Lewascan2

Noble Arms - The ASEAN War [Moved to New Thread]

@MagusDream
3/3
Final approval given for Willard. You're cleared to drop that bad boy in the character tab.

Sovereign's Will: A Fantasy Roleplaying Game. [CONCLUDED]

Location: Hdur, Kindeance.
@A5G@Randomness@Pakde

---

"Thank you. I am Jazdia Crystalspark, I assume we know each other already."

Veronica actually didn't, but that ignorance wasn't one she was necessarily focused on curing at this present moment, off-topic as it was. The name rang a bell at least, but the answered stayed on the tip of her tongue long enough to get swallowed by the processing of the rest of the conversation.

"Miss, your assessment intrigues me, you vehemently recommended us to depart immediately with consideration for the Prince's survival. I must say I doubt it. If the information is as crucial as you suggested so much it would force the capturers to take drastic action, then how can we know the prince is not already dead now as we speak? Why don't we hear about it already? What could be gained from killing the monarch silently and dumping his body on a river hoping his vengeful father would lose interest in hounding the killer's trails?"

"The answer to most of those questions, as I'm sure you well know, is that we simply don't know," the pale girl sighed. Fiddling with the pencil tucked atop her right ear, she frowned. "For all that we've learned, we still have yet to uncover one of the most crucial aspects of this whole mystery: the enemy's ultimate goal. If it were simply to start a war, they could kill the Prince and be done with it, parade his body and let the bloodshed commence." She leaned forward again, folding her hands and resting her elbows atop the table, as her eyes bored holes in the marked map. "For all we know, that could still be the goal, and they simply plan to do so at a more strategically expedient time. Knowing they're compromised might push them to accelerate their timetable." Massaging the bridge of her nose, she shook her head. "Given how little we know, it wouldn't be wrong to plan for the worst-case scenario. Anything is on the table."

"The perpetrators are not stupid. The prince is a valuable political tool. I don't think they would waste their bargaining chip just because they heard some group of people are commissioned to search for the crown prince. Hell, even if Fredricus mobilize his entire army to the perpetrators' stronghold they would know it better to keep The Prince alive to be used for parlay."

"I don't disagree. The Prince is valuable," Veronica nodded. "But they do not have to kill him to potentially do worse, and even then, his death as a means to an end is not even close to outside the realm of possibility. The enemy isn't foolish. This entire affair was executed with applaudable precision and competence, particularly in their capacity to deny investigators information and disappear. Given that, I'm inclined to expect then to engage in more of the same if they catch wind of someone being on their tail. If Fredricus sent an army, I quite doubt they'd be there to recieve it."

"The well-prepared trap is unavoidable, it's still a few hours ride without stopping and if the news were relayed yesterday, they had the entire night to prepare their welcome mats. I'd say departing now and tomorrow morning would not make any difference, except we will be less ready the sooner we get there."

"I suppose it is..." Veronica sighed, briefly running one hand down her face, before settling her chin down on the back of said hand, elbow propping it up from the table. She'd been consumed with what-ifs and has-beens for the past number of hours. It was hard not to let herself slump at that, as she forced herself to maintain her composure and straighten up. Everything about the very concept of walking into a prepared trap offended her shinobi sensibilities on a fundamental level. The fact that it was now nearly guaranteed to be a near future burned nearly as much as the sun.

"It is not only my informant, Lady Veronica. Half my team are in various state of injury from a recent battle. As much as I hate delaying, we'll be in much better shape for battle comes tomorrow."

"I-" Veronica shook her head in frustration, before nodding in acquiescence, solidifying her recomposure. "I understand, Dame Matilda. I apologize for speaking carelessly. Sometimes... No, it's unimportant. I believe this is a case of 'missing the forest for trees', as it were. I will attempt to be more mindful." She didn't feel she needed to elaborate openly further to Matilda of all people. For Veronica, an undead, as much as she might try to stay connected with mortal life, there were some things she simply couldn't sympathize with any longer, hadn't been able to for years. What would have been a devastating injury on someone else was an inconvenience to her. And exhaustion? Sleep? What were those? Did they taste good? She was being impatient. She knew it. She was being driven by frustration and injured professional pride over the mission's compromised integrity. She acknowledged that too.

Sometimes, given the way she had been trained, it could be remarkably frustrating to deal with operating with a large group using conventional local tactics. Her training told her time was of the essence, that she should take her compiled clues and go alone, at least scout out the opposition at a minimum... But she wouldn't do that. With anti-scrying measures in the mix, it was possible she'd overlook something dangerous. Going it alone was too reckless, no matter the potential benefits. She wasn't in a good position to be a one-woman army, and if the enemy had already received warning even before she managed to reach them independently of the larger group... that's exactly what she would likely have to be, while somehow simultaneously safely exfiltrating with the Prince in tow.

So, she would-

"Still, there's no need to commit to an extreme. We can depart in a few hours after taking care of the preparations, we do lack the horses to make the trip. Spend the night elsewhere, or simply camp out. Come the morrow we'll be much closer to our objective, wherever it may be. Hell, it'll probably afford us enough time to check both in worst case. Is this agreeable?"

Veronica perked up a bit at that. Given the possibility of serious injuries, the fact that they would ultimately be in traveling shape -well, if not in full shape, then hopefully on the road- by tomorrow was... Well, it was better than a lot of things. Provided the rest of the group didn't convince Matilda of an alternative course of action, that was better than Veronica might have worried. Ultimately, it wasn't agreeable, and Veronica was sure Matilda could have discerned that even in the absence of an outward reaction from the vampire. It was a compromise, and not even a guaranteed one. But when it came down to it, the orc Guard Captain was still the one giving the marching orders.

"It will have to do," Veronica finally voiced diplomatically, expression neutral. Her dissatisfaction was barely concealed, but she wasn't going to pursue this unproductive line of discussion further, at least for now. Besides, now that she was actively considering the state of the team, just based on the intensity of the lingering stench of blood, she couldn't help but feel that she was both being a bit selfish and, simultaneously, unable to truly let that selfishness go. Emotionally driven irrationality, however, was dangerous for a being like her, and so she would avoid acting on it on principle, now that she was conscious of it.

Sovereign's Will: A Fantasy Roleplaying Game. [CONCLUDED]

Location: Hdur, Kindeance.
@Eviledd1984@A5G@Randomness@Pakde

---

"Hello there," she chimed in, glancing at the newcomers with genuine mirth. "I don't know we have such an important meeting here. What gives with my invitation?"

Victoria's head perked up, swiveling away from the Guard Captain to one of the battered members of the team. The blonde elf had spoken up, and despite being in such a state, she didn't seem ready to let that stop her from contributing. "Greetings." Leaning back in her chair, the pale girl gestured broadly above the map and smiled without teeth. Why have the meeting here, where just about anyone could possibly see? It was beyond Veronica, but Matilda had given the go-ahead, which would just have to do, she supposed.

As for why she'd not chosen to "settle down" where the elf was seated... Slitted eyes drifted to the table in front of the elf, loaded with croissants and teaware. Yeah, there wasn't any space there, and like hell she was going to risk getting food -or stars forbid, drink- spilled on her map. Her ruby gaze rose from that sight to meet the elf's, a single brow rising with the upward perk of one corner of her lips. "By all means, feel welcome. Any aid you can offer would hardly go amiss." She could have apologized for the unintentional snub, but given the elf's amused tone, it seemed that would be unnecessary.

Sovereign's Will: A Fantasy Roleplaying Game. [CONCLUDED]

Location: Hdur, Kindeance.
@Eviledd1984@A5G@Randomness

---

“There is a possibility that Henri will be willing to come quietly, I will make sure that happens.”

Veronica resisted the impulse to audibly "tsk" her tongue at the brief glare her... enthusiasm received, but she didn't bother looking contrite, not when she didn't feel a lick of sympathy. Honestly, it was beyond her how Matilda and Henri were considered friendly acquaintances, given his recent actions. Veronica certainly didn't know Henri in a personal capacity, but she didn't expect he'd be any different now than he had in the past. He was trusted to be the Royal Tutor, so he wasn't an idiot. He certainly wasn't a fool by any measure. Which meant there were precious few other conclusions to reach about his recent actions than active malice or some level of reckless arrogance.

Either way, Veronica wasn't particularly fussed about how the Royal Tutor was removed as a potential threat to the mission at hand, but she'd certainly admit to wishing to exact retribution upon him both for the Royal Family's sake... and on a pettier level, for compromising a mission she was personally involved in. The perfectionist within her recoiled violently every time she thought about the state of the mission. Veronica wasn't sure which she found more unforgivable in an ostensible ally, malice or incompetence, but she was starting to put some thought into it now.

