I have done everything in my power to stop it, but it wasn’t enough. All the years that my company has devoted to scientific advancement, to helping people…to curing disease….
They say that there is nothing that can be done. They say that I should accept this, that I’ve tried everything. Despite my best efforts, my body is shutting down, my insides liquefying within me, even as I stand here watching the city that I love crumble. I will die knowing that I’ve failed my city in ways that most people can’t even imagine. I’ve made mistakes, and I will answer to those when I meet my Maker. Though some of my actions may have been foolhardy, I had only the best intentions.
But you know what they say about the Highway to Hell and good intentions.
It was a mistake to allow a shipment of advanced weaponry to fall into the hands of street gangs. Though I knew that there would be some civilian casualties that resulted from the turf war that would be enhanced by my guns, which were more or less hand held blaster cannons, I thought it was a small price to pay for the gangs to eradicate themselves.I believed that the sacrifice of a few would outweigh the benefit to the many, that their sacrifice would be for the greater good.
Unfortunately, I was wrong.
Very wrong.
While at the time I was infuriated when one of Lost Haven’s masked vigilantes destroyed my stockpile of weapons, costing my company over half a billion dollars in losses, I’ve come to realize that it was for the best, and I’ve done a lot to in the time that’s passed since then to make amends for my past sins. However, in some ways I feel that it is too little too late.
When I first received my diagnosis, I thought that the doctors were fools. There was nothing that I couldn’t fix. I’d never even heard of Snyder’s Disease, and up until that day I’d thought that I’d heard of everything. However, I was ignorant about Snyder’s Disease because it is exceedingly rare, having only been known to have affected twelve people in history. Soon after I learned of my illness, I shifted the focus of RenCo to finding a cure. The experiments we conducted ran the gamut from DNA manipulation to gene splicing. Not even human cloning was off the table, yet the results were…varied.
The last experiment before this so-called Pax Metahumana crisis was both a success and a stunning failure. The result of that experiment was an amazing display of how far science has advanced, and proved that RenCo would be on the forefront of scientific advance for years to come. However, the subject of that experiment was…unstable.
Still, I was left with hope. There is no cure for Snyder’s Disease, but I am determined to leave no stone unturned in my search for that cure. Once that cure is discovered, I will personally lead the charge to eradicate disease the world over. I may have caused great harm to countless people in a misguided attempt to help, but I will make things right.
It depends on how powerful the constructs are, and how you use it, really.
If you go and draw, say, every comic book, video game, and movie character you can think of, and they have all their powers somehow, yes. Completely overpowered and IMO, kind of random and silly.
But if it you use the abilities sensibly and it makes sense in game, it can be quite interesting. But my concern with a powerset like that is that it can easily fall into camp, which wouldn't quite fit with this setting. But if it's done right, it can absolutely work.
The other idea I had was for someone whose power was to bring to life the things they drew, but I guess something like that would be too overpowered, eh? XD
Oh snaaaaaaap it's a thing! A thing it took me forever to post because I wasn't happy with it over and over again. I haven't 100% decided on a starting city, but I'm considering dropping her in Pacific Point, like a lurid hydrogen bomb.
Character you have created: Caroline Lewis Alias: Babel Speech Color: DeepPink Character Alignment: Villain Identity: Known Character Personality: Babel is entropy in action: a disaffected, destructive adrenaline junkie who now finds herself with the ability to fulfill every whim, appetite and revenge fantasy she ever had. There's no plan, no grand ambition, no long-term goal other than burning through life like a roman candle and tearing down the comfortable little illusions of a broken society. She's a one-woman circus, and everyone's getting a free ticket.
Uniform/costume: Caroline herself is thin, her face long and a little too pale, crowned with a punkish, neglected mess of bright pink hair and glittering with a number of cheap piercings. Most of her life til now has been spent comatose in thrift store throwouts, threadbare stockings and hoodies and bad heavy metal t-shirts.
In contrast, her 'working' costume is a well-tailored carnivalesque outfit that was intended for an upmarket casino hostess: A glossy lycra catsuit the same deep, lurid pink as her hair, belted at the waist and stitched with six black diamonds in a playing card style, the ensemble completed with shoulder-length gloves and heeled over-the-knee boots in matching black patent leather. You know, like a comic book. Not practical? Maybe. But when all you have left is making an impression, why stop at the ankle?
