Lunamaria Hawke
Andre Valias
FourtyTwo
Rune_Alchemist
wintersoldier
Neziul
vietmyke
Noctis
PickYourPosion
| {Full Name} |
Verra Valinova
| {Age} |
19
| {Species} |
Human
| {Gender} |
Female
| {Appearance} |
For someone like her, standing out in a crowd has never really been an issue whether it be those rather radiant emerald green eyes of hers, or the striking natural red of her long braided hair. She's always been the center of sorts among people in that way, having a soft and honest smile that people gravitate to and a natural beauty that has only improved over the years. It does leave her to be one of the least intimidating heroes of course, as not only does she tend to approach things with an optimistic mindset and a smile on her lips, but she's just shy of the national average in terms of height. Being 5'2" never held her back though, nor has it ever left her feeling like she's had anything to prove. That much is clear enough in her shape, being rather… Womanly though still very much fit due in large part to her active lifestyle. So much so, that she's joked that every day is cardio day and she's often seen in either some kind of track outfit or basic sportswear.
It's a majority of her wardrobe in fact, only here and there going out in something a little more casual and less sporty. Perhaps a reflection of her personality, she is only lacking truly in proper dress wear. Few dresses are in her possession, and only a couple pairs of earrings that she really doesn't like to wear except in very specific circumstances. Her makeup selection is equally lacking, preferring to only highlight here and there if necessary, though a bit of lipstick does go a long way, even if she has an unhealthy preference for pink. Overall, she's almost exactly as she appears, a rather upbeat, outgoing and almost disturbingly chipper young woman just enjoying life and dealing with it as best she can in the circumstances.
It's a majority of her wardrobe in fact, only here and there going out in something a little more casual and less sporty. Perhaps a reflection of her personality, she is only lacking truly in proper dress wear. Few dresses are in her possession, and only a couple pairs of earrings that she really doesn't like to wear except in very specific circumstances. Her makeup selection is equally lacking, preferring to only highlight here and there if necessary, though a bit of lipstick does go a long way, even if she has an unhealthy preference for pink. Overall, she's almost exactly as she appears, a rather upbeat, outgoing and almost disturbingly chipper young woman just enjoying life and dealing with it as best she can in the circumstances.
| {Equipment and Personal Belongings} |
Townhome - Since moving out a year ago to start college the small two-story in the Missouri State district has served as a stabilizing force in her life no matter what has happened. It sits just a couple blocks away from the main campus facing towards the state park and Stockton lake, proving rather ideal for morning, evening and even midday runs. The home is by no means extravagant, even with two bedrooms and a furnished basement, but what matters to Verra is that its paid for(by her mother of course) and it is home for her. Also the spare bedroom serves as an excellent streaming room that she's set up quite nicely.
"Tiburon" - Emblazoned with the emblem of a silver shark that totally wasn't pulled off the car of the same name, and featuring a custom-made case of glass and polished white-aluminum Verra's gaming computer is perhaps her most prized possession. For good reason too, as the mineral-oil cooled rig took her over a year to save up for and features a few components that aren't exactly on the market yet, but allows her to play games at frame-rates that even the most hardcore would consider decadent.
Personal items - Cellphone, large assortment of clothing from dress clothes to sports-wear, other various items expected of a college-age woman with her own home.
"Tiburon" - Emblazoned with the emblem of a silver shark that totally wasn't pulled off the car of the same name, and featuring a custom-made case of glass and polished white-aluminum Verra's gaming computer is perhaps her most prized possession. For good reason too, as the mineral-oil cooled rig took her over a year to save up for and features a few components that aren't exactly on the market yet, but allows her to play games at frame-rates that even the most hardcore would consider decadent.
Personal items - Cellphone, large assortment of clothing from dress clothes to sports-wear, other various items expected of a college-age woman with her own home.
| {Physical Abilities} |
Polyglot - Though technically coming about more and more due to a superability, her ability to speak multiple languages was already a skill before hand. Being born in Russia, naturally it was one of two languages taught to her at an early age and has left her with that subtle accent that she just can't shake. English was the obvious second, with Spanish coming in as a third, French as a fourth and German finally in school. Before gaining her powers it was a little hard sometimes to sort what was what, since knowing five languages isn't exactly easy, but now it feels like second nature to her with a bit more practice.
Athlete - Even before gaining powers, Verra was already a decently accomplished athlete. Track star for six years in her later years of school, as well as a couple years of gymnastics and doing enough time as a cheerleader that half her school photos are of her in a cheer uniform, she was already put in a mindset to keep herself at peak performance for most normal people.
Streamer - Okay hear me out, no seriously. Gaming and such was initially a hobby for her in school, inflicting childhood trauma via the most recent FPS or fighting game, but now it's pretty much her primary job while part-time attending art school. It's a matter of pride to her, to the point where she even holds herself back purposefully, making sure she only plays to the ability a normal person can play at. Don't call her a twitch-thot though, you'll get banned from her stream so fast the ban would even outrun her.
