Iconic Encounter: Custom Rig

"What did I tell you about these cheap knockoff sonic plugs?” Quig takes the charred scrap in his paw, turning it in front of Iseph so they can see. “They tear like paper under a little arcanospheric turbulence!”

Iseph’s expression is always rigid, courtesy of its metallic composition, but now it’s utterly blank, like they didn’t even hear.

Quig tries again. “What? That rough landing get to you? You? Hunter of adamantine? Just breathe—wait, no—circulate your arc coolant and loosen up those radial connector bolts.”

“You’re rambling,” Iseph observes, “so you’re fine.”

Their metallic voice almost sounds annoyed with Quig. Weird. They must really be shaken up, Quig figures. Iseph trudges past the landing pod, shrugging off the orbital dive gear to make their customary initial survey for hostiles.

The mysterious Gate of Altyris consumes the horizon with its diameter, framing Quig’s android companion and the rest of the empty landscape. They don’t really know why it exists or where it leads, only that the whole system is counting on them to activate it before the incursion.

“Still no idea what this old tech is made of,” Quig says as he scampers after Iseph, his rig clanking away. “But whoever built that big ring sure did carve out all the good alloys from the planet, didn’t they? This ground’s got more holes in it than I’ve drilled into the ship over the years, and that’s saying something.”

“Probably unstable,” Iseph mutters. “Watch your step. Not flying down for you again.”

“Please. Who do you think you’re talking to, buddy? This magnetic hover field is so good it’ll send you flying if you get too close!”

Quig flips a switch on his boots. His jump jets make a soft humming sound, buffeting him a few scant inches off the ground.

“Well—maybe not flying,” Quig admits. “But you’ll feel it—oooohhhhh! Look at this!”

He skates over the broken earth and stops his momentum only by grabbing hold of a fantastic console webbed with circuitry and control runes, only some of which he recognizes. Sure, there are also beautifully crafted ancient statues standing around it, but those are just decoration. Not his thing.

 Iseph asks, “Is that the on button?”

“Well, it’s made of the same alloy. Scan can’t identify it.” Quig has already made the attempt and stashed his hand-scanner back in his rig. As fast as he can run his mouth, his brain always runs faster. “Similar design. Lemme just pry this panel off—oh, good! That didn’t break anything! Yup, I can see the connector here. Then down that channel, and—yup. Binocs confirm it, straight to the ring. Kinda reminds me of your sub-neural network. You ever mess with the settings on that?”

When Quig looks up, he’s surrounded by spare parts and loose hardware strewn across the ancient alien platform where the console sits. Iseph eyes him the way Quig might eye a passing astral leviathan—with increasing concern the longer it lingers.

“Well, have you?”

Iseph blinks. “Have—what? No? Why—”

“Ohhh. That might explain why your joints erode so fast, ‘Seph. I’m not kidding about loosening up those radial connector bolts.”

Iseph shook their head. “Makes my combat form imprecise.”

“Yeah, yeah, obviously not for combat! But you can swap between modes, you know! Had to learn that myself.” Quig returns to the console, crawling inside to clear out the grime and replace the rusted parts. “When I said goodbye to Scout—boy, I hope he’s okay—I’m sure he is, he’s a clever bot ever since I figured out how to get him sentient—he’ll do great out there, he will, but I think about him sometimes, you know—hand me that spark rotator, will you? No, the spark—oh right. You wouldn’t know what that is—I invented it. That spiky one with the whoosh doohickey over there—no, the—yeah, that one—so, as I was saying, when I designed Munchkin, I realized she’s gotta be adaptable, modular, ready to switch things up at—”

An alarm beeps in his helmet. Munchkin springs from Quig’s rig. The turret unfolds behind him and deploys a quickly-heating barrel in seamless parallel.

“—a moment’s notice!”

Quig rolls into Munchkin’s shadow before an arc ray can blast his tail off. The next shot traces him but strikes Munchkin’s armor plating instead.

“See? Zero-latency combat mode initiation!”

