User:AlwaysAPrice/Angel Eyes
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| Angel Eyes | |
| |
| Natural Scrapper - 22 | |
| Martial Arts / Willpower | |
| Player: AlwaysAPrice | |
| Activity Level: Frequent | |
| Real Name: | Andrea Morse |
|---|---|
| a/k/a: | Andie, Angel, A.E. |
| Physical Identifiers | |
| Species: | Human |
| Sub-Type: | Caucasian |
| Gender: | Female |
| Apparent Age: | Early 30s |
| Height: | 5'4" |
| Weight: | 134 lbs. |
| Build: | Muscular/Athletic |
| Complexion: | Smooth |
| Eye Color: | Ice blue |
| Hair Color: | Pink-red (dyed) |
| Distinguishing Features | |
| Irises turn a bright, luminescent yellow when using her powers | |
Angels of Heaven and of Hell walk among us bound in mortal guise, their true nature invisible to human eyes and thus to each other. These Celestial and Infernal agents have for millennia waged a secret war of manipulation, believing they serve the greater cause of divinities long since withdrawn from the fight, leaving the outcome to be decided by their wayward agents -- or by us. Humanity is their Battlefield.
From time to time in the course of maintaining their Angelic Deceit, an Angel in human form will take a human mate, sire human children. From time to time, a Celestial may unwittingly lie with an Infernal, and give birth to a human child in whom is contained in equal measure their conflicting Essences.
We are the Seers, the Angelborn. In our Sight the truth is revealed; in our blood lies the power to vanquish the Deceivers.
My name is Andrea Morse.
I am an angel slayer.
Last Updated: 10/28/2010
Contents |
Powers
The Sight
The chief gift possessed by the Seers, the one from which their name is derived, is the Sight -- the ability to perceive the true form of angels in human hosts. This vision extends beyond its primary purpose with training, however, and often allows a Seer the insight to pierce the veils of human deception and some magical illusion. While the exact manifestation of each power is different from Seer to Seer, in Andrea's case she must make a conscious effort to suppress the Sight, and does at most times, as the truths and information it reveals about the world around her can be overwhelming to process. When she allows the Sight free reign of her senses, most often in the heat of battle, the irises of her eyes take on a telltale yellow luminescence -- she wears yellow-lensed glasses most of the time to obscure this.
The Sight may lay dormant for a lifetime; the Angelborn may live a long and fruitful life never knowing their true origin or that of their parents, die peacefully and pass on as the awakened can not. Should they suffer severe enough psychic or physical trauma in life however, the Angelic Essence will bind itself to the soul in that moment of desperate need. Andrea's awakening came with her first death, when she was murdered by her father. She found then that she could not die and, betrayed and now witness to the truth of her father's Infernal nature, slew him with the same weapon he had used to murder his wife and daughter. Her blood, still wet on the blade, bound the angel to the body it had inhabited long ago and ultimately it was annihilated.
Angelic Essence
Human children with a single angelic parent rarely manifest any ability; the shard of Angelic Essence that is entwined with their human soul is usually too fragmented to be consciously applied, and should it prove active the benefits will likely seem prodigious, but never superhuman. When the Essence of the Celestial twines with that of the Infernal, however, then the power to become a threat to the Deceit has the opportunity to awaken -- with study, that Essence can be consciously manipulated and shaped by the human soul to which it is bound, leading to a host of amazing talents. Over time, Andrea has learned to apply her own power. The most prominent (and the most frequently useful, given her dangerous lifestyle) of the applications she has developed is to force an acceleration of her body's healing processes. Most of her talents focus on enhancing her physical ability, making her stronger, faster, more resilient, but she is also able at times to reach outward with her power to subtly influence the minds of others.
Seer's Blood
The factor that, more than any other, makes the Seers a threat to the Deceit is their blood. Angels of the Deceit can inhabit the body of those who are faithful to their causes, but when they do so they are unable to leave it until the death of their host. The angel itself is theoretically eternal, but the Rules of Engagement which constrain the angels of the Deceit have allowed one exception. The blood of a Seer can be used to bind an angel to its earthly vessel. If the host is then killed with the blood of a Seer in its system, the angel will die with it, its spirit annihilated and vanquished to oblivion, removed from the Battlefield forever.
This is why Andrea will often draw her blades across her own flesh before entering a battle in which she expects to encounter an angel. She chooses not to heal most of these wounds, that their scars can serve as a warning to her prey that she will go to any length to rid the world of Man of their manipulation.
Immortality
Though they can be killed, a Seer can never die. The marriage of Celestial and Infernal essences in their souls prevents their access to the afterlife in any of its forms. Andrea will forever be the age she was at the time of her first death.
