Dame Agincourt
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
I guess I, um, I always used to be reading the wrong type of comic books. 'Cause, er, it seems like what should happen is that I get powers, and then, y'know, suddenly I get the confidence to lose fifteen kilograms and get my maths homework right first time and, um, start asking boys out. But, um, I'm still fat, and I'm still getting C-minuses, and I'm still... well, yeah. But... but does it count as growth if I stop worrying about it? 'Cause I'm doing okay, really. And I'm starting to think, well, maybe, maybe the whole point is to do something where you're happy with yourself. And I might not be thin and I might not be brilliant and I might not be Angelina Jolie but I can go out there with my bow and I can fight off the vicious and the cruel. I can. I can set my feet and draw my bowstring and say, your tyranny will go no further, you'll not hurt a single other soul, the meek will prevail!
...so that's, um, that's pretty good, I guess.
| |
| No, her stubby little legs can't reach the ground, but this is a minor inconvenience. | |
| Dame Agincourt | |
| Player: @Kadrin | |
| Origin: | Magic |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Blaster |
| Security Level: | 25 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Melanie Taylor |
| Known Aliases: | None, as yet. |
| Species: | Fully human. |
| Age: | 14 |
| Height: | 4'10" |
| Weight: | unknown (Melanie is quite willing to walk a full twenty kilometres to avoid stepping on a scales.) |
| Eye Color: | brown |
| Hair Color: | brown |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American, with some English a few generations back. |
| Occupation: | Full-time high school student. |
| Place of Birth: | Paragon City |
| Base of Operations: | Paragon City |
| Marital Status: | single, never having been anything other than single. Not too strange, given that she's fourteen. |
| Known Relatives: | both parents living, one aunt in Chicago, and a whole clan of cousins back in the UK. |
| Known Powers | |
| none unaided. When touching her bow, superhuman vision, superhuman speed and jumping, high strength and stamina, the ability to manifest and manipulate arrows of light and fields of electricity. | |
| Known Abilities | |
| none unaided. When touching her bow, great athleticism and supernatural accuracy. | |
| Equipment | |
| a magical, legendary bow, constructed from stripped-down materials of legendary items, and matching quiver. Heavy gloves*. | |
| * They sound rather less irrelevant when there's a bowstring slapping into your wrist all night. | |
Tiny, meek, unathletic, and unpopular, Melanie Taylor has never really seemed like anyone's idea of a grand crusader for the innocent. She's quite happy to spend hours in her room with a stack of maps or a book of go strategies through the ages while other kids are dancing, having fun, playing video games, or actually studying, and one might have thought that would carry through into her crimefighting career. Beyond that, most of her interactions with children her own age have left her with an outlook that seems somewhat misanthropic. But it's difficult to deal with Melanie long before noticing that, fundamentally, she's got a good heart, and wants more than anything for everyone - even the bad people - to be happy and unhurt.
That said, she's not above pinging a few fowling blunts off choice villains' heads.
Contents |
History
Early History
Melanie Taylor was born in the obstetrics ward of Chiron Medical Centre in Atlas Park, and has lived in Paragon City all her life. Indeed, she's never much moved; her father is a real estate agent who owns an apartment complex around the Promenade, and the four-bedroom two-bathroom apartment on the twentieth floor has suited the Taylors down to the ground. This means that yes, Melanie has lost her schoolbag to Hellions once or twice, though not as often as she claimed to her maths teacher. ("No, they... they just took my, um, my homework. I don't know why. I don't, I don't understand the criminal mind.")
An only child, born when both of her parents were past forty - and though Melanie only suspects and doesn't know this, three earlier pregnancies resulted in miscarriage - Melanie is the joy of her parents' life and perhaps, maybe, just a trifle spoiled. While her room in the apartment is indeed a paean to conspicuous consumption, with a high-speed computer, an impressive amount of video game consoles, and a Japanese-made katsura goban that cost $2,000, the love of Melanie's parents mostly manifests in less tangible forms. Indeed, they're probably a little too clingy to her, but Melanie certainly doesn't mind.
