| NAME: |Grace Bethany Kennison
| NICKNAME(S): |Thumper. It started as a tongue-in-cheek joke by the media, but then it stuck.
| D.O.B.: |08/10/1996
| AGE: |19
| SEX: |Female
| SEXUALITY: |Heterosexual
| APPEARANCE: |Grace is around five and a half feet tall and appears to be of a healthy weight, although it’s a little hard for her to say what her exact weight is now. We’ll touch on that a bit later. She has a pretty straight build and lacks any real tone or definition. She would classify herself as “skinny fat” and always gets nervous when it’s swimsuit season. Her dark brown hair falls around the top of her shoulders with bangs that sweep across the tops of her eyes. She finds her ears a bit too big, so she rarely wears her hair up. Her eyes are a dull blue. Her skin is tanned by the sun, forcing a slight outburst of dark freckles all over her bared skin. She finds using a lot of makeup to be a hassle, and tends to stick with just a little touch up here and there. Grace stands with a slouch and has a tendency to keep her head down. When she speaks a slight Cajun accent that she absolutely hates betrays her heritage. She tends to dress casually in graphic tees and jeans or shorts, giving her that nice, normal, unassuming American teen look. Grace always wears a necklace with a cross on it.
She used to fight crime in street clothes and a mask, but since assuming the identity of Thumper she made her own costume. The outfit is just a tight blue tracksuit with an uppercase T made out of masking tape on the front and back and a black paintball helmet with a tinted visor. Grace has read enough dark comic books to know the dangers of wearing a cape. It’s absolutely tacky looking and completely horrible, but it does the job of protecting her identity.
| GENUS: |Homo-Virium
| CLASSIFICATION: |Atlas
| ABILITIES/SKILLS: |Remember how it was hard for Grace to say what her true weight is? That’s because Grace is slowly but continuously growing denser. As time goes on Grace gets heavier and heavier and heavier. The last scale she purchased went up to 700 pounds; she broke it about a month ago. However, Grace doesn’t fight crime by just sitting on ne’er-do-wells until they scream uncle. She has those classic tough guy powers, too. The more dense she gets the stronger and tougher she gets. Grace can lift one and a half to two tons over her head with relative ease, meaning she can toss a medium-sized sedan towards someone like it was a medicine ball. Grace isn’t going to pretend like she understands the laws of motion or anything like that, but she does know that when she is moving and hits someone they generally stay down--and she pulls most of her punches. The girl’s also pretty tough, and unless you’re strong enough to sling vans around like paper planes trying to best her physically is a real dumb idea. Bats and knives tend to just break on her, normal bullets leave nasty welts and can knock the wind out of her, and fancy high-grade military shit could feasibly do some damage but still see her breathing. She doesn’t have much experience fighting Hyperhumans, but she could probably take a better licking than most.
Unfortunately for Grace, her powers are mostly limited by her otherwise subpar physique. She’s hardly an athlete. A reasonably fit person could outrun Grace, and her added strength does little to change the fact that she’d never be able to dunk a basketball. The only knowledge of fighting she has comes from video games and kung fu flicks, so she’s prone to attempt ridiculous moves that are just impossible to actually do in. She’s generally just uncoordinated and even clumsy when in action. Most of the times that she throws a punch she misses with her fist and accidentally connects with her shoulder, which is typically enough to knock someone off of their ass, send them flying a few yards, and fracture a few ribs. Outside of combat, her weight is a general problem. She tends to avoid elevators and has to stick to cargo vans and truck beds to travel due to her weight causing cars to drag on one side. Grace has broken enough chairs in her life to resign herself to sitting on the ground forever. Her power is “always on” so she has to interact with most of the world as if was a model ship she was building inside of a glass bottle. She also has this absolutely asinine idea that she’s going to be a proper superhero, which means NO KILLING.
Grace’s density has done little to strengthen her mind. Her biggest weakness would probably be either MINERVA- or CUPID-Class Hyperhumans. She may be thick skinned and denser than a rock, but apparently she’s soft in the heart and head. As well, she has frequent nightmares about drowning since she knows from first hand experience that she sinks faster than an anchor strapped to several hundred other anchors. Being over or near bodies of water generally fills her with dread, and she lives a mile from the beach in a damn state full of bayous and swamps.
| BACKSTORY: |Grace was born on the absolute hottest day of the year in Pointe Bordeaux, Louisiana to her less than thrilled bible-thumping parents who now had another damned mouth to feed. She was the fifth child of Mr. and Mrs. Kennison. She was also their fifth favorite after her big brother Peter in first, her older sisters Harmony and Prudence bouncing around second and third, and the family dog Samson taking fourth. She was sixth until her brother Joseph came out of the closet a few years back. A little something about Grace’s father: Dad was a true Southern gentleman and a good Catholic who’d give you the shirt off of his back and some from his wardrobe as well unless you were a Muslim, a homosexual, or a Falcons fan. Dad always said that he was just trying to protect Mom from being ridiculed by the neighbors for having a gay son, but we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to when Grace was not in the honorable position of being the second-most-hated.
