[s]Character you have created: Taylor Zheng
Alias: Maverick

Speech Color: [color=B80000]All forms (Changed it for less confusion)[/color]
 
Character Alignment: Villain

Identity: Secret

Character Personality: Taylor is the kind of person to consider adrenaline—the rush of combat or the glee of getting away with a crime—the purest kind of joy a human can feel. She is always seeking out the most dangerous thrills with reckless abandon and the most powerful opponents, treating nearly everything around her like a toy that she is free to play with, destroy or steal as she pleases. While she isn’t manic, her obsession with her own enjoyment to the detriment of property and other people borders on sociopathic. As far as evil, she is more along the lines of an arrogant bully than any serious mastermind. She won’t hurt normal people unless they get in the way of what she wants, but at the first sight of a Meta she will doggedly challenge them to brawl any chance she can get, villain or hero (though heroes are always much more fun).

She adores “good, old-fashioned” battle banter with her opponent, but when such banter borders on insulting her appearance (most especially her “mannish” physique) or her control over her powers she can lose her temper. She loves watching professional wrestling, inspiring her costume and a few of her theatrical moves in combat. She reads comics often, and can get annoyed when the things she does don’t line up with how her comic book fantasy should have gone. She strongly supports the notion of anarchism, and severely resents heroes as liars and hypocrites. While people close to her have been caught in the crossfire of hero-villain fighting, she believes that controlling oneself when one can harness so much power is a waste and that collateral damage is bound to happen anyway.

In a more intimate light, Taylor doesn’t see herself as the person she wants to be. Not due to her moral choices, as far as she knows; but rather due to her own astronomically high expectations of herself. Any moment of doubt is immediately washed away by seas of fury, as if she is terrified of the moment she may realize that she can never be as perfect and powerful as she wants to be. Seeing perceived perfection in others—popularity in social situations, wealth, conventional beauty—fills her with an envy that she, again, drowns in robustness to desperately stave off emotional pain. So far, her acts have not been very much planned, or at least planned with the intent to take over the world or slaughter people. She is easily responsible for costing the government fortunes in property damage, putting hundreds of civilians and policemen in the hospital, and stealing from top-security facilities, but something gives her pause when it comes to cold-blooded murder. Her bloodlust is largely unrelated to sadism, and while violence is the only language she loves, sometimes seeing the pain she brings to people face-to-face “ruins her fun”. She is terrified of being seen as weak and will desperately seek to disprove anyone who thinks so, to the exception of all else at the time.

Since she has gotten her powers, Taylor has drifted, ever so slightly, from her “normal” group of friends. The more acute of them have noticed, and tensions are rising within the circle over whether or not Taylor’s posse are even useful to her at all anymore. She has become more power-hungry and bossy, thinking, subconsciously or otherwise, that she is superior to them for her powers. What effect this will have on her relationships has yet to be seen.

Uniform/costume: [hider=Zheng][IMG]http://i58.tinypic.com/27wtzcw.png[/IMG]

 (I know she looks very masculine, couldn’t fix it. She is very muscular, but not ridiculously flat-chested and broad-shouldered as the picture may suggest. Also: I used Heromachine 3 to make that image, it’s an absolutely fantastic creator for whipping up costume/character designs and it’s browser-based. Seriously, check it out.) [/hider]

Origin Info/Details: Taylor grew up surrounded by Metas—they were celebrities, local heroes, and leaders on a citywide and national scale. As a child, weaving through the darker streets of Lost Haven was tough, but taught her the valuable lesson of always putting herself first. As her parents had disappeared when she was two years old, she was a foster kid, drifting between homes, getting chucked into the next family as soon as the old one couldn’t handle her violent outbursts. Even while her relationship with adults was severely strained, she had a faithful group of childhood friends to rely on, from beating on neighborhood rivals together to organizing shoplifting plots as an avenue to extra money for the toys and entertainment they couldn’t get at home. Both boredom and adulthood became her greatest enemies, treated in her mind like the deadliest of diseases.

