[quote=@Amethyst]
[hider=Canary][center][img] https://i.imgur.com/dgPAO6h.png[/img]
[sub][color=ffd147]Luca Zorione Perez || “Canary” || Genderfluid || Nineteen (07/22) || A Class Villain || Color Code ffd147[/color][/sub][/center]
[b][color=ffd147]Aliases:[/color][/b] In their daily life, they go by Luca or Zorri interchangeably, to go with their fluid self-image. They have three known legal aliases, for which fake documents can be produced at any time - one Lucas Santana, one Zara Sutton, and one Peter Kingsley.

[b][color=ffd147]Physique:[/color][/b] A slim, androgynous figure standing five feet nine inches tall, Zorri dresses primarily in oversized hoodies and slim-fit jeans, their well-worn belt adorned by a variety of charms and trinkets. She always wears a mask covering her angular nose and thin lips; the mask is always pristine, made out of white cotton and probably lined with a filter of some sort. Her medium brown hair is choppy and slightly overgrown, falling in a piecey bob that covers her ears and skims the back of her neck. Notably, her eyes are a warm amber shade that brightens to a glowing gold when she uses her powers. 

Her skin is a fair, light olive tone somewhat leaning towards yellow undertones; whenever she’s using her power it glimmers faintly gold, and when using her battery ability her whole body radiates an orangey-gold glow. 

On the right side of her chest, centered just below her collarbone but radiating up over the top and outside of her shoulder, there’s a large scar of about a hand’s span, raised, red, and vaguely, irregularly star-shaped.

[b][color=ffd147]Blood Type:[/color][/b] B+

[b][color=ffd147]Occupation:[/color][/b] half-time villain, half-time philanthropist, and part-time online college student, studying chemistry.

[b][color=ffd147]Affiliation:[/color][/b] The Dogpack

[b][color=ffd147]Personality:[/color][/b] Luca is a ready performer of their most idealized self, vivacious and flirty when surrounded by those they trust, and earnest and optimistic to those who they don’t. Those who don’t know them imagine them to be a great kid, straight-A honor roll sort of thing. They’re fond of games of deceit and subterfuge, though they’re decidedly bad at them; its all they can do to keep their petty crime ring a few steps in front of the law. Though that’s mostly because of their underlings…

Beyond this, though, they’re fiercely loyal to the gang that raised them, having a close-knit, sibling-like camaraderie among the handful of them that roam Castleburg’s streets. Luca is in a place of being undermined as their leader, however; back in Las Palmas they were somewhat of an underdog, about the fifth or sixth in command up until the split. Their friends view them as a somewhat fragile younger sibling to be protected. As a result of trying to prove themselves, Luca is prone to overcompensating and lashing out with a cruelty (and often a brashness bordering on stupidity) that is very unlike who they aspire to be. They try to stand by a platform of “no bystander casualties”, though as their work becomes more dangerous (and lucrative) it’s harder and harder to make sure that happens.

They’re fiercely protective of those they see as less-fortunate and incredibly bitter towards those in power, especially those they perceive as not doing enough to support those who are even worse-off. 

They prefer to style themself as a “roguish freelancer”, not as a villain. 

[b][color=ffd147]Backstory:[/color][/b] The Dogpack of Las Palmas has been Zorri’s family since before she can remember. She cut her eyeteeth on petty pickpocketing in the heart of the city’s rich tourist districts, begging and scrapping for food and places to sleep on the streets. As she grew, she watched the city changing before her eyes.

Her family – and it was a family, even if people who didn’t understand called it a gang – grew in size and in influence, and turned from mere survival to …thriving, in a sense. They grew plants and brewed moonshine and cooked harder drugs, or at least, the older kids did, and scrounged up money for rent in an apartment that was far too nice for the likes of them.

As she grew up, she began to be trusted with more responsibility. Some of the older members left, off to pursue their own doings – some of them went off to jail, and came back different, or didn’t come back at all, and so the power kept shifting, the gang fairly-reliably remaining under 30 years old and around 30 members. Even the constant fleeing from the law was no match for the unity and safety in family the group always found.

The city was changing, though. Fewer and fewer tourists came as packs of cerberkins and similar, canine-adjacent Leftovers, as well as feral dog packs, began to descend on the city. IBERIA tried their best, but the feeble hero organization proved no match for the ever-growing packs of dogs and doglike beasts. All at once, people remembered that the Canary Islands were not, in fact, named after the pretty little songbirds, but rather named for the dogs. 

The Dogpack had always remembered, having started from the same scrounging of scraps and begging at rich venues that so many of the canines did, and for a while there was a sort of wary, mutual respect between the ragged teens and ragged creatures. But as the years went on that peace eroded; soon it was a struggle, again, to survive. Without the income from tourists, the beginnings of poverty set in, and crime spiked. New competition, often from superpowered groups, began to erode their territory.

By this point in time, several of the Dogs had developed powers, Zorri among them, but they didn’t have the same sheer destructive skill that the other gangs had, and they quickly lost ground. 

