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Shin-Ra Employee File
Tier: WEAPON
Employee Number:
Birth Name: Gloria ‘Glory’ Haruno
Code Name: Meteor
Race: Human
Height: 1.60m
Weight: 51.2kg
Age: 29
Date of Birth: January 5th
Town of Birth: [N/A]
Current Assignment: Shin-Ra Knights Experimental Division
Pay Grade: SFE, Grade 4
Physical Description:
Glory is a rather petite individual, short and slender-framed without much in the way of curve to her, and does not look even remotely like one of the most dangerous individuals in the entirety of Company-controlled territory. Her features are sharp, with years of rather imperious living etching aggression into them; Glory almost always looks vaguely pissed off on top of whatever else she’s feeling at the time. Her hair, jet black, is worn in a short, faintly sassy style that keeps it out of her eyes in a scrap, with the assistance of a whimsical shooting-star hairclip she defies anyone to give her guff over.
Given her abilities, her eyes are unusually normal – a light blue often described as 'icy', given Glory's temperament. Both are the same color, and never once have they glowed in response to her power. Glory's been known to wisecrack about the occasional desire to get some minor cosmetic treatments done so her eyes look as beguilingly exotic and mysterious as everyone assumes the eyes of a staggeringly powerful mentalist should.
Psychological Evaluation:
Glory’s upbringing has afforded her a peerless education and exceptional training in a dizzying array of subjects, preparing her for the life of distinguished service which is expected of every individual who bears Haruno blood. Despite her estrangement from her family, much of this background has rubbed off on her. Glory is very disciplined and has spent every day of her life practicing restraint and control; she is an exceptionally reliable talent known for her steady head and (relatively) stable personality – at least, among those tasked with commanding her.
She is not, however, a terribly pleasant individual.
Glory is very easily bored, and while she doesn’t let her frequent boredom interfere with her assigned duties, she doesn’t see a need to hold her tongue, either. If she feels she’s being underutilized, given make-work assignments, or otherwise not being afforded the respect she believes she’s due (which is often), she will let those around her know. Loudly, and with a degree of acerbic frankness the Company would very much prefer she wouldn’t display. Her mouth, and some of the things she’s done in her off time to try and alleviate her frequent bouts of boredom, have earned Glory a somewhat undeserved reputation as capricious and somewhat cruelly whimsical.
Much of this is fear concerning her abilities – no one terrifies the masses quite as completely as an exceptionally powerful mentalist – but a good portion of it is simply a reaction to Glory’s arrogance and difficulties with keeping herself amused.
Pre-Employment History:
As a scion of the prestigious Haruno family, Glory has lived most of her life with access to every service, luxury, and advantage she could wish. Most would assume this sort of upbringing would create an obnoxious, mostly useless spoiled princess incapable of contributing in a meaningful way to society. This is because most are not familiar with the Haruno family’s creed: “Earn what you take.”
The Haruno bloodline believes that all privilege must be earned, and that the earning is ephemeral. The power and influence the Haruno family has accrued is due to the effort, discipline, and sacrifice of their ancestors. To coast on their name would be to throw away within a handful of generations what their ancestors toiled to leave them. Harunos are brought up to believe that any one of them who slacks off and rides their name to an easy, lazy life are forcing another Haruno somewhere else to work twice as hard to maintain their family’s status to compensate. They do not tolerate laziness, and are somewhat infamous for their willingness to disown those who fail to live up to the obligations of the Haruno bloodline.
Glory is no different. Discipline, honor, and a rather intense sense of noblese oblige have been drilled into her since her earliest memories. For every privilege she enjoyed, she had to master a lesson or complete a piece of work. She was afforded the very finest care and tutelage – and it was made clear to her that she was to be worthy of that care and tutelage or it would be revoked. When her mentalist talents started to manifest, she was given into the keeping of the most elite instructors of the mentalist arts her family could find – which, of course, meant the most elite instructors there were. Again, she was expected to justify the expense of her excellent teachers by mastering her abilities as quickly and completely as she was able to. When Glory began to teach her instructors mental exercises she’d worked out to better handle her abilities, her family knew she had succeeded as excellently as any proper Haruno was obliged to do.