Athlete - Even before gaining powers, Verra was already a decently accomplished athlete. Track star for six years in her later years of school, as well as a couple years of gymnastics and doing enough time as a cheerleader that half her school photos are of her in a cheer uniform, she was already put in a mindset to keep herself at peak performance for most normal people.
Streamer - Okay hear me out, no seriously. Gaming and such was initially a hobby for her in school, inflicting childhood trauma via the most recent FPS or fighting game, but now it's pretty much her primary job while part-time attending art school. It's a matter of pride to her, to the point where she even holds herself back purposefully, making sure she only plays to the ability a normal person can play at. Don't call her a twitch-thot though, you'll get banned from her stream so fast the ban would even outrun her.
| {Superpowers} |
Speed-Force Conduit - Among the varied heroes across the multiverse there are those who unlike the Kryptonians with their strength, the myriad caped crusaders of Gotham or those who call upon nature to aid them instead rely upon pure speed. They are called Speedsters, singular individuals who have come about in some way to draw upon the very essence of speed in order to become the fastest man or woman of their time. Yet some are chosen among the chosen. Unlike those who made themselves speedsters through their own devising, unlike those who came about through circumstance, there are those who are chosen to represent the Speed-Force itself. They are the conduits, the ones whose lives are tied to that of the Speed-Force itself even before they are born. Verra Valinova is one of those, an individual who was given her gifts in order to protect not just her home, but to act as the living avatar of the Speed-Force and defend against threats to it.
Superhuman Speed/Reflexes - Naturally as a speedster, Verra has the ability to move significantly faster than any normal human and even most metahumans/powered individuals at this point. This enables her to be able to react in such a way that it feels as if time was slowing down just for her. Even things such as a speeding bullet appear still, giving her all the time in the world to move herself or someone else out of the way. Of course, this also relates to her primary power of being incredibly fast. Her true speed is unknown as she continues to grow at an exponential rate with every time she pushes herself to her limits. At the current moment though she is capable of reaching a mere mach 3 from a standing start.
Superhuman Stamina - Along with superspeed, comes the ability to sustain it for long periods of time. Verra's superhuman stamina means that what would normally exhaust normal humans, is as easy as rolling out of bed. It takes excessive use of her powers to break a sweat, and pushing the limits to even come close to tiring her.
Accelerated Healing - Down to the cellular level, Verra's body is in tune with the speed force and infused with its energies. Among the many other benefits and abilities, is that of greatly enhanced healing. What would take weeks for normal humans to heal from, she can do in mere hours if not minutes, and even some of the mortal wounds are just a setback. Accelerated healing can be a double-edged sword however, in that she has to be extra careful when dealing with broken bones and making sure to set them correctly as fast as possible before new bone growth occurs. Otherwise the bone would have to be broken again.
Enhanced Mental Processes/Senses - Moving at superspeed is one thing, reacting another, but being able to understand everything is something that could become quite difficult. Luckily for speedsters, their minds are also accelerated to process information as fast as they receive it. As quickly as she can turn the pages in a book, Verra can read and understand it. At the moment for her it's a bit hard to grasp sometimes, having to take a moment to truly process everything, yet just like her speed itself, such things will come with time. Already she's finding that she has a near-photographic memory, able to recall things with an accuracy that she wasn't able to before. In addition to her mental processes, her senses have also been vastly enhanced through her connection to the Speed-Force. This is primarily why things appear to move in slow motion to her at times, how she can hear whispers across the room and feel changes in temperature or charge in the air around her.
Superhuman Speed/Reflexes - Naturally as a speedster, Verra has the ability to move significantly faster than any normal human and even most metahumans/powered individuals at this point. This enables her to be able to react in such a way that it feels as if time was slowing down just for her. Even things such as a speeding bullet appear still, giving her all the time in the world to move herself or someone else out of the way. Of course, this also relates to her primary power of being incredibly fast. Her true speed is unknown as she continues to grow at an exponential rate with every time she pushes herself to her limits. At the current moment though she is capable of reaching a mere mach 3 from a standing start.
Superhuman Stamina - Along with superspeed, comes the ability to sustain it for long periods of time. Verra's superhuman stamina means that what would normally exhaust normal humans, is as easy as rolling out of bed. It takes excessive use of her powers to break a sweat, and pushing the limits to even come close to tiring her.
Accelerated Healing - Down to the cellular level, Verra's body is in tune with the speed force and infused with its energies. Among the many other benefits and abilities, is that of greatly enhanced healing. What would take weeks for normal humans to heal from, she can do in mere hours if not minutes, and even some of the mortal wounds are just a setback. Accelerated healing can be a double-edged sword however, in that she has to be extra careful when dealing with broken bones and making sure to set them correctly as fast as possible before new bone growth occurs. Otherwise the bone would have to be broken again.
