A'ight, people, we've got our first locale coming up.
Battlefield
A series of islands in the sky, filled with ruined stone structures and green lichen, ivy, and grass. The main island can fit eight fighters, and has three smaller floating platforms over it. From Battlefield you can see the desecration that has ravaged the World of Trophies. When the Council of Thirteen took control, they drove fighters away from Battlefield to prevent them from staging an uprising; however, the characters just kept coming back. Only the main island was safe, and quite frankly it wasn't very large.
"Sure thing, gentlemen," Facilier said, making a spin before presenting a tarot card with exactly what Hi-hat requested. "Everything you need to know: right on this card."
Facilier handed the card to Hi-hat. "Now, you're sayin' that we're going to tell 'em of an attack, then come back in later for the Serpent's Eye, correct? Now, I think this job'll be a breeze, on account of my quite obvious charisma. And if you ever need a little magic," Facilier continued, dangling a voodoo amulet in front of his own face, "I think we've got it covered right here."
The bokur leaned over to Shivani. "Not a thing to worry about, ma'am. I fully intend to fulfill my end of the bargain just as I said it, like I said earlier."
Westgate, Black Fall, PA; staying in Isabella Isle, Knightsdale Rows
Appearance
Hair Color:
Dark brown with black motor oil stains, especially in the shoulder areas.
Eye Color:
Dark brown
Ethnicity:
Korean
Physical Appearance:
Ratchet has narrow Asian eyes that are turned inward with the tear ducts at about 4 degrees, with round edges and untouched eyelashes. Ratchet has smile lines near her eyes. Ratchet has a nose with a bit of a bulbous tip, with barely-noticeable blackheads that she over-emphasizes almost to the point of it being rather annoying. When she’s amused, her nostrils flare out as she laughs (not cartoonishly large, but just somewhat noticeable), and she doubles over. Her lips are somewhat thin and stoic, although she prefers a slight smile, just to let people know that behind the grime and fiberglass, she’s a human being. Her ears have attached lobes and do not protrude very far from her head. They are shaped somewhat like a blunt “?”. Ratchet does not wear makeup, since she doesn’t see any point if she’s just going to get her face and body all covered in motor oil anyway.
Ratchet usually ties her hair back in a ponytail using a rubber clamp (she claims that it’s the first thing that she found when she first went into the auto shop, and asserts that she doesn’t give an expand dong about it). Sometimes she forgets the clamp on her nightstand and just gets another clamp from the garage (she has a collection of about five clamps, two of which her father has asked her repeatedly to return). Nevertheless, oil does splatter, and it does get in her hair. (Before you ask, Ratchet does take showers, but she often surrounds herself with engines anyway.)
Ratchet has broad shoulders for a girl and toned arms. Her left forearm is missing due to an accident with a semi truck’s engine block. Instead of a left forearm, she has a three-pound fiberglass gauntlet buckled to her left bicep that has a rip-key flywheel attached to a wheel well where her wrist should be. She has to wear a brace to keep the thing lifted up, since she couldn’t find anything sturdier to support the fiberglass prosthetic. She wears the brace around her waist. The flywheel’s key mechanism is made of an old BeyBlade top and part of a shopping cart’s wheel and pivot. Because she has to work harder to lift her left arm due to the weight of the mechanism; as a result, her left arm is slightly thicker with muscle than her right, and she has a bit of a hanging posture. Ratchet quite honestly does not care what size her breasts are, but if she snaps a string or something by accident she’d have to go buy a B-cup brassiere. She usually just hops into a baggy pair of overalls, making hip/rear size somewhat irrelevant in public, although she does have a typical Korean lower-body type, with bulbous calves and horseradish-shaped thighs (albeit somewhat stretched for her height). She wears size 8 shoes.
Underneath her right breast, below her armpit, Ratchet has a long splotchy birthmark that you could see if you strain to see it (please don’t, first of all, it isn’t that important, second, looking for a birthmark under a boob isn’t the quickest way to a good relationship with anybody). Generally she will have grease spots and oil splatters on her skin all over the place, and will likely smell like gasoline for most of her day. (True friends would like her whether she smelled like a diesel engine or not.)
Ratchet shaves her legs, like, once in a blue moon, since she sees no reason to due to her overalls.
