[OOC] Heroes II Sign-Ups & Discussion

Hey guys, just got internet back. I'll be rockin and rollin once I get caught up and have a decent amount of time available to write.

- Secret Identity -



Name: Felicia Cutter

Age: 23

Gender: Female

Nationality: American

Appearance: A full year of living in a sewer hasn’t left Felicia looking very appealing. With consistently ragged clothing, platinum blonde hair streaked with dirt, and a feral expression, the woman who nearly became a proper superhero now looks exactly like the sort of homeless drifter who lives off of shit runoff water and scavenged meat, aside from the impressive muscles packed onto her slender frame. Her eyes have become permanently locked into a slitted reptilian state even when she’s in her human form, forcing Felicia to keep her gaze locked to the floor when she wants to stay hidden in public.

Personality: It’s a mess.

Felicia wasn’t exactly stable when she first met Doom, Marc, and all the others involved in last year’s events. Losing the people she cared most about, years living on the run, scared even more of her own monstrous self than she was of the people who had ripped apart and remade her body, had driven her into a haggard mix of paranoia, fury, depression, and general apathy towards the world around her. A betrayal by her only friend, and six subsequent months of agonizingly regrowing her entire body in the depths of a sewer, pushed her right off the deep end.

If you asked her, Felicia would deny the obvious decreasing stability of her mental state. On the contrary - as far as she’s concerned, this is the most stable she’s been since she gained her powers. For the first time in years, she has a clear goal to work towards: revenge. Revenge against Beige for what he did to her, revenge against Marc for stabbing her in the back, revenge against Doom for trying to impose his will onto her, and revenge against anyone else who gets in her way. A petty and simple motivation, perhaps, but Felicia has come to admit that she’s a simple monster, with simple needs.

Biography: Felicia’s life has been a living hell of random chance for years now. Back when she was a simple second-year college student from Ohio vacationing with friends in Brazil, the start of her horrific luck was signaled by Doctor Beige, egomaniacal billionaire mad scientist, kidnapping her for use in his ‘experiments’. Felicia can’t even count how many times she begged for death in the months that followed, as her body was slowly and painfully transformed across dozens of agonizing surgeries and traumatic genetic sequencing into… something inhuman.

Bits of DNA from a prehistoric predator were jammed into her genetic code, with a trigger gene that could initiate physical changes on command; the end result was a woman who could shapeshift, for lack of a better term, from a scared human girl into a half-dinosaur freak. Even in her ‘normal’ state, her physicality had been enhanced far, far beyond the human norm, to the point that she was a walking tank, halfway indestructible and able to crush steel in her palm. Beige was gleeful to have created such a powerful new toy, all at the low cost of one forgettable kid’s psyche.

He never got to play with her before his efforts backfired rather spectacularly. His predator was so effective that, while being hauled out for another round of gene therapy, she managed to overpower the guards and start eviscerating her way through the remote island compound. A hundred bodies were shredded up and spread across the bunker in a gory mess by the time she escaped, swimming like a mad woman for days until she had the fortune to stumble onto a fishing boat steaming for Florida.

The crew never made it.

Felicia doesn’t really remember creating the disaster zone of blood and organs that was found derelict just off the coast weeks afterward. By then, she was long gone, running for her life up the East Coast in a desperate effort to evade Beige’s reach. For the next few years, her entire existence was a horrific one, drowning in amphetamines to keep the beast inside from breaking out and going on a rampage, moving constantly from one city to another, always looking over her shoulder, living in back alleys, and contemplating just throwing herself off a bridge to be done with it all.

Any opportunity to do so was lost when Beige, at long last, managed to capture her yet again. She woke up in his Chicago headquarters facing the man who destroyed her life, and in a repeat of history that he should’ve seen coming, immediately managed to break out. This time, she didn’t do so alone: Felicia and two other of the doctor’s subjects, a cyborg named Marc and a psycho telepath named Novak, orchestrated a bloodbath of an escape.

Their escape was a complex one, ending with Felicia obtaining a new power of regeneration and the trio recruited by the Chicago Five as cock-rate superheroes. Despite her hostility at first, Felicia started to embrace the idea over time. Maybe she could do some good with her body’s horrific state. If this worked out, maybe she could even be heroic, something more than a traumatized beast fighting to keep herself from slaughtering hundreds. The idea persisted right up until the Siege torn down most aspirations for the entire team.

The worst part of that battle… it wasn’t that the ‘good guys’ lost. It wasn’t the blood and gore, or the carnage that was unleashed. It wasn’t watching Marc, the man who’d she’d considered her only friend in years, betray her just to get himself more power. It wasn’t even that Beige, the man she hated so much, the object of her undying rage, managed to get the upper hand, narrowly dodging death and dealing it out instead. Against all belief, it wasn’t that his helicopter’s minigun tore her to absolute shreds, reducing what had once been his most promising asset to a bloody pulp smeared across a rooftop.

