Blizz

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

______________________________________________________________

Crosspoint, Hope, Overclock, Workshop, Gray Man, Memento, two more whose names she didn't catch...and Jane.

They all definitely seemed decent to be around, except for Gray Man- Will- who they needed earpieces to even be around. Jane felt out of her element to say the least, but she got this far, so she told herself not to be such a damn shut-in. Once upon a time, she used to have very decent social skills, about as much as anyone used to being around people could expect to have. Jane hasn't had much normal conversation in a safe setting since the Psychos rolled through, though. She was thinking about what to say to these people, they were supposed to be her teammates for the foreseeable future, so they needed to get along and not kill each other. On some level, she very much wanted to get back to some sense of normalcy, but Jane never pictured it would mean being a hero instead of just a girl with two flesh-and-bone arms and no passenger. This was ultimately a whole new world for her.

Still, that’s not the worst that’s happened to Jane yet.

Something was on her mind that she didn’t get to ask last time she and the Director interacted. So- uh. Hm. I guess this is everyone, huh? In that case- I was wondering. Us? I mean- There’s plenty of kids around here who got their acts together better than some of us do.” She didn’t say it out loud, but she knew about the Shipyard Tinker. And that wasn’t even including Gray Man just existing. ”What- what made you wanna pick us in particular? Why us?” Jane asked. The others were probably thinking the same thing, or maybe they knew something she didn’t.

Jane wouldn’t be the most legally above-board person here. The PRT had absolutely no way of finding out anything about her. No identification on a database, not even a birth certificate, until they met her and found she was a tinker who sold small pieces of haphazardly-made tinkertech to villains with pocket change to spare. With the amount of material she had that consisted of rusted up junk, she couldn’t exactly make a doomsday weapon, but more than one villain on the street had a piece of machinery to use in their toolboxes that was made by her.

Jane didn’t want to admit that, though.

”Or were we just- did we just get picked first?”

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊

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---

"This is the last chance I’ll give you to surrender before your life is forfeit."

---

---

_Name:

Sierra M. Danvers

_Alias:

Siren

_Nicknames:

None

_Age:

38

_Gender:

Female - She|Her

_Personality:

Stoic and hard to read, people tend to think Siren is a too intimidating to talk to, and while she is, she's only intimidating the way that someone is when they're stone-cold serious about doing their job properly without room for failure. Siren commands respect wherever she goes with an air of well-backed confidence, she knows exactly what she is capable of, and makes a point of knowing exactly what the people around her are capable of as well.

Siren is a dependable woman, she’s not afraid to offer assistance to heroes who need it, and has been known to steer the occasional innocent parahuman away from going down the path of villainy. Anyone who has had the opportunity to work with her knows that she has her act together, and has had it together for years, which is a lot more than most parahumans can say. She has taken on a great deal of responsibility during her hero career, and isn’t afraid go down swinging for her convictions.

Beneath her tough exterior lies a deep sense of compassion for the world around her. Years of dedicating herself to fighting back villains and even the Heralds mean she has weathered more than her fair share of storms. One can argue that Siren is a bit of an outlier, having witnessed as much as she has over the years without losing the determination in her eye to keep going. Some may find it inspiring, others may think she’s simply hiding more hurt and baggage than they realize.

_Appearance:

Out of costume, it's all comfort. Sweatpants, baggy sweatshirts, and anything that doesn't make her feel too humid. Due to the side effects of her powers, Sierra's hair is always wet. She hasn't been able to successfully dry it in the last two decades. How wet depends on how much she uses her powers. After a head-on fight with villains, it looks like she dunked her head underwater. When she wakes up in the morning, it only feels somewhat damp. Don't ask how she sleeps comfortably. Don't ask about the eye, either. Siren wears a getup that makes someone think she's a pirate instead of, well, a siren. Turquoise colored, hydrophobic longcoat, a pair of knee-high boots, padded elbow gloves, and bulletproof vest designed to look like a regular undershirt for subtlety.

_Biography:

She fell from the top and couldn’t swim.

Everything was blue for as far as she could see, her limbs felt like stone. She was cold. There was no solid ground to stand on anymore, she was far from the shore by now, no doubt. The rumble in her ears was all she could hear, the faint reflection of sunlight from the far off surface was growing further and further.

But she thrashed and clawed through the water. She tried with every fleeting breath to pull herself closer to the light. Her lungs were screaming. She could feel her strength dwindling, and her arms didn’t get any lighter for it.

She sank down.

And down.

Down.

”I don’t want to die.”

Everything went black, and the sky spilled open. A storm emerged from a cloudless sky over the land, screaming winds and rain heavy enough to drown the highest mountains. Thunder shook the ground for miles, trees were torn from their roots as if they were grass, and she walked home across the ocean.

She was the ocean.

When the storm passed, she knew she was different.

Sierra was a Breaker. A Parahuman.

”My name is Siren.”

---

24 years have passed since Sierra’s trigger event, and she has spend that time using her powers as an independent hero by the name of Siren, protecting her home from all manners of villains, joining the fight against Heralds, and eventually using her experience to set examples for other up and coming heroes. Siren never hid her identity, to the surprise of many, as she knows she was never perfect, and knew she had to hold herself accountable should she ever make a mistake that out others in harm’s way. As a very successful and competent vigilante, Siren had received countless offers from hero teams, some sponsored by the PRT, others independent. She never took the offers, they were never her scene.