Attire:
Usually, Ratchet just throws on a underwear, a shirt, and some grease-stained, baggy overalls before going about her day. (She likes overalls because she finds the belly pouch very, very useful.) Instead of having pockets, Ratchet wraps a tool belt around her waist that contains the objects that she needs for the day. She has a philosophy of always carrying a wrench and a screwdriver, but whatever else she’s got in there depends on what she’s going out to do. Sometimes she just leaves with a tin of Altoids, her Nintendo 3DS (you never know where you could get a StreetPass), and her wrench and screwdriver.
Ratchet only wears short-sleeved T-shirts because of the need to accommodate her prosthetic left forearm, which has, at the end of the wrist, a flywheel instead of a false hand (the reason for which I will explain later). She has a variety of different colors and patterns, some with logos or designs or images upon them (she has a particularly-worn, somewhat grease-stained Pikachu shirt) that she picks based on the first one on top of the pile in the dresser drawer. Her dark-blue denim overalls have several large grease spots, especially in her chest area and thighs. The overalls have a sizable pocket, about 7” tall and 11” wide. She has a pair of black Converse All-stars with no laces that she always wears (except to band concerts and other formal occasions, in which her attire in general will be formal as a whole), and may or may not put on socks depending on the potential for jeopardy that she could put her foot in that day. If she does decide to do so, she will put on a not-necessarily-matching pair of Hanes socks. She has both white and black socks, and doesn’t give a shake of a wrench to whether or not they’re the same color.
Personality
Personality:
Ratchet is always focused on a task at hand (only her right one, since she doesn’t have a left), when she has one. She will relentlessly pursue a task, but can become focused solely on that task and not much else. (Fortunately, she does not suffer from functional fixedness.) Nevertheless, her work ethic and passion make her an all-the-better fit for the auto shop. Ratchet is passionate about cars and how they work.
Despite having suffered an injury that led to an amputated left forearm, she seems quite mellow about it, and even makes several hand jokes. When not working seriously on something, Ratchet is chill and calm. She sits with her lanky legs out and her arms wrapped around the back of her chair’s seat. Ratchet has a small tic in which she’ll play around with a bolt on her prosthetic, twirling her right index finger around it clockwise. She may fidget, and once or twice check her Instagram or tumblr or something. She often gets wrapped up in sports if she watches them, especially soccer. However, she’s willing to snap right back to work when she is needed.
Ratchet talks about a variety of subjects, such as Doctor Who or Pokémon, and subscribes to shofu’s YouTube channel. She has an appreciation for a variety of different fandoms and/or published works (including the famed Moby-Dick) and has an appreciation for dank memes. She posts often to tumblr, mostly in the form of sketches that she takes crummy iPhone pics of. She’s not quick to pick a fight, but if she hears them fightin’ words tho, she lets her flywheel rip and holds it up as if preparing to rub tire tracks all over the perpetrator’s face. She doesn’t give a crap about the negative connotation within gender that her nickname has acquired in modern times, since she knows that it means a kind of wrench (Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest bothers her a little, though).
In terms of interpersonal relationships, Ratchet certainly likes to talk to people who share any of her interests. She does not get bored with people, and actually has social interactions, contrary to the rumors that spread about her affinity for automobiles. Yes, she enjoys fixing up a car with her papa, but really, people? Ratchet’s all about motors, and that applies to her speech as well; she’s a total motor-mouth. Get her talking about cars, and you’re going to be there for a while. Ratchet, however, is persistent in trying to maintain a person’s attention upon her, and can be a bit pushy or demanding. She never means harm.
Hobbies/Interests:
Model-making (especially cars), video games (especially Mario Kart), drawing (thankfully, she didn’t lose her writing hand!), auto repair, trumpet.
She loves putting model cars together; she finds the entire experience, from cutting out the pieces to piecing them in place to painting and lacquering the whole thing, very rewarding and quite calming.
She’s an ace at Mario Kart, and loves to pick either Toad or Rosalina. She bought both Mario Kart 8 packs and likes the City Tripper and Circuit Special the best out of the kart bodies. She often gets first, but isn’t too fazed by losing. (But she sucks at League of Legends, unlike most of her Korean brethren, including her brother Winston.)
Mostly she just has time for quick sketches and gestures, but if she has time to sit still and draw, she’ll do it.
