Pino is the first playable character in the fan game by the Cireclinlin community. He first appears as a wooden puppet with no legs.
The autonomous house puppet was first prototyped in the early 1880s and introduced to market over the following years. They became popular in the 1940s after a biopic was made about the prototype.
At some point, house puppets were produced in both a basic model and a more expensive deluxe model, the difference being that the basic model shipped without legs.[1] The family that "adopted" Pino as a babysitter and housekeeper got a basic puppet because they couldn't afford the deluxe version. They tried to hide the existence of the basic/deluxe split from him, telling him he hadn't fully "hatched" yet in reference to the rough egg shape of both his inner packaging and his torso.
Pino heard of incidents in the village from a little bird[3] in 2015-12, visited a few times, and came to stay in 2016-03 for a couple reasons. He found others like him in the sense of not having "hatched" all the way, such as Green in #141, and that he found villagers in sticky situations and felt like helping.[4] When no one else would, Pino did. But not wanting to start trouble, he kept a low profile[5] for the first few months until Al arrived in 2016-07. Pino has had to put up with occasional insults that he's a sex toy.[6]
Pino begins somewhat weak but becomes stronger as the party acquires different attachments that connect to his pelvic ports. The deluxe upgrade, found early on, adds legs and begins to disprove the lie-to-children about "hatching". Other specialized attachments add a tail or tracks to the lower body. This allows new powers as the plot demands, possibly using a turn in battle to switch out.
An attachment port for controlling either a limb or a different device has real-world precedent. One hardware hacker has started a project called SynLimb to make a mechanical arm generate control voltages for a modular synthesizer.[8]
A puppet with legs on is shorter than a fully grown adult human in order not to appear imposing to people. It's roughly as tall as a 7-year-old human child or Pepper from SoftBank: 1.2 m (4 feet). This is taller than the original prototype, which was roughly 0.9 m (3 feet) tall,[9] but not so short that the desire to be taller consumes his life, as was the case for the prototype.[10]
A comment to "Bottle of Water" (#4678) by Dave asked: "How can a puppet talk on its own?" I thought it was a good question but could not come up with an answer the same day. Instead, I began to collect evidence:
We can assume a production puppet uses food for two purposes: running the organic part and running a biobattery that powers the electric limbs. The limbs can also run on a conventional rechargeable battery located near the bottom of the body. If it's charged from mains or solar power, he doesn't need to eat as much. In fact, if he overeats, he feels the fat squeezing its insides against its exoskeleton in the same way as an obese insect.[12] It produces enough power to drive the arms and small attachments, such as legs or tracks, but larger ones (such as a car with a neural interface for puppets) need their own power.
Incidentally, Japanese has a cluster of words appearing to relate to a wooden servant boy:
Categories: Cireclinlin