Appearance:

In his robotic body, Monte has a slim build supporting somewhat bulky limbs. He is short in height. His joints consist of ball-joints. Monte's feet are undetailed.

He has thick and fluffy lavender hair that is medium in length. He has a reddish pink sclera and his irises are grey with a white pupil that has 'splits', separating the iris into 6 parts. He has green auditory devices on the side of his face to serve as his ears. Monte has incredibly sharp and pointed teeth

Around his shoulders and hips are thick blue wires that help with body movement. He also has thick red wires coming from the base of his skull to his back that basically serves as an external spinal cord, and one coming from his back to his chest that moves 'blood' through is body into his heart.

As a human, he has a slim build and is short in height. He has thick reddish-orange hair that comes up to a spike. His eyes are green. He has patches of freckles on his face and all over his body. He is missing an upper right canine tooth. He has a slight upper-turned 'pug' nose.

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Early Life:

Being born into a influential family, it appears from the outside that Monte grew up with all he needed. However he started becoming troubled leading up to and into his adolescence. Constantly causing arguments with his teachers, getting into physical fights at school and poor grades caused him to be expelled from several private schools, and without any other options was eventually placed into a public school, where his parents continually had to pay off school officials to allow him to stay. His younger sister, Sara, also transferred to the public school per request, wanting to stay close to her brother.

Feeling terrible for hurting his family so much, he reaches out to a school therapist for help. The school therapist contacts his parents and requests that Monte be seen by psychiatrist and perhaps be placed on medication. Monte's parents refuse, saying it's just hormones and a phase that he'll eventually get over. Monte feels devastated and betrayed, causing his mood to sink even lower. This event causes Monte to feel disdain towards his parents, and is something he has yet to forgive them for.

The Split:

At age 15, Monte becomes infected with a man-made virus with a high mortality rate. With no cure available and the chance of recovery looking slim, Monte's parents allow for a risky and controversial procedure for his soul to be placed into a robotic prosthetic body and to place his human body into a deep freeze stasis while they wait on a cure. For this, Monte initially holds contempt over his parents for continuing his suffering and not simply letting him die.

Unfortunately, in a recovering war-torn world where such high technology is feared for possibly becoming weaponized, this means Monte is seen as a threat. While still recovering in the hospital, he is reported as being a potential threat. He is forcibly split from his family and exiled out of Roma, the largest city on the island of Isis. He is placed into another group of people who have been deemed potential threats in the process of being exiled. "Potential threats" include amputees with cybernetic prosthetics (cyborgs), people with various abnormalities and the chronically ill. They are all then thrown into the area surrounding the outside of Roma called "The Wilds", which contains wilderness, waste land and caravans of other exiled people.

Finding himself unable to mingle with other outlanders or join a caravan, Monte wanders the island alone. He eventually stumbles upon a secret underground bunker that had been abandoned but had previously been used for various scientific testing. He decides to stay here and to start using the bunker's equipment to see if he can do anything to help his situation out at all. He stays here in isolation for 4 years, only having other human contact when he disguises his body and leaves to gather supplies.

Finding Pompeii:

One day, a set of experiments that involved mad dogs are able to break free and escape from his compound. Monte runs after them to try to kill them off but is unable to do so before they attack a young woman who was wandering about outside. He eventually shoots the dogs dead, but they had already mauled the girl's arm quite badly, causing her to pass out from shock. In a panic, Monte picks up the girl and runs back into the underground compound.

Monte attempts surgery in order to save the girl's arm, but is unable to do so and must perform an amputation. He also notices that she appears to be blind in her right eye, but decides to not correct that since that did not occur due to any of her current injuries. He sets her up with a prosthetic cybernetic arm, takes care of her other wounds the best that he can, and waits to see if she will wake up or not.

Quite a few hours into her recovery, the girl awakens and immediately becomes frightened with her surroundings before she notices what has happened to her right arm, which drives in upset and anger even further. Monte's attempts to put her at ease fail miserably as she shouts abuse and physically fights him as much as she can in her poor condition, demanding that he leave her alone.

The girl eventually allows Monte to help her, realizing she needs it. She ends up telling him that her name is "Pompeii" but refuses to tell him anything else about her. Monte ends up taking care of her for a short time, helping her learn how to control her new prosthetic limb. He also offers to fix her blinded eye in some way, but Pompeii refuses.

Monte disregards this, engineering an eye attachment created out of gear which will allow Pompeii's blinded eye to have sight once again. Pompeii is amazed that not only she can fully see, but also that Monte chose to make this for her, despite her refusal and being so rude to him initially. She realizes that Monte genuinely is trying to help her and eases her defensiveness, if only slightly.

Once Pompeii had fully healed up, Monte tells her that she can leave at any time and go back to The Wilds. However, pained with guilt, he offers to let her stay with him and in exchange for working for him, he would keep her fed, sheltered and safe. She reluctantly goes with the offer, knowing well that caravaners and outlanders will now treat her poorly with suspect due to her now being a cyborg. This starts their rocky partnership.

