Digimon: Fractal Codex

  1. Appearance
  2. Backstory
  3. The cameras

Name: Calraith

Species class: Digimon

Digivolution graph: Puwamon → Poromon → Biyomon → Airdramon → ??? → Glowholydramon (probably) Normal stage: 3 (Rookie, Biyomon) or 4 (Champion, Airdramon)

Attribute: Vaccine

Tamer: None

Abilities:

Appearance

As a biyomon, has an avian skull helmet, and a triangular-fronted tabard of some dark material. The back side of it has a pouch that sometimes contains a data storage medium.

As an airdramon, has a harness of approximately leathery material, which puts a couple of saddles on her back, a bunch of pouches mostly filled with electronics on her sides, and a chestful of aforementioned cameras. They’re enormous (for cameras, by human standards), and behind openings in a surface made of that material; covers slide over the openings if she lays flat. She’s also over twenty metres long, with other proportions to match.

In both cases, the skullmet is inlaid with metal strips that bring to mind circuit traces, and her eyes look like eyes, not like someone stuck a red LED and a fog volume in her eyesockets.

Backstory

At some point in the past, she was hanging around when a certain Ken Ichijoji swept past in a snazzy purple suit and was looking for a bunch of flying minions. She was among the ones that got ringed. After some time of this she graduated to being the one he’s occasionally seen riding around on the head of, which also meant she was around when he got bored and decided to engage in some mad science. Or hotrodding, considering her job description by that point was basically “really sweet ride”.

Experimentation in this case involving installing the first two abilities mentioned up there, the HUD and stat-o-vision, all the better for analysing what’s in front of her and showing it to her boss. Who would probably be standing directly on her head, lest we forget, but it also helps if he’s not nearby. She’d have to use a radio or something but can still call in what she sees with some measure of intelligence, which is more than a bunch of CCTV cameras–or teleoperated kuramon–do. So she had to learn to do that as well, mostly by trial and getting yelled at.

By this point, she liked the flying around and being the coolest ride in the digiworld, but then there’s the world domination thing, which she wasn’t so hot on but couldn’t really complain. Literally, what with the mind control rings. They weren’t imposing the liking being augmented though, so his defeat didn’t at all diminish that.

Instead, she continued to seek upgrades, not in a “omnomnom my enemies to gain strength” sort of way, but seeking out particular data, and those who could weave it into her. Somewhere along the way, she learned the nature of digivolving, and how to control it; not a greatly studied topic since you can’t go up except the usual ways, and who’d want to go down? You’d be weaker.

You’d also be smaller, which is why she learned to do it and squash the discomfited feelings she had about doing so (as digimon with tamers show, you can go up and down like an elevator and still feel fine with no existential dread or humilation). She also volunteered for experiments involving installing data that ended up as her harness, partly under the logic it’d be more comfortable for any hypothetical future riders.

Or not so hypothetical, she worked for a time as an air taxi, before she met a group of digimon with the rather ambitious project of creating detailed maps of the whole digital world in all its topographical (and topological) perplexity. She didn’t eat any cameras, but that’s not for lack of desire to incorporate data. Rather, it’s because 1) eating cameras is for dungeon monsters who don’t speak any language, and 2) all that would do is buff eyesight slightly.

Some persuasion, contracts with worryingly large numbers in (she still owes on that one), and much strapping to an operating table–well, an I-beam and some gantry cranes; they don’t really make operating tables that size–later, she found herself half disassembled, insofar as something not technically a robot can be, with data regarding some of the world’s most justifiably expensive1 imaging devices being slowly slotted, screwed, and generally integrated into her.

And so we get to the present day, where she still works as an aerial photographer, courier, and general professional enormous flying thing. She’s never discovered what her later digivolutions might be; it took considerable work to ensure she could still de-digivolve after incorporating the cameras, and so it’s anyone’s guess what her next stage would be. For now, this is her final form, not that she’s stopped keeping an eye out for a potential way to digivolve further.

The cameras

The precise specifications are ambiguous, but a number of things may be stated: One, they collectively output many more than the three bands familiar to human eyesight, over a somewhat wider range of wavelengths. Two, “normal” photography is available not only pointed straight down, but angled ahead, behind, and to the sides a little, to aid in seeing the sides of buildings and the like. Three, a number of the “bands” actually sense the assorted odd energies and warps that underpin digimon phenomena (the goggles Izzy makes in Tri do something similar). Four, Calraith has very little idea how to interpret the latter set.

  1. We aren’t talking gold-plated here, except in a metaphorical sense. The casing is far more sensible and anything up to the size of a small child. Think how good phone cameras are getting, and scale that up. She can see your house from up here, and then some, like what newspaper you subscribed to and how your geraniums are getting on. ↩