Cyrania

Golden Age

I'll bite! It's been about ten years since I wrote in a group, but I've been wanting to get back into it (and punching Nazi's is always a good time.)

If this character concept completely missed the mark, lemme know and I'll go back to the drawing board based on your suggestions or what you feel the cast needs!

Where she might be at the story's beginning: The Wake comes ashore at Norfolk. The "accidents" stalling the naval construction have been killing workers, and she can hear that they weren't accidents (the dead down there are loud about it.) She's not there to guard the guns; she's there to find the saboteur the military can't. Glad to have her cross paths with whoever's holding that sector!

Hider

Archetype(s) - Fantomah (the powers); the Spectre, the Shadow, and every spook-show medium who ever faked it til they made it
Name - Marguerite "Margo" Devereaux
Alias - The Wake
Age - 31

Powers/Skills/Equipment

• Phantom Form - Margo sheds her body's warmth and rises out of herself as a slow, blue-pale wraith: hair gone white, eyes empty, bottomless black sockets, the face hollowing toward a skull. Everything below only works in this shape. Out of it she's an ordinary woman.
• Drift & Fade - she floats rather than flies, silent and unhurried, and can thin to mist to slip through a wall or half-vanish in shadow.
• The Pull - telekinesis at parlor-and-alley scale: wrench a pistol from a hand, throw a grown man across a room, slam every door in a hall, snuff a streetlamp.
• The Showing - her real weapon. She floods the guilty with what they've done, crowds the dark with the faces of the people they hurt, and plays their worst night back until they break, confess, or run. Terror and small illusions; she leaves them breathing.
• The Cold Ear - she's drawn to fresh, unjust death. Near a body or the place of a killing she can catch the last frightened minutes still hanging in the air. Good for finding who did it.

Weaknesses

• No phantom form, no powers. Human Margo bleeds and bruises and stops a bullet like anyone else.
• The form has a hunger to it. Each time she goes deeper, a little more color and warmth stays behind. She's afraid one night she won't come all the way back.
• The Showing needs a conscience to bite into. The remorseless, the fanatic, the broken-minded barely feel it.
• A line of salt or a closed circle pens the Wake and holds her where she stands — but only the Wake. In her own skin, Margo steps over it like anyone.
• In phantom form she runs cold. Frost rimes the glass and your breath fogs before you ever see her. It gives her away.
• Cats hate her.

Personality - Theatrical, tender, implacable, lonely, wry.

Experience - About two years as the Wake, since the winter of '36. Longer than that working crowds for a living, which is its own kind of training.

Appearance - Tall, dark-haired, and pale, with a signature red lip that will later be known as "Victory Red." She's traded the fortune-teller's spangles for severe widow-black: a fitted coat, leather gloves she keeps on, dark hair pinned close, a small pistol she doesn't advertise. She has the look of a woman who reads the obituaries first.

Bio - Margo worked the Atlantic boardwalk as "Madame Devereaux," selling séances and cold readings to the grieving for a dollar a sitting. All of it fake, and she was damn good at it. One winter night a customer's husband decided she'd heard too much about his affairs and held her under the cold salt off the end of the pier until she stopped moving.

She doesn't talk about what met her down there. Only that it offered her a way back up.

Now she comes up out of herself as the Wake, and the dead the law writes off have a way of reaching her. She's drifted the coast toward the navy towns, because lately that's where the bodies have been turning up.

Potential Storylines

• The Man in the Mask - a real skull hunting a fake one. She takes it personally that a butcher chose her iconography. The catch: the Showing slides right off a man who feels nothing, which makes the Laughing Skull the toughest brute she's faced.
• What the Nazis Dug Up - the Reich's occult men ship stranger things than ore home from their expeditions, and something in a crate on the docks answers her when it shouldn't.
• The Price Comes Due - she agreed to leave a piece of herself behind each time she rises. Someday there won't be much left to come back to, and something is keeping the account.
• Rebranding - the Wake is gaining popularity and scaring schoolchildren. She needs help from her fellow heroes to make her hero image more palatable to the general public.

Additional Notes - She doesn't kill on purpose. She'd rather a guilty man live out his years unable to close his eyes in the dark. Tonally she's the horror story standing in a punch-em-up book. I'm seeing her as the one the other heroes are maybe a little nervous to stand next to.

@Antlers

We were decrying that we didn't have a woman yet.

She's quite the fascinating character.

Golden Age

Elastic Man

Archetype(s) - Martian Manhunter, Plastic Man
Name - J'amez J'amezon /Detective James Jameson (when in human form)
Alias - The Manhunter (on Mars)/Elastic Man
Age - 33
Powers/Skills/Equipment - Telepathy, Telekinesis (allowing him to fly for short periods), and Shapeshifting (this allows him to stretch out and absorb damage like he's made of plastic, to appear invisible at times, and to phase through objects). He's also a police detective, so he has a gun and some detective skills, along with some acting prowess and knows some forensics techniques.

