• Species: Autonomous Mechanical Humanoid
  (AMH 315-19D)
• Gender: Male
• Physical Age: 47
• Chronological Age: 47
• Height: 5’5”
• Weight: 253 lbs.
• Military Ranking: Property
• Training:
  None Official
  

Biography:
Mephisto is an Autonomous Mechanical Humanoid (more commonly referred to as an android). Androids are highly esteemed for their capacity for knowledge retention and feats of strength (on some models). They are also outrageously expensive to own and maintain. For this reason, there are only three R&R teams in existence with androids and two of them are HAWGS.

In the Alliance, androids hold a very tenuous place between being full-fledged citizens and property. Early on in Alliance history as androids with artificial personalities and intelligence were created, a landmark case was won in the Alliance court system granting that any mechanical, sentient being (that was able to pass a certain test) was considered alive and afforded all the rights of an alien immigrant (which are not many). This ruling eventually developed into a system of android certification and assembly that would create two types of android, the mass produced, just under legal standards, property robot and the rare sentient android (who were most often created as a novelty for lonely wealthy people). While sentient androids are essentially free beings, they have very few legal rights and are often treated like property even though legally they are not. There is also a huge black market trade in androids and many of the outlying territories disregard the freedom of the androids by faking testing results.

Sam decided that the team needed an android after their first ship was stolen in a cryosleep ambush. The perpetrators were rogue officers who had ship schematics and managed to infiltrate the heavy defense systems before the auto-wake procedure was complete. The party was left for dead in the failing ship that the criminals had used. Sam, of course managed to fix the ship before life support went out, but he vowed that he would get them an android (who do not have to go into cryosleep as long as they have an ample supply of power).

After their request for an android was denied, Sam set about making one. After three disastrous attempts, he gave up and, using some pirating networking, he managed to find Mephisto on the black market. After considerable repairs and modding Timeus asked that Mephisto be allowed to join their party as a linguistics expert robot (not sentient). Sam wrote a temporary program for him and they used this to have Mephisto pass all the required tests for mechanical beings in the service of the military and he was allowed to join. Sam then restored his original programming and he has been a member ever since. Most recently Sam rigged a state-of-the-art holographic appearance simulator, which gives Mephisto the appearance of being mostly human.

While Mephisto does serve as a linguistics expert and general fount of knowledge, he has also taken on the roles (unofficially) of technical and medical officer on away teams. He has also, to a certain extent, become Sam’s assistant. The two of them are especially close and often work together when they are not on missions. Sam has even beaten Mephisto at chess once, though the rest of the crew secretly believes that Mephisto let him win.