Friday, October 11, 2024

Student: Blink [Team Dragon]

Name: Tyler John Taylor
Codename: Blink
Age: 18
Appearance: 6'4"with broad shoulders and narrow hips, sandy brown hair worn long but pulled back, leather jacket that he will not be parted from.
Notable Skills: strategy games, particularly chess, basic cooking, camping, football, basketball, pop culture trivia, speaks French (Canadian)
Quirks: loves video games, works out to maintain his physique, doesn't see himself settling down romantically, night-blind, terrified that he might screw up and get somebody hurt

Tyler is a decent student, but frequently gets by on his looks and charm; socially, he's more of a follower than a leader, but he knows how to pick up on other people's cues and is always willing to lend a hand. In strategy games he is absolutely ruthless (but never cheats); in sports he's more laid-back. He's originally from Canada, but he's been in the States since shortly after his power kicked in and only occasionally lets his accent slip through. 

As Blink, he is a master teleporter, capable of teleporting either himself or others; he can still only teleport one person at a time, though, and he needs to either be able to see his destination or already be familiar with it in order to arrive safely. His role on Team Dragon is generally more supportive than combative, but his ability to teleport others gives him some offensive options.

Thursday, October 10, 2024

Student: Nightfall [Team Kraken]

Name: Catarina "Cat" Altagracia Montoya
Codename: Nightfall
Age: 17
Appearance: 5' tall, with medium-brown skin, dark brown eyes, and black hair, with a gymnast's tight musculature; wears a black jeans jacked adorned with various patches that she's sewn in place herself.
Notable Skills: first aid, dance, gymnastics, driving, bluffing, reading reactions, speaks Spanish
Quirks: slow to make friends/keeps to herself, constantly polishing her glasses, likes animals better than people, nervous and has trouble relaxing, loves sushi

Cat is a relatively new addition to the school, as well as to Team Kraken. She's a solid student; what she lacks in insight, she makes up in persistence. She prefers not to interact with people she doesn't trust -- which is basically everybody -- and can come across as aloof or even hostile. (She is also quite capable of being actively hostile if she feels the situation warrants it.) She gets along better with the instructors and the younger students than she does with anybody close to her own age. 

Despite this, she has been recruited to the recently-formed Team Kraken -- in part for her power, and in part because of her absolute willingness to fight. She is working on developing more control, both of her power and of herself; she's been reprimanded for overdoing things during training once already, and doesn't want a second reprimand on her record. Cat's most obvious ability is the power to summon darkness, suppressing all visible light in an area of her choosing, but she can also shut off most electromagnetic radiation (notably including radio waves). When she extends a field of darkness around her, she can feel everything that happens inside it, so despite her lack of physical enhancements she generally has little trouble dodging enemies unless they can see in the dark. 

She once used her darkness to escape a particularly nasty situation, actually traveling through the darkness to take herself outside of a building where she was being held. She would love to be able to move around that way at will.

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Student: Veil [Team Dragon]

Name: Chance Justin Rutherford
Codename: Veil
Age: 18
Appearance: 6'0" but lean enough to look taller, light skin, brown eyes, dark brown hair
Notable Skills: guitar, driving, boxing, track and field, basic handyman skills
Quirks:gay, enjoys brightening the school uniform with fashion accessories, loves theater, talks a lot (especially when he's nervous), wants to be an entertainer

Chance is a quintessential Theater Kid, with a flair for the dramatic and a deep love of being the center of attention. He is a decent but not exceptional student, strongly motivated by praise from his instructors. He took up boxing in middle school when he first started getting seriously bullied for his flamboyance, found that he enjoyed the exercise, and added track and field to his routines as well. When he's not entertaining an audience, he enjoys building and repairing things. 

In his identity as Veil, Chance is the second-in-command for Team Dragon, and the primary reason that they're largely undefeated. He uses his ability to create psychic illusions to keep himself hidden and ensure that the rest of his team is not where they appear to be, allowing them to attack unseen while their opponents attack non-existent targets. The power is not without its limitations; at present, Veil can effectively influence about thirty people at once, with a maximum range of about ninety feet. Because his power is psychic in nature, any cameras in the area will record actual events rather than the illusions. Nevertheless, it has proven to be a huge asset for the team.

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Student: Armor [Team Kraken]

Name: Allison "Ally" Catherine Colvin
Codename: Armor
Age: 16
Appearance: 4'8", with a petite build, light brown hair that she mostly keeps shaved, and blue eyes.
Notable Skills: electronics, lockpicking, welding, soldering, math, physics, chemistry, Science!
Quirks: enjoys stress-testing her creations as much as inventing them, thinks hot dogs are the best food ever invented, forgets to practice fighting and related skills, doesn't like the sun, loathes spawn-campers.

Ally is the school's first gadgeteer, and the faculty are still working out how best to deal with her. Quiet and prone to wandering off on her own, she tends to get absorbed in what she's doing to the point of ignoring obvious dangers -- especially when her power has kicked in and she's busy working out a design for something that's going to be really, really cool, she promises. 