Though it does make it tricky to tell them that every night she goes out, typically to the sewers, and has criminals shoot at her.
Melanie goes to high school in Paragon, where she hangs on to a passing grade by the skin of her teeth. She's far from stupid, but she's not brilliant, and her absent-mindedness and difficulty with focus tends to sabotage her successes. Her grades in Maths, P.E., and Art are particularly poor, and Computing and History mostly average, but in English (due to a tendency to indulge her imagination) and Geography (due to a genuine interest in the subject) she actually does quite well. For a long time, the only after school activity she participated in was the go club, of which she was the founding member and one of the only five - two of whom had just read Hikaru no Go too many times and were more interested in Akira than atari. Recently, she's taken up music - she's not terrible with the cello, and finds it a wonderful way to relax - and, unsurprisingly, archery.
Superhero Career
Dame Agincourt's origin story is simply enough explained. One day, on her way home from school, Melanie saw a small ginger kitten poking its nose out of a back alley. Tempting fate - or, rather, a squadron of theoretical Hellions with designs on her purse and/or virtue - Melanie followed it into the alley. Well, she was tired, and it was a very cute kitten. At the end of the alley, the kitten led Melanie to a poorly hidden mahogany case, clasped tightly shut, in which Melanie found the bow.
The bow - which likely has a name, but it's difficult to extract information like that from a kitten - was and is a wonder of the bowyer's art, above and beyond being constructed from various historical and legendary items. Its limbs are built from the wood of a Spartan's unbroken shield, recovered after the battle of Thermopylae. Its string is a magically made composite of twined cables; three from the bowstrings of Robin Hood's merry men, three from hairs shorn from Samson's head, and six from the sling David used to slay Goliath. Its quiver was that used by William Tell, when he was tested by Vogt Hermann Gessler. In the fourteenth century, these items were brought together by a mystic order called the Knights of Neptune (who later schismed, mostly turned evil, tried to control the world from behind the scenes without much success, and then destroyed themselves with infighting over a failed prophecy... but that's another, overarcing, many-hero-and-villain-backstorying story). The best of the Knights' bowyers bound the weapon together, and their most powerful spells were cast upon it, to imbue it with power enough to make whoever wields it a mighty warrior of the weak against the strong, the pure against the cruel, the vulnerable against the predatory and the meek against the tyrannous. The weapon was first wielded by an English yeoman at the Battle of Agincourt, against hugely superior French numbers, and anyone who has seen Henry V knows how Agincourt turned out. (The English won a decisive victory with amazingly few casualties.) Since then, in the way of heroes and legendary weapons, the bow was passed down through the ages, showing up frequently where the weak are oppressed; the most recent records show it wielded by a Free French agent against Vichy forces at the Battle of Madagascar.
Melanie was, at first, rather less excited about the bow than about the cute kitten who seemed to want her to adopt him. Fortunately her parents' apartment complex does not have a No Pets policy, and there's a balcony and fire escape outside Melanie's room that means he can always find his way to the street and back. She named him Lion.
It took some time for Melanie to realise what the bow and quiver could do for her, but sooner or later, she did - there is no skill that is not eventually realised, some folk think. Her heightened athleticism was the first to be realised, and then her impressive skills of archery, and finally the ability to manifest and manipulate the arrows of light and electrical fields.
This led Melanie to a point of decision. Obviously, the bow needed to be given to someone who could work out what to do with it, and MAGI was closest. But after only a very little testing, the magicians of MAGI concluded that the bow had chosen Melanie as its wielder; it would work for no other archer. So Melanie - fourteen years old, out of shape, not particularly fond of most people and the only child her parents would ever have - had to decide. Would she take up a life of battle, danger, and possible death; or consign the legendary weapon to a museum where it would never be used again?
The decision she made was quite obvious: if she'd made the other, this page wouldn't exist.
