The Hue Shift

Chroma

Chroma, full name Chromatic Aberration, is perfectly normal, I swear. It's just a normal robot that lives a normal life. It works as a bartender, and lives in an apartment in the city that it can barely afford, even with the roommate. (The roommate is a girl named Alicia.) It also has a cat named Patches. It owns a car, some old rusty shitbox that it never lets anyone borrow.
It's normal. It has to deal with normal, modern human problems, like not being able to afford rent, or losing its job.

Unfortunately for it, it is also a monster.
It has to eat a human being alive roughly every month, or it will eventually shut down. So, every month, it drives out to some small town, and eats someone alive. It tells everyone it's going stargazing. It coughs up their bones and everything else inedible on the outskirts of town, burns everything flammable, and buries everything else. It prefers not to think about any of this, choosing to block out the faces of its victims with red scribbles. It remembers all the names, though. And the precise locations where it's buried their remains, and the dates, and just about all the details it can learn about them from their possessions.

It feels absolutely awful about all the murder, if it does think about it. It's frequently haunted by hallucinations(?) of red scribbles, or scribbly red eyes, the same ones it uses to block out the faces of its victims.

pronouns: it/its
gender: robot
height: 1.65m (without antennae)
age: 24 years old
: December 9th, 1999
species (?)
artfight: Chroma on ArtFight

Robots

Robots exist alongside humans. They generally have some sort of technology for a head, with TVs being the most common. Their heads are generally functional, for example any speakers will be where their voice comes from. Most robots also have a tail that's some sort of cable, which they generally charge through. Their bodies are usually metal or plastic. Robots are actually robots, they run on electricity and have to charge, and they can store files, connect to computers, and access the internet. There aren't other monsters like Chroma.

Robots aren't manufactured or created by anyone, nor are they born like humans are. Instead, they just kind of appear randomly, usually in a field or something. Robots exist all over the world, and started appearing some time in the late 70's or early 80's. No one has actually seen a robot appear firsthand. They usually spawn with knowledge of language, and of how being a robot works, but they know very little about the world, so they generally spend a couple years just kinda learning about the world. This "learning period" is sort of the robot equivalent of childhood.

Minor Characters

Alicia

Alicia is Chroma's human roommate. She doesn't really help Chroma to take care of Patches, and would probably put him up for adoption if Chroma wasn't around. She works from home. She's generally pretty nice, she would pretty much always cover Chroma's half of rent if it asked. She's also the kind of person that responds to really long text messages with a single thumbs up.

Touchtone

Touchtone is a phone-headed robot office worker. She has to pick up her own phone to talk, since her voice actually comes out of the phone. She seems stuck up, but she's actually pretty nice. She likes puns. She occasionally gets dragged to the bar Chroma works at by coworkers.