ArchStrike
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
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| ArchStrike | |
| Player: @ArchStrike | |
| Origin: | Mutant |
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| Archetype: | Scrapper |
| Security Level: | 50 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Beverly D'Angelo |
| Known Aliases: | ' |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 34(apparent) / 64(actual) |
| Height: | 5'6" |
| Weight: | 135 lbs. |
| Eye Color: | Brown |
| Hair Color: | Dark Brown |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Police Officer/PPD-SG Liason |
| Place of Birth: | Paragon City, RI |
| Base of Operations: | Steel Canyon |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Mother: Susanne Father: Samuel(Deceased) |
| Known Powers | |
| Highly-accelerated regeneration capability, pronounced dexterity and advanced metahuman strength tied to mutative causal factors. Also displays flight and superhuman speed capability. | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Trained in hapkido, judo, aikido, shaolin and wing chun kung fu. Experienced in urban combat and hostage rescue. Has qualified up to and including advanced SWAT team tactics and Law Enforcement procedures. Advanced marksman skills. | |
| Equipment | |
| Regulation PPD Sidearm(.40 caliber), tactical shotgun, assault rifle, body armor, scanner, handcuffs (rated for Omega level suspects), advanced HARD-suit supplied by private party (for the lack of a regulation HARD-suit because of limited numbers). | |
| No additional information available. | |
Contents |
Affiliations
Friends & Associates
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Alliances
- Sentinels United
- United Champions of Paragon
- Esoteric Order
- Shieldsmen of Paragon
- Knights of Paragon
(others to be listed)
Known Adversaries/Nemeses
Personality
ArchStrike is at once, professional and congenial. Retaining her humanity and humble nature, she's also a bit expressive of her feelings, and quick to respond to them. She's an honest, dedicated protector personality with the firm realization that she can't save everyone. A pragmatist, she still dreams of small greatnesses in her duty but within she holds reservations regarding her current assignment, it's reasons, and is one driven to investigate like situations, be they professional or personal.
Able to take the lead if needed, she's not quite the leader personality and is content to act as the voice of experience or council. Her sharp tongue and equally sharp wit are signature marks of this strong willed and devout woman, balanced by a pleasant demeanor and a warm smile.
Character History
Beverly D'Angelo is a native of Paragon City. Born in 1943 to parents that themselves were lesser mutants (Samuel, possessing greater than normal strength...and Suzanne, possessed of high reflex quotient) that happened to also both possess regenerative factors that while not highly advanced, were formidable enough to retard cellular aging moderately. During her youth, she became familiar as kids do with her neighborhood and came to love the feeling of living in such a special city. A few of the early super heroes, and all the fascinating types of people that congregate in such an environ captured her imagination and the stories she'd hear from her father, a member of the Paragon Fire Department, instilled in her the idea of wanting to help others in some similar way.
Schooling swept by swiftly, and at the onset of her teen years it was discovered that, in fact, she too shared in not only the gifts of either of her parents, but both. As these began to assert themselves, her parents began to suspect that her genetic abnormalities might be far more pronounced than either of their own and on the advice of her councilors and friends of her father's; sought out and found a willing sifu who not only would be able to help her to focus her now growing strength and dexterity, but would attend to her schoolastic needs as an academic teacher. This was seen as doubly beneficial as in addition to receiving guidance through an overwhelmingly awkward period of life, she; by virtue of spending so much of this time out of the public school system would also be able to escape the trials suffered by metahumans at the hands of the suspicious and manipulative. Throughout this time, her discipline allowed her focus, her dexterity gave her form and grace. It was during these formative years that she found her center and began the road to self-awareness.
After recieving High School Accreditation and attaining her Associates of Social Sciences in college, she began work as a clerk at the Ziggursky Penitentiary and was successful at keeping a low profile as far as her abilities were concerned. The atmosphere was rife with the whispered rumors of the Federal Government pressing "supers" into service, and such was the death she didn't wish for. After almost a decade of work in the offices of Paragon's maximum security penitentiary, it became necessary to back off from public life for a time, spending time with her family and trusted friends, seeking pleasure and comfort in continuing her study with not only her sifu but others as her skill grew along with various low-key life pursuits that gave her a sense of purpose.