Before coming to Redline, she was a very well-known quantity where she came from. She brought down many villains over the years, and made close friends among the more “professional” heroes. Siren always took pride in her ability to spur changes among capes and guide others down a good path. It was that willingness to set examples that made the PRT approach her in a more official capacity for the Wards Initiative. It was not the first time they spoke, but rather than say they wanted, they conveyed that they needed someone like her for the Guardians in Redline. They needed her affinity for guidance among younger capes, and she obliged.

There was never a reason for Siren to join the PRT officially. She always had plenty of money from working in the Marina where she was thrown from just before her trigger event. She had enough common sense not to do anything stupid with her powers, and she always enjoyed the freedom of independent work. But Siren was accustomed to supporting less experienced capes from her time spent in costume, and she believed in what the PRT did. When they told her about a movement to train parahuman children who may be coming from bad circumstances and equip them with the tools to be the next generation of heroes, she gladly took a place among the Redline Guardians.

_{Powers: Hydrokinesis/Water Physiology [Breaker 7(Shaker 6)]}

Siren has a form she shifts into where her body is altered to be made of water. Her clothes blur and mingle with the surface of her skin and seem to cascade away towards any edge. Her hair goes from being constantly wet to a raging waterfall in the shape of hair, that no one can touch without their hand passing through or being pushed back out. In this form, Sierra absorbs any free water in a solid or gaseous state that her body touches, which is used to slowly heal wounds. She can also walk on water in this state, but the most important advantage to Siren’s Breaker state is that it allows her to access her Shaker power: Hydrokinesis. In this form, she can freely manipulate free water in any state, such as liquid or ice cubes, on a molecular level. This allows Siren to artificially change the state of water and move it like an extension of her body, which it technically is. Her body takes on the physical properties of water, which can allow some forms of physical damage to pass right through her.

Siren is also capable of altering the weather with enough humidity in the air, effectively forcing rain to pour down. This doesn't have much of a practical use unless the rain is particular heavy, and takes time, but it makes Siren ability to flood a street a lot easier if it happens. Siren can't recreate the wind or lighting associated with a thunderstorm, but sometimes, when she is pushed into circumstances like the ones during her trigger event, a full-blown thunderstorm just might occur outside of her control.

_Other:

She lost her eye and half of the skin on her face to a striker with an explosion power that turned organic matter into bombs.

_{Theme Song}

The Real McKenzies - The Tempest

open.spotify.com/track/6gXLYsEkqlhe41…

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

______________________________________________________________

Jane barely caught the earpiece that the Director tossed her way. Her mechanical arm jerked forward like a dog ready to heave up something it shouldn't have bit into, and she caught it, but then it slipped out of her hand, and then she caught with her other hand, and it slipped again into her other one. Jane was many things, but a starter for the catcher position on the Redline Redliners baseball team was not one of them. When the director brought up introductions, she deliberately waited to go last so she could get a feel for these people before she said anything that might make people not like her. A girl about her age, and another tinker no less, went first. Beverly Hillshire. That was a nice name. She seemed like a pretty nice girl, Jane thought. Seeing people her age made Jane relax a little, and she started feeling a bit more optimistic about this when Overlock of all people turned out to be a member of the Ward Initiative. Overclock. She knew the guy, not personally, but who in Redline hadn't at least heard of the dude? He was a big deal, as far as Jane was aware anyway. Two tinkers and a hardcore speedster who already knew what he was doing? A huge relief in Jane's eyes.

While people were starting to introduce themselves, Jane started to think this might actually work out. Until she didn't... Beverly's contraption exploded into a mountain of confetti, absolutely burying the girl. Jane wasn't expecting that, so she jumped a mile like someone just popped a balloon in her face. And then another girl appeared through a portal- another mover?! -and the one who consigned herself to the corner ran over offering to heal her. It was a very hectic scene all of a sudden, not something Jane was accustomed to being right next to, and it somewhat killed the mood. Jane finally relaxed a little when one of them just went with it. The kid whose voice sounded like the color green, Will. Aka, Gray Man. He seemed awfully unbothered by the whole ordeal that just happened, and it made Jane feel even more out of place.

Jeez, she really should've just stayed in the yard.

Okay. Introductions. Come on, she thought. At least say something.

"Well, uh- That's crazy. Huh? Yeah, okay...Hi." She sounded notably awkward. "Name's Jane. Jane Rosner. I don't really have a codename, but- well." She raised her arm up for them to see, in all of it's hacky, junkyardborne grittiness. Some of it actually looked like it was starting to rust over.

"Tinker. If you need something big and mean or something that a person operates, that's me. Like...Uh- something you climb inside, a mech, maybe. Maybe something that move things, or, y'know. This." She motioned to the ugly-looking arm. "If anyone gets blown up and loses a leg, don't worry, huh?"

God, that was awful.

She meekly made her way over to one of the couches and sat down on the far edge of the first one she saw. Jane hoped, suddenly, that none of them recognized her anywhere. Moreso, she hoped that she was lucky enough that Overclock didn't happen to see her when she was putting food on the cinderblock during a split fraction of a second any time he was using his power. That lighting of his kept her awake on more than one night, and she's lost track of how many times she saw it tearing through the city. Hopefully not, she told herself, he was pretty intimidating power-wise, after all.

