Zip and Zap, Zappit Brothers's page

Magliozzi Cheetum Was born to a pair of gnomish parents. From a young age, Magliozzi matched the boundless curiosity common in feychild gnomes with a dizzying intellect. His parents tried to provide him with everything he might need to grow a career in the STEM fields, but despite his middle-class upbringing, the one thing he lacked was someone his own age to explore with.

Being a gnome on Absolom station, most sentients he met quickly outgrew him, and his only siblings were twenty and thirty years his senior. This didn’t deter Magliozzi, but it did leave him constantly feeling a little empty.

As he grew up, he eventually attended the University of Absolom, where he eventually go his master’s, then doctorate, in robotics. As his Masters thesis, he built a semi-autonomous drone that he nicknamed his ‘brother,’ to show some sophisticated new techniques in allowing AI to make jokes.

As Magliozzi worked on his dissertation, he began to find himself relying more and more in his drone, and as time wore on, the nickname of ‘brother’ stopped being a joke and started to feel more and more real to him.

Fresh off of his doctoral graduation, Magliozzi was hired by a prominent research firm, but after a few years, he began to feel the job was soul-crushing. He hated the stifled creativity and the rigors of constantly producing academic papers, and began looking for other outlets. Eventually, he joined the pit crew of a junkbike racer just for the ability to fix his creativity. There, he found his humor, cheerfulness, and all around creativity was really appreciated. He had really found his calling working on junkbikes with his drone, and began searching for ways to exit academia for a job that let him do more of that.

Luckily for him, word of his exploits reached a reporter who was doing a piece on botscrap for New Pact-Worlds Radio. The producer invited the duo on for an interview segment to talk about how junkbikes worked, and the phones started ringing off the hook with questions about how to make their own junkbikes, or how certain parts worked. In short order Magliozzi was offered a job hosting weekly segments talking about how to repair ships, which he leapt at. Now branded as ‘Zip and Zap,’ the two host a weekly radio show. They have since also joined the Starfinders as a means to broaden their Horizons and learn even more engineering techniques.