First appearance: Playtest 3 (Pre-Launch) — Brunhilda Doogle v White Hat H03 (Mudcat and Caustic duke it out in a 1v1 test) · watch it on YouTube
White Hat H03 was a warforged gunslinger, a robot cowboy with twin pistols, a white hat and a pocket square, and a manner that was “southern, sort of.” Played by Mudcat, he fought the snake-tailed archer Brunhilda Doogle in Playtest 3 (Pre-Launch) — Brunhilda Doogle v White Hat H03 (Mudcat and Caustic duke it out in a 1v1 test). Over a long, grimy brawl he lost his hat, gained a nickname, and finally took his opponent down with him in one of the stranger mutual kills on record.
Story
White Hat started on the ground while Brunhilda perched on top of the rocks above him. He opened strong: his “special robot eyes” saw straight past her cover, and three pistol shots found their mark. Brunhilda answered with her longbow, aimed “at your stupid mechanical shiny head,” then ducked behind a rock and dared him to come up after her. He climbed, struggling up a rock face that was not especially hard to climb, and covered the last ten feet in a sudden puff of magical travel. Brunhilda was unimpressed: “It’s not Misty Step, it’s Greasy Step. The oil just seeps from you… polluting Mother Nature in all her glory.”
Things went badly for him at the top. His eyes glowed red as he tried to hex her, but she shrugged it off and the spell short-circuited in his own brain and cursed him instead. She lashed him with a thorn whip, dragged him to the edge, and pushed his white hat off the cliff. White Hat stayed cool: “Bigger snakes have been in my boots than you… tipping a man’s head off is very unbecoming.” The bareheaded robot was promptly christened “White Hat Ho” by the crowd, and he took it in stride. “Nobody calls me a hoe but me,” he declared, then spat a forceful stream of oil into the front row “like front row SeaWorld,” with another shot at Brunhilda for good measure.
The fight dragged on and the arena turned against him. Brunhilda’s tail threw him off the ledge, and when he tried to climb back he slid off the rock face he had greased with his own oil. Her poison spray barely bothered his robot body, but her fear spell did: a giant screwdriver with angry eyebrows, “kind of like Clippy from Word,” spun over him, and he insisted, “No one’s scared of you. I just don’t like screwdrivers.” Then a flood washed them both off the cliff and the rain started, and White Hat began to rust, his armor weakening as it fell. His gun jammed when he tried to shoot her bow out of her hands. He fixed it and hit her bow hard, and Brunhilda licked his oil off her blade to intimidate him. It hurt her, and nobody was impressed.
When a constrictor snake slithered out of a hole and chipped a tooth biting his metal leg, Brunhilda charmed it into a loyal pet. White Hat broke away, shook off his fear, and found his hat in the mud at the bottom of the ravine. He dusted it off with his pocket square and put it back on: “Seems we’ve got the upper hand again.” He dazed Brunhilda with a shot and then blasted her new snake friend into flopping sections for biting him. She turned invisible and brought two rockslides down on top of him, pinning him in the dirt. A lightning strike hit them both and revealed her again, and he shot the bow out of her hands (“My precious bow! That was a gift!”). In the end she wrapped her tail around his neck and lifted him off the ground, vowing to hold him “till you rust in the rain.” The squeeze fired every neuron in his synthetic brain, his hand jerked the trigger, and the shot hit her in the stomach and dropped her “like a ribbon falling to the ground.” Moments later, rain poured into the open circuits of his crushed throat. “It seems that this was my day to shine in the sun,” he said, sparking in all directions and staring at the sky, before he rusted and stopped. It was a tie.
Personality and Abilities
White Hat was a gentleman gunslinger with a drawl and a strong sense of decorum, and he took particular offense at having his hat knocked off. He spoke Loxodon and Leonin “so he can speak to the animal races,” and described himself with odd corporate pride as “founded on the principles of fair economics in the oil trade.” He took mockery with good humor, and he was nearly unflappable unless screwdrivers were involved.
In a fight he relied on his pistols, which could reshape into a metal shield to block a shove, and on special robot eyes that saw through cover. When he cursed someone, his eyes glowed red. He could patch his own wounds, blink short distances, and spit jets of oil at enemies and spectators alike. As a machine he shrugged off poison and cold, and a snake’s bite only chipped its tooth on him. His great weakness was water: rain rusted him, and in the end it finished him.
Relationships
- Brunhilda Doogle: His opponent, a nature-loving snake archer who despised his oily pollution. She took his hat and he shot her snake. They killed each other within moments, her blood mixing with his oil.
Memorable Quotes
“Nobody calls me a hoe but me.” (Playtest 3)
- “Bigger snakes have been in my boots than you… tipping a man’s head off is very unbecoming.” (Playtest 3)
- “I may be just a simple machine. But I was founded on the principles of fair economics in the oil trade.” (Playtest 3)
- “No one’s scared of you. I just don’t like screwdrivers.” (Playtest 3)
- “Seems we’ve got the upper hand again.” (Playtest 3)
- “It seems that this was my day to shine in the sun.” (Playtest 3)