Foxtrot Charly
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| Foxtrot Charly | |
| Player: @Twoflower | |
| Origin: | Natural |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Mastermind |
| Threat Level: | 50 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Elizabeth Vicious |
| Known Aliases: | Queen Charly the Awesome, First Monarch of the Principality Formerly Known as Sealand, Long May She Reign In Utter Badassness, Awwyeah (full title) |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 16 |
| Height: | 5'0" |
| Weight: | 95lb |
| Eye Color: | Brown |
| Hair Color: | Brown |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Mercenary, Terrorist |
| Place of Birth: | Rogue Isles |
| Base of Operations: | The Principality Formerly Known as Sealand |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Father (Arbiter Vicious) |
| Known Powers | |
| Limited Mu Magic | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Infiltration, Military Tactics, Munitions | |
| Equipment | |
| Light Assault Rifle, Explosives, Acid Mortars, Shield Generators, Fire Team Teleporter | |
| No additional information available. | |
Charly is different things to different people. A loyal friend and devoted leader. A terrorist wanted by law. A freedom fighter against child exploitation. A betrayer of both her family and her adopted family. In the end, all she cares about is what she's chosen for herself to be, and that's a crusader and a comrade in arms with her peers.
Contents |
Affiliations
Her heart belongs to Foxtrot Company, a group of highly skilled and military minded activists campaigning worldwide for children's rights with bullets instead of brochures. Although her secretive origins place her in the camp of Arachnos, she has since rejected them and works solely with Foxtrot.
While she hates Longbow for their simplistic views, she has worked with Wyvern in the past, and maintains an ongoing relationship with "the spydorks" Indigo and Crimson. She passes them intel on Rogue Isles operations, they pass her tips on child exploitation. She's also given shelter to deep cover agents from Paragon provided that their interests never contradict her own. Charly fights hero and villain alike... the only alignment she really cares about is if you are for her cause, against her company, or willing to get out of the way.
Personality
Charly is a true believer. Her cause defines her, gives her purpose. She works tirelessly to gather intel on child exploiters and to terminate them with extreme prejudice, to set a vivid example to others who would follow in their footsteps. Although this zealous mission defines her, she does have interests beyond her calling.
Completely jaded to the colorful madness of the superheroing / supervillaining world, she takes things like alien robots and space nazis in stride and with an aura of heavy snark. Unless her friends are directly threatened by whatever crazy menace has arisen, she finds a hard time taking such things seriously, preferring to rise above it by dismissing such things as absurd. Still, that also means she won't hesitate to deal with those problems in a hail of gunfire. Violence is generally always the answer, after all.
When it comes to the company and to her personal team (fire team alpha) she's protective, commanding, and friendly all at the same time. She supports their interests and fights for their goals, and will defend them to the death if need be. Death is not something to flee and hide from, but to embrace... provided that your death lets you achieve your mission objective. A pointless death is nothing to cheer on.
Although Charly considers herself and her company to be "anti-heroes" she will fight Longbow when they get in the way of her goals. Longbow are arrogant, power mad, and harshly judgmental of others... all traits Charly despises. Still, she doesn't go out of her way to provoke heroes, and will usually use non-lethal ammunition against them unless they prove to be a deadly threat.
Powers
Her secret Arachnos training from an early age with the Mu mystics has given her one trick -- a shield of bio-electricity, which absorbs incoming damage, and can spread it through her fire team (who are willing to share the burden in order to continue the fight). She has no supernatural powers beyond that.
Abilities
Combat Coordination
Using her Arachnos training and her skills learned since joining Foxtrot company, Charly has become a skilled battle tactician -- not one of the greatest in the world, but capable, and talented at thinking on her feet if not seeing the long term and planning a far-reaching vision. She prefers to collaborate with her intel officer Foxtrot Romeo and his apprentice Foxtrot Juliet for matters which require delicate planning. Her talents lie more in dealing with the situation on the ground and getting out alive.
Using various combinations of her gadgets and munitions and her bio-electric feedback shield, Charly can play both offensive and defensive roles in combat. She's studied enough psychology to push the right buttons and provoke enemies into attacking her -- after all she's just a young slip of a girl, and they should be able to easily and quickly dispatch her, right? By the time the enemy realizes she's absorbing the damage easily, it's too late, and they're pounded down by Charly's teammates or by the thunder of her fire team's guns themselves.
Fire Team Alpha
Fire Team Alpha consists of a standard combat unit -- two ground soldiers, one medic, two spec ops for crowd control, and one heavy assault specialist. In this case, that's Alpha, Beta, Hotel, Victor, Delta, and Yankee respectively. Although all of them originate from Arachnos as Charly does, they're fiercely and quietly devoted to her, and have followed her through the loyalty roller coaster of her life.
Personal Armory
Charly's assault rifle is not designed for versatility, capable of firing single blasts -- she relies on her fire team for a broader spectrum of damage. Her real asset is in her extradimensional storage belt, which contains rapid-assemble kits for acid mortars, tripmines, shield generators, seeker drones, and more. She keeps a supply of caltrops on hand as well as web grenades. Her primary battle tactic is to set up and defend a solid defensive point, so many of these tools don't apply well to rolling battles, but her team is flexible enough to adapt.
Her primary travel means is a teleportation module, which also serves as a snare to pull enemies into her grasp. Many a victim has walked along, unworried, only to find half a second later they're staring down the barrel of six rifles, standing on a patch of caltrops, and being bounced around by concussion mines while acid eats at their armor. Few survive such a surprise.
She has considerable reserve gear in storage at Foxtrot Company's base, which is housed in the principality formerly known as Sealand, which Charly's friends bought on eBay for her as a gift. Charly herself is the new Queen of Sealand, and loves issuing crazy, royal edicts like mandatory Hawaiian Shirt Thursdays. Sometimes she's even joking about it.
Character History
Joining Foxtrot Company
The story is that Charly was an army brat, moving from base to base all her life. Her father was in a Special Ops, and vanished on a mission, with no official MIA/KIA status filed. After her drunken mother turned abusive, she was sent to live with an uncle instead... who threatened to molest her. She killed him, arguably in self defense, and fled. Soon she was discovered by Foxtrot Company, who took her in.
The reality is that Charly is really Liz Vicious, daughter of a high ranking and controversial Arbiter, who was tasked to find out why Lord Recluse's plans are so frequently foiled by the heroes. What new thinking did Arachnos need in order to achieve world domination? He planted various spies in heroic and villanous organizations, tasking them to learn new techniques and new approaches which Arachnos could implement on the road to victory. Charly, his beloved daughter, was assigned to Foxtrot Company and given the cover story of a real runaway child -- who was, in an act of "mercy," simply mindwiped and put in the care of a loving foster family rather than killed outright.
In order to "help" Liz integrate herself fully into Foxtrot and learn from them, Arbiter Vicious faked his own death, and the death of the entire infiltration project. Liz Vicious was alone, with no support and nobody knowing who she really was... and her father's plan worked. Feeling abandoned, she fell more firmly into the role of Foxtrot Charly, began to believe in their causes, and slowly forget her origins. Eventually all that mattered to Charly was her friends and her faith and her cause.
The lesson that Liz Vicious was sent to learn was taken to heart by Charly -- that only by TRUE loyalty, not the backstabbing power-ladder climbing Arachnos was known for, could any success in life be found. Only in genuinely caring for others and supporting them could you find strength. Charly embraced the company and its ideals as she developed her skills and what would become her true personality.
The Johnny Sonata Days
Despite finding new friendship and a new family, Charly did yearn for more. She commented frequently about her lost US army dad... the cover story having played perfectly into the reality of "losing" her real father, as she thought she had. When she started working missions for the management of the Golden Giza, she drew the attention of one Johnny Sonata. The two hit it off well, with him starting to become the father figure she sought.
Although her friends worried for her, particularly when circumstances seemed to indicate the two had an illicit relationship (which in truth, they never did) they cautiously watched over her during this time. Charly changed her wardrobe, took up poker to varying degrees of success, and generally integrated herself into a second family at the Giza. Not that anybody else at the Giza other than Johnny really liked her, but Johnny did, and if you don't at least pretend to like Johnny's friends Johnny may stop being your friend and you may stop breathing.
Unfortunately, Johnny had a problem... his contract with the Wailers for his soul. He tried to keep Charly out of the mess, but when Charly found out the truth, she insisted on helping recover the soul. Calling on the support of her friends, Charly battled her way to Johnny's personal hell... where his soul killed itself. She came back to find a soulless, heartless Johnny shrugging off his would-be adoptive daughter and telling her to get lost.
The truth was that Johnny's soul had a tendency to 'grow back' each time it 'died'... leaving him to latch onto new people, friends, lovers, whatever to care for him until he stopped caring anew. Only Foxtrot Echo knows this truth, having dealt with Johnny's mess in the past. He declined to tell Charly, out of fear she'd make another attempt to connect with Johnny, ending in the same disaster again and again.
Arachnos Betrayal
Soon after, Charly found herself summoned using her old recall codes from years before -- by her surprisingly not quite as dead as seemed father. Arbiter Vicious explained why he pretended to be dead, and that it was time for Charly to "come home" and teach Arachnos the lessons she had learned.
Foxtrot Company figured out what was going on in short time. They felt betrayed, but it was clear that Charly was Charly, not Liz Vicious, not anymore. Her heart was Foxtrot. She knew Arachnos was a self-defeating organization run by fools and would always be so, that the lessons she had learned would never truly be taken in. Her father's experiment, which he still believed in, was doomed. But she also knew if she didn't return to Arachnos, they could hurt Foxtrot Company in retaliation.
For a few weeks, Charly played a double-double-agent, pretending to have returned to the fold while continuing to support Foxtrot Company. She was given a standard black and leather red Arachnos uniform which she hated putting on each day, for both what it represented and simply because Evil Clothes were designed more for intimidation than comfort.
It became clear that Arbiter Vicious himself knew Arachnos was doomed to failure -- but he saw this as an opportunity to splinter away from Arachnos, to forge his OWN villainous organization to conquer the world through loyalty and comraderie and mutual respect of evil peers. What's more, he wanted his daughter to come, even though he knew her heart wasn't in it.
To sever her ties to Lord Recluse and Arbiter Vicious once and for all, Charly journeyed with her friends to the future to hunt down and murder a possible future Lord Recluse. She took his severed head, spine still dangling, and threw it at the feet of the present day Recluse... a gauntlet to say that she was done with them, and if he got in her way again, this would be the result. Lord Recluse babbled something about strength and evil and respecting her right to forge a path of villainry... but some witnesses claim (and are executed for said claim) to have seen a glimmer of fear in his eyes that day.
"They're coming."
In the days leading up to the Second Rikti War, a Rikti propaganda unit was teleport-kidnapping various powerful villains, stripping them of their metahuman powers, and dumping them back on the street with a mental loop of "They're coming, they're coming," blocking out all other conscious thought.
Charly was unfortunately taken by this unit -- but they evaluated her and determined her to be a non-threat, as she had no particular powers of note, and was only a 'harmless little girl'. After Romeo snapped her out of the mental loop, to say Charly was angry was an understatement. Livid that the Rikti had overlooked her, she signed up immediately with the Vanguard to take out some personal revenge and show them that Foxtrot Company was no harmless little kiddie tree fort.
Present Day
Her loyalties reaffirmed and her faith in the cause as strong as ever, Charly leads the company onward, as she has always wanted to. The years roll on, though, and she's slowly growing out of childhood... one day, like all Foxtrot members, she may depart in order to have her own life outside the company. Or she may choose to die in battle for the cause she holds faith in. Or she may simply stay on, even into old age, to teach other children the path.
Trivia
Much of Foxtrot Company's lore is inspired by the movie Lord of War, and its depictions of child soldiers being used by African dictators. Child exploitation happens every day in every corner of the world, and little is done about it. Making a terrorist organization slash children's crusade seemed like an interesting way to explore these issues in a fictional context.
The spelling of Charly's name is based on the Prodigy song, which is in turn based on the movie about a retarded boy. Other spellings like Charlie were considered, but something about the -ly suffix felt like the right alternative.
When asked "How will your character die?" I decided that Charly's future is probably to be a grumpy grandmotherly figure known as "Old Battleaxe Charly," matron over a family-run illegal arms dealing operation. She'll probably die in crossfire during a routine arms deal gone bad, but will leave behind a hell of a legacy.