She keeps two Glock-18 automatic pistols tucked into the belt, the slides repainted in pink and engraved in silver glitter -- one reading 'Eat Me', the other 'Drink Me'.
Origin Info/Details: Babel was an experiment that both succeeded and failed. First a happy accident; then an unhappy one. Remember Darrow Engineering? They may be a lot of things, but they're not quitters. The loss of Dr. Gaster and xenohybrid experiment BPE-45A (Yeah. Her.) was a setback to their psionic tinkering, but while they lost the subject, they'd learned a lot. They still had a wealth of research, a clear agenda, considerable resources and powerful backers greedy or frightened enough to want that power in their hands.
With stakes that high, "ethics" is just a word.
And that's how we got the Babel project: a grand attempt to create organisms that could access and influence what they called the noosphere -- informational space. A tall order, and one that required raw material. A lot of raw material. Living material. Recidivists, junkies, the homeless; people nobody would care about or miss, supplied in secret to covert facilities by shadowy third parties or corrupt law enforcement. Deniable. Disposable. And Caroline Lewis was all of these things. A deeply troubled young woman who had lost the battle against her inner demons a long time ago and finally fallen so far down her own spiral of substance abuse and self-hatred that even the thugs she'd found shelter with had left her to overdose or die in a drunken fistfight with a moving train.
Despite her penchant for self-destruction, tests showed Lewis as one of the most promising specimens by far: in fact, she was a latent natural psychic in potentia, who only needed a touch of biological coaxing to blossom into rich, useful material for the project -- material that would then be harvested, cultured, and put to better use.
But history has a way of repeating itself. Impossibly and for no understandable reason, the subject activated before the altered brain could be removed. The half-baked specimen was unleashed, and the facility was burned out to the last living thing.
Guess they didn't learn as much as they thought.
The final punchline to this bitter joke is that the source of the girl's psychic potential is a small, anomalous brain tumor, inoperable and steadily growing, which allowed the unnatural treatment to take root, almost seeming to welcome it. By degrees, it is both twisting her brain into increasing states of mental power and ever so slowly killing her. She has a limited, stolen supply of an experimental medication, Noussphairaretroamphetamine 44 (abbreviated to Nupharamine, or just "Noose" on the black market) that stabilizes her condition and allows her to exert greater control over herself, but in one last, cruel twist of irony, the tablets are damagingly addictive when taken over an extended time, taking a toll on her even as they ease her burden.
Hero Type (Select one): Psychic Power Level (Select one below): Street/City Powers (Be Specific):
Psychohazard: Babel radiates madness like an isotope. Where she goes, a whirlpool of psychic chaos goes with her, and unlike most metahumans, she doesn't so much employ her powers as try with all the willpower she can muster to keep it under control. Restrained, her influence manifests as overexposed vision and chromatic aberration, images splitting apart into flickering red, green and blue planes like a malfunctioning LCD monitor. Unleashed, her presence dramatically warps the perceptions and sanity of those around her, its intensity ranging from confusion and disorientation to mass hysteria. People collapse, scream, hallucinate, attack one another, and gradually lose control of language, regressing into an odd form of glossolalia. The closer to her epicenter one draws, the worse it becomes.
As if this weren't enough, she is vulnerable to rare, psychoactive seizures which tremendously swell the power of her abilities while completely incapacitating her control over them. Paradoxically, it is at her most vulnerable that she becomes the most dangerous.
Hallucinopath: When in control of herself, Babel can influence the nature of the illusions she spawns, and through that, the people experiencing them. In accepting the evidence of their senses, people find themselves playing by her rules.
1.5 Second Sight: Babel's affliction dilates her perception of time, allowing her to instinctively 'see' 0.5 to 2 seconds into the future. While so short as to be useless for planning, this expanded awareness has a critical effect on her aim, physical instincts and reaction time, giving her the appearance of having superhuman reflexes when in fact her physique is normal, and she's simply started moving a second before a shot is fired.
White Noise: It's not that Babel is immune to mind reading; It's just that attempting to mentally probe or restrain her is like flying a light aircraft into a hurricane. To a psychic or sensitive, her mind reads as raw, lurid chaos, a raging pink vortex that doesn't repel them, but rather tries to drag them in and eat them alive.