Enhanced Mental Processes/Senses - Moving at superspeed is one thing, reacting another, but being able to understand everything is something that could become quite difficult. Luckily for speedsters, their minds are also accelerated to process information as fast as they receive it. As quickly as she can turn the pages in a book, Verra can read and understand it. At the moment for her it's a bit hard to grasp sometimes, having to take a moment to truly process everything, yet just like her speed itself, such things will come with time. Already she's finding that she has a near-photographic memory, able to recall things with an accuracy that she wasn't able to before. In addition to her mental processes, her senses have also been vastly enhanced through her connection to the Speed-Force. This is primarily why things appear to move in slow motion to her at times, how she can hear whispers across the room and feel changes in temperature or charge in the air around her.
| {Limitations} |
Okay so, nevermind the caloric intake required to continually maintain her body at such high speeds, which is all the time because she can't exactly turn it off. Talking a caloric intake of biblical proportions. The kind that had her politely asked to leave an all you can eat buffet. Or that without her connection to the Speed-Force she really is just a normal person. A relatively in shape and decently quick one thanks to all those years in track, but still an incredibly basic person. Her speed healing making it so that if an injury isn't properly set like immediately after it could heal wrong and cause serious complications like a bone poking where it shouldn't might also be a concern to most as well, however all that said none of those are even touching on the most serious issue…
Moving that fast causes some serious friction, and not watching your speed can really ruin an outfit >:|
Moving that fast causes some serious friction, and not watching your speed can really ruin an outfit >:|
| {Personality} |
Everyone knew that girl. The one that seemed to be right there at the forefront of everything in the school, part of the popular cliques and holding favor with the teachers as well. In most instances that kind of person was often the type to smile to your face and murder you with words behind your back, or at the very least plot something rather humiliating and despicable. For Verra throughout her school years she was only half of that. She was the one who was friends with everyone, making her way into the popular circles through a genuine smile and caring for others. A bright ray of optimism and cheer no matter what happened, she was the one to rely on when it came to help with studies, life issues or just when someone needed someone to talk to. Even when her own father died she didn't take it out on anyone else, didn't shift her outlook on life or do more than stop for a moment to process and talk about it with her closest friends.
| {Place of Origin} |
Not actually originally from Central City, Verra's childhood was a series of new places for years all the way from the city of her birth, St. Petersburg, to the one she would eventually call her home. Both parents being military, and specialists at that, would have normally made things rough for a young girl just trying to be a kid and live her life, and it would have been more than understandable if she had withdrawn into herself because of it. Yet, Verra did not. Her varied childhood pushed her to make as many friends as she could in the short time she had at each new place.
| {Background} |
Eventually things had to settle though, and they did for a time when her sister was born and then when she was starting to walk and talk just like her, learning at just a swift pace. A year in Berlin turned to a few months in Honolulu, then a stay in London and back to the states to settle in Central City for just a short time. Having just turned ten, the younger Verra had been more than a little excited to see the city that been the center of a lot of attention on the TV and among her previous friends. Everything was looking up in her mind, her parents telling her that it was looking like their stay would be extended since her father was taking an extended leave of absence at work. She had even been making more friends at school, though one was a bit weird she didn't hold it against her and soon enough got her to be a little more open with her.
It was just as she was actually getting to be comfortable with school yet again and the new city that things took a bit of a turn. The fourth had always been something quietly celebrated at home with a couple friends here and there before moving to Central City. Since then though, and with their dad's job slowing down they had kind of put down roots and were more and more socializing with their neighbors. So most of the block had been invited to a big barbecue hosted by her parents with burgers, hotdogs, super soakers and fireworks in the evening. Things had been going pretty well for most of the day, her and Lexi had been playing with their friends, including the nerdy girl from the orphanage. It was only on the fourth round of burgers that their father had complained of feeling a bit dizzy and light-headed, promptly passing out at the grill just as some of the adults were joking about old age catching up with him.
At the time the doctors and her mother explained it to the two girls that he had been sick for a while, some kind of cancer that had been in remission for a bit and had been why they settled down in Central City. The younger Verra had never seen radiation poisoning of course, and neither had her sister Lexi, nor did either of them really know who their parents were. After some time and maturing a little more, she learned just a bit of the truth, not all of it of course but enough. While Marianna and Iosif Valinova seemed quite ordinary military parents to most people, both had some rather deep and highly classified secrets. What Verra found out a few years ago put clarity to things, discovering that her father had actually been an agent of the KGB, then FSB and in some reports openly named as the "KGBeast". It didn't take much more to learn he actually died of long term polonium exposure as part of his job, but even after learning of that she never thought of him differently.