Personality
Superhero Personality Traits
So far, while Melanie hasn't told her parents about her other job - knowing that they would be horrified - she's made no major attempt to keep a secret identity. She's quite sure that she couldn't properly maintain it if she tried, and she doesn't believe she'll accumulate enemies dedicated enough to harm her loved ones. The one thing she has kept secret on the streets, even from close friends, is that her powers are not inborn. The magic of the bow likely makes it unbreakable, but Melanie knows she's easily disarmed, or caught when she's at school... if every gangbanger she fought knew that they could render her as defenceless as any other fourteen-year-old with a blow to the wrist, her career would suddenly be a lot more difficult.
Like the rest of her supergroup, she is a firm believer in nonlethal methods to the last. She tries not to cause more pain than she can help, either. This is partly because she is a firm believer in rehabilitation, and partly because she's quite squeamish. Most of her arrows are blunt, and even her explosive arrow is mostly a shockwave, and her burning arrow magical fire that doesn't cause permanent injury. But if necessary, and particularly when she's angered - a difficult thing to manage - she is quite willing to put barbed broadheads into shoulders, ankles, and wrists. When panicked, furious, or pushed right to the wall, she even knows precisely where along the waist one can stick a bodkin point without hitting any major organs.
Dame Agincourt likes to fight at a range, so as to keep strong enemies away from her... and sometimes to make sure she doesn't see their faces. When forced into close combat, she tends to immediately use her Lightning Clap to knock melee attackers as far away as possible. Using her super jumps and ranged shots, she also fights from high places where she's difficult to reach.
Human Personality Traits
The first thing anyone notices after having spoken to Melanie Taylor is that she is the living avatar of the nonword 'um', with occasional spots of 'y'know?'. Not very skilled at socialisation and never sure of herself on a conversational level, she tends to stutter, repeat herself, and generally do what shouldn't be done in public speaking. While she is occasionally driven to speak from zeal over a subject, this often ends poorly. However, since acquiring the bow, either her own confidence or some form of possessing impulse leads her to impassioned speeches before some battles - typically ending with her battle cry, "the meek will prevail!"
She is absent-minded and contemplative, and can often drift completely away to the point of not following a conversation at all; she tends to apologise profusely after these events. In exams, she tends to dream of yellow submarines for a full hour and a half, leaving tiny fragments of time to scribble furiously at her paper. She only avoids this when she's in states of high-adrenaline panic, which tends to be most of her missions.
She loves classical music, but her recent experiments with the cello (largely formed from wanting something big enough to carry her bow around in without being suspicious, a cello case fitting that just fine) have led her to discover the headbanging cello stylings of Finnish band Apocalyptica. She will never admit to dancing around her room furiously to their CDs, but that wouldn't get through a polygraph test. She likes go a lot, for the ordered pattern aspects, and while she's decent at chess she doesn't enjoy it as much - she can't quite wrap her head around every piece's differing utility. She's been surprised to find that she actually enjoys archery a great deal, finding it quite relaxing and focusing at once. She enjoys dancing, but doesn't do it much, considering herself too unfit.
She is afraid of snakes, but not rats or spiders. Since taking up the bow, and redefining her personality a lot around it, she has become highly phobic of blindness and eye injury - attempts to blind her with magic, dust, or a plain old knife will trigger her into a fight-or-flight response, and it is pretty much always fight. Most of her moments of fury come after a villain has made an attempt on her eyes.
She loves her cat, Lion, and when not practicing go or playing one of her consoles or running along the roofs of Paragon, she likes to relax and rub his belly.
Supergroup
For poorly-socialised Melanie, applying unprompted to join The Palladium Sentry was probably a lot braver than her regular attempts at fighting the scum of Paragon City. In her interview, she shot a cup out of her interviewer's hand, though she had to be prompted to do so several times with escalating volumes of "are you sure this is all right?" This impressed him enough to make him take her on board.
In her first few days of superheroing, Dame Agincourt mostly wanted to go it alone, but she came to see that there were threats she absolutely couldn't take on on her own... and that it wasn't just normal people who needed help sometimes. Bow or none, she needed support sometimes. While occasionally feeling overwhelmed by internal politics, she has found working with the Sentry a lot more rewarding than her earlier pavement pounding.
One Final Note...
Her favourite piece of music is Pachabel's "Canon".
