#joyceste

Joyceste Milliband, nicknamed Joyce by many, is 19 years old with a dark complexion and ever darker brown hair. He wears big round glasses without a frame, giving him the appearance of an academic overachiever, which is entirely accurate. He talks with a voice that is somewhat high-pitched for a man and constantly seems to project a shyness, but the reality of it has less to do with him being shy and more with a history of getting looked down upon by big dudes despite always being the smartest person in the room.

After an uneventful childhood in a low-income family, at age 15 Joyce invited himself to the prestigious Mangyo Academy on a full scholarship by hacking the school’s student database. Two years later, he was selected for an internship at Kengnatz Corporation and impressed his superiors so much that he was instantly hired by the company even before completing his Mangyo Academy degree. At Kengnatz, he worked as a data analyst for three months before being moved to the top-secret Butterfly Branch, which develops various models of human-piloted robots ranging from two to thirty meters in height to be deployed as special agents on corporation duty. Joyce displayed a natural aptitude to pilot these robots and became a member of the core piloting team.

Each “Butterfly” mech is an incredibly complicated system handcrafted by a large team of engineers. They are all unique and can be considered prototypes in that no blueprints exist for them and each one is developed individually without relying on any kind of industrial standardization. They also implement a wide variety of cutting-edge technology, and because the prototypes are so new, no systems are in place to make using these machines easier for the pilot. No user interfaces, control manuals, or autopilot functions exist, so the pilot has to control every subsystem of the mech manually and simultaneously. As a result, archetypical “thrill-seekers” and people with a martial background aren’t fit to pilot these mechs, and indeed their physical fitness is almost irrelevant. Instead, a very high degree of specialized engineering knowledge is required of the pilot. In addition, they typically also have to perform complicated mathematical calculations on the fly and without any help. As an academically inclined person with a genius-level IQ and an affinity for math, Joyce meets these unusual requirements perfectly.