Kakumei First Cour

Stone Cold Sage

Casefile

_Moniker

Aberashi, Mizo

_Selfhood

Female - She/Her

_Rank

Freelance Jonin

_Affiliations

Hizuru, Konohagakure
Anti-Accord, Hokage Faction

Concept

_Cause

Mizo is a Jonin of Konoha descending from the common Aberashi clan. Well-known in Konoha’s ninja world as one of the most powerful Shinobi over her time, rivaling the great Ikuya the Technician and the Tenth Hokage of her former squad, Mizo is a self-made ninja and deeply respected by her comrades for her mastery over Earth Style and Senjutsu. While most Jonin master several forms of jutsu, Mizo dedicated herself to only two, and everyone that knows her well enough knows she could put them in their place with only one if she needed. As a Freelance Shinobi, she goes wherever she chooses, often taking part in most paths a ninja takes up ranging from intel and scouting to a squad leader and coordination with the police force. Her experience makes her valuable in virtually every one of these aspects.

_Effect

The middle child of a small clan, known for local production of sake, Mizo was no one special. Just an ordinary child in an ordinary family. Upon entry into the ninja academy, she had a serious challenge ahead of her, the clones she made dissolved too fast, and she had next to no talent with any ninjutsu other than the Earth Wall. Most of her instructors thought her chakra wasn’t strong enough for being a Shinobi, until Satoru stepped in, and taught her a new jutsu, the Mud Clone. The academy’s program didn’t mention this one, and Mizo had never heard of it, but she mastered it in less than an hour. Satoru concluded that Mizo was simply best at Earth Style jutsu.

After this, Mizo was allowed to continue in the academy on the condition that for every standard jutsu she couldn’t learn, she learned an Earth Style variant that her instructors would approve as equivalent. As the years went by, she lacked many of the jutsus that most students had, but she had a grasp of the Earth Style that none of her classmates could match. While one or two of her classmates could make a 20 foot high wall of rocks, Mizo could make one 100 feet high

During her time on Satoru’s squad with Ikuya, and a now long gone friend, she learned of an enigmatic form of jutsu called Senjutsu. Satoru helped her study this art, and she once again found something she was practically born to master. Of all the Senjutsu users in history, Mizo grasped it in ways not even Satoru could wrap his head around. Ikuya and Hinami could always put up a fight against her Earth Style, but they never stood a chance when she split the ground open, to drop them into a 50 foot hole. She had gone from an unknown kid to a specialized, self-made shinobi in just a few years. In recent times, Mizo has dedicated less and less to her freelancing work and more to training a squad of Genin. Though, she still gets called on from time to time.

Attributes

_Talents

• Can outdrink all of Konoha
• Geographical knowledge
• Speaks fluent Kawandan

_Tools

• Hatokira: For serious business.

• Nichirin Knuckledusters: For really serious business.

• Anti-Lightning Style Vest: Something she picked up from Ikuya, to ensure she isn’t rendered totally useless against lighting style attacks

• Chakra-Comms: A communication device Mizo developed during her days at Konoha’s ninja Academy. Designed to link up between squadmates and draw power from the user’s chakra. This tech is open source, used by many squads after Ikuya helped her get it approved for standard use.

• K-Watch: Used for simple things such as a calculator, a data storage device, emergencies, and handling money digitally.

_Techniques

Earth Style
•Mud Wall: A wall earth

• Mud Clone: A clone made of mud

•Tremor Clone: A clone rigged to shatter in to sharp pieces of stone

•Earth Flow Wave: Splits huge fractures into the earth

•Earth Flow River: Turns the ground into a huge river of mud

•Earth Dragon Bullet: Create a dragon made of mud to fire blasts of chakra-infused earth

•Earth Dragon Bomb: Create a dragon made of chakra-infused mud to explode like a tremor clone

•Earth Rampart: Like mud wall, but many times as large and designed to be stood on top of

•Sphere of Graves: Make a boulder and throw it

•Antlion Sand Pit: Mold the ground into a covered pit, while using chakra to track footsteps on the surface

•Headhunter: Trap people in the ground, from the neck down

•Sealing Art - Burial Mound: Similar to headhunter and antlion sand pit, melt the ground and mold it around someone until they drown in mud, sealing them within forever.

Senjutsu - Myoboku

•Hatokira: Mizo summons a heavy wooden staff, too heavy to be wielded by anyone other than her. When this staff is infused with a huge amount of nature energy, it has the power to render chakra inert.

•Great Oil Flood: Mizo breaks the ground open with her hands. This causes a surge of toad oil to rush forward, soaking everything. The oil can be lit by anything from a match or spark, to a fireball or a paper bomb.

•Myoboku Senses: While using Senjutsu, Mizo can detect the chakra and life force of others up to a kilometer away, as all sages can. She can differentiate between different people, seeing a glimpse into what they truly are based on the “color” of their life force.

•Summoning Jutsu - Great Horned Titan: Mizo summons Gamamaru, a 10 foot tall, old friend from Myoboku who wields a longbow and fire style ninjutsu.

•Tectonic Body: Mizo pushes all of her nature energy to the surface of her skin, resulting in a translucent glow that shields her body from physical harm, this can also be used to shed excess energy in emergency situations, or to shape energy into a certain way to use as a barrier. Doing this pulls the energy out of her body temporarily, meaning she cannot sense life or chakra unless she takes in additional energy.

•Rain of Planets: A combination of earth style and senjutsu, which pulls nature energy’s petrifying properties into the shape of boulders to rain down and crush everything in their path.

•Path of Peace and Stillness: Mizo reaches deep within herself, channeling unfathomable amounts of natural energy to be mixed with her chakra. Doing this opens the path to Myoboku, and resurrects a single person at the cost of her own life. This is a technique Mizo invented with the intent of bringing back an old friend, but after seeing what became of her former Sensei, she knew her friend wouldn’t want it to happen.

