Heavy Metal Thunder
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| Heavy Metal Thunder | |
| Player: @SPTrashcan | |
| Origin: | Natural |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Blaster |
| Security Level: | 37 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Leonard Brzezinski |
| Known Aliases: | None |
| Species: | Homo Sapiens |
| Age: | 27 |
| Height: | 182 cm |
| Weight: | 78 kg |
| Eye Color: | Brown |
| Hair Color: | Brown |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Musician, electrician, vigilante |
| Place of Birth: | Cleveland, OH |
| Base of Operations: | Paragon City |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Nana Brzezinski |
| Known Powers | |
| Mighty Voice, Electro-Daredevil | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Perfect pitch, eidetic tone memory | |
| Equipment | |
| Buzz Knuckles, Rocket Skates | |
| No additional information available. | |
Lenny Brzezinski is a cheerful and intense young man with a love for justice, thrills, and rock and roll. His vocal talents and aptitude with dangerous voltages make him formidable, but his willingness to lay everything on the line for what he believes in makes him a hero.
Contents |
Affiliations
Lenny hooked up with the DFB Crew as he shares their philosophy of street-level action, but he gets along fine with the more strait-laced members of the Do-Gooders - in particular, he's pleased as punch to work with pop sensation Morning Misa. He's also teamed up with E B of the Brigands of Light, although E B's perpetual enthusiasm worries him slightly.
Lenny has also had an intense and complex relationship with the Smith family, befriending the mighty banker Douglas Smith and helping him track down his wife (at that time the symbiont of the barely-reformed Nictus Moonblaze), and later working with his time-traveling daughter Melanie "Timestream" Smith. Although Doug has retired from heroing and his daughter is respectively five years old and fifteen years in the future, "Uncle" Lenny still swings by from time to time to visit with the Smiths and play with lil' Mel.
Lenny may well be the Synaesthete's number one fan, and hopes that the mixtapes he leaves on her answering machine manage to convey his admiration.
Personality
It's easy to get to know Lenny, and anyone who does will quickly find out that he is generally happy, highly enthusiastic, unflaggingly determined... and, well, how to put this. A bit of an oaf. Just slightly more bravery than sense. A knucklehead, perhaps. The kind of person who is surprised to hear that the movie was based on a book, shall we say. Lenny always means well, but he firmly believes in getting up and doing something now and figuring out the plan later, if at all. He insists that his brain works best under duress, which is why he first gets in way over his head and only then starts thinking. He also frequently talks faster than he thinks, which often leads him to apologize and clarify that he has nothing against (for instance) minorities, women, the elderly, robots, or Kheldian... uh... Americans. Which, in fact, he doesn't.
Lenny is also endlessly enthusiastic about his hobbies - music, extreme sports, and high voltage electricity.
Musically, his tastes are eclectic and wide ranging. Although rock in all its flavors is his first and best love, he ranges across genres and around the globe. Unfortunately, his perfect memory for melodies doesn't match his spotty memory for names, so he remembers far more tunes than titles or artists. He's often reduced to singing snatches of songs when talking about music, then spending the rest of the conversation searching his mind for a name to go along with the sound.
As for sports, if it has wheels and is powered by the rider, he has at least attempted to jump over a car on it. Consequently, he is well known among ER doctors and holds the dubious record of having broken nearly every bone in his body at one time or another. For some reason this has not dimmed his enthusiasm one iota.
Lenny is significantly more careful with his third hobby - electricity. From the first time Lenny saw a jacob's ladder, he was hooked on the power of, well, power. Like his hero and role model, Nikola Tesla, Lenny is always experimenting with new and exciting uses for electrical current. He incorporates many of his own high-power inventions in his stage shows, thrilling onlookers with such devices as the Van de GraaffTheremin. Although his education in other areas is spotty, Lenny has taken community college courses and is a licensed journeyman electrician.
Powers
Mighty Voice
Lenny is loud. Very, very loud. Through years of practice he has trained his voice into an instrument both precise and astonishingly powerful. By pitching his voice to certain resonant frequencies, he can stun or concuss living foes or shatter inanimate objects. The concussive force of his focused shout smashes armor and leaves bruises.
