canaryrose

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

Much to Carmen’s relief, the chatter continued on without interruption upon her entrance. Only a few waves, some surprised looks, and a singular “hello” were thrown her way. The director didn’t even seem to notice her. … Or maybe he did, since he threw her a pair of earbuds. Carmen fumbled with them for a moment, glancing around as she sat on the couch. What were these for? Everyone else seemed to be already wearing them, so she put them in her ears. Were they a headset? Like in spy movies? They didn’t seem to block any sound, so she decided that was it. Headset. Right.

Carmen waved back to Andy, not quite wanting to interrupt the very animated conversation going on. They seemed to be talking about… who they were? How they got here? There was a slew of introductions and one very cringy thing said by Andy (Carmen could barely keep from rolling her eyes). But she elected not to respond, instead sitting on her couch. She had expected the Director to be angry with her for being late, but he seemed to be nonchalant, which was good. There was confetti everywhere, which was strange. It didn’t look like they had thrown a welcome party.

An older girl sat next to Carmen, followed by her… friend, maybe? Bev and Morie. “Mine’s Carmen. It’s… nice to meet you!” She held out a hand for a polite handshake. One seemed enthusiastic and bubbly, and the other seemed quiet. A strange mix, but they seemed to be nice. They had an interesting look in their eyes. Was that… no, it was pity. An ugly feeling settled in Carmen’s stomach, twisting. Out of the corner of her eye, a boy gave a wide smile to her- in direct contrast to how cold he’d been acting to everybody else. In the Director-imposed silence, she contemplated her position in this room of wannabe heroes.

God, she might as well have been wearing pigtails and holding a teddy bear for the way they all looked at her. They were being so nice, but it wasn’t comforting. It was mocking. They didn’t intend it that way, but she felt it like nails on a chalkboard. It didn’t show much on her face, but she still felt that twisting. She was familiar with that feeling. She’s so young to be going through this. Oh, and she’s so young… What did they think she had done to get here? Why did they think she was here? She wasn’t like them. She wasn’t a criminal. She hadn’t been forced to do anything by anyone.

Well, maybe she had. It hadn’t been that much of a choice. Her mom had called the PRT, arranged a meeting, and signed the papers, all without Carmen’s input. She had known but didn’t argue, wasn’t asked for her opinion. Maybe she was less like them than she had thought. These kids were heroes, people with hero names and powers they understood. And she was a thirteen-year-old girl who had been signed up and thrown into a world she didn’t understand. While she was having her small crisis, Carmen listened to Director Fukuda’s phone conversation with an open ear. She intuitively knew to shut up whenever adults spoke, so she did, keeping her lips zipped and ears peeled. What he said was… concerning. Her anxiety spiked. What on Earth was going on?

“... Things are getting interesting? Mr. Fukuda, is something wrong? Are- are we getting attacked? By villains?” If Carmen had further dissected his conversation she would have understood that it likely wasn’t that, but the idea concerned her. God, fighting? This soon? She didn’t even know how to fight with her power yet.

“Um, but, since I think I didn’t get to it… I’m Carmen Foster, but I guess I’ll be V to everybody else. I’m 13, I go to Redline Middle, my mom signed me up for this, and my power lets me make stuff. Objects. I'll show you.” Carmen stood as she said it. With an almost unnoticeable flash of light and smoke, a basketball appeared in Carmen’s hands. She chucked it at the opposite wall, letting it bounce around the room, but then curled her fingers and watched it vanish into that same fog. She sat down on the couch again, watching the room warily for reactions. People had been impressed with her power. Would they be?

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

Carmen couldn’t stop staring at the oven clock. 5:55. Director Fukuda- who had sounded very serious- had given a deadline of 6:00. The Fosters’ apartment was close to the PRT building, but it was rush hour, and she wouldn’t get there by 6:00. Frick. Her mom was late. Why was she late? Carmen could have walked herself, but nooo. She wasn’t allowed to walk there by herself. She had to get a ride. From her mom. No one else was getting a ride from their mom! Older kids got to walk, or take a taxi, or may even drive… so unfair.