"Well, there is a place I was told where the prince possibility could be. But my informant needs a good night's rest before he can take us there. It is a village surrounding a fort, and from what I was told it is a two days on foot from here. And apparently, he had seen the kidnapping happen, while he was out hunting with his brother and his friends. Although I am unsure if he truly knows the location where the prince could be. Nor if he had really seen the kidnapping itself."

"A night's rest?" Veronica muttered, borderline aghast. She glanced at the now closed windows, knowing the sun had yet to even reach high noon. "We don't have a night's rest. With the unrest in the capitol and the compromising of this team's secrecy, conspirators will have surely sent a message by some means to the Prince's captors. Every hour we wait is another hour the enemy has to prepare... assuming they don't just kill the Prince and hammer another nail into this country's coffin," she finished grimly. Shaking her head, she added, "To say nothing of our present time limit. If it does take us two days to even reach the Prince -assuming we even have the right location, that'll already be a day longer than our time limit, assuming a similarly lengthy return. No, we don't have time to wait."

And then, her gloomy demeanor faded, as her expression was overtaken by a fresh, toothy grin. "And thankfully, we shan't need to."

“If I may have a look at your map, young lady.”

The tall, shadowed man interjected, carrying a pungent medicinal scent intermixed with something... other and simultaneously familiar. Raising a single brow, Veronica replied, "Just a moment, Ser." Rather than grant him immediate access to her map, the young vampire strode over to an empty table. Veronica unrolled the map a bit further on the table surface and steadied it, placing the case down on one end to hold it open and slipping a pencil out of said case.

"Dame Matilda, you've given me just the information we need to narrow things down drastically." Arching a brow slyly back at Matilda, she smirked with a once more closed mouth. "Two days by foot, was it?" The pencil in her hand sketched a quick series of flashes, drawing invisible lines in the air away from Hdur's marked location on the map towards several areas relatively near to the center of the vague circle. "My scrying attempts kept getting rebounded. Kept having to adjust power input, constellation degree. Needed to see how the defense reacted. It's really an impressive thing, throws you back further the more power you hit it with, and you need to come at it with a certain minimum level of high force to even hope to latch onto anything inside. Means you can't really avoid being rebounded pretty far. Still, I did manage to find approximately the... 'center' in a sense."

She shook her head. "But I digress..." The pencil etched several new marks on the map, emphasized and encircled a couple prior ones. Each of the locations had a thin line sketched to them, several straighter than others, cutting through forests and wilds instead of using roads. "With a distance like 'two days on foot' as our guide, I can narrow this down to these few. I've accounted for both options that can be accessed by typical means -that is, the roads, which include the town of Thurn and the villages, Pesti and Fanghorn. I've also marked those that could be reached if we rough it straight through the wilds, which include the town of Darude and the village of Vickerville." Tapping her pale lips with the pencil, Veronica's brows furrowed, as she considered the array of locations. All in all, that was still a lot of potential hiding places for the enemy and their captive, too many really.

Sliding her hood back and shaking her ebony tresses free, Veronica pulled out a chair at the table and seated herself heavily. "Admittedly, I'm not greatly familiar with this area except in passing, so any perspectives the rest of you could offer would go a long way." She tucked a little hair behind one ear, perching the pencil there. "Granted, most of these locations are so close together that we could probably search two in a single day, but every moment counts."

“It is as Guard Captain Matilda says. With two sources, I agree that likelihood of finding the prince here is good. Let’s see.” Solomon reached over the map and touched a couple of the villages named on the map, “The hunters say they saw the captors flee to a small village watched over by a lord. These villages are of decent size while having lord’s residence. This one in particular is a fort, constructed around the same time period as the lake ruins.”

"Small village, huh?" Veronica remarked, nodding and listening intently to the cloth-swaddled man's input. "Then that removes Thurn and Darude from the possibilities..." Solomon further elaborated the existence of a lord's residence as a feature, which ended up marking off Vickerville too. "So, that just leaves Pesti and Fanghorn, both accessible by two day's travel on the road, faster if we push with urgency or access to a sufficient number of steeds."

Her crimson gaze rose once more to meet with the orcish black knight. "Dame Matilda, it is my utmost recommendation that we set course at once, with or without your informant's rest. If need be, someone can carry him by horseback and do his share of the walking, but I fear we have not an ounce of spare time to wait. The moment we can possibly be in readiness, I will chart a course to pass through both of these locations." She frowned and drew silent momentarily, considering the logistics of traveling with injured in a practical and hasty manner. "With time being critically of the essence, any recovery that must be done from injury or fatigue may be best done on the road. I suppose we could purchase a cart for them to ride in if necessary."

Sighing, her gaze turned imploring. "I should clarify: my worry is not that we cannot bring the Prince back within the designated time... though that certainly contributes. Rather, it is that if we delay, we shall most likely be walking straight into a well-prepared trap." She half-grimaced, mouth curling oddly with the impulse to open and yet stay closed enough to conceal her fangs. "Furthermore, if the enemy gets a message back to the Prince's captors before we arrive, who is to say they won't have moved him by the time we arrive?"

Sovereign's Will: A Fantasy Roleplaying Game. [CONCLUDED]

Location: Hdur, Kindeance.
@Eviledd1984@A5G

---

“You may speak here, there are only trusted ears inside this inn.”

"Even the-?" Veronica's eyes darted to the four unknowns in the room, but at Matilda's seemingly confident assurances, her narrowed pupils reluctantly relaxed back into more almond-shaped slits. As long as they spoke lowly, hopefully, they should go unheard by the prying ears of the wrong sort. While Veronica would have vastly preferred to take this conversation to a secluded room, just to be sure, she relented nonetheless and made no further pursuit of the matter. "Very well." That she simply trusted Matilda's judgement went unsaid.

Sighing, Veronica briefly ran a hand down her face, brow pinched. "Then let me be thoroughly candid. I can think of no kinder way to put it, but Ser Henri has committed what can only be deemed as treason against the Crown. In this dire time of national need, with the safety of the Prince and the kingdom at large in the balance and a war brewing on the horizon, the Royal Tutor has gone explicitly against the mission statement and our King's direct orders and compromised us and likely the Prince's safety." Her expression darkened, one hand falling to grip a sheathed sai tightly. "Were it not for his prior record of loyalty as the Royal Tutor, I've little doubt that my orders would be to execute him where he stood." Her dangerously level tone spoke that the idea still wasn't completely off the table if the Royal Tutor refused to come anything less than quietly.

Drawing in a calming -if technically unnecessary- breath of air, Veronica shook her head. "That said, it's not all misfortune, thank the stars." Smiling, this time with bared teeth and a glint of impending retribution in her ruby eyes, Veronica reached into her pack slid out a small scroll case. "I didn't have time to corroborate with other scrying practitioners, given the situation, however, I do believe my own independent investigations have borne fruit." She drew out and unrolled a small, regional map, tucking the case under her armpit. She spoke in a lower tone, just to be certain. "But after much trial and error, I'm confident in my results. I was hoping to be able to corroborate with your own end of the investigation, but it's my belief that we have located the Prince." Upon the regional map, she had scrawled in pencil several marks in a roughly circular radius. Haphazard additional markings dotted the interior of that circle. "His location is warded, but..." She grinned viciously. "That just meant I needed a few extra catalysts than normal."

Sovereign's Will: A Fantasy Roleplaying Game. [CONCLUDED]

Location: Hdur, Kindeance.

---

This was a disaster.

Veronica forced herself to stow the unproductive thought, as she strode beside Anderson, loyal squire of the Head of Guard. Even so, for those familiar with her, the unnervingly extended quiet that had been shared for most of the hurried journey to the humble village of Hdur was all her companion might need to discern the tension within her. The Capitol they had left was in a right state of chaos. Though the Guard had done well in their efforts to quell the worst of the public unease, three fiery bombings upon prominent Guild warehouses had both civilian and merchant alike in a tizzy... to say nothing of the aggrieved party, the Black Serpent Guild.

Oh, and don't even get her started on the Delvings and the rest of the Noble court! Rumor had it that the bloody Royal Tutor had assaulted Aaron Delving and his guards completely unprovoked in his office. Luckily, the elder Delving, Admiral Silas, had been there to put a stop to the foolishness at hand, and somehow, Henri had not been arrested on the spot. If that were all, it would have been one thing... but what Henri had been pursuing in their less than amicable discussion... Well, the rumors were wild, but Veronica had heard several truths, truths that she knew for a fact should not have been available to the public forum. And so did the King.

