Name: Alice "The Metalhead" Blackwood Gender: Female Age: 19 Alternative Form: Wyvern Appearance: Alice is a somewhat short, heavyset, muscular girl, 5' 4" and 190 pounds, to be exact. Her skin is somewhat pale, mainly due to spending most of her daylight hours indoors. Her muscles, while not grotesquely large, are very clearly defined on her arms. Her hair is jet black, and about midway down her back when left alone, though she ties it in a ponytail to keep it out of her steely gray eyes. It's impossible to tell what her legs look like, as they're covered 24-7 with a pair of heavy, black, military cargo pants completely covered in pockets and other things. Her face and steely blue eyes appear to be locked in a semi-scowl. Many people would frequently mistake her for a man, mainly when her figure was completely obscured by some equipment or another. Shifter Appearance (Why is it so hard to find images I don't hate?!): Half-way shifted: [img=http://i.imgur.com/bKAfS.jpg] (This is as close as I could get- but imagine black instead of brick coloring) Her already heavyset build receives a boost, as does her height. She easily tips the scale at 400 pounds, and her height would rival that of a relatively tall human- around six feet. Her hands, tough and calloused, increase greatly in strength, and proportionally in size, large claws sprouting from the fingers. Most of the back of her is covered in scale-like material, with a good portion of the front also covered, some parts left uncovered to allow for mobility and such. Her eyes take on a more fiery quality, with either a hint of crazy arsonist or giddy teenager present. Her teeth grow and sharpen, becoming far more carnivorous, wicked points for tearing flesh easily noticeable were she to open her mouth. Her hair takes on a similar fiery quality, not waving like an actual flame, but the normally black hair acquires flaming ends, almost like the main body has burnt out and the ends are still glowing embers. All the way shifted: [img=http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jIK72OG7-fA/UXj-0ASE-9I/AAAAAAAAAOI/pLv1QEwRBmA/s1600/blackwyvernwithhugehorns.jpg] Abilities: -Intimate knowledge of production firearms, if it shoots bullets and is made in a factory, she knows how to shoot it -Extensive training in military style close combat, i.e. Krav Maga- she's more than capable of killing with just her bare hands -Prior to the shifter nonsense, she worked in a workshop. She can most likely jury-rig anything within reason, as long as she has the necessary items (as in, "Your knife is dull? I can fix that, sure.) Powers: -While half-shifted, she gains the ability to breath fire, as well as being particularly resistant to heat; nothing to withstand lava with, but a hot summer day wouldn't bother her whatsoever. The fire is relatively hot, but not enough to melt anything truly impressive, though this will likely change with time and such. -While half-shifted her skin becomes much tougher, only increasing in hardness and density. It has a similar consistency to hardened leather while half shifted, going all the way to short of full on dragonscale on most of her body when fully shifted. -While half-shifted, her already impressive physical strength is only augmented, becoming even more so when fully shifted. -As a passive ability, she's inherited the reptilian trait of shedding her skin once in a while. Only, when she sheds her skin, superficial injuries (minor lacerations, etc...) will heal. -While half and fully shifted, she gains the ability of flight. Nothing agile or delicate, but she does have staying power and strength. -Half-shifted and fully shifted, she gains claws. Cutting through bulkheads won't ever happen, but woe betide any cow who finds itself a target. Background: Alice was born in New Hampshire, right up against the Canadian border. Dropping out of school at a young age, claiming it was boring and that they never did anything interesting, she went to a nearby private school that prided itself on it’s technical teachings. The public school was thrilled to be rid of her- having brought up several issues with her parents. Incidents such as the time she’d “accidentally” forgot to return to classes after lunch, and released hazardous materials into the building with no knowledge of their nature… while there were no fatalities, her voice never recovered from her brief exposure and remains horribly raspy to this day. While she still resented the homework, the private school did a far better job of occupying her and curtailing her more destructive tendencies. While she went on several business excursions to the south, and some to Canada, with her father, she would spend most of her time inside, surrounded by machinery and banging away at some machine, part, or tool that wasn’t working quite right. Her father, who owned a small but successful firearms