Dusty Finish
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| Dusty Finish | |
| Player: @Twoflower | |
| Origin: | Natural |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Blaster |
| Security Level: | 50 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Delilah Finish |
| Known Aliases: | None |
| Species: | Human (Fictional) |
| Age: | 26 |
| Height: | 5'3" |
| Weight: | 120lb |
| Eye Color: | Brown |
| Hair Color: | Brown |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Longbow Agent |
| Place of Birth: | Fictional Western |
| Base of Operations: | Paragon, Longbow Carriers |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Father |
| Known Powers | |
| Resistant to Personality Change | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Sharpshooter, Ambushes and Traps, Military Tactics | |
| Equipment | |
| Flight Belt, Cryo Armor, Winchester, Ambush Gear | |
| No additional information available. | |
Dusty Finish is a fictional western heroine, pulled into our world during a Thorn ritual gone awry in a King's Row theatre. Since then she's led a storied career as a hero, protecting her new home frontier, in unofficial and official capacities.
Contents |
Affiliations
Her early work was with D.F.B., street-level heroes from the same block she 'originated' from. When the Iraq war began, she joined an experimental heroing unit with the U.S. Army; although she was discharged with incident, she was brought back on board when Longbow was formed due to her military heroing experience. Currently she works with a number of task forces in Longbow, including Rogue Isles operations and Praetorian infiltration. She has a related connection to the Malta Resistance on Praetorian Earth as a result. With D.F.B.'s unofficial retirement from active duty to assist in training younger heroes, she primarily works with the Do-Gooders now.
Personality
Honest as the day is long, Dusty takes pride in her simple views of the world. She likes things to make sense, to have some structure -- and will fight to defend a peaceful life for others, even if it means complicating her own. After researching her origins a bit (via critical analysis of the Western genre) she's attributed this to the strange mix of character archetypes found in her... both of the violent gunman that dispatches the force of chaos which threaten peaceful folk, and the maternal force of civilization over the west itself.
Despite preferring a simple life, when things get weird and strange and complex, she doesn't go to pieces; if anything this focuses her even more. Any strange situation can be solved when you know what to shoot at, and hit your target with pinpoint accuracy. When a friend is in danger, when the city's in turmoil, your job is to sort out the mess and bring back the peace. She prefers to let others do the figuring-out step of that sorting-out, but will take on the job if nobody else is, in the interests of bringing back the status quo.
When it comes to violence, Dusty packs clips for her rifle which do non-lethal damage... and special ones with lethal and armor piercing capability. As her work in the military showed her, some enemies simply can't be "defeated." Terrorists, enemies of the state, mass murderers, these are people that the police and the military deal with extreme prejudice, and when authorized to by Longbow, so will she. "If a man needs killin', that's just how it is." She takes no particular joy in it, but no particular sorrow, either.
Powers
Due to her fictional-yet-flesh nature, she has one "superpower," which is neither blessing nor curse. Simply a fact of life for her to deal with.
Dusty is affected by changes to her character's continuity. When some "lost films" of the Dusty Finish series were found and released on DVD, new memories flooded into her mind, including ones that films critics considered out of character for her -- the canon of the films became her life canon. The only way to gain control over her personality again was to buy back the rights to her own trademarks.
This also means she's highly resistant to other forms of mind control and personality change. The other-worldly sense of true selves that emerge when visiting the spirit realm of Croatoa don't affect her at all -- or rather, they simply present her as she is, which is what she is, always. The Carnival of Shadows can scramble her mind with their illusions but they have yet to break her will or change her beliefs, as they often do when bending people to their cause. While her friends sink to their knees and are flooded with thoughts that are not their own, she's the one standing up and calmly aiming her gunsight on the one responsible.
Abilities
From her fictional background, Dusty is a crack shot, arguably superhumanly so simply because of the western standard of the gunslinger hero -- but her marksmanship is on par with some of the world's top snipers, who have no meta-powers themselves, so the case could be made that she's just that good.
As her character was an expert in laying out clever ambushes and traps, so is she, using anything from improvised devices and explosives to standard issue munitions. She can analyze a situation from blueprints or rough maps, determine choke points, and with enough prep time hold a sizable force at bay until they give up or until reinforcements arrive.
Devices / Flight
Her standard inventory loadout includes a targeting drone linked to an eyepiece (to improve her 360' spatial awareness), a cloaking device, a flight assist belt or rocket boots, pouches of caltrops, and a small supply of tripmines. Her weapon of choice is a customized multi-rifle developed by the Winchester corporation, in honor of her status as a western heroine. She doesn't do an endorsement in return, but simply owning the rifle seems to satisfy them.
Cold Mastery
Recently she's obtained an experimental Longbow Cryo-Armor suit, which gives her a mechanical means of generating ice armor, debilitating localized snowstorms, and a hibernation super-shield. She doesn't particularly like the cold, being used to the heat of the west, but uses its functions for practical defensive purposes. ("Only a fool'd turn down ice water in the desert.")
Character History
Early Days
The Dusty Finish movies are low-budget westerns from the 50s, a semi-successful spinoff of the more popular movies starring her father, the original Dusty Finish. Her movies balanced gunplay with dialogue and outsmarting her enemies, more than the action-based movies of her father's era.
When the Circle of Thorns used a King's Row theatre showing a western movie marathon as staging ground for one of their rites -- not even a particularly important one, simply an initiation for young Thorns to try out demon summoning -- they accidentally summoned Dusty into being.