In the mid-80s, as change in the priorities of not only other people but seemingly in the entire world view began washing through society, Beverly was a witness to that which would foreshadow her destiny. It was a July afternoon's serene bustle of Steel Canyon urban life that was slashed by the sound of gunfire and the wail of a police siren. A car carrying heavily armed suspects to a local bank robbery was being chased by said unit, the vehicular acrobatics in the somewhat tight restraints of the Canyon's thorough-fares a sight to behold until a ballistic assault from the fleeing vehicle managed to disable the PPD cruiser, it losing control and violently slamming into a car nearby being driven by a mother returning home from a daycare with her child. The civilian vehicle slid insanely towards the embankment, flipping 360 degrees on it's central axis as it hit the sidewalk and implanted itself into a storefront. The crowd milling both sides of the street had thinned from the flight to safety of those nearby the accident, but stepping to the side of one particular crowd was an 80's fashion clad Beverly D'Angelo. She looked around, as the crowds nearby did, with the expectation of the swift arrival of one of the cities "Supers" that would tend to the victims and danger forthwith. A minute passed, then another, the police officer clearly unconscious and the female victim crying out for help. Yet none approached. Finally it was all she could take and Beverly ran forward, herself, first to the PPD cruiser to check it's driver and when satisfied of his condition she then raced to the akimbo addition to the storefront, it's passengers in a panic. The driver's hair was stained with running blood, the child in the back now screaming for it's mother now having passed out from shock. At once still reflexively frightened for what may come from her public display of her physical abilities and overwhelmed at the sound of the child's keening she plunged her hands into the doorframe and began a herculean effort to wrench the door free. Moments passed, with her calling out for help from a crowd that was both in shock of the non-intervention of a public "hero" and the terror that rose from seeing the undercarriage of the car she wrestled with burst forth into brilliant flame, it licking out from the ruined hood. Wrenching the door frame, finally, from the car, Beverly ripped both woman and child from the car with abandon and flung herself into the sky mere seconds before the car exploded. Witnesses would say that though they could not identify the young female hero, the communal thought that the fire somehow was angered at her intervention by it's skyward climb as if to chase the three in mid-hover was breathtaking. Placing her charges on the pavement of the street once assured by the approach of the fire department's sirens, she flung herself into the air again, removing herself from the public eye in an attempt to salvage what little chance there was for her own private life. It was the one and only time she would ever do something like that with anonymity.
It wasn't until the late '90s, having seen the fullest acceptance of metahumans into the social framework that some decades-worth of gentle cajoling by FPD officers that had become her uncles and friends finally reached her. She felt safe enough to venture out into the world at large, without fear, to openly make use of her abilities and gifts. It was then she applied to and was immediately accepted by the Paragon Police Academy, a natural result of her upbringing and outlet for her abilities. Becoming one of Paragon's finest was, to her, a life altering experience. It could be said that many super-heroes sometimes forget the day to day struggles as they're seen to attend to larger and more public events. Anyone could be a "limelight hero", but to her it seemed that far fewer could honestly wear the shield and excel. Being a part of the "Blue Line" and sharing in that dedicated group of professionals, mirroring that of her father's on the FPD was her goal, and achieve it she did with full marks.
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It was a scant few short years later that fate would step in and deliver a near mortal blow to her spirit.
