Jill Williamson/History
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Character History
Jill was born to a hard working Midwestern farm family in Stilwell, Kansas. As a child, she got a healthy dose of love, understanding and support from her parents. Her home life was ideal; the stuff of comic-book legend. She grew up strong, happy and most of all, with an unshakable sense she had to help anyone who needed it.
Because that's what her dad would want.
Childhood
Jill was born on the 30th of June in the small Kansas community of Stilwell to a family of hard working farmers. Her family farm, run for generations and passed down to oldest male (or female, when necessary), was being run by her father, who had just gotten a contract to sell the majority of their production to a large multinational bread producer. Times were good, and Jill would reap the benefits.
Her childhood was one of easy times and decent living - while the Williamsons didn't really have a lot (they were not upper crust by any means), David provided everything he could for his children. Jill was allowed - and encouraged - to try anything she could, extracurricular-wise. Somewhere around age six, she took a field trip to a local martial arts academy with her class. There, she fell in love. Jill signed up for Taekwondo classes as soon as her father agreed that evening at dinner.
She spent years refining her skills under the academy's master, learning everything she could. She even made it to nationals in a tryout for the Junior Prep team when she reached 14, but was eliminated from her weight bracket during the tournament. All that loss did was cement her belief that she needed to train harder.
In high school, Jill's bubbly and outgoing demeanor made her very popular. She wound up being offered a spot on the cheerleading squad, where she took to tumbling as if it were second nature. At some point in her freshman year, the person who played her team mascot fell ill and couldn't make it to a basketball game. Jill stepped up immediately, and found over the course of that game that she had a lot more fun in the kangaroo costume than she did with the pom poms. She came to an agreement with the other girl, and they traded jobs. Jill became Boomer, the school's kangaroo mascot.
Rikti Attack!
During early 2002, when Jill was 15, the Rikti launched an assault on Paragon City. Slightly less well known is the fact they launched similar, smaller assaults on a number of other locations around the world, for the express purpose of setting up new bases of operation. Stilwell was one of the communities affected.
The Ritki attacked during a division basketball final, teleporting into the school gym at Jill's high school and laying waste to the scattered, screaming crowd with their energy weapons. Jill, fully suited up as Boomer, made a valliant attempt to save some of her fellow students by taking an energy bolt square in the chest. She went down, assumed dead, and the assault destroyed the gym (and roughly half the school) before a hero finally cleared the Rikti out. Threat neutralized, the emergency personnel picked through the wreckage.
One person survived the initial gym assault, though barely - Jill. Her regeneration factor, dormant until the massive system shock the weapon gave her, had kicked in. Her chest had a fist-sized hole burned into it, but somehow she was still drawing breath.
EMTs took her to the University of Kansas Hospital's Trauma Center in Kansas City for treatment, and much to the shock of her medical team, she recovered. Slowly. She was in a coma for two months as her body, resistant to any pain killers they could give her, broke and re-knitted itself to a new specification. Bone and tendon restructured to turn her into a half-kangaroo.
As far as doctors present could figure, what happened was this: The Rikti weapon has burned her costume, which contained actual kangaroo leather, into her chest wall when it fired. Her regeneration factor kicked into hyperdrive, selecting all DNA present and attempting to 'fix' her body as best it could. It wound up assuming the kangaroo DNA in the leather was part of Jill, and restructured her accordingly. And the change was irreversible.
Jill was now stuck as a furry, nearly six foot tall 'monster'. One who had, during the attack, lost all her friends to an invading force.
Headed to Paragon
In the time immediately following her physical change, Jill was angry. Angry at the Rikti, angry at the mutation and angry at the universe at large. She spent a few years basically living in shadows and sulking, the ultimate in emo teens, avoiding human contact. She rarely left her room unless food was involved, and even then, did so grudgingly.
Eventually, though, things changed. In 2007, she decided enough was enough and packed a bag - it was time to take the fight to the invaders themselves. She left a short note at home, packed the few items of clothing that still fit her in a gym bag, and hopped a bus bound for Paragon City, where she hoped to learn more.
Around New York state, a man spotted Jill hunkered down in her seat and assumed her mutation was a sign of demonic origins. She argued with him about it, explaining the truth of the situation, but he would not be dissuaded - at some point, he produced a Bible and attempted an exorcism. Jill put him in an arm lock for his trouble, and while both parties were shouting, the driver pulled the bus over and threw the both of them off on the side of I-80 for endangering other passengers. Jill was forced to walk the rest of the way to Paragon, as she had no money and no one would pick her up when she attempted to hitchhike. This did not improve her mood.
Once in the city, she dealt with the Hero Registrar's office, and a file clerk who kept insisting she needed a hero name. Something good, like Kid Kangaroo or Hoppalong Jill. She snatched the forms and wrote her own name in the hero name blank, thrust the pages into his face, and left.
She spent the first two weeks on the city living on the streets of Kings Row, huddling in doorways at night for warmth and dragging Skulls to the police for a few dollars worth of food by day. During this time, some students from the now-defunct (due to explosion) Grae Academy found her and ended up sneaking her into their dorm. She was there a few short days before they talked her into enrolling for herself.
Learning the Ropes
After managing to get enrolled at Grae Academy, Jill did a lot of slacking. Educationally, she was viewed as lazy by her professors. She would frequently skip class to get into trouble with one or more of her friends, and her homework, when completed, was generally a joke - she once wrote an entire AE program about Brass Monday that somehow ended up involving a strike team of ninjas and a Chuck Norris clone as the main enemies rather than Nemesis. Class work, she said, was boring.