Only then does Quig poke his nose out from behind Munchkin.

The statues surrounding the console step off their platforms, shedding dust from their joints. Under the grime, Quig now sees they’re made of the same alloy as the console.

Iseph unloads their guns on one of those mechanical guardians, precise as always, though its chassis absorbs most of the damage impressively.

Quig licks his tall front teeth. “Oh, I want some of that scrap when we’re done here!”

 Iseph shouts, “Can you activate the gate or not?!”

Quig tries to finish his repairs, but in his haste, his paw slips, slamming his rotator into a panel. A puff of sparks and ozone-flavored smoke blooms into his helmet.

“Oops.”

Iseph rounds on him, so Quig clarifies quickly.

“Uh, the control panel is in better shape than I expected, but the power core is fuzzed!”

Iseph’s opticals snap to the gate the size of a space station. “We have to power that?!”

“Oh, not the gate! That’s fine! It’s just the controls—Oi! Could you big hunks of scrap sit still for a sec? I’m working here!”

Quig draws his arc pistol to fire at a guardian with a glowing arc blade marching too close for comfort. Nigh simultaneously, Munchkin returns fire at a guardian with a zero cannon, firing frosty energy rounds without prompting.

The guardian with the blade shakes off Quig’s shots and advances. That’s when it trips Munchkin’s motion sensor. She swivels a secondary reaction cannon, stopping it in its tracks with an opportunistic blast.

“Ha! See? I told you to sit still!” Quig fires again, but this time, he observes how the armoring alloy reacts. His brain races through possible methods to pierce it even as he generates ideas for powering the console. “Maybe with repairs, the landing pod engine could power the console—what do you think, ‘Seph—”

The blade guardian closes the distance and swings down at Quig’s head. He blocks with his arc pistol, but the guardian is over twice his weight. Quig topples onto his back. The blade burns, searing his eyeshield hotter and hotter the closer it bears down.

One of Munchkin’s frost rounds strikes the cannon guardian in a leg joint, and it wobbles and trips into the chasm. Quig’s round ears perk up at the receding sound of the alloy hitting stone—down—down—down…

“Nice lucky shot, Munchkin,” Quig grunts, “but I think you’ve got a better tool for the rest of this job!”

Munchkin activates her array shift in response to the neural command from Quig’s exocortex. The blazing barrel recedes, replaced by a barrel with self-protective vibrational dampeners. When her next round strikes the blade guardian, the tip of the ammunition shell clicks and a thunderclap detonates.

Sonic ripples vibrate through the guardian’s chassis and crack it at the weakest joints. Then Quig hears a hundred tiny internal mechanisms shattering under sonic shock.

It wheels back from Quig and slumps over the console, powering down.

Quig springs back up to his hindpaws. “Sonic damage! Great! I can always be louder!” He reaches into his rig for an electromag grenade. “Let’s just make a few adjustments here…! How you doing over there, ‘Seph?”

The only response Quig gets is a flurry of gunshots.

“You know, you’re not a great conversation partner, ‘Seph.” Quig sticks a thin tool into the grenade’s casing. “I feel like we never talk. I mean, I’d usually chat like this with Navasi or Dae, but this arcanosphere’s sent the comms to the cats—that’s why I didn’t tell you I had it all under control, see, when the pod went down—could’ve saved you a trip—”

“We!” Iseph takes another shot. “Are in combat!”

“Yeah! What about it?”

Iseph doesn’t answer and instead swings around to fend off a guardian approaching from behind.

“Must have lost their train of thought,” Quig mutters. “Happens to me all the time! Anyway, I’m glad you didcome, ‘Seph, in these circumstances.”

Iseph’s gunshot shatters one of the statues’ headplates. They lift their head, heartened...

Quig pulls the pin on the grenade. “Who would I talk to if you weren’t here? Sure, there’s always you, Munchkin, I like talking to you, but it’s nice when someone quips back. You know?”

Iseph’s face snaps back into a grimace.

“Yeah! See? Munchkin says she wants to get to know you better too, ‘Seph. You can talk to us anytime.”

