Ms. Astounding
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| Ms. Astounding | |
| Player: | |
| Origin: | Science |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Defender |
| Security Level: | Confidential |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Laura Alexandra Eddington |
| Known Aliases: | Laurie |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 23 |
| Height: | 6'1" |
| Weight: | 169 lbs. |
| Eye Color: | Brown |
| Hair Color: | Brown |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Former lab systems technician at the University of Paragon City |
| Place of Birth: | Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America |
| Base of Operations: | Atlas Park, Paragon City, RI |
| Marital Status: | single |
| Known Relatives: | Henry Adams Eddington (father), Ivona Oborskaia (mother) |
| Known Powers | |
| Time dialation and temporal field distoration | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Ability to affect the timespace around people, other objects, and herself | |
| Equipment | |
| Confidential | |
| No additional information available. | |
Contents |
History
A Matter Of Timing...
Henry Adams Eddington was born on Janaury 9, 1953 in London, England, in a well-to-do family with an academic history of teachers, scientists, and lawyers. Instead of following this fine tradition, Henry was more interested in understanding how things worked. As a young boy, he often took apart radios to find out "where the little man in the box lived", his explanation to his mother when caught. While he never found that little man, it set the path for him to become one of England's most respected aerospace engineers.
After earning a master's degree from the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering at the University of Manchester, Henry's career as an aerospace engineer took off (no pun intended). He designed and field-tested many jet engines used on both commercial and military aircraft, earning the admiration of his peers in the field for his ability to turn any design problem inside out in order to solve it. His greatest acccomplishment, however, would not only earn him a Merit of Honor from the United Kingom, but also introduce him to his future wife.
On June 9, 1983, an airliner carrying members of the Russian National Orchestra en route from Moscow to Paris experienced multiple engine failures and was in danger of crashing into the ocean. Henry, who was well-versed in the design flaws of that jet engine model, was called in to troubleshoot. Working with the pilot and engineers from Moscow, he was able to balance the engine thrust on the remaining engines to allow the airliner to land safely at an emergancy landing strip in Paris. One of the members of the orchestra, a pianist named Ivona Oborskaia, wanted to meet the man who saved her and the other passengers. When they finally met, Henry (in his own words) "was smitten to bits" at the sight of the lovely Ivona. In turn, the pianist found the tall handsome Englishman "charming". The two fell in love after that day. Ivona emigrated to England shortly after, and the couple married on April 21, 1985.
On February 10, 1987, Henry received an offer from a major American aerospace company to be a senior project manager. He accepted the offer. On September 1, 1987, both he and Ivona emigrated to the United States to live in Cincinnati where the head office of the company was located. On September 15, 1988, Laura Alexandra Eddington...their first and only child...was born. "Laura" was Henry's mother's name, while "Alexandra" was the English translation of Ivona's mother's name.
The Eddington's Astounding Child....
Laura Eddington grew up in a loving home where her father Henry was a successful senior project manager at an aerospace corporation, and her mother performed in the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra as a pianist. Having the strikingly beautiful looks of her mother helped her popularity in school. She also inherited her father's height, which worked against her on occasion. While her height helped her on the female high school basketball team, it also led to some awkward moments during her dating years, and teasing from the "mean girls". She finally fell in love with a boy named Brandon Hampton, who was on the high school football team. They dated for two years before they broke up: Brandon went on to play in the National Football League, which had an impact on their relationship. They still maintained a good friendship afterwords, with Laura keeping track of Brandon's success in the NFL.
As the end of high school came closer, Laura had to decide what she wanted to go for post-secondary education. On a rainy day on May 13, 2005. she took stock of her talents on a notepad at the kitchen table of her home. She knew she had her father's curiosity about what made things go, though she was not as brilliant as he was. The difference in her case was an interest in electronics and computer systems. On the other side, she could play piano, almost as good as her mother in fact, and had a lovely singing voice. In the end, she decided to enroll in the University of Cincinnati's Mechanical Engineering Technology program, with a minor in computer network applications.