Grace’s first slight against her parents came on the day she was baptised and happened to relieve herself on Father Forrest. Nobody else really paid it much mind--Grace was, after all, a baby--but her parents were absolutely mortified. They had friends in that Church. Friends who laughed. At them. It was SUCH a big deal. Their daughter continued to be just an utter, absolute embarrassment. She screwed up her first communion. She fell asleep in Sunday School. She was constantly in trouble with the Sisters at her Catholic school for making rude noises during nap time. She inappropriately displayed affection towards others. “Bless that Grace,” her parents’ friends would say. “She’s so soft-hearted,” they would say. Her parents knew what they meant. They meant to say that she was soft-headed, that their daughter was an idiot. Why couldn’t she be better behaved like her sisters? At the very least, she could show some shame.
Despite being an absolute fumbling fuck-up in the eyes of her parent’s and being forced to attend the horrendous doldrums that is the Sunday Mass of the Roman Catholic Church, Grace actually took a shining towards religion. Not to the extent where that when she started attending public schools in third grade (once her family could no longer afford the private Catholic school) she was that one kid always talked about Jesus and God and quoting the Bible and having that fucking creepy purity towards them, but she was religious. Despite all the jokes about altar boys, she was proud to be Catholic. Besides, as a girl she didn’t have to worry about that sort of scene. She read the Bible regularly. She could spit some mean Hail Marys, and we aren’t talking about football because she could not do sports if life depended on it. She wore a cross every day for every second to this god damn day. Shit, while other kids were running around doing little kid shit and the annoying Jesus girls were telling them they’d go to Hell for it, Grace was spending her time volunteering for food drives and helping out with charities.
And somehow she was still the least favorite kid because her Dad caught her reading comic books. What the hell, they weren’t even hers--she had borrowed them from Joseph.
Grace’s powers came about around the time she started puberty. Always a little bit on the heavy side and hurt by her schoolmates because all children are bastards regardless of whether they knew their dad or not, Grace started dieting. Which, when all her Mom served was cornbread and whatever proteins she could find on sell and cook in a pan full of butter, meant she just didn’t eat. The girl was always hungry, and she was always miserable, and she always felt weak, and she never lost weight. Even as the fat disappeared from her body and her skin turned yellow and dry she was somehow gaining weight. Grace was absolutely baffled, but the scale did not lie. All skin and bones and she was fat, fat, fucking fat. Completely disgusting; a skeletal cow.
And then she went swimming with her brother Joseph in the river one summer when she was thirteen. Swimming was probably the one activity she was any good at, and the girl sunk like that boat in that one movie. If Joseph didn’t help drag her out she would’ve drowned. If she hadn’t almost drowned she would’ve probably starved herself to death. Listen, Grace isn’t going to go around and tell anybody that it was a miracle, but she thought it was a miracle. At the very least a wake up call. She started eating right after that and blossomed back towards a healthy shape.
Joseph and her decided not to tell anybody about that drowning incident on account of the fact that neither of them wanted to get in trouble. It kind of solidified them as each other's favorites in the family. Neither of them knew what the hell was happening to Grace’s body, but both of them worked together to make sure her parents or the other siblings didn’t find out. They joked that their Dad would call an exorcist if he found out, while both secretly believed that wasn’t actually far from the truth. As a sign of good faith, Joseph told Grace about his homosexuality. As a sign of good faith, Grace decided to not be like their Dad...except when it came to fan of the Falcons; those people were just godless heathens and assholes to boot.
The problems with her strength started to arise by the time she with fifteen, and unlike her weight this grew exponentially. What started as her accidentally tearing books in half turned into her breaking door handles and faucets. Eventually inevitably it became clear that she couldn’t hide these changes from her parents. Besides, it was getting exceptionally weird at dinner when she refused to sit out of fear of breaking her already rickety chair. So...she told her parents. The reaction she got from at first was, well, confusing to say the least, until she remembered that these were the same people who were mortified for years after she had used a priest as a porta-potty when she was less than one year old. Her parents told her that she would not tell anybody about this and pulled her out of school. Mom would teach her and she’d get her GED once this whole damn thing passed.
The reaction was so mild that when she told Joseph about it he figured that maybe he should tell them about himself. It still took him time to work up courage, and only when a nearly seventeen year old Grace talked him up did he finally do it. The whole ordeal went less than ideal. Apparently, Dad was fine with having a freak for a daughter, but having a son be a sinner was absolutely unforgivable. Why, what would the neighbors say? The whole part in the Bible about forgiving those who sin seemed to be something that must have been newly added in versions that came out after her father had read the good book, because he threw Joseph out of the house. So Grace, in her final act of defiance against her parents, followed Joseph out. The two pariahs rented a studio apartment in the bad side of town. Joseph worked, Grace couldn’t land a job. Her refusal to sit or shake hands always threw people off, and being a high school dropout didn’t help.
This was all around the time that terrorist exposed the existence of Hyperhumans to the world. Everything around Grace sort of blew up after that--apologies for the pun. It was a nice reassurance to know that she wasn’t the only weirdo on the planet, but the warm fuzzy feeling of not being alone quickly subsided as people reacted the typical way they did around things they didn’t understand by trying to get rid off it as fast as possible. Grace felt that good old Catholic guilt swelling up inside of her. Somebody, somewhere had to do something to prove that Hyperhumans weren’t a bunch of monsters. She expressed these feelings to Joseph, and he sat her down and gave her the most important talk of her life. She’d become a superhero. Like, a real life superhero running around and helping people in need. How wasn’t that a good idea? The Mavericks made it work.
She started her superhero (vigilante is such a negative word) career a year ago. Grace and Joseph would sit in their apartment listening to a local police scanner for any crimes. Grace would then take to the streets where Joseph read her directions over the phone via Mapquest. She was relatively unknown (and both not thanked and not hated) for the longest of time until a few months ago when she stopped a thief in a public area. The socially awkward girl wearing all black with a halloween mask over her head realized that she was being record by people with their phones, and in a moment of brilliance decided now would be the time to go viral and spread awareness that Hyperhumans were doing good in other places besides Larissa. She just had to say something cool, something awesome for the headlines. The only thing that came out of her stupid dumb mouth was something she had read dozens of times. The girl, posed like an action figure, turned slowly to the camera’s as her cheeks grew hotter and hotter and said in the shakiest voice ever: “Thou Shalt Not Steal.”
The video that showed on the news ends with her immediately running away.
Grace bore witness to the most embarrassing moment in her life for weeks as the video spread across local new stations and onto the Internet. Joseph played it for a week on loop straight, rolling with laughter. The media did not let it die, and as she continued her work as a “superhero” news stories and head lines reading “The Bible-Thumping Vigilante Smites Another Sinner”, “Hyper Religious Hyperhuman Halts Crime”, and “The Hand of God Crushes a Getaway”. One pundit referred to the girl as “Thumper” for the way she beats criminals like a fiery preacher beats a bible. The name stuck. Eventually, Grace rolled with it. If it rose awareness of Hypes trying to do some good, then so be it. She’d be the crusading weirdo the media wanted, even if it meant sitting and sweating through Sunday sermons while hearing her priest condemn “Thumper” for giving Catholics a bad name.
| MOTIVATION/OBJECTIVE: |A pep talk from her brother was all she needed. ”You got superpowers, you gotta be a superhero! It’s, like, Superpowers 101. It’s in Genesis. God made Adam and Eve and was like, eh, I can do better. Then God made Hyperhumans and was like, hell yeah, I nailed it, way to go God. Now go out there, fight some crime, give a few photo ops, and get rich and famous. This was before Greed was a Deadly Sin, mind you, and that jazz isn’t even in the Bible anyway. And I always give to my Church every Sunday, anyway, okay?”
| REFERENCE POST(S): || NOTES: |■ Grace’s brother, Joseph, is about three years older than her and serves as her dispatcher and radio back up, as well as runs (and filters most of the hate from) her Facebook and Twitter pages through a Tor proxy to prevent people from tracking down their IP address.
■ Grace has managed to keep her paper thin disguise so far. Her parents know about her powers, and the only reason she can imagine why they haven’t gone to the authorities about her yet is that either they a) don’t care or, more likely, that b) they wouldn’t want the neighbors to know that it was their daughter.
■ Thumper, despite her efforts to do good, is generally disliked. She has miraculously yet to hurt any innocents while taking down a criminal, but the same cannot be said for the amount of money in tax dollars she is bleeding the city for via accidental property damage. She gets a healthy amount of hate on the Internet for being a Hype and for, thanks to the media’s portrayal and her own act of leaning into it, being a religious zealot.
■Sausage and mushrooms are an eternal classic, but pineapples are my fucking jam.
