Juke is incredibly smart and learns at shocking speeds. Her natural genius in analysis is only rivaled by her spiteful and cruel disposition. Antisocial, prideful, and a definitive control freak, Juke has the single desire to be the one calling all the shots. She tends to fold when put under strict, authoritative pressure and prefers to work alone from the shadows.
Underneath all the layers of hatred and frustration is a lonely girl who hates nothing more than being vulnerable. Torn from comfort time and time again throughout her life, she is cynical and distrusting of both her own and others's emotions and motivations. Her unstable megalomania is fueled by a childish desire to have secure support.
She harbors extreme bias against off-worlders and Stem Slimes, regarding them as lesser and not deserving of rights or respect compared to the native Stem Ram species.
Juke has an IQ of 233 and is extremely proficient in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, chemistry, and deductive reasoning.
Her stomach is abnormally small, and she can only handle a meal a day.
Juke works as Stem Tower's sole researcher. She maintains the STEMNET's integrity and performs investigative work when required. Most of her free time is spent developing weapons.
She tests her arsenal on Fungal Plains Stem Slime hives. However, her weapons aren't only built with the slimes in mind. Juke watches Blema's hold on the city with a keen eye. If the opportunity arises, she would love to remodel all of Stem Island in her own image...
Born to Jest and Mary Clorentine, Juke's first eight years were raised in a comfortable, noble household supported by her father's electronic sign company.
Her father and mother both did their best to teach her everything they could. Jest took Juke under his wing, teaching her everything he knew about engineering from a young age. She was a fast learner and rivaled her father's own genius; Juke became a stubborn and spoiled child who wanted to tinker and experiment without her father overseeing her creativity.
For reasons Juke couldn't grasp, the family sold their company after her 8th birthday, left behind their comfortable home, and moved out into the Outlands. Confused, young Juke rarely interacted with off-worlders in the past. She had never been outside of the noble neighborhood up until that point, and her reaction to the culture shock was based on her father's own views; she viewed the off-worlders as lesser.
Her parents became incredibly busy as they learned to settle into the new rural lifestyle. The components that the family could barter all went to her father's own engineering projects. Her mother was out until midnight, working odd jobs for food and supplies. Juke no longer had school to occupy her.
It was too much for Juke. She shrunk in on herself as she tried to grasp everything.
Realizing the damage they were doing to their child, Mary started spending more and more time with Juke. As her body aged, Mary was there to comfort and help her. Juke quickly bonded with her mother and begrudgingly set aside her own desire to do projects to help her father with his.
When Juke was 11, a pack of Stem Slimes descended upon Gillsway. Her father held her tight as her mother tried to defend their property.
When the slimes were gone, her mother had been dismembered.
Her logical brain knew the truth., but Juke didn't believe it. She denied it.
That was, until her father became abusive as he drowned his emotions in drinking. The reality set in. Juke took up what used to be her mother's responsibilities and operated like a robot around Gillsway. And, as Jest fell into a further state of despair, she picked up his projects.
She resented them all. Gillsway, its citizens, her father, but most of all, the slimes that had killed her mother. Stem City stood proudly in the distance, a constant reminder of where she could've been.
Jest married another woman and managed to pick back up his old projects. Now given some free time after so long, Juke began experimenting with building weapons. She would buy Stem Slime goo from the local hunter and test various household appliances on them.
Her stepmother berated Juke and caused her to draw further within. She would take to stealing her father's own supplies when he wasn't home.
As another pack of Stem Slimes raided Gillsway, Juke took it upon herself to try out her weapons. It ended in failure, with Juke losing her entire left arm in the attack. Others died in that hunting group's raid, including her stepmother along with a dozen or so Gillsway residents. She did not grieve for them, instead fashioning several prototypes of prosthetic arms the very next day.
Jest tried to make amends with his daughter, but she had burned that bridge a long, long time ago. His concerns didn't matter to her. Her one goal was this: make it out of Gillsway, one way or another.
When Juke was 16, she spotted an opportunity. A trio of Stem City Lawmen were patrolling around Gillsway. Using a makeshift taser, the teenage Clorentine disabled and stole the models. She secretly tampered with them in her room, reverse engineering their internal mechanics and delving into their code with an old laptop.
After a few weeks of work, Juke had separated the Lawmen from their STEMNET servers, crafted her own primitive one, and used the droids as henchmen. Jest pleaded with her to scrap them because he was afraid that Stem City would come looking for them. She didn't care. Come, take her! It couldn't be worse than this dump.