Attributes (Select one at each category):
Strength Level: Normal human Speed/Reaction Timing Level: Normal human speed/Uncanny reflexes (precognition) Endurance: Normal human Agility: Normal human/5x depending on illness and drug use. Intelligence: Average. Fighting Skill: Somewhat trained
Resources: Minimal -- if she wasn't able to take what she wanted, she wouldn't know where her next meal was coming from. Weaknesses: Pyrrhic Victory: Babel's greatest strength is also her most dangerous flaw: Her own power is slowly killing her. Restraining her psychohazard ability taxes her greatly, even painfully, and though rare, her random seizures can leave her hemorrhaging, crawling on her hands and knees.
Addict: A dependance on experimental, psychoactive medication to stay in control is its own set of problems.
How Can You Challenge a Perfect, Immortal Machine: Since Babel's abilities are almost exclusively mind-affecting, robotic adversaries, drones or those otherwise completely immune to psychic influence naturally counter her main advantage, leaving her to rely on her precognition window and her capable but limited combat skill.
Supporting Characters:
Cheshire Cat: Only Babel can see or hear this taunting, elusive monster. It has to be a figment of her fevered imagination, yet it sometimes knows things it shouldn't possibly know...
Rabbit Hole gang: The Rabbit Hole is a seedy "villain bar" frequented by C-list bad guys unlikely to ever make the big time.
Tommy Trollface: A former mob triggerman, Tommy's life was changed after an accident during a shootout in a chemical plant with a vigilante hero left his face permanently twisted into an uncanny replica of the Trollface meme. Though initially embittered, Tommy has since embraced his new persona and is even considered something of a folk hero amongst the bulk of internet culture. If he had a voice actor, it would be Gilbert Gottfried.
Professor Amstrad: After being diagnosed with terminal cancer during the height of the cold war, this brilliant scientist replaced most of his body with mechanical parts, attempting to future-proof himself using the finest cutting-edge computer technology 1981 had to offer. The result is now something both impressively ahead of its time and laughably obsolete. Though something of a laughing stock amongst the meta community, it's never wise to underestimate the old professor. He may be a stubborn traditionalist, but he is still a genius, and his assault robots are no less lethal for being made of ribbon cables and cheap plastic.
Killa Deth: A hereditary metahuman and rap artist who inherited abnormal size and comparative super-strength from his father, an unnamed superhero who didn't stick around to pay child support. Despite his name, Killa Deth is actually a chilled-out vegetarian and not given to violence. Unless you badmouth his mixtape, in which case he'll pulp your skull with his bare hands.
Do you know how to post pictures on RPG boards?:
It was a warm and sunny day in the garden maze. Insects chirped happily in well-tended flower beds. Birds sang from hidden perches amongst shady trees. Dandelion blossoms floated gently on the still and breezeless air. And for mile after mile in every direction, the maze stretched out, a deep, shady labyrinth of tall, green hedges, walling it all safely in.
It was a very calm and peaceful place.
At the center of the garden, on the trim, green grass, sat a long, low table draped with a white cloth, set as though for a tea party. At its head sat a dark-haired young girl of perhaps seven, dressed in blue and white frills, the other seats filled by a number of floppy, friendly-looking stuffed toy animals arrayed in their own little chairs.
With practiced manners, the girl picked up the teapot and poured, a stream of milky, violet fluid that smelt of hospitals and antiseptic bubbling from the spout. Setting down the pot, she took the lid from the sugar bowl, which was filled with small, plastic medical tablets, pink at one end, blue at the other. She dipped her spoon and emptied the pills into her cup, stirring vacantly. It was better to have one spoonful, but sometimes she needed two, for that was simply how things were done. She took a small sip, swallowing it down. It tasted like nothing at all.
The girl, whose name was Caroline, kicked her legs under the chair, back and forth, her thoughts empty. There was no bother to think of anything. It was a lovely day and she had only to wait here until her mother came for her, which would surely not be long now.
She had just started taking another sip when there came floating through the still, warm air a smooth, beguiling voice that didn't sound like anyone she knew. Caroline looked up, blinking as surprise slowly surfaced from beneath her placid thoughts.
"Though thy slumber may be deep," it crooned, "Yet thy spirit shall not sleep; There are shades which will not vanish; There are thoughts thou canst not banish..."
The girl's head tilted curiously as a wide, bright, toothsome smile appeared at the far end of the table, bobbing along the edge of the cloth.
"...By a power to thee unknown..."