Ratchet often helps out in her father’s garage, repairing cars for the people of Black Fall. Since she discovered her power, she found it a whole lot easier to help out since she can flick her wrist and bring a dolly with tools over (okay, that’s not exactly how her power works, see the section on her power).
Ratchet, despite having only a single arm, loves to play the trumpet, and had to develop several strategies for maintaining proper intonation without the ability to use her trumpet’s mini-tuning-slide. She plays popular songs and video-game music she finds on the Internet, but also owns a concerto book. She’s been second chair in her school’s top wind ensemble, and the section leader graduated last year, so she’s practicing to be chosen as first chair. (She refuses to touch other people’s instruments. Ew!) She was given a trumpet solo in this year’s marching band field show opener, and is enthralled to be able to play it.
Skills/Talents:
When rollerblading, she can do a special trick in which she twists her left arm and uses the flywheel to do a 360-degree turn. She looks a little awkward while doing it, however, and whether or not that can be called a talent is debatable. Ratchet has exceptional talent in the arts and humanities, and an advanced understanding of single-variable calculus, but kind of glazes over in any life-science topics. She can hold her breath for seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds, and quite literally cartwheel. To compensate for the loss of her left hand, her right hand has become extremely deft, and allows Ratchet to perform card tricks with ease, as well as other delicate tasks.
Ratchet is, however, a bit of a wild driver (habits from experience in playing Mario Kart). For this reason, she has a smaller, more maneuverable car, an old Fiat 500 with a Bluetooth music player bolted to the dash and an iPhone charger plugged into the cigarette lighter (because she’d rather charge her phone than smoke). She and her dad worked on improving the 500’s suspension system in order to keep it from sustaining damage from Ratchet’s driving. She hasn’t gotten killed yet, though, so that’s a plus.
Prized Possession:
Her wrench and screwdriver, which were given to her mother the last Christmas before her mother’s death (2008).
Quote(s):
”An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. You know, like myself.”
“You can call me pushy. That’s really not too far from the truth.”
“I still manage to be pretty handy around the auto shop, despite… you know.”
“It’d probably take a blue shell, a red shell, and a Bullet Bill to get me in a car crash."
History/Bio:
Injae Park, AKA Ratchet, is a first-generation Korean-American born to Jehyun and Evan Park on March 10, 1998. In her younger, more vulnerable years, Injae (known affectionately as “Ratchet” to her father Evan due to her curious habit of twisting objects) had a curious mind and a tactile style of behavior. Until she was about nine, Ratchet lived in the town of Amherst, MA, before moving to Black Fall. She plans to return there for college if she applies and gets in. As a child, Ratchet spent a lot of time in her father’s garage, simply playing around with whichever spare part happened to lie right next to her. (Her father, responsibly, kept her out of the way of any cars he worked on, at least until she was mature enough to have the sense not to herp-a-derp knock over a Ford Mustang’s engine and crack her skull open.)
Ratchet’s power of kinetokinesis first came to light in kindergarten, when, dissatisfied with the slow speed of one of those Fisher-Price backyard mini-coasters, she willed the coaster to move faster and accidentally caused a boy to fall off the swings by immediately removing his kinetic energy and forcing gravity to start over with him. Suffice it to say, she made the little cart move a bit too fast and launched herself into a chain-link fence, breaking her own leg.
Quickly, the paramedics rushed Ratchet to the emergency room, where they informed the Parks of an abnormality in Ratchet’s DNA, indicative of a Meta-human. Suffice it to say, they were required by law to register Ratchet in the NEST database. Of course, neither of the Parks were happy that Ratchet was being treated like a convicted felon. The bureaucrats, however, allowed the Parks to stay in Amherst until any noticeable development occurred in Ratchet’s powers (under strict scrutiny, of course). (Perhaps the fact that Ratchet freaking broke her leg helped them with their discretion.)
Ratchet managed to live a fairly normal life, although awareness of her powers allowed her to experiment with them. For instance, she would roll a Hot Wheels die-cast car across the garage floor and stop it with a motion, before causing another Hot Wheels car to move using that same kinetic energy. She continued to hang around her father’s garage, and her father even began to teach her the ropes of auto repair.
