Burnt Heart
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
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| Burnt Heart, seeking out her prey | |
| Burnt Heart | |
| Player: @BurntHeart | |
| Origin: | Mutant |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Brute |
| Threat Level: | 29 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Serina Martinez |
| Known Aliases: | Burnt |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 26 |
| Height: | 5' 8" |
| Weight: | 128 lbs |
| Eye Color: | Brown |
| Hair Color: | Red |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | Puerto Rican |
| Occupation: | Wanted criminal |
| Place of Birth: | Steel Canyon, Paragon City RI |
| Base of Operations: | Sharkhead Isle, Rogue Islands |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | None living |
| Known Powers | |
| Creation of fire and plasma | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Wanton destruction and choas | |
| Equipment | |
| Her hands and her Harley | |
| No additional information available. | |
Burnt Heart is @BurntHeart's name sake in-game and on Virtue is a villain. She was originally created as my very first character on Liberty Server and is a Fire/Fire blaster there. I had attempted to re-create her on Virtue as a hero several times, but the original concept never seemed to stick here, so she was forgotten about, for a while. She was rolled up once more, as a Fire/Energy Tank. This time as the girlfriend of an Outcast leader in Steel Canyon who was Brimstone Bobby's nemisis. That particular Outcast leader was later killed off by Burnt Heart who then took control of his cell of Outcasts and her career as an Outcast and criminal was born.
With the advent of CoV, she was to be yet again, re-imagined, in true villainous form as a Fire/Energy Brute. Instead of being a "destined one" who had been broken out of the Zig, Burnt Heart instead led an RP event with help of the then, Guardian Angels Reborn, in which she broke GAR nemisis; Karnage, out of the Zig and they "aquired" an Arachnos Helecopter, fleeing to the Rogue Islands. It's been a long journey for a character that is my namesake globally and forumly, but she is still one of my best loved concepts in spite of not getting much play time.
Contents |
Affiliations
Supergroup: Dark Moon
Former gang: Outcasts
Personality
Burnt Heart is a fiesty and firey Puerto Rican who lusts for watching things burn. What things? Everything. She covets power and will sacrifice just about anything for it. One thing she will not sacrifice; however, is her lust for wanton destruction. Burnt has been dubbed to unreliable for use by Arachnos, as she will just as soon burn a target to the ground as secure valuable information. This destructive streak has caused her constant turmoil as she is rejected by groups she has sought to use to gain power and influence with. Her earning for power and recognition from others remains, but the patience to achieve those goals is absent.
Powers
Burnt Heart is a mutant with the ability to create and manipulate fire. She uses this ability to sheath herself in shields of fire and plasma, covers her fists in white hot plasma, and creates thermal updrafts which she uses to leap from place to place when she cannot use her bike.
Fire Shields
Burnt Heart is able to engulf her own body in shields of fire and pure plasma, making it difficult to hit her. Barehanded melee attacks are generally thworted by the sheer heat she expells, while ranged attacks are often shrugged off as projectiles are incinerated by her flames.
While she is not immune from attacks, they generally cause only small amounts of damage, but Burnt Heart can be weakened over time and eventually taken down. Psychic attacks cause her significant trouble as she has no means to protect herself from these. Her blind fury and impatience has made any attempts to train her to shield her mind, futile, at best.
Plasma Enhanced Melee
Burnt Heart is able to produce white hot balls of plasma that engulf her hands when fighting. These plasma coverings make her melee attacks deadly, often burning her victims if not incinerating them completely.
Rarely does she leave a victim down and generally finish off the job, leaving nothing but ashes and bone as remains. She regularly will then continue to pummel the location of the fight, leaving scorched walls, floors, furniture, often consuming the entire structure in flames if possible. This is not to hide any evidence of her crime, but simply for the love of burning things.
Super Leaping
Burnt Heart uses her manipulations of fire to create thermal updrafts in the air around her. These updrafts allow her to leap great distances and high into the air. Again, if patience and concentration were concepts she could befriend, it is possible she could fly on these updrafts, but leaping gets her where she is going and she simply doesn't care enough to spend the time learning to fly on her updrafts.
Skilled Biker
When not leaping to and fro, Burnt Heart's perferred mode of transportation is a Harley Davidson motorcycle, which she rides at great speeds across any open area she can. ((Writer's Note: This is Superspeed RP'd as a motorcycle)) The model, and year of the bike is irrelivant to her, as she is not a motorcycle afficianado. She likes the sound a Harley makes over other bikes and likes them in black, that is all she cares about.
Burnt Heart has never purchased one of her own, she simply steals them when she seems one that suits her liking, and rides it until she finds another one, or it is destroyed. She generally rides recklessly and has a passion for dangerous stunts. She does not consider herself a "biker chic" as she has no respect for the machine itself other than it's sound and it's ability to make other people nervous.
