![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
(no subject)
OOC INFORMATION
Player Name: Hats
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact:
Other Characters in Game: Jon Sims
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Taylor Hebert, Skitter
Canon: Worm
Canon Point: Between Cell and Imago. Taylor has just murdered two people, joined the heroes, and gone to jail in the past week. Specifically, it's July 20 2011
Background: Wiki Entry It's on the sparse side – the timeline linked above is more helpful.
Suitability: Taylor, even as a villain through the first half of her story, always threw herself into the events shaping her world. She fought Leviathan, a three-story-tall sea monster with tsunami powers, to protect her city. In the wreckage afterwards, she was the only one of her cohort to use her resources to protect and support as many civilians as she could. She fought the Slaughterhouse Nine, collectively one of the five largest threats in the world, because one was predicted to bring about the end of the world and when she failed to stop him, she abandoned her friends, even her boyfriend, to join the heroes so she could have another shot at it. Beyond the canon point I've chosen, her every action for the next two years is about preventing the end of the world, even throwing herself into supposedly unsurvivable situations.
Powers:
Taylor possesses a form of telepathy that transmits and receives information via. yet-unknown-channels that grants her total control over most arthropods. So although she usually controls a variety of insects, she can also control a number sea creatures such as crustaceans and can even control certain in-body parasites such as heartworms.
Control
She can make her minions do things that they would not normally do, and push them to the limit where they end up harming themselves with how much effort they put in. She can make them do things such as walk into fire, produce so much web silk that they physically couldn't produce any more, or stinging while injecting little to no venom. Once she stops controlling them, her bugs revert to their normal behavior patterns. However, if she has given a command to them, she must intentionally dismiss the instruction she gave them or give them a new one, or else they will continue to fulfill their last command. This resulted in the accidental murder of Director Tagg when she was knocked unconscious, as her last order to 'sting him' was not interrupted by her, so her insects stung him to death without her able to stop them.
Multitasking
Taylor has an almost limitless ability to focus on multiple insects at once, or to focus on other things while also using her insects. She can give general instructions, in which case she is only vaguely aware of their movements, or guide individual insects through complex tasks, in which case she is more precisely aware of their movements and environment. However, she could be distracted by the difficulty of focusing on her insects' senses, or by some other power interfering with her insects.
Her power would sometimes perform actions by habit when she was incapacitated or when she was in an altered mental state without her conscious instruction.
Senses
The sensory input from her bugs is "fuzzy" and difficult to interpret. She can sporadically hear and see clearly, but the "signal quality" is unreliable and depends on what kind of bugs she's using. She usually can't discern tone of voice.
Based on the combined sensory input of large numbers of insects, Taylor can gain a very clear mental picture of whatever they're interacting with. She can also sense the biology and location of every bug she can control. This gives her enhanced aim and the ability to dodge attacks with supernatural reaction times. However, in environments where bugs are scarce, or when dealing with materials that they don't interact with well, her image of the area can become less reliable.
Limits
Taylor has a limited range, around a quarter-mile. During periods of stress (specifically, the perception of being trapped), it can increase, nearly doubling for a short period of time.
There is no limit to how many bugs she can interact with, control, or sense, so long as they're within the radius of her range.
Her power doesn't work on creatures below a certain size. Yes to fruit flies, fleas, and heart worms, no to eyelash mites or microscopic parasites.
Skills
Taylor has come up with a multitude of creative uses of her power. For example, she uses spider silk constantly, as armor, triplines, restraints, and in one case, to cut a massive monster in half; coats her insects in petroleum jelly and capsaicin to use them like pepper spray; deploys groups of bugs to create humanoid figures, mask her movements, and clear out rat infestations. She can disguises or project her voice by having her insects buzz and chirp together. She occasionally use her bugs to cover her while she moved without noticing, making her difficult to track.
Taylor has an unusually high pain tolerance, which she blames on her exposure to a pain-bomb of Bakuda's.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
Taylor planned carefully for three months after her powers triggered, intending to debut quietly as a rogue hero and decide later if she wanted to join the officially sanctioned Wards. Her first night out in costume, she overheard a gang talking about their plans to kill some children. She attacked the gang and wound up fighting their leader, the nigh-invulnerable, fire-breathing Lung.
Taylor realized immediately that she was outmatched and that she'd made a dramatic error in having this fight on a rooftop, where she was trapped and Lung was not. She fought brutally, going after his eyes with stinging insects and other sensitive parts with black widows and other venomous spiders. Still, she would have died were it not for the arrival of four other powered teenagers and two van-sized mutant dogs, who tip the balance of the fight so that Lung is incapacitated by injuries before a hero arrives to take custody.
