Landstorm the Mouse

Landstorm the Mouse is the founder and CEO of Landstorm Electronics, which manufactures and distributes pre-assembled computer hardware, most notably the Lightning series of smartphones. He wears a three-piece suit and carries a rapier. Landstorm excels in electrical engineering, but generally fails in other types of engineering. He is cheerful, easily intrigued, and easily bored.
==Appearance==
Landstorm is a two-foot-tall anthropomorphic mouse. His fur is white with patches of brown. He wears a charcoal gray, pinstriped, three-piece suit, along with a white dress shirt, red bow tie, and bulky black knee-high boots. He also occasionally wears a rapier.
In other sensory description, Landstorm has a high-pitched voice. He also talks very rapidly -- a legacy of his city upbringing, no doubt.
==Personality==
Landstorm is notable for his cheerful and optimistic disposition. He enthusiastically pursues whatever catches his interest, although anyone who has experienced a few of his "pet projects" will go to great lengths not to be involved in the testing of whatever his newest one is. (Aside from his electronic inventions, Landstorm has only ever had one contraption not blow up spectacularly.)
==History==
=== Childhood ===
Landstorm was born to his mouse parents in a slightly futuristic city. Since his family didn't have much money, Landstorm spent most of his free time in the library (instead of playing the newest video game or watching TV), and became an avid fan of science fiction and fantasy. His favorite books were Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C. S. Lewis. He dreamed of growing up to be a great adventurer like Reepicheep, and was on his high school's fencing team. (He still sometimes carries around the mouse-scale rapier he acquired.)
Starting in middle school, Landstorm started walking home from school to save his bus fare to buy electronics parts with. Gradually, he began to spend less time reading and more time tinkering, and eventually decided that being an engineer would be the next best thing to having adventures.
=== Landstorm Electronics ===
At the age of seventeen, Landstorm founded Landstorm Electronics, making microchips in a shed in his parents' backyard and offering them for sale online. Although he knew his design was revolutionary, Landstorm had trouble catching the attention of major customers, and let the project lapse as he prepared for college. Shortly after he enrolled at [redacted] University, however, Landstorm met Sho the Foxlion, an economics and marketing double-major who was nearing the completion of her degrees. Sho thought Landstorm's innovation had potential, and convinced him to hire her as soon as she graduated, becoming LE's second employee.
With Sho's help, LE quickly gained a foothold in the electrical engineering industry, and Landstorm began to branch out beyond microchips, delving into nanoelectronics. He patented a design for a low energy consumption display the next year, and just after he graduated created a breakthrough quantum computer. Just a year later, the very first LE smartphones, which utilized all of Landstorm's inventions to date, hit the market with huge success. By this point, LE had over a hundred employees.
The "Lightning α" smartphone moved LE from the wholesale to the retail sector, and once again Sho, now CFOO, was able to generate the necessary publicity. The following years saw the production of LE computers in other shapes -- tablets, laptops, desktops, servers -- but the Lightning series continued to be the company's best seller, with the Lightning β and the Lightning ɣ both earning due acclaim. The Lightning δ, the current model, was released on LE's ten-year birthday.
=== Dimensional research: rumors and truth ===
Landstorm, famously attracted to ever-smaller electronics, is rumored to be testing hypothetical uber-microchips, which would be constructed based on principles of quantum electrodynamics and stack three-dimensional transistors in more than three dimensions. Some prominent scientists have called this "unfeasible", "fundamentally unsound", and even "impossible"; Landstorm has not commented in reaction to these criticisms, or even confirmed that such research is indeed underway or planned...
-- The [redacted] Journal
In private, Landstorm laughs at these speculations until his ears shake. It's an entirely different kind of "dimensions" he's researching -- and he thinks he's very close to a discovery which might be able to transport him to different worlds.
One day, an experiment blew up in his face, and somehow catapulted him into the events of Scattered Pieces, where he had a surreal encounter with other dimensional travelers (including an opportunity exercise his skill in fencing), which was abruptly cut short as the portal between worlds re-opened and sucked him back to his office in Platinum City. Further work on this evidently flawed exceedingly promising prototype is underway.
==Abilities==
Landstorm has a natural talent for mathematics and spatial visualization. He also has an innate advantage when it comes to manual dexterity and assembling minute parts, because his hands and fingers are small (although proportionate for his body).
==Skills==
Landstorm is literate: he can read with great speed, and write with great illegibility. Additionally, he is highly knowledgable about engineering, although (with one exception) his electrical engineering projects are the only ones which work out.
==Weaknesses==
Although brilliant when he applies himself, Landstorm is easily distracted by puzzles and shiny objects. (Shiny puzzles are the worst!) He also has a short attention span, often leaving in the middle of meetings or tactlessly interrupting important people's speeches.
== Trivia ==
The notable exception to the everything-Landstorm-makes-that-is-not-electronic-will-most-certainly-blow-up-in-short-order rule is a pair of boots which Landstorm made when he was about fifteen. They haven't spontaneously combusted yet, so he considers them a win. On the other hand, they've never done anything other than be normal boots, either. Landstorm can often be heard making the claim that they are seven-league boots which run on brainpower -- that if he could ever stop thinking, they would do exactly what their name implies -- but that remains to be seen.
Another fun fact: Landstorm compulsively (and unknowingly) quotes works from our world. In Part 1 of Scattered Pieces, he quotes from the following:
* The Tick: The Animated Series
* The Princess Bride (the movie)
* Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
* Hamlet
* The Book of Job
* The Epic of Gilgamesh (as translated by Maureen Gallery Kovacs)
Category:Mice
Category:Males
Category:True Neutral
Category:Engineers
Category:Smart Characters