Around the smile, a cat's head faded into view, followed by a long, plump body and a swirling, question-mark tail.
"...Thou canst never be alone."
"What a curious song," observed Caroline, blinking slowly. Though she had been content here with her tea and her dear animal friends, her thoughts now felt clouded and suddenly unquiet. She struggled to speak. "Wherever did you come from, mister cat?"
"Why, nowhere." the cat replied, smiling, "The same as you."
"Oh." The girl's eyes dropped. She stared vacantly down into her rippling cup of violet liquid. Her stomach rebelled, gurgling and twitching. "I feel... ever so queer, of a sudden." she said, softly. "Not well at all."
"Truly?" the cat paced sidelong in front of her, brushing her comfortingly with its tail, in the manner of felines. "Perhaps you would feel better if you drank a little less tea."
"But it's a tea party. One must drink tea at a tea party."
"Ah? But are you drinking tea because it is a tea party, or is it merely a tea party because you are drinking tea?"
Caroline's brow creased as she wrestled with the odd question. She went to take another sip, but faltered, held back, something nagging at her fogged mind.
"...Do you suppose mother will come soon?" she asked the cat, "I must wait here until she comes to collect me. But..." she trailed off.
"Perhaps we should go and find her?" the cat got up, stretching its forepaws and arching its back contentedly. "The Caroline I know was never much fond of doing what she was told."
"But I don't know the way through the maze." the girl protested.
"But I do." the cat declared. It coiled its way around the teapot, drawing close, eyes luminous above its glowing grin. "Come with me, Caroline. The way is simple, if you know it; Not out, but through. All you need do is open your eyes, and wake up."
"I can't wake up if I'm not asleep!" she admonished.
"Well then," grinned the cat, padding right up and smiling into her face, "You must be asleep."
The girl stared.
The teacup slid from her fingers and shattered, pink and blue tablets scattering across the tablecloth.
Whoah, is it supposed to light up like--
EEG just--
The girl's eyes fluttered open.
Oh sh--
LOCKDOWN LOCKDOWN START THE BAFFLERS
There was a horrific noise, like a detuned string section being slammed into an active microphone. Pain burst through her head. A woman started screaming into an intercom. A mirror-faced hazard suit standing over her swore and staggered backward, spinning cranial saw in hand, overturning a metal tray full of vicious stainless steel instruments with a tremendous crash that didn't stop but grew louder and louder and louder, joining the tumult of shouting and the pandemonium of warped, deafening noise.
The girl sat bolt upright, tearing a respiration mask from her face and dragging a ridged rubber tube out of her mouth, retching as she felt it come up her throat, trickling violet fluid. She heaved down breaths, facing her pale, pink-haired reflection in a mirrored observation window, coughing and blinking in the sterile glare of blinding hospital spotlights. No longer a child but a young woman, slumped upon a molded surgical table in an enclosed, glistening cell of shining white tile, air thick with the overpowering smell of antiseptic, surrounded by glowing readouts that flickering on wall-mounted machines straight out of a science fiction film.
"What the f..." The room heaved to one side and she slid from the table, falling heavily to her knees, fighting the urge to throw up. "What the fuhhh..."
Everything lurched and spun. Caroline clutched at her head, choking back a scream as her brain throbbed, burning in her head and swirling outward, thick and sticky like candyfloss and fallout. One of the machines sparked and went black. Alarms started blaring from outside.
A gloved hand grabbed hold of her roughly, the faceless, white-suited surgeon pulling at her, the electric saw still whirring in his other hand. She kicked, struggled, cried out, threw the bedsheet at him in an irrational, desperate reflex. The figure panicked, shrieking and flailing at the white fabric as though it were a scorpion, driving the whining saw through it and into his leg, stabbing again and again, yelling get it off, get it off GET IT OFF ME. Blood sprayed like sawdust from a mill, painting the pristine tiles red, and still he kept slashing, hacking and babbling until he sheared through the tendons of his leg and collapsed, thrashing helplessly in a spreading scarlet pool.