Laura excelled in her studies during her university years, earning co-op positions to work for credits at various technology firms before one place dropped her name at key science labs in Paragon City in Rhode Island. The director of each lab expressed great interest in Laura and offered her positions there. While science labs were not her preference, the opportunity to work with advanced technology was irresistible. She informed her parents about her decision to move away to Paragon City. Ivona cried at the thought of her daughter moving far from home. Henry cried for a different reason. His tears were from pride for his daughter.
After graduating from her university program one semester early through an extra-credits program, Laura's proud parents helped her pack and find a place in Paragon City. While they had some misgivings about their daughter living there, they both felt she would be safe. After all, what could possibly happen to her in a city full of superheroes?
Laura was hired at Portal Corporation in Peregrine Island as a junior grade systems technician on January 17, 2011. Her job performance was exemplary during the first few months of maintaining systems and diagnosing problems, putting her head and shoulders above the rest of the technical support team. Her lead supervisor recommended her for transfer and promotion to work at the University of Paragon City's Astrophysics lab in Steel Canyon. Accepting the transfer, Laura was now a full systems technician maintaing cutting edge technology borne from the Rikti invasion and encounters with other races. Laura Eddington was on the threshold of a promising career in technology, much like her father was in his day. Laura and her parents were euphoric. Little did they know it would all go horribly wrong in just a few months.
Deconstructing Laura...
On April 30th, 2011, Laura arrived at work early at the University of Paragon City to begin a final systems check of the containment chamber, built by the project team she was assigned to. The project involved creating an artificial singularity to study the spacetime geometry around it as it rotated. While she did not understand the physics involved, being a hands-on techie, she heard the findings could lead to many practical applications, such as storing food and other perishable goods in a bubble where time stood still, and where the energy required to create anti-grav devices would only require the power of a flashlight instead of a portable fusion reactor. If a significant measure of time dialation was noted between the edge of the singularity, known as the event horizon, and the protective damping edge of the containment chamber wall, the project would be considered a success. The readings from the containment chamber would later be sent to labs throughout Paragon City for further analysis.
As expected, everything was in order and the diagnostics reported green. She ran a programming interface check, and noted some new programs were added by the containment chamber's software programming team to handle possible distortion readings inside the chamber as measurements were taken. As this was not her area, she decided to let them handle it. Her responsibility were the sensors inside the containment chamber and the power systems of the particle accelerators that ran as rings around it. The entire installation was really quite impressive: it reminded her of a photo of the Arènes de Lutèce in Paris, taken by her parents on vacation two years before she was born. The operation stations of both her technical support team and the scientists were suspended from the roof in steps. The containment chamber was at the centre of it all, a tall grey metallic cylinder covered with various status lights ranging from blue to red and plasma display screens that she could switch to on her terminal at the click of a mouse.
As the rest of her technical support team arrived and logged in to their respective stations, she saw the one hour countdown timer appear on one of her own station displays. She knew it was a go, and that various system checks were being performed, in the same manner a rocket launch would go through pre-flight checks before liftoff. Every system check, every stage of the containment chamber fireup, went smoothly. As she was on the front end of the suspended roof platform, she was able to watch through the thick protective glass the displays and lights on the surface of the containment chamber light up one by one. She glanced again at the countdown clock. Five minutes to go. "Let the game begin", she smiled to herself.
Five minutes seemed more like five hours, but when it came, it came without fanfare. No roar of sound, no flashing of lights, not like what you see in those blockbuster movies at the theater. The containment chamber slowly stirred to life, and the artificial singularity formed. As it's rotation started, the project director being to intone instructions to various teams. When it came time for her station to report sensor readings, she calmly replied her figures. No time dialation, no distortion as the singularity begin to rotate faster. The particle acceleration team reported they were going to increase power to the containment chamber fields to increase the size of the singularity, but only by fractions of a micron, just enough for the geometry of space around the singularity to be hopefully warped. This process of the project director asking for readings and the various teams reporting repeated several times, and admittedly it was getting boring. After reporting yet another zero change in time dialation. she stretched and yawned, looking around at the various teams on either side of the ring. Everyone else was showing similar signs of boredom, except for the head scientists who were the physics muscle behind the creation of the singularity. Their expressions were not of boredom. They weren't even angry or upset. They looked confused.