Misc
• Mizo once split an entire mountain clean in half with a single punch. It was witnessed by others.

The Star in the Night

License

_Moniker

Yozora Hoshi, the Number 2 Hero, Starstrider

_Selfhood

F-28-She|Her

_Alignment

Hero

_Affiliations

Society as a whole

Concept

_Ethnicity

Hizuru, Ishgarian

_Cause

A bright and brave soul, Starstrider holds onto a deep seated conviction in bearing the responsibility of heroism. Noble and kind to those she meets, she inspires everyone to be the best they can and never fails to demonstrate honor and dignity. An old friend once told her something, “When the sky falls, never fail to shelter those around you, that they might find inspiration and join your voice as you rage against the fury of anything dangerous.” The last words she ever heard from a selfless warrior stuck with her, and she has never wavered in her selfless nature.

_Effect

From a young age, Yozoru struggled with her quirk sapphire-blue solar flares bursting from a child too young to read, cosmic winds burning the surroundings of every step she took. Her quirk proved to be a very dangerous one that she needed to learn to control whether she wanted the role of a hero or not. During her attendance at Eirei, under the wing of the legendary Zeal himself, she worked herself to the bone to tame the violent, lawless star in her body. When it came time to move on to the next stage of her life, she knew she was leaps and bounds ahead of most as a result of her circumstances.

Attributes

_Talents

_Non-combat
Things like being good language, sciences, singing etc.

_{Celestial: Navigator - Mutation - Emitter}

In the middle section Yozoru’s chest can be found a gaping, seemingly inorganic hole that holds a glowing sphere that is typically covered up by clothing. That sphere is a blue giant, a star. This star generates cosmic radiation as a normal star would, which would normally be dreadfully harmful to people, but Yozoru’s body relies on it. As a result of this, she is generally a rather energetic and lively girl to be around. On top of that, her body is naturally a bit warmer than most, hovering around 100 Fahrenheit. The star will never truly “go out,” but there are ways of purging its energy to weaken her, such as high-speed flight, or the hero technique she invented called the Apotheosis Protocol.

Because this star is a part of her body, Yorozu can redirect the cosmic energy coming off of it however she feels is necessary. This principle allows her to fire projectiles of cosmic starlight, or even power purpose built devices, which she does in the form of her hero gear that she describes as the “Engine of Creation.” It’s a fusion-powered harness coupled with medium-grade weight armor at the shoulders and knees, as well as some heavy boots and a helmet and back side thrusters that are manually powered up. Yozoru relies on her quirk for a large portion of combat, more than anything.

_Tools

The Engine of Creation: A self-contained, highly sophisticated, and extremely durable exo-suit designed to draw power from Starstrider’s starlight. It contains everything from communications and flight assistance, to a full range of live data regarding the environment.

<sub>Warcry

Super Moves</sub>

docs.google.com/document/d/1G11n6Z6ny…

_Theme
Starset - Back to the Earth
open.spotify.com/track/3PWXVMXuFMP171…

Lights Out

License

_Moniker

Jack Hawthorne - The Dark Hero: Nocturne

_Selfhood

M - 36 - He|Him

_Alignment

Hero

_Affiliations

Eirei Academy

Concept

_Ethnicity

Libertan

_Cause

Nocturne is known to have a sort of dreary, peaceful atmosphere around him. He comes off easily as gloomy, but that impression is offset by him overall demeanor. Nocturne always has his head held up high, and is always very dignified and respectful to others. He tries to be the best he can to the people he meets, never failing to demonstrate great patience and tact even in dire situation.

His students are no exception, even when he’s busting a move on them while he’s trying to teach them how to use their quirks in smarter ways.

_Effect

*Lost an arm during violent times in his younger days back in Libetria
*Moved across the world to get away from it
*Now he's an instructor at Eirei
*I'll do this properly some other time lmao

Attributes

_{Non-combat Talents}

Things like being good language, sciences, singing etc.

_{Quirk: Umbramancy [Emitter - Transformation - Navigator - Enchanter]}

Nocturne’s quirk consists of a range of abilities which give him manipulation over all sources of darkness in the surrounding area, as well as the physical or non-physical properties that dictate how darkness interacts with the world. Nocturne can transform a simple absence of light into a form of semi-matter that behaves as tangible or leave it as simply a three-dimensional shadow. He can apply this in the form of a barrier, a weapon, or to weaken a source of light. This forms the basis of Nocturne’s quirk, and everything else he does is based on this. The more iconic side of Nocturne’s quirk allows him to transform into a living shadow that defies logical explanation. Like a human being drowned in blackness, Nocturne’s body loses all color, and the only thing that stands out in this form is his eyes, which become solid white. In this form, Nocturne can apply his shadow-shaping to himself to become untouchable like a ghost, or to fly at quick speeds.

_Tools

A left arm made of shadows

<sub>Warcry

Super Moves</sub>
docs.google.com/document/d/1i-1_A4L9w…

_Theme
Krobak - Marching for the Freedom We Have Lost
open.spotify.com/track/4fAnGRva4yavbW…

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

______________________________________________________________

She should've just stayed in the yard.

