Antediluvixen

Cancelled

@Aphelion

It'll be fabulous.

As will the mook slaughtering.

Cancelled

Something tells me our Paladin won't like most of the other characters in our little motley crew.

And that those same characters won't like him right back.

This is going to be fabulous, darlings.

The Dust: Relaunch

@SirBeowulf

Sorry, human, my idea of a good place to live is The Divide.

(Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo I double posted damnit.)

The Dust: Relaunch

@Shotgun Bear

Just figured I'd mention that bullets are generally lead and copper and a magnet won't do anything to them.

Now, steel core ammunition...

The Dust: Relaunch

If this is telekinesis dude, why not just accelerate a rock towards the offending lock?

Why pick locks when you can remove the door?

The Dust: Relaunch

I made a creature thing.

Styx Owls

Name: Styx Owl
Species: Bubo virginianus infernus
Rarity: Common
Behavior: Hostile if provoked, Predator, Scavenger
Location(s): Dust's Mountains
Key Points: Almost exclusively nocturnal, territorial during the night, live in cave hollowed into the rock faces of Dust's mountains.

Appearance: The most immediately noticeable trait of the Styx owl is its massive talons, long, hard, and sharp enough to pierce steel. The birds are large, slightly larger than an Andean condor, with a wingspan of about four meters and a weight of nearly 20 kilograms. They bear a distant resemblance to the Great Horned Owl, but the feathered "horns" of the pre-apocalypse owl have given way to rigid and wickedly pointed barbs, albeit with feathery fringe. The birds are considerably darker and in fact almost pitch black, hence their name, and have retained the nearly silent flight of the Great Horned. Their eyes are generally a liquid gold color and are striped through with jets of black. Their calls are for the most part like those of the Great Horned, save for their attacking cry let loose when they are but moments from striking their target, which sounds uncannily like someone screaming in rage and despair- another inspiration for their name.

The Dust: Relaunch

@SirBeowulf

Just so long as you don't smoke cigarettes or hang out with bundles of sticks, god hates those for some reason.

The Dust: Relaunch

@SirBeowulf

Cazadors, Deathclaws, Wanamingos, Super Mutants, The Master, Fred Phelps.

The Dust: Relaunch

Basics

Name: Vladimira Kovalik

Age: 21

Apparent Age: Early 20s

Height: 1.65 meters (5’ 4”)

Weight: 77 kilograms (170 pounds)

Eye Color: A pulsing red, like molten steel, her eyes have whites but no visible pupils. They glow, and the pulsing is in sync with her own heartbeat, and speeds up or slows down to match it. The glow dims if she weakens.

Hair Color: Her hair looks as if it is made of ultra thin steel wires, though it behaves just like normal hair.

Physical Disabilities: A noticeable limp in her right leg- an old injury, broken leg that just didn't heal quite right.

Physical Identifiers:
Eyes and hair
A large burn covers her lower right abdomen and upper thigh.
Her arms are pockmarked with scars of varying sizes.

Appearance: Vladimira is no otherworldly beauty, but still looks more than simply half decent. Her steely hair is kept in a mid length ponytail, often tucked inside a shirt. Her face has something of a hardened edge to it, tempered by the heat of molten metal and welding arcs. Her eyes are striking with their pulsing red glow, as is her hair, gleaming in whatever light there is. Her features are Slavic, with relatively thin lips and surprisingly white teeth. She has full, high cheeks with smooth and almost unblemished skin.

Despite her modest height, she has a rather burly upper body for a woman, with defined muscles evident on her arms and shoulders. Her welding goggles, fused to a gas mask, never seem to leave her face, though the glow of her eyes can be seen if one gets close enough and she doesn’t have the filters at their fullest.

Were she to remove her armor and mask, there is little that's particularly triking about her appearance. Arms and upper body pockmarked with scars, burns, and ample muscle. A large bust (think ~38DD/38DDD Approximate bust size. Image contains boobs.) doesn't hurt her looks. Her hips defined more by the degree of muscle packed around them from carrying heavy loads than by any curve.

Background

Residence: No permanent one at the moment, is traveling (albeit not directly) to Wolfwater.

