Palas
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| Palas | |
| Palas | |
| Player: @White Nightingale | |
| Origin: | Technology |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Tanker |
| Security Level: | 50+3 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Leonore Ramirez |
| Known Aliases: | None |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 22 |
| Height: | 5'2". 8'5" when transformed |
| Weight: | 90lbs. 300lbs when transformed |
| Eye Color: | Blue |
| Hair Color: | Black. Red when transformed |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Publicist (Greenpeace), activist, superheroine, eco-warrior, homeless vagrant |
| Place of Birth: | Seattle |
| Base of Operations: | Paragon City |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Olallo(father), Leonore (mother) |
| Known Powers | |
| Invulnerability, supernatural strength, superhuman speed | |
| Known Abilities | |
| None. | |
| Equipment | |
| Girdle of Palas (see powers) | |
| WARNING: Potential anti-establishment content | |
Contents |
Hot Blooded
Leonore Ramirez always embodied the qualities of her zodiac sign (Leo): Dominant, extrovert, passionate, visceral, and terminally stubborn. A tomboy that lived jumping before looking and getting in all kinds of problems because of standing for what she believed in, from school fights to getting arrested often at Greenpeace protests.
Don't look at gift incarnate technology in the mouth
The mysterious girdle of incarnate-grade technology that would change Leo's life literally stumbled at her feet during the first Rikti invasion, bouncing from among the debris of a dropship that was just blown out of the sky.
A Rikti artifact? Spoils of war from another vanquished race? Leo had no idea of what it was or where it came from, but as soon as she learned how to use it, she didn't hesitate for a second regarding what to do with it.
Let's see the pigs try to jail her now.
Taking the name of the goddess of arts&sciences (an all-time favorite of her, even when she herself has never been that brilliant or talented), she decided to take activism to the next level: Wrecking illegal logging operations was just the start, her newfound powers allowed her to be anywhere on earth in a matter of hours, and soon she found herself sending whale-hunting boats back home, terrorizing baby-seal hunters, backing up women rights protests in the middle east and protecting scrapyarders in the Etoile isles. While she was always a quick first responder in case of emergencies and her activities crossed the interests of more than one super-criminal, she was always of a mentality of "leave supervillains to the other capes, I'm going to change the world!"
"Changing the world," unfortunately, rarely comes without a price.
The Price of Peace
| |
| Rainmaker Blue | |
| Price of Peace | |
| Player: @White Nightingale | |
| Origin: | Natural |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Blaster |
| Threat Level: | 50+3 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Major Maxine Rayne |
| Known Aliases: | Rainmaker Blue |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 27 |
| Height: | 5'6" |
| Weight: | 110lbs |
| Eye Color: | Blue |
| Hair Color: | Red |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Former US Army Major, Commander (Lextalionis), Malta Operative |
| Place of Birth: | Texas |
| Base of Operations: | Paragon City |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Classified |
| Known Powers | |
| Incarnate-grade cybernetic implants that give her superhuman strength and stamina and near supernatural reflexes | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Special Forces training | |
| Equipment | |
| state-of-the-art combat armor and weaponry based on salvaged Rikti technollogy and stolen IDF designs. | |
| WARNING: Potential anti-establishment content | |
Malta is what happened soon after the incarnates twisted the world powers' arm forcefully to end the Cold War back in the sixties. Governments wanted to declare war on metahumanity then and there, but the people of the world saw them end the war single-handedly and then watched them talk governments down on television world-wide. The people adored them, and no amount of propaganda was going to change that. Declaring war on supers would have caused the people to raise up in arms even in the USSR.
Governments had to let it slide and accept the change, at least publically. Their Spooks, on the