Weaknesses - Fire (Both in the pyrophobia sense and in the sense that fire messes with his psychic-based powers and causes them to go haywire, leading him to seem like he's melting like plastic). Also, while he has superhuman strength, speed, and reflexes by Martian standards, he's only human average on Earth due to the difference in gravity and atmosphere

Personality - Compassionate, Haunted, Curious, Methodical, Persistent
Experience - 5 Martian Years/10 Earth Years as the Manhunter, 1 Martian Year/2 Earth Years as Elastic Man
Appearance - His Martian form: Fairly typical green skin with pupilless red eyes in a humanoid form; His back was branded with the mark of the Martian World Government which is usually hidden underneath the blue and red straps and trunks and blue cape that was his 'uniform'. As he was forced to wear that uniform for some time, he sometimes slips into it out of force of habit, but he is seeking to fight that habit.

His main human guise: A 6 ft square jawed, blonde haired Caucasian male with square shoulders. Usually wears a collared shirt, formal slacks, a trench coat, and a fedora like a film noir detective.

His Elastic Man guise: Black haired, slim jawed, slight figured guy with a red top like the Golden Age Plastic Man's with a white undershirt under neath and red pants with a yellow belt, black boots, and a pair of sunglasses.

BRIEF Bio -J'amez was a Maritain Forensic Scientist who suddenly found himself with abilities beyond a normal Martian. The Martian World Government, a Soviet-esque dictatorship, at first sought to persuade him to become their puppet superhero. But when he sought to refuse, they burned his home and family (wife, son, & daughter) to make it seem like he died then placed him under J'ac'b J'amezon /Dr. Iron Will's, his twin brother's, "care" in order to make him into the Martian Manhunter. His will was broken, but then was able to escape due to Dr. Erdel's teleportation experiment and so now tries to keep a low profile as an ordinary human police detective so as to not end up the pawn of Mars or of anyone else ever again. However, when people are in danger around him, J'amez can't help but act. So he ended up becoming Elastic Man on Earth, focusing on his shapeshifting as his primary crime-fighting weapon in such a way as to seem like he's only a very rubbery man. As he's become more attached to his new home though, he can't help but want to protect it as much as he can. So he's taken to seek to take care of any spies and those that seek to attack the coast.

Potential Storylines - Mars attempting to silently infiltrate America and take advantage of the WW2 chaos and so discovering that J'amez is still alive, Refugees from Mars trying to get away from their government, J'amez hiding that he's an alien, Nazi Scientists wanting to capture him to figure out how his powers work and how to make more of him for their army

Additional Notes - Playing around with how in the Golden Age, Martian Manhunter had been a scientist before coming to Earth and of course, Mars still had a very alive population originally and was always supposed to be a 'perfect' place with no crime. I'm also playing with the fact that Mars does have a lower gravity so J'amez would need to be super-strong on some level in order to better blend in with other humans and to function as a superhero.

Golden Age

@Cyrania Needs to be in the character tab!!

@Omega Man

Juat making sure I could!

Golden Age

Elastic Man

Archetype(s) - Martian Manhunter, Plastic Man
Name - J'amez J'amezon /Detective James Jameson (when in human form)
Alias - The Manhunter (on Mars)/Elastic Man
Age - 33
Powers/Skills/Equipment - Telepathy, Telekinesis (allowing him to fly for short periods), and Shapeshifting (this allows him to stretch out and absorb damage like he's made of plastic, to appear invisible at times, and to phase through objects). He's also a police detective, so he has a gun and some detective skills, along with some acting prowess and knows some forensics techniques.

Weaknesses - Fire (Both in the pyrophobia sense and in the sense that fire messes with his psychic-based powers and causes them to go haywire, leading him to seem like he's melting like plastic). Also, while he has superhuman strength, speed, and reflexes by Martian standards, he's only human average on Earth due to the difference in gravity and atmosphere

Personality - Compassionate, Haunted, Curious, Methodical, Persistent
Experience - 5 Martian Years/10 Earth Years as the Manhunter, 1 Martian Year/2 Earth Years as Elastic Man
Appearance - His Martian form: Fairly typical green skin with pupilless red eyes in a humanoid form; His back was branded with the mark of the Martian World Government which is usually hidden underneath the blue and red straps and trunks and blue cape that was his 'uniform'. As he was forced to wear that uniform for some time, he sometimes slips into it out of force of habit, but he is seeking to fight that habit.

His main human guise: A 6 ft square jawed, blonde haired Caucasian male with square shoulders. Usually wears a collared shirt, formal slacks, a trench coat, and a fedora like a film noir detective.

His Elastic Man guise: Black haired, slim jawed, slight figured guy with a red top like the Golden Age Plastic Man's with a white undershirt under neath and red pants with a yellow belt, black boots, and a pair of sunglasses.

