Psykera
Radiation Assault
Primal Forces Mastery
Psykera was a level 50 Mind Control/Force Fields Controller as well as a Level 50 Radiation Blast/Energy Manipulation Blaster. Currently, she is a Mind Control/Radiation Assault Dominator. She was one of the original members of the Paragon Youth Corps.
((Information on this page is 'public knowledge.' There’s a reasonable expectation that someone might know it, if they followed the news at the time, did some internet searching now, or is in the know about superpowered affairs. Feel free to act on any of it, or hit me up at @Psykera in-game if any of it seems interesting to you!))
Origin
The Otherland Project
In early 1999, a coalition of governmental and private interests ushered in the impending turn of the century by beginning intensive research into metahuman gene therapy.
Their objective, as stated, was to create reliable technology that could be used for purposes of super-medicine and super-science - but also to bolster the superhuman forces of Freedom Corps and other NATO interests around the world. Spearheaded by the FBSA's SERAPH division, and with cautious but tacit support from key members of the Freedom Phalanx, they accelerated their research and development efforts and set out rich incentives for companies to develop useful scientific techniques. Two brilliant scientists, the married couple Johann and Caroline Wilder, took their newly-established company - and their younger daughter, Naia - to Galaxy City in Paragon to apply for the grants.
The Wilders' procedures were safer than most of their competitors, and an opportunity was created by a high-profile incident where the more aggressive methods employed by one of the other contenders, a Crey subsidiary, led to hideous, malignant mutations in a test subject. Still, the Wilders experimented for years without any true, significant success stories. Things were starting to look bad, when suddenly in 2003, Naia, at age 14, started manifesting the effects.
The files are sealed, but an exhaustive investigation was conducted. People who were not test subjects had been exposed to the Wilders' low-intensity radiation baths. By some miracle there was no identifiable damage, but the error still almost brought down the company - and it would have, had Naia not been such a success.
Her brain chemistry altered and her psionic gene activated, she began to develop faster than her parents' most optimistic projections. Low-level telepathy came first, then both low and high-intensity telekinesis, and all without any serious unstable side effects. Naia's parents refused to actually hand her over to the FBSA program, but the information gained from her unplanned exposure allowed them to finally reach the breakthrough they - and SERAPH - had been looking for. Ms. Liberty's attention was attracted. Freedom Corps came calling. The government's interest in pursuing the safety failures diminished. The Otherland Project was born.
At 14, Naia just thought the entire experience was exciting. Her parents were busy, but they supported her, and as places to develop psychic abilities go, Paragon City was a pretty good one.
Then the Rikti came.
History
Postwar Years
With the world's supers devastated by the alien invasion, Naia was among the hundreds of newcomers that stepped up to fill the void in those black years that immediately followed the war. Under the name Psykera, She started out rescuing people from burning buildings and interrogating Skulls, but her career truly began when she went up against the Lost. Naia was outraged by the way the Lost used their psionics to manipulate the vulnerable, beginning a long career of fighting against abusers of telepathic ability.
Psion prodigy or not, of course, she was still a teenager, and soon after putting on her mask and cape she joined the Teen Squadron, a supergroup offering training and a support system for young people during the chaos of the postwar years. She made alliances there that would last through the end of her career - the oil empire-heir-turned-shadow-mage Gothic Revenger, the escaped psionic cyborg experiment called Assembled Girl, and the indestructible, many-powered, many-aliased career hero Nod Marks' (under his first two identities, NeverDark and Recharged).
The late stages of the struggle against the Lost threat led to Psykera's confrontation with the infamous Lost ringleader Abdul Azeem, late in 2005. The Pariah was unique not for his psychic power but for his calculating intellect, dedicated to advancing the goals of the cult and its secret masters through careful planning and manipulation rather than just fanaticism. He appeared on the scene after months of careful planning, and struck directly at one of the cult's most outspoken opponents. No one actually knows what happened - or, if her old comrades from the Teen Squadron do, they aren't talking - but disturbing rumors clung to Psykera for months after their first in-person encounter, that she had been seen consorting with the Lost and other known supervillains. Whether this was an undercover operation or something more concerning has long been debated by fans (and Bureau agents). Whatever the case, Azeem was delivered to the Zig and Psykera returned to her normal activities, her enmity for the Lost seemingly multiplied tenfold.
