Enter Your Position...
You were recently promoted to a position on Tesladyne's Zeta Team, the entryway from labwork to ACTION SCIENCE! Finally being on one of the official rosters for field work on call rather than just going out when someone needs a specialist. You are out there taking chances, making mistakes, getting messy, hunting cryptids, and fighting giant mechs! Though the last Zeta Team was all fried by an underwater volcano, someone has to be out there studying the world in all its gritty detail. Who is more qualified than you, Indiana Jones? Okay, Indy might be more qualified but he's not real. Even the most qualified person who knows Quantum Physics like the back of their hand and can karate chop through concrete might end up as Interdimensional Vampire chow if they're not careful.
The year is 2012, the month March, a few months after the "8/11" incident where ALAN, in a desperate bid to stop Robo from reaching it, used its influence over worldwide bureaucratic infrastructure to conjure evidence that Robo had spent several decades illegally trafficking nuclear material. The charges are dropped in the wake of ALAN’s defeat when physical evidence fails to align with ALAN’s trumped up paper trails. Even so, the scope of the charges and the speed with which they are dismantled only fuels the suspicions of some in the government and media that there is “obviously” an even larger and more dangerous terrorist conspiracy with Robo at its center. The outrage-based wing of the 24-hour news cycle continues to “just ask questions” about Robo’s involvement with the hijacked nuclear material found during the Hashima Incident.
Even if things are very tense between the public and the company, some strange things have started happening. Odd shipwrecks, strange lights in the sky, and ghost radio stations cropping up with no apparent explanation. Only you're an Action Scientist, right? It's your job to find an explanation and then punch it if needed! You never know where a lead might take you, maybe the next case will be the team's turn to save the world! Fame, glory, and SCIENCE!!! lay ahead, waiting to be discovered.
"There's Science and then there's SUPER Science..."
The world of Atomic Robo is the kind of place where a nuclear-powered robot was built by Nikola Tesla in the 1920s and no one thinks that’s strange. Then there was that pyramid super tank, executing a water clock program that took 5,000 years to compute, that emerged from the Egyptian desert and attacked long-dead cities with its solar-powered death ray. And who could forget when the remnants of the secret Nazi space program nearly started World War 3 in the 1960s. Then there’s the really weird stuff like the Vampire Dimension and the time-traveling yet historically inaccurate velociraptor. Look, these things just happen. Believe it or not, though, Atomic Robo’s world is basically just like ours. The main difference is that the dials for Science and Conspiracies are set a few notches higher.
What does Tesladyne do?
Tesladyne today is a multi-billion dollar corporation with field offices around the world. Founded by Dr. Atomic Robo Tesla after the death of his creator Nikola Tesla in 1943, Tesladyne existed only on paper until Robo returned from World War Two. Initially an aerospace firm, the need for a dedicated rapid-response team that specialized in cutting edge scientific investigations and defense soon became apparent. Dangerous technologies and covert organizations began to appear around the globe in unprecedented numbers due in large part to the secret “Teslatech” arms race started by the Allies and Axis and continued by the Cold War superpowers.
Tesladyne represented the end of an era. Previously men and women would have operated individually with limited and local success—mystery men, gentlemen vigilantes. But a wide range of scientists, explorers, and adventurers gravitated toward Tesladyne as the work it conducted became increasingly exotic. For the first time in history, there was an international collection of scientist-adventurers operating under a single banner.
For nearly 60 years, Tesladyne was the most famous and controversial tenant of the Empire State Building. Then in 2002, in the wake of 9/11, Tesladyne was moved to a disarmed Titan Missile complex off the coast of New England. Tesladyne, no longer limited by NYC zoning statutes or noise complaints, entered a period of tremendous growth. The staff and scope of operations increased at a dizzying pace for the next ten years.
Typical field teams consist of three to five Action Scientists drawn from a wide array of disciplines. Field teams are equipped with conventional weapons and some specialty equipment according to preference and available resources. Travel is typically via unarmed and lightly armored transports. There are dozens of branch offices across the globe that can offer various levels of support at the local level.
Working at Tesladyne
Scientific staff usually starts as a paid internship most often gained through a university program. This lasts six months to a year. Interns may then apply for residency. Resident Scientists are selected for Action Science on an individual basis. There are no hard-and-fast rules to advance from Resident Scientist to Action Scientist. Anyone pursuing any field of inquiry is eligible. Sometimes interns jump straight into Action Science and sometimes they remain Residents for years. Action Scientist isn't a “higher” rank than Resident Scientist, merely riskier.
All scientific staff, whether Resident or Action, are subject to a rigorous physical fitness program to promote health and energy. Plus, a fit staff is more able to evade scientific catastrophe. Action Scientists come from every discipline and are grouped into teams with a wide range of expertise to promote “outsider” thinking and non-traditional approaches to problem-solving.
Although Tesladyne has done a great deal of work for the U.S. Government over the last seventy years, it is not—as popularly believed—under control of the U.S. Government nor does it answer to anybody of the U.S. Government.
Tesladyne is funded in part by the United Nations. In theory, this is a subsidy so that member nations don’t have to pay through the nose for Tesladyne operations, but in practice this financial courtesy extends to non-member nations as well. Tesladyne cannot act on its own. The organization must be contacted by a high ranking government official (roughly governor, its equivalent, or higher) through specific channels to be granted the rights under international law to act on the behalf of that nation (the US included). In essence, Tesladyne cannot act without first being “invited” to do so.
