Alanna O'Cat
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
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| Alanna O'Cat | |
| Player: Sonicheart | |
| Origin: | "Natural"/Unpowered |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Controller/Brute |
| Security Level: | 50+3 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Alanna O'Cat |
| Known Aliases: | The Angry Architect Nerd, Aoikakoneko, Aoi Kaminarineko |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 22 |
| Height: | 5'1" |
| Weight: | Confidential |
| Eye Color: | Blue |
| Hair Color: | Brown (Dyed blue) |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | New England |
| Occupation: | Web Video Producer |
| Place of Birth: | Paragon City |
| Base of Operations: | Paragon City |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | O'Cat Family of Founder's Falls |
| Known Powers | |
| None | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Video Production | |
| Equipment | |
| Jetboard, Combat Suit, Architect Power Simulation Card. | |
| This character works in a few semirelated identities. | |
This Character Page is in Earliest Progress.
This Character is somewhere between the Serious and Silly lines. Her plot is made to be entirely feasible within the Virtue Verse, but she is kind of a parody of the likes of the Angry Video Game Nerd and The Spoony One, along with architect farming in general.
Alanna O'Cat is the second of three children of the O'Cat family - an Irish family that moved into Paragon scant years before the first World War, and who have stuck around ever since. Ordinary to the "T" that ends their name, the O'Cat family have had little to make them special - typical careers and lives, no real connections to fame or fate.
Then Alanna, at age 20, early in her college days (majoring in Video Production) decided to try her hand at web video. And wouldn't you know it, a fresh and endless topic had just came out: The Architect System, and all the terrifyingly bad scenarios that user-developed content is famous for. With the aid of a Kickstarter fundraiser and a knack for sewing, Alanna purchased a 'flyer' remote video camera, a slightly cat themed, slightly celtic themed, entirely impractically themed superhero-like suit, and one of the devices that provides Architect Entertainment with it's profit lines: an Architect Power Simulation Card. These Cards, when held in one hand while entering the Architect Portal, cause the character to form in the Architect simulation with a complete set of superpowers.
A combination of a Fire/Kinetics Controller APSC, a friend to remotely operate the camera from outside the Architect, and a lot of time with a video editor, and Alanna O'Cat had created two (publicly known to be the same person) identities for herself - Aoikakoneko (literally "Blue Fire Cat"), a half-parody of the generic young female superhero, and The Angry Architect Nerd, who mocks Aoikakoneko's adventures through the worst content of the Architect (and the Home Version, introduced in mid-2009) while drinking copious amounts of Turning Tide Beer and ranting with increasing incoherence at the terrifyingly bad scenarios she is presented with. The combination touched with an audience, and well-placed ads started making her a fair bit of money.
Then, after finishing a two-year series, The Angry Architect Nerd announced that Series 2 would begin September 13th, 2011 with a live broadcast in Galaxy City - and that she'd now be using a custom-built actual suit to fight in, under the new identity "Aoi Kaminarineko" ("Blue Thunder Cat" - and no, she won't take joking about eighties television series well). Indeed, she had ordered just such a suit from a high-tech arms dealer from the Rogue Isles - an electrified, armored version of her classic outfit. While it looked the same, it carried a directable electrical current, allowing Alanna to produce a series of useful effects. More importantly, however, were the flat-blades that popped over each wrist, allowing her to apply martial trainings she had begun to develop against - well, the simulated threats of the Architect. She made absolutely clear she had no plans to go into real-world super activity. (Naturally, the suit was following the recent trend among APSC owners of Claws/Electric Brute builds...)
And then the Shivans happened. And then, when she was about to help Blue Spectrum during the mess of her escape, she entirely accidentally hit the trigger on her blades and shanked him instead. Spotted by an Arachnos agent, she wound up escaping with them to the Rogue Isles - now with an arrest warrant on her head in her home city, and no way to get there without keeping a now-undesirable mask.
Fortunately, she still had two resources to get her life back. First, a will to work for unpleasant causes - like Arachnos - under a temporary guise. Second, her site. Quickly recording short broadcasts to satisfy her fanbase, she promised that she would be reestablished in Paragon, her record cleared, and that she'd have a new feature coming to The Angry Architect Nerd for Series 2 to thank people for their patience.
Quickly working in the name of profit, Alanna managed to get out from under Arachnos' thumb through a series of savvy plays to power. Coming out on top of a high-profile five-way brawl between the Council, Sky Raiders, Council, and the supers Mangle and Frostfire ended with Longbow and PPD landing over two hundred arrests in the space of twenty minutes thanks directly to her actions - and those of the very arms dealer who had provided her her suit. Needless to say, her record was cleared the next day.
With Series 2 starting, Alanna's show now uses a new, slightly fresher formula - while every episode features a sampling of the deepest depths of Sturgeon's Law as applied to the Architect System, she's started to build a new popularity for her schedule of guests - some of the most interesting and storied individuals of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. The interweaving of a sampling of their personal narrative with the terrifyingly bad content they put themselves through has won her many fans across Paragon, the Isles, and beyond - and she claims that her secret waitlist (featuring folks of every alignment imaginable) now runs tens of meters long, providing her plenty of cool people to write - and record - about, now assisted with a dedicated personal studio in Aeon City, linked into the Base Portals network for secured access.
The thing is - Alanna runs real work on both sides of the aisle, as well, recording supers in action and placing it for broadcast too. She considers broadcasting rights more important than simple money, and usually refuses to work clandestine jobs - though she'll delay a broadcast for a week to let information become stale with little argument.
Somehow, she's managed to keep her real name and home a secret all the while, even though she works unmasked. When interacting with any superpowered community, the Architect, or anything at all related to her public identities, she goes by "Aoi" as a shorthand. To learn her real name is to know one is trusted by her deeply.
More recently, Alanna's actions have started bringing her into the Incarnate cycle - where her knack for recording has earned no small number of Incarnates no small amount of good press, back on Primal Earth. She considers Maelstrom her specific rival out of the major Praetorians - a symbol of government control of media now, he runs directly counter to her loose, free-media ethos.
Personality/Interaction Notes
Alanna's a bit of a fangirl of Dr. Aeon (she doesn't know about some of his darker experiments) - not uncontrollable, but she tends to think positively of him in the overall. Her personal base is located near Aeon City.
She tends to use video production terms a lot without realizing it, and has a tendency to confuse others without realizing it with surprising frequency.
The suit's batteries are rather sub-reliable at best. She has mentioned having to replace the batteries after three minutes of use in some cases. She keeps where the batteries are located in her mostly-skintight outfit a secret.
Mentioning Thundercats around her is a sure way to quickly piss her off, due to her third codename literally translating as "Blue Thundercat."
She's usually OOC when running content that isn't Architect; her singular exception so far has been her Rogue Alignment missions.