She turned back to her station and began a diagnostic to make sure the sensors inside the containment chamber were not malfunctioning. As expected the sensors measuring areas of the space inside the containment chamber right to the chamber wall were operating perfectly. The particle accelerators and power systems were operating with only a small deviation, but well within design limits. She went through this enough times in simulation runs to know this as fact. "What would Dad do in a situation like this?", she mused to herself. "Ah. Turn it inside out". She began to picture herself inside the containment chamber as best she could, walking around and taking a list of all the parts inside the chamber. For each item, she would run a diagnostic check while it operated, and noted nothing odd. She then checked the power transfer regulators and capacitors down the conduit line where massive amounts of energy were feeding the felds that formed the singularity. She ran a few programs that measured the average power flow based on a measurement of time. She clicked a few icons on her display with her mouse and read off the rate for each mouse click to herself, "per microsecond...per nanosecond...per picosecond...per femtosecond...per attosecond...per eptosecond...per yoctosecond..." and then she froze.
The figure for the power transfer rate at the yoctosecond was decreasing slowly. At that extremely fine level of precision, it was as though time was.....oh no....NO!!!!
She grabbed the phone and punched the button for the containment chamber's software team lead. When she heard, "Keller here", she asked. "How far from the singularity does that new time dialation program adjust down the sensor network?". Keller replied, "Just the sensors a few Planck lengths. We just want to measure the quantum effect at the edge of the singularity. Why?"
She said, trying to keep the panic out of her voice, "I just did a reading of the power transfer feeds 10 metres from the edge of the containment chamber, at the yoctosecond rate..the transfer number is slowing down! It shouldn't if the particle guys are dumping more energy into the chamber! It should go up! Damn it, it should go up!"
She looked up through her window at Keller's area and he held up his hand, talking to another programmer. As the programmer went over to her station, Keller turned back and over the phone. "Laura, change your display to measure the average transfer flow at all orders of precision, and tell me what you see". She clicked a few icons on her display and watched carefully....no changes until she suddenly saw ALL the power transfer rates near the edge of the containment chamber begin to slow down. "T-the transfer rates are showing a slowdown at the seconds level too! The...the time dialation is happening right at the edge of the containment chamber w-", she began before Keller interrupted, sharply, "take a diagnostic of the power relay flow rate powering the lights and screens on the outside of the containment chamber! What is the rate of flow, regardless of order of magnitude?" She requested her station to show the readout of one plasma screen display on the outside of the chamber but could not get the display to appear on her screen. Frowning, she accessed the sensor that the containment chamber display was connected to directly to measure the power transfer flow to the plasma display and the status lights. It was at that point she hit the alarm utton.
The program responsible for compensating for time dialation for sensors nearest the singularity must have glitched on the first attempt. Those sensors were showing no changes because time dialation slowed them enough to disconnect from the rest of the sensor network that still existed in normal time. This explains why the wrong decision was made to send more power to the fields forming the singularity. But Laura found it was a compound error: the glitched program tripped over the first sensor in the same way a person would stumble over a rock, out of control. The program incorrectly adjusted EVERY sensor along the network, each of which was not designed to measure time displacement in the first place. Each sensor ended up reporting an adjusted normal time flow. Only by changing the measurement sample of the power flow rate to the quantum level did it show the time displacement field was well beyond the singularity, well beyond the containment chamber wall itself!
And it looked like Keller came to the same conclusion. He already hung up his end of the conversation, yelling at everyone, ordering them out of his area. Her technical support members were already making a beeline for the emergency exits because she sounded the alarm and she was not that far behind them. The only people remaining were the core team members trying to force the containment chamber into an orderly shutdown. But if the singularity had slowed timespace right OUTSIDE the chamber wall, it was probably still working on processing order-number-whatever to increase power to the singularity. She didn't want to remain to see the outcome of that backlog....