Profession: Formerly a metalworker/welder/mechanic/gunsmith, now essentially a traveling heavily armed scavenger and mechanic, with a hidden depth of knowledge regarding firearms.

Aligned Faction: Neutral.

Relatives:
Andronikov Kovalik- (Father, Alive, Accepting of his daughter’s powers)
Galina Kovalik- (Mother, Deceased)
Andrei Kovalik- (Brother, The bastard’s alive!

Backstory:

Vladimira Kovalik’s parents met each other in the sweltering heat of a manufactory, covered in protective leather that did nothing to shield them from the heat. Odd that two people could almost instinctively tell they liked each other while swapping jokes over grinding wheels and bandsaws.

After two years, they’d moved into their own welded together house and continued to turn scrap metal into something valuable, only now they always worked together.

Vladimira Kovalik was born roughly three years later, two years after her brother. Raised in the industrial town of Arclight, she took to metalworking like a duck to water as soon as she could walk, surprising both of her parents with her raw enthusiasm for the work, as well as the mechanical genius she seemed to have. She would stay up late at night, tinkering away at whatever her latest project was, be it an expanded magazine for some wandering scavenger’s rifle or a turbocharger fan. She loved to use her hands, refining parts to turn an old beat up scrap rifle into a borderline work of art, or operating ammunition presses, or welding a piece of steel to another piece of steel.

Her brother however, was just the opposite. He had no desire to stay indoors making guns and ammunition, he preferred to simply wander around, exchanging idle conversation with anyone and everyone. Whereas his sister’s obsession with machines limited her human contact to almost zero, only sometimes speaking with her family while eating, Andrei lived for meeting new people and longed to leave Arclight and do… anything.

Which is what he did.

One morning, only a week after her eighteenth birthday, Vladimira was woken to a strange sound… it was almost as if her mother was crying, and her father trying to comfort her.

It had been apparent to her that something was very wrong, and -her leg freshly broken due to her own foolishness with one of her hammers- she hobbled towards the direction of their voices to find a piece of ragged paper on a table, as well as her parents.

She had tentatively walked to the table and read the paper. The note was short and succinct, briefly covering his boredom with Arclight and desire to see the world. She’d put the note down then, and gone to inspect the small room he had called his own. It seemed as though all he’d taken had been some clothing, food, and water.

While his departure had little to no effect on her, she’d probably spoken fewer than a hundred words to him in her whole life, it shook her parents badly, especially her mother.

While Vladimira continued on like normal, perhaps a stray thought entering her mind now and then about how Andrei was doing, wherever he was, and her father seemed agitated whenever someone mentioned Andrei’s name to him, and he seemed to blame himself for not noticing his son’s wanderlust, her mother was the one truly hit hard.

Galina Kovalik would constantly fret about her son’s condition, it drove her to distraction, such that her attention would constantly drift away from what she was doing. For two years she lived like that.

One day, while working an ordnairy shift in the factories, Galina’s attention lapsed once more as she operated a ladle handling steel to be dumped in a crucible. Her husband and daughter were elsewhere, but they both heard the explosion, as well as everybody else in the factory. Sprinting as fast they could, they found five burned bodies thrown like ragdolls against various machinery covered in cooling steel, among them Galina, only indentifiable by the necklace clutched in an unburned hand.

Her father was devastated, becoming almost a shell of his former self, only seeming human around the only family he had left; and while her brother’s departure hadn’t affected Vladimira too much, her mother’s death did. She was continuously haunted at night by images of burned flesh and a hand clutching a necklace. She’d been withdrawn before, but afterwards she would spend entire days cooped up in a workshop working ferverishly on various things to keep her mind occupied. Her minimal human contact dropped even further, and enthusiasm for her work petered off too. If she stayed in the workshop she could pretend it hadn't happened. Close the door on reality, even if just for a little while.

Vladimira also couldn’t help but think on how close she’d come to death herself that day. She’d come down with a bad cold, or something like it, and had left the area around the crucible that would explode not soon after to clear her mask, as it had been dangerously fogging up and a small part of the visor was even covered in mucus. A simple cold was responsible for her not becoming a sixth body, but she’d also been there keeping her mother’s mind focused and helping her operate the machinery. The same cold might’ve also been responsible. She knew her mother’s mind had wandered, Galina would always hold the little necklace in her hands and pray for her son when her mind wandered…

It shook her to the core to think her mother might be dead because she had left to clean her visor. She felt like everybody she saw, not that she saw many people, were all silently judging her, accusing her of being responsible for the explosion, especially the families of the other dead.