In field work, however, Jill excelled. She loved everything about taking the fight to Paragon's problems, and went out of her way to help numerous in-city groups as best as she was allowed by school rules - and sometimes beyond those. Vanguard, for example, was an organization Jill got behind immediately. She spent so much time in the so-called Rikti war zone taking out her aggression on the extradimensional nasties, they gave her access to their armory and had a specially tailored suit of their iconic Impervium armor built for her. The bad part to this pairing was that Jill didn't tell Vanguard's recruiters she was expected to be in class more frequently, and eventually meta-authorities were called in to lock Jill down and drag her back to class.
The up side to that incident was that it drove the point home to Jill - she needed to get back on track, because her behavior was hitting the point of being a problem to herself and others. She spent a lot of time in those days on the phone with her mother, getting back the support net she had fled from. Her mother told Jill the one thing she needed to hear - that her family still loved and supported her, and they would be there when they needed her. Her mother asked her to send home any press clippings of her hero work; she wanted to make an album of 'her girl in action'.
Jill's attitude, behavior and grades turned around in the following months. She was present for classes, did her homework properly and eventually she managed to come close enough to graduation that, when her extra heroing was considered with her school credits, Paragon education officials considered her diploma as complete - even though Grae Academy blew up in 2009 before she finished all her course work.
A picture of her with her diploma now hangs on her mother's living room wall, a testament to what hard work can bring.
We're in Business!
After her graduation, Jill drifted for a time. She was unsure of what to do with herself, and standard day jobs just didn't seem to work - even in the 'City of Weirdos' she was frequently deemed too odd to work in a public setting, especially where food preparation was involved. No one makes full-body hair nets, after all. She spent a lot of time patrolling the streets, not really having any sort of plan.
Then it happened.
She caught a gang of Freaks attempting to break into the Pwn Shop, a local favorite pawn shop in Kings Row. She stepped in, stopped the robbery and saved the shop's owner - a fellow kung fu nerd - from certain harm. In gratitude, he offered her some of his unused warehouse space at a reduced rate and made the offhand suggestion she should go into business as a hero.
Jill took the hint.
Within a few months Jill had secured a business starter loan and converted the space given to her into a new office/apartment for herself. Facekickers LLC, Kings Row's newest Hero-for-Hire org, was born. Since then, she has taken on work for both the city and private citizens alike. In her eyes, it's the best job she could have - she does work too dangerous for the police, keeps people safe from meta-human threats, and gets paid enough to support her enormous food habit all at the same time.
The organization works on a sliding pay scale; those who can afford more pay more, those who can't may get work done free if the services of Facekickers LLC are still needed.
Thus far, there are only two full-time heroes attached to Facekickers - Jill and her business partner, Alex (the heroine Diesel Blitz). All other members of the business are on retainer for specific work, and not part of day to day operations.
Change for the Better?
During a routine dust-up with a small sect of the Circle of Thorns, Jill came into posession of a page from an arcane text. Having no expertise in magical matters, she took it to various stores and known magic-users throughout Paragon. All of them told her the same thing - they didn't want anything to do with the page, but they knew someone who might: A bookshop owner from Croatoa, Methea Ravensong.
Jill paid the mystic a visit, and wound up leaving what appeared to be a page from the Malleus Mundi in the other woman's care (both parties agreed that the idea was much safer than leaving it with M.A.G.I. officials, who have a noted history of lacking in the security department). 'Thea agreed thereafter that she owed Jill a favor, which could be collected on at a later date.
Jill reached that later date a few weeks after their meeting, and returned to 'Thea's store with an idea - she wanted to regain the ability to use her human form. After some discussion, it was revealed that not only was this a practical decision from an investigation standpoint (a human is a lot less recognizable than a nearly six foot kangaroo), but for the less practical reason of Jill being concerned that she might not be physically appealing to someone she liked.
'Thea, for her part, attempted to talk Jill out of the ritual required, stating that not only was the last of her reasons a bad one (as the person she was using as a last excuse may actually like her better the way she was), but that the ritual had a chance of killing her outright. Jill brushed the concern aside and went through it anyway, coming out the other side a nauseous but stable human woman. She is now stuck in her human form until she can return to see 'Thea, and spent a few days at Cygnus Medical Center to get some genetic testing done - one of 'Thea's concerns, post-ritual, was that the sudden change may have awoken any genetic defects Jill had been harboring.
Thanks to much conversation about her decision on Formspring and 'Thea's initial questioning of her motives, Jill has also come to the decision that this whole project may have been a hasty, ill-concieved notion from the get-go - she recieved much support from people who state she was perfectly fine the way she was, and they actually liked her looks better in past. She spoke with Alex (Diesel Blitz) on release from the hospital, and though the other girl was extremely drunk at the time, discovered her feelings were, in fact, reciprocated...and the two are now dating.
Provided, of course, that wasn't the booze talking.
Jill has also now gained the ability, with aid of a magical focus, to change back and forth between her human and kangaroo forms at will. An offshoot of this entire episode was the introduction of Vince to 'Thea - Vince, like Jill, is a former 'average human' seeking to regain his natural state, and when he heard about Jill's luck with the ritual, he wanted to meet the caster. In the end, Vince chose another route - but at least he and Jill got pizza.
New Plan of Attack
Considering she now has permanent, at-will access to her human form again, Jill has been thinking about what she can really do with it. Constantly learning and re-learning her personal brand of fighting over and over for her two different forms doesn't really appeal due to time constraint involved, but being aware of the possible field application of 'blending in', Jill wanted to get some sort of combat skill she could use that wouldn't interfere or overlap with her other style of mostly kicks. As a result, she's decided to seek out a local dojang (tae kwon do gym) and learn some weapons forms to augment her new body in combat.
She has also taken up a goal - to finally begin progression on her formal tae kwon do ranking again, and earn her WTF-sanctioned teacher's certifications.