She was already halfway up the ramp towards the emergancy exit when her vision started to blur. She shook her head and noticed the edge of her peripheral vision begin to curve, as if she put on someone else's eyeglasses. She felt like it was taking longer and longer to go from one step to another and the repeating of the klaxxon was slowing. Before she had the chance to panic, she heard a sound like someone just put a tape recording on sudden rewind:
- WhhhuuuuuurERRRRRRRRRRreerrrrrrruh!!!!!*
and felt herself heading backwards...more like stretched backwards...towards what used to be her station and the glass window in front of it. As she hung upside down in what must have been an anatomically impossible backward C shape, a fly stuck in amber, an exploding flash of energy mercifully rendered her unconscious. It spared her from going insane from the sight of her arms stretched cartoonlike towards a cluster of floating glass shards and shattered lab debris suspended around the containment chamber, now crushed like a beercan....
Time Out...
It took nearly three weeks in a hospital for Laura to become lucid enough to understand where she was. Her previous bouts of of temporal induced delirium where she believed she travelled back and forth in Paragon City's history (S.E.R.A.P.H. repeatly confirmed she never left her bed, in both terms of space and time) had many concerned she would not survive the first 72 hours after the University of Paragon City accident. A kindly doctor who was handling her care told her she suffered no physical injury, though there were signs of emotional and psycological trauma based on her delirious rantings about time travel. To help deal with those bouts, she was given a neural inhibitor and some sedatives to allow her body to "reset itself" as the doctor described the process.
After hearing about what happened and taking a plane to Paragon City, Henry and Ivona spent many days at the bedside of their stricken daughter, reading to her and trying to calm her down when she became delirous. Henry demands answers from the university about what happened and who or what was responsible for the incident.
The Eddingtons got their wish when the university finally held an inquiry into what happened once Laura was well enough to leave the hospital a month after her admission. Two weeks after the inquiry ended, a report was released by the board faculty stating that Laura was not responsible for what happened and that a programming error in the code that handled the polling of the networked sensors was the cause. It also concluded that had Laura not been so observant about the situation, the shutdown procedure may not have been initiated at all and a sizeable section of Steel Canyon would have compressed down to the size of a marble.
Laura was given a citation and the honorary keys to Paragon City at an awards ceremony, with her proud family and friends at her side. After the ceremony was over and her parents flew home to Cincinnati, Laura had a problem. She was out of a job and no corporation wanted to hire her, making her think she was being treated like a jinx or albatross. On top of that, she was still suffering vision issues where her sight would blur and warp like it did during the containment chamber incident. Repeated trips to the doctor showed no sign of trouble with her eyes.
The reason for her vision troubles became apparent by accident. She noticed her wristwatch would slow down or stop entirely only to start up again after she took it off her wrist and left it on a dresser or table. She asked a friend to loan her a wristwatch, claiming she misplaced hers, but in fact she needed the wristwatch to conduct an experiment. In her experimetn, Laura would leave her friend's wristwatch on a table while holding her own for 10 minutes. Before the experiment, the wristwatches were synchronized to being a few seconds difference. After 10 minutes, Laura's wristwatch was a few minutes slower than her friend's. She re-sychronized both watches again and repeated the experiment again, but this time holding her friend's watch while leaving her own on the same table. This time it was her friend's watch that was slower by a few minutes. She repeated the experiment with her bedroom alarm clock by holding it and leaving both watches on her dresser. The alarm clock was slower by a few minutes.
This phenomena was not limited to timepieces. She found that if she took two pop cans out of the fridge, and held one in her hand, it would remain colder than the that was left on the counter in her kitchen. Armed with what she learned, she went down to City Hall to make an appointment with a representative from S.E.R.A.P.H, the FBSA agency that dealt with heroes who had science-based powers. To her surprise, they were very willing to meet her to arrange a battery of tests, explaining that anticipated some sort of side-effect involving time from the Paragon City University incident. A week later, S.E.R.A.P.H. doctors conducted the tests and learned that not only was she slightly out of sync with normal space/time, she was exhibiting the same properties as a singularity, complete with a very small event horizon around her body that curved light slightly around her. This explained her vision problems. If light was being curved, images appeared distorted as the light entered her eye and reflected off her retina.