Some guy in a suit from the PRT, of all things, waltzes into the one part of the city she didn't think anyone would ever be in, starts drilling her about being a tinker and how she'd freeze to death in that shitbox she called home if a villain didn't pick her off. Next thing she knew, Jane had an offer to join a hero team once this guy in a suit saw her arm. Jane was more than a little jittery as she walked around crowds of people along the sidewalk through the snow. Both of her hands were stuffed in her pockets, and a hood was pulled over her face, because god damn, it was cold. Jane was honestly somewhat rattled that someone wanted a junkyard tinker on a brand-spanking-new hero team, or that anyone with any notoriety knew about her well enough to even find her. She wouldn't have gone through with the idea if Fukuda hadn't mentioned money, Jane lived in a rusted-out junkyard at the edge of Redline, and only occasionally made a few quick bucks by slipping someone some illicit tinkertech. It helped to keep her from starving, but it wasn't sustainable in the long run. Eventually, someone would come and arrest her, or someone would kidnap her and hold her hostage for free tinkertech, if she was one of the lucky tinkers who got captured. Most solitary tinkers weren't lucky these days.

She could feel her left arm seizing up again.

The PRT building stood off in the distance. A monument of dilapidation and parahuman bureaucracy. Built like a prison and ran better than one. Jane stared at the dull, picturesque front of the building for what felt like 20 minutes. Did she really want to do this? Was she supposed to dress nicer? Would they even let her in? Did she get replaced already? What if this, what if that. What if she got killed by a villain here? instead of in the junkyard? Jane walked until she was by the shield-like statue of the PRT. The place sure didn't look inviting, she thought. If she turned back and just went..."home," maybe she could avoid all the chaos and stress and general danger being a legitimate hero could cause. She could wrap herself in a bunch of shoplifted blankets while her hotwired microwave warmed up something to an edible temperature, and hope it produced enough heat that she'd wake up the next morning. It would've been pitiful, but at least it was something she knew, something predictable. This? This was chaotic. Jane was never a big fan of chaotic.

Still, she thought, it might be nice to eat something that wasn’t ate out of a can too hot to be touched by anything but her left arm. She shook off the snow and went inside.

It was a certified miracle she wasn’t asked for an ID. Instead, all she had to say was that she was a concerned citizen, and that she was here to report overhearing a suspicious conversation between Tech Wizard and a member of some meddling teenagers in a van in a seedy hotel room. An elevator ride and a retina scan later, and…she was face to face with a girl her age and the guy in the suit. One looked very properly dressed, the other was, well, in a suit while she was wet from snow and had a somewhat battered aesthetic going on. If you could even call it that. A sweatshirt that looked like it was put through a warzone and cleaned up to the best of Jane’s ability, and a robotic arm consisting on metal shafts, gears, springs, a workwear glove, and the bulb of a flashlight. She looked out of place.

No going back now, she thought as she raised her metal hand in an uncertain, non-committing wave.

”Uh. Hi.”

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

💨💨💨💨💨

_{”Alright, chief. Square up, let’s go.}

_Name

??? ???

_Alias

Grassbones

_Nicknames

Grass

_Age

Presumably mid to late 20s

_Gender

Male - He/Him

_Personality

The free-spirited vigilante always has a cool and level attitude. Grassbones likes to take the path of least resistance, to the point of almost being outright lazy, but just enough that unnecessary problems are avoided. Anyone who interacts with him knows he can be somewhat flighty, and acts like his head is in the clouds. It’s easy to mistake Grassbones for just a helpless cape who has no idea what he’s doing, and isn’t taking the role seriously, that couldn’t be further from the truth. What he lacks in decorum, Grassbones makes up for in comfortable, deadly levels of competency.

Grassbones gets along with others easily. Having been a vigilante for as long as he has, he has found himself working closely with “official” heroes on more than one occasion, and has never had anything bad to say about his temporary co-workers and allies. Whether they appreciate his largely unprofessional go-with-the-flow attitude is another story. I’m fact, he probably frustrates the Protectorate quite a bit. Despite his typical mindset, the one thing he never budges on is the pressure of joining the PRT.

_Appearance

Standing at 5”6’, and seemingly a lean and wiry person, no one has ever seen Grassbones’ real face, because you can’t unmask a skeleton. In his hero getup, Grassbones is a literal skeleton dressed for flexibility and practicality. His “costume” consists of sweats, slip-on shoes, hand wraps, and a cargo vest containing his most valuable resources for the battlefield: cigars and a zippo lighter. Don’t be fooled by the minimalism.

Whenever Grassbones uses his power, smoke rolls off of his hands and wrists, and out of the holes in his skull where his eyes and nose should be. Although, it’s anyone’s guess if the smoke coming from his face is actually coming from his face, ir if it’s because of the cigar he never stops smoking. Despite the fact that Grassbones doesn’t have eyes in costume, you can tell when he’s staring right through you. Despite not having any facial muscles, he somehow manages to articulate emotions as if he still looked like a living person. It’s…unsettling.

_Biography

A young man had come
from a past of bad choices and severed connections. He grew up in a family that had often struggled to make ends meet, and so he fell in with bad crowds to support them. Bad crowds, of course, means he found work with a villain, doing illicit odd jobs such as a getaway driver, gunman and money launderer. It was it was bad work that paid well, and that was all he cared about.

When he realized he was in too deep, he tried to make himself scarce, but his family found out, and they abandoned him. He spent months alone, running amok among the bad guys to try and make something of himself, but they turned on him, leaving him with nothing. The rage of betrayal turned him into a parahuman.

