oh god send help i'm making gardevoir ocs again

Aaaaah I have so many questions for the Android Therion AU. Ravus Industries has def used Therion for Less Than Legal activities and I wonder how much of their treatment of him skirts on the rights of an android as well (honestly in a capitalist hellscape I'm surprised they have any at all as much as there's a sense of 'we made you we own you forever unless you can afford to buy yourself outright')

That aside, I am *very worried* for Alfyn's safety as Ravus Industries tries to get Therion back. Like... they don't have issues killing if they use androids for assassinations. owo;;

Well, even in a capitalist hellscape there's civil rights lawyers. How far the rights of artificial lives go is...up in the air, at this point. Can they vote? Can they own property? Are they considered citizens? Do anti-discrimination and labor laws apply to them? Unclear, and probably varies between jurisdictions. Either way, androids have at least been around long enough at this point that they're not like, a chattel slave class outright. Also not super common, maybe one out of every 50 or 100 people is an android, but enough that it's a sizeable population, enough that they cannot be considered property outside of specific circumstances, and Therion happens to fall under that legal category.

Therion (and by extension Gareth) are officially and legally, despite having just as much going on upstairs as any human being, property of Ravus Industries. The paperwork was all filed beforehand, he's made with a specific purpose in mind and 'would pose a danger to others' if not under the control of the company, or they claim that he has no true intelligence and is therefore not sentient enough to qualify as a citizen, or something. I'm not gonna pretend I know enough about civil rights law to make up what those exceptions are, but just know that Ravus either fudged most of em or paid off some politicians to let them keep the whole thing hush-hush or both.

There's probably a good few sympathetic scientists and engineers who consider him fully human but unable to really do anything about his situation without jeopardizing their own. There's clearly others, like whoever wrote his file, who look at Therion and only see a tool. One that's helped Ravus Industries take down competitors and acquire their tech and research illicitly, but in this case one of the benefits of Therion being private property is that responsibility lies on the company, not him. Legally speaking, at least. I'm sure some of the less-sympathetic caretakers threaten to reprogram or scrap or replace his parts every time there's a mistake, because he's not a person, he can't learn, he's a machine who has defective parts.

At any rate, uh...Alfyn is definitely in trouble, lol. Like luckily he's still a country boy who can handle himself (Still has swarthy carpenter genes and experience with an axe, probably has a shotgun or whatever the 31st century equivalent would be), and magic is probably still a thing in the 'sufficiently advanced science' way (still thinking about how osvald just does math so hard it makes fire. baller), but ultimately the one thing that's keeping him safest is the fact that all of Therion's remote activation and tracking parts were disabled or removed after his initial escape. That's it. Ravus wants to turn Therion into a Homing Murderbot so bad so they can just retrieve him very easy so they can make him. idk. steal whatever the Wyndhams are doing or murder union organizers or something. The Fantasy Pinkertons are absolutely on his ass.

Luckily Alf at least has his trusty repair van and mobile engineering kits, as well as his usual irresistible charm that nets them allies wherever they go. Ravus Industries is a well-known company that employs a lot of people, but, uh. So are Nestle and Apple, if you catch my drift here. And it's not like they're alone, either! Tressa knows enough about how businesses and boards of investors work to predict what Ravus is gonna try, Olberic and Cyrus together have enough practical and theoretical knowledge of tactics to make for very effective planners, H'aanit knows how to live off the grid and hide your tracks and is the only member of the party who can wield a shotgun with more precision than Alfyn. Ophilia and Prim are also there, idk what they do, Prim is better with diplomacy and has less qualms with muder than Therion and Ophilia is probably very good at finding them allies or places to lay low (what are you going to do, say no to a bishop???).

I have MANY thoughts. some of them related (Cordelia may or may not be a C-suite at Ravus and is very conflicted on what to do about the situation bc she thinks the robot is hot and should go free but knows the practical use he has to the company. either way therion doesnt like her) some of them not (prim has her own goals and possible beef with Ravus but keeps getting distracted by h'aanit who is a lethally hot butch lesbian) but. im having a lot of fun thinking about the whole thing. heehee hoohoo funny sci-fi au