User:AlwaysAPrice/Fairy Wren
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| The Daring | |
| Fairy Wren | |
| |
| Natural Defender - 21 | |
| Trick Arrow/Sonic Attack | |
| Player: AlwaysAPrice | |
| Activity Level: Frequent | |
| Physical Identifiers | |
| Species: | Human |
|---|---|
| Sub-Type: | Caucasian/Asian |
| Gender: | Female |
| Apparent Age: | Early 20s |
| Height: | 5'9" |
| Weight: | 132 lbs. |
| Build: | Trim/Athletic |
| Complexion: | Fair |
| Eye Color: | Hazel |
| Hair Color: | Dark Auburn |
| Distinguishing Features | |
| None | |
| Additional Information | |
| This is the third hero to use the identity of the Fairy Wren, and the first female to do so. | |
Those familiar with the exploits of Australia's own Fairy Wren associate the name with a mysterious daredevil of a man clad in blue and black. The current Fairy Wren would have it no other way -- she has adopted the moniker to honor the sacrifice of her two predecessors who came out of retirement the day the crimson portals ripped open the skies over Melbourne and Sydney; who are both believed to have given their lives in defense of their planet.
As did those who came before her, this Fairy Wren carries the Wren-Bow, the magnificent longbow indelibly linked with the legacy of her foregoers in the minds of the people they protected. She lacks, however, their keen precision and so employs it chiefly as a support tool for the delivery of a variety of gimmicked payloads. For offense, she relies on a sonic amplification unit of her own design that turns the wrencall used in the past as a devious psychological taunt into a debilitating physical weapon.
Last Updated: 10/28/2010
Contents |
Equipment
The Wren-Bow
For 87 years, the Fairy Wren has carried this weapon into battle; this finely crafted longbow is the defining tool of the legend.
It was the core of the first Fairy Wren's arsenal of tricks and traps; the second Fairy Wren supported his mutant abilities with a keen aim second only to his predecessor's.
The current Fairy Wren lacks the precision of those who have gone before, but she carries the Wren-Bow to honor them nevertheless. To her, it is a support tool for the delivery of gimmicked payloads that do not require precise aim to be useful, such as flash-bang grenades, glue bombs, and the like.
Sonic Amplifier Mask
Fairy Wren uses a sonic amplification unit of her own design as her main form of offense in combat. Whereas the original Fairy Wren would whistle his wrencall from the shadows merely to strike terror into the heart of Melbourne's underworld, this Fairy Wren has made the wrencall into a devastating sonic weapon on the streets of Paragon.
Abilities
Physical Conditioning
Fairy Wren is very athletic, having spent the last few years of her life honing her body for the work of crimefighting under the tutelage of one of Australia's few Heroes to survive the Rikti War, a close associate of the first Fairy Wren known as the Bushranger.
Knife Throwing
Another skill learned from the Bushranger; she keeps a number of sleek, aerodynamically balanced blades in quick-release sheathes concealed within the loose sleeves of her costume.
Amateur Gadgeteer
While she's no Dr. Science, she is a capable enough engineer and inventor to care for and improve her own equipment.
Weaknesses and Limitations
Since she usually needs to keep her hands free to wield her bow, and to prevent mishaps during close-quarters combat, Fairy Wren designed her Sonic Amplifier Mask without any external controls that would need to, or accidentally, be pushed. Its only control, the power switch, is located on the inside and the mask must be removed to access it. The intensity and volume of her sonic attacks are derived only from the modulation of her own voice, and even a normal speaking volume could have devastating effects on a nearby listener. As a result, when she speaks she does so only in the softest whisper she can manage, which her mask distorts into a vibrating, sepulchral rasp.
She really hates it when people try to make her laugh.
Background
Personality
Fairy Wren takes what she does extremely seriously -- she detests the wisecracking, flippancy and posturing that she sees most heroes her own age indulge in. This life is a dangerous one, one that ultimately took the lives of her predecessors, and that she will never forget. She has little patience for those who don't understand, as she likes to believe she does, what really defines a hero.
Despite the circumstances under which the previous Fairy Wrens were lost, killed as they teamed to defend their world from the Rikti invaders in 2002, this Fairy Wren has very little malice towards the remnants of the Rikti that continue to threaten the world. She is angered more by human criminals, those groups who took advantage of civilization's weakened state after the War to sink their fangs in and try to suck away the spirit of the survivors.
The Fairy Wren Legacy
The First Fairy Wren
The Fairy Wren was born in 1920. 23-year-old Jonathan McAllistair, son of munitions industrialist Conrad McAllistair, had sought for years a way to forge his own identity out of his father's long shadow. In secondary school, ignoring his father's attempts to groom and guide him towards the family business, Jonathan took up archery as a way to unleash the aggressions and frustrations he stifled when focused on his studies. Talent manifested almost as soon as the bow was in his hand, and he spent years honing his skill. As the 1920 Olympics approached, Jonathan used the cachet of his surname to convince Australia's Olympic Committee to add himself and others to their Olympic team in pursuit of archery gold.