Many months later, a vigilante named Grassbones appeared in Redline, and quickly became a known quantity among the PRT when he took down and rounded up the same villains he used to work for. None of them recognized the skeletal face when he dragged them into the headquarters of the Redline Protectorate, declining all offers to join as an “official” hero. A few years have gone by since his first appearance, and he has built up a dodgy reputation as a frustrating, but above-board vigilante with an aversion to working in what the PRT considers an official capacity. He has never been known to endanger the lives of anyone he faces, or break any laws, but his staunch insistence on remaining independent has turned more than a few heads, especially when it doesn’t fit with his regular attitude.

Grassbones has always been willing to cooperate with other heroes on important matters. In fact, he contributed a lot to the evacuation and rescue efforts during the last Herald attack. His strict aversion to joining the PRT, and putting himself under their jurisdiction however, has put him at odds with some of the organization’s higher-ups. Not that he cares.

_Powers:

Grassbones is a grab bag cape with multiple minor powers that work together. In no particular order, his powers consist of Thinker, Breaker, and Brute. All of Grassbones’ powers are fueled by the inhalation of smoke, which is why he is virtually always seen smoking a cigarette or a cigar, which can give him enough energy to use his power for roughly two to three days, depending on how much he smokes.

His most well known power is his thinker power, which places an emphasis on direct combat and planning. His power grants him superhuman proficiency in hand-to-hand fighting, reaction time, reflexes, and predicting what an opponent is most likely to do. The trick to countering this is to stay off his radar- don’t give him the opportunity to discover your tricks with reconnaissance, or let him know you’re coming. If he knows you’re going to attack, his tinker power will take the wheel.

Both of his other two powers are tied to his breaker form. Using a portion of his smoke, Grassbones changes into an inhuman state, a skeleton, in which he is capable of punching a bony hand-shaped hole through a brick wall, and survive an equally strong punch to the skull. While he couldn’t survive a fall from the roof of a skyscraper in his skeleton form, it would take more than a baseball bat to the face to take him out, if you even managed to hit him, that is. His boney form also gives him the ability to move faster than the average human, and move in ways most can’t. He’s incredibly agile, which makes running across Redline very easy.

The easiest way to deal with Grassbones is with a high-caliber firearm from a distance. He may have superhuman reflexes, but he can’t dodge a shot from a sniper rifle, let alone predict that he’s being aimed at from a couple hundred yards away.

_{Theme Song}

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

🦾🦾🦾🦾🦾

_{”Uh. Need a hand?”}

_Name

Jane Rosner

_Alias

Scraprig

_Nicknames

Scrappy

_Age

17

_Gender

Female - She|Her

_Personality

Defensive, dodgy, twitchy, squirrely. What more could you say? Jane acts like she's got something hiding under the floorboards that would land her in prison when you try to press her for intimate details about herself. Whenever you get her talking about something like her tech, or just something as mundane as the weather, she's perfectly fine. But the moment you ask why she doesn't have a birth certificate, it's a long story, and she doesn't know what you're talking about, she just has it stuffed away somewhere too inconvenient to get at this particular moment. Also, she's suddenly very busy. As long as you don't get too close, she's chill and like to hang around you. That is, if you can get around her at all. Being a tinker, Jane tends to stay locked away somewhere for hours at a moment's notice staring at a piece of something that's supposed to move, and she won't come out until she makes it move exactly the right number of degrees that it's supposed to move, so help her god.

Jane is also a little...weird around big crowds. She starts getting paranoid and acts like she's looking for someone, but if you ask, she doesn't know what you're talking about and you're being weird. It's hard to tell if she's trying to find someone, or if she's trying to not be found by someone. She might even be to make sure someone else isn't found. You can never tell with her. She's scrappy like that.

_Appearance

Scruffy and taller than some girls, Jane is visibly an active person. Her hair is always cut in a very choppy way, which is probably because she's literally been chopping it with a knife for the last few months. The most notable thing about her is the spindly and geometrically messy left arm she has. Her right arm moves like a human arm, while her left tends to move in very jittery ways, and has the manual dexterity of a leopard seal. If you can’t tell it’s mechanical by the fact that she chops a tin can in half like her hand is the jaws of life, wait until she rolls up her sleeve and a fog light shines out of her wrist.

_Biography

Who’s askin’? All you need to know is she lost her arm after a villain gang rolled through her town a year and a half ago, and she triggered roughly six months after when she ran into them again. Mind your own business! Well, if you must know, she’s also been living in an abandoned junkyard for roughly the same time that she’s been a parahuman. It’s not pretty, but at least she can rig something up to keep herself warm at night. Jane’s trigger event is on a need-to-know basis, bucko, and you don’t!

_{Powers/Skills}

Despite acting like a Stranger to the core, Jane is a Tinker whose speciality is…complicated. If you asked her, she would say some convoluted thing like “Electro-cybermechanics.” Anything that consists of a combination of electrical technology and mechanical, as well as anything that can interface with an entire human is something Jane should theoretically be able to work with. This includes robot suits, heavy duty gizmos, and, much to her fortune and general gratitude, mechanical limbs. How they work is also “complicated,” much like the work of any tinker on the planet, but she also has a much more concrete specialty in the form of scrapping and repurposing. The problem with this is that everything she makes in such a way looks like something out of a low-budget Mad Max movie, but easily accessible.

Jane can turn a drive train and a break pad into a comically long angle grinder, turn a microwave into a kit bashed computer, and only god knows what would happen if she got more than rusted up junk to play with. Her arm was made from a lamp, a table saw, a rusted-out truck axle, a bedbug-infested recliner, and a cut-resistant glove she shoplifted once along with a pack of doubled stuffed Oreos. Also, it only has three fingers.