Her mother was a little distraught at the sudden death of her husband of course, and as the eldest Verra stepped up a little more around the house to keep up spirits. Another year went by and things were almost normal except for the lack of a man around the house, though one of her mother's friends did stop by from time to time to check up on things and help babysit Lexi. At least until she was hit by a truck. That had nearly been the breaking point for her mother, but as she did for the loss of her father, Verra stepped up again and doubled-down on her efforts to give her something else to think about. While her mother dipped in and out of the drink for a few years, she gave her something to be proud of. Her focus on her grades became almost obsessive, spending as much time as she could studying and pushing herself to be the best daughter she could to make up for two losses. Aced tests turned to advanced placement classes in an already fairly premiere school.
It didn't feel like enough to her, even as her mother praised her for everything she did and told her that she didn't have to, it felt to her like she did. Throughout school she made sure that she did her very best, no matter what. She even held study groups to help other people, solidifying her friendships with a few particular people. Though she's really not sure if Thea will ever forgive her for introducing her to anime. That and her love of gaming fell victim to her inner competitive nature, leading her to be asked to "turn it down a bit" whenever the group got together to have a night. All that aside though, even when it felt like she rarely actually had a moment to herself… They were some of the best years of her life. It was when she met the friends she has now and truly got to experience what life was like living in one place and setting down roots.
So much so that when it finally came time to look towards college, while a good number of her classmates had been picked for one campus or another out of state, she chose to stay. Just a neighborhood over in fact, enrolling at MSU just two years ago in art design. The move came as a bit of a shock to almost everyone at school, as she had always been thought of as Ivy-bound, and she had received more than a few letters of acceptance and scholarships for such places. But she chose home. It was partially because she wanted to stay close to her mom, partially because she actually wanted to do something creative, but mostly because she liked being in one place. Central City had been the first place her family had really settled down, and even with the loss of her sister Lexi and her father, it was still more of a home than anywhere else.
College life for her had been very different from that of high school, and not just because she had her own place now and needed to support herself. That much had been taken care of by her mother ensuring she had a roof over her head, and her picking up a side job doing streaming in her off hours. What changed was just how many off hours she actually had. A stark contrast to most of her school life, she had actually pulled things back and was taking it a little easier than even most college students. Just a couple courses a week, most of the mandatory curriculum online when she could, and things felt nice and easy for once. She finally had time to just take things in and move at a different pace, one that had her doing a morning run to get started, a couple hours of coursework, then most of the day streaming one thing or another before a run in the evening and calling it a night to do it all over again the next day.
One day meshed into the next, and soon she was almost through with a year of college, just enjoying life as it came. Things had been a little cool and it was perfect jogging weather for her that October a year ago, and she had been a little more into her nightly run than normal. The park was at that ideal state of autumn chill that wasn't quite wintry, but just a little more than it had been all month. Her route along the lake had been a good warm-up, Stockton eerily calm for once as the sun was high in the sky, and slowly dipping as she took the long trail up into the edges of Siltwood and the national park. It was dark by the time she realized she had gotten a little too into her run and was a few miles outside the city in what she often joked as "out in the grapes". Not only that, but she was a bit off the trail and it had been feeling like a storm was brewing just over the mountains to the south. The lights of Central City dimmed on the horizon as it broke, a soft rain at first but with those wintry hints as she made her way back towards Siltwood and home.
Yet she was a bit off the path and in an unfamiliar part of the state park. Some of the trails led deeper into the woods and weren't very well marked, some of them looked to have been purposefully blocked off, and one in particular headed in the direction of home but wasn't one she would have normally taken. Then again, normally she wouldn't have been that far out into the grapes in axe-murderer territory, so she took that winding trail into the darkened reach of the Ozarks. Twists and turns had her questioning if it really was a shortcut at times, here and there feeling like the city was behind her and she was really heading further south. Sometimes she swore she heard the sound of drums out in the woods, but no matter where she looked the sound didn't seem to be nearer or farther.
Then something truly strange happened. At some point she had passed a bit of old fence along the trail, long since fallen into disrepair and the signs faded from years of disuse. The trees moved in odd ways as she felt as if the rain was falling slower around her, yet that couldn't be possible. An electric sensation began to work its way along her body, starting the moment she passed that fence and building and building the deeper she went into what was clearly some kind of restricted area. Only when she found herself in the middle of a clearing surrounded by strange stones did she stop and take stock. The rain had come to a standstill, and it wasn't that the storm was breaking over head. No, it had become worse actually, with more and more rain and hail surrounding her.