Ocer time, her vision became worse. The doctors created a special wrap around visor to compensate for the curving of light so she was able to see properly. One doctor noted the temporal field around her body reacted when she became upset or agitated and wonder if she could control it the way she moved a finger or leg. Through some tests, Laura was able to not only control the rate of timespace geometry slowing around people and objects, she became adept at doing it around people or things she chose while ignoring other said objects. At the conclusion of the tests, a senior official at S.E.R.A.P.H. concluded that not only could she become more proficient at using these new powers, the powers themselves were getting stronger the more she used them, just as a muscle gets stronger or weaker based on the amount of usage. He suggested perhaps using these powers to serve the city in some capacity, either as a superhero or being registered with the Freedom Corps or Hero Corps, might be a path worth considering.
It's Nothing Like The Comic Books!
After some consideration about what to do with these new powers, Laura decided to register with the FBSA as private individual with super powers. The first thing she needed was a name. This turned out to be the hardest thing to do. After picking up the forms at City Hall and filling them out, Laura sat at the registration terminal to select her new name. Ms. Singularity? *beep* reserved! Ms. Space? *beep* reserved! SuperWarp? *beep* reserved! Afte what seemed like an eternity, she found a name that was not reserved, and one she wasn't particularly fond of: Ms. Astounding. While accurate in a way, it...didn't roll off the tongue easily. Statesman? Heroic! Siste Psyche? Lyrical! Positron? Cool! Ms. Ah-stound-ing? Ugh! And as she would discover later on during her patrols, some villians would delight in calling her "Ms. Ass"...
Having a new Icon clothing store for superheroes in Atlas Park made the task of designing a costume ridiculously simple when compared to the name find. She found mixing two stock patterns over a bodysuit made of unstable molecules sold by Icon, panels and perplex, gave the suit a "temporal look". She chose two colors, blue and gold. Blue was her favorite color, and her father would use the word gold in some expressions and sage advice. A modified visor completed the look. Standing in the mirror wearing her costume for the first time, the new Ms. Astounding felt things could only get better from this point on.
Wrong. It's nothing like the comic books in Paragon City. Training is a must if you want to survive against even minor thugs like the Skulls and Hellions. And there are rules. You don't damage property. You don't risk harming the civilians. You teleport the villians to the nearest PPD holding pen after cuffing them, while being careful not to rough them up too much, and killing is verboten, no matter how much they are asking for that. The agents and contacts that populate Paragon City will only work with you if you are a referral from someone else you know, which in turn introduces a Catch 22 of sorts. If someone doesn't know you, you can't work with them, but how can they know you if they won't let you work with them?
Ms. Astounding would learn over time that the life of a superheroine is both harrowing and horrific. During her training under a veteran super hero named Event Horizon Man in Galaxy City, the senior superhero became frustrated with Ms. Astounding over her inability to understand some ground combat skills when dealing with a mob of villians. He decided it would be best, mostly for his sanity's sake, to take her back to Atlas Park to try another approach. Two hours after they departed, Galaxy City was devastated by the Shivans arriving in a hail of meteors. Had both heroes remained in Galaxy City instead of returning to Atlas Park, they would have, like many others, had to find a way to escape, assuming they were not killed or wounded in the process. This act of destruction shook Ms. Astounding's confidence bad enough, but she was emotionally distraught when she learned her former boyfriend, Brandon Hampton, was in Galaxy City and was killed instantly during the opening moments of the Shivan invasion. He was attending a charity drive open a new children's care centre in one of the hospital branches.
Who Am I?....
Ms. Astounding is trying to come to grips with the new life she has chosen for herself, but it is a hard and difficult journey. She is slowly building a network of agents and contacts willing to help her. Her first attempt at joining a super group, the Pariah Project, did not work out as well as she hoped since she was unable to keep up with the more experienced and capable superheroes that comprise this heroic group. She is now forced to live a double life, the first as Laura Eddington, a former lab technician now forced to work at a Cookes Electronics store as a service repair person since she cannot find work in her chosen profession. The second life is that of her alter-ego, Ms. Astounding, who is a new superheroine, still very inexperienced yet learning quickly and painfully that the forces of evil are formidable, and are quite capable of sending her to the hospital on many occasions via the medical teleporter. It is also a life she is forced to hide from everyone, even her parents. The lying to those who she cares about, and the secrets she has to bear alone, are the deepest and harshest cuts of all.
If she ever survives these trying times and triumphs over the challenges from both outside in Paragon City and inside her conflicted psyche, she will definately earn the name "Ms. Astounding"...