The Paragon Youth Corps
The city began to make its way out of the postwar years, and it was the high point of Psykera's career. But misunderstandings within the Teen Squadron led to fractures, and a group led by Recharged, Gothic Defender, Psykera, and the Assembled Girl departed to found their own team, the Paragon Youth Corps. Funded by Gothic Defender's resources, they dedicated themselves to providing their own brand of support to new young supers. (The veteran members were getting old enough that 'Youth' wasn't terribly accurate, but, it was the idea that counted, and they wanted to help their community and other young people the same way the early Squadron had helped them.) The Youth Corps took in a wide variety of inexperienced metas and troubled youths, while also doing their bit against the enemies of Paragon. Psykera kept the city safe for years from the seemingly invincible supervillain Vis Vires - a mutant with (quite literally) angelic features and delusions of divine righteousness - by telepathically forcing him to reckon with his own conscience and self-awareness.
During this period, the Corps recruited the powerful empath and spirit medium called Silencer Micheal, a person who would have great importance to Naia's life. His honesty and integrity quickly won the Corps' loyalty; Gothic Defender all but instantly adopted him as a surrogate son, Assembled Girl as a brother, and Psykera as a dear friend and confidante. The presence of so many potent telepaths in the group made them an unofficial but respected authority on psionics, in addition to their services to the city's teenage metas.
Psykera and Silencer Micheal were soon spotted regularly together, an iconic psionic duo that won great public acclaim working closely with Dr. Science and SERAPH against the Rikti remnants. A very close bond formed during these undertakings, built on their shared experience as telepaths and the impossible odds they had faced against the battle-hardened alien veterans - a bond that eventually became romantic. This connection has not lessened in strength; they remain in a relationship today.
Identity Crisis
But being a super is never smooth. In the summer of 2006, Psykera rushed off to foil a Circle of Thorns sacrifice. With late warning and almost no time to lose, she had to go underground and face them alone.
The next time anyone saw her, her teammates were hauling her incapacitated body out of the cave entrance, along with the kidnapped citizens and an entire coven of unconscious or dead Circle. Unconfirmed reports that she was dead spread through the media.
After a few days, though, she reappeared. But she seemed like an entirely different person. Her manner was cold and detached. She didn’t recognize longtime friends or contacts. And she seemed to have been kicked back some thirty security levels in terms of her mastery of her own powers. Her teammates tried to keep her as sheltered and away from the press as possible. Her behavior grew more and more erratic, until finally she disappeared for a few weeks.
After that, Psykera changed her costume, but other than that everything seemingly went back to normal for her. Some fringe elements of the superhero fan community have spent most of the time since this incident arguing about what exactly happened
The Exile
Every team has a darkest hour, and every hero has an archenemy.
Concrete information about Psykera's is difficult to come by. It's certain that she is a she, and that she called herself 'the Exile.' She was a dark sorceress of immense power with enormous mastery of demonic magic. She appeared in early 2007, and quickly assembled a cabal of infernalists from the ranks of occultists and mystics, even including a few disillusioned members of the Circle of Thorns and Mu. This group called themselves the Exiles, in honor of their new mistress, swore themselves into her pact with powerful demonic entities, and set about assembling a cult of the disenfranchised and desperate in the Etoile Isles.
Operating out of an ancient Mu ruin on a small island off the coast of Sharkhead, the Exiles struck out at Paragon City. They committed horrific atrocities, but their attacks were a smokescreen for their true objective. A meticulously planned strike on the Youth Corps was executed; most of the group was tricked into splitting up and ambushed, many members were injured, Psykera was kidnapped and tortured by the Exile - and one of the group’s newer members was revealed to be a demonic infiltrator, who manipulated the team’s tech specialist, the Unblinking Watchman, into turning their base’s systems against them. The Corps managed to escape the base before it turned into their tomb by the skin of their teeth, and then followed the Exiles back to their island stronghold to rescue Psykera. They did recover her, but she was on death’s door.
This was the first shot of a long war; the Corps battled the Exiles and their sorcerous mistress for months, the fighting growing increasingly ugly and personal for both sides, pulling them away from their other endeavors and responsibilities. The conflict saw the Corps working with a strange, motley crew of rogues and malcontents from the Rogue Isles, who were all fighting the Exiles for their own reasons; an obscure, amoral mystic named Argoth, the demonic-powered swordswoman called Moonsorrow, and the band of mercenary killers led by the ruthless ex-special ops veteran only known as The Major. This team of unlikely allies eventually fought the Exiles to a standstill - only for them to move on to their endgame.
The mystic organizations of the region became aware of enormous infernal energies gathering in the Exiles’ island temple. They were preparing a ritual that, if successful, would unleash an army of the Exiles’ demonic masters onto the Earth, an event of apocalyptic proportions. Paragon’s defenders organized to face this onslaught, but The Youth Corps’ leaders, by now veterans of years of fighting the threats to peace in Paragon, struck at the temple immediately, somehow instantly bypassing its heavy layers of teleportation-proof warding. They ran into an Arachnos strike force sent to put a stop to the ritual, and all hell broke loose. In the midst of the chaos, they faced the Exile and her elite servants at the altar in the highest level of the Mu ruin.
The survivors of the battle below witnessed the top of the temple consumed in a cataclysmic magical blast. No one other than the Corps members themselves, and their allies, survived the battle at the altar. Their after-action report stated that they had stopped the ritual by destabilizing the opening demonic portal, causing catastrophic magical feedback that destroyed it in a massive explosion. Psykera had focused every ounce of her remaining power into a shield around her friends and allies. The strain nearly killed her, but she just barely protected them from the detonation.
To the knowledge of Paragon City and U.S. agencies, the Exile was never seen again, and without her leadership, the cult completely collapsed, its members slaughtered by Arachnos.
(In the Isles, though, they tell a different story…)
Second War
The second Rikti invasion saw Psykera’s longtime opposition to the Lost and their Rikti masters reach its ultimate conclusion. As the Rikti descended on Paragon, the Youth Corps took to the field, fighting them in the streets and then assaulting the invaders’ open-ground drop zones. Psykera flew above the fray, shielding neighborhoods from the plasma bombardments and leveraging her telekinesis to clear wreckage and haul people out of collapsing buildings. She resigned her Vanguard commission at the end of the Praetorian War, but for the duration of the conflicts she remained a proud member. Considering her decorated history of enmity towards the Rikti and their Lost cultists, many people were surprised by her public support of the peace negotiations with the Traditionalists. “They were lied to,” she said in an interview, expression neutral. “A lot of them died, too. They were our enemies, but your enemies are people too - when you have powers like mine, you don’t get to ignore that.”
Evolution
Psykera’s life, of course, was not all battles with aliens and demonic fanatics. She was also still a test subject of her parents’ Otherland Project, which grew considerably in size and scope over the years. To improve their understanding of the processes they had created, data on the development of Naia’s powers was very important. As her abilities grew and more and more of the potential in her altered genes was revealed, a regular stream of blood tests and brain scans fed huge amounts of useful information back into the project.
But following the final battle with the Exiles, she went on missions less and less, and when she did she seemed to take fewer and fewer risks. Rumors circulated that she was terminally ill, or that she was losing her powers. Something in the battle on the altar, it seemed, had had a degenerative effect on her. But after an absence of several months, she was emerged from the Otherland Project headquarters, ready to take the fight back to the enemies of the City in an entirely new way.
Clad in a suit of prototype powered armor, the 'Anchorite', developed by Otherland’s scientists and technicians, she took on the new identity ‘Altus Infinitus.’ The armor contained extensive experimental systems that contained, dampened, focused, and controlled the vast quantities of psi energy she was suddenly generating. This marked the beginning of the second half of Naia’s costumed crime-fighting career, as she channeled these enormous power reserves into staggering firepower that left the enemies of the City reeling.
Wisdom Incarnate
Even the greatest heroes got a little lost in the madness of the Praetorian war. Psykera more than most, perhaps. After the destruction of Galaxy City she vanished from the public eye for months. (Some say she was injured in the Galaxy attack, others that she was working under a different identity.) But as the Praetorian assaults increased in ferocity and IDF attacks ravaged American soil, she made an explosive return to the scene; playing host to an Incarnate presence that called itself ‘Athena.’ She took part in the initial strikes back into Praetorian Earth, but after the battle of Keyes Island she returned to Primal Earth and spent most of the war protecting the coastal neighborhoods from the IDF and their allies.
Modern Day
With the defeat of Emperor Cole, the need for heroes in Paragon City for a time diminished. Naia Wilder’s secret identity had not really been a secret for years, not since a very public incident in 2008 involving a Paragon Protect clone of her, and in 2013, she mostly retired from the position of costumed crime fighter. She moved to the Otherland Project’s new facility in New York State, and has spent most of the past eight years officially employed there, working with her parents and their team to study her own abilities and advance the project’s understanding of her genome. She helps train Freedom Corps volunteers and test subjects of the current version of the project that are beginning to develop their own powers, leveraging her decade of experience for the benefit of the next generation. She can occasionally be heard from on talk shows or podcasts or interviews in other people’s books.
But mostly, she enjoys a quiet life with her partner, Micheal.
Until pretty recently, anyway. She’s come out of retirement and returned to the City, put on her costume and dipped a toe back into the crime-fighting waters. “You can take off the cape,” she says, “but the cape never quite takes off you.”
Personality
Psykera, for the most part, takes a steady-handed approach to crime-fighting. In most situations she maintains an even temper, trying to serve as a voice of reason to her team if necessary. She has stepped up into a leadership role a number of times, her abilities giving her a good understanding of other people’s temperaments and personalities. Her access to other people’s minds has given her an intense empathy for others; she understands why they do what they do, and so it’s rare for her to hate her opponents, preferring to stop the harm they might do and get them into custody - judgement is to be saved for the courts. She takes ethics in crime-fighting extremely seriously and believes in the bounds of the law and the CCFA. Heroes should avoid lethal force if at all possible; with the obvious caveats. Elite Rikti troops, war machines, the Rularuu, there are some things supers have no choice against. “Killing people is wrong,” she once told the Paragon Times, “and we can’t get into the habit of doing it. But sometimes an Ubermensch's about to punch your head off, and it’s you or him.”
Maybe even more important to her, though, are the ethical implications of psionics. The violation of others’ minds, to her, is perhaps the greatest crime imaginable. She has stated that she does trust herself with that power, but as she’s gotten older she tries not to use it unless she absolutely has to, and she goes out of her way to target supervillains and organizations that use telepathy for unethical purposes.
Romantically, she is quietly but firmly devoted to Silencer Micheal.
Attributes
Powers and abilities
Mind control and Telepathy
Psykera’s claim to fame is her immense telepathic prowess. She detects thoughts and manipulates enemies’ minds, disabling key opponents before closing with her energy attacks. Her abilities go beyond this into much more subtle; when one of her teammates developed unexpected psionics and uncontrollably broadcast his own thoughts, she imposed mental blocks to contain him and let him get used to his powers gradually. The range and clarity of her telepathic communication is also famous; she regularly connects her teammates in a shared psionic link to ensure their communications can’t be disrupted or overheard. Its range is limited, but extremely long. Her wide experience with a variety of paranormal phenomena has also given her great psionic insight; she can detect and recognize many kinds of psionic, spiritual, and mystical effects at a solid range.
Telekinesis
Psykera’s telekinesis is potent enough, but her real asset is her skill at manipulating telekinetic fields. Precision and careful control can be worth more than raw power when it comes to deflecting projectiles or manipulating gravity.
Enhanced Genetic Structure
Due to the other effects of the experimental radiation therapy on her genes, Psykera recovers from injuries somewhat faster than an ordinary human, is more resistant to most diseases, and is projected to live longer than the average person. This is common to almost all successful test subjects of the Project.
Zero Point Conversion
Her most impressive power, though, is the ability to convert psi energy directly into zero point energy. This quantum force is poorly understood, but in her hands it translates into immense power. The limit of this power is hypothetically infinite - but her physical body is actually incapable of sustaining the amount of energy involved; using her full power would burn out her brain. Her parents' laboratories at the Otherland Project built her a suit of power armor, the “Anchorite”, that helps dampen, contain, and direct the immense energy she generates in this process, allowing vastly more of it to be used. The armor also collects information about her powers, as they offer valuable insight into the possible future of the Project. Control of this ability also allows her to interact with, detect, and manipulate many different types of energy.
When not wearing her armor, she wears an artifact around her neck, a silver ‘Key’ on a chain given to her by Silencer Micheal. The properties of this object are obscure, but it stabilizes her, allowing her to function and use a limited amount of her power without her armor’s psychic dampers.
Pyrokinesis
Psykera does have the power of pyrokinesis, but very rarely uses it; her control of psi energy gives her sufficient firepower but is much easier to scale back to nonlethal intensity, and generally more versatile.
Other Capabilities
Psykera retains contacts in Paragon City and throughout the superheroic community, though most of her allies have retired or stepped back from active duty. A handful of novice superheroes and metahuman Freedom Corps agents were trained by her, and she is not a member of the Midnight Squad, but she does possess some knowledge of magic and is on good terms with the group.
She has extremely wide knowledge of psionics. Her years of experience combined with her expansive powers of perception have been supplemented over the past decade with insight into the scientific and biological underpinnings of psychic phenomena; she is no scientist, but as a practical consultant she has some renown, and it's not uncommon for still-active supergroups to call for her advice. This knowledge has been gained from her years of work with the Otherland Project, having gradually absorbed some of the knowledge of her parents and their fellow scientists. The Project's work contributed to the powers of some of Longbow’s Wardens, their technology has been licensed to the Subgenetics Corporation, and intensive research is ongoing into gene therapies for medical uses.
Costumes
(WIP)