It looks like shit, but it fucking works.

_Other

• Jane spends a lot of time in public libraries, about as much as she does trying to make her arm less shitty.

• She doesn’t have a birth certificate. Or a state ID…or driver’s license, or SSID. Not that you would want to, but you wouldn’t be able to exactly prove that Jane Rosner is her real name.

• She’s also not technically a resident of Redline.

• Her favorite superpower is probably Amazon’s. She thinks Amazon is hot.

• In the last few weeks, she’s been heavily considering joining the Knights Aspirant so she can have money and get out of a nasty-as-sin Junkyard. There are no hero teams who would want a tinker whose gimmick is junk, but if she’s lucky, the power armored mercs will.

🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊

---

---

"This is the last chance I’ll give you to surrender before your life is forfeit."

---

---

_Name:

Sierra M. Danvers

_Alias:

Siren

_Nicknames:

None

_Age:

38

_Gender:

Female - She|Her

_Personality:

Stoic and hard to read, people tend to think Siren is a too intimidating to talk to, and while she is, she's only intimidating the way that someone is when they're stone-cold serious about doing their job properly without room for failure. Siren commands respect wherever she goes with an air of well-backed confidence, she knows exactly what she is capable of, and makes a point of knowing exactly what the people around her are capable of as well.

Siren is a dependable woman, she’s not afraid to offer assistance to heroes who need it, and has been known to steer the occasional innocent parahuman away from going down the path of villainy. Anyone who has had the opportunity to work with her knows that she has her act together, and has had it together for years, which is a lot more than most parahumans can say. She has taken on a great deal of responsibility during her hero career, and isn’t afraid go down swinging for her convictions.

Beneath her tough exterior lies a deep sense of compassion for the world around her. Years of dedicating herself to fighting back villains and even the Heralds mean she has weathered more than her fair share of storms. One can argue that Siren is a bit of an outlier, having witnessed as much as she has over the years without losing the determination in her eye to keep going. Some may find it inspiring, others may think she’s simply hiding more hurt and baggage than they realize.

_Appearance:

Out of costume, it's all comfort. Sweatpants, baggy sweatshirts, and anything that doesn't make her feel too humid. Due to the side effects of her powers, Sierra's hair is always wet. She hasn't been able to successfully dry it in the last two decades. How wet depends on how much she uses her powers. After a head-on fight with villains, it looks like she dunked her head underwater. When she wakes up in the morning, it only feels somewhat damp. Don't ask how she sleeps comfortably. Don't ask about the eye, either. Siren wears a getup that makes someone think she's a pirate instead of, well, a siren. Turquoise colored, hydrophobic longcoat, a pair of knee-high boots, padded elbow gloves, and bulletproof vest designed to look like a regular undershirt for subtlety.

_Biography:

She fell from the top and couldn’t swim.

Everything was blue for as far as she could see, her limbs felt like stone. She was cold. There was no solid ground to stand on anymore, she was far from the shore by now, no doubt. The rumble in her ears was all she could hear, the faint reflection of sunlight from the far off surface was growing further and further.

But she thrashed and clawed through the water. She tried with every fleeting breath to pull herself closer to the light. Her lungs were screaming. She could feel her strength dwindling, and her arms didn’t get any lighter for it.

She sank down.

And down.

Down.

”I don’t want to die.”

Everything went black, and the sky spilled open. A storm emerged from a cloudless sky over the land, screaming winds and rain heavy enough to drown the highest mountains. Thunder shook the ground for miles, trees were torn from their roots as if they were grass, and she walked home across the ocean.

She was the ocean.

When the storm passed, she knew she was different.

Sierra was a Breaker. A Parahuman.

”My name is Siren.”

---

24 years have passed since Sierra’s trigger event, and she has spend that time using her powers as an independent hero by the name of Siren, protecting her home from all manners of villains, joining the fight against Heralds, and eventually using her experience to set examples for other up and coming heroes. Siren never hid her identity, to the surprise of many, as she knows she was never perfect, and knew she had to hold herself accountable should she ever make a mistake that out others in harm’s way. As a very successful and competent vigilante, Siren had received countless offers from hero teams, some sponsored by the PRT, others independent. She never took the offers, they were never her scene.

Before coming to Redline, she was a very well-known quantity where she came from. She brought down many villains over the years, and made close friends among the more “professional” heroes. Siren always took pride in her ability to spur changes among capes and guide others down a good path. It was that willingness to set examples that made the PRT approach her in a more official capacity for the Wards Initiative. It was not the first time they spoke, but rather than say they wanted, they conveyed that they needed someone like her for the Guardians in Redline. They needed her affinity for guidance among younger capes, and she obliged.

There was never a reason for Siren to join the PRT officially. She always had plenty of money from working in the Marina where she was thrown from just before her trigger event. She had enough common sense not to do anything stupid with her powers, and she always enjoyed the freedom of independent work. But Siren was accustomed to supporting less experienced capes from her time spent in costume, and she believed in what the PRT did. When they told her about a movement to train parahuman children who may be coming from bad circumstances and equip them with the tools to be the next generation of heroes, she gladly took a place among the Redline Guardians.