It was that she lived.

Felicia doesn’t even know how it was possible. She recalls being reduced to an eye and a string of brain matter, blown off the roof by the helicopter’s gusts of wind into the depths of a Chicago sewer. That she lived, that her mind was fully intact even with her brain destroyed… it doesn’t make any sense to her, if she’s being perfectly honest. She’s come up with theories, even thought up a good one about her entire mind being able to somehow save itself on her genetic code - it would explain why her memories are a void between her ‘death’ and when she’d first regenerated her entire brain and skull back fully - but at the end of the day, it’s all just guessing.

What she knows for sure is that the next six months were the worst hell she’s experienced, and that includes when she was first transformed. She could heal from any injury, it seemed, coming back from any trauma… but it was not painless. The agony, the sheer unceasing torment of her nerves agonizingly growing back, of muscle and bone and skin ever so slowly returning, made her an urban legend in Chicago’s worst neighborhood once her ability to breath had returned. It wasn’t known much outside one little district, but in that area, the Wailing Sewer, a shit delivery pipe that seemed to scream 24/7, was an instant legend.

The screaming went from a constant to a recurring element once she could walk around again. It took three months of regeneration for Felicia to get back on her feet, and almost immediately she was trying to kill herself. A hundred different suicide methods only resulted in more pain and more regenerating, finally forcing her to admit something terrifying: she couldn’t die. No matter how much she screamed up at the sky, begging whoever was listening for some sort of end, her suffering was going to continue.

Six months in, she had at last fully healed, looking like her normal self again - all powers, and all horrific side effects, fully intact. Faced with immortality, she clawed her way back to a civilization of a sort: Breaker Town, a ruined block of apartments in the seedy, decaying part of town where she’d washed up, once empty yet now filled to the brim with the Breakers. Amidst half-demolished structures and jury-rigged shelter, packs of castoffs had come to call the place home; the homeless and penniless of course, mixed with kids kicked out of their homes, political dissidents who’d lost everything over the course of their lives, refugees from foreign wars who’d lost hope in the American Dream, and a healthy smattering of good men ruined by outrageous felony convictions, ready-mixed into a slush of counter-culture and hatred for the societies that had screwed them over.

In this kind of powder keg, it’s easy to get angry at the world outside. Felicia was a boiling pot of primal fury to begin with - six months in a nightmare and taking up residence in one of Breaker Town’s luxurious dumpsters just amplified what was already there. She was spiteful, overflowing with rage, and in desperate need of revenge. Not heroism, not to be the good guy, not to hold up ideals that had just gotten her turned into fleshy paste. She wanted to get back at the people who’d hurt her - Beige, Marc, Doom all of them. A pure, carnal hatred was the only thing driving her anymore.

Beige had to be first. It was his fault, his mad experiments that had created her. Yet she couldn’t attack him directly, not until she figured out a plan; just rushing Smog Towers would get her captured and experimented on further, turned into his ultimate lab rat. It would take time, months or even years, to figure out how to orchestrate his death; in the meantime, however, her bloodlust needed to be sated. This need led her to a perfect synergy: she couldn’t hit Beige, but she could hit his lackeys.

The slaughter that began afterwards has rocked Chicago, shocking even the jaded, violence-accustomed citizens of the Windy City. Massacre after massacre, pure brutality on display as scientists and businessmen suddenly find themselves targeted by a mysterious, quite clearly insane killer ripping them to shreds, along with anyone in the vicinity. The body count after a few months is in the dozens thanks to her policy of not leaving any witnesses. Bodyguards, assistants, family… even a kid or two has been found as a shredded corpse at the site of various mass murders.

The victims, according to the CPD, are unconnected. More of Beige’s obfuscation at work, hiding some of his shadier deals. Felicia doesn’t care much what the public thinks - she cares what Beige thinks. By now, he’s bound to have figured out just what’s been targeting his people, and she can only hope that he’s sleeping poorly knowing just what kind of a monster he’s brought upon himself. The only pleasure she gets anymore is a sadistic joy in imagining him quaking in fear when he first realized who the newest villain in Chicago really was.

That’s what she is now. A villain. A few years ago, she couldn’t imagine the thought, but now… now it seems right. Deep down, she has to admit… maybe she was always the bad guy. It just took someone much worse to bring out her own inner monster.

- Super Identity -



Name: Velocia

Appearance: A crude amalgamation of humanoid and saurian features, Velocia looks more akin to a monster than a superhuman. Usually clad in whatever she was wearing when she transformed, her Dino Form is quite distinct, with its bony spikes protruding from her limbs, rows of sharp horns, talons, slitted gold eyes, motley green scales, digitigrade legs, and writhing tail.

