Name: Barda Smith
Alias: Big Barda
Age: 31
Personality: Stern, Disciplined, Stubborn, Poised, Unimpressible
Archetype: Alien
Powers:Superhuman Strength: Can lift a car, can probably stop a tank, and can definitely punch someone into next week—or any variation thereof. She can’t lift a building, or course correct a jumbo jet. She can use it to jump particularly high to emulate low-level flying, but gravity is a cruel mistress.
Enhanced Durability: She’s not invulnerable, but she can take a hit. Blunt force is going to have to hit hard to affect her, and she can shrug off low-caliber bullets and most basic human weaponry.
Veteran Fighter: She knows how to fight as she’s been trained since she was a child. Not everything is throwing herself into the fray, well some of it is, and hoping for the best. She plans her attacks out and does her best to target weaknesses. She's also a top class swordswoman, even if her "sword" is a diminutive rod.
Mega Rod: A near-indestructible mace capable of shooting out concussive blasts. There’s a steep cooling period between each blast, meaning with the length of battles, she’ll probably only able to get one out.
Weaknesses: Not Invulnerable: For someone that’s primarily a frontline fighter, she’s going to be eating a lot of damage. Her insides are not as tough as her outsides—and things will break down. She can be drowned, poisoned, irradiated and crushed. High-caliber bullets can also pierce her skin. Alien, mystical, supernatural, hyper-engineered blades can cut her. Also, enough pointed energy will burn through her.
Mega Rod: As this is her prime weapon, if it is knocked from her hand in battle—she’ll have to rely on hand-to-hand combat. And while a seasoned veteran, opponents with more complex fighting styles will have advantage over her. She’s quite good at grappling, but if she can’t get someone in her hold—then what’s the point.
Slow: Barda is tall, heavy, and clad in armor. Her reaction time to things is going to be slowed down by her size and gear. She’s more likely to take an attack than to dodge it—which doesn’t help when it comes to accruing damage.
PTSD: Having been put into war since she was basically a child, Barda has not come out one-hundred percent intact. She can be felled by a panic attack in situations that reflect when she was at her most vulnerable in combat. Or if she becomes overly frustrated.
Can’t Fly: Not really a weakness, just an inconvenience.
Appearance:Standing at seven-feet, it’s hard to imagine something you would notice first if not her height. Maybe next would be her musculature, heavy and well-defined, an absolute terror to sleeves and the shoulders of clothing. Her skin is darker, but she’s ethnically ambiguous—as one would imagine from someone who didn’t grow up on Earth. Her black hair is thick and long, but she wears close to her head, not really having the patience or time to deal with stray locks interfering with her vision. Her nose is prominent—hooked and is only offset by the sweet curve of her deep colored eyes. Her lips are full but constantly twisted into an unimpressed smirk. Her body language says it all, arms crossed over chest, hip cocked to the side, and her foot tapping with impatience as humans ho-hum around her.
Outside of her armor, she’s fond of wife beaters, pants, and boots. Though not really one to dress up, she does like bits of gold jewelry and has a few piercings— pity the poor chump who had to do that. She’ll wear jackets if the weather accounts for it, but for the most part, her arms—and all their scars—are on display.
In her armor, she stands like a golden knight—hair twisted into an ornate and non-bulky headpiece. There’s not overly special about the armor beyond its alien designs and flare for red and blue woven into it. It’s bound to break down before she does, but it does add some
oomph to her punches and allows her to take a little more damage than if she was unarmored.
Character Evolution:This feels entirely tropey, but I would like for the character to gain empathy and sympathy. As it stands, she’s never reached her emotional core, in steep contrast with her comic book iteration. So, gaining understanding and acceptance is the largest evolution. A rivalry would be interesting, I think, as she takes her experience and expertise probably a bit too seriously. Romance? Well. As long as it happens naturally. And definitely, always, shenanigans.
BRIEF Bio:Being a genetically-engineered super soldier whose sheer existence is to go into wars, is not where Barda likes to begin her story. But it is where the story begins. Waking up cold and alone in a vessel that wreaked of quietness and a deep-seeded hate, her mind thumped with thoughts of battle and a blood thirstiness for war. These were not thoughts that she placed there herself, she realized. It was a realization that not many of her sisters would ever have, and it would define her decision to leave.
It was hard to say if she was ever a baby, but she was a child. One that was rigorously trained from the moment she existed till she reached an age that she could be useful in battle. Every day she’d only see the inside of the sleek metal warship that ripped through space and challenged planets. She’d dream of what was outside. What the smell of air was. The taste of anything but her own blood and the odd paste that was fed to her on a daily basis. Wind? Earth? It was all she ever wanted. She quickly learned that dream was stupid.
Her first battle thrust her into a nightmare of a planet, dark and bleak with corpses strewn around like dead leaves. She hesitated, only for a moment, until the voice in the back of her head screamed:
go! She didn’t know how many she killed that day—week, month, she was unsure—but she remembered cleaning herself and her armor—viscous blood hung on in clotted balls. These days went on for what felt like an eternity. An eternity of slowly climbing the ranks, of slowly leading her own team into the disaster that was their lives.