Teamwork?:

After telling him a little bit about her past, Pompeii asks what Monte's story is. Fearing that telling the truth would lead to harm towards himself or his family, Monte begins his lie of being nothing more than a humanoid robot that was left in the bunker to conduct experiments and do engineering work. Pompeii initially seems suspect at this, but seems to accept the explanation.

Monte struggles immensely with having to suddenly socially interact with another person after years of forcibly isolating himself. This along with keeping up a huge lie about his life and with Pompeii continually starting arguments and heavily criticizing Monte does not do well for his mental health. He starts becoming increasingly irritable, which Pompeii notices, causing her to calm down her behaviour for his sake.

They slowly begin to trust each other more after some time. Monte "promotes" Pompeii from doing cleaning and grunt work, to helping him fix machinery around the compound as well as taking her out on supply gathering missions outside the bunker. Pompeii reciprocates by being kinder and eventually dropping her guard around him, though she does occasionally tease him for various things, a major one being giving him the nickname "Sooty" due to the letters S.U.T. being engraved into his back panel.

In the long run, the two become each other's close and only friend. Despite this, Monte struggles with wanting to tell her the truth about himself, fearing that if he mentions that he has been lying the entire time that Pompeii will reject him. At the time, he ultimately decides to not reveal the truth.

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Family:

Father: Jakob

Jakob is very high up in an influential company, thus bringing home wealth to his family. His position however keeps him very busy and he doesn't get to be around his family as much as he'd like. He blames Monte's outbursts on just being teenager, citing that he himself once had a mean streak when he was around the same age and he grew up just fine.

Mother: Karla

Karla is a very sweet but slightly naive housewife. She is incredibly doting towards her children, finding it nearly impossible to punish them when needed. She finds it easier to ignore Monte's bad behaviour and respond to it with repeating overbearing praise for him.

Sister: Sara

Sara is Monte's younger sister by two years and the only family member he felt close to. Despite Sara feeling jealous and angry over Monte getting all the attention (albeit negative) from their parents, she still tries to help him with things. She is the one who convinces him that he is hurting the family and that he needs to talk to someone. At one point they were inseparable, Sara even transferring schools when Monte had to so she could stay by him, however things may have changed in the past few years...

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The Good, The Bad and The Whatever:

• Monte is incredibly smart as well as talented in various areas. Despite his young age, he excels at the sciences and maths. As such, these were also the only subjects he got good grades in, since these classes actually kept his interest.

• He also has a penchant for music, often keeping a radio on wherever he is working. He can play a handful of instruments including violin and acoustic guitar. He'll sometimes play these for himself or for Pompeii, as she shares a love for music and singing.

• Monte enjoys keeping insects as pets, his favourite being his millipede named Mildred. He stops keeping worms in the compound after realizing Pompeii has a phobia of them (but not after teasing her about it first).

• Monte displays a more whimsical side when in an attempt to keep himself some company, he builds several small automatons that have very basic functions, his favourite being named "Menander". The automatons often display playful or shy behaviour

• Monte also uses a communicating computer system named "ELEGY" the he recoded somewhat so it do basic conversations with him. He continues to add coding so the system is able to do more advanced conversations.

• Monte has a highly sarcastic side and can be just as a smartass as Pompeii can, which causes her to try to one-up him. Pompeii usually outlasts him when these "arguments" happen.

• He is able to eat and drink normally in his robotic body, but he decides not to since he doesn't need to and it would be a waste of resources for others. Occasionally Pompeii will try to feed him, causing him to have adverse reaction via coughing and gagging since his body is no longer used to food.

• Monte suffers from severely low self-esteem and a fear of failure, causing him stop trying at many things, as he feels that if he doesn't try at anything then he can't fail at anything either. The only way he is able to push himself and make an attempt at anything is if he forces himself to hyperfocus at the task at hand. However at the end of it all, this fear of failure will return and more often than not he will abandon these projects regardless of how close to completion they are.

• He often only finishes these projects if they are only for the benefit of others, such as doing his sister's school work for her when she is stumped or, on a bigger scale, building Pompeii's prostheses.

• Even though he is highly critical of himself, he is also sensitive to being criticized by others, causing him to lash out at other people or at himself.

• When he does have outbursts of bad behaviour around others, it usually emerges as anger or extreme confusion. If he is alone, his outbursts are usually more depressive in nature.

• If enraged or otherwise highly upset, Monte's eyes malfunction and emit an odd glowing pattern.

• During high anxiety situations, Monte will nervously scratch at himself or chew on his hands. This occasionally escalates to purposeful self harm and suicidal behaviour, however Pompeii begs him to stop or at least get her help if he gets these feelings.

• Pompeii eventually convinces him that he needs to be able to do nice things not just for other people, but for himself too. This causes him to start taking care of himself better.