Indeed, Australia might have had a chance with McAllistair's prodigious ability in play. Unfortunately, there were those elements who sought to take advantage of a different opportunity.
One of the seedier figures in Melbourne's underground, "Whiskey" Dick Callahan, was a minor player in a worldwide cabal of oddsfixers. Each schemed in their own territory to influence their nation's most accomplished athletes, all towards the goal of fixing the Olympics for their own ultimate profit. Callahan was a cruder operator than most, however.
The day that Australia's Olympians were to depart for Antwerp, Callahan's hired muscle kidnapped McAllistair and half a dozen of his fellow would-be competitors. Callahan's men kept the athletes under guard in an abandoned brewery, forcing Australia to send their now handicapped team on without the missing participants, and to withdraw their archery entries entirely.
McAllistair looked for opportunities to effect an escape in every element of his surroundings. Callahan's men were paid for their brawn, not their brains, and as such were not particularly careful about inspecting the abandoned offices and store rooms they chose as makeshift cells for their prisoners. Jonathan escaped by breaking through a water-damaged section of wall, and stealthily retrieved his bow and quiver.
A kicked rock jeopardized his exit as it clattered across the floor and caught the attention of Callahan's goons. He heard one of them grunt, "What was that?" With only a second to think before he would be discovered, Jonathan employed an absurd ruse. He knew only one birdcall, that of the superb fairy-wren that was such a nuisance at the range he practiced at (the birds would alight so frequently on arrows sticking out of their targets that Jonathan had made a sport for himself of terrifying the creatures by planting his next arrow directly beneath them). Now, he made use of that pointless talent and cooed a soft wrencall from the shadows.
"'s just a wren, mate. 'ey're harmless." He heard the guards begin to walk away, and seized upon this new opportunity.
"Not this one," he growled as he leapt up onto the crate that had shielded him from their view, nocked and released a pair of arrows. The arrows ricocheted perfectly off the steel pole in front of him, redirecting their course just enough to skewer the shoulder of one guard and the thigh of the other. With them wounded, he rushed in and punched their lights out before they could scream for help.
McAllistair freed his fellow athletes and together they made their escape and reported the kidnapping to the police. Despite McAllistair having heard the guards use Callahan's name, "Whiskey" Dick had an ironclad alibi and no provable ties to the perpetrators, and therefore would not be charged with any involvement. Fueled by anger over having his Olympic dream ripped out of his hands by only a few hours of captivity, and inspired by his own moment of ingenuity with the birdcall, Jonathan McAllistair decided he had the resources to seek his own brand of justice.
A week after the kidnapping, a mysterious figure in blue and black began to strike at Callahan's criminal operations throughout Melbourne; gambling dens, brothels and opium houses were routed by this masked figure who struck from the shadows and announced his presence with an innocent wrencall, a sound that quickly began to send shivers down the spines of criminals throughout the city.
It was a thirst for revenge that drove Jonathan at first, until he finally brought Callahan to justice, but the taste he had of the life of a masked avenger was all he needed to decide the course of his life from then on. After surprising his father by agreeing to work for McAllistair Munitions, only so that he could have access to a workshop to construct gadgets to help him in crimefighting, Jonathan began in earnest to live the double life of a hero.
The Second Fairy Wren
Perhaps no villain gave the first Fairy Wren such a challenge as the cunning mastermind of the Ouroboros Syndicate, the arcane Baron Rose. From his mountain fortress in Outer Mongolia, Baron Rose pulled the strings of a vast, international criminal conspiracy. Though Australia was perhaps one of the countries least affected by his manipulations, as Fairy Wren discovered the extent of the Ouroboros' insinuation into both the criminal underworld and governments of many nations, he dedicated himself to bringing down Rose once and for all. To that end, Fairy Wren took the fight to Rose himself in 1940.
Fairy Wren ultimately triumphed over Baron Rose, though it nearly cost him his life. It was only Rose's betrayal by his daughter, Cassandra, that saved Jonathan's life and spelled the end for the dread Baron, when she tore away the magical amulet that had extended Baron Rose's life by centuries and allowed him to build his criminal empire. For the first and only time, Fairy Wren took a life in battle when he shot Baron Rose through the eye. Cassandra escaped from the inexplicably crumbling fortress with him, and the two would eventually become husband and wife. They shared the magic of the Baron's amulet, which suspended the aging process and accelerated healing whenever it was worn; they took turns wearing it for a day at a time, effectively doubling their lifespans.
The magic with which Jonathan and Cassandra extended their lives had a significant side effect. Cassandra herself had been subject to it due to her father's employment of the talisman, and for that reason she refused to don it for the duration of her pregnancy in 1950. Nevertheless, the dark magics which once had prolonged Baron Rose's life for centuries caused Jonathan and Cassandra's son to be born a mutant, gifted with the ability to call forth the dark essence of the underworld to serve his will.