Her robots left a lot to be desired; she only tolerated their poor AI for so long before going in and trying to optimize their code. The reprogrammed Lawmen, whom she called "JUKEBOTS", were now faster. Yet, she wasn't satisfied. She integrated her old Stem Slime armaments on them.
A gang of Stem Slimes came to Gillsway. Many died, but the Clorentine workshop's property was defended by the JUKEBOTS. However, the injuries that the robots sustained during the siege ended up requiring new parts. Juke needed more.
In XX812, a group of Lawmen entered Gillsway with Fencien Armeldia III as their enforcer. Juke intended to pick off a few of her units and nothing more. However, it went awry. The focused enforcer spotted Juke attempting to hijack one and promptly arrested her.
Juke struggled at first. She couldn't let this happen. She didn't have the funds to pay off whatever fine they were going to toss on her.
However, her fear turned into amazement. The first time in Stem City's streets in a decade, she was amazed. It was everything she ever hoped for—controlled security. Thrown into detainment, Juke's mind went wild. If she was to be locked up anywhere, she was glad it was here.
Blema Von Voldark, a woman that she had only overheard horror stories about, had Juke escorted her up to her office. It was there that, in an amazing twist of fate, Blema offered Juke a job.
Only momentarily was Juke confused.
Blema pulled up blurry, low-quality recordings of the JUKEBOT's cameras. Juke, being inexperienced, had missed quite a few connections in the Lawmen's code. They were still connected to the STEMNET, and Blema's personal interest in her tampering was the only reason Juke wasn't arrested far earlier.
Juke's pride had been shattered. She was never the genius she thought she was; there was always somebody pulling strings.
Blema, again, offered a job; Without a doubt, Juke was a natural in this field, and Blema wanted somebody who would stick around for a long, long time.
Despite the shame, Juke saw this as what it was: an opportunity to escape Gillsway and take charge of her own life. Her intelligence would finally be respected.
Leaving Gillsway behind with zero regrets, an 18-year-old Juke started work under the other Stem Tower researcher, Bally Backster. She got to sleep in a comfortable bed and had infinite tools at her disposal. The only issue was that Mr. Backster watched her every move. Starting out, she was his assistant, and she detested that role. However, as time passed, she came to realize that he respected her as an equal.
It was a strange feeling. She had never been treated as an equal before. She had never had anybody besides her mother ask her how she slept. Her stomach had swarms of butterflies in it whenever they studied and worked together. On her own personal computer, Juke rambled out her thoughts in an attempt to document this apparent sickness. She learned chunks of chemistry and biology from Bally, hearing a lot of his findings relating to wild Stem Slimes.
It suddenly came to her one day as he took a screwdriver out of her hand and flashed her a cheeky smile: She loved him.
Juke was on top of the world. Her days were filled with helping out the handsome man, and her nights were filled with extensive plans for the various things she wanted to research and develop now that she had nigh-infinite resources at her disposal.
One particular idea became her fixation. She wanted to figure out how to use Stem Slimes eusocial biology against them; she dreamed of a future where rams ruled over them all.
Blema gave her and Bally access to The Complex in XX813. It was then that Juke discovered the illusive Imine Green. She tried to convince Bally to experiment on Imine with her, but she declined. He seemed to respect her as another living thing and refused to partake in cruel experiments.
She didn't understand. How could he? These things killed people relentlessly. They were monsters.
But her fluttering heart didn't want to lose his respect. She lied, saying that she understood him and wouldn't do it. He accepted it at face value. However, late at night, when she knew Mr. Backster was sound asleep, Juke snuck down to The Complex and began performing horrific experiments on Imine. She needed to figure out how Stem Slimes worked, how they made offspring, and how to manipulate the offspring.
Her results came to fruition. She found a way to force Imine to create goolings with the right mixture of chemicals. Creating specialized machines to produce goolings, Juke was trying all sorts of things to make them docile and recognize her as their queen.
The only person who knew was Blema.
During the XX814 Ahsonov Ball, Juke found herself heavily intoxicated. Foggy memories of her childhood flooded back. Weeping, Bally came and swept her off her feet. They danced on the ballroom floor, the delusional and drunk Juke spilling her heart out to him. They went back to the Stem Tower dorms that night and had the time of their lives.
Juke was as happy as she had ever been. She lived above even the nobles, had several flings a week with the handsome man she adored, and was advancing her agenda of a ram-dominated utopia by experimenting on Imine.