A few days after her cold seemed to peak and then retreat she lay in her bed in the pitch darkness, hands idly fumbling with some wires to keep her mind occupied- but for some reason it wasn’t, not completely. A pulsing red glow illuminated a small area in front of her eyes, much to her confusion.

She’d sat up, looking for the source of the light, but didn’t see any. Laying back down, the glow returned, right in front of her eyes, almost like they themselves were glowing.

She’d bolted upright then, staring at her hands as she brought them to her eyes and brought them away again.

Stumbling from the bed she’d grabbed the only mirror they owned, more of a shard of an old one, but it still worked. Her eyes, those were the first things she noticed. They looked like small discs of red hot metal, almost glowing white in the center, the whites were still there, but her pupils and irises were gone, replaced by… And her hair, she didn’t recall her hair looking like fine steel wires.

She didn’t know what to do, a single word had drifted across her mind, Immortal…

She was an Immortal. That cold hadn’t been a cold.

She dropped the mirror, stumbling back as it landed on an old shirt. She fell into a sitting position on her bed. I can’t stay here. She realized, They’ll do… something, I don’t know what and I don’t want to know.
__________

She’d woken up the next morning to her father sitting across from her, conflicted emotions on his face.

“I know.” He said simply, holding up the shattered fragments of mirror and tapping his eyes, though he’d still looked slightly stunned when she opened hers to look at him.

She’d felt paralyzed with fear as he sat there for what seemed like an eternity, but was closer to fifteen seconds. Then he’d stood up, and walked out of the room, returning with an old military rucksack filled with what looked like food, water, and other essentials…

“You’re going to need these. They won’t let you stay here.” He’d managed to choke out to her, pulling out the rifle she’d tweaked over the years into a finely tuned piece of rugged art, and affectionately dubbed “Comrade”, from behind the chair, along with the two old pistols he’d inherited and kept around, hoping to never use them. Vladimira had worked on those too, giving them new barrels to replace the old and worn ones.

That didn’t change the fact that she was being handed a backpack and weapons and told she needed to leave.

She’d taken the weapons and backpack without further eye contact, wanting to just leave and get it over with.

“I love you, you know that right?” Her father’s words had caught her and she’d looked back for the last time, dropping the bag and weapons and rushing back to hug him tightly. Just as quickly, she’d run for the door, scooping up the rucksack and weapons and running from the house.
__________________________________

Four months later…

She was living in a small hole she’d carved into the desert ground and covered with a metal sheet she’d forced into the proper shape -fitting that she could manipulate iron and steel, having spent her life working with tjhem- and sand, all of it concealed by a cluster of boulders. She’d acquired a gas mask somewhere along the way and had made the decision to melt her welding goggles to it, which kept the sun out of her eyes and the harsh winds and sand from her face and lungs. The cloak had been taken off the corpse of a bandit who looked to have acquired it from a scavenger or traveler.

Still haunted by nightmares of burned flesh, often with herself taking her mothers place, screaming as the molten steel splashed onto her. Still haboring guilt. Whenever she spoke with people her mind would conjure images of what they might look like dead, bleeding out on the ground, burned beyond recognition, filled with bullet holes… she’d almost gone beyond caring at that point, her heart hardening further as she sank into an apathetic slump.

She wasn’t comfortable, or content, but she was surviving, and that was something. She sold her skills as a mechanic, and sold what she scavenged too, managing to subsist on the relatively meager income, but she wanted more, there was always room for more of the ammunitition used as currency in her pockets.

Gear

Weapons:
“Comrade”: An old Mosin-Nagant 91/30, has twenty one notches on the stock, presumably from the Russian soldier who last had the rifle, has a folding bayonet and a carry strap.

Comrade

Two TT-33 Tokarev pistols: More old Russian weapons, Vladimira carries them in two paddle holsters strapped to her thighs and is somewhat capable of using them simultaneously, though she generally will simply pull out Comrade if she actually needs to shoot somebody at any range.