Robin McAllistair, however, was decidedly underwhelmed by his ability, even as he grew old enough to understand what he could accomplish with it. He was far more interested in following in his grandfather's footsteps and becoming a head of industry, and eventually took his father's place as CEO of McAllistair Munitions. Under Robin McAllistair, the company rapidly expanded into a major player in defense contracting. After buying out an innovative but struggling Japanese technology firm and expanding to explore research and development in fields beyond munitions, Robin moved the company headquarters to Osaka, Japan in 1980 and reinvented the company as McAlliTech.
It was his desire to be a master of the business arena that ultimately led Robin to co-opt the Fairy Wren identity for himself. As it gradually came to light that a competitor was behind an assortment of plots to sabotage McAlliTech interests, and that there was no legal proof of these shady maneuverings, Robin realized the only way to save his company would be through less formal channels than he had until then relied upon.
Both Japan and Australia were stunned when a new, younger, and super-powered Fairy Wren took to the skies over Osaka. As the Fairy Wren II, Robin used his powers to obtain the evidence he would need to shut down his even less ethical competitor. Over the next few years he would don his version of the Fairy Wren garb only occasionally, and often with purely selfish motivation -- though he never used his power to give himself or his company an unfair business advantage, he primarily used it to rob competitors of theirs.
His at first decidedly unheroic attitude not only aggravated his long-retired father, it also began to drive a wedge between Jonathan and Cassandra. The elder McAllistair felt Robin was tarnishing his legacy by using the Fairy Wren identity selfishly, for his own gain and profit; Cassandra saw that whatever Robin's original motivations might have been, he was doing good in the world and had perhaps found a spark of heroism within himself. She also never failed to remind Jonathan that he first created the Fairy Wren to settle a personal vendetta himself.
As time went on, Robin found himself keeping his costume at hand so that he could intervene in random crimes as a service to the city; not long after that, he began to prowl the night seeking out crimes to stop, with an enthusiasm he had never expected to feel. When his daughter was born, the gradual change in his attitude clicked into completion. While he retained a prominent position within the company, he turned over the day-to-day operations of McAlliTech to a trusted advisor and moved back to Melbourne with his wife Sumi and daughter Melissa to take up residence in the McAllistair family home. For the first time in fifteen years, there was a Fairy Wren watching over Melbourne again.
The Third Fairy Wren
In 2002, the Rikti came. Heroes around the globe responded to the threat on a scale never before seen, and almost all of them were lost in the ensuing interdimensional war. When the crimson portals tore open the sky over Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's greatest heroes brought the fight to the invaders. Even heroes who had retired due to age or to attend to familial responsibilities heeded the call, and for the first time the two Fairy Wrens rose to Australia's defense side by side.
Both were lost.
Melissa McAllistair, then 17 and just finished with high school, was devastated by the loss of her father and grandfather, not to mention the destruction wrought upon the planet by the Rikti. Even growing up aware of her father and grandfather's legacy, she had never given the least bit of thought to becoming a hero herself. It had always seemed that the world had more than enough. But when the call went out across the world for new heroes to rise to face the challenges brought on in the aftermath of the war, she saw no option for herself but to honor it.
With a fierce dedication born of grief, Mel committed herself to training her body and mind in the skills of crimefighting. She began to practice with the Wren-Bow, retrieved from the battlefield with her father's body (the body of the senior Fairy Wren was never found, but he is presumed dead). She learned investigation techniques from the cunning private investigators employed by McAlliTech's legal department; fighting skills from her grandfather's old ally, the Bushranger. Improvising from sketchy blueprints for discarded projects at the family company, Melissa developed her sonic amplification mask as a way to compensate for her lack of natural talent with the bow.
After settling on a look for a costume, loosely inspired by elements of those worn by her predecessors and colored a muted brown like the female superb fairy-wren, she took the final step in her journey. She flew to Paragon City in the U.S.A., registered herself under the name of her forefathers, and hit the streets of Galaxy City to put herself to the test.
((Player Notes))
- Fairy Wren I would have been an arch/dev/mun Blaster, Fairy Wren II a dark/arch/maybe-elec Defender.
- Originally made Fairy Wren just because I noticed that, contrary to my experience in every other RPG, I hadn't had any female characters who kept my interest in CoX.
- Started with the costume, going for a tomboyish and utilitarian look that was still functionally absurd and revealing enough to fit in with more traditional comic book costume design.
- Name came second -- I wanted a bird, and the first thing I came across was Australia's superb fairy-wren. The idea of using such a cute and utterly unthreatening creature as a superheroic identity in the grim avenger tradition struck a chord with me.
- I've rerolled Fairy Wren three or four times,
and really can't muster the energy to play her very often (my style just doesn't mesh with the powersets), but the background is my favorite of all my characters so I consider her a keeper.- Update: I fired FW up on a whim recently and I think I'm in love. What made the difference was playing her with a sizable team and having the opportunity to make the best of her debuffs against big spawns; TA/Sonic feels very similar to the way my Rad/Dark Corruptor plays (Flash Arrow for prep time instead of Fearsome Stare, Glue Arrow in place of Tar Patch, Ice Arrow instead of Petrifying Gaze, and /Sonic's -resist is kind of like a gradual Scourge).
- Main influences include:
- Batman
- Superman & Batman: Generations (I)