Trial by Fire
The Rikti Invasion was swift, savage, and destructive for the world on a level that was nearly impossible to believe. Tested to the breaking point, the greatest heroes of the world were catapulted into the fight for survival against an enemy they barely had a defense for. Emergency services were drained and everyone that could, did what they could. That was never more firmly said about any than the Fire/Police/Emergency Services of Paragon City. Even to this long lived woman, having survived three major world conflicts, the ferocity and suddenness of this newest aggressor was completely overwhelming. During the fighting, as she stood with Hero's, SWAT, and National Guard alike, rescues were being attempted even in the midst of the heaviest combat. It was during such a hazardous rescue attempt that her Father's engine crew was ambushed by a Rikti assault platoon mere moments before she and other defense forces could shield them. It was also during the initial volleys of the invasion that her long time boyfriend, Micheal D. Parks, a reporter for the Paragon Times was lost and believed killed while attempting to gather information from the combat zone personally. Their loss both shook this formidable woman to her very core, and yet provided the fuel with which she would find the strength to carry on in the face of such a determined and voracious foe. Their memory, and the memory of their loss, carry on with her to this day.
During the combative occupation of the city, Arch served with valor as a meta-human member of what were termed "cleaner squads". In the chaos of the fighting, it was seen that formulaic military maneuvers were of little use and that reclimation of the city was only going to be achieved by the supers-population being supported by strong individual squads of military or other similarly skilled combat veterans waging the war on the ground in ways that would keep the Rikti guessing as to the plan of the day, or more precisely the next main attack point. In serving with these unsung heroes, "norm" and meta alike, she experienced the horrors of war that so few talk about but that many in those days did. Resonating within the young woman, it's a set of memories and personal pains that have buried themselves deeply into her psyche and memory, reverberating loudly far into the future.
Following the war, she stayed as she had been, in the local police precinct of Steel Canyon, now barricaded by War-Walls and trying to assist as best she could with the reconstruction and providing of protection and relief during the reclamation of the world.
The Rebuilding
During a performance assessment, some years after the Rikti Invasion, it was found that during the intervening years, with so many more "supers" becoming "capes" and tending to the criminal element, that the PPD and it's forces were somehow being overshadowed in the populaces opinion. There began to grow a small but vocal minority of the Municipal Police that were feeling resentful of supers, feelings of alienation by those they had sacrificed alongside building to levels never even thought of in this world. It was during this assessment that the Mayor's office, in co-operation with Freedom's Phalanx and the PPD hierarchy decided that some "supers", Officer D'Angelo being one, should be reserved to other assignments more in line with their abilities to allow the feelings of alienation to subside rather than risk division in the ranks of the city's primary law enforcement service.
Thus, Officer D'Angelo; nicknamed by SWAT personel and now officially registered with D.A.T.A as the hero ArchStrike; was assigned liason duty with a SuperGroup that was being reopened and restaffed. As the official PPD Liason and a Commander within the newly reemerged SG: The Justice Guard, she serves Paragon and still continues to carry the determination and love of others that she hopes her father would be proud of.
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Equipment
Badge Number: 8574
Regularly and normally uses and retains certifications for regulation PPD issue uniform, armor, weapons and equipment but has also taken advantage of the technical resources of the Justice Guard to have a HARD-suit constructed for added protection with appropriate design changes befitting needs of flexibility and fluidity of motion. Presently, has also taken to working in a more comfortable and less restrictive "hero" costume depending on occasion and need.
Powers and Abilities
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Advanced Metahuman Strength - Being a mutant, her own biology is what seems to be the single limiting factor as far as physical strength is concerned. The tensile strength of her musculature is on par with some of the most advanced polyalloy myomer known to current science but still requires chemical energy to produce metahuman effects. By reports, she's demonstrated the ability to snap-kick the diesel engine of an eighteen-wheeled rig several hundred yards, followed by ripping the driver's side door off to get at the driver.