TT-33 Tokarev with holser and ammunition

“Thunder (From the East)”: A PTRS-41, somehow survived the apocalypse, she has no idea how, but she’s never gonna give it up, never gonna let it down (never gonna run around and desert it…)

Thunder (From the East)

Armor:

Vladimira had a pair of welding goggles fused with a gas mask fitted with particulate filters to keep out the dust of… Dust… she’s currently searching for a replacement. She wears a ragged hooded light grey cloak with baggy, overly long sleeves sewn on the inside to shield the arms from sunlight, blocking out the sun from her body and effectively concealing what she has underneath it. Concealed under the cloak is a smallish headlamp, capable of providing enough light to see by at night. She wears urban camoflauge cargo pants with an obscene number of pockets filled with various pieces of scrap metal and other random junk. Her shirt is rather unremarkable gray linen. She has two plates of steel secured firmly on her front and back, able to stop shots from most firearms up to and including medium power rifle cartridges, something like a 30-06 AP round would easily punch straiht through. Four similar but smaller plates protect her elbows and knees, all plates have impromptu cloth padding underneath them for comfort and to soften the impact of a bullet or anything else. She wears thick metal plated gloves of her own making, and has a pair of tank like combat boots that reach to about her knees, also plated with metal.

Ammunition:

Dirty Rounds: The remnants of several spam cans full of old Soviet milsurp ammunition.
~250 rounds of steel cased 7.62x54R ammunition on five round stripper clips.
~200 rounds of 7.62x25mm Tokarev mostly kept in the same small bags they came in, and not easily accessible, 32 of them are loaded into the eight round magazines for the Tokarevs.
~20 rounds of 14.5x114mm ammunition salvaged with the rifle, kept loose and loaded into the weapon’s magazine as needed.

High Grade Rounds: N/A
Heavy Ammunition: N/A

Backpack A:
An old military rucksack, khaki colored:
Items Within: A basic first aid kit; a spare shirt and pair of pants; extra water; some spare scrap metal for emergencies; food; spare batteries; small blowtorch; water purification tablets; a small wad of plastic bags for… something, she has no idea why she keeps them around; small tent for shelter from the sun folded up and tied to the bottom, a sleeping bag is tied to the top.
Miscellaneous: A rope tied at her belt; bandolier of pouches containing the ammunition loaded onto clips or magazines; a two liter canteen sits on a strap around her shoulder; a compass in a small pouch on her belt, in other pouches on the belt are more small pieces of scrap metal for various uses.

Immortalis Information

Manifested Phenomena: Ferrous Metals (anything with a significant amount of iron, so iron and steel).

Unique Abilities:
Artisan Engineer: Like clay, but shinier and a hell of a lot tougher. Vladimira molds the steel she controls almost as easily as a sculptor working clay into the desired shape. She can mold the steel she controls into almost any shape imaginable, mainly limited by her imagination and the material itself.

Strengths:
Intelligence: Vladimira is smart. She may not have a rigorous higher education in mechanical engineering, but she can reverse engineer the internal workings of a diesel engine with little to no prior knowledge and figure out how to repair it to at least working order.
RUSSIA STRONK: Spend as long as she has lugging about welding equipment and hammering things and one builds up some muscle. She has prodigious physical strength and can carry heavy loads without too much difficulty, as well as having a brutal punch.

Weaknesses:
Mighty Glacier: Vladimira is relatively slow and not exactly agile, and while able make a short few meters sprint in decent time, is not able to attain any real speed, even when unarmored.
Do you feel lucky, punk?: Despite her intellect (and common sense) telling her such things are ill advised, she’s likely to charge into a situation in the spur of the moment, and has no issue with extreme violence to get what she wants.
Ya’ gotta make do with what ya’ got: Vladimira can only manipulate metal in her environment, she cannot produce it herself.
Dark and Troubled (recent) Past: The nature of her mother’s death and its effect on her father has had a profound effect on her as well, in addition to nightmares about being covered in molten steel that she has no control over, certain things will overwhelm her with paranoia/fear/anger/or any mixture thereof.

The Dust: Relaunch

@Aeonumbra

Only half mad?