When Taylor was 11, she took up weightlifting. While she was already athletic, seeing others, girl or boy, in her middle school who were stronger or faster than she was made her as angry as she was jealous. She poured herself into her athleticism, studying wrestling and judo techniques and squeezing free classes out of a local personal trainer, Bryce, in exchange for being an errand girl for him, delivering the steroids he peddled out of his gym to his customers. She trained alongside the closest member of her posse, Andre Shea, whose situation was similar and whose pent-up anger rivaled her own after years of foster-hopping. They watched out for one another, in turn watching over the younger members of their flock while they were too small to fend for themselves. Even through all the crime and violence, they were like a family, especially when Andre, at 18, finally left the system and scrounged together enough money to get an apartment where Taylor and the gang could sleep and avoid their surrogate parents.

At that point, Taylor was 14, in her first year of highschool. She quickly became well-known to the school population as a delinquent of the worst kind; to the “weaker” students she was a deranged bully, to the teachers she was a nightmare, and to the jocks she was [i]terrifying[/i]. While she was still peddling steroids--and eventually other drugs, at the request of Andre—she never took a single dose herself, seeing it as a “wimp’s way to power”. On the other end of the scale, Andre had fast become dependent on a strange pill that had recently hit the market, one with radical results and dire consequences. As his size grew and his temper quickly shortened, Taylor watched her friend of a decade metamorphosize into a monster. 

One day, while she was walking back to Andre’s place from school, his most recent girlfriend was standing on the lawn of his apartment building, looking bewildered and bruised. She explained to Taylor that Andre had become irrationally violent, leapt through the window to their third story apartment and crashed right down on top of a car before he continued running like a wild animal. Neighbors had called the cops, and soon enough the whole apartment was being searched. The police didn’t truly care about finding Andre, only ripping the place apart in a search of drugs and to drag away all the street kids that he had been harboring there. Taylor managed to dodge the cops, but seeing her friends pulled apart and separated into families across the slums left her feeling more alone and powerless than she’d ever felt in her life. Desperately, she approached her personal trainer for details on whatever steroid Andre had been taking, hoping he’d been the one to pass them around to different dealers. 

When he claimed he couldn’t give her any answers, after a full month of furious searching around, she resigned to the disbanding of the Shea gang, pouring herself then into her school’s wrestling team before getting expelled for breaking one of her opponent’s legs in the middle of a competition. She escaped jail time through sheer dumb luck: a sympathetic jury to her sad tale of a lack of parental guidance, an attorney bent on winning “unwinnable” cases for rep, and a judge who cared little for both the defense and prosecution, seeing them both as little more than a couple of inner city kids beneath his notice. Expelled at 16, she opted against reentering school, knowing she’d make more money outside of the law. The only adult Taylor knew at that point was Andre’s old friend, Christian, and so she approached him for a place to stay until she grew old enough to rent her own place. His cheap apartment in Little Sicily proved insufficient, and so much of the posse turned to Nan, the owner of a popular nightclub for the seedier underbelly of Lost Haven. She rented and owned an apartment for them until Taylor could own it herself, and in exchange a portion of the money the gang made on drug dealing and doing jobs for bigger fish went to her to offset the cost of the apartment. 

Andre’s disappearance hurt Taylor less and less as her world shifted to just trying to stay afloat. Her life was tough, but her family, her true family, was closer than ever, and the boredom and loneliness of school was gone, hopefully for good. Halfway through the summer, she had long since left behind her steroid-pushing trainer to work herself up on her own in preparation for her debut as a fighter in an underground ring. She saw how much money a champion could make, and, toting all her street experience as well as her natural strength, she entered the fray. The fights became easier as Taylor slipped into a natural routine, but the amount of money she was making off of them alone wasn’t enough to keep her happy. She needed more—more excitement, more brutality than battles won in a few well-connected punches.

Her wishes were granted with the reappearance of her old trainer, Bryce. He busted down the door to her apartment late one night, just as she had come back from a fight. He was furious, and even before he whipped out a gun and started screaming Taylor knew he’d been popping the same drug Andre had. It seemed to affect him differently; his skin was oily, impossibly so, and his muscles seemed to hang off of him like rotting meat off a bone. He accused Taylor of stealing half of his stock to sell for herself before she left him behind all those months ago, demanding it back. When she insisted she didn’t have anything, he vomited some kind of putrid bile all over her, knocking her out instantly by the sheer stench. 