Fredricus was furious, and frankly, for her own part, Veronica was nearly as much so. All of her work to fly under the radar. All her efforts to be discreet, to uncover the Prince's location. All of it might have been for nothing.

As it turned out, Henri was another member of the off-the-record team Veronica been too late to join from the get-go... and she was starting to wonder if that wasn't a good thing. Not more than a day hence, and one of the mission's core objectives was compromised, inexorably so. It wasn't necessarily that the Delvings couldn't be trusted. After all, Admiral Silas and his family had served in an exemplary and loyal manner for many years. But it was simply the principle of the matter. The Prince's abduction and a nearly successful assassination attempt on the Crown itself were cause for unusual means and assumptions in these troubling times... Rather, that Veronica's Lord King would send for someone- something like her to aid him in such a personal and national matter truly spoke of the desperation at hand.

The situation was a disaster. The Delvings had obviously brought their alarming findings to the public forum, and the other nobles now clamored for answers. Fredricus had denied the claims, but the nobles had demanded proof... proof the King did not have. He had claimed the Prince was in a safehouse a fair distance away after the inciting incident and would need several days to be called back to the Capitol. All in all, the summit had ended with the promise to send for the prince at once, and the nobles had dispersed, dissatisfied but mollified... for now. It was half-assed bandage over a festering wound at this point.

Whatever narrow time limit they had been on just got a whole lot narrower... as had the King's patience. Veronica, personally, wasn't particularly worried on her own behalf... insofar as her own culpability in the present fanned flames of the crises... which was to say, no culpability at all. Between herself and Anderson, they had gotten results, and all that was left was to corroborate with the rest of Matilda's charges. Indeed, Veronica wasn't worried that she would be held culpable for the chaos; her end of the mission had gone the closest thing to flawless as it could have, given the circumstances. No, for the young vampire, the true worry was the stability of the kingdom and safety of the royal lineage that had so graciously offered her a chance to prove herself. It was for the King, whom she worried, surrounded on all sides by schemers and possible traitors. It was for the guiltless young prince she worried, whose life may very well be in greater danger should his kidnappers have been alerted to the existence of the investigation.

The only grace to be found was that... well, that was what they were here to meet Matilda's team about.

There was no time to waste. The fate of Kindeance was in the balance.

---

It almost felt like she was walking underwater. Not in a physical sense, nor really the sense that she was actually hindered in her movements, but as the noonday sun glared down from above, Veronica mercifully found herself free of its baleful vengeance. Sometimes, she found herself seeing her magic as a mixed blessing. In many ways, it was responsible for her life being ruined, for her death... or undeath as it were. In others, it was the only reason she could live anything close to a normal life at all... the only reason she was even free and beholden to herself to begin with. Shaking her head, Veronica tugged her simple brown cloak a bit tighter, almond-shaped pupils peering about at the bustling village.

It wasn't a large place, Hdur. It was the sort of place where just about everyone was as liable to know everyone else, tight knit, localized. And a bit of risky place to be to avoid attention. The concept of "fading into the crowd" might as well have not existed around these parts, so the less of a show they gave the locals, the less likely the mission's operational security would be even more devastated than it already was. Between herself and Anderson, Veronica was sure they already were quite the pair. One clad in armor and exemplifying the Royal Guard. And the other cloaked and concealed, aside from glints of steel and flashes of velvety red and black fabrics.

Even going to the effort of donning a cloak, even were she to have changed into something even less conspicuous, Veronica knew it would have done little good the moment someone caught a glimpse of her eyes. She'd long-since given up trying to appear normal. If anything, in her experience, the more you tried to hide, the more people seemed to sense it and want to find out more about you. Thus, "refuge in audacity" had become her staple, and it was only that the situation was presently so dire that she bothered to do anything differently here and now.

A seemingly nameless inn and a local bakery crested into sight, as the two travelers made haste without hurrying... if that made any sense... towards where they were to rendezvous with the erstwhile black ops team of their Majesty's conception. Veronica's fists tightened minutely atop the handles of her sheathed sai daggers, resisting the urge to twist her expression into a snarl of ire at what might lay beyond. Forcibly relaxing herself, she shoved down the call for bloody violence and placed aside the impulse to execute the Royal Tutor for treason the moment she laid eyes on him. It wasn't like it would have brought her much satisfaction in a practical sense anyway. She'd never found herself hungry in his presence, so she was somehow certain that, whatever he was... he probably didn't bleed. Not exactly her idea of an ideal opponent.

Speaking of bleeding... Veronica gave a couple audible sniffs of the air, as she and Anderson neared the inn. The smell of breadstuffs filled the air in accompaniment to many an equally appetizing scent... but there was a far more delectable aroma on the wind. Not even hours old. Hell, maybe not even minutes old. It was nearly overpowered by an array of medicinal scents, but there was no mistaking that which her body craved more than life itself.

Veronica gave a couple more audible sniffs, her eyes darting to Anderson. They'd worked well enough together on the occasion over the years, and in that time, Veronica had developed an array of signals to her closer comrades. Any that knew her mannerisms well, knew that she didn't make unnecessary efforts, and noisy breaths were certainly one of them. It was as good a signal as any, a simple and concise one to convey to her allies.

Blood had been shed.

"After you, milady."

Briefly schooling her expression into an almost girlishly vapid one not dissimilar to a spoiled noble girl, Veronica rolled her eyes playfully at the squire opening the inn door for her, the delicious scent of sanguine essence billowing out from within. "Many thanks, Ser~." Obligingly, she smiled without teeth, the corners of her eyes crinkling in mirth, as she acquiesced to his prompt and stepped inside the establishment.

Initial impressions of the sorry band? Not great. Crimson eyes panned across the room, taking in the battered state of half the occupants. The smell of blood was tantalizingly thick in the air, and Veronica had to swallow back the light burn in her throat, drifting away from the immediate conversation to moderately discreetly draw forth one of her waterskins and take a swig of the glorious nectar within. Tongue flicking across pale lips to catch any lingering droplets, Veronica swallowed thickly, the burn doused, and replaced her waterskin at her hip.

The distraction of her Thirst -that she hadn't noticed building- now kept at bay, Veronica's slitted eyes returned to those present. She resisted frowning. The faces she was seeing weren't all in alignment with what Anderson had told her to expect. The blonde elf, the cloaked shadow of a man, the ronin Samurai, and the runaway noblewoman were present... but the royal guardsman was new... along with three other unknowns at their own table, one of whom might have been napping if the sound of his breathing patterns was any clue. Veronica's eyes narrowed. What little secrecy they had left was paramount. She had nothing against this guard or these possible civilians in particular. Perhaps they were even valuable witnesses, but if they weren't... The pale girl shook her head lightly. Killing any of them would likely serve no purpose at this stage, not with the Capitol in such a state as it was.

As Ser Anderson and Lady Rosenving exchanged pleasantries, Veronica set to a small task of her own. Relatively unhurried, she passed by each of the large windows that were set into the front of the building and presently letting in a healthy breeze and beams of sunlight, and she began firmly closing the shutters of each in turn and untying the curtains, drawing them across the windows and casting the living area into comparatively muddled shades of candlelight. Letting out a small sigh of relief, Veronica finally released her magic, rolling her shoulders, as the watery sensation slid from her body.

Her ears perked up at the steady thudding of an armored figure descending the stairs into the common room, and Veronica felt a genuine smile finally slide into place across her lips. Striding forward to stand next to Anderson once more, the pale girl favored the Head of the Royal Guard, Matilda, with a nod and a brief, small crease of the waist, hands clasped behind her back.

"A bird, ma'am? If you don't mind it arriving slower I'm sure I can deliver a message with less risk." He gestured to the vampire that came with him. "I brought lady Veronica, she arrived earlier this morning. Aside from that, there's some words from the king. Is it secure to speak here?"

Veronica only smiled knowingly, barely more than the slightest upturn of the corner of her lips, one she didn't bother to conceal from the black knight with a mirthful eye squint to accompany it. There was no need at this moment to correct the squire about just how long a vampire had actually gone unchecked within the very castle walls themselves before she had deemed her end of the investigation sufficiently explored enough to present findings to another involved and sanctioned party. "Dame Matilda," she greeted with her usual close-mouthed smile, "were it only that we should reunite under kinder circumstances." She shook her head in a show of disappointment, ebony waves of hair swaying about her chin. "One of these days, surely, we shall meet outside the eve of violence."