It had stopped in mid-air. Each drop suspended in air as if time had come to a standstill. She walked through the deluge in pause, looking over the stones surrounding the clearing, finding a path from the outer circle to the center. It was a language unlike any other, carvings that looked older than they had any right to be and arrange in ways that didn't match existing architecture. Yet as she took a step onto the capstone in the center, it seemed as if it had always been there and always would be. Her thoughts on how strange it was to encounter something like that in the woods of Missouri would end up being quite suddenly interrupted though, as a pulse of sorts came from the stones, charging the air and setting her teeth on edge. It felt as if electricity was building all around her, and before she could even start to process what was happening, a bolt of energy split the clouds from above and struck her where she stood…
At the same time as her unfortunate brush with natural forces park rangers were luckily working the area and tracking the movements of local predators. While their search for bears and possible large cats had been coming up thankfully sparse, they had seen the strike and felt as if there was something odd about where it hit. Taking that same backwoods trail they made their way to a clearing in the woods and found Verra laying in the grass unconscious… No traces of the strange stones or the fence that had previously marked a region of naturally occurring dark matter.
For a few months she had laid in a Central City General hospital bed, almost completely unresponsive and baffling the nurses, local doctors and even the experts called in from all across the country. Off and on the instruments would read her as just fine one moment, and without a pulse the next. Sometimes they saw her eyes moving behind her eyelids, other times she was so completely still that there was the very real concern that she had passed right until the alarms went off yet again. Her mother had very nearly beaten a nurse for suggesting just such a thing, briefly leaving just her best friend Kara and a few of her other close friends as her only visitors for a bit. They spoke to her at times, and a few of them she could actually hear as she lay there unable to wake from her coma, but her recollection of those events is hazy at best, calling it a never ending dream with the flashing of lightning against dark clouds.
Eventually though the particle accelerator went off, detonating in the heart of Central City and washing the entire region with massive doses of dark matter that awoke the latent metahuman genes in that portion of the population. For a short time there was hope that maybe she would be one of them, that she would wake up with some strange power or another and be just fine. She didn't, not for months, and at least her mother felt like she might not have done so at all if not for the intervention of a certain reclusive and eccentric scientist. One that was the cause of so many woes throughout the nation, a pariah of his community and almost a hundred thousand short thanks to a check he wrote to the hospital to smooth things over. Two months after the particle accelerator explosion Harrison Wells had made yet another of his attempts to right the wrongs that the public had heaped upon him. Working the exceptionally strange case of a former high-school track star and beloved member of the community falling into a coma after a lightning strike seemed like just the thing.
It ended up being a bit of a mixed bag in the public's eye, some feeling that he was ambulance chasing in a way, looking for any possible out to get back in the good graces of public opinion. Some felt like it was a genuine effort as he actually did have the personnel and tech at hand that eventually proved that she still had an active mind even at nearly ten months under. There was of course a couple people who were very vocal about the idea of a forty-something scientist taking in an unresponsive attractive college girl into the basement of STAR Labs and some of their own theories on that.
Finally a year after the lightning strike though, there was a breakthrough. As two of the techs had been working on some of their own projects and watching over her, she opened her eyes. Above was the soft white lighting of a lab, seeming right out of a video game she had played once, and for a moment she thought that she was in another dream, but when she pinched herself and felt the pain of it, she winced and nearly fell out of the hospital bed she had been laying in. Worse than scaring herself, she had startled the two techs and they must have dropped whatever they were working on as a fire erupted at one end of the room and engulfed one of them. At least it seemed that it had, though the second one was gone completely. What followed after her rather sudden awakening was a lot of screeching on both sides, finding out that the two lab techs were actually one, or the one was actually two different people, something about a hypervelocity glomp or a fusion dance, and finally Harrison Wells coming in to make sense of everything.
She found out in short order the details of what had happened while she had been in a coma, just how long she had been out, minus her mother's hospital incident, and allowed a few visitors before going back to rest. Her mother had been out on business but notified and was on her way over, Kara said something about having to cancel something but would be right over and a few of her other friends had much the same to say. It was out though that she had woken up, and while there was no shortage of requests to interview her by local news groups, the biggest surprise was her first visitor. Another woman back from the dead it seemed, Thea Queen had been in town and available when the word got out that she was awake, coming over to see her and have quite the awkward conversation. It didn't help that the last time they had spoken had been right before Thea apparently died in a motorcycle crash on her way home after finally getting her to agree to a date.
Friends and family came and went over the next week, one by one finding her in those same good spirits that defied the universe's best efforts to bring her down. More than just her spirits though, her physique bounced back with a vengeance, only taking a couple days of rest and light exercise before she was on her feet and running circuits around the STAR Labs campus much to the annoyance of Harrison Wells and her keeper, the little fireball of a pair of lab techs her and Thea had taken to calling the "Firesmol". At first it didn't feel strange to her that she had recovered so quickly, or that she seemed to be making better times each circuit. Only when she was put on a treadmill and told to push herself did things start to get really weird. Ten miles per hour came and went without effort, like an easy jog in the park. Then she hit twenty and it still felt like nothing. Forty, then sixty, then a hundred. Faster and faster she went until her image began to blur on the treadmill, Harrison Wells watching with slight concern as the numbers kept climbing, all the while the lab techs were beside herself(themselves???) with excitement.