All of which makes her estrangement from her family all the more shocking.
The sheer magnitude of Glory’s abilities meant her family began to expect her to become one of the most influential individuals on the planet. She had the capability to become a figure great enough to go down in history; as a member of the Haruno bloodline, she was expected to live up to that capability. The expectation was for her to rise to the uppermost echelons of civilization, becoming a senior statesman or a high-placed executive in the Company. Some in her family even thought her a candidate for the next President of Shin-Ra, should she apply her talents properly.
Glory, however, had no such ambitions of her own.
She reveled in her mentalist abilities, delighting in the development and exercise of her power. She loved being a powerful mentalist, and she found she enjoyed advancing the art and science of mentalism, as well. Her teachers introduced her to those who studied the psychic and psionic arts, and she gladly offered her services in the advancement of their research, offering both personal insight and experience and a level of demonstrated experimental ability some researchers had previously thought unsustainable by a single being.
Glory had been instilled with all of the usual Haruno sense of obligation and noblese oblige…but she did not aspire to the heights of civilization. She did not want to be a world leader. She most certainly did not want to be a President. What she wanted to be was the most practiced and accomplished mentalist she could be, and so she decided to offer her services to the Company’s military arm, seeking employment with SOLDIER and, eventually, the Knights division when the Company took an interest in her talents.
The Haruno family, as a whole, holds military service to be for those of feeble mind and bloodthirsty temperament. Glory’s family objected strenuously to her choice of service; while she hasn’t been quite completely cut off or disowned (she is serving, and her family is loath to relinquish their claim entirely on the most powerful mentalist born since the Cataclysm), she is currently living off of her Company salary and the proceeds from her personal crafts sales, with only a single servant retained from her family’s estates. She speaks only rarely with her clan, and in those instances the conversation inevitably turns to her family’s bitter disappointment in her decision to ‘waste’ herself as a mere fighter of battles when she could aspire to so much greater heights.
Glory is oddly at peace with this state of affairs, claiming that the lack of distraction makes it easier to focus on strengthening and refining her mentalism and contributing to the world’s understanding of the art. As the Company is loath to lose the services of the most powerful mentalist born since the Cataclysm, it is currently willing to accept whatever Glory’s terms happen to be.
Employment Records:
Glory has undergone extensive testing – all voluntary – with the Company’s mystic arts research division as well as civilian research institutions, attempting to plumb the secret depths of her mentalist abilities. The testing has produced much in the way of information on the nature and limitations of mentalism and psychic/psionic power, but has not used produced practical applications worth reporting.
Glory has also undergone a modified SOLDIER training program as well as Knight division extracurriculars. Her evaluations for her training days are mixed; when her mentalist talents were applicable she came close to breaking several records (outside of the records she shattered into dust when it comes to pure mentalism, of course), but when forced to test her basic physical capabilities without her mentalism, she scored well below the normal cutoff marks for entrance into the SOLDIER program. Given the prodigious potential of her mentalist abilities, the Company decided to make an exception in Glory’s case and permit her enlistment.
Glory has categorically and strenuously refuse all offers to undergo the SOLDIER Mako infusion process, claiming that not only does she not need the boosts the process would offer her, but that she is entirely unwilling to risk damaging her mentalist talents by mucking about with bodily modifications she doesn’t remotely need to do her work. The argument has enough merit that the Company has waived Mako infusion requirements for Glory, much the same as it has done for other Knights with unusual abilities.
Field Capabilities:
[[OOC: See ‘Real Talk’ section, below, for a glossary of terms and notes on the magnitude of Glory’s abilities.]]