The other teenagers split at the sight of the hero Armsmaster, but not before Taylor realizes they were the 'children' Lung and his men were planning to kill. They, like Lung, are supervillains. And they presume Taylor, with her black costume and creepy power, is one too. At first, so does Armsmaster. He threatens to arrest Taylor, accuses her of conspiring with the teenage villains, and once he believes she's just a clueless newbie, intimidates her out of taking credit for Lung's capture.
From this night stems everything that shapes Taylor as a villain, and later a hero. The mistakes about her motives lead her to join the Undersiders, first as a plant intending to betray them, later as a full member of the team. The interaction with Armsmaster is the foundation of her distrust in the official PRT heroes, which culminates in her murdering Alexandria and Director Tag, two leaders of the PRT.
Even the injuries she dealt Lung have lasting repercussions – the spiderbites resulted in amputations, beginning a feud between the Undesiders and Lung's gang.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
Taylor's standard of action is To Reduce Harm. As a villain, she didn't tolerate civilian by-catch when it was avoidable, but when it wasn't, she also didn't hesitate to sacrifice the few to save the many. She works hard to balance the bad she does with good, as evidenced by the endless work she put in after the destruction of her city to provide a safe territory and community for survivors. And especially by her decision to throw away her friendships, wealth, and freedom to join the heroes to be one more tool that might stop or slow the end of the world.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
Taylor most admires people who are able to take on new information and revise even strongly held opinions. That sort of flexibility is something she knows she's lacking, and is working on.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
Taylor thinks of herself as ruthless (more ruthless than she is), and is afraid that's her power having a bad influence on her psyche. In the moment of a fight, a conflict, she feels like the course of action she's taking is the only one open to her, but will always second-guess herself later, wondering if she could have safely resolved the situation without hurting anyone.
What is their sign, and why?
Death. At the canon point I'm using, her whole being is dedicated to working towards a single goal: preventing the end of the world. There is no immediate reward – in fact, she's given up her entire life to be on this path. Likely there is no reward at all. It's not the first time she's done that either – she worked for months and blew up a comfortable working patronage to rescue a girl she felt responsible for, which got her shot and nearly burnt alive.
SAMPLES & ARRIVAL
Samples:
TDM Samples: 1 | 2
Taylor in another game: Recovering from having been killed.
Arrival Scenario: Thorne
Player Name: Hats
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact:
Other Characters in Game: Jon Sims
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Taylor Hebert, Skitter
Canon: Worm
Canon Point: Between Cell and Imago. Taylor has just murdered two people, joined the heroes, and gone to jail in the past week. Specifically, it's July 20 2011
Background: Wiki Entry It's on the sparse side – the timeline linked above is more helpful.
Suitability: Taylor, even as a villain through the first half of her story, always threw herself into the events shaping her world. She fought Leviathan, a three-story-tall sea monster with tsunami powers, to protect her city. In the wreckage afterwards, she was the only one of her cohort to use her resources to protect and support as many civilians as she could. She fought the Slaughterhouse Nine, collectively one of the five largest threats in the world, because one was predicted to bring about the end of the world and when she failed to stop him, she abandoned her friends, even her boyfriend, to join the heroes so she could have another shot at it. Beyond the canon point I've chosen, her every action for the next two years is about preventing the end of the world, even throwing herself into supposedly unsurvivable situations.
Powers:
Taylor possesses a form of telepathy that transmits and receives information via. yet-unknown-channels that grants her total control over most arthropods. So although she usually controls a variety of insects, she can also control a number sea creatures such as crustaceans and can even control certain in-body parasites such as heartworms.
Control
She can make her minions do things that they would not normally do, and push them to the limit where they end up harming themselves with how much effort they put in. She can make them do things such as walk into fire, produce so much web silk that they physically couldn't produce any more, or stinging while injecting little to no venom. Once she stops controlling them, her bugs revert to their normal behavior patterns. However, if she has given a command to them, she must intentionally dismiss the instruction she gave them or give them a new one, or else they will continue to fulfill their last command. This resulted in the accidental murder of Director Tagg when she was knocked unconscious, as her last order to 'sting him' was not interrupted by her, so her insects stung him to death without her able to stop them.
Multitasking
Taylor has an almost limitless ability to focus on multiple insects at once, or to focus on other things while also using her insects. She can give general instructions, in which case she is only vaguely aware of their movements, or guide individual insects through complex tasks, in which case she is more precisely aware of their movements and environment. However, she could be distracted by the difficulty of focusing on her insects' senses, or by some other power interfering with her insects.
Her power would sometimes perform actions by habit when she was incapacitated or when she was in an altered mental state without her conscious instruction.