When she awoke, she was in the dark corner of his gym’s storage basement, where he kept the bulk of his stock, tied to a pole. His mutated visage huddled before the mess of boxes and tables, where he presented an entire baggie of the vile pills that had ruined his, Andre’s and many others’ lives. He explained that he’d stopped selling them when he saw what they did to people, but that he then had nowhere to put them. So, in his steroid-induced craze, he decided he would stuff Taylor full of them easily past the lethal dosage and see what happens.

The first few doses tasted like poison. Her bones felt like rubber and her stomach turned to ice. Her chest ached like an overfull barrel straining against the metal bands binding it, and as the execution dragged on the flow of her thoughts grew jagged—waves punching a rock face, an eagle floating on the whims of the sky, a dark room where one madman killed another. First she felt sick; then she felt agony. Excruciating, enough to make a strong mind snap like a mouse’s spine. She stopped struggling when he shoved the last pill into her mouth, resigned to her freshly-polished spot in Hell hours ago. 

Bryce commented on how long she was lasting, assured that even an ex-protégé of his couldn’t stay alive through all the damage he just did to her system. When, thirty minutes later, she was still breathing, he grew impatient. He struck her across the face with a talon; still he was not satisfied, still she was alive. He took to punching her in the stomach and face, vicious and endlessly frustrated with her endurance. Just before he could land a killing blow, her skin turned into the same cold iron as the pole she was bound to.

She was furious, she was hurting, and she was [i]powerful[/i]. The chains that kept her bound to the pole snapped in one arc of her arms, and in the next motion she had her fingers locked around his neck. All the bile he spewed up rolled off of her metallic flesh like oil in a pan. She didn’t know her own strength. It wasn’t until she let go, minutes later, that she realized she’d snapped his neck almost instantly, that she’d been strangling a dead body. Her body turned to normal, and she fled back to her apartment, sickened and confused. 

Her posse was waiting in the apartment for her arrival, all horrified by her kidnapping and relating the thousand different stories of how they went looking for her. Somehow, they’d vacuumed up the bile from the section of the carpet where she’d been attacked, and while a faint smell lingered it didn’t have the strength to knock her out again. She waved her friends away, with more weariness than she thought she could have after all the adrenaline minutes previous, plopped down onto the threadbare couch to share what happened, and turned into fabric. 

She has been honing her powers for months upon months now, incorporating them into her daily life until they felt natural enough to be used in combat. She hasn’t started her streak of villainy on a particularly dazzling note, despite her personality: mostly just using her powers to mug, rob, and fight her way into money to both support her newfound obsessions and to provide for her family. She has abused her powers more often than not—though understandable, seeing as how much of her life was dictated by forces outside her control.

Hero Type: Shape Shifter/Muscle

Power Level: World

Powers: Taylor possesses the ability to take on the embodiment of most any material she touches, if she concentrates on that material. Her ornate belt buckle can hold up to eight samples of any material she can fit in there, tucked into special pouches that keep the sample snug as well as in contact with the skin of her lower abdomen through special holes in the suit. This lets her have a consistent source of several materials she relies on in combat, such as a sample of metal, diamond or rubber. Her physically strongest form, made of augmentium—an alloy that is impossibly durable—gives her near-invulnerability, incredible strength and stamina, and an immunity to vacuums, suffocation and any ills that would normally affect those whose internal systems haven’t turned inorganic. In her diamond form, she is more brittle and significantly not as strong, but has increased finesse in combat as well as superior cutting ability with not only diamond fingernails but the occasional grown blade. While living flame, she will haphazardly blast everything around her with fire, with little care for both accuracy and bystanders. She can fly like a rocket, with great plumes of blinding flame trailing behind, but it is dangerous to do so, seeing as her powers are, at least in some small way, controlled by emotions: one moment of doubt, terror or rage could turn her supernova. Her rubber form is more agile than her diamond form, but lacks as much combative capability, instead allowing her to defend against ballistics or bounce from tall buildings onto shorter ones as a quick avenue of escape. 