Master Mentalist – Glory is both an incredibly powerful psionic and a very potent psychic, combining a greater number of high-level mentalist abilities in a single individual than the Company has witnessed in over three hundred years. Her unprecedented breadth of capabilities, and the overwhelming power of her primary talents, has earned her the moniker of ‘Meteor’ – an extinction-level event in human form.
Psionicism: Telekinesis – Glory’s most potent talent by far is her telekinesis. She’s one of only six psionics in the entirety of the Company’s record capable of all three fundamental forms of telekinesis, and she is far and away the most powerful of those six.
-Mental Construct telekinesis – the generation of objects utilizing pure force of will and psionic power – allows Glory to weaponize her telekinetic ability. She can form blades, hammers, shields, armor, and many other constructed forms out of raw force, or create and control invisible hands capable of dexterous manipulation of objects. There is a limit to how many constructs Glory can maintain at once, but it is not a small limit. The most common and broadly applicable form of telekinesis, and the first type Glory was trained with during her youth.
-Directed-Force telekinesis involves the raw manipulation of kinetic energy, functioning a bit like high-order wind controllers that use the air around them to push things. Surges of kinetic force can be used in much the same way surges of wind or water can – to knock things down, blow things away, or otherwise sweep Glory’s problems out of her path. Vortices of directed force can rip objects to pieces, while narrow bolts of extremely focused power are as dangerous as any high-energy ballistic round one would care to name. While easily the most destructive form of telekinesis, directed-force is also the clumsiest and the least suited to fine manipulation or dexterous work.
-Invested Will telekinesis is at once the most limited form and the most insidious; by investing a shard of her own will into an object, Glory can ‘possess’ that object, controlling it as finely and easily as she does her own limbs. Once under her possession, the object resists interference from other mentalists and is able to be used much more precisely than is otherwise capable with mental-construct or directed-force. However, there is a limit to how finely Glory can fragment her will to directly possess objects, or how much of herself she can cast free. Every investiture weakens Glory until she recalls the sliver of will she’s invested; while a handful of investitures are unnoticeable against the raw magnitude of Glory’s abilities, enough of them can significantly erode her other powers.
Psionicism: Teleportation – True teleportation is a vanishingly rare psionic talent, with most ‘teleporters’ being mages utilizing blink-style spells or spiritwalking tricks. Glory is an exception; she is a true teleporter, able to twist space such that she moves from where she is to where she desires to be without crossing any intervening space or invoking otherworldly shortcuts – or causing something (or someone) she’s touching to do the same.
While her telekinesis is of much greater potential magnitude than her teleportation, most military experts who’ve offered an opinion agree that while Glory’s TK cannot be overestimated when planning a battle with her, it’s her teleportation that’s truly terrifying. She can escape from otherwise inescapable traps, or cast her enemies into inescapable traps. Enemies attempting to engage her in close combat find themselves simply transported elsewhere – usually several hundred feet off the ground.
Unfortunately for Glory (less so for everyone else), her powers of teleportation are not quite omnipotent. Her range is limited to the area she can directly perceive with her Mind’s Eye, limiting her to a few hundred meters unless she’s exerting her Eye. She cannot teleport multiple times in rapid sequence; each teleportation inflicts a toll on her will, quickly ‘flickering’ teleportations can render her insensate and unable to manifest her abilities until she recovers. Most critically, however, her teleportation has a warm-up period. She cannot instantaneously teleport; when she invokes the ability it takes her roughly three quarters of a second to get the proper mental grip on where she wants ‘port and what she wants to send there. At the level of conflict Glory routinely finds herself in, such a delay can be and often is an eternity.