She was still in her school uniform. The crest of Redline Middle School was emblazoned on the right side of her blue polo, and she wore khakis underneath and a gray puffy jacket on top. As she waited for her mom, Carmen had packed a backpack for the Wards headquarters, too. Hadn’t he mentioned there were beds there? She had the red backpack slung over her shoulders. She had also tidied the house, and packed herself an Uncrustable and some carrot sticks for dinner later. She had been busy. But now, Carmen stood by the door until…

Her mother walked in. Valerie was a short yet imposing woman, wearing a boxy police uniform. She looked similar to her daughter- dark hair, dark skin. “Carmen, come on, go, get in the car, you’re late!” Her mom rushed her out the door and down to the car- a police car. Carmen groaned.

“Seriously? We’re taking the squad car?”

“Jonas has the other car. Get in. I won’t have you getting fired on your first day.”

Carmen resisted the very true rebuttal that she was already late and climbed into the front seat. It was always disorienting to find herself in the front seat of a cop car, and even more disorienting to know she was headed towards her own version of law enforcement. As they pulled out of the driveway, Carmen fiddled with her hair. Had she forgotten to get the hair tie out of her room? Dangit! With a kind of ease, she summoned a purple scrunchie from thin air and used it to put her hair up. It would dissipate later, but she would find a more permanent solution. Her mom’s gaze slid towards her, silently judging.

“You know, Carm,” she started, and Carmen braced herself for whatever she was going to say, “I want you to understand something. These other kids you’ll be working with are trouble. They’re delinquents, criminals. I don’t want you getting mixed up in all their business. Keep your distance and don’t get comfortable.”

Carmen shifted in her seat, eyes on her mom. “How do you know that? I thought our identities were supposed to be secret.”

“They are! Don’t worry. Just… most parahumans are trouble. Something about the… the powers and psychology or something. I don’t know.”

“But I’m a parahuman,” Carmen said. It was something that had taken her a lot of time to come to terms with it. She was pretty sure she still hadn’t come to terms with it. Her power seemed so tiny, but getting it had changed her life. She wasn’t sure if that change was good or bad, but it was change.

“Well, yes, but…” Valerie trailed off, looking resolutely into the street. “You’re different.” She left it at that, and Carmen frowned.

“I don’t-”

“Jesus, this traffic,” her mom interrupted. There was in fact, a long line of cars trailing through their icy downtown, but Carmen couldn’t see how that was relevant. Although she was going to be late, and that was a terrifying thought. “Hm. Can’t have you be late Let’s fix this.” Without warning, her mom flicked the sirens on and began to speed up, other cars making way for them and their supposed emergency.

Carmen flattened herself against her seat. “MOM!” she screamed.
“Seriously?! This is SO embarrassing!”

Valerie laughed. “But you’re not as late as you would’ve been, are you?” They pulled up to the PRT Headquarters at exactly 6 o’clock. People turned their heads, spooked as the cop car with the sirens pulled up and then turned them off. A few PRT officers turned their heads, making their way over to the car. “Get going, Carm. I’ll see you at home- curfew is 9:30, you understand? Don’t let that Fukuda guy keep you later, or I swear to God he is dead. It’s not a school night but you need your sleep. Oh, and be careful-”

Carmen stepped out of the car, still flushed. “Bye. See you later.” She huffed and headed into the building, red backpack slung over her shoulder. She checked her watch. 6:01. Frick! She sped up, walking to the receptionist’s desk with purpose. What was it that she was supposed to say? Something strange… She thought for a moment as the receptionist stared at her curiously. She had seen a ton of teenagers today and knew what was coming. “Hi, I’m here because, um… my mom got bit by a rat and it turned her into a Herald.” That sounded right.

The receptionist sighed. “You’re the last one, kid.” She buzzed up an officer to escort Carmen down to the Wards headquarters.