Attributes: Due to the nature of her powers, here listed are the more common forms she may take with the materials she has available on her belt or in her environment. 

(Normal Form/Augmentium Form/Flame Form/Diamond Form/Rubber Form)

-	Strength Level: 500 Pounds/100 Tons/Cannot Lift/200 Pounds/1 Ton

-	Speed/Reaction Timing Level: Normal/Normal/Up to 700 MPH, Unstable at that point/20 MPH/10 MPH

-	Endurance at MAXIMUM Effort: 2 hours/5 hours/3 minutes/3 hours/4 hours

-	Agility: 2X/Normal/25X/10X/15X

-	Intelligence: Average (Though below average common sense, very poor emotional stability, and an incomplete education. Her idea of a battle tactic is “punch or throw it around until you win”. One advantage: she knows the streets and scumbags of Lost Haven like a graft on her brain.)

-	Fighting Skill: Trained (Greco-Roman wrestling techniques, especially.)

-	Resources: Minimal (Whatever she can scrounge and steal.)

Weaknesses: She can only maintain whatever form she takes while touching the embodied material directly, and moving away from it will make her lose her focus on it and return to normal after a few minutes or so. She also cannot shape her form without serious strain on her focus, such as growing diamond spikes or shaping her fist into a hammer. As such, more incorporeal forms such as water, flame or sand put so much violent strain on her concentration to keep herself from dissipating that she can only maintain them for a few minutes, though often less. Her weight is also affected by her forms. Dependent upon the material she is made up of at the time, she can range from being a few pounds to a handful of tons.  Any pieces of her broken off while non-human, unless she is in an incorporeal form that can reshape to a degree, immediately turn back to her own flesh and will be treated as a grievous injury or amputation when she returns to her normal form. Her fire form is messy: violent, volatile in every way. To avoid a meltdown that would very much result in her dissipation (and therefore death), she can only maintain such a form for a few explosive moments, after which she is fatigued and emotionally drained. She has never tried taking on the form of anything even more volatile, such as electricity or even radioactive materials, and is both awed by and secretly nervous of the possibilities.

Supporting Characters:

-	Nancy “Nan” Avina: The 40-something owner of the nightclub, The Tomb, Taylor and her gang meet up at. She knew Taylor through Andre, her son’s highschool buddy, and they’ve become friendly through the rough patches they both had to go through. She knows of Taylor’s powers and was the one who helped get together the design for her costume. She also gets a cut of whatever Taylor gains from her thievery and side jobs in exchange for paying for an extra apartment the gang stays in.

-	Andre Shea: Taylor’s closest friend for much of her life, about 4 years older than her. He has been missing for three years and has likely developed superpowers, like Taylor, as a result of the mysterious steroids he was abusing. Taylor would search for him, if she had any leads as to his whereabouts at all. A growing part of her has begun to loathe him for leaving without any notice, even if he might not have wanted to.

-	Christian Avina: Nan’s son. A friend of Andre’s, but largely unrelated to the gang. He and Taylor rarely get along, though they both share an affection for May. He works as a bartender for Nan’s nightclub.

-	Randy Paez: A member of Taylor’s posse since she was 10, and among her most devoted and impressionable. While he’s only 2 years younger than her (15), he tends to treat Taylor like a much more experienced, respectable source of authority than she actually is. He is often the driver in getaways for his sharp reflexes and quick thinking. 

-	May Rojas: A rare new addition to Taylor’s normally exclusive little family, though more honorary than anything. Nan, May’s aunt, adopted her after her mother was killed as a result of a Meta fight. She most often stays in Nan’s apartment or goes to school, being a six-year-old, but will on occasion go with Taylor on errands. She is the only member of the posse that neither knows of Taylor’s powers nor participates in illegal activities. While Taylor will not openly admit it, May is the only person whose safety Taylor constantly worries over.

-	Gene Hart: The seedy operator of the underground fighting ring Taylor was a part of. He is among the most well-connected men in the city, if he can be convinced to give up what he knows. Taylor still visits the ring from time to time, but he doesn’t let her fight much anymore because of the risk of her killing somebody, which could get them all caught.

