Black Replica
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
She's a punny character, like Meo Tsang. Her name is a double pun; she's a powerset clone of Joule's character Spiked Shot and her looks are patterned after the original costume of Joule's Dark/Dark corruptor, Integration by Parts who looks quite a bit different now. Being the clone of two Dark characters, her name "Black Replica" makes sense. Her name is also a play on the weapon from Melty Blood, the "Black Barrel replica." Her name, Shion, is also derived from the wielder of the Black Barrel replica, Sion Eltnam Atlasia (pronounced 'shion' in japanese). Gameplay-wise, she's a Spines/DA scrapper. She owns face, like any Spines/DA scrapper should.
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Background
Shion was created in a lab in late 1992. Her parents were brilliant scientists based in San Francisco, California. In an attempt to create an ultimate superbeing in their offspring, they combined the DNA of two powerful metahumans and injecting it into her mother's fertilized ovum.
Shion's parents were in for a let down when the girl was born with no super powers of any kind. Disappointed, they raised their daughter with a minimum of adult supervision - they were much more involved in their research into super powers than their daughter's upbringing.
Unsurprisingly, Shion grew up to be spoiled and rebellious. Her parents were rich, and she got away with everything. She was the most popular girl in her middle school and high school. She smoked, she drank, and she partied. Her parents were just too busy studying the cause of the Rikti Invasion of 2002 to care what their little girl was growing up to be.
In July of 2007, Shion was about to have her first sexual experience with a boy. As the sexual tension began rising and the two began undressing each other, Shion's powers manifested. Black appendages erupted from her body, which nearly resulted in a fatal injury for her romantic interest. He was terrified and broke up with Shion on the spot. She was emotionally devastated. Due to this first experience with her powers, she has a general dislike of most males and refuses to treat them as equals.
Shion's parents were overjoyed. Their experiment had been a success! Shion's powers were incredible! Her parents were incensed to find out more about the results of their experiment.
Rebellious Shion had other ideas, though. Instead of being her parents' guinea pig, she signed up at the San Francisco branch of Hero Corps, and asked if she could be transferred to a place far from California. The largest hotspot of super-powered activity in America was Paragon City, and Shion gladly accepted the offer to go to get away from her parents. After signing paperwork for her release of custody from her parents, Shion boarded a plane and headed to Rhode Island as an agent of the Crey-sponsored Hero Corps branch in Providence.
Arriving on the East Coast for the first time, Shion finished her high school education and began learning about how to control her super powers. She became good friends with two other metahumans from the academy: the mutant Toast Widow and the sentient computer program Internet Trend. The three would stick together through all of their training.
After she completed her education in 2008, the three fast friends would be organized into a squad and dispatched to Paragon City, where they would handle minor civil disturbance issues in concert with the local police force. While Hero Corps was not able to keep an office inside the War Walls due to political pressure, the local police and private corporations still believed that Hero Corps was needed to help keep Paragon stable. Black Replica led the team as they entered Atlas Park for the first time, directing a few ragtag Freedom Corps heroes with her to clean out the sewers underneath the city.
Allies
Toast Widow - A rejected candidate for the Arachnos Night Widow program, Toast Widow lacked the skills, discipline, and psionic ability needed to succeed as a Night Widow. Embittered, the mutant girl began an underground war against Arachnos and gained no small amount of notoriety due to her moniker. Rescued by Hero Corps operatives conducting a Grandville raid, she eagerly signed up to prove her strength and has become an instrumental part of Black Replica's team. Toast represents the team's stability and is the most experienced and stable of the three.
Internet Trend - Black Replica's best friend. Internet Trend is a living computer program that constantly gathers data from the internet, and empowers her team with the unusual strength of "epic lulz." Despite being a computer program, Trend has a very fun, cheeky personality. She could be described as careless, except that Shion is extremely reckless and Trend spends most of her time making sure Shion doesn't get in over her head.
The Semicolon Avenger - A newer addition to her team, Semi is a cyborg time-traveler from the future, sent to the days when global communication originated in order to save the English language. Her prim and proper manners are a point of contention among the members of Act Cadenza, but she tries hard to fit in. She is the acting maid for the team, and helps the most with cleaning.
Powers
Black Replica can be best described as a psionic vampire.
