Puzzle/Profile

Puzzle

Profile

Quotes

Career

The ArSC unit known as "Puzzle" was a bold experiment by Cyber Media in the creative field of sculpting. 42Lab was heavily involved in the project and supplied much cutting-edge technology, fitting it with research-grade sensory modules with multiple photoreceptor arrays. In addition, Cyber Media also spent a great deal of money in hiring several avant-garde artists to consult on the project in the hopes of uncovering new possibilities in the field of AI creativity.

Many restriction programs were removed from Puzzle's neural cloud module, which allowed her to demonstrate tremendous creative ability and an aesthetic sense that was far ahead of its time. As a result, her works won many prizes. However, after a certain exhibition, Cyber Media suddenly announced that she would be ceasing her sculpting career and entered her into Project Neural Cloud.

Doll Profile 1

The development of Puzzle was a particularly tortuous process. "Dolls creating art" had always been a nigh-paradoxical problem, and the draft for the project had not been able to pass even after a dozen or more iterations. Finally, at the behest of their consultants, the development team removed some of the base layer restriction programs in Puzzle's neural cloud, which incidentally provided them with surprisingly good simulation data. After repeated risk assessments, Puzzle was finally greenlit for production.

Perhaps it was because many of the many limiters that had been removed from her, but Puzzle had a bad character and exhibited confusing behavior—in particular, she held conventional values and ideas in contempt. When awakened, she directly skipped past the verification process and grabbed the nearby workers, asking them to provide sculpting tools for the "newly-born artistic genius". In the end, another Doll had to step in to contain her outrageous behavior. As a result, the researchers had already flagged Puzzle as a developmental accident and began considering the abandonment of the project.

However, the moment she came into contact with clay and a sculpture knife, she immediately produced her first piece, "Q.O.O.H.L.". based on the Venus de Milo ornament in front of her. Puzzle's understanding and analytical ability astounded the artists present, who strongly and collectively urged that she be allowed to be put to work creating art.

Doll Profile 2

Despite her terrible personality, Puzzle remained extremely passionate about art. As long as the appropriate material and venue were present, she would immediately throw herself into the creative process, consequences be damned.

As a result, Cyber Media organized an exhibition tour for Puzzle, allowing her to pour her bizarre imagination into creative work. It was certainly better than letting her pour paint all over an art gallery's balcony on a dark and stormy night.

However, they soon realized the folly of their decision. At the first stop on her tour, the only thing in the vast exhibition hall was a small glass room, which contained Puzzle, wearing only a nightgown and covered in paint, cradling a broken electronic canary as she paced about, laughing maniacally as she carefully explained each and every display piece around her to the canary. As night fell, she exited the room and declared that the exhibition's theme was "Explaining Sculpture To A Dead Canary".

Her outrageous performance made Puzzle a darling to the art critics, and they dubbed her with many titles—"The Heir To Dadaism", "The True Postmodernist" and even "The Representative of Post-Correction Neo-Ultramodernism."

Puzzle had no comment on all this, save to create a new work for each of those titles in the next stop on her tour, which she then personally smashed into powder and flushed down a custom-made giant toilet bowl.

Doll Profile 3

Puzzle's extreme behavior at each of her exhibitions caused Cyber Media to question and review the content of her creative work. After much negotiation, Cyber Media finally secured her cooperation under threat of downgrading her visual modules. After that, Puzzle held an exhibition that she called "the bestest art exhibition ever", titled, "Puzzle's Pussies".

Puzzle filled the exhibition hall with many cute cat statues. But just as the review committee breathed a sigh of relief that Puzzle was finally holding a "normal" exhibition, something happened which made them all go pale.

Puzzle walked around the exhibition hall, carrying paints of various colors which she used to dye the cat statues in various shades and hues. A reporter described it as "What I thought of as cute cat statues had vanished, replaced by a mass of terrifying lines and colors, oversized, distorted eyes and claws, as well as many other shapes which defied description. In an instant, the entire venue had become something from a schizophrenic's imagination."

A further investigation revealed that most of the human audience experienced hallucinations, insomnia, chest tightness, nausea and other symptoms, while some Doll members of the audience reported shutting down. Cyber Media decided that Puzzle was out of control and quickly ended the exhibition while stating that "Puzzle's art was too avant-garde for current society" before entering her into Project Neural Cloud.

Doll Profile 4

Many people give Puzzle a wide berth due to her... unique personality, but she has never been interested in social interaction, having been fascinated with creating works of art for many years. The sole exception is the performer Doll known as Nascita.

The staff could not understand it. After all, the two of them had not had any contact with each other beyond being in the same place when they were awakened. However, Puzzle was nothing but disdainful to Nascita the tokusatsu actress, even going so far as to voluntarily contribute props to her performances just so she could go to the filming location to mock everything about Nascita from her lines to her acting technique.

Nascita's manager once tried to stop these unnecessary interactions, but he soon realized that Nascita's performances when smashing up Puzzle's props was exceptionally striking, while Puzzle often supplied surprisingly useful criticism while arguing with Nascita, and so he tacitly allowed the relationship to continue.

Supposedly, Puzzle had a huge fight with Nascita after the terrifying kitty exhibition and chased her out of the exhibition hall. When a staffer worked up the courage to ask what had happened, she returned to her usual evasiveness and replied—

"Something that's been over-carved loses its aesthetic appeal. I don't believe in taking in broken scraps whose original shape is indistinguishable."

Doll Profile 5

Long periods of creative work have made Puzzle highly adept at the use of color. Her unique visual modules mean that she can see far more colors than humans and ordinary Dolls can, thus affording her a unique view of the world and granting her the ability to uncover the chromatic links between objects. Puzzle insists that "this is the truth only she can see" and calls it "spirit sight", from a phrase she saw in a light novel.

However, "spirit sight" alone isn't enough to satisfy Puzzle's perception demands. She once ran into a creative bottleneck, and as a result, she was not overly resistant to being forced into Project Neural Cloud—rather, it afforded her the opportunity to experience the weird and wonderful world of the cloud server through a different perspective. For instance, through the eyes of a cat.

Her special kitty form not only rekindled Puzzle's passion for art, but even caused a spike in the Oasis' urban legends—

"Many Dolls have reported moving statues appearing at night in the Oasis, accompanied by creepy mewing. We suspect these are caused by excessive stress, leading to redundant data accumulating in visual and auditory modules. We should consider taking action regarding... Wait a minute, when did that statue appear—"

—Oasis Security Audio Log, Serial Number 011887AS