BRIEF Bio -J'amez was a Maritain Forensic Scientist who suddenly found himself with abilities beyond a normal Martian. The Martian World Government, a Soviet-esque dictatorship, at first sought to persuade him to become their puppet superhero. But when he sought to refuse, they burned his home and family (wife, son, & daughter) to make it seem like he died then placed him under J'ac'b J'amezon /Dr. Iron Will's, his twin brother's, "care" in order to make him into the Martian Manhunter. His will was broken, but then was able to escape due to Dr. Erdel's teleportation experiment and so now tries to keep a low profile as an ordinary human police detective so as to not end up the pawn of Mars or of anyone else ever again. However, when people are in danger around him, J'amez can't help but act. So he ended up becoming Elastic Man on Earth, focusing on his shapeshifting as his primary crime-fighting weapon in such a way as to seem like he's only a very rubbery man. As he's become more attached to his new home though, he can't help but want to protect it as much as he can. So he's taken to seek to take care of any spies and those that seek to attack the coast.

Potential Storylines - Mars attempting to silently infiltrate America and take advantage of the WW2 chaos and so discovering that J'amez is still alive, Refugees from Mars trying to get away from their government, J'amez hiding that he's an alien, Nazi Scientists wanting to capture him to figure out how his powers work and how to make more of him for their army

Additional Notes - Playing around with how in the Golden Age, Martian Manhunter had been a scientist before coming to Earth and of course, Mars still had a very alive population originally and was always supposed to be a 'perfect' place with no crime. I'm also playing with the fact that Mars does have a lower gravity so J'amez would need to be super-strong on some level in order to better blend in with other humans and to function as a superhero.

Golden Age

So I actually found a webpage listing out golden age superheroines so I'll see if there's anything close to my idea.

This one though is quite interesting: The Magician from Mars

So anyone who does want to do a female heroine does have resources now.

Golden Age

<Snipped quote by Azure Bubbles>

I was just thinking this! I was actually going to apply for an Italian female version of Alistair when I saw the ratio, but I couldn't find a good image to use, and my original idea was for him based partially on a heroic version of the Flashman novels.

@Half Pint

And in the end, it's better to do the gender right for the character instead of forcing it to work a certain way for some ratio.

If we end up being allowed a second hero, I do have a female heroine concept. The problem is I'm not sure of there's actually a golden age archtype for a Victorian/classical disney princess-esque likely British lady who can maipulate plants, can heal others, has telepathy, and maybe also has light powers. A woman who has never wanted to be more than tradionally feminine, but she then develops powers and the situation forces her to fight regardless.

There's a plethora of tomboy heroines and seductress villainesses. But while it feels like a concept that could have easily been in the golden age, I don't know of any that are actually like that.

Golden Age

Hello,can I join?

@Ashifa ASMR YT

You certainly may!

What sort of hero are you interested in?

Golden Age

Awesome!

Maybe someone will come in with a more Batman/the Shadow-coded hero, though there are certainly a ton of other golden era archtypes to tap into.

Worlds Collide: A Merged Universe Superhero Roleplay

Finally got ARGUS back into the picture!

It's been a while, hasn't it.

Worlds Collide: A Merged Universe Superhero Roleplay

A R G U S
A R G U S

The Therapeutix Gala
New York City, USA

"This is frog-hunter calling Eagle One. There's a complication."

"Eagle One here, frog-hunter. What sort of complication?"

"Three ring-necked pheasants and a great blue heron just entered the pool. Still no signs of our frog. Should we clear before the heron notices?"

"Negative. Just don't enter the pond. Keep eyes out for the frog either entering or leaving. Once he's alone, you know what to do."

"Understood. Frog-hunter out."

---

WITHIN A SECRET GOVERNMENT COMPLEX
Washington, DC

Amanda Waller sighed, rubbing her forehead. Was she the only one who could think around here? The gala was too good of an opportunity to catch the flying Martian that had eluded all their squads so far. If he felt so secure as to go out for hot chocolate with some of the rising 'heroes', then surely he'd go to a place where he'd been fully invited. Right? With a sigh, she got up from her chair and strode down to the lower levels.

SWORD being there was troubling though, especially if they were using the 'Lanterns' as their representatives. So far, it had seemed like SWORD genuinely did not realize that Martians had landed on Earth. Why else were they still allowed the American landing site uncontested? Especially when they'd come down so hard for one measly escape pod? Though of course, it could be to lure her into a false sense of security. Or with the escape pod, they'd also understood that the DNA within was the most valuable aspect of the find...

She shook her head. She'd kept what spies she could on SWORD's operations. If they hadn't found that SWORD knew anything about the Martians, then they didn't know anything and she could allow her paranoia to ease a bit. Still though, too many 'heroes' had risen up, many simply acting on their own and expecting civilized governments to just accept their existence. Warbird was a promising push-back, but she was still far too unpredictable. Why couldn't her colleagues understand? Power without order and discipline would always lead to tyranny and ruin. And no child or radical ever truly had the order and discipline they needed.

She finally descended into the lowest level where a human-sized tube gleamed within power as a figure floated within. Amanda rested her hand on the glass. Soon, they'd show them all. Soon, they would show the world true heroes, fighting for the cause of their country and not allowing 'feelings' and 'uncertainty' fuel their actions. But first, they'd need to see if this prototype survived.