A PRT officer showed up in full tactical gear and grabbed Carmen’s shoulder, guiding her to the elevator. She almost immediately felt uncomfortable. “Hi.” No response. The elevator ticked down, level after level, including going beyond the prison sector (which made Carmen’s heart rate pick up- she was not going to jail this was NOT a Scared Straight thing) and eventually stopped on the floor below.

Carmen stepped out of the elevator, looking thoroughly nervous. Just from observations, she could tell she was the shortest, youngest, and most ordinary person in the room. All these people were genuine teenagers. Oh boy! And they were all looking at her. She gave a cheery little wave, flashing a braces-filled smile, and tried to mosey on over to the couch, avoiding attention from the Director. Maybe he’d think she was there the whole time?

Young Justice

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Location: Metahuman Youth Center Interacting with:Aleen'a (@baraquiel), Cecile (@dreamingflowers)

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Alisa made the decision to tag along with Aleen’a. “I’ll come with!” She followed closely behind her. After their conversation earlier in the lab, she worried for her friend, and especially worried about her ability to keep their mission under wraps. Aleen’a was normally a little spacey, but right now she was extra spacey. Plus, it never hurt to stick with a friend in a strange place. Which the center definitely was. As much as Alisa hated to admit it, being around so many strangers made her nervous, especially when she was pretending to be a partially human girl. Last she checked, metahumans didn’t come in the robot variety. So she had to blink. And remembering to blink was hard.

As soon as Alisa had finished and attached her new hand- which still felt a bit strange- she had rushed off to her room to get ready. Her first instinct had been to go for pastels and chunky earrings and skirts, but then she realized that she was trying to not be noticed and had gone with a black hoodie and jeans instead. She had worn her clip-on strawberry earrings, though. They were too awesome to not wear!

On their way to the cafeteria, Alisa spotted something through a window and had to stop. Was that… an art studio? She unattached from Aleen’a’s side and moved to peer through the glass. It was! They had easels, and the good markers, and was that a pottery kiln? She probably wouldn’t have any time to paint while she was here, but it couldn’t hurt to go inside, could it? She jiggled the door handle. It was locked. A frown crossed her face. Damn. She would come back later. But she had lost Aleen’a! Shit! She rushed down the hall to the cafeteria, where she was met with Aleen’a having a conversation.

Alisa went back to standing at Aleen’a’s elbow, entering at the start of their conversation. At Camila’s comment on height, Alisa was met with a twinge of annoyance. She forgot how tiny standing next to Aleen’a made her look. Not that Cecile had called her short, but still. Annoying.

“Hi! You weren’t talking to me, but I’m Ally. Me and her are friends, we just got here. She is very tall! It’s nice to meet you.” Alisa shook Cecile’s hand way too tightly. Damnit. Alisa cringed in embarrassment. She had fucked up the calibration on the new hand. Something to fix later.

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

V

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"It's V. Like, um, CTRL-V. The keyboard shortcut? Copy and paste?

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Name:
Carmen Foster

Alias:
V

Age:
13

Gender:
Female; she/her pronouns

Personality:
Carmen could most aptly be described as a ball of sunshine. She’s a relentless optimist, reacting to most situations with a smile. She’s outgoing and tries her best to make new friends. But, more often than not, she’s not successful, because, well… Carmen is awkward. Her words always seem to come out wrong, twisted. She drives people away with her unending enthusiasm. But Carmen is resilient. Her nerves are easy to ruffle but, otherwise, she maintains her optimistic disposition in the face of everything. Pain, rejection, mocking- she manages to keep a good face on despite it all.

After all, she only cries in private.

Carmen is intelligent too. One might even call her a nerd. She’s into everything- from cartoons to stuffed animals to computers. She’d never admit most of her interests to the other Wards, but she can often be seen reading a Percy Jackson novel with a stuffed unicorn in her lap. She earns good grades and is proud of it, almost addicted to the high of it all.

Appearance:
Carmen is shorter than average for her age, being 4’9” and not showing any sign of growing beyond that quite yet. She’s small, weighing in at 98 pounds. Her small stature betrays her status as a late-bloomer- something she secretly hopes to overcome soon.