Quickly, however, her tone and demeanor sobered, her arms folding across her ample chest. "However, today is unfortunately not one such day." She nodded at Anderson. "We bring ill news from the Capitol. Any measure of security we can afford, no matter how small, is paramount at this juncture." Her crimson eyes drifted towards the others occupying the commons, particularly the seemingly random presence of a guardsman... and three other unknown men occupying their own table, almond-shaped pupils briefly narrowing to nearly paper-thin slits.

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story (Rebooted!)

HIGHLY CLASSIFIED: Slaughterhouse Seven, Yandere

---

---

"Don't you see? I'm going to save you... All of you... my precious Humanity~."

---

---

Name: Miko Danvers

Alias: Yandere, The Seven's Sister, The Second.

Nicknames: "That Crazy Bitch", "The Pink One", "The Girl in the Skirt", "Twin-tailed Terror", "Her".

Age: 16 (physically) (true mental age unclear; given her vast skillset, assumed 20's)

Gender: Female

Personality:
Cheerful and peppy on the surface, she is nonetheless equally capable of becoming psychotic and murderous on a dime and is incredibly unstable and overconfident. Despite any evidence to the contrary, Yandere is under the impression that she is acting to save the world and seems to believe that she can avert some unnamed "apocalypse", which she has failed at multiple times. Assuming her claims about her power are correct, this, understandably so, would be the primary reason she is batshit insane.

Despite this, under the vast majority of circumstances, Yandere is incredibly well composed and controlled in her mannerisms. If she's acting eccentric, that's usually because it's what she wants others to see. She often wears a gleeful smile, a smile that tends to stretch to psychotic levels once the adrenaline hits and battle is joined. It is rare indeed that Yandere ever truly takes her opposition seriously. After all, with her power, why should she? Even when seriously injured or seemingly inconvenienced, all she will do is smile and smirk, even offering a peppy mocking congratulation or two. She is quick to dole out almost genuine sounding praise to her opposition, but anyone with any conception of her power can be well aware it's likely not anything she's not seen before and clearly overcome.

Under no circumstances has Yandere ever shown a single iota of genuine fear or distress that has been witnessed past the infamous day of her Trigger Event. Though, she will sometimes feign such with her opponents to lull them into a false sense of security. Truly, given her physical limitations, it is all too easy for others to underestimate her, especially first-time opposition. She is a crafty schemer at heart, always poking and prodding at her opponents verbally, teasing out their mindsets to determine if they are worth keeping around for the "Grand Plan" and the betterment of humanity as a whole. Even while she's having a rip-roaring good time messing around with her enemies, she's also scouting them as allies in her quest. If they pass, she's more than willing to throw down the hatchet to try and bring them into the fold, and with her ability to effectively wholly analyze the psyches of others through trial and error, to an outsider, she may appear to say exactly the right things at the right time to make her case seem all too reasonable.

Regardless of her methods or seeming amorality, Yandere desires to save humanity above all things. To her, it is her one true calling in life, and no sacrifice is too great in the service of that goal. Her only worry, one she has pushed to the backburner for the time being, is what she's going to do with herself once she succeeds. What will she do after? What burnt bridges will she need to rebuild? Once she's done the deed, what is left for her? What kind of proper profession would she like to undertake? And once she reaches the end of her life, can she even die of old age, or will she be forced to redo things all over again?

Existential concerns aside, some part of her hopes that she'll make some genuine friends along the way and actually have comrades and loved ones at the end of things. While saving the world certainly takes priority for understandable reasons, she'd also like to have a boy-or girl-friend to settle down with. Honestly, at this point, she's not super picky either way; it's just a little difficult to get people to take your advances seriously when you're an infamous serial killer. She'd like something genuine, but maybe that's asking a lot...

Sigh. "Ah well, here I go a killing again~!"

Appearance:
Civilian: A 5'6", 140 lb. raven-haired half-Japanese-Caucasian teenage girl with blue eyes, she is someone who has been thoroughly smacked with the puberty stick in... certain areas (cough) She is athletic beneath her oft deceptively covering wear, despite appearing almost as delicate as she is busty, and wears her hair in single ponytail. Even in this state, she tends to favor bright, cheerful colors, and she has enough taste to avoid being garish about them. Though, dark tops with light bottoms also appeal to her. Skirts are an unironic staple of her wardrobe, along with a variety of snug, form-fitting sweater shirts, sometimes turtle-necked. She usually has at least a few knives concealed somewhere on her person.

Cape: In all reality, her civilian guise is donned with incredible rarity. Most of the time, she boldly goes where she pleases with her hair dyed a bold pink and pulled up into a pair of ponytails with bowed ribbons. Aside from that, she typically wears a now ominously distinct white and blue Japanese schoolgirl outfit. On first glance, it would be assumed to be a cosplay, if not for the fact that Yandere has taken a known trip across the sea before to obtain it by questionable means. Certainly, if nothing else, she can't be said to half-ass her image. In addition, she dons an intimidating number of knives, both throwing and not, beneath her skirt strapped to her upper thighs, and she can usually be seen with a book bag slung over one shoulder and sometimes a fanny pack hanging from the back of her waist, the latter usually only in the case she seems to be expecting a fight. The fanny back is usually holding some handy odds or ends that just conveniently aid her situation as if she were fucking Dora the Explorer.

While her power and infamy amongst government agencies means having an actual secret identity is generally a pipe dream, Yandere occasionally will whip out the makeup and some spare clothes and have an actual peaceful night out on the town. A casual drink with another here, a playful movie there. If she wants to disappear into a crowd, she has the means and the knowledge to make it happen, even while under intense scrutiny.

Biography:
Our story begins 30 years past. It was the early 1990's, and the chaos of the emergence of the Parahuman phenomenon had roughly settled down. After 70 years of lessons learned quickly and harshly, some level of true order had been restored to the world. Though villains had crawled forth from every crevice, heroes had risen to meet them, and the world, in turn, rose to support those heroes in whatever way they may.

The world had recovered, and though not all was well, things were improving. Until one day...

The First Herald and the Rise of The Guardians

Long story short, when a twenty foot silvery titan oozes out onto the beach of Katsuru, well....How are you supposed to respond to that? Locals didn't really know what to make of it, so, foolish as it was, they approached the strange entity, watching with awe as it strode onto land, like a God amongst mortals.

Of course, the panicking began when, without even sparing a glance, spears of that almost mercury-esque substance jutted from its body, ending the lives of most of the onlookers in the span of a second. They ran, but it was far too late; with seemingly no attention to the act, what were once spires of death formed into liquid tendrils, hunting down the fleeing prey and splattering them across the earth in brutal fashion. All the while, it kept walking.

When Japan's Capes began to enter the scene, they soon realized how bad the situation was; this was not the villains of old, who they could play cat and mouse with, always pushing and pulling, but never so far to escalate the situation. No, this was a monster of Greek proportions, an abomination with no thoughts towards such base things as morality. But even when they stopped pulling punches, they found themselves outmatched. Each time it was crushed, splattered, melted or frozen, it simply formed back together, an unkillable slime that seemed to become all the more unbeatable with each failed attempt.

Cleaving through any signs of humans it came across, the thing that soon was dubbed 'Progeny' made its way into central Japan with no remorse; civilians were told to flee, but escaping this monstrosity was impossible. It moved with a disturbing fluidity. Not 'fast' in the superhuman terms, but so disgustingly mobile that nothing could stop it, even slipping through the thinnest cracks to emerge where it desired. It was inevitable that you were found by it, barring rescue from Capes...Who were likely bound to die in the process. This rampage pushed on, with the creature never stopping to eat, drink, or rest, hours of travel time spent either moving or killing.

When it reached Tokyo, no one was ready.

The Capes there, heroes and villains, desperate to stop the demon, banded together, unofficially becoming the first example of The Herald Accords. However, Japan had never been well known for their impressive Capes, and none were capable of stopping this menace....That is, until, four distinct portals opened in the sky, though after the creature had already obtained ample time to eviscerate the population and Capes alike.

Dropping in, prior to them ever becoming The Guardians, were Guardian himself, Amazon, Gatecrasher, and a late and great member of their team, Shockwave, whose ability was to unleash ungodly amounts of electricity in waves; thanks to help from a Tinker friend, they'd found ways to focus the ability, turning him into an extraordinarily strong Blaster/Shaker.

With these four, Progeny, while not killed, was pushed back long enough to force a retreat from the enigmatic creature; Japan was in ruins, certainly, with the body count having reached millions, not even mentioning the Capes that littered the streets of Tokyo, but they had stopped it.

After this, the PRT officially created The Guardians, with the four who stopped Progeny being the founding members.