“Chuck it!” Iseph shouts at him.

“Cheese Louise! You could just say no—oh. Chuck the grenade.” He tosses it over his shoulder just as it starts beeping rapidly. “I was getting there! We were in the middle of—”

The words “a heartfelt conversation” vanish beneath an explosion of sound.

An earsplitting cacophony buries the following sentence as the vibration of the sonic grenade shudders through the unstable terrain. Cracks lace the ground, each setting off a chain reaction in the rock. Everything apart from the ten-foot-square around the console crumbles, slabs of earth careening into the abyss like dominoes.

The guardians still standing plummet into the maw of the planet. Iseph leaps to the console just in time to avoid the same fate, and Quig hits Munchkin’s emergency recall switch, prompting her to fold back into his rig.

For the first time since they arrived, they stand in utter silence.

That lasts until Quig opens his mouth again.

“Phew! That was close!” Quig pats Iseph on the shoulder, now that they’re within reach. “That turned into a bit of a clusterfuzz, didn’t it?”

Iseph gives him a withering look and wipes dirt from their opticals.

Quig himself frowns, turning toward the open console. “Now, how am I gonna run big enough power cables across that chasm from the pod…?”

His eyes rise to the guardian slumped over the console.

“Hold on. You must have an independent power source…”

Quig yanks the console’s power cables out of its case and pries open the glowing casing over the guardian’s power core. With a few adjustments and an adapter, he plugs it straight into the body.

The console lights up, and Quig begins the activation sequence for the gate.

“Just like that! Easy cheesy!” Quig smiles at Iseph.

Iseph, however, stares at the corpse of the constructed guardian that their companion has fashioned into a battery. “That’s horrifying.”

Quig glances between them.

“Oh! Sorry! I guess it is, kinda! I didn’t…” Quig points a thumb at the body. “You want me to disconnect and…?”

“No. It’s practical,” Iseph says. “So are most of your suggestions. Practical and disturbing.”

“Oh.” Quig nods. “Just let me know if I ever, you know, bother you.”

Iseph shakes their head. “You just talk too much.”

“Probably.” Quig can’t argue with that.

Iseph’s internal servos spin.

Quig asks, “Seriously, if you’re not comfortable, you can just tell me to shut up—”

“I,” Iseph interrupts him. Quig lets them talk. “I… would like your help… with my radial connector bolts. The zero-latency mode shift is impressive. I’d like that edge. But I don’t know how to…”

Quig’s whiskered face stretches into a toothy grin. “I’ll show you! Every sentient should get to know their own hardware! Even us meaty ones! I tell you, even my knees have been telling me a lot lately. Everything’s got something to say! If you know how to talk to it, the whole universe opens up to you!”

The gate blooms to life on the horizon beyond.

---

About the Author
Gene Markey is an AuDHD New England writer, artist, and long-time GM. When not rolling 20-sided dice or writing about games, they provide graphics to small organizations promoting third spaces and local community.

About the Iconic
Quig (he/him) is a male ysoki mechanic who recently parted ways with his best friend, Scout, after helping the drone develop into a true artificial intelligence. Now, he’s tinkering with a new prototype—a customizable turret. The mechanic class uses an electric implant or device known as an exocortex to control a powerful mechanical ally—a drone, turret, or deployable mines. Learn more at starfinderplaytest.com!

About Iconic Encounters
Iconic Encounters is a series of web-based flash fiction set in the worlds of Pathfinder and Starfinder. Each short story provides a glimpse into the life and personality of one of the games’ iconic characters, showing the myriad stories of adventure and excitement players can tell with the Pathfinder and Starfinder roleplaying games.

The mechanic class is still a work in progress, but you can learn more about ysoki in Starfinder Player Core, releasing at Gen Con 2025, on paizo.com, and at your friendly local game store! Be the first to play Starfinder Second Edition by subscribing to the Starfinder RPG or Starfinder RPG (Special Edition) lines and receive a free PDF when your book ships!