, her makeshift system transported her mind into the body of her dimensional analogue in Millennium City.
Tabby Hodges
Born November 1, 1990, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tabby was the daughter of Technophile and Cybele, both retired heroes. Technophile was the owner of Hodges Computer Engineering, and Cybele was an employee of Magic Lantern Bookstore and a member of Witchcraft's magic circle. Tabby inherited abilities from both her parents, and was building her own robots and personal computers before she was 14. Taking advantage of accelerated admission to Millennium City University, she pursued a dual major in computer engineering and robotics engineering, and had completed her PhDs by the time she was 20.
On December 1, 2012, Tabby woke up with the first migraine of her life, and her father's home security system showed that she had spent the night in the family's laboratory, building a robot entirely different from any robots she had built before. Cybele took the problem to her circle in an attempt to discover the cause of her migraine and lost time.
Before the circle was able to discover what was going on, Tabby disappeared for a week, and when she returned home, she was covered in a substance that looked like dried, iron-rich mud, and was wearing a headset with a face shield, heads-up display, and digital storage system, and carrying a sonic blaster pistol, both of which she had not had before she vanished.
Courtroom Drama
After returning home, Tabby learned that the "mud" was actually dried blood, which had genetic markers that matched those of four police officers who had vanished that day while on duty. Since she had no memory of the previous week, up to the time she woke up in her own room, she was horrified and unable to do anything other than turn herself in to the police.
District Attorney Walters charged her with four murders, while her father analyzed the blaster and display, and her mother recruited the help of her circle to discover what had happened. Since her parents paid for a defense attorney and associated expenses, Tabitha had proper representation, and Tabitha cooperated fully with the attorney in fighting the prosecution.
The efforts of both her father, whose analysis of the blaster and face shield showed that they were unlike anything Tabby engineered, and her mother, who enlisted Bethany to use her magic to play back the encounter between Tabitha and the police officers, supported Tabitha's claim of self-defense against corrupt cops who had attempted to take advantage of a lone, apparently unpowered vigilante, for what they had described as "stress relief."
Thanks mostly to Bethany's courtroom display, the jury returned not guilty verdicts on all four charges.
Cooperation
Because she had been charged with murdering police officers, and despite her lifetime ties to Millennium City, Tabby had been denied bail, and so spent most of 2013 in jail while the trial went on. In jail, Tabitha did her best to shield Tabby from the hostility of the guards, and began communicating with her.
At first, Tabby thought she was losing her mind, but her mother convinced her that Tabitha was, in fact, not a figment of her imagination, and so she began to respond to the voice in her head. By the time her case came to trial, Tabby and Tabitha were in agreement as to the need to fight, and cooperated fully with her parents and Bethany in fighting the case.
The Roboticist
Once she had been released, Tabby and Tabitha created the registered identity of The Roboticist in order to fight criminals, both on the street and in uniform.
In 2014, she was hired by Cerberus Tactical Services, where she has worked since as a consulting engineer and field operative since, doing analysis of samples taken from the scenes of the work they did for UNTIL and PRIMUS, and working with the company's other engineers to develop solutions for unusual opponents and circumstances, where she remains employed to the present.
While working at CTS, she returned to MCU to complete a PhD in Quantum Physics. When she confirmed that her designs used mana for power, she began studying magic with her mother, and then returned to MCU to pursue an MA in Thaumaturgy, in order to better understand the nature of her ability to use magic.
In summer of 2018, after exposing the District Attorney's offfice's attempt to bury scientific evidence she had been instrumental in developing, she established a foundation dedicated to assisting those being subjected to predatory and unjust prosecution. To be eligible for the foundation's assistance, applicants must demonstrate to her satisfaction that the prosecution truly is either predatory or unjust, but if they can do so, she will use all the resources at her disposal to assist them in getting proper legal representation, necessary expert witnesses and independent investigators to assist with their cases.
Relationships
Family and Friends
- Technophile: David Hodges, a retired hero and currently owner of Hodges Engineering, is Tabby's father
- Cybele: Clover Larson-Hodges, a retired hero, currently working at Magic Lantern Bookstore and a member of the circle led by Witchcraft
- Witchcraft: Bethany, or Bethie, as Tabby calls her, is not only Clover's employer and leader of her circle, she is also a family friend
Enemies and Rivals
- Daniel Watson: District Attorney, he considers his defeat in prosecuting Tabby to be a personal affront and an insult to the concept of criminal justice. He has been looking for any excuse to put her behind bars, despite her scrupulous adherence to the law since winning her freedom. Her activities in fighting predatory prosecution and exposing corruption within the police and District Attorney's office has only increased his hatred for her.
- Millennium City Police Department: Despite the fact that the officers Tabitha killed were known to their fellow officers to be corrupt, they were still brother officers, and therefore protected by the "thin blue line". The fact that she has been responsible for the exposure of a number of other corrupt and criminal police officers since becoming a registered hero has made her as unpopular with the MCPD as any VIPER agent.
- Longbow: A Longbow agent who somehow made it through a Portal Corp portal to Millennium City during the dimensional collapse, when she discovered that Tabitha had not died with her home universe, she put together a costume reminiscent of her old uniform and began hunting her the same way she used to hunt the people of the Rogue Islands.
