Rogues Operating in Phoenix, Arizona
No one is really sure of this man's name, his background, or even if he's really from Panama. All that is known for sure is that he is an expensive and mysterious hitman, charging upwards of 20,000 dollars. He's worth every penny. He is a favorite of the Cartel, though they are not his sole employer by any means. While the Panamanian has the metahuman ability to inspire fear in people near him, his main marketable skill is his gunfighting prowess- even without using his powers he is able to take on larger groups and come out on top.
The woman known as Last Chance is a controversial figure. She is armed with incredible, futuristic technology- some kind of advanced energy weapon and a device that can create a nearly impenetrable shield of energy. When first encountered, she was killing seemingly random people in the Phoenix area- a college student, a housewife, even a ten-year-old. However, her victims were by no means indiscriminate- each was very carefully selected and staked out before the kill. When captured by the police, she claimed to have traveled back in time in an effort to prevent a horrible dystopian dictatorship from taking power in the next fifty years. According to her story, each of her victims played a small but integral part of this government's rise. She had no identification, no fingerprints on file, nothing to confirm or deny her strange story. Some believed her story, others thought she was merely a madwoman who had gotten ahold of experimental tech. Whatever the case, she soon escaped and continued her killing spree.
When James Perez, by his own claims a descendant of Spanish nobility, was rejected from the Olympic fencing team no one thought much of it. Then Perez came back calling himself Hidalgo, dressed in the latest 17th century fashion and wielding a rapier he claimed was owned by one of his ancestors. The sword, as it turned out, was magically enchanted to cut through anything, anything at all. Bank vaults, reinforced concrete, body armor, the skin of superhumans. Stung by the rejection, Perez set out to "restore honor to his family name" through targeting those he had thought besmirched it, as well as outrageous and colorful crimes, such as robbing a bank only to give all the loot to a homeless man. Hidalgo and Sixgun have crossed paths more than once, primarily because Hidalgo considers Sixgun a worthy foe and will attempt to engineer a confrontation between the two merely to give an otherwise ordinary crime "spice".
Serge Ionescu, formerly a member of Communist Romania's secret police, runs a perfectly legitimate business. Panopticon Security offers surveillance and protection to various high-value clients throughout the Southwest: banks, casinos, armored cars, museums, even private homes. However, even with as much as he makes legitimately, Ionescu moonlights as a consultant for criminals under the codename Argus. For a hefty fee, he is willing to sell all kinds of information on potential targets: passwords, floorplans, patrol routines, psychological profiles of targets, and so on. His work is absolutely painstaking, every little detail being accounted for and meticulously analyzed. Ionescu does not act on any of this knowledge himself. Planning and executing a robbery, cybercrime, blackmail, or hit is the client's duty, Argus merely tells them what they need to know.
While he is a competent personal combatant, what makes Argus truly dangerous is his ability to find out secrets through patient detective work (not to mention wiretaps, hidden cameras, and drones). In case he needs insurance, Argus holds evidence (real or manufactured) of the dalliances and sins of most major law enforcement figures in the Southwest. In addition, he has even been able to piece together the secret identities of several prominent superheroes. Ionescu is choosing to keep this knowledge to himself until it is needed.
Hector Espinosa is the Cartel's man in Phoenix and one of their top earners. Having come north in the late Aughts, he ruthlessly seized control of the drug market by outright murdering several local druglords and intimidating the rest into working for him. Whether you're buying a dime bag of weed or hundreds of pounds of cocaine, the money is going straight to Espinosa, and from there to Juarez.
While El Rey commands the services of a disciplined and well-armed group of former special forces operators, he takes great pleasure in personally killing particularly troublesome foes. A deadly martial arts expert, El Rey is entirely capable of killing a man with his bare hands and indeed prefers it. Sixgun hopes to someday take him down, but it will be a massive undertaking.
One of the Juarez Cartel's more eccentric members, the man known only as El Tecnico (the technician) is their chief chemist, responsible for setting up and overseeing the manufacture or refining of drugs north of the border. One of the country's foremost chemists, he is capable of creating military grade chemical weapons or explosives with minimal resources and have even dabbled in the odd superweapon (on a theoretical basis). Additionally, he is also a masked luchador. At all times, El Tecnico wears a red and black mask and wrestling trunks. Not even his boss El Rey has seen his face. El Tecnico is actually very capable as a wrestler, demonstrating expertise in various grappling arts such as jiu-jitsu, hapkido, and Greco-Roman. The man views himself as a wrestler first and scientist second, though the rest of the world recognizes his scientific talent is what makes him truly dangerous.