Moving beyond her small stature, Carmen is of Mexican origin. Her skin is a smooth medium-brown, and her hair is a deep brown, curly and shoulder-length. Her eyes, too, are an ochre brown and they sparkle with secret mischief and hope.

Biography:
For as long as Carmen can remember, it’s just been her and her mom. Valerie Foster had her first and only daughter young. Carmen’s father had never been in her life. It isn’t something she angsts over. In fact, she prefers not to know a man who was shitty enough to never want to speak to his own daughter. For the first few years of Carmen’s life, her mom and her hopped around from apartment to apartment, her mom from job to job. That was before her mom found her calling as a cop though. Now, they live in Redline in a mid-level suburb. Carmen doesn’t remember the before much, but she knows life is good.

Valerie Foster raised her daughter to be tough. She doesn’t take people’s shit and doesn’t get into trouble. And if she did… well. Valerie is a disciplinarian, a tough-love sort of woman. But that’s not to say they aren’t close. Carmen loves her mother and her mother loves her back. Carmen is the center of her mother’s world.

When she got to middle school though, things started…changing. It was unsettling. Mom got a new boyfriend, who was nice enough but threatened the dynamic. And kids turned mean. The world turned mean. Carmen was tough as always, but sometimes there are problems you can’t fix. And this was one of them. Things piled up. And one day, she exploded and the solution appeared right in her hands.

Carmen’s trigger wasn’t one she could hide from her mom. Although she wasn’t in the PRT, as a cop, she had all too much experience dealing with Redline’s parahumans. And Valerie had never liked parahumans- always mistrusted them. They were trouble, even the heroes. And to find out her daughter had become one of them? It strained their relationship to the point of breaking, and it still is. Committed to keeping her daughter on the straight and narrow, Valerie found out about the new Wards program through a law enforcement contact and quickly enrolled her daughter without her input.

Powers:
(DESIGNATION: Striker 6, Tinker 1)

V’s power allows her to summon any object she has a good understanding of out of thin air. As she would put it, her power comprises two functions: copy and paste. She copies an object by learning how it operates and committing it to memory, and pastes it by summoning it. Her objects do not obey the laws of physics. If destroyed or altered, they’ll simply disappear, and any chemical testing reveals that they’re made of no particular material. Put rather confusingly, she turns raw energy into anything she chooses. Her objects can only be summoned directly into her hands and disappear within one hour.

Her power has a burnout function. Once V creates too many objects within a 12-hour period, she can no longer summon any more. That limit depends on specificity (ie a pink AK-47 that fires bubbles instead of bullets vs a gun), necessity (Epi-Pen while someone is in active anaphylaxis vs a hammer when one is nearby), complexity (a high-tech Tinker gun vs a BB gun), and size (ie a skyscraper vs a piece of string). The rules are all very complicated but V can feel herself running out, akin to a battery. She has to conserve her power carefully.

Skills:
None to speak of. (aka pls god don’t make me do this section)

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

V

---

---

---

---

"It's V. Like, um, CTRL-V. The keyboard shortcut? Copy and paste?

---

---

Name:
Carmen Foster

Alias:
V

Age:
13

Gender:
Female; she/her pronouns

Personality:
Carmen could most aptly be described as a ball of sunshine. She’s a relentless optimist, reacting to most situations with a smile. She’s outgoing and tries her best to make new friends. But, more often than not, she’s not successful, because, well… Carmen is awkward. Her words always seem to come out wrong, twisted. She drives people away with her unending enthusiasm. But Carmen is resilient. Her nerves are easy to ruffle but, otherwise, she maintains her optimistic disposition in the face of everything. Pain, rejection, mocking- she manages to keep a good face on despite it all.

After all, she only cries in private.

Carmen is intelligent too. One might even call her a nerd. She’s into everything- from cartoons to stuffed animals to computers. She’d never admit most of her interests to the other Wards, but she can often be seen reading a Percy Jackson novel with a stuffed unicorn in her lap. She earns good grades and is proud of it, almost addicted to the high of it all.