That terrible day was the first Herald attack, or as it has been commemorated in Japan, Red Day; a grim reference to the streets, running red with the approach of the goliath entity... The devastation left in its wake slew millions and left the entire nation shell-shocked and battle scarred, reduced to a 2nd world country. Though the infrastructure of the island nation wasn't completely ruined, they had been completely unprepared for an attack of such scale, and with their already low birthrate, even 30 years later, their population hadn't bounced back.

It was into this devastated nation that Maki Fuma was born. She grew up in a nation struggling economically and nationally, and she had no desire to stick around. Far from one to allow herself to be shackled be tradition or nationalism, she fled to the United States at the first available opportunity and came to settle down in the State of Oklahoma. Having come from a struggling country, Maki knew of hard word, and in the far more prosperous America, that served her well. She got a job, went to school, went to college, graduated with honors and married well, taking up her husband's surname of Danvers. The life she led couldn't have been called more than upper middle class, but it was hers and one she was content with. And soon enough, she was having her first child, a bright young girl named Miko.

As she grew, Miko came to internalize her mother's standards of hard work and determination. She learned to value the will to push through all obstacles, to never stop even if one stumbled. She learned of her mother's old home and came to enjoy indulging in their media and culture, even as she never took what she already had now for granted. She was a cheerful soul, who made friends easily and scored well enough to make her classmates wonder about the memes of Japanese grades. Her life was good, peaceful, aside from the occasional inevitable Cape shenanigans; though she was never unlucky enough to be nearby or collateral.

And then Gaia attacked.

Trigger Event

Mother Nature.

The Moving Mountain.

The Terror of Heaven and Earth.

As it emerged, 14-year-old Miko had been at school, and the alarms sounded all too late. Gaia began its grim chore, drawing up the land towards itself, swallowing and compressing all that was natural and manmade alike into its personal armor. And being inside her school, Miko was swept up inexorably in the tide. Even as she struggled to stay atop the flow of crumbling structures and earth, all around her friends, teachers, strangers and other civilians alike were crushed and ground up. In the chaos of it all, in the face of her innocent horror and a dire need, she Triggered.

Unfortunate timing that.

In losing consciousness in her precarious position, she was swept into the tide proper, no longer able to escape the flow, as she was drawn towards the behemoth titan... and painfully crushed against it... only to awake within the flow. Panicked and confused, she was drawn in again and crushed all the same... and returned once more. Even as the world around her went mad in the face of a great and terrible storm's manifestation, a horrible pattern began to emerge. Soon enough, this bizarrely reoccurring event become her personal death loop, constantly being ground up, crushed, compressed, entombed, suffocated, drowned, sliced and diced, sandpapered, and just generally reduced to a fine bloody mushy smear in a variety of ways so almost distinct that if one didn't know better, they'd think the Herald was somehow experimenting to see if any would stick.

At first, her power didn't go very far back and didn't include the combat reflexes and muscle control needed to get out with so little breathing room, but after dozens, even hundreds of resets, where Miko went from begging for help to begging to be saved, to begging for a hero, to begging for mercy, for it to stop, for her to just be allowed to die, to not even bothering to beg at all and simply screeching incoherently. By the time she Second Triggered, she was out of her mind with panic, and she was soon running on pure power-fueled instinct, which even then, was barely enough given how far in she'd already been dragged.

Finally, she escaped from the pull, only to be met with a vicious storm of truly unholy proportions. More mad than not, Miko in the face of these new factors died again... and awoke under the crush once more. For the true horror of Miko's own power became clear. At this time, she did not know how to reset herself, and her power would always default to resetting her backwards as far as it could manage upon death/forced reset. And because her power could not take her further back than her Trigger, even a single mistake, a single slip-up, would see her plunged right back into the beginning of the nightmare.

For a while, her fresh panic at the revelation of the brand new level of her personal nightmare, genuinely broke the girl entirely, leaving her a shell resigned to a small eternity of resets, her body continuing to act half-heartedly to escape, relying entirely on her power's muscle memory to progress in the face of the girl's mind checking out. And yet, without her guiding principle, it could not manage to quite make it further, for where could it go once instinct ran dry? And so it went. A hundred resets. Two hundred. Five hundred. A thousand. But what could a young girl's mind do in the face of such reckless, targeted malice? Her power had already Second Triggered in desperation; it had nothing left to give. What happened next would be upon her shoulders.

And so it came to be that, eventually, perhaps inevitably, Miko's mind simply registered pain... differently. One might even say not at all. After countless deaths, it had become just another sensation, and while the girl was shattered, in the face of this, she began to pull some of the pieces back together. A spark of hope, a rekindled animalistic drive to survive. Whatever one wanted to call it, it was a fire that she clung too with everything she had left, a bonfire of determination and spite, a drive to escape.

And once the mind behind the power was back in the saddle somewhat, so the escape attempts redoubled in full. The number of deaths did not lesson. No, not by a long shot. But now, actual progress was made, even if it was horrifically glacial, even literally one step at a time in places, the journey so foul and lethal that even the slightest deviation meant to be smote beneath the Herald's renewed attention. Even despite all that, the girl pressed onward with a drive even she didn't understand.

Little did she know, however, but her cries for help had actually been heard by a Japanese hero, who'd come from overseas to aid in the fight. It was unfortunate, truly. Under nigh any other circumstance, such a person would have been her hero and lead the girl to a better life. Unfortunately for both, the girl had the personal attention of the Herald, and someone like this hero was merely in the way. If even a single deviation, a single mistake would cost her, would reset her, then she could not allow her path to be impeded or deviated by any outside element.

And so it was, with barely even conscious recognition of her actions, the girl's body killed the hero a few resets later, a single knife-hand to the windpipe, crushing the good Samaratan's life beneath the weight of her drive to live. Though she was witnessed doing such, though her actions provoked rage and betrayed hate from the other defenders, the Herald's focus upon her rent such collateral damage about her person that none were able to waylay her rightly, more concerned with the battle at hand.

Eventually, inevitably, the Herald was delayed, faltered, long enough -if just barely- for the girl to escape its gaze and make her mad flight, as far and as fast as she could manage, stopping for nothing till she had left the city entirely.

It would be in the days, weeks and months to come, as she recovered herself, realized what she'd done, and fled from the hostilities of nearly everyone around her, that the girl would come to take up wearing an outfit reminiscent of the hero she had unwittingly slain and a reminder of all else she and her family had lost. She knew from the quivering in her heart that she would never be able to stomach returning to that day, that she would never be able to save or spare that hero, to undo the hate for herself. She knew that, knew that she'd live with it forever, for better or worse. And so, if only though her outfit, she'd honor their sacrifice in her own way.

In the aftermath, her home and family were gone, razed to the ground and crushed, the city flattened beneath the Herald's wrath. With nowhere to go and no-one to turn to, the young madwoman did what she could to discover a new purpose in life. And though it took years, years of resets and mishaps, deaths and hardships, she soon encountered it. A horror. An apocalypse in truth. What she saw in the grim-dark future of Earth Bet, she could not overcome. They were not ready... not as they were, not while weakened by the countless interpersonal wars and grudges of man, not while Heroes and Villains alike played their games, not while the Heralds were left to their own devices to further upend mankind's support structure.

Miko looked upon it all and came to know that she loved humanity more than anything else. Even if they hated her. Even if they killed her over and over. Even if they drove her out and rejected her, she wanted more for them all the same, wanted better for the world. It had taken her all too long, but even her ordeal under Gaia had not destroyed her mind and soul entirely. No, though she was reluctant to ever face the mountain again, much less a Herald at all, her will had been hardened under the pressures of life into a shining diamond of determination. She had become -if not whole- then something more than a pile of shattered glass and psychotic edges. To return was to lose everything. To stay was to lose everything. At least with the former, they would have a chance.

And so, saying farewell to what few loved ones she had, she reset. And reset. And reset. And reset. And reset again. And again...

Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.Reset.

And when she finally stopped?

She was back, the wrath of Gaia fading in the distance, her home crumbling all over again like a returning nightmare.

But she turned away from the past... and faced the future with a steeled spine and a mad glint in her eyes.

Something was coming. Something humanity wasn't ready for.

But maybe she could change that...

No matter the cost...

She had to.

Joining The Seven

Despite her general demeanor, her goals seem righteous-ish enough, so one might have boggled at the very idea of even someone as mad as her joining Writhe and the Seven, unrepentantly vile and murderous monsters in human-ish form. And under normal circumstances, they'd be right to be confused.

Only, Miko -or rather, Yandere- was never one to constrain herself to a single set of options. On the surface, the Seven were a dead end, both strategically and to her own reputation. Well, if her power wasn't what it was. Being that it is what it is, she sees no issue with pursuing even this most depraved of timelines. After all, if it goes to wrong? She can just scrap it.