Her powers create an aura of pure mental energy that surrounds her. While initially this only created a skintight barrier that protected against attacks, it has evolved to spilling excess energy out in a radius around her. The result is a minor mind-altering affect that makes her more difficult to see. The effect can also induce headaches and even temporarily short out a person's nervous system at close range. Due to her psionic powers, Shion is incredibly resilient to psionic attack and all forms of mental manipulation. Even illusory powers or magically created fear effects are ineffective against her.
Black Replica is also able to manifest ectoplasm that she can extend from her body and project at enemies. Despite the psionic nature of her attacks, the appendages are solid and cut or pierce their target rather than inflicting mind-altering damage. The blades are typically projected from her body, thrown or propelled at high speeds. Once embedded in her target, the spines decay rapidly, leaving a residue behind. The residue is a bloodborne poison and causes minor inhibition of motor functions. Shion can also extend the spines a short distance rather than fling them at foes. If she does so, she can lodge them into an enemy and drink his blood, revitalizing her. She does not need to do this to survive, but she can drink blood from most living creatures in lieu of other forms of sustenance such as eating.
Black Replica's powers also allow her to create psionic appendages for the purposes of mobility, giving her superhuman running speed. Initially, she is not very skilled at manuevering in any direction except in a straight line and is not very adept at throwing herself up in the air with her powers. Fortunately, Toast Widow's ability to accelerate matter help her overcome some of these shortfalls. Given her year of experience in traveling through Paragon, she has gained some measure of agility using this power, but still relies to some degree on external assistance if she needs to ascend to higher ground.
More recently, Black Replica has improved her mastery of her powers, alleviating to some degree her normally short operation time. She also has developed psionic clairvoyance, and can see things slightly before they happen. This allows her to bypass enemy defenses and visualize things her eyes would normally be unable to see. Even while blinded, she is surprisingly able to fight using this awareness, but it is very taxing on her to use constantly.
Despite her small stature, Shion is an excellent fighter even without her powers. She has learned how to use her fists and feet, and can block incoming blows surprisingly well.
Weaknesses
Mentally, Black Replica is extremely protective of Internet Trend and will go to great lengths to see that Trend is unharmed. While she is good friends with Toast Widow, Shion is much more likely to keep a level head if Toast is in harm's way. If Trend is hurt or in danger, Black Replica is likely to go into a frenzy in order to protect her.
Shion's most characteristic weakness is that she is easily exhausted, especially if she is attempting to use her clairvoyance. She can only remain in full use of her powers for a small period of time before she must rest. Without her teammates, whose powers keep her focused and strong, Black Replica would only be able to fight for a few minutes at most. This is especially true if she is injured. Despite lengthy training and experience with her powers, this remains a severe weakness for Shion. However, due to this training, she can prolong the use of her powers much longer than she ever could when she began her hero career. She can even maintain limited use of ectoplasm for indefinite durations, a huge improvement over her initial uses of the power.
She also retains a sense of touch of all of her appendages until they leave her body, and thus striking them can wound her. She prevents this whenever possible by throwing her spines at the enemy, rather than using them as melee weapons.
While her energy field is effective at stopping most forms of attack, Black Replica is more vulnerable to energy based attacks, including electricity.
Shion's small physical stature is an unusual weakness compared to most physical fighting heroes. While her psionic field does reduce the injury from most attacks to a minimal level, her small size and weight allows her to be thrown around by much stronger metahumans.
Notes
- BR was originally created to be a farmer. She is pretty good at it. She was such a blast to roleplay on a small number of occasions though that I dramatically expanded her character design.
- BR is extremely short. She's about 4'8" or about 5'1" in costume 5 (which has longer legs). This is mocked pretty much all the time by most of her friends.
- Her personality in a nutshell is that she is a cheeky bitch.
- BR is extremely genre-savvy. She doesn't break the fourth wall, but she often points out the ridiculousness of things, whether in gameplay or RP terms. She's especially fond of mocking the average D stereotypes and comments on how she never does anything super or heroic, usually being relegated to "Defeat all Hellions in area."
- Despite being level 50, she is not a recognized Hero of the City.
- BR is extremely underpaid by Hero Corps, given her team leader position. She is paid a minimal 7.50 an hour, and due to child labor laws can only work 25 hours a week. Both Toast and Trend make 10.25 an hour and have full work weeks. Trend's job is usually systems analysis, and Toast claims to patrol, but in reality she pretty much sits around the house and watches TV all day. Shion typically does Toast's patrols.