_{Powers: Hydrokinesis/Water Physiology [Breaker 7(Shaker 6)]}

Siren has a form she shifts into where her body is altered to be made of water. Her clothes blur and mingle with the surface of her skin and seem to cascade away towards any edge. Her hair goes from being constantly wet to a raging waterfall in the shape of hair, that no one can touch without their hand passing through or being pushed back out. In this form, Sierra absorbs any free water in a solid or gaseous state that her body touches, which is used to slowly heal wounds. She can also walk on water in this state, but the most important advantage to Siren’s Breaker state is that it allows her to access her Shaker power: Hydrokinesis. In this form, she can freely manipulate free water in any state, such as liquid or ice cubes, on a molecular level. This allows Siren to artificially change the state of water and move it like an extension of her body, which it technically is. Her body takes on the physical properties of water, which can allow some forms of physical damage to pass right through her.

Siren is also capable of altering the weather with enough humidity in the air, effectively forcing rain to pour down. This doesn't have much of a practical use unless the rain is particular heavy, and takes time, but it makes Siren ability to flood a street a lot easier if it happens. Siren can't recreate the wind or lighting associated with a thunderstorm, but sometimes, when she is pushed into circumstances like the ones during her trigger event, a full-blown thunderstorm just might occur outside of her control.

_Other:

She lost her eye and half of the skin on her face to a striker with an explosion power that turned organic matter into bombs.

_{Theme Song}

The Real McKenzies - The Tempest

open.spotify.com/track/6gXLYsEkqlhe41…

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

I like this one better than Siren.

🦾🦾🦾🦾🦾

_{”Uh. Need a hand?”}

_Name

Jane Rosner

_Alias

Scraprig

_Nicknames

Scrappy

_Age

17

_Gender

Female - She|Her

_Personality

Defensive, dodgy, twitchy, squirrely. What more could you say? Jane acts like she's got something hiding under the floorboards that would land her in prison when you try to press her for intimate details about herself. Whenever you get her talking about something like her tech, or just something as mundane as the weather, she's perfectly fine. But the moment you ask why she doesn't have a birth certificate, it's a long story, and she doesn't know what you're talking about, she just has it stuffed away somewhere too inconvenient to get at this particular moment. Also, she's suddenly very busy. As long as you don't get too close, she's chill and like to hang around you. That is, if you can get around her at all. Being a tinker, Jane tends to stay locked away somewhere for hours at a moment's notice staring at a piece of something that's supposed to move, and she won't come out until she makes it move exactly the right number of degrees that it's supposed to move, so help her god.

Jane is also a little...weird around big crowds. She starts getting paranoid and acts like she's looking for someone, but if you ask, she doesn't know what you're talking about and you're being weird. It's hard to tell if she's trying to find someone, or if she's trying to not be found by someone. She might even be to make sure someone else isn't found. You can never tell with her. She's scrappy like that.

_Appearance

Scruffy and taller than some girls, Jane is visibly an active person. Her hair is always cut in a very choppy way, which is probably because she's literally been chopping it with a knife for the last few months. The most notable thing about her is the spindly and geometrically messy left arm she has. Her right arm moves like a human arm, while her left tends to move in very jittery ways, and has the manual dexterity of a leopard seal. If you can’t tell it’s mechanical by the fact that she chops a tin can in half like her hand is the jaws of life, wait until she rolls up her sleeve and a fog light shines out of her wrist.

_Biography

Who’s askin’? All you need to know is she lost her arm after a villain gang rolled through her town a year and a half ago, and she triggered roughly six months after when she ran into them again. Mind your own business! Well, if you must know, she’s also been living in an abandoned junkyard for roughly the same time that she’s been a parahuman. It’s not pretty, but at least she can rig something up to keep herself warm at night. Jane’s trigger event is on a need-to-know basis, bucko, and you don’t!

_{Powers/Skills}

Despite acting like a Stranger to the core, Jane is a Tinker whose speciality is…complicated. If you asked her, she would say some convoluted thing like “Electro-cybermechanics.” Anything that consists of a combination of electrical technology and mechanical, as well as anything that can interface with an entire human is something Jane should theoretically be able to work with. This includes robot suits, heavy duty gizmos, and, much to her fortune and general gratitude, mechanical limbs. How they work is also “complicated,” much like the work of any tinker on the planet, but she also has a much more concrete specialty in the form of scrapping and repurposing. The problem with this is that everything she makes in such a way looks like something out of a low-budget Mad Max movie, but easily accessible.

Jane can turn a drive train and a break pad into a comically long angle grinder, turn a microwave into a kit bashed computer, and only god knows what would happen if she got more than rusted up junk to play with. Her arm was made from a lamp, a table saw, a rusted-out truck axle, a bedbug-infested recliner, and a cut-resistant glove she shoplifted once along with a pack of doubled stuffed Oreos. Also, it only has three fingers.

It looks like shit, but it fucking works.

_Other

• Jane spends a lot of time in public libraries, about as much as she does trying to make her arm less shitty.

• She doesn’t have a birth certificate. Or a state ID…or driver’s license, or SSID. Not that you would want to, but you wouldn’t be able to exactly prove that Jane Rosner is her real name.

• She’s also not technically a resident of Redline.

• Her favorite superpower is probably Amazon’s. She thinks Amazon is hot.

• In the last few weeks, she’s been heavily considering joining the Knights Aspirant so she can have money and get out of a nasty-as-sin Junkyard. There are no hero teams who would want a tinker whose gimmick is junk, but if she’s lucky, the power armored mercs will.

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

I may end up scrapping Siren and going for a whole different character since I made her thinking the Wards had been around for a while.

Be prepared for a scrappy rat bastard to possibly take the stage.