Then the treadmill broke and she face-planted a concrete wall. That one hurt quite a bit, but proved that not only was she fast, like really fast, but so was her healing. The injuries from her little accident, while mild and not really anything to keep her too long anyways, were gone within a couple hours without so much as a trace. As it turned out, her little adventure in the woods had left her with more than a few powers of her own, just as some of her friends hoped, but not quite in the same way. Something about them felt different somehow, like while they were a gift, there was a purpose to them.
Verra didn't think too long on the whole concept though, soon enough returning to her old life and finding that her friends had taken care of a lot of things while she was sleeping off a rather shocking run-in with mother nature. Kara had apparently put the word out via most of her accounts that she had an accident, and the outpouring of support both during her coma and when she announced she was awake again was one of the better moments of waking back up. Well, aside from actually waking up. Some of her social media did take a bit of a hit in followers, and both her streaming accounts lost quite a few, but she's been getting back into things again and now that she's active again she's pretty much almost right where she was before becoming super.
That was the only small thing that had changed in truth, and over the last two months she's been trying to figure it all out in how exactly to deal with being powered. She wasn't like the other metas, she could feel it, but she still had these abilities and there was that feeling that she should do good with them. So a little call to a friend saw a costume made, one that was abruptly torched when she ran a little too fast and ended up standing in the middle of the Cortex rather sparsely dressed. The next one was made of fireproof material, so that was one problem solved. All that was left was a name she figured, and with a little input from Kara and Wells, she felt like she had one that felt rather fitting…
Velocity.
It was just as she was actually getting to be comfortable with school yet again and the new city that things took a bit of a turn. The fourth had always been something quietly celebrated at home with a couple friends here and there before moving to Central City. Since then though, and with their dad's job slowing down they had kind of put down roots and were more and more socializing with their neighbors. So most of the block had been invited to a big barbecue hosted by her parents with burgers, hotdogs, super soakers and fireworks in the evening. Things had been going pretty well for most of the day, her and Lexi had been playing with their friends, including the nerdy girl from the orphanage. It was only on the fourth round of burgers that their father had complained of feeling a bit dizzy and light-headed, promptly passing out at the grill just as some of the adults were joking about old age catching up with him.
At the time the doctors and her mother explained it to the two girls that he had been sick for a while, some kind of cancer that had been in remission for a bit and had been why they settled down in Central City. The younger Verra had never seen radiation poisoning of course, and neither had her sister Lexi, nor did either of them really know who their parents were. After some time and maturing a little more, she learned just a bit of the truth, not all of it of course but enough. While Marianna and Iosif Valinova seemed quite ordinary military parents to most people, both had some rather deep and highly classified secrets. What Verra found out a few years ago put clarity to things, discovering that her father had actually been an agent of the KGB, then FSB and in some reports openly named as the "KGBeast". It didn't take much more to learn he actually died of long term polonium exposure as part of his job, but even after learning of that she never thought of him differently.
Her mother was a little distraught at the sudden death of her husband of course, and as the eldest Verra stepped up a little more around the house to keep up spirits. Another year went by and things were almost normal except for the lack of a man around the house, though one of her mother's friends did stop by from time to time to check up on things and help babysit Lexi. At least until she was hit by a truck. That had nearly been the breaking point for her mother, but as she did for the loss of her father, Verra stepped up again and doubled-down on her efforts to give her something else to think about. While her mother dipped in and out of the drink for a few years, she gave her something to be proud of. Her focus on her grades became almost obsessive, spending as much time as she could studying and pushing herself to be the best daughter she could to make up for two losses. Aced tests turned to advanced placement classes in an already fairly premiere school.
It didn't feel like enough to her, even as her mother praised her for everything she did and told her that she didn't have to, it felt to her like she did. Throughout school she made sure that she did her very best, no matter what. She even held study groups to help other people, solidifying her friendships with a few particular people. Though she's really not sure if Thea will ever forgive her for introducing her to anime. That and her love of gaming fell victim to her inner competitive nature, leading her to be asked to "turn it down a bit" whenever the group got together to have a night. All that aside though, even when it felt like she rarely actually had a moment to herself… They were some of the best years of her life. It was when she met the friends she has now and truly got to experience what life was like living in one place and setting down roots.
So much so that when it finally came time to look towards college, while a good number of her classmates had been picked for one campus or another out of state, she chose to stay. Just a neighborhood over in fact, enrolling at MSU just two years ago in art design. The move came as a bit of a shock to almost everyone at school, as she had always been thought of as Ivy-bound, and she had received more than a few letters of acceptance and scholarships for such places. But she chose home. It was partially because she wanted to stay close to her mom, partially because she actually wanted to do something creative, but mostly because she liked being in one place. Central City had been the first place her family had really settled down, and even with the loss of her sister Lexi and her father, it was still more of a home than anywhere else.