Caroline struggled to get to her feet, trying to raise herself from the blood-slick floor on shaking, nerveless arms. It was happening everywhere, now. The intercom filled with bellowing, panic, madness. Facility staff were attacking one another in the corridors, shooting at things that weren't there, doubled up on the floor in fits of hysteria. The men in the security station were laughing and slapping each other on the back, convinced they were watching cartoons. The walls seemed to melt, to run like quicksilver. Her head was pounding like a cheap apartment over a shitty nightclub and she could feel her poisoned mind spilling over, expanding like a nuclear accident, contaminating every living thing it touched.
one and two are overloaded-- --cinnamon the cinnamon we have to-- Go near that door son and I will put you down without a second-- /It's on fire it's burning-- MY BABY, MY BABY'S IN THERE--
She heard gunshots, saw silhouettes in the dark mirror with each muzzle flash, bodies slumping and falling as they ran for the door to her room. There was another shower of sparks and an electronic screech before the monitors blanked out and the room was plunged into pitch darkness, bathed in red emergency lighting a second later. The corridors outside rang with tinny, hysterical laughter, clunking metal and unhinged, animal howls that couldn't have been human but were. Caroline slumped on the wet floor, laughing weakly along with them, pushed beyond endurance as her mind continued to seep like radiation out of her skull. She was Chernobyl. She was Babel. She was Babylon. It was a horror movie, and everyone was the monster.
Fala la lan-
BURN IT TORCH THE FREAKING WING IF YOU HAVE TO JUST KILL IT KILL IT NOW KIT IT RAW KOIL LO L̶A ̨X̨F͡I Ļ̨́͢͠À̡̛͡ Z̧͞O ̴̛͠͝F̴̵͏H̕̕G̨̀̕̕F͡͠í͝͠͞I̴͘͘͡į̛͢͞͞i~̴̕
There was one final gunshot.
She stood in the pouring rain and watched it burn, barefoot in a backless hospital gown, soaked to the skin. Gun in one hand, plastic bottle in the other, coastal winds beating at her remorselessly. It all looked so small from outside. Just another ugly warehouse in a row of ugly warehouses. Nothing to suggest the six levels underneath it that were now going up in greasy, colorful smoke. Nothing to hint at the shrink-wrapped bodies and the floating brains.
Caroline tore her red-rimmed eyes away from the roaring inferno, staring off into the vague glow of night. The cat's smile beckoned from a streetlight far ahead, its tail flicking idly below, and she followed, as though in a trance.
Radiance watched as the last giant Venus flytrap withered and died under the stress of her electrical attack. With the final man eating plant fallen, she turned her attention to the young girl who she had watched summon the plants from beneath the factory floor. The young woman wore an expression of pure hatred.
“You bitch!” The young woman screamed with murderous rage.
Radiance was about to make a retort when something grabbed her arm out of nowhere. Before she realized what was happening, she had been pulled off of her feet and toward the ceiling, where she found herself in the clutches of the spider woman, Black Widow. Before Radiance can react, the spider woman is on her, stunning her with a series of punches to her face.
“Care to try that on me?” Black Widow mocked as she tossed Radiance from her web, sending her crashing hard to the concrete floor. Not pausing to gloat, Black Widow leapt down to the floor, straddling Radiance. The vile spider woman began producing her silk-like web and began to encase the electromancer in a cocoon-like web.
Radiance struggled against the spider woman, however Black Widow quickly encased her lower body in the web as she moved up the heroine’s body.
“It’s useless to struggle, but by all means, keep fighting. It only prolongs your suffering.” Black Widow taunted as she leaned in within centimeters of Radiance’s face and bared her sharp, vampire-like fangs.
“Didn’t anybody ever warn you...?” Radiance started to say.
“About what?” Black Widow asked, confused by the question.
“Bug zappers.” Radiance said as she grabbed Black Widow’s arm while simultaneously unleashing as much electricity as she could muster in her dazed state. Black Widow cried out and her body writhed in pain as over 200,000 volts coursed through her body. Radiance held onto Black Widow for several excruciating seconds, and when she finally did let go, the spider woman’s body flew several feet away from her. Radiance lay there for a moment as she gathered her wits, and then slowly got to her feet after freeing herself from what remained of Black Widow’s webbing. She then went over to the spider woman who was laying motionless on the factory floor and checked her pulse.
Good, she’s alive. Radiance thought to herself.
After being satisfied that the vile spider woman would survive, she stood and readied herself for the next wave. However, she began to feel unsteady on her feet. The combination of the injuries that she had sustained in the fight with Black Widow as well as the energy she had spent was too much for her, and she collapsed to the ground where darkness took her, at least momentarily.
Member
Eddie Brock,
adncod,
Captain Uni,
Torack