To be honest, she encountered Writhe by chance more than anything else. She'd not had any plans for her current timeline, but when she got into town and was met with Writhe doing his thing? Well, she was never one to balk at an opportunity. Maybe her standards had been a little higher before, but after her latest round of failures, the urge to seek success in more... niche and controversial areas had arisen within her. And coming face-to-face with the head-honcho of the Seven himself? Well, she just couldn't resist.

Apparently, the feeling was somewhat mutual, though an outsider might be hard-pressed to discern it. For all that Writhe was only content to engage in conversation with her in the midst of visiting hilarious amounts of attempted ultraviolence upon her person, the two managed to have a bizarrely philosophical discussion, and -after a period that was by far longer for Yandere than Writhe- they came to something of an accord, a pact of... relative nonviolence. While it was clear to both that the other was firmly -even psychotically- set in their ways, the urge to see if they were up to the challenge compelled both to join hands in alliance... for the time being.

To Yandere, the monster, Writhe, was an opportunity.

With his power draining, he could be either the nexus upon which she could build a savior of humanity... or a nexus by which all defense and hope would be torn to pieces. She was honestly as interested in picking at his mindset as he was at hers, to see if she can tease out a "redemption" similar to what she underwent in her first full "run" of life. If not, then she sees little wrong with hanging around and finding a way to kill him. Ultimately, she sees him mostly as more trouble than he's worth, so between the options, she'd favor finding a definitive way to end him over managing his entire universe of issues long-term.

At minimum, however, one of her primary goals, in service of humanity, is to protect any people she believes could help. Essentially, she goes around doing her "part" in the Seven by killing people she has determined are problems while sparing assets. She even goes to the trouble of utilizing her "Yandere" persona to choose people she wants to "date" to keep the other Seven off their backs for the most part. Basically claiming them as "hers" to do with as she pleases.

Yandere's "tests" as a member of the Seven tend to be similar and yet inverted to Writhe's. While Writhe actively wants to break people in a complete way, Yandere wants others to show her their strength instead and show their determination. She wants them to rise to the challenge, to prove themselves to be the defenders and saviors humanity will need. Yandere seeks to actively foster the conditions from which heroes shall be tempered and rise stronger and more sure in their convictions than ever before. Of course, this is not to say that her means of doing so can't be cruel and unusual. As she was someone once broken down in every way that matters who rebuilt themselves from the ashes, Yandere's standards for what is "reasonable pressure" tend to be a tad skewed.

Powers/Skills:

• Athleticism: Her limits are constrained primarily by her physical ability as a base human. As such, it has served Yandere well where possible to keep up a strict training regimen to push what limits she can. Her manual control of her body means, however, that she can override her muscles' natural limiters and briefly perform shocking feats of ability... at the cost of damage to herself, of course. But in the right circumstances, the trade-off is worth it.
• Insane Pain Tolerance/Willpower: Yandere's pain tolerance can best be described as: "Y E S". Due to her horrific Trigger Event and the many many horrible deaths and injuries she has effectively suffered since and had permanently carved into her memory, she will not so much as flinch in the face of full-throttle torture porn levels of horrific brutality being inflicted upon her. She'll be distinctly annoyed at the inconvenience of the injury itself, sure, but it's just another day at the office.
• Martial Arts: Anything Goes: While not a proper practitioner per-say, Yandere has committed a vast quantity of hand-to-hand fighting styles to memory. She is the equivalent of a top-tier black belt even without her power informing her muscle memory, and her combat style is in turns highly unpredictable and playful or brutally efficient... and still unpredictable. Sometimes, if she's feeling cute, she'll even memorize her opponents' attacks during the fight and immediately use them in return, just to mess around.
• Polylingual: She can speak nearly every language, and those she can't, she appears to learn the basics of within subjective seconds.
• Skilled: If it can be learned by a mundane human, she probably knows the basics at a minimum, and can correct any deficiencies in what appears to be an instant. Medical techniques, piloting, gunfighting, tracking, smithing, hunting, building, cooking, parkour, operating high tech machinery and Tinkertech alike. You name it, she can do it. In the case of Tinkertech, it's quite literally just an effective matter of trial and error for her, before she appears to operate or identify it perfectly as far as anyone else is concerned.
• Unreadable: Her absolute control of her body language means that when she genuinely wants to deceive someone, it is literally impossible to see through her down to a hormonal level without a straight up truth/lie-detecting power. Technological lie detectors tend to fare no better than a regular person.
• Groundhog Day (Thinker/Shaker(?) 12): Yandere's power, which she openly boasts about, is what she claims to be genuine time travel. While proof one way or the other has naturally yet to be obtained, her power at least effectively mimics as though that were the truth. One way or the other, she is either telling the truth, or she is a Thinker of truly absurd proportions. In practice, until proven otherwise, she will be assumed to be the latter for everyone's peace of mind.
  
  Her claim is that anytime she dies -or even anytime she wants, she is thrust back in time up to a full day... and she can keep going with no cap other than the day of her Trigger Event. Her power also gives her perfect recall and muscle memory. What this translates to is that she can retread the exact steps of any and every encounter, retrying any and every hardship or failure until she wins. In essence, she is a monstrously powerful combat Thinker and Precognitive who is always living in the "winning" timeline.
  
  As a result of her perfect recall and muscle memory/control, Yandere is capable of learning nearly any skill or piece of information in what appears to be subjective seconds, even instantaneously. Her effective precognition means she can commit to absolutely insane tactics, before "undoing" the consequences and retaining all the information she has gathered. In effect, there is no system she cannot penetrate, no password she cannot divine, no secret identity too secret or sacred. If she wants to know something, it is literally impossible to stop her from learning it without storing it away off-world/dimension, and even then, you're assumedly only buying time from the inevitable. It can generally be assumed that she will always be aware of the exact limitations and functions of her opponents' powers and be prepared to counter them.
  
  Even were her active powers to be shut down, according to Thinkers, she would retain all the information and skills she has gathered, along with the imbued muscle memory, giving her a comparatively extremely favorable position from which to retreat or otherwise survive until she can regain her power and "undo" the incident.
  
  At present, there are no known methods of evading her power's detection. As her power is proven to be capable of clearly targeting even the Heralds, the vast majority of even highly specialized Strangers are incapable of evading its gaze in turn. Even when she is seemingly otherwise unaware of their location, Yandere has been noted to "fire blindly" and kill or disable potentially troublesome concealed foes without even the slightest amount of notable effort.
  
  She has proven on multiple occasions to be able to accurately predict the location of Herald attacks over a day in advance and narrow down the alternate targets in the case that the original is avoided in response to her prediction. She has also been able to determine the Heralds' specific targets/the purpose of a given attack and the fallout of failing to stop them.
• Unrestrainable (Trump/Mover 9): Yandere's power possesses an automatic trigger function, preemptively defending her from any effect that would shut down, weaken or otherwise hinder or negate her access to her power. To be clear, she is not actually immune to said effects like Null Trumps and Masters, but her power effectively ensures she always knows they are coming and allows her to never actually be caught out in a position where they can catch her. This effect triggers against more than just other powers, and it is decisive enough to prevent her from being meaningfully imprisoned, trapped, or disabled by other means, including paralysis or unconsciousness. In the case of the latter, notably sleeping, her power still triggers automatically if she would be put in a situation thereafter from which she couldn't awaken for an unnatural period of time.

Other: Favorite power sets involve time stopping or manipulation. Though, I'm becoming a big fan of speedsters as well.

Themes

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story (Rebooted!)

Got it. I understand now. What would a person that can reverse time for people on touch and that has a ability to increase or slow down the speed of himself and others be classified? Master/Mover/Striker? Are there any combinations that cannot happen? Also, this series is cool. Also, Scion was a god....kinda, and he seemed like a guy with depth. First one I've ever seen really, but I watch anime, so maybe my scope is a bit narrow.

@Isaac

Assuming it were allowed:
Striker would be the core rating, since the power requires touch to even do anything.
Secondary rating would be Trump, since technically, this sounds like it can grant effective superspeed. Power-granting is Trump.
Assuming by "reverse time", you mean it displaces them back to a position/state along their own personal timeline without actually reversing time as a whole, then yes, it might provoke a Mover rating as well, especially in a personal capacity. Rating number/intensity would depend on how far back the PC could rewind.
As far as can be told, there's no specific combination of power ratings that never end up together. There's some unlikely/uncommon combos, but having a classification in one power type doesn't necessarily preclude having another.
There also might be a Brute rating for the effective self-healing it sounds like this would do.