-	The other members of Taylor’s posse: To be introduced as the story goes.

[hider=Sample Post]

This was it. Maverick’s time to [i]really, finally[/i] shine.

When Nan first waved the little leotard in Taylor’s face, rattling off on all the time and effort it took to sew it together without looking like “B-Grade 1950s crap”, she loved it. She still loved it: the colors, the sleekness, how much better it was than a pair of goggles and a hoodie. But—she reached down to fix her wedgie—something about it just felt off. She supposed she could go whining to Nan [i]after[/i] she became the most damn powerful Meta in Lost Haven history. [i]Maverick! The fearless, the beast, the best of all of you.[/i]

[color=firebrick] “Heheh. Alright, Randy, get lost.” [/color] She pat the hood of his car, stepping back as he nodded and sped off back towards the city. She raised her gaze to the amalgam of trees that bordered the lonely dirt road she and Randy had been trailing down. If her sources were right (AKA the egghead she beat the crap out of a few hours ago), she would be able to find the government facility where, apparently, they kept a sample of augmentium. What they wanted to use it for, she didn’t care. Who was really deserving of it more, the thief who worked hard to find and steal it or the huge government who would just keep it around to stare at and write in their diaries about? She wasn’t about to let [i]that[/i] slide. 

She wandered through the trees in her rubber form, just in case they’d set up any turrets or something, finally stumbling upon the footpath the scientist had assured was the right way to go. She sighed. Sure, she’d asked for a back entrance, but a little manhole in a sandpit under a bush? Not really a grand entrance. Maybe she [i]should[/i] have gone with that whole calling card idea Randy had suggested, at least to help get the word out once she’d stolen the metal. Maybe a red jockstrap or something. 

She snorted and tugged the manhole open, peering down the dark, echoing pipe that stretched into the earth. There was a ladder, but she ignored it and landed deftly on her feet about thirty feet down. The tunnel the manhole led to was quiet and dark, a few floor lights dimly flickering to illuminate the few lonely crates that lined the walls. Maybe she found an abandoned entrance. Maybe that stupid dork led her to some caved-in tunnel so she couldn’t get in! 

She growled and, seeing one end of the tunnel was a dead-end, went the other way, struggling through the dimness and finally coming across a door. A [i]big[/i] door. She experimentally tapped the metal it was made of and scratched an armpit thoughtfully, neither recognizing it nor thinking she would be able to shear off a piece as a keepsake. Her hunk of nickel wasn’t the best metal to use, but it wasn’t the worst by far. Turning into her metal form, she wound back a fist and gave the door a whopping, solid punch. It dented, and miniature torrents of rust burst from it and hurried to the floor. She struck again, and thrice, until finally on the fourth blow half the door flew off its hinges, bent back at a violent angle and shooting beams of blinding light into the tunnel. She groaned, shielding her eyes as the light caught her skin and sent it gleaming, and crawled through the door to a plain little storage room with a floor plan on the wall. Jackpot. 

In the few minutes it had taken Taylor to decipher the map, apparently all the security in the facility mustered in response to the silent alarm she’d evidently triggered when she punched down that door. She hardly even had time to pull off a cool pose when a huge squad of men came charging in, guns at the ready. She could hear a few grunt and growl at the sight of her. “Looks like a Meta.” 

[color=gray]“Hey, guys, I don’t think you wanna know what’ll happen when you try to shoot me. Put down the toys and lemme through before I kick your faces in!”[/color] She held up her fists threateningly, baring a set of glaring teeth. 

“We’re not letting you go anywhere. Lay down on the floor or we will open fire!” Some dude in a little hat—he looked like the lieutenant or commander or whatever—started barking out orders. Geez, how pathetic. Taylor almost felt sorry for all these normal people. How did she ever survive before she could turn herself into a big hunk of metal and throw cars around like empty cardboard boxes?