College life for her had been very different from that of high school, and not just because she had her own place now and needed to support herself. That much had been taken care of by her mother ensuring she had a roof over her head, and her picking up a side job doing streaming in her off hours. What changed was just how many off hours she actually had. A stark contrast to most of her school life, she had actually pulled things back and was taking it a little easier than even most college students. Just a couple courses a week, most of the mandatory curriculum online when she could, and things felt nice and easy for once. She finally had time to just take things in and move at a different pace, one that had her doing a morning run to get started, a couple hours of coursework, then most of the day streaming one thing or another before a run in the evening and calling it a night to do it all over again the next day.
One day meshed into the next, and soon she was almost through with a year of college, just enjoying life as it came. Things had been a little cool and it was perfect jogging weather for her that October a year ago, and she had been a little more into her nightly run than normal. The park was at that ideal state of autumn chill that wasn't quite wintry, but just a little more than it had been all month. Her route along the lake had been a good warm-up, Stockton eerily calm for once as the sun was high in the sky, and slowly dipping as she took the long trail up into the edges of Siltwood and the national park. It was dark by the time she realized she had gotten a little too into her run and was a few miles outside the city in what she often joked as "out in the grapes". Not only that, but she was a bit off the trail and it had been feeling like a storm was brewing just over the mountains to the south. The lights of Central City dimmed on the horizon as it broke, a soft rain at first but with those wintry hints as she made her way back towards Siltwood and home.
Yet she was a bit off the path and in an unfamiliar part of the state park. Some of the trails led deeper into the woods and weren't very well marked, some of them looked to have been purposefully blocked off, and one in particular headed in the direction of home but wasn't one she would have normally taken. Then again, normally she wouldn't have been that far out into the grapes in axe-murderer territory, so she took that winding trail into the darkened reach of the Ozarks. Twists and turns had her questioning if it really was a shortcut at times, here and there feeling like the city was behind her and she was really heading further south. Sometimes she swore she heard the sound of drums out in the woods, but no matter where she looked the sound didn't seem to be nearer or farther.
Then something truly strange happened. At some point she had passed a bit of old fence along the trail, long since fallen into disrepair and the signs faded from years of disuse. The trees moved in odd ways as she felt as if the rain was falling slower around her, yet that couldn't be possible. An electric sensation began to work its way along her body, starting the moment she passed that fence and building and building the deeper she went into what was clearly some kind of restricted area. Only when she found herself in the middle of a clearing surrounded by strange stones did she stop and take stock. The rain had come to a standstill, and it wasn't that the storm was breaking over head. No, it had become worse actually, with more and more rain and hail surrounding her.
It had stopped in mid-air. Each drop suspended in air as if time had come to a standstill. She walked through the deluge in pause, looking over the stones surrounding the clearing, finding a path from the outer circle to the center. It was a language unlike any other, carvings that looked older than they had any right to be and arrange in ways that didn't match existing architecture. Yet as she took a step onto the capstone in the center, it seemed as if it had always been there and always would be. Her thoughts on how strange it was to encounter something like that in the woods of Missouri would end up being quite suddenly interrupted though, as a pulse of sorts came from the stones, charging the air and setting her teeth on edge. It felt as if electricity was building all around her, and before she could even start to process what was happening, a bolt of energy split the clouds from above and struck her where she stood…
At the same time as her unfortunate brush with natural forces park rangers were luckily working the area and tracking the movements of local predators. While their search for bears and possible large cats had been coming up thankfully sparse, they had seen the strike and felt as if there was something odd about where it hit. Taking that same backwoods trail they made their way to a clearing in the woods and found Verra laying in the grass unconscious… No traces of the strange stones or the fence that had previously marked a region of naturally occurring dark matter.
For a few months she had laid in a Central City General hospital bed, almost completely unresponsive and baffling the nurses, local doctors and even the experts called in from all across the country. Off and on the instruments would read her as just fine one moment, and without a pulse the next. Sometimes they saw her eyes moving behind her eyelids, other times she was so completely still that there was the very real concern that she had passed right until the alarms went off yet again. Her mother had very nearly beaten a nurse for suggesting just such a thing, briefly leaving just her best friend Kara and a few of her other close friends as her only visitors for a bit. They spoke to her at times, and a few of them she could actually hear as she lay there unable to wake from her coma, but her recollection of those events is hazy at best, calling it a never ending dream with the flashing of lightning against dark clouds.