Blema came to her and asked if Juke could create a method of controlling Imine. Curious, Juke questioned her superior and heard the whole plan: The dictator wanted to use Imine in a show to the Outlanders on why the Stemrails aren't to be messed with. The time limit was short, but Juke was confident. Operation CHAINEDSLIME would be the apex of her career.
Figuring out a solution in record time, Juke gleefully handed Imine over to Blema.
However, she had been deceived. Imine had faked being on a leash and escaped without finishing all of Operation CHAINEDSLIME. Blema, distraught at this outcome, took it all out on Juke. A majority of Juke's funding was removed, along with her access to The Complex.
Bally Backster, hearing about Juke's Stem Slime experiments from Blema, told her that he was disgusted by her. Her heart shattered. She couldn't take it. She retreated to herself. Why couldn't Blema see that mistakes happen? Why couldn't Bally see that she did it in pursuit of a better world?
Looking down at the city she once thought was perfect, an isolated and afraid Juke realized that it was nothing short of awful. Off-worlders trashed the great streets below, nobles were beat down by Blema's disorganization laws, Outlanders lived in chaos, and foreign nations saw their desires only as a toll and not as a nation's needs.
Stem Island was a dirty slate that required a good wiping. If the time came and she could, Juke would gladly be the one to take the blame for doing so, considering Blema seemingly only sought to sow uncertainty and chaos.
She and Bally continued to work together. She stayed silent. She wanted nothing more than to make him proud, but how could she?
In XX817, Q1, Bally Backster vanished from the Stem Tower dorms. He didn't come back.
Juke was heartbroken. Despite their rocky relationship, she still wanted to find him. She used whatever means at her disposal: security cameras, Lawman video feeds, and private investigators. Nothing came back.
He had seemingly vanished into thin air one day.
It was months before Juke came to terms with the reality of the situation. He had either left Stem Island or died. It didn't matter which, because the outcome was the same: again, Juke was alone. Again, without warning, something dear had been taken from her.
It was an ordinary rainy day in Stem City when she came to a conclusion: It was her versus the world.
Blema loosened up Juke's chain, giving some of her budget back now that Bally was no longer in the picture. Juke heartlessly thanked Blema before disappearing into the lab.
Juke created her multi-purpose power back, upgraded goggles, and even claimed a Lawman deployment vehicle from the Nexus as her own mobile lab. Knowing Blema's Lawmen were useless, she stole an entire squadron of them and spent a whole year decking them out with new armor, new weapons, and a and a new code. The JUKEBOTS Type-2 were online. Making sure to leave no stone unturned, she severed them from any and all of STEMNET's control. They were her own soldiers.
She drove around the Fungal Plains in her lab and began exterminating every single Stem Slime hive she could find with her arsenal.
During the prototyping of the JUKEBOTS type-2, she originally modeled them as resembling Bally Backster's own likeness. Her twisted vision saw it as a tribute. Called Project Baltimore, her heart poured everything into it. However, it went sour quickly. Juke wanted a mature, cool personality like the Bally she loved once had. Instead, the AI devolved over time into a screaming mess of childish nonsense.
Despite the hundreds of thousands of tweaks and resets, it would always end up the same. Painful memories seeped forward as week after week of failed debugging came and went. At some point, Juke snapped. She couldn't take it. She couldn't take Bally's image without accurately replicating him.
She should've incinerated him, but she couldn't do that to her one true love's face. One rainy night, Juke snuck out of Stem Tower and headed into the sewer system underneath the southeast Buck Street. Plugging him up to the stems underneath the city, she abandoned him there. He would stay powered on; that warped memory of Bally Backster would live on.
Blema Von Voldark - Respected when first employed, Juke has come to hate Blema. Her secretive nature clashing with a sociable persona causes Juke to be extremely distrustful. The only reason Juke stays under her employment is the free resources, the nice dorm, and the opportunity to be next in line.
Fencien Armeldia III - Juke barely manages to tolerate Fencien; they are complete opposites in both personality and philosophy. She views Fencien as outright stupid.
Jest Clorentine - She detests her father. The few times she's had to go back home for supplies were quiet and cold.
Bally Backster - Juke tries not to remember the way he made her feel.
Baltimore - A reminder of all her failures and the climax of her broken heart.
Organia Sweloz - A hired muscle for Juke's own ambitions. She barely cares about the woman herself and only regards her as a tool.
Imine Green of XX534 - A lesser form of intelligence who outwitted her. Juke wants nothing more than Imine's corpse for experimentation.