Senses
The sensory input from her bugs is "fuzzy" and difficult to interpret. She can sporadically hear and see clearly, but the "signal quality" is unreliable and depends on what kind of bugs she's using. She usually can't discern tone of voice.
Based on the combined sensory input of large numbers of insects, Taylor can gain a very clear mental picture of whatever they're interacting with. She can also sense the biology and location of every bug she can control. This gives her enhanced aim and the ability to dodge attacks with supernatural reaction times. However, in environments where bugs are scarce, or when dealing with materials that they don't interact with well, her image of the area can become less reliable.
Limits
Taylor has a limited range, around a quarter-mile. During periods of stress (specifically, the perception of being trapped), it can increase, nearly doubling for a short period of time.
There is no limit to how many bugs she can interact with, control, or sense, so long as they're within the radius of her range.
Her power doesn't work on creatures below a certain size. Yes to fruit flies, fleas, and heart worms, no to eyelash mites or microscopic parasites.
Skills
Taylor has come up with a multitude of creative uses of her power. For example, she uses spider silk constantly, as armor, triplines, restraints, and in one case, to cut a massive monster in half; coats her insects in petroleum jelly and capsaicin to use them like pepper spray; deploys groups of bugs to create humanoid figures, mask her movements, and clear out rat infestations. She can disguises or project her voice by having her insects buzz and chirp together. She occasionally use her bugs to cover her while she moved without noticing, making her difficult to track.
Taylor has an unusually high pain tolerance, which she blames on her exposure to a pain-bomb of Bakuda's.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
Taylor planned carefully for three months after her powers triggered, intending to debut quietly as a rogue hero and decide later if she wanted to join the officially sanctioned Wards. Her first night out in costume, she overheard a gang talking about their plans to kill some children. She attacked the gang and wound up fighting their leader, the nigh-invulnerable, fire-breathing Lung.
Taylor realized immediately that she was outmatched and that she'd made a dramatic error in having this fight on a rooftop, where she was trapped and Lung was not. She fought brutally, going after his eyes with stinging insects and other sensitive parts with black widows and other venomous spiders. Still, she would have died were it not for the arrival of four other powered teenagers and two van-sized mutant dogs, who tip the balance of the fight so that Lung is incapacitated by injuries before a hero arrives to take custody.
The other teenagers split at the sight of the hero Armsmaster, but not before Taylor realizes they were the 'children' Lung and his men were planning to kill. They, like Lung, are supervillains. And they presume Taylor, with her black costume and creepy power, is one too. At first, so does Armsmaster. He threatens to arrest Taylor, accuses her of conspiring with the teenage villains, and once he believes she's just a clueless newbie, intimidates her out of taking credit for Lung's capture.
From this night stems everything that shapes Taylor as a villain, and later a hero. The mistakes about her motives lead her to join the Undersiders, first as a plant intending to betray them, later as a full member of the team. The interaction with Armsmaster is the foundation of her distrust in the official PRT heroes, which culminates in her murdering Alexandria and Director Tag, two leaders of the PRT.
Even the injuries she dealt Lung have lasting repercussions – the spiderbites resulted in amputations, beginning a feud between the Undesiders and Lung's gang.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
Taylor's standard of action is To Reduce Harm. As a villain, she didn't tolerate civilian by-catch when it was avoidable, but when it wasn't, she also didn't hesitate to sacrifice the few to save the many. She works hard to balance the bad she does with good, as evidenced by the endless work she put in after the destruction of her city to provide a safe territory and community for survivors. And especially by her decision to throw away her friendships, wealth, and freedom to join the heroes to be one more tool that might stop or slow the end of the world.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
Taylor most admires people who are able to take on new information and revise even strongly held opinions. That sort of flexibility is something she knows she's lacking, and is working on.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
Taylor thinks of herself as ruthless (more ruthless than she is), and is afraid that's her power having a bad influence on her psyche. In the moment of a fight, a conflict, she feels like the course of action she's taking is the only one open to her, but will always second-guess herself later, wondering if she could have safely resolved the situation without hurting anyone.
What is their sign, and why?
Death. At the canon point I'm using, her whole being is dedicated to working towards a single goal: preventing the end of the world. There is no immediate reward – in fact, she's given up her entire life to be on this path. Likely there is no reward at all. It's not the first time she's done that either – she worked for months and blew up a comfortable working patronage to rescue a girl she felt responsible for, which got her shot and nearly burnt alive.
SAMPLES & ARRIVAL
Samples:
TDM Samples: 1 | 2
Taylor in another game: Recovering from having been killed.
Arrival Scenario: Thorne