Psionicism: Pyrokinesis – Pyrokinesis, or ‘firestarting’ in layman’s terms, is usually an artefact of telekinetic talent, using a variation of directed-force TK to generate and/or control thermal energy. Despite this, psionics capable of both telekinesis and pyrokinesis are rare. The talents generally seem to require different mindsets and do not commonly show up in the same individual. When they do, one talent is invariably significantly weaker than the other, and such is the case with Glory’s PK. She’s capable of sparking flames – violently, at need – and can influence those flames to spread in certain directions or burn more intensely, but she does not possess the ability to outright shape fire, or extinguish it with pyrokinetic talent. Telekinetic talent suffices nicely, but in Glory’s own words, “I have enough pyrokinesis that I don’t need to carry grenades. That is just about it.”
Psionicism: Amplification – The power of Amplification is sometimes referred to as ‘internalized telekinesis’ by those in the field, but the moniker is not necessarily correct. Amplification refers to a psionic’s ability to enhance and reinforce their body using their power, making themselves stronger, faster, tougher, or otherwise more physically capable than human norm. Powerful amplifiers often seem almost god-like in their incarnate potential, nigh-immune to physical harm and able to rip heavily armored fighting vehicles to pieces with their bare hands.
Glory is capable of amplification, but does not enjoy the talent. Glory’s amplification takes the form of self-directed invested-will telekinesis, forcing her body to respond to the dictates of her power rather than her normal physiological functions. In doing so Glory can resist even severe injury, using her own TK to hold herself together and avoid blood loss, and can operate as an extremely powerful physical combatant, but the strain it places on her body is intense. It leaves her in significant and extensive pain, and once she Amplifies herself she must continue to do so until the end of a battle, as she suffers from sharply reduced dexterity and frequent involuntary muscle spasms for several hours when she cuts her amplification.
In her own words, “once I Amplify myself, I am destined to spend several hours as a clumsy, twitching mess who feels as if she has been punched in every last inch of her body, then left out in the sun too long. It is rather significantly worse than the worst hangover you’ve ever experienced. No, I do not Amplify myself without dire cause, and if you could feel what I do for two simple minutes after I do so, you would most emphatically agree with my decision.”
Psychic Arts: Mind’s Eye – Glory’s Mind’s Eye is her second strongest mentalist talent, following her telekinesis. It is suspected by Company scientists that the overwhelming magnitude of Glory’s telekinetic talent is directly responsible for the strength of her Mind’s Eye – the two talents are closely intertwined, few psionics possess one talent without some degree of the other.
In short, Glory’s Mind’s Eye is a powerful sixth sense, allowing her to directly perceive the world around her. She simply knows where everything around her is, and to a lesser extent what it is and what it’s doing. It is difficult bordering on impossible to properly surprise Glory, as her Mind’s Eye is a passive sense that functions to some extent at all times, independently of her will. She can focus her Mind’s Eye to increase its range or sensitivity, though doing so is stressful for her. Regardless, the combination of her ludicrously prodigious telekinetic abilities and her powerful Mind’s Eye makes Glory incredibly dangerous in combat, eliminating her blind spots and letting her know where both her enemies and all of her potential weapons are at all times.
Psychic Arts: Telepathy – The quintessential mentalist ability is surprisingly one of Glory’s lesser talents. She is capable of speaking mind-to-mind with anyone she can perceive with her Mind’s Eye, and with some effort she can discern an individual’s surface thoughts (an ability generally referred to as receptive telepathy), but the latter talent is not subtle. Most individuals become aware of the intrusion, though few know enough about psychic abilities to recognize it for what it is and simply feel as if they are being most intensely watched. Even untrained civilians can, with a sufficient amount of raw determination and hackles sufficiently raised by the unpleasant sensations of her intrusion, disrupt Glory’s receptive telepathy.
Her projective telepathy – the ability to transmit her thoughts or commands to others – is significantly stronger, but still somewhat limited. She does not possess the classic ability of ‘mind control’; she cannot implant commands into others and force them to comply, nor can she take direct control of a subject’s body. At most she can issue orders wrapped in a sense of correctness, which the subject perceives as a sudden idea that seems like just the right thing to do, but individuals are able to reason their way out of such requests without a great deal of trouble. More creative uses of her telepathy can be far more dangerous, but tend to be taxing.
Psychic Arts: Empathy – Empathy, in terms of mentalist ability, is the power to directly perceive or influence emotions. As with her telepathy, Glory is a much stronger projective empath than she is a receptive empath; her receptive abilities are limited to perceiving the surface emotions of those around her, though she has trained herself to be significantly more sensitive to feelings of hostility, anger, violent anticipation, and other emotions generally associated with imminent attack. As such, she has a semi-functional ‘danger sense’ of sorts that, combined with her Mind’s Eye, usually allows her to detect even the best (physically) hidden attackers before they can ambush her.
Glory’s projective empathy is significantly more powerful. She can generate waves of emotion over a wide area, sharing her own emotions with those around her or imposing artificial emotions drawn from her own memory. Waves of terror, despondency, or lethargy can inhibit groups of lesser threats without requiring Glory to flatten them with telekinesis, while feelings of determination, conviction, or empowerment shared with her allies can rally them in the face of flagging morale. Among other uses of the ability.
Psychic Arts: Kinesception – Kinesception is the somewhat unusual psychic ability to control one’s own senses, and is one of Glory’s minor talents. She can increase or decrease the responsiveness of her physical senses, sharpening or dulling them as she requires. The most common use Glory puts her kinesception to is deadening the otherwise debilitating pain of her particular brand of Amplification, but if she finds herself in a situation where her Mind’s Eye is hindered or unavailable she’s also able to increase her natural senses to levels that can partially compensate for the lack of her Mind’s Eye.
Mentalism: Untapped Potential – Glory is dimly aware of reserves of mentalist ability within herself that she has not yet tapped into. She concurs with expert scientific opinion that these faintly-sensed wells of power likely represent as-yet undiscovered specific mentalist abilities; as opposed to, as one researcher put it, “bigger barrels for the guns you’ve already got”.
The existence of these nodes of undiscovered ability is unheard of; most mentalists manifest all of the abilities they possess during their youth, with the few exceptions having been quickly coaxed into developing the remainder of their talents upon working with other mentalists. Mentalist talents can be strengthened or refined with training and exercise, but entirely new talents do not lie stubbornly dormant in a trained mentalist. Why they have done so with Glory is a mystery, though one she is quite keen to solve.
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Corporate Combat Training – Any personnel assigned to the Knight initiative are required to complete Level 4 combat training at the minimum, regardless of extenuating personal abilities. As such, Glory is an excellent swordsman, a superb marksman, and possesses working familiarity with common military explosives and vehicle operation.
Unfortunately, without the use of her psionic talents her abilities as a hand-to-hand fighter are average on a good day, despite her expertise in the forms required. Without her mentalism, Glory is considered a mediocre combatant at best. She’s not any stronger than her diminutive frame would suggest, nor is she unusually fast. Compared to hand-to-hand monstrosities such as Gever or Satori, Glory’s talents in a bare-knuckle fisticuff are essentially nonexistent.
Magic Deficiency – Glory is an almost impossibly powerful mentalist; that very same prodigious talent heavily interferes with her abilities as a conventional spellcaster. Nor is she fortunate enough to be a 'null' – someone whom magic cannot touch. She is as vulnerable to the effects of mystical or ethereal techniques as anyone else is, but for whatever reason Glory finds it extremely difficult to connect with and make use of her stores of mystic energy. Combined with the fact that those stores are no greater than an ordinary civilian's, and Glory finds it easier to simply think of herself as incapable of conventional casting, reliant only upon her prodigious mentalistic ability.
Oh, whatever shall she do.
Registered Equipment:
Meteor Sword – Glory’s only regular physical weapon is a smallsword forged specifically for her hands; a gift from her uncle Leonas upon her graduation from Company military training. The blade is quite fancifully crafted, with a bell guard etched, hammered, and enameled to resemble a fiery meteor, with trails of flame sweeping towards the sword’s pommel to form a knuckle guard. The blade itself is formed of sturdy battle steel, filigreed with a pattern of flames climbing up the lowermost third of the blade without compromising the weapon’s structural strength. The Haruno family crest has been stamped into the inner face of the sword’s guard, opposite Glory’s favorite ‘Uncle Leo-ism’: “Reach for the stars – but only with gloves on.”
The sword is augmented with psychoreactive material and was designed to ‘attune’ to Glory over time. The sword resonates with Glory and is steeped in her power; over time the weapon attuned to her so completely that she discovered it had invested itself with her will. She’s able to control the blade as easily as she can her fingers or toes, and unlike a typical invested-will manipulation, her ‘Meteor Sword’ doesn’t impact her abilities at all. It simply does what she tells it to because it is so completely hers it cannot imagine doing otherwise.
Shut up. Mentalism doesn’t always make logical sense.
Executive Power Suit – Executive power suits are the standard corporate uniform of the middle and mid-upper echelons of Shin-Ra Incorporated. They come in a variety of colors ranging from dark grey to light grey to dark and light grey-blue, a variety of tailoring styles ranging from sensible to practical, and a variety of fits from just right to spot-on.
As ubiquitous and utterly boring as the EPS can be, it’s also a power suit in truth for certain personnel. Higher-level executives, and combat personal, often commission executive suits with hidden nanotech or materia capabilities. Common are personal HUDs with networking capabilities, automated medical support in the case of injury, auto-Barrier setups to protect from ambushes, or booster systems designed to enhance the physical strength and precision of the wearer to some extent. Some executives add additional capabilities to their power suits, though limitations exist concerning how much power can be supplied to additional functions within the suit without bulky, obvious external power packs.
Glory's EPS is not her preferred clothing; she would much rather wear something with some snap to it. However, she does possess a personal EPS for official functions. Hers is a charcoal grey with electric violet highlights, an unusual and somewhat striking combination, but beyond the ordinary systems installed in a senior executive's EPS (HUD, integrated communications, and auto-medical support), Glory has not integrated anything else into her EPS. She feels no real need to.
Real Talk
(Questions asked elsewhere on the board(s) will be answered here, as they arise, to form an FAQ record of sorts.)
1.) Yes, Glory is listed as a ridiculously powerful character. She is one of a handful of characters in the group she was built for that is expected to be able to scale up enough to resist enemy invasions/attacks of any potential magnitude, at need. I am not a powergamer, however; Glory’s abilities are generally stepped down to wherever they need to be to ensure a decent contest, within understandable limits. Glory’s exceptionally powerful mentalism is a key aspect of her character; there’s a limit to how far I can step her down before it stops making sense. Please do be prepared to throw down like a boss if you step into the ring with Glory, but don’t feel as if you’re going to be hopelessly outclassed if ‘like a boss’ doesn’t include the ability to rearrange geography on your end. I can compensate just fine, and in fact prefer more mid-range bouts to ridiculous planet-cracking idiot-fights.
2.) To define terms as they’re used in this document (more will be added as questions are asked):
-‘Mentalism’: The ability to manifest power directly from the mind, without requiring magical/spiritual affinity. Those who practice mentalism are known as mentalists; the term is usually reserved for those capable of both psionicism and psychic arts.
-‘Psionicism’: A sub-grouping of mentalist abilities which deal with inducing directly observable effects on the physical world. Telekinesis, teleportation, amplification, etc. Those who practice psionicism are known as psionicists or psions.
-‘Psychic Arts’: A sub-grouping of mentalist abilities which deal with influencing intangible factors not directly observable by science. Telepathy, psychometry, clairvoyance, etc. Those who practice psychic arts are known as psychics.
-‘Esper’: A popular but incorrect layman’s term for mentalists. ‘Esper’, correctly, refers only to psychics whose only abilities deal with extrasensory perception.