Things came to a head when Zorri was sixteen; several of the younger members of the group were mauled by a cerberkin while out on patrol. She was able to stabilize the most severely injured of them, but the damage to the group’s morale was done. They stopped patrolling altogether. Several of the longtime members left, as did many newcomers; they sought more security, more power, and less dog attacks.
Zorri begged the others to consider leaving, but they would not hear her. Eventually, she could take it no more, and she gathered up the few allies she had; they bought fake passports and eventually made their way the [i]hell[/i] out of Las Palmas. Their destination? Castleburg. A huge city of all sorts of people, a sprawling underground, and minimal MWE encounters…

As soon as they arrived in Castleburg, they realized two things. First of all, Zorri’s asthma, which had been manageable in the much smaller city of Las Palmas, was entirely uncontrollable here. The teen very nearly died from the thick air of city life; it’s rumored that their mask has some sort of specialized filter in it that is the only thing that enables them to continue living and working in the inner city. Second of all, Castleburg was not much better off in regard to heroes, or really any law enforcement, keeping the peace. There was the same hierarchy of gangs and families in the underworld here, too, and more of the damage to the city seemed to be done by heroes than by villains.

Now much smaller in numbers, and in a much bigger place, the remnants of the Dogpack struggled to carve out a niche for themselves. And having nearly died, Zorri struggled to re-earn the respect of what was left of her family. She sought to be the same kind of parent as Javier (the head of the pack when she first joined up) was, but found the youth of Castleburg unwilling to fall in with a group with no real territory or industry to speak of.

It’s been three years of slow, hard work, but it’s paid off. They fell in with the same drugs-and-petty-crime niche they had before; some of the Pack talk about going bigger and really making a name for themselves, but Zorri isn’t so sure. She doesn’t wish to be a [i]villain[/i], even though her gang – which is now getting involved, once again, into hard drugs, grand larceny, rumors of prostitution and (if they take up the lead they’ve recently sniffed out) illegal monster-fighting rings – seem to have that idea. They’ve begun attributing their collective works of mischief and illegality to Zorri’s name; in the public eye they’ve become The Canary’s Dogpack. It’s become an order of theatrics; yellow feathers, or failing that, yellow flowers, left at the scene of the crime in their getaway.

She doesn’t know what to do with them, but they’re bloody successful. An impressive dossier of grand larceny follows them, thousands stolen from the residences of affluent people all across the city. Less-well-documented drug charges follow them as well, and a few counts of possible homicide – Zorri is [i]pissed[/i] about those. She’s expelled gang members for reckless endangerment and for homicide before; murder is fine, if it’s someone who needs murdering (and she can think of a few bloated businessmen that she’ll [i]jump[/i] at the chance to take a laser to) but the innocent bystander is blameless, in all of this. 

They’re supposed to be more on the side of Robin Hoods, not Hannibals. Jeez.
[hider=The Canary’s Dogpack]
A gang of about eight core, full-time members, and about a dozen more who flit in and out for various purposes. They’re all teens and twenty-somethings, currently renting a home in Watervale that’s much too nice for their likes.
 
Their current base of operations is a seedy club in Brookside, where most of their growing and science happen in the basement, while the upstairs is a bar and club that caters to the not-yet-legal-to-drink-in-regular-places crowd. The place has several escape systems in place and Luca is on guard themself every night they’re open, ready to net the whole thing in an illusion if law enforcement comes knocking. There’s (forged, but well-forged) paperwork at the ready if they’re asked about a liquor license and so on, and similarly forged health inspection certificates. They do a hopping business; the gang almost doesn’t have to do crime to stay afloat. 

As a group they’re known both for their crime and for their frequent donations to soup kitchens and community schools; as long as no one questions where the money is from, money is money, right? It’s theorized that once the gang members are looked after, Luca donates most or all of their surplus to those in need. Hoods, not Hannibals. 

In addition to Luca, three of the others have powers, and as a result are kind of the “face” of the gang. Their information is briefly detailed below.

Elias “L” Ferreira, aka “Torero”: He’s about 22, big and brawny and kind of stupid, being brutally honest. Probably a B- tier by now, his abilities are superhuman strength and reflexes. He’s trained since before he could walk with a handgun. At the moment he serves as Luca’s muscle and brawn; incidentally, their right-hand person who’s been with them since the early days in Las Palmas.

