More old art from 2009! And now we're getting into more Spotlighters! I'll copy my old description, which said it better.

So! Here we have a Spotlighter, pre-activation. Spotlighters themselves come in a wide array of colors, and you probably remember me mentioning that these colors randomized at start-up; but what exactly does that mean? Well. Since these guys are mass-produced, it wouldn't make sense for Secure Technologies to manufacture each and every color variation separately, it would take too much time and effort- so they found a better way.

Spotlighter 'fur' is actually comprised of a series of hollow, fiber-optic like strands; these strands can be programmed to project any color or color combination imaginable, and it solves the problem of how to create lots and lots of color variation without having to make each one separately. This allows them to produce a whole slew of what are called 'shells' (the un-coded, essentially empty bodies that will later be loaded with programming, personality, color and other data) at a time, and just activate them as needed.

This is one such shell. Since no coding has been loaded yet, the fur shows up as semi-transparent; once activated, the colors will randomize, and the resulting combination will be written permanently 'to disc' along with personality and other data, and cannot be changed. However, if someone did want a specific color or pattern to show up, this information could be pre-coded instead of randomized, but it must be done prior to activation, before everything is finalized.

An interesting note on Spotlighter data and shells: though personality and color data cannot be changed, it can be transferred between shells, much in the same way data can be loaded from one computer to another. So essentially, if a Spotlighter becomes damaged beyond repair, you could transfer their entire programming 'package' (basically what makes them 'them') into a whole new shell, and that shell would have the same colors, voice, and memories as the previous one did. This also allows individual Spotlighters to transfer between the different divisions (common, medical, mechanic, etc - which all have different base shells) as many times as needed. There is a very, very slight chance of data corruption occurring during transfer, though it's very rare; but if this happens, you could wind up with distorted/glitched color data (or even patches where it didn't load at all), warped personality/memory data, glitchy programming, and all sorts of other things that would be pretty bad, considering it's something that you can't fix.

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I like how I said that color can't be changed once it's written to disc, and then immediately discovered the concept of jailbreaking Spotlighters. Most of the time it can't be changed- and any authorized user won't be able to, it takes a lot to be able to do- but naturally a group of individuals have figured out how to make that happen. But what would a group of security-based robotics be without the inevitable thief organization stealing them for their own ends?