Appearance:
Carmen is shorter than average for her age, being 4’9” and not showing any sign of growing beyond that quite yet. She’s small, weighing in at 98 pounds. Her small stature betrays her status as a late-bloomer- something she secretly hopes to overcome soon.

Moving beyond her small stature, Carmen is of Mexican origin. Her skin is a smooth medium-brown, and her hair is a deep brown, curly and shoulder-length. Her eyes, too, are an ochre brown and they sparkle with secret mischief and hope.

Biography:
For as long as Carmen can remember, it’s just been her and her mom. Valerie Foster had her first and only daughter young. Carmen’s father had never been in her life. It isn’t something she angsts over. In fact, she prefers not to know a man who was shitty enough to never want to speak to his own daughter. For the first few years of Carmen’s life, her mom and her hopped around from apartment to apartment, her mom from job to job. That was before her mom found her calling as a cop though. Now, they live in Redline in a mid-level suburb. Carmen doesn’t remember the before much, but she knows life is good.

Valerie Foster raised her daughter to be tough. She doesn’t take people’s shit and doesn’t get into trouble. And if she did… well. Valerie is a disciplinarian, a tough-love sort of woman. But that’s not to say they aren’t close. Carmen loves her mother and her mother loves her back. Carmen is the center of her mother’s world.

When she got to middle school though, things started…changing. It was unsettling. Mom got a new boyfriend, who was nice enough but threatened the dynamic. And kids turned mean. The world turned mean. Carmen was tough as always, but sometimes there are problems you can’t fix. And this was one of them. Things piled up. And one day, she exploded and the solution appeared right in her hands.

Carmen’s trigger wasn’t one she could hide from her mom. Although she wasn’t in the PRT, as a cop, she had all too much experience dealing with Redline’s parahumans. And Valerie had never liked parahumans- always mistrusted them. They were trouble, even the heroes. And to find out her daughter had become one of them? It strained their relationship to the point of breaking, and it still is. Committed to keeping her daughter on the straight and narrow, Valerie found out about the new Wards program through a law enforcement contact and quickly enrolled her daughter without her input.

Powers:
(DESIGNATION: Blaster/Shaker 6, Tinker 1)

V’s power allows her to summon any object she has a good understanding of out of thin air. As she would put it, her power comprises two functions: copy and paste. She copies an object by learning how it operates and committing it to memory, and pastes it by summoning it. Her objects do not obey the laws of physics. If destroyed or altered, they’ll simply disappear, and any chemical testing reveals that they’re made of no particular material. Put rather confusingly, she turns raw energy into anything she chooses. Her objects can only be summoned directly into her hands and disappear within one hour.

Her power has a burnout function. Once V creates too many objects within a 12-hour period, she can no longer summon any more. That limit depends on specificity (ie a pink AK-47 that fires bubbles instead of bullets vs a gun), necessity (Epi-Pen while someone is in active anaphylaxis vs a hammer when one is nearby), complexity (a high-tech Tinker gun vs a BB gun), and size (ie a skyscraper vs a piece of string). The rules are all very complicated but V can feel herself running out, akin to a battery. She has to conserve her power carefully.

Skills:
None to speak of. (aka pls god don’t make me do this section)

_{Mind control is cool.}

It's short and not my best work, but here it is.

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

I’m out of town this weekend so I won’t be able to get anything up until next week.

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

@Mintz

Fun fact, her alias is V. As in, CTRL V.

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

Holy shit, this exploded in the last couple hours I’ve been working. I’ll be making a perky 13-year-old with sort of… copy paste powers, I want to say? She can recreate any item she sees and handles, but her power can run out. The amount of energy each creation takes depends on specificity, necessity, and complexity. Each item disappears within one hour and she can disappear it at will.

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

She does. It’s my personal nightmare.

I’ll start a character sheet soon.

The Wards: A Grimdark Teenage Superhero Story

Not sure if I’ll have the time, but I love Worm so count me in.