Electro-Daredevil
Backing up Lenny's voice is his array of dangerous electrical inventions. His most employed weapon is the Buzz Knuckles, a pair of gloves with embedded high-power capacitors that release tremendous stunning shocks on contact. The powerful electrostatic discharge from these gloves can send unprepared foes flying or simply knock them flat. Lenny also carries a high-power taser to zap enemies at range, and a portable Van de Graaff generator which gives all nearby foes a debilitating shock while it recharges the capacitors in his gloves. Lenny himself escapes harm from these devices by weaving a Faraday cage into his clothes, wired to grounds in his boots.
Abilities
Perfect Pitch
Lenny can identify and reproduce a chord of up to seven notes immediately and flawlessly. He is in part naturally gifted, and the rest comes from years of autodidactic practice learning songs by listening to them on the radio and playing along.
Eidetic Tone Memory
Lenny can memorize, recall, and reproduce any series of tones of arbitrary length. He can also recognize any sound he's heard before and recall when and where else he has heard it - down to recognizing individual particular instruments. As a party trick, he will demonstrate his talent by listening to short snippets of songs and then listing off every instrument heard, down to brand name, model, and year of manufacture. Again, this is partly a natural gift and partly from years of constant practice.
Weaknesses and Limitations
Lenny is tough, brave, and healthy, but he's also only human, and not very bright to boot.
Equipment
Buzz Knuckles
Lenny's peculiar take on the self-defense stungun, these gloves are built with blunt metal prods in the knuckles attached to a powerful capacitor. Combined with Lenny's own streetfighting talents, these devices make Lenny's punch pack quite a wallop.
Rocket Skates
Unsatisfied with the speed at which ordinary human-powered inline skates let him traverse Paragon City, Lenny made his pair ten times as fast - and a hundred times as dangerous - by attaching chemical rockets. The resulting contraptions let Lenny cut a fiery streak through downtown traffic, and with a little bit of luck can also send him hurtling over any obstacles. Unfortunately, rockets don't have brakes, so Lenny will often be left with somewhat more propellant than he needs and be forced to circle the block a few times until the rockets burn out. He's working on the problem, albeit with some difficulty as he's had trouble obtaining a license to store liquid oxygen.
Character History
Lenny doesn't talk much about his early life. He was born and raised in the less pleasant parts of Cleveland, where his mother still lives - Lenny never mentions his father or any siblings. He still has one friend from his youth in Cleveland, Benneton Lorca, who he remembers from time to time (usually in the context of meaning to someday give back something or other he borrowed). Given his current spectrum of knowledge, it's easy to guess that he didn't do well in school, but his skill with electrical work suggests that he either attended a technical school or learned on the job. His vocal abilities suggest a combination of great natural talent and focused practice, but his near-total ignorance of music theory indicates that he never received formal training.
Lenny moved from Cleveland to Paragon City during the period of reconstruction following the first Rikti invasion, apparently seeking opportunity and a way to escape his roots. He has lived in the same apartment complex in Kings Row since his arrival, and considers it his home. He became involved in the Paragon music and arts community almost immediately, but supported himself with construction work for several years before becoming sufficiently established to make a living on gigs alone.
Lenny became a registered hero almost by accident. As the gang violence in Kings Row showed no sign of abating, he joined a neighborhood watch group and patrolled the streets in his spare time, reporting serious crimes and intervening himself in minor disputes. When he returned home one evening to find his own apartment in the process of being burglarized, his outraged shout was loud enough to stun the two Skulls making off with his stereo (as well as wake up the entire block). When he handed over the dazed criminals to the officers arriving on the scene, they suggested that if this was likely to become a common occurrance then he should consider obtaining a hero license to facilitate citizen's arrests. Lenny did so, only to discover that there was a lot more - and a lot worse - going on than a few gangsters smashing windows and stealing purses. Never one to back down from a challenge, he applied everything he had wherever he was asked for.
Since then, Lenny has battled everything from ninjas to zombies to demons, alongside alien pop stars, time-travelling accountant's daughters, millionaire witches, and streetwise lizardmen. He takes it all in stride, with a cocky grin and a cheerful (if not always terribly clever) remark.
Trivia
- Lenny is almost never seen in Pocket D, because he considers the place too classy for him. Yes, really.
