The Mutt

The Mutt: Verge Scrap-Built Scout

"I built it from a mining surveyor chassis, a cargo loader's optical system, and the drive motor from a refrigerator. She works fine. She mostly works fine."

The Mutt is the standard self-built Engineer drone on the Verge: cobbled together from whatever was in the Workshop, held in shape by thermal tape and optimistic thinking. It is fast enough to be useful, fragile enough to be frightening, and just glitchy enough to keep everyone's stress levels elevated.

Its Sensor Rating of 2 means it will reliably miss roughly half of what it's supposed to detect, which is fine, because the other half is probably something you didn't want to know about anyway.

Default Module: Sensor Array (installed). Sensor Rating becomes 4. It now picks up Gloom-Static frequencies with unsettling specificity.

Field Note: The Mutt has a tendency, to stop moving and rotate its optical sensor slowly in a direction that thermal imaging later confirms contains nothing. Engineers who have built three or more Mutts have stopped checking what it's looking at. This is a healthy coping strategy.