Sparkz
| Gale Power Grid | Translation |
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Contents
Botched Legacy
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| "Go hard or go home." | |
| Sparkz | |
| Player: @White Nightingale | |
| Origin: | Mutant |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Blaster |
| Security Level: | 50 |
| Server: | Confidential |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Lilianne Burnell |
| Known Aliases: | ' |
| Species: | Mutant human. |
| Age: | 19 |
| Height: | 5'8" |
| Weight: | 59kgs |
| Eye Color: | Brown |
| Hair Color: | Auburn |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | College Student |
| Place of Birth: | Paragon City |
| Base of Operations: | Paragon City |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Jennifer (mother), Jeffrey (father), Paige (younger sister), Amy (older sister) |
| Known Powers | |
| Living battery. Electromagnetism manipulator (see below for details) | |
| Known Abilities | |
| (private)Military training, Oboro-school Ninja training, experienced combatant. | |
| Equipment | |
| Hellphone | |
| WARNING: STRANGEREAL-LIKE. Will make use of fictional cities, city-states, and countries when armed conflicts and humanitarian crises are used in-story (CoH already features two anyway). WORK IN PROGRESS. Page started as a stand-in. | |
Lilianne Burnell. Daughter in the middle and third generation legacy. On mother's side, all women in in the family are electric mutants of varied degree of power, of which only one each generation has power effective enough to inherit the name of Sparkz.
Lilianne wouldn't be it.
In fact, the genetic roulette would mock her by making her show signs of power from birth, but said "power" was being a deffective battery. A battery without electrodes that would keep accumulating power all of her life without a means to tap into said power, ever. While her parents knew back when she was age three, they sorta just stalled and didn't tell her, delaying the inevitable. Lily had looked forward to carry the family's legacy and they just didn't have the heart to take that from her. The three daughters were equally trained early on by their mother, for even if it was clear the oldest daughter was going to be the one to carry the name of Sparkz, there was no reason to assume the others couldn't become heroines on their own right. When Amy's time to inevitably succeed mom, she was jealous, but when Paige happened to erupt at age nine, she was positively frustrated.
The Next Best Thing (maybe)
Lilianne made use of her spare time compensating and venting aggression with contact sports, schoolyard dynamics, fencing, and summer boot camps. While Jeff was okay with having a daughter he wouldn't have to worry sick every time she goes "do her thing," he wasn't quite happy when she said that, if she didn't get her powers by the time she was seventeen, she was enrolling herself in Longbow (ironically, to feel herself closer to dad, since he was a war veteran, yet being a war vet was exactly why he didn't want his daughter to see war). Jenn, on the other hand, was looking for ways to help Lily cope with the inevitable. Having a talk with her contemporaries (namely, other retired capes now with families), Jenn eventually came across the concept of ninjutsu as a tool to teach perspective. As a matter of fact, actual "ninjutsu" is not a martial art, but a gruelling training that turns every day of your life into the worst day of your life for as long as it lasts. After such odyssey, things like getting a flat tire in the middle of a highway in the desert or being passed up for a promotion all seem trivial. Yes, that sounded like just the thing to ease her daughter up for the disappointmet of a lifetime. For this, however, she wouldn't trust just any generic dojo, and instead she cashed some favors with old Longbow friends now in cushy positions to bring her daughter training from the best teacher the Freedom Corps could get.
This was NOT supposed to work, just saying
Masao Musashi was only there to pay a favor and humor and old friend of the family for a few months before telling them what he already knew: The girl was too old to begin actual training. Sure, he could teach her "ninjutsu" (and by "ninjutsu" be understood turning her life into hell for as long as training lasted), but her qi reserves were none and her third eye was perfectly shut. If anything, the nine mudras would be little else than basic meditation for her.
The training was not supposed to interact the way it did with the supercharged synapses in Lilianne's brain and remove the synaptical equivalent of a clot to give her mutation the final push it needed yet could never develop on her own like a child born too early.
It was not supposed to actually work.
This close from nukenin
For better or worse, Masao turned out a far better teacher than expected, but now he had to explain himself before the clan's other Jōnin for sharing clan secrets with a gaijin. Lilianne may be trained in Oboro-school ninjutsu, but she is no way acknowledged by the clan as a ninja. Furthermore, Masao warned her that passing said knowledge on to anyone else is likely to attract retaliation from the clan.
As if on cue...
Amy had been active as the new Sparkz for a couple years now... and unfortunately went through a transformative phase, not one for the better. First a fight with a nemesis of hers depowered her for a year, and during that year an extremist vigilante group radicalized and recruited her. To this day, Amy and her new super crew are wanted vigilantes suspected of the murders of several politicians world-wide.
For better or worse, seemingly, the family name had just freed up. And hey! Now her parents didn't have to go drop a bomb on her.
Sparkz III: Treading the line
The newly-minted Sparkz was a battery with seventeen years of untapped power, and ready to put all that juice to use. She found herself rather at home fighting terrorists like Arachnos and the Council, neutralizing their metahuman assets, and foiling doomsday devices. Also, since many of the friends she made at summer bootcamps were already enrolled, she keeps an ear on the ground (so to speak) for distress beacons, becoming rather adept at extracting troops stranded at sea or behind enemy lines.
Being increasingly tight with military types means Lily has gotten increasingly in touch with the unsavory nature of how the sausage is made. While she has managed to stick to her principles and do the right thing in the end so far, she has butted heads with her share of heroes who are quicker than her in choosing between what's legal and what's right. From Becky Beacon flaunting Longbow blockades and helping Etoile refugee boats reach American shores to Haley Hadron disarming invaders armed with American weapons at Mueanaa's border.
With world governments in current incarnate panic, she's aware of how close her country is from a new attempt at renewing the Might For Right act, so well intentioned as heroes may be, she tries her best holding the horses of overly eager capes before incarnate panic reaches a point of no return. Nevertheless, Longbow and otherwise US government collaborations only keep getting shadier, and she's starting to wonder how much is enough.
Personality
As a Leo, she's aggressive, impatient, and a risk taker. While her mother and grandmother fostered in her a strong sense of noblesse oblige, at the end of the day, her bottom line is her family. Finding herself working with military more often than with civilian authorities removed any squeamishness about killing when necessary (to her mother's dismay) but she still won't do it inside US territory out of discipline. She works hard and plays hard, and doesn't like complications in her leisurely or me time.
Powers: Zen and the art of applied Kuji In
Lily applied what she had learned and focused her newly found powers into a self-styled, mutant version of the Kuji-In, applying her electromagnetism affinity to compensate for her lack of qi reserves and psionic training.
Rin: Strength of Mind and Body
While Lily could never direct electro-magnetism into full telekinesis, she works it in objects she touches, defacto faking super-strength. She's been constantly pushing her weight limit until reaching her current 300tons.
Pyō: Channeling of Energy
While Lilianne can finally throw lightning bolts like she always wanted, she instead favors a short-range EM field-based particle beam, a death ray* that works like a defacto beam sabre.
Tō: Harmony
Her electric senses turn her into a walking radar in addition to a receptor of all incoming signals (which she can tamper as well).
Sha: Healing
She has enough control over her nerves to deaden or shut them down as needed, becoming immune to pain.
Jin: Mind Reading
While Lily can't read minds, she can focus to read people's EM emmissions (i.e their "aura"), thus becoming privy to their emotional state and health.
Retsu: Control of time and space
She can change her wave/particle frequency just enough to briefly turn into lightning; while she can only sustain this form for a second at a time, that's more than enough to move up to three times around the planet. Alternatively, she can stretch this limitation by piggybacking on radio waves, electric currents, and power lines (one of her "party tricks" is calling someone on the phone and then popping in on their end of the call). As a side effect, Lily's reaction times quickly risen to match this new speed, now matching the reaction speed of top-tier metamartial artists. Furthermore, as she found out the hard way by calling a friend without knowing where this friend was at the moment, she can use this ability across dimensions** (provided she has access to transdimensional communications equipment, that is).
Zai: Control of the sky and the elements
While power sappers and nullifiers have been around for over a decade, it was when Lily's developed a method that seems to work on incarnate-class targets that the top brass took notice. By extending her natural EM emmissions to cover a large area, Sparkz can intrude into metahuman enemies' nerves and cumulatively weaken them. This process can be slow, and means Sparkz first needs to survive an incarnate's onslaught long enough to weaken them into a manageable position, but it's still more than Longbow has right now. Being (normally) immune to powers suppression, incarnates are the biggest cause for concern for all governments in the world. Incarnates cannot be jailed, and their vast power means they cannot be killed either (except, perhaps, by other incarnates). If Longbow, if NATO, could successfully arrest one single incarnate, that would do wonders in "showing the world governments are back in charge," recovering the control they lost ever since Statesman went and stole governments' authority along with their nuclear arsenals back in the sixties. Such victory over an incarnate has yet to happen. Nevertheless, Longbow sees a new asset that warrants grooming.
Curious on how much more juice they could squeeze out of this new asset, a Longbow paranormal R&D big wig tried an experimental procedure on her and then recommended her to major in IT on the off chance Sparkz also developed an affinity for cyberkinesis. After the unexpected (if partial) success, this big wig offered to further assist her, not out of the kindness of her heart, but rather that cybermancers are on a classification rather close to the Nuclear 90 on the threat scale, and as such, armies are forbidden from having cybermancers in their ranks, so having a freelancer one indebted to the corps for occasional black operations was a wise investment. Unlike actual cybermancers, however, she can't make devices behave in ways they're not meant to (she can hijack a killer drone, but she can't make it do anything that would go against its A.I's Basic Inference Rules Set), and she is constrained by her own expertise in IT and electronics (metatechnology and alien devices are beyond her grasp).
(*) The "Death Ray" was Nikola Tesla's most famous theoretical weapon, and worked by tuning an electro-magnetic field at the right frequency to generate positron-electron pairs and then shoot them separately through an ionized plasma gas channel. This particle beam would impact targets and wreak the ensuing havok of a matter/antimatter collision upon them. In a world of superheroes, it's only reasonable to assume this theoretical weapon works.
(**) As per a proposed hypothesis on "quantum phones," each electron is a potential gateway between universes.
Trivia
Her Birthday is on July 28.
While ninjutsu was her salvation, the fact of ninpo's teachings bringing her (relative) content also barred her from the main requisite to qualify for incarnate power (unbridled ambition). Nevertheless, she has at least enough traits of the Zeus Archetype to be on MAGI's watchlist since, to date, no one has any idea of where did Statesman's power go after Darrin Wade's arrest, so the world powers are on the lookout for the inevitable successor.
She's currently majoring in IT at PCU (Founder Falls' campus).
Her drink of choice is the mojito.
She hits both the D and Stardancers in costume, while she visits more earthly clubs as a civilian.