On a fateful day, less so for her team, they were decimated—purely and truly. Believed to be dead, Barda was left nearly crushed under the bodies of her sisters. When she pulled herself free, she stood there, alone, on a dead planet. For a second, she thought she was crying, but warm blood just streamed down her face. She understood the concept of crying, she’d seen her enemies do it. But, she was unable to feel it. There was something she was poignantly aware of though—pain and freedom in equal measure.
Barda won’t bore you with the story of how she survived and eventually exited the planet. But she will
tsk under her breath about those poor smugglers. Eventually, she made her way to Earth. The ship was in shambles, along with her patience, as she brought it to the surface of the planet—in some open field. Poor field mice, but the humans were fine. She’d like to tell you that’s how she ended up where she was today. Unfortunately, it was a bit trickier than that. There was a whole bureaucratic process and rigorous interrogation she had go through to get her citizenship on a planet that she
landed on. Earthers were not quite fond of people just showing up.
To be entirely honest, Barda had no interest in becoming a hero. She actually managed to live a few years in quietness until trouble rumbled to the surface in the form of a mugger. He pressed the gun to her back and demanded her money. She turned, and he threatened her again. Without really blinking, she ripped the gun from his hands and punched him into a wall. It was then that little voice in the back of her head started up again. It almost made her giddy with excitement. Muggers escalated to metahumans, then to murder robots, and then alien parasites, and then into an actual life of heroism. Tabloids referred to her as “Big Barda” which was rude—beyond rude, actually. She couldn’t help it if humans were so much smaller than she was. But it stuck as her moniker even if she lets out a long, furious sigh about it.
Notes: - Owns lots of cats. Refuses to be called a “cat lady.”
- Works a gym part time, teaching basic cardio and strength building fighting styles, and trying not to crush her clients
- Lives in a suburb. Has attempted a casserole once.
- Enjoys talent competitions on the television, and doesn’t understand why elimination is not more violent.
- Has attempted to go on dates. Has never
not been bored by them.
- Fails to understand the concept of “hobbies.”
Sample Post:Battles were always waged on theaters of emotional and physical conquest. Sometimes the ringing in her ears would come back. Soft, like a bird call and then escalating into a shrill siren that consumed her entire psyche. It only came in moments of intense frustration or vulnerability. It’d been a long time since she’d had one of these attacks, her breath hitching in her lungs, and her eyes stinging. She’d had them during intense battles on Earth, and now in a hardware store.
The man in the blue vest kept asking her to clarify. “Do you mean this screw?” He held up one that was immensely smaller than what she needed.
“Longer,” she said, widening her fingers.
He went back to the bin and rummaged about, attempting to locate what she was looking for. He grabbed another one and held it up. “This one?”
“No.” Her voice was getting a bit loud with a low growl tapered to the end of it.
“Are you listening? That’s the wrong hex. I’m trying to fix my faucet, not install drywall.” The fact that that knowledge bubbled to the top of her mind with the ease of how to snap a man’s neck was off-putting. But she did have a house now—a house with a leaky faucet.
The man sighed and went back to the bin for the fifth time. He started speaking under his breath as if she wasn’t close enough to hear him. It was a bit piecemeal, the growing static in the back of her head attempting to eclipse her ears. But she knew he’d uttered “bitch.”
Without a pause, she grabbed him by his blue vest and hoisted him upwards. He went limp, a shrill noise escaping from his lips—or maybe that was in her head—or maybe both. She pulled him up to meet his eyes.
“What did you just call me?” she asked.
“Beautiful l-l-l-lady?” His voice hitched.
“No.”“Y-y-you can’t do this. I’ll call security.”
“And you can explain to them about your level of incompetence and disrespect.” She leaned in.
“I’ve squashed an entire person underneath my boot when I wasn’t angry. Would you like to see what happens when I am angry?”The man vehemently shook his head.
“Good,” she said, dropping him. He landed in a puddle of shivering and more whining.
“And you know what, I’m just going to buy a new faucet. I’ve grown tired of this place.”With the awkward exchange of purchasing a piece of metal to siphon water for a swipe of a flimsy, plastic card—she’d broken nearly forty of them—Barda was the proud owner of a new faucet. As she passed the threshold of the store, exiting it to get back into her car, she suddenly wasn’t outside. No, she was back inside. But inside where?
It was quiet in there and empty.
“Why is Earth like this? Why do the mundane and fantastical happen in such wide berths?” She exhaled, holding onto her sack as she wasn’t about to go back to the hardware store. Barda had no idea where she was. This was not a place familiar to her, and it wasn’t the sort she’d seen in a magazine or on the distraction box—television.
“I demand to know who is responsible for this and ask that you undo it. I have a faucet to fix, and I’d rather not come back to an underwater kitchen. If I do…” She said into the void. Something tingled in the back of her mind. It wasn’t the growing anxiety of earlier, no, it was her intuition. There was something wrong about this place—very wrong.
She walked down the hall, figuring there was no other way than forward and made a turn. On high alert, she slowly rounded the corner. There was nothing there. Not even dust motes peppered the air. She walked further forward and gripped her bag with an intense focus. She didn’t have her Mega-Rod here, and damn if it wouldn’t be useful.
Finally in all that silence, except for her breathing, she entered an open room. It was there she realized where she’d been transported to, given all the trappings and a sign dictating where this was. This was the Justice League’s HQ. Her brows fell, and she exhaled.
“This makes perfect sense,” she said—her voice deadpan and disgruntled.
Simple Unicycle