Character History
Serina Martinez was born in Paragon City after her parents had come to the US mainland from Puerto Rico. They came to the US poor and hoped to make enough money here to raise their family better than they could have back home. Edwardo and Rosa Martinez both entered the work force of Paragon City, but Rosa, quit her job as a waitress when she was six months pregnant with their first child, Serina.
Edwardo continued to work his way through colledge, earning a degree in financial management. He secured a middle management job at an international bank in Steel Canyon after their second daughter, Felizida, was born. The family seemed to settle in to a normal Paragon existance.
On Serina's fourteenth birthday her family planned a suprise party for her and when she came home from school that day, friends and family jumped out to suprise her. Unbeknownst to them, Serina had been keeping a secret for the last year. The shock of the suprise caused her to burst into flames uncontrollably, badly burning her father and mother, while incinerating her younger sister.
Her father recovered in the Steel Canyon medical center, but her mother died a week later from the 3rd degree burns she sustained over 80% of her body. Serina's secret of being a mutant had cost her the life of her mother and younger sister. She was enrolled in a special class offered by GIFT, to help her learn to better control her mutation, but the relationship with her father was damaged beyond repair.
Edwardo became distant and depressed, sitting for hours alone in the dark of their home. He refused to move out of the house and only allowed repairs to be done when the City threatened to condem the house. He eventually lost his job at the bank and started drinking heavily, living off the life insurance they had on Rosa.
Serina hated coming home and hated herself for causing her father's depression and drinking. She hated herself for killing her mother and sister, and found herself hating the people at GIFT trying to help her understand her powers. If they had only been their sooner the accident wouldn't have happened.
By the time Serina was sixteen she had taken to staying away from home for several days at a time to avoid her father. She started running the streets with other mutants, calling themselves Outcasts. The leader of the Outcast gang that worked the streets near her home was named Ricco, Ricco the Rock, with the mutant ability to summon raw earth to his bidding.
Ricco and the other Outcasts taught Serina to stop apoligizing for her abilities, taught her to use them to her advantage, taught her that the real criminals were the heroes off fighting big named villains and not bothering themselves with the plight of the day to day folks in Paragon City, taught her to hate the rich who could afford private education for their "metahuman" children, while working folks like her parents get nasty suprises because they couldn't afford to educate their daughter to use her powers.
Serina bought into this philosophy completely, as well as Ricco's advances toward her to stand at his side as his girlfriend. Together Ricco and Serina, who then took the name Burnt Heart, ran their gang with ruthlessness and abandon. The beginnings of Serina's desire to see the whole world burn, to let the whole world feel the pain of losing a sister and mother, began to fester.
Enter Brimstone Bobby
Ricco and Burnt's gang found a young mutant, who had appearently been sold to a pediphile. They rescued him from the filth, killing him without mercy, and took to young boy into their fold. He was what they called a Duo. His mutation allowed him control over two elements, fire and earth. He was named Brimstone.
Once he was old enough the gang included him in a heist they were planning. The heist went bad; however, when the killing started and Brimstone hesitated, wanting to stop and call for help. Ricco and the gang left him there to take the fall for them when the police were on their way.
Once in custody Brimstone was counseled by GIFT representative Antonio Nash and eventually was released from jail on probation and given a temporary hero license. Burnt was infuriated that someone they had taken in and cared for had turned on them and urged Ricco to strike back. They had tracked Brimstone, now calling himself Brimstone Bobby to a supergroup called The Guardian Angels Reborn.
Ricco was reluctant to challange Bobby and GAR, he had heard stories of this group working out of Kings Row. They were grittier than other supergroups and had members with extremely dark powers, one was even rumored to be a vampire.
Burnt Heart was sickened by Ricco's waivering and began to see he was content with running a small gang in one neighborhood, that he had no ambition to reach up and grab more control over the Outcasts, that he had no desire to rule Steel Canyon, or eventually lead the Outcasts completely. The betrayal of Brimstone Bobby was just the catalyst that showed her how small Ricco really was.
Enter Karnage
Burnt Heart kept tabs on GAR and Brimstone Bobby, even going to length of threatening GAR member Steel Scalple when it was outted in the press that she and he were dating. Ricco tried to pressure her into leaving GAR alone, but Burnt Heart would not be deterred.
She happened upon a chance meeting with a notorious villain known in the dark places of Paragon City, the fiend known as Karnage, a vampire. The two hit it off almost immediately. His thirst for destruction and mayham and her desire to watch the world burn, clicked.
Under his tutaledge, Burnt realized she would never get where she wanted tied to Ricco the Rock, so she burned him leaving only a small pile of ash on the floor of the warehouse they had taken to living in. She then set her sights on Frostfire himself.
Karnage was impressed with her passion and her brutality, but understood she was still unexperienced in the finer arts of killing. He allowed her to challenge Frostfire, to see what she was made of. He accompanied her on her raid of his hideout and watched in glee as she ruthlessly burned her way through his guards.
In the final challange she had seriously wounded him, but he managed to escape at the last moment, evading death at her hands. The fact that she had made the leader of the Outcast flee from her, was a point not lost on Karnage, in spite of her anger at not getting the kill.
Karnage brought her a gift later on, something called a Demon Rose. A single rose bloosm in the deepest shade of crimson possible. It was magically enchanted to live forever, as long as it was fed human blood regularly. Burnt was overwhelmed at the gift, not because it was a romantic gesture or meant that the two of them were now an item, but because it opened up a world of possibilities she had never had access to before meeting Karnage.
She realized that it wasn't Ricco who had been small, it had been she, herself, who had been small. Thinking that she could get anywhere tied to a small gang of thugs like the Outcasts. Karnage showed her that a whole world of wickedness existed and was hers for the taking, if she reached for it.
Enter Arachnos
Burnt Heart and Karnage hung out periodically, while she honed her skills and made connections of her own with the under world of Paragon City. Karnage had gotten himself tangled up in some big time plot against GAR, set up by some supervillain who had been posing as a hero for some time. The result of this ploy landed Karnage in a cell in The Zig.
Once Burnt got wind of his incarceration, she decided to show him how far she had progressed and planned a break out. Enlisting the aid of some Trolls she had paid to work for her, Burnt had a tunnel under The Zig constructed. Then using various spells she had liberated from Thorn libraries as well as some charms she had procured from Pandora's Box magic shop, she located Karnage's cell in The Zig and from deep underground, weakened the mystical and technological restraints they had secured him with.
This weakening was all he had needed to finish the job himself and quickly met Burnt in the underground tunnel. The two fled to an awaiting Arachnos Hover Chopper Burnt had secured from a unit of Arachnos agents and troops headed for some assault on Paragon City they were planning.
The two flew the chopper out over the city and the Atlantic, heading for the Rogue Islands where they would lay low for a while.
Upon arrival at a landing site on [http://paragonwiki.com/Mercy_Island Mercy Island} the two were met by a flank of Arachnos troops and an Arbitor. They were congratulated on their escape from Paragon and their procurment of the Arachnos flyier. They were offered the opportunity to begin working for Arachnos itself. Both declined, citing the fact that they do not play well with others. Arbitor Diaz informed them they would be allowed to remain in the Etoile Isle's as long as they did not interfer with Arachnos affairs and that the offer to join their ranks would remain open.
Enter the Rikti
To this day, Burnt and Karnage occassionally team up for a bit to cause some mayham or destruction, but they have both gone their seperate ways since landing on Mercy Island. They teamed up one last time in Paragon City, when both had returned for their own reasons and found the city was being invaded quietly by Rikti, again, but these Rikti were different, they were from yet another dimension and had abilities and powers normal Rikti didn't have.
It was during this attack that Burnt over heard a conversation with the hero Dreamkatcher about a rogue part of his personality that had been trapped in a Soul Crystal of the Thorns and was being held at the MAGI vault. She secured the crystal during an Alternate Rikti attack on Atlas Park. She and Karnage then freed the being inside and helped to secure a new body for him at a Crey cloning facility.
The being called himself Soulfyre and joined forces with them. During their assualt on the Crey facility they, unknowningly, activated a dorment android program, Replimax, who also began following them, secretly.
The climax of the Rikti assualt occurred when the members of GAR, who were battling these alternate Rikti, enlisted the villains help in a raid on Perez Park, where the alternate Rikti were attempting to establish a beach head. The villains agreed and Karnage agreed to go with the hero strike team traveling to the alternate Rikti's home dimension.
The villain team assumed the raid would simply be great fun and an opportunity to cause some destruction with the help of some heroes, not to mention the chance to rid the world of some Rikti and maybe some members of GAR accidently in the process.
The raid on Perez Park succeeded and the villains quickly fled back to The Rogue Islands when other heroes began coming to the park to investigate the explosions and fireballs. Once back in the safty of the Rogue Islands, Soulfyre and Replimax decided to continue working with Burnt Heart, as Karnage drifted off into the shadows yet again.
The three villains united to form a loose association of villains called Dark Moon, short for The Legion of the Dark Moon. Their numbers have grown somewhat since their intial formation, but they remain simply a loose association of members who share information and resources to aid each other in their nepharious plots and dealings.