Ratchet’s mother was diagnosed with leukemia in 2006; she lost the battle to cancer in 2008, but lived to see her daughter hit puberty and begin to blossom into a good, strong young woman. Mrs. Park knew, and appreciated, Ratchet’s love for machines, and acknowledged Ratchet’s desire to help her, even though she knew that Ratchet couldn’t. She knew she was terminal by the time December came in 2008, and rushed to buy Ratchet her treasured wrench and screwdriver before finally passing.
Ratchet lost her arm in 2010, when she was in seventh grade. Her father, sleepily working on a Peterbilt’s engine, jerked a winch too hard. Unfortunately, the cables were too worn-out to support the sudden movement, and the engine fell, banging a corner and shattering Ratchet’s left arm, right below the elbow. Miraculously, the engine block spared Ratchet’s left arm’s joint, but the doctors had to amputate everything below that. To make it up to her, her father resolved to build her prosthetic himself, with Ratchet’s input. By this point, Ratchet knew a lot more about her power over kinetic energy, and discussed plans with her father about her prosthetic limb. They didn’t have the technology available to the public then to create artificial neurons and therefore neural connections to a prosthetic hand, but that didn’t stop Ratchet and her father from crafting a metal forearm from a shopping cart, a BeyBlade (or two, since they accidentally snapped the first one trying to fit it into the wheel well), and three pounds of fiberglass.
2011 proved a turning point in terms of Ratchet’s powers, since that was the year that she took a physical science course and learned about the conservation of energy, and gained a fuller, more in-depth understanding of her abilities. (Knowledge of her powers certainly made the class a lot easier, more so than that ruddy life-science garbage.) Curious Ratchet continued to experiment with the mechanics of her ability, and even learned to play video games using her power, manipulating the control stick or D-pad with little bursts of energy from her flywheel arm. (She was SO glad when Nintendo included the 3DS stand accessory with Kid Icarus: Uprising!)
Eventually, Mr. Park had to move his business from Amherst to Black Fall because of Ratchet’s developing power over kinetic energy. There, she attended high school, having a generally normal life at school and helping her father in the garage at home (while keeping up with her homework; Koreans have standards!). She took marching band, concert band, and auto shop, waiving out of foreign language due to her proficiency in Korean. She just finished her AP Physics 1 and AP English Language and Composition classes, crossing her fingers that she would get 5’s.
After her pre-summer band camp, Ratchet, with her family, left for Verthaven, planning to stay for about a month. (The fact that one of the districts in Verthaven shared the name of one of her favorite video game characters quite amused her.) Primarily, she is visiting her family, and they are staying with their father’s sister, who has a daughter younger than Ratchet.
Relationships
Family:
Evan Park—Father
Jehyun Lee Park—Mother (deceased)
Winston Park—Brother
Sonmi Kim—Aunt
Kate Kim—Cousin
Dynamics:
Evan Park | Familial Love | Father | ”Dad might be cluttered, overworked, and a little on the dopey side, but he’s still my dad, there for me every time. I mean, know any other dads that’ll make you a prosthetic out of a BeyBlade?”
Winston Park | Classic Brother-Sister Love/Annoy Relationship | Younger Brother | ”Sometimes I’m tempted to let my wheel fly and drag Winnie, in his chair, away from his little League of Legends game. Mostly ‘cause that’s all he talks about.”
Sonmi Kim | Cool Aunt | ”I think awesomeness runs in the family whenever I see my aunt.”
Kate Kim | High Positive Regard | ”Always, always look forward to seeing good old Kate. She’s a lovely younger cousin, and I like playing with her. Though she shouldn’t mess with my trumpet stuff…”
Abilities
Power Class:
Elemental (Energy)
Power:
Kinetokinesis: The ability to control a body of mass’s potential energy and transform it into kinetic energy. She can manipulate another body's kinetic energy to transform that potential energy, essentially giving an object an indirect “shove.” To do this, she can take energy from a different, moving body, or a moving part of a body of mass, and transfer it to a different, resting body. This, however, causes the moving body from which Ratchet leaches the kinetic energy to come to a stop, its movement converted back to potential energy.
Ratchet can therefore use her power to make an engine turn or a motor run by focusing her power upon a shaft, cog, or piston. She finds it easier to move the internal mechanisms of an engine rather than an entire car or bus because of the complexity of the machine and the fact that if she tried to use her power to move the car itself there would be a horrible grinding noise that signified the destruction of the engine (learned that the hard way).