Highly Advanced Regeneration - From the birthright of her ancestry, in this woman rests the ability to regenerate what would be wildly fatal wounds, damage, and is so rapid in pace that she begins regeneration immediately upon suffering damage. This gives the illusion of her being invulnerable...but it's only an illusion. She can still be shot, crushed, fried, etc...however it's believed that nothing short of massive tissue disintegration or disruption, or long-term exposure by damaging forces powerful enough to knock the young woman unconscious are capable of overcoming this marvel of genetic power. Viral and bacteriological infection is almost unheard off in her family line, and it is the same in her history. In addition to vastly more advanced damage regeneration, tests have shown that not only does this ability affect higher systems in her body, but also on her very DNA itself. Oxidation and protein breakdown that is known to be a primary and prominent cause of the natural aging process in non-mutative humans is itself hindered, if not repaired completely by this advanced cellular mechanism, the upper limit of which is currently not known.
Pronounced Reflexes and Dexterity - Her physiology mixed with an abnormal amount of physical training (owing to her having an extended period of what is known as "peak physical health") have given Arch finely honed balance, response time, and a pronounced hand/eye ratio.
Martial Arts Training - Having trained martial arts for nigh-on four decades and having such a natural talent and control of her body has lent to an exceptional mastery of both the "hard" and "soft" methodologies of Japanese judo and aikido; respectfully; as well as Chinese martial arts styles that include hapkido, shaolin and wing chun kung fu, the latter of the assemblage being favored by default and in the Nei Jai style; mostly allowing opposing combatants to attack first thus remaining in line with her ethics as a police officer. With these in her arsenal, Officer D'Angelo is exceptionally well-armed for almost any hand-to-hand situation.
Ground-level Superspeed(Limited) and Flight - After being assigned the task of defending the Terra Volta reactor from and impending Sky Raider attack, Officer D'Angelo's mutative factors were ignited yet again, bestowing upon her an as-of-yet unexplainable ability to fly, at rather high velocities (also utilizing a set of booster rockets built into a special pair of armored boots developed by Servanta Technologies to further increase her speed, or merely to lessen her own effort in maintaining flight.) and to also achieve superhuman speed on foot, the latter being an ability she's only capable of utilizing for body movements or in short distance motions; an example of which would be her signature coup de`grace, a double-fisted, charging, body blow. The appearance of said mutual ability is less pronounced than her previous talents, but yet still bears mentioning as she's naturally incorporated said abilities into her arsenal.
Weaknesses and Limitations
Physical weakness isn't a major factor in this mutant's life, but psychological weakness's are. She is still unsure of herself in the guise of "SuperHero" and can become tentative of action in extremely hectic circumstances. It's the fear of failing those that are depending on her, a fear borne of her failure to protect the defenseless firemen of her Father's brigade.
However, it's already been noted that she is, outside her "meta"-human status, still human to the greatest extent. Her highly advanced regenerative abilities and pronounced strength are maintained by her own natural body bio-systems and as such, are subject to it's ability to handle extreme circumstances. Overwhelming damage or extremely prolonged "super" activity take a toll on the woman, and even though she pushes herself forth with titanic reserves of willpower and the enormous amounts of physical training at her command, she has been seen almost dead on her feet after some notable engagements. Though not invincible as some others that she serves with, she keeps up as best she can, sometimes to her own detriment and with the price of a few longish stays in the ER or ICU.
Also, it should be noted that her temper is the reported reason for her being nicknamed by her fellow officers as "Arch-Strike" as those who have earned her ire have learned. Not necessarily quick to anger; she is, however, an explosive personality once her levels of frustration or aggression have been ignited and heated to a high point. The sight has been described by accounts as "like seeing Gabriel go nuclear" and it's something that Beverly struggles with far too often.
Commendations and Awards
- Awarded Meritorious Police Duty - 04/2002
- Awarded PPD Commendation-Integrity - 08/2003
- Awarded PPD Commendation - 08/2005
- Awarded PPD Medal of Valor - 04/2007
- Awarded NYPD Combat Cross - 01/2008
- Awarded NYPD Purple Shield - 01/2008
Musical Themes
- Main theme - Chevaliers De Sangreal (Hans Zimmer - "The Da Vinci Code")
- Fighting theme - Burns Attack (Boom Boom Satellites - "Appleseed(2004)")
- Romantic theme - May it Be (Enya)