She was a bit panicked at first, being in a strange new world and new era... but acclimated with surprising ease when Elisa, leader of D.F.B., talked to her frankly and directly about what had happened and what world she was in. Dusty took to being fictional as well as could be expected, and decided that she was real enough NOW to count, and that was all that mattered.
Although she learned from her early heroing experiences, particularly in using modern traps and ambush technologies, she felt a bit hollow from endlessly putting down the same enemies day in and day out. Dusty wasn't making much of a difference, only putting out fires.
Operation Iraqi Freedom
When Uncle Sam came knocking, to recruit heroes for an experimental superheroic task force in the liberation of Iraq, Dusty agreed without hesitation. It was a new direction, and one she believed in -- keeping America safe from terrorism. Saddam had superhuman weapons hidden away in the sands, the UN was told, and those weapons were best countered by America's superhuman resources.
On arrival, though, she found the reality of the situation to be less than patriotic. No superhuman Republican Guard. Nothing worth note. Mostly she spent time trying to avoid boredom, as did the rest of her squad, alternatively drilling and training and lazing about with no marching orders. If anything, the army was not eager to put superheroes in harms way when the ground situation proved to be focused on suicide bombers and IEDs -- the media would not take kindly to an unheroic death for these larger than life heroes.
Restless, Dusty went on patrols despite orders to stay put... and that's when she found an illegal Crey facility experimenting on Iraqi civilians. Crey was only on site to develop vaccines for possible Iraqi chemical weapons; they certainly didn't have "authorization" to prey on the innocent for their twisted science. Dusty calmly set up enough nonlethal traps and improvised distractions to cover her as she escorted the civvies to safety, and led them back to the nearest safe town.
On returning to base, she was immediately shipped back to the states and discharged with the incident on file -- but without any mention of an illegal Crey facility. Despite the unglamorous end of her tenure, she had no regrets serving in the army, and felt a lingering notion that the time would come to serve again... and this time, properly.
Crey and Hollywood
Although they hushed up the Iraq incident, Crey did not forgive and forget. When a long lost series of Dusty Finish films were issued on DVD, they took note of the backstory changes that reflected on the heroine known as Dusty Finish herself... and saw opportunity.
They purchased the rights to her character outright, and sold them for a pittance to a porno director, with instructions to make a film that would utterly humiliate her character and turn her from a skilled combatant to a nymphomaniac laughingstock. On reading of the plans in Variety, Dusty was furious -- Crey had found a way to harm her in the way no other villain could, by soiling her reputation and trampling her family name.
Only through extensive, multi-month litigation did she win back the rights to her character. The judge's condition was that, like any trademark usage, she had to defend it and show good faith in using the trademark actively. A low budget indie film venture was put forward using most of Dusty's savings, and a film student fresh from college directed Dusty Sundown -- an epic about the meta-legend of Dusty Finish.
In the film, a young girl claiming to be the heroine Dusty gets in over her head against Dusty's nemesis, Black Bart, but is rescued by the true Dusty Finish, a woman in her retirement years. The sequel option was left open to continue with the young heroine as the name was passed down by the "original," but plans went unfunded as the movie met good reviews but poor box office. Nevertheless, her name -- and personality -- were salvaged in the process, and Crey's plans were thwarted.
Longbow
As the threat of the Rogue Isles grew, Dusty was visited by none other than Ms. Liberty herself, who was behind the original superhero army unit in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Here was a genuine menace, a terrorist nation, a rogue state run by supervillains... the perfect target for a force that blended the military with superheroes. Longbow was established, and Dusty signed up, with the understanding that she had her own local work to do against the forces that threatened Paragon.
Since enlisting she's served with honors on the Isles themselves, as well as being an infiltration and recon expert against the Praetorians. She's defended various points in Paragon against invading villains seeking to cause mayhem on the streets, and has generally found more success fighting evil than she did in Iraq.
At the time, most of her Longbow work was classified, as she was jaunting between worlds to stop an apparenty Arachnos / Praetorian alliance of our world. She's worked with the heroic Malta Resistance Front on Praetorian earth, but even with their help, she wasn't able to uncover the information her commanding officer claims should be there. The whole operation took months and had no productive output, and yet, she found herself up for promotion for her "good work" on the case...
Second Rikti War
...which turned out to be a ruse. Her CO was a Rikti in disguise, keeping Longbow nice and distracted, and finally gathering a bunch of them in one place for a "promotion ceremony" which was promptly bombed in the initial minutes of the war.
Dusty was promoted to captain, and in addition to her bars, she got impaled on some of the building rubble. She almost lost a lung, and was in a coma for the ENTIRE Rikti War, missing all the action.
When she finally came out of it, she was informed that she'd never have 100% lung capacity again, that the other Longbow at the ceremony were fine because they had actual metahuman powers, and that the promotion would stand despite it being a sham. None of these things made Dusty a happy person. She's fixing to get some revenge, bitter about being hoodwinked and taken out of the action.
(to be continued!)
Trivia
A "Dusty Finish" is a term from professional wrestling. Promoter Dusty Rhodes favored this story twist and used it quite often... too often, many would say. The plot goes that one wrestler would beat another by some underhanded technique the referee didn't notice, and after the three count was made and the victor declared, a SECOND ref would run to the ring and reverse the decision. After that, the good guy would win, sending the crowd home happy.
This actually has nothing to do with this character's personality or background. It was just a neat sounding term for a western style heroine.