Eventually though the particle accelerator went off, detonating in the heart of Central City and washing the entire region with massive doses of dark matter that awoke the latent metahuman genes in that portion of the population. For a short time there was hope that maybe she would be one of them, that she would wake up with some strange power or another and be just fine. She didn't, not for months, and at least her mother felt like she might not have done so at all if not for the intervention of a certain reclusive and eccentric scientist. One that was the cause of so many woes throughout the nation, a pariah of his community and almost a hundred thousand short thanks to a check he wrote to the hospital to smooth things over. Two months after the particle accelerator explosion Harrison Wells had made yet another of his attempts to right the wrongs that the public had heaped upon him. Working the exceptionally strange case of a former high-school track star and beloved member of the community falling into a coma after a lightning strike seemed like just the thing.
It ended up being a bit of a mixed bag in the public's eye, some feeling that he was ambulance chasing in a way, looking for any possible out to get back in the good graces of public opinion. Some felt like it was a genuine effort as he actually did have the personnel and tech at hand that eventually proved that she still had an active mind even at nearly ten months under. There was of course a couple people who were very vocal about the idea of a forty-something scientist taking in an unresponsive attractive college girl into the basement of STAR Labs and some of their own theories on that.
Finally a year after the lightning strike though, there was a breakthrough. As two of the techs had been working on some of their own projects and watching over her, she opened her eyes. Above was the soft white lighting of a lab, seeming right out of a video game she had played once, and for a moment she thought that she was in another dream, but when she pinched herself and felt the pain of it, she winced and nearly fell out of the hospital bed she had been laying in. Worse than scaring herself, she had startled the two techs and they must have dropped whatever they were working on as a fire erupted at one end of the room and engulfed one of them. At least it seemed that it had, though the second one was gone completely. What followed after her rather sudden awakening was a lot of screeching on both sides, finding out that the two lab techs were actually one, or the one was actually two different people, something about a hypervelocity glomp or a fusion dance, and finally Harrison Wells coming in to make sense of everything.
She found out in short order the details of what had happened while she had been in a coma, just how long she had been out, minus her mother's hospital incident, and allowed a few visitors before going back to rest. Her mother had been out on business but notified and was on her way over, Kara said something about having to cancel something but would be right over and a few of her other friends had much the same to say. It was out though that she had woken up, and while there was no shortage of requests to interview her by local news groups, the biggest surprise was her first visitor. Another woman back from the dead it seemed, Thea Queen had been in town and available when the word got out that she was awake, coming over to see her and have quite the awkward conversation. It didn't help that the last time they had spoken had been right before Thea apparently died in a motorcycle crash on her way home after finally getting her to agree to a date.
Friends and family came and went over the next week, one by one finding her in those same good spirits that defied the universe's best efforts to bring her down. More than just her spirits though, her physique bounced back with a vengeance, only taking a couple days of rest and light exercise before she was on her feet and running circuits around the STAR Labs campus much to the annoyance of Harrison Wells and her keeper, the little fireball of a pair of lab techs her and Thea had taken to calling the "Firesmol". At first it didn't feel strange to her that she had recovered so quickly, or that she seemed to be making better times each circuit. Only when she was put on a treadmill and told to push herself did things start to get really weird. Ten miles per hour came and went without effort, like an easy jog in the park. Then she hit twenty and it still felt like nothing. Forty, then sixty, then a hundred. Faster and faster she went until her image began to blur on the treadmill, Harrison Wells watching with slight concern as the numbers kept climbing, all the while the lab techs were beside herself(themselves???) with excitement.
Then the treadmill broke and she face-planted a concrete wall. That one hurt quite a bit, but proved that not only was she fast, like really fast, but so was her healing. The injuries from her little accident, while mild and not really anything to keep her too long anyways, were gone within a couple hours without so much as a trace. As it turned out, her little adventure in the woods had left her with more than a few powers of her own, just as some of her friends hoped, but not quite in the same way. Something about them felt different somehow, like while they were a gift, there was a purpose to them.
Verra didn't think too long on the whole concept though, soon enough returning to her old life and finding that her friends had taken care of a lot of things while she was sleeping off a rather shocking run-in with mother nature. Kara had apparently put the word out via most of her accounts that she had an accident, and the outpouring of support both during her coma and when she announced she was awake again was one of the better moments of waking back up. Well, aside from actually waking up. Some of her social media did take a bit of a hit in followers, and both her streaming accounts lost quite a few, but she's been getting back into things again and now that she's active again she's pretty much almost right where she was before becoming super.
That was the only small thing that had changed in truth, and over the last two months she's been trying to figure it all out in how exactly to deal with being powered. She wasn't like the other metas, she could feel it, but she still had these abilities and there was that feeling that she should do good with them. So a little call to a friend saw a costume made, one that was abruptly torched when she ran a little too fast and ended up standing in the middle of the Cortex rather sparsely dressed. The next one was made of fireproof material, so that was one problem solved. All that was left was a name she figured, and with a little input from Kara and Wells, she felt like she had one that felt rather fitting…
Velocity.