Reputation: Shitty, to say the least. The freaky monster lady was hardly regarded well when she first popped up in Smog Towers a year ago; subsequent lurking in the sewers of Chicago have not contributed positively towards her limited public perception. To most people, she’s an urban legend; those who know she exists don’t have so much as a shred of trust for the freak.

Primary Power: Velocia’s most prominent powers are her straightforward physical enhancements. Whether in or out of her Dino Form, she has the raw physical strength to bend back steel and the cheetah-like running speed to match. In close combat, she’s the kind of overwhelming powerhouse that can slaughter a platoon and level a building.

Secondary Power: Beige’s experiments left her able to shapeshift to and from her Dino Form, a strange, scaly aberration of humanoid and velociraptor features. She looks even more like a monster, but on the bright side, this form provides her with green scales that are bulletproof, at least for small arms fire, along with a powerful tail and spikes along every limb; the bony talons are present in her arms as well, able to pop out even when she isn’t going into her Dino Form.

Tertiary Power: A complicated circumstance with another of Beige’s subjects provided Velocia with healing abilities - though merely calling it regeneration isn’t doing it justice. Minor damage to her body repairs itself quite fast, and even traumas such as severed limbs can be regrown from in time. Her greatest feat, coming back to a complete body after regrowing from a few pounds of pulped flesh, has led Velocia to conclude that she’s quite possibly immortal, or at least can grow back from even a tiny smattering of cells.

Weakness: Velocia has, of course, smaller vulnerabilities. A crippling dependence on methamphetamines, for one, medication that’s necessary to prevent random transformations into her saurian self. Strong forms of knockout gas will force her to assume a human form temporarily. Cause enough trauma, and even her regenerative abilities won’t be enough to keep her in a fight - she can come back from a tiny clump of flesh, but that takes time, precious time. Armor-piercing rounds, assuming you can keep a bead on her, will penetrate those armored scales.

But her greatest weakness, her true kryptonite, is her complete lack of stability. Velocia wasn’t all there even a year ago, when she’d tried to be a hero; getting ripped to tiny bits and having to piece herself back together amidst the stank of raw sewage, months and months of painfully regrowing her entire nightmare of a body… Velocia’s about as far from mental health as you can get. It gives her an edge of unpredictability, to be sure, but Velocia is a creature of almost pure predatory instinct, and instinct can always be overcome by a bit of quick wit and clever thinking.

Gadgets: None

Choice: Three - Felicia has been on a regular killing spree these past few months, and Emmett is the next victim on her list.

- Stats -

Strength: 10 - Velocia is a tank, plain and simple. Her sheer physical power is enough to rip apart solid steel or toss a car. The amount of damage she can cause to property, and more importantly, to a human body, should never be underestimated.

Dexterity: 10 - Despite her bulk in her dino form, Velocia is among the most agile human beings on the planet. Not to mention fast - she can keep pace with a speeding vehicle for a surprisingly long period of time.

Intelligence: 5 - Felicia isn’t exactly stupid. Feral and prone to emotionally-charged bad choices, maybe, but not stupid. She’s still far from a genius, but Velocia has enough of a brain in her skull to avoid being a dumbass slab of dino meat.

Willpower: 8 - Self-control has been an ongoing problem with Velocia in numerous ways, but one can’t fault her for a lack of spirit. You don’t drag yourself out of a sewer after a year of slowly piecing your body back together from a pulpy mush without an incredible will to live.

Perception: 5 - Velocia’s senses were enhanced as part of her mutations, but regeneration trauma has reduced this from being truly superhuman to a much lower level.

Charisma: 1 - Velocia has all the charm of a bag of flaming dog shit. Psychotically angry and violent when she’s not drowning in misery, she’s almost totally incapable of a pleasant social interaction - and that’s without being a half-dinosaur freak of nature.

Luck: 1 - Some people get dealt a bad hand. Velocia has been dealt the entire deck. Becoming superhuman had a price, and that price was years of endless misery and more pain in a day that most people will ever experience.

I miss the days when the OOC always had a new conversation in it.

I fervently hope this complaint somehow brings that back.

Yeah Reaps we're always chatting about this in the Discord. It's almost *too* active over there. Get on it man!

What now

As you know, I have accepted this. Welcome to Heroes, assassinfred!

So hey guys, weird thing--I'm open to booting this back up. Crazy, right? And yeah, yeah, Raven's unreliable and whatnot. I am. So I'm doing something to fix that. I'm committing to shorter posts, less maps, less music, and less art. Gonna do everything I can to make this easier, quicker, and more reliable for myself and you guys.

I completely understand if people don't want to do this again. That's okay. But how does everyone feel? No harm in asking.