Ratchet is well aware that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed; the loss of her left arm both hindered her and helped her. Instead of opting for a fake hand or a hook or something, Ratchet instead had a metal forearm with a flywheel embedded in the wrist joint installed into her arm. Ratchet found it somewhat difficult to construct the flywheel mechanism with only one hand to work with, but with a couple old BeyBlades and some help from her father, she could pull (get it?) off the job.
tooconfusing;didn'tunderstand: She moves stuff by making other things stop moving.
Limits:
In the very simplest terms: inertia, the tendency for an object at rest to remain at rest. In order for Ratchet to properly use her ability, she must overcome the inertia of that body with enough kinetic energy. Otherwise, she might as well try and move a brick wall.
Ratchet cannot obtain kinetic energy from too many sources at once, which is why she can’t just snap her fingers and have the kinetic energy of the air itself at her disposal (also, that would probably kill someone). She compensates for this with her flywheel; contrary to what you may think, however, this does not provide Ratchet an endless supply of movement, since that would be both OP and scientifically inaccurate.
Ratchet also has to deal with the force of friction, which prevents her from being a perpetual motion generator. To keep a body constantly moving, she must re-spin her left arm’s flywheel and continually transfer energy into the body, like shoveling coal into a steam locomotive’s boiler. She may be able to compensate for this for a while, but for larger objects this proves a problem. Ratchet’s ability is inversely proportional to the mass of the body she tries to use her ability on, even if she does have the flywheel which can activate kinetic energy for her to use.
One thing to note: this power does NOT mean levitation. Whenever asked if she could levitate things, Ratchet scoffs and asks if the questioner knows the basic laws of physics. She can’t defy gravity. The least she can do is constantly remove kinetic energy, but even then she can’t keep up with gravitational acceleration.
Weaknesses/Drawbacks:
Attempts to use her power on massive objects will result in cramping; overexertion will cause Ratchet to pull a muscle. This is because the energy that she indirectly exerts must overcome the body’s inertia, as explained above. Also, Ratchet will become tired if she has to keep yanking the flywheel’s rip key over and over again; this gets progressively worse as the object she tries to move increases in mass.
Other:
Sample Post:
Mother of pearl, why won’t this plane take off?!
Injae Park, A.K.A. Ratchet (for her mechanical prowess, NOT as a derogatory term) fidgeted in her somewhat-uncomfortable economy-class seat on an American Airlines passenger jet. She was sorely tempted to will the kinetic energy away from one of those baggage-carrier trucks and push it into the airplane; only her knowledge that trying it would give her a hernia kept her from doing just that.
She flicked the wireless switch off her Nintendo 3DS and checked her Pokémon Alpha Sapphire game. The Dusknoir on the bottom screen bobbed up and down as she moved the model of May around the map using her right index finger. A little pastel-pink bubble hovered over Dusknoir’s icon, signaling its desire for cupcakes.
She pulled out her 3DS’s touch stylus from the back of the console; just as she did that, however, she heard a loud DING, announcing the beginning of the safety-and-regulations video that played before every flight. “Thank you for flying American Airlines…” it began.
Ratchet knew all this already. Pull on the straps to inflate the thingy, put all carry-on whatchamacallits in the overhead place. She rolled her eyes and looked casually out the window.
As section leader of her school band’s trumpet section, Ratchet felt that she had a need to memorize the show music. She had stuffed an older version of the show’s opening production in her pocket just to memorize the melody. She pulled it out, unfolded it carefully, and began to hum her part, pinning the sheet to her lap with her flywheel and miming the fingerings with her right hand. Ratchet winced as she heard the wheel creak. Oh, gosh, that was going to annoy people. She would have to oil that. She had convinced her dad to let her take her trumpet on vacation, and she luckily had a bottle of valve oil on her. She could probably use that.
Um, right after they reached a cruising altitude.
Ratchet felt the airplane lurch forward and taxi onto the runway. She looked out the window, away from her opener. The turbines whirled faster and faster, making a high-pitched whine that signified that the plane was soon taking off. Ratchet folded her paper back up and stuck it in her pocket as the plane surged forth, powered by its jet engines.
THE EXPAND HAS COME