Her masterwork so far is the suit of power armor that she uses to make herself part of the newly-formed Team Kraken. Its design and creation has put a serious strain on the school's budget, but when she's wearing it she can monitor, decrypt, and disrupt all sorts of broadcast communications, use controlled EMP bursts to fry electronics and (potentially) send people into seizures, and recreate some degree of super-strength and damage resistance. She hasn't worked out how to make it fly (yet) but she has equipped it with jump jets that allow her to leap about sixty feet forward and forty feet up, along with a variety of non-lethal armaments to deal with combative opponents. Her real power, however, is that given the time and resources she can assemble the right tool to handle nearly any situation.

Monday, October 7, 2024

Faculty: Headmaster Jonathan Saint-Vincent

Name: Jonathan Charles Saint-Vincent
Codename: The Saint, but he rarely uses it
Age: 86
Appearance: 6'1" with broad shoulders and well-developed arms and torso; his legs are of regular proportions, but otherwise atrophied. His eyes are mismatched: one green and one gray, and his salt-and-pepper hair is neatly styled. Tends towards business suits. Owing to various attempts to cure the nerve damage caused by polio, he looks about half his actual age.
Job: Headmaster, teaches history

Jonathan Saint-Vincent presents himself as an affable older man with a variety of intellectual and political interests. He is considerably older than he looks, and is completely paralyzed from the waist down owing to a childhood brush with polio. He detests using a wheelchair and used to get around with crutches and braces, but recently one of the students (a gadgeteer named Ally Colvin) provided him with a supertech exoskeleton for his legs. (He still has to be careful about how he moves; the rig provides movement but not feedback. Ally says she's working on actual prosthetics but hasn't cracked the neural integration problem yet.) 

Jonathan is a sort of jack-of-all-trades psychic, with modest (but well-practiced) telepathic abilities, telekinesis able to lift up to about three hundred pounds, and minor cryo- and pyro-kinetic abilities. He can defend himself one-on-one, but generally avoids super-battles. He's far more interested in running his school and helping his students prosper. While he's an active and committed proponent of the idea that Exceptionals and Mundanes can live together in peace, he does sometimes have qualms about sending teams of students into potentially dangerous situations, and the recent business in South America has dropped him back into his doubts -- despite the fact that Dragon Team returned completely intact, and with a new student/team member. 

Publicly, he is known as one of the world's foremost researchers into "deviants" and their origins and powers, and his stance on the need for well-considered policies that promote equality and integration garners him both support and opposition from various interested parties.

Friday, October 4, 2024

Student: Team Captain Jade [Team Phoenix]

Name: Emily Annette Hubbard (goes by Em)
Codename: Jade
Age: 17
Appearance: A six foot tall, athletic blonde with creamy skin and blue eyes, who tends to sportswear or jeans and t-shirts and keeps her hair short, giving her a somewhat boyish look
Notable Skills: Soccer, rock-climbing, spelunking, baseball; recently took up classical european swordfighting; good leadership skills with a (usually) easy-going approach; knows how to drive.
Quirks: loves animals, hates thunderstorms, dyslexic, sings to herself, bisexual

Em is very laid-back when off the playing field, but extremely focused and competitive when on it; for her, leading Phoenix Team is just a natural outgrowth of being a team captain for soccer or baseball. She's equally focused on her academics, and considerably more intelligent than her "dumb jock" persona suggests. Her power allows her to manifest shapes of shimmering green force. (She takes her code name from its appearance.) So far she has demonstrated the ability to create armor, sword, shield, axe, and spear, but only as objects touching her body; she would love to be able to throw them or create the effect at range. Her power sometimes appears to act on its own, and it's an open question whether it's simply reacting to her unconscious thoughts and desires or whether it's actually some sort of symbiotic entity that sometimes acts for itself.

Thursday, October 3, 2024

Faculty: Salvation

Name: Dianna Dean Salvatore
Codename: Salvation
Age: 31
Appearance: 5'10", slender, with black hair, olive skin, and dark brown eyes.
Job: Auxiliary Headmistress; also teaches algebra, calculus, and trigonometry.

Ms. Salvatore (as even her colleagues usually address her) is graceful, reserved, and always attentive. She is also one of the top five telepaths on the planet, and in her identity as Salvation is renowned for her Salvation Sword, a construct of pure telepathic energy capable of bypassing all physical armor and damaging an opponent's psyche to produce a variety of effects. She also possesses minor and unreliable precognition, which she swears is more a burden than a help.

Together with Headmaster Saint-Vincent, she keeps track of the day-to-day functioning of the school, the students, and their teams. Budgeting, logistics, and accounting all fall under her purview, and she frequently serves as the school's investigator, using her power to resolve minor disputes, determine the truth of accusations, and in extreme cases prevent outsiders from remembering any of the school's secrets. She is very much by-the-book and has little sympathy for troublemakers. The students generally regard her as hard but fair, and nobody really wants to get on her bad side. 

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