business, couldn’t have been more thrilled, and he would spend many hours with her when time permitted, offering advice on this or that, all of which she took to heart. When she turned sixteen, she began to work in her father’s business. It wasn’t anything a regular person might’ve given a sixteen year girl, either. She worked on the factory floor, hammering, chiseling, screwing and unscrewing, soldering, etc… Her father would repeatedly ask her if she was actually enjoying her work, to which she would respond, “It isn’t work if you actually enjoy it.” Partly at the insistence of her father, and partly out of her own curiosity, Alice began to research several martial arts forms with the ultimate goal of training in at least one of them. Her focus tended to be on the ones that prioritized neutralizing the threat as soon as possible, or at least conferring some survivability to a mostly unarmed person- such as Krav Maga or Jiu Jitsu. While she lacked the dedication to a martial art necessary to travel great distances to study under a master of, well, anything, she did find a former IDF hand to hand instructor who'd immigrated to the US. Surprisingly, she didn't find him by searching the internet for the best martial arts instructors nearby, but rather he came into her father's store while she was around. He took a liking to her, and agreed to teach her what he knew as an exchange of favors, the favor in kind being a nice discount. When she wasn't working on something, eating or sleeping she would likely be training with him, or practicing on her own. At seventeen, she was doing much the same thing, right up until she woke up one morning in the workshop, with a charred worktable gently smoldering in front of her. She’d gazed bewilderedly at it for a while, not realizing what had happened, then realizing that her hands had a distinctly scale-like quality that… really shouldn’t have been there- the claws didn't help either. She’d managed a shriek of surprise, surprising considering how her already husky voice had only deepened further from the change. She’d pulled her phone from a pocket -a small miracle in itself that it hadn’t been destroyed- and had promptly shrieked again. Luckily she hadn’t fully shifted, so the excessively large pants she wore hadn't ripped. As she had watched the morning news, having managed to… somehow turn back, her father somehow in more of a state of shock than she herself, Alice had realized the government, among others, would be coming for her, and anybody else who this had happened to. Be it to train her as some instrument of death for the bureaucrats, or to vivisect her. To her great surprise, the first to knock on the door hadn’t been a suit with sunglasses and advanced extraterrestrial weaponry, they did come eventually, but she’d been long gone by then. Hiding out in Canada, she burnt through what little physical currency she’d been able to bring, and soon began to work to make ends meet. She’d had to stay relatively low income, otherwise citizenship issues might have come up, but she would frequently go out into the Canadian wilderness and experiment with just what her shifting could do. On April 25th, she awoke with grass against her skin, as opposed to a mattress. Her first thought had been that she’d fallen asleep in the wild, but apparently that was not the case. Personality: While her demeanor might seem almost aggressive at first, or very defensive, Alice is nearly incapable of taking most anything seriously. Despite this, she is fiercely individualistic- having taken New Hampshire's motto, "Live Free or Die" to heart. She'd gone as far as throwing one person who'd harassed her about serving society and the greater good across a table. She is just as fiercely stubborn, perfectly willing to stand for several hours straight in an argument and refusing to concede a point unless her personal opinion on it changes. Nonetheless, she is generally a relatively decent person to be around, and fiercely defensive of friends. Topics such as romance, or anything in that general area, confuse her utterly. She has never felt romantic or sexual attraction to anybody, though whether that’s a natural thing or a result of 90% of her waking hours being spent working with machines is up for debate. Other: (This is a WIP) I suppose this would be a theme song: [youtube]yjJDBP292rM[/youtube] -The nickname Metalhead refers mainly to the excess of metal... anything she spent her time around, reinforced of course, by the fact that she has a thing for metal music. -As she did, in fact, fall asleep in the woods, she had the heavy black jacket festooned with pockets that she would wear out of the house on her person, with just a simple undershirt beneath. In addition, she had a relatively heavy knife strapped to her pants, for cutting things that required more finesse than "this log needs to be in two pieces".