So, in summary: Striker/Mover/Brute/Trump, possibly with a small side of Breaker.

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story (Rebooted!)

Wait, what's up with the numbers? If you've already explained this, though, just say so and I'll look for it again.

@Isaac

If I may ask, to lead with, what do you know about the Worm setting?
This is an AU of that, so there's actually a preexisting power system we're running on.
I can link you, so here: this has all the basics.
https://worm.fandom.com/wiki/Power_Classifications

Sovereign's Will: A Fantasy Roleplaying Game. [CONCLUDED]

Veronica Blackwater

Name: Veronica Blackwater
Species: Human Vampire Lord
Age: 25 (appears 18)
Gender: Female
Height: 5' 8"
Appearance: Veronica appears as a pale young woman, not to a porcelain degree, but more like she could use a bit more sun. Her long black hair falls in mostly straight waves down to her mid-back. Her irises are a bloody crimson hue, with her pupils narrowed to reptilian slits. Her frame rides a balance between curvaceous and athletic, lined beneath supple skin with wiry, compact muscles that tend not to be apparent without a physical inspection. Though she often wears a smile, it is rarely an open-mouthed one, largely to avoid broadcasting her fanged incisors. She tends to smell mostly scentless, as the combination of scentless soaps and an undead body that doesn't decompose leaves her presence mostly muted to mundane means. Her garb is fairly eccentric, all blacks and velvety sanguine reds with a subtle butterfly motif. Actual metal armor is applied sparingly and primarily to her joints, almost as an afterthought, to the point of giving the false impression it's only for decoration. By the metrics of society, her garb is rather immodest, the design and accents often drawing the eye to exposed skin or tight enough to be somehow more provocative than outright absence.

Full Body

Bio

Born far from the Capital in a place within Kindeance that could best be described as "that idyllic village with some farmer", Veronica was an average human daughter to a peasant hunter... aside from a slight hiccup. Born under a good omen, she was blessed with an innate magical gift for "reading fate", a Seer who might one day have been found and trained to be the mystical advisor of this or that hero, guiding them on the path to a glorious destiny. However, as fate would have it, a True Vampire, one Lord Blackwater, who had long-since set down roots after hailing from a land outside Kindeance, unfortunately heard tell of her and sought to turn her as a subordinate to use her gift for himself. The girl, otherwise defenseless aside from her capacity to see her near future, was captured and a year thereafter turned into a similar creature of darkness, lesser and mystically bound by her hated "master's" bond as her Sire.

Over the two years since her abduction, she was trained in the arts of ninjutsu and magic. she had no choice but to be honed into a weapon and tool for her "master", made an unwilling killer and her magic refined further for the sake of making her a more useful tool for foreseeing misfortune and spying upon the Vampire Lord's enemies... when she wasn't used to murder them outright. Unfortunately for him, training her resulted in the resentful little vampire awakening a second aspect of her gift, one that allowed her to avoid the destiny that she could prior only despair at. Through this, she was able to slip the master bond of her Sire and catch him unawares. Caught off guard, the Vampire Lord was torn limb from limb, and in drinking his blood, Veronica fully became a Vampire Lord like her Sire and shattered whatever might have remained of their bond.

Come the morning, her tormenter's remains were reduced to ashes by the sun, and Veronica once more breathed the sweet air of freedom... Though it was tainted by the bitterness of her new "condition" as a Vampire Lord -if a young one, and she was unsure what to do with herself. Despite bloodied hands and a darkened spirit, she hadn't been under her Sire's yoke long enough to taint her morality irrevocably. She was still herself, and she had no intention of being the monster the next hero would slay.

With that determination made, for the safety of innocent lives, she reluctantly made a home in her Sire's former lair and left primarily only to get sustenance, once more taking up a hunter job of her human family in order to have an at least legitimate supply of blood to drink. In such a way, delivering "pre-drained" cadavers to local butchers of nearby towns and villages, she made a simple living on simple coin... along with whatever her Sire's coffers contained. Her "condition" was one she mostly tried to conceal, but in the end, the King had his ways. Long story short, a year after regaining her freedom, at age 20, she was found out, but the fact that she had stayed a "productive member of society" and wasn't going around murdering people unprovoked and generally being a megalomaniac stayed the hands of potential hunting parties. The fact that it was eventually discovered that she had slain the Vampire Lord before her added another element of potential trustworthiness to her, and so, she was approached as a potential agent of the King to be given a chance to truly prove her loyalty and good will to the kingdom.

As such, for the next half decade, Veronica would find herself occasionally acting on behalf of "favors" from the Crown, working as an espionage agent, Seer, and sometimes soldier and scout for the Guard. Collaborations with Matilda, the Head of the Guard, weren't common, but they weren't uncommon either. Over the course of 5 years, the two developed a basic working relationship. They may not necessarily trust each other, but they don't specifically mistrust each-other either. And Veronica would be inclined to trust her back to the orc warrior.

Over the years, Veronica came to be less resentful of her "condition", and with the tentative faith afforded to her by the kingdom, she has come to redevelop a sense of confidence and acceptance. Nowadays, her "condition" is just another part of life... one she expects will be very long, so she has chosen not to wallow in self-pity and depression. Her once concealing garb has been exchanged for borderline proud eccentricity. While she does not explicitly advertise her "condition", she is no longer shamed by or afraid of it. She is a Vampire in the King's Court, who has earned her place through good will, and she'll not let any tell her otherwise.

Come the present day, due to the seriousness of the kingdom's crisis and the desperation involved, Veronica would find herself requisitioned as an investigator, using her divinations to aid in tracking the Prince's kidnappers with the Guard while the main black ops team was off performing their own tasks. It is because her typical place of residence is a quite a fair distance from the Capitol that she was unable to be reached in time to join up with the main team initially.

Skillset

Talants:
Ninjutsu: She has been harshly trained in this collection of fundamental survivalist and espionage techniques, among which are: methods of gathering information and techniques of non-detection, avoidance and misdirection, along with disguise, escape and concealment. She's no stranger to picking locks or disabling traps either. This is the root of her shinobi teachings, one in which she has attained mastery status or near enough to it. Heavy focus. While medicine and archery are also parts of these techniques, she favors them lesser.
Medicine: Her capacity for medical techniques tends towards "field surgery" and making sure injuries aren't immediately lethal. Setting bones. Popping dislocated joints back in. Applying splints, stitches, bandages and salves. She knows where to stab to kill fastest, so she has a pretty good idea how to be more careful when treating certain afflictions. She's not a biology guru or proper doctor; that's for certain. She's just got a good head for improvisation.
Archery: She's a decent shot, but she prefers unaware or otherwise stationary targets. She compensates with her magic to predict her targets' movements for more difficult shots.
Taijutsu: For those times she is trapped in prolonged CQC, she's adequate in the art of unarmed -or lightly armed- combat. Unarmed combat isn't her favorite, but she's not going to get steamrolled. Prefers to disengage and arm herself.
Shurikenjutsu: She is excellent in the art of handling small, bladed weapons, both in CQC and as throwing weapons. This is her preferred fighting style. Fighting fair is for chumps.
Sojutsu/Bojutsu: The art of wielding polearms. Particularly, Veronica favors the spear and scythe. Novice but unconventional. Her most inexperienced but also intuitive martial art and her "passion project". Technically, she's got the basics down pat, but her focus was never open combat under her Sire. That is something she became more familiar with working with the Royal Guard. In other words, she's mostly self-taught, so she tends to fight unconventionally in this art.
Lip Reading: In the course of spying and assassination, she has developed the capacity to roughly read speech from afar.
Parkour: Her vampiric strength makes her an able and acrobatic navigator of unconventional terrain, very useful for infiltration.
Hunter: Her family trade, she is a respectable hand at tracking, trapping and skinning prey, along with camping in the wilds.
Peasant Roots: Knowledgeable in the basics of various "womanly" tasks like cleaning, cooking and sewing.