Equipment
The Blade of Idris
According to legends shared by both the Deceit and the Seers, the bronze sword of the first Seer has been reforged again and again throughout the millennia, each time cooled in the blood of the Seer who would wield it. This is ritual and no more, it does not lend the blade any mystical power -- at least, none that it might not already possess. It is simply the traditional way for the new owner to claim the blade as their own and commit it to their purpose.
Andrea was the first to wield the blade in centuries; though she possessed the Blade in its current form, that of twin falcatas, for over twenty years after pursuing the legend for years, she never bothered to perform the ritual of ownership. She does not know for certain if the focus-like effect the blades had on her were a trait of the Blade itself or merely the result of her own affinity for them, but her opposition to reshaping them had a superstitious fervor behind it. The cleaving strikes with which the falcatas were most effective came quite naturally to her, but she nevertheless trained tirelessly to master the nuances of wielding them in a variety of styles beyond the traditional.
The Blade was lost to her in 1976 (see: Weaknesses and Limitations), and to date she has found no leads as to their current location other than that they are somewhere in Paragon City.
Abilities
Training
Several decades after her powers as a Seer were awakened, Andrea faked her legal death, stopped using cosmetics to fake her aging, and left the United States to learn more about her true nature. For the next five decades, she traveled the world, finding others with the Sight and learning from them, uncovering the secrets of the Angelic Deceit but taking care never to engage them until she knew the extent of their abilities and her own.
As a result of her travels and studies, Andrea is an expert martial artist and swordswoman, and also has considerable experience with firearms and explosives. She is an intelligent and canny researcher, and a master of disguise and surveillance. Her speech is peppered with enunciatory oddities picked up during her years of travel, but the most frequent inflections still reflect her New England upbringing.
Fighting Style
Andrea has always been most comfortable with a weapon in hand, most especially the Blade of Idris. When she is wielding her swords, which she has trained with so much that they feel like an extension of her own limbs, she is able to focus more intently on channeling her Essence to defensive purposes to keep her at the peak of her fighting form against even large groups of opponents while she gradually and gracefully whittles away at the threat. Unarmed, she channels more of her ability into offense -- she cannot take such a prolonged beating when she has to focus on striking with the force and accuracy needed to cripple her assailants, but she makes up for it with the fury with which she strikes. Her unarmed style focuses on punishing strikes with her elbows and knees in equal measure to the more preparatory and strategic blows delivered with fists and feet; Andrea could never be accused of holding back in any fight.
Weaknesses and Limitations
In 1976, after Andrea finally began to make her mark by uncovering the machinations of both sides of the Angelic Deceit and removing several of the most influential agents of both sides from play, the two sides entered into a pact to remove the threat. Andrea was lured into a trap and captured, and kept captive in a high-security state psychiatric institution. There, through years of psychological and pharmaceutical manipulation, she was convinced of her own insanity. She came to believe that her powers, her memories, her enemies, all that constituted her identity was a fabrication of her own deluded mind, that it was all an utterly fantastic rationalization spawned by the trauma and guilt of having murdered her own father.
Andrea escaped in 2007, with the help of two "watchers", members of an informal society of theologians, historians, anthropologists and conspiracy theorists who share their observations and suspicions about the Deceit and its players in an effort to uncover hidden truths about human history. When an anonymous tip from someone identifying themselves only as "M" turned them onto the trail of Andrea Morse, they tracked her down in search of answers and helped her to remember the truth of who she was and what she was capable of.
The decades of brainwashing have not left her unscathed, and while she has resumed her hunt for the masters of the Deceit, this is now primarily motivated by a desire to exact revenge for what they have done to her. She is no longer the threat she once was, and she still has many doubts about who she is and what she is doing. She is sometimes prone to behavior most would consider less than stable.
While her blood can be used to vanquish angels of the Deceit, the process is not without risk. Once a Seer's blood is in the veins of an angel's human host, it unlocks power normally blocked by the Rules of Engagement under which the Celestials and Infernals must operate. When a Seer's blood binds essence to flesh, the angel is able to wield a greater portion of its power directly in the physical world.
Andrea has a severe dislike for the MedCom emergency teleportation system upon which most of Paragon's heroes rely, a dislike based on the portal technology which is the basis for its operation. Being teleported wreaks havoc on her Sight, which she has discovered, during Rikti invasions and during her early investigations into the nature of the Lost, is blind to beings with extradimensional origins. Magical methods of teleportation do not cause this sensory disruption, but it never fails to make her uneasy nevertheless.