Aya Martinez, aka “Flamenco”: 21, tiny, clever, and very pretty, she’s [i]incredibly[/i] popular as an entertainer at the club. A C- tier, her ability is limited clairvoyance about the history of an object, based on touch. Useful in a variety of niche circumstances. Beyond that, she’s the closest thing Luca has to a friend and advisor. She has a great head on her shoulders but 

Nicolas “Nico” Valverde, aka “Conquistador”: 19, handsome in a roguish, kind of scrawny way. He’s probably a B- in power level; he’s gifted with super speed and “Blur” as he calls it, which creates a brief illusion of him still in the place he started from – it gives him the appearance of teleportation, even though he doesn’t [i]actually[/i] teleport. He’s been using blades and informally training a variety of martial arts since he was a child; he prefers blades to firearms, finding them a far more intimate way to kill. Probably the most terrifying and amoral of all the OG Packmates.[/hider]
[b][color=ffd147]Power:[/color][/b] An incredibly powerful variant on photokinesis, Luca’s power was named “Luc’s Luster” and then eventually shortened to “Lucluster” (A play on “lackluster”) by an affectionate gangmate. It’s far from lackluster, however…

[hider=Lucluster]While on the surface it’s simple light manipulation, which enables widespread visual illusioning by simply bending light rays around objects he wishes to hide or alteration of the rays reflecting off of an object, Luca’s abilities go far beyond these usages of petty illusion. He is very good at this level of power manipulation, however; he could illusion the width of a city street and length of a city block with reasonable focus, and maintain it for several hours as long as he didn’t need to change the scene much. Animated scenes obviously take more energy than stagnant ones. He finds this use to be very boring, but it does have its advantages.

More offensively, he is capable of reflecting and refocusing light from most parts of his body. A common use of this is gathering light with one hand and using the other to lens it into a thin, highly-focused beam. At the moment, this is dependent on willpower and focus and currently renders a thumbtack-sized beam, but he can use external lensing (he always carries a variety of conical and domed pyrex and other high-temperature-glass, stolen from other [i]totally legitimate[/i] applications, for specifically this purpose) to focus this light further down to about the size of a pin’s pointy end. The effects of these beams are dependent on the light he has accessible; with full-spectrum light like sunlight, he can dip into the effects of infrared or ultraviolet lasers, for example. His max power output is similarly dependent on his light source, though his maximum limit is established by his body’s conductance as well; he can’t very well divert the entire energy of the sun. He can divert streetlights and similar constructions entirely, but has no tangible effect on the sun even when pulling as much power as he can. Sunlight can be focused to melt or at least soften steel; with a few hours of direct sunlight, planning, and focus, he could bring a building down with strategically placed weak points. Not that he [i]would[/i], but he could. These lasers are highly effective at rendering electronics ineffective; they can melt indiscriminately through plastic and softer metals, and with a bit of time to sit can melt glass and even steel. When focused down as thin as possible, they have a blasting effect and can etch or, given enough time, bore through non-flammable or meltable materials.

He can store the energy from light sources in his body, rather like a battery; in direct sunlight he can charge his “battery” to full in fifteen minutes if he focuses on it, but it’s exponentially longer time from artificial light or if his attention wanders – a bright streetlight might charge him in two hours of constant absorption, a lamp in a house four, a nightlight might take a whole day. As he’s charging his eyes begin to glow, then his skin, and finally (and most visually conspicuously) large, ray-like wings of light, spanning several meters, fan out from his shoulder blades. These wings are entirely intangible; people can walk through them with no ill effect save a warm or slightly tingling feeling. He has to be focusing in some capacity for his battery to charge with any efficiency at all, though he does passively charge a very small amount as he spends time in the sun.

As an interesting side effect to all of this, he doesn’t get sunburned, even though he’s fairly pale.

From this battery, he has a few powerful effects he can manifest, a testament to the diversity of his power. The first is a powerful, short-burst regenerative effect. It’s easiest to do on others if he’s in physical contact with them, but he can also do it on himself, though he lacks the focus to do it neatly. The stored energy, applied to damaged tissue, can forcibly regenerate it in a rather short time. It has been used to heal wounds that would have been shortly fatal (notably a chest gunshot that barely missed the heart but punctured lungs) though it would not be something successful on brain or neurological injuries. It also takes incredible precision to use neatly – it’s easy to cause disfiguring scarring. The scar on his chest is a result of this. Its important to note that this does not debride the wounds as it heals – Luca still has lead rattling around in his ribcage.

The second effect he can manifest is a sort of barely controlled hyper-agility, including short bursts of flight. By channeling the energy into his muscles and bones, he can override his body’s psychological limitations and hit harder, run faster, and jump higher than a normal human, though not beyond the physical capabilities of his musculature. He doesn’t have increased resilience to match; it’s not uncommon for him to have stress-related injuries as a result of using these abilities. Related, though distinct, is the use of the stored energy to lift his body several meters into the air; he can hover for a short time or propel himself through the sky in traditional superhero style flight,  though at the moment it takes about five minutes to deplete his energy from full. It’s important to note that he hasn’t learned how to [i]land[/i] yet if he completely depletes his power.

Third, and most destructively, he is capable of emitting stored light from his hands into beams resembling his usual spectrum of lasers, even without a light source to divert, though these stores are quickly depleted.[/hider]

[b][color=ffd147]Other Notes:[/color][/b] They’re genderfluid and often refer to themself with different pronouns and terminology on different days, as is reflected in the sheet, even if they don’t really change their appearance.

They have terrible asthma and probably another respiratory condition that they've never had diagnosed. It’s rumored that their mask has some sort of specialized filter in it that is the only thing that enables them to continue living and working in the inner city.[/hider]
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this is gonna be so fucking confusing but i love them