Racial Traits

True Vampire/Vampire Lord:
Darkvision: Even in pitch black, she can perceive the world in shades of grey. Though even this eyesight cuts off into murk past a certain point. Her long-range vision is otherwise very keen under proper lighting.
Inhuman Physicality: Undeath has removed the normal limits on human musculature, giving her the capacity for peak human levels of physical feats. However, her muscles will still tear from exerting themselves to their fullest capacity, requiring she only do so in bursts and wait a brief while for them to heal. As long as she doesn't push too hard, she can still operate at normal human levels during the wait. While her body isn't exactly any more durable than a human's, she doesn't feel pain as more than an irritant, and most wounds are not lethal, only disabling.
Healing Factor: Her wounds regenerate quickly. Not enough to be all that useful in battle, but outside battle, an hour's rest will mend most wounds, and a night's rest can restore her body entirely, even the loss of her head. Due to the constant nature of the regeneration, she is unable to reattach fully severed body parts. Her regeneration either starts with her mostly intact head or her body if the former is unavailable. Large-scale regeneration rapidly accelerates her bloodthirst's progression.
Undeath: She is unaffected by poison, disease, exhaustion or age.
Thirst: She doesn't need to eat, sleep or breathe, though she still requires some blood to sate her thirst. While as an undead, she technically doesn't need sustenance, much of her vampiric strengths will become less prominent with prolonged abstinence. In addition, much as any hungry creature, she is prone to increasingly large spurts of irritation and bloodlust until sated. She can subsist off animal blood, but sentient blood is far more fulfilling. She can also consume mundane foods, but they give her no nutrition.
Unreflected: She has no reflection, whether it be a mirror, body of water or any other surface.
Sunlight Vulnerability: Though more resistant than a lesser vampire, sunlight is still her bane, burning badly but not lethally unless she remains in prolonged contact. Chop her to pieces and leave her exposed to daylight, and the sun will do the rest in about an hour.
Holy Vulnerability: Certain "holy" or otherwise "sanctified" magics have the capacity to be a special bother to her as an undead.
Averted Weaknesses: As a Vampire Lord, she no longer suffers from some of the weaknesses a typical lesser vampire exhibits. Running water no longer hinders her, and she doesn't need to be invited to cross a threshold of a residence. Wooden stakes are as any other weapon, even if getting stabbed in the heart would still be pretty annoying, for the splinters if nothing else.
Siring: Vampire "reproduction" is fairly simple. While their undead bodies preclude them from being fertile, they can convert other living beings to more of their kind with a transfusion of their blood to a creature that has been drained dry of their own. The recipient will rise a day later as a lesser vampire fledgling, mystically subordinate to their Sire and unable to disobey direct commands. A fledgling that is granted the opportunity to consume a notable quantity of their Sire's blood again will be freed of the bond and become a True Vampire, otherwise known as a Vampire Lord, but only if their Sire was a Vampire Lord themselves. Lesser Vampires can create fledglings, but if the Sire does not become a True Vampire, their fledgling will be left precluded from being able to become a Vampire Lord as well for as long as that state persists.

Spells

Born a Seer when she was human, Veronica's magic revolves around divination, the capacity to view the past, present and future in order to gather information.

Sight of the Fated: Shows her the near future up to five seconds. Allows her to "simulate" her immediate future possibilities without committing to them until she finds one she likes. (eg. she can plan to leap through a window, and she will witness what would occur if she did/who or what is on the other side) She particularly favors using this with her archery. However, the present is always moving at least a little, and she can only make scry attempts so fast. She only has so much time in a given moment to make "guesses" and act on one before the "baseline" of her visions changes. And then she has to put up with the result. If she's facing an aware and skilled opponent, this can be particularly troublesome, especially if she has to waste time using her predictions to avoid attacks on herself rather than returning the favor.

Avert the Destined: Allows her to slip out of "phase" with the interference of the natural course of "destiny". When she enters this state, she becomes imperceptible and intangible to forces of direct mystical origin, shedding any hostile afflictions that currently linger upon her, like curses or bindings. A magical explosion and its immediate integral collateral (shockwave, small debris and such) would wash over her harmlessly, but a thrown steel beam would still ruin her day if not dodged. Divination can't see or target her. She treats magical shields and wards like they don't exist, and the barriers won't even register the intrusion. On the inverse, this separation with the mystical means she cannot affect the world with her other magic in turn until she reverts this state. This spell covers more obscure mystical phenomenon, including the "purifying" effect of the sun's rays on vampires, allowing her to be a "daywalker". (eg. this is what slipped her from her Sire's leash)

The Gift Known as the Present: Allows her to scry distant places and events that are occurring immediately in the now. The further she wants to reach and the more senses she wants to use at the targeted location at once, the more intensive the effort required, so she usually only uses sight and sound. Can be used either for short range strategic glimpses in combat, or ritualistically for spying on distant events. She can target specific individuals, but only if she knows what they look like or otherwise has some manner of catalyst related to them. She can scry any location she has seen personally, as visualization is important to the spell. Though, notably, she can expand the number of "starting points" available to her by panning her vision around a targeted location, her scrying gaze sufficient for the purposes of "marking" new places and people as "seen".

What Has Come Before: Through focused, meditative delving, allows her to wind back the clock of her vision and perceive past events that occurred in a radius of roughly 30 feet from her position. She can wind the clock forward as well, accelerating the "replay" to skip less interesting/relevant material. She can maintain this spell on the move and track events of the past up to the present as fast as she can manage to physically keep up with them. That said, she can only peer back as far as three days, so haste in reaching the "scene of the crime" is still a priority to ensure trails do not go cold.

Equipment

General:
Medium-Sized Brown Backpack: Compact and simple to don and doff.
Change of clothes: Includes favored garb, a brown cloak, and practical full-body coverage wear for sun protection/stealth.
Mundane Rations: Dry foods like jerky, dried fruit and nuts. (Sometimes used to help conceal her "condition".)
Blood Rations: Several thick waterskins with blood of varying types in them (usually animal). A sip every meal period is typically enough to keep her topped off at peak performance.
Scentless Soap: A standard cleanliness measure ground into her to aid non-detection. Applied whenever bathing.
Coin Pouch: A padded, sectioned pouch, made to silence the jingle of coin.

Armament:
Light Armor: Primarily leather over vitals, but some metal on forearms, elbows, knees, lower shins, upper sternum & shoulders.
Sharpened Sai Daggers: Typically a defensive weapon, when weaponized, they make an excellent tool for liberating a victim of their eye sockets' contents, along with scrambling the brain behind them. Veronica uses them like deadly nails, punching precise holes in her foes' vitals.
Throwing Knives: Not particularly deadly unless aimed well, they still make decent distractions if aimed for the face or neck. Passable for melee combat in a pinch. Far more threatening if coated with poison.
Seijaku/Silence - Composite Recurve Shortbow: A bow type useful for firing while mobile. (stored in a leather waterproof case)
Quiver: 30 arrow capacity. (30/30) Strapped to small of her back. Barbed & non-barbed arrows.
Chigetsu/Blood Moon - War Scythe: Bathed in the blood of many lives over the decades, a strange, crimson polearm once belonging to her Sire. One end is mounted with a spearhead and the other with a scythe-head that is bladed on both edges, oriented oddly like a farming tool, rather than a typical war scythe. Normally, this weapon would be rather impractical, but it comes into its own wielded by a vampire's physicality. The scythe has the magical property to shrink down to the size of a sickle for discreet transport or return to normal (takes 5 seconds in either direction). The enchanted weapon's longevity is the result of the property of blood absorption, slowly but surely repairing itself with any sanguine essence that lingers upon its surface.

Miscellaneous/Tools:
Tinderbox: Contains flint, fire steel, and dry cloth soaked in oil.
Infiltration Kit: Includes a small file, lock picks, a small mirror mounted on a metal handle, a set of narrow-bladed scissors and pliers.
Kaginawa/Grappling Hook & Rope: A sturdy, steel hook and a compact bundle of thin but very sturdy and long rope.
Weapon Maintenance Kit: Includes a whetstone, rags, specialized oils, and spare bowstrings.
Medic Kit: Contains bandages, gauze pads, splints, basic salves, alcohol, needles, thread, syrettes, scalpels, whiskey & biting stick.
Pocket Watch: A well-maintained silver-cased device that once belonged to her Sire, it has been quite useful for tracking the sun.
Compass: In good condition. Points north.
Leatherbound Logbook: A coded log of information gathered during investigations. Pencils included.
Maps: A small, leather-bound book. The contents are of a variety of maps of the kingdoms, particularly Kindeance. Also a variety of far more quality, larger maps kept rolled up separately. All maps are kept within a rubber-lined, waterproof case, for preservation.

Other: Blackwater is not her birth name. As a peasant, she had no family name. Rather, Blackwater is a "title" bestowed upon her by her vampiric Sire, a demonstration that she was to be molded like clay into his tool and "family". With his demise, she remains the sole "inheritor" of Blackwater's assets.

She is part of Anderson's team that managed to track the Prince's kidnappers the hard way (with a touch of her divination magic) and will likely be running into Matilda's team at the estate. It is because her typical place of long-term residence is a quite a fair distance from the Capitol that she was unable to be reached in time to join up with the main team initially.