She rolled her eyes and began to walk toward the door the little soldier boys had come in through. [color=gray]“Look, you guys don’t make for good banter material and I’m bored enough after having to walk through your crappy abandoned hallway back there! I’m—“ [/color]

Well, they opened fire. And it was about as effective as Taylor thought. She danced away from the barrage, groaning and ripping a panel off the wall to use as a shield. The bullets didn’t hurt her too bad, but all the little dents in the nickel they left would definitely be annoying bruises later. [color=gray]“Ow! &*$%! That %&@#ing hurts [b]you asses! [i]Clearly the bullets aren’t working![/i][/b]”[/color]

Oh god, this wasn’t how she wanted to be remembered by these mooks. Using the wall panel as flimsy cover for her escape deeper into the facility, she cursed wildly and turned over her shoulder to chuck the sheet of metal at the approaching security men like a frisbee. The few who got hit toppled immediately, crying out when their kneecaps cracked at the sheer force of the debris thrown. The others had to reload, giving Taylor an opportunity to at least belt out a quick namedrop. [color=gray]“That’s what you get for %&@#ing with [b]Maverick![/b]” [/color]

She can already picture telling this to Randy and getting an earful for it. And Nan—Oh, [i]&*$%[/i]. She glanced down at her hole-riddled costume as she ran, and though her metal skin kept her from feeling the draft as much she could tell that the back was definitely in no better shape. This was a nightmare.

Taylor ran through the floor plan in her head, as well as the scientist’s words. She had to find Storage Room C, which was…down one of the many nondescript hallways, for sure. At least there were a few signs to point the way. She rounded a corner at a particular sign’s behest, and found herself staring down the barrels of yet another security team. They opened fire.

Taylor closed the gap with a leap that scrunched back the floor underneath her heels, winding back to tackle and lock in her arms one of the men. He screamed, and she grinned when one of his shoulders popped. The others stopped shooting when they saw him in her arms, and she chucked him into two others, both cracking the skulls against the metal wall adjacent. The other three began to fire again, retreating in the hall until their backs were brushing the door to Storage Room C. Seeing her continue to approach, one of them cried, “She’s after CM7! Don’t—“

He was cut off with by a hunk of the floor she chucked at his head in her charge, knocking him out instantly and making the others panic further. “Stop! Stop, we’ll—“ 

[color=gray]”Too late, %&@#ers.”[/color] She cracked her knuckles with a muted sound like metal wrenching, showing off a shimmering set of teeth. They dropped like a couple of mayflies. 

The door broke open in a few well-placed punches, and Zheng was almost disappointed at how awful their security had to be to make this as easy as it was. Maybe their greatest defense was how well-hidden it all was? Not that [i]that[/i] mattered, now. She peeled the remains of the thick door off its hinges, stepping into the dusk of the storage room and gleaming dully in the dim light. Sure enough, on a little pedestal, guarded by a glowing, yellow force field, was a plain little hunk of metal, maybe large enough to fit into the palm of her hand. 

Approaching, she could see no obvious wires that powered the field, and upon tapping the surface with a metal finger, it sparked threateningly. She realized with a sudden rush of boredom that it was probably supposed to be hurting right about now. Sure, she’d give the next person she came across the worst zap of static in their life, but a part of her had still hoped it would’ve been a bigger challenge to get the augmentium. She sighed and plucked the metal from the pedestal, staring intently as electricity arced across her skin in mesmerizing patterns, reflected against the smooth sheen, and died away like little snakes phasing into a mirror. She cranked the front plate of her belt buckle off, revealing the eight compartments hidden within. Three were filled: one with a cluster of diamonds ripped out of stolen rings, one with an innocuous sample of metal similar to the hunk she held in her hand, and the other containing a simple strip of rubber. 

She delicately tucked the augmentium away. It thrummed like a powerful engine against her skin, alive, promising endless floods of power. She replaced her belt buckle’s front plate, locking it into place with a decisive click. The nickel melted away, and in its place rose up a perfectly reflective visage: smoother than anything she’d ever seen, shining in the dull light like the most radiant star in the early-morning sky. The surface of her skin wavered between colors as she moved, and she admired the vibrant display with a quickening heart. 

[color=silver]”Oh, yeah. Now things are getting [b][i]fun.[/i][/b]”[/color][/hider]

Note: Taylor is a huge pottymouth, but I've censored the worst of it. Hope that's alright.[/s]