The Monochrome Soldier

The second-newest member of Nightmare's Pantheon. Cross isn't just a multiversal tyrant's least-favorite creation, but the 11th iteration of it, created to replace the 10th after its catastrophic attempts to restore (read: recreate) their original universe. While Cross' history as an ex-royal guard is written from his shoulder-width toes to the yardstick permanently soldiered to the inside of his spine, he's not nearly as ill-fitting of an acquisition to Nightmare's group of terrorists as many assume, beset by a hair-trigger temper and startlingly naive ideas about how the world should work — and an adult's power to back them up. Indeed, this combo has spelled disaster for him before... but in Nightmare's hands, it may very well spell disaster for everyone else, too.Cross is largely delegated to transport, since he bears the rare ability necessary to create gates between AUs. During "normal" raids, however, he doubles as a physical tank; a bit slower and less magically adept than most of his coworkers, but packing nearly three times the punch behind every swing.

basics

ORIGIN POINT

Cross was created alongside TAU-XT-0 — a small artificial reality conceptualized by a powerful entity known as X!GASTER, whose dreams of perfection had long-since festered within the cage of the incredible ability he was gifted as a newborn outcode: the OVERWRITE button. Alongside his artificial brethren, Cross' earliest years were spent on the branching paths of multiple different timelines, acting more-or-less as overglorified guinea pigs in Gaster's pursuit of a "perfect story". Over the course of these lifetimes, many different iterations of Cross came to live and die under Gaster's heel, but all of them were united in one thing —Gaster could not stand him.No matter what he did to him or what elements of the timeline he changed, he could not stamp out Cross' bullheadedness; a sense of imperfect, belligerent free-will that stained, time and time again, the white-and-indigo canvas onto which Gaster was trying to paint his magnum opus. And the terrible irony was, Cross wasn't even the "main character" of the story he sought to tell. Instead, his "beloved" children — pale, anomalous imitations of the Catalysts found in most worlds — were raised up to be powerful, time-altering entities known as the X!EVENT. The problem is that Cross, significant chunks of whose code had been borrowed from the "sans" sourcecode, was doomed to be tangled in the Catalyst's web regardless of what anyone wanted. In fact, when his 10th iteration — who'd been raised as a royal guard explicitly to protect the X!EVENT — was inevitably brought to awareness not just of his own artificiality, but of the antagonistic role reality had decided on him playing as the Catalyst's would-be murderer, he attempted to rail against fate, endeavoring to kill his "father", take over his OVERWRITE button, and finally set the "story" on a better path... and he succeeded. At least insofar as to successfully delete TAU-XT-0, only then, to his horror, to find that he could not recreate it. As a monster, his SOUL simply could not generate the needed DETERMINATION.Luck — both good and bad — brought him to fight alongside Nightmare for a while after, aiming to forcibly recreate his home with stolen chunks of other universes' code. But the first moment his goal was in sight, he betrayed Nightmare, thinking the task finished and his happy ending at hand.....a debt Nightmare must have thought well enough paid when he almost immediately got himself killed. Otherwise, why would he have allowed Cross' 11th iteration to come crawling back a few years later, tail between his legs, looking for a new home — and a begrudging new master — to call his own?

main ability: code manipulation

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trivia

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