Affiliations
League of Misfits
Andrea signed up with this group as a rather spur of the moment decision shortly after her registration went into effect. Their lack of a regimented operational hierarchy allows her the freedom she needs to begin investigating possible agents and operations of the Deceit in the Paragon City area, but the support the League of Misfits show for their fellow oddballs and outcasts is something she secretly needs as she rebuilds her identity and acclimates to a world that has progressed thirty years without her.
Background
Personality
Andrea is fairly serious by nature, reserved but possessed of a dry sense of humor that comes up most often as a means to guard against stress and keep her head cool in dangerous situations. She takes the responsibility she has adopted by registering as a defender of Paragon City's citizenry very seriously -- she has spent much of her life defending humanity from threats it is unaware of, but since her re-entry into the world and her encounters with several of the visible threats that are at large in Paragon City, she has re-evaluated her priorities. This is where, more than anywhere else in our world, people with abilities like Andrea's are needed. So, for now, she will aid the heroes of Paragon with every aspect of her talent; she does not doubt that the machinations of the Deceit will come to light in her Sight sooner or later.
And one way or another, she's going to find her swords.
Public Knowledge
Anyone seeking information on Andrea Morse on the Internet will find nothing. A Wikipedia article someone attempted to make about her shortly before she escaped from captivity was deleted and locked against recreation within five minutes of its creation; the contents of the initial edit were purged from the article history. All the public records relating to her apprehension and trial-less incarceration in 1976 have been redacted to a degree that would only suggest a cover-up if any of them hadn't been unfortunately misplaced.
Andrea uses "Angel Eyes" as little more than a comm handle for her interactions with her contacts and teammates -- she invites most to call her Andie or Andrea. She freely shares the name Andrea Morse and takes credit for her deeds with the press, insisting they note both her name and handle -- she is making her presence and identity explicitly clear, but to what end remains uncertain.
((Player Notes))
- Angel Eyes is currently a MA/Will Scrapper. I'm concurrently working on a
Will/DB Tank(reutilizing the Choppin' Broccoli gimmick from my collection of failed joke characters) that will be repurposed into Angel Eyes once a certain level (likely 22) is reached and her quest to retrieve her swords is played out in-game.- Will/DB didn't work for me...while it quickly proved very survivable, the damage and slow availability of attacks just turned me off. So, DB/Will it shall be.
- Angel Eyes' powers give me a wide range of RP-able powersets and archetypes the more I think about it, so it's highly likely I'll be adding incarnations as time goes on, well after the bladed Andie goes live anyway. Normally I create characters in this game to have powers that operate in a way reliant on and reflecting the game's operation -- this is the first (successful) transplant character I've made where I'm shoehorning a pre-existing concept and story into the CoXverse.
- I tried this character once before here but deleted it thinking I wouldn't be able to make it work in this setting, especially considering that there are several people who already play their own interpretations of angels in the game. Now that I'm getting my RP legs back with my SG, I've started thinking in a few new ways and thought I'd give it another crack.
- I'm being very careful to word things in a way that will not come off as powerposing, by tethering all the godmode-able elements of Angel Eyes' powers to my own background mythology and defining the Deceit as not being all angels but rather a discrete faction of angelkind -- also note that Seer's blood only binds and makes killable angels of the Deceit. If I've failed to do so, input on correcting that is welcome on the article's talk page.
- Around level 10-ish I got in a bit over my head with MA/Will Angel, mixing it up with the Vazhilok, Outcasts and Council on the streets of Steel Canyon -- I'm on the verge of defeat when my inspiration tray starts to fill faster than I'm beating down criminals. I start popping pills and finish off what I was fighting, and not wanting to waste the buffage that remained I dove right into the next nearest batch of baddies -- and so on and so forth, with insp after insp popping into my tray. I tried to put on a good show -- at one point I kicked someone over my supporter's head, then leapt over to finish them off. I fought longer and harder than I had any right to do at that level, and when all was said and done (as I stood there stunned after using the last inspiration, an Awaken), my mysterious benefactor hits me with this:
Lost RO Knight: Dispense Object {ERROR: PRODUCT EMPTY}
Angel Eyes: Thanks again.
Lost RO Knight: {DUMPING CHANGE BIN}
Lost RO Knight: {PLEASE CALL 1-877-COJERKS AND REPORT UNIT ERROR #7315A. HAVE A NICE DAY.}
- Dumps a bunch of influence in my lap and zips away. I already had a high opinion of The Circle of Jerks for their sense of humor, but this was awe-inspiringly cool. A gift I fully intend to pay forward next time Gx has a full tray and comes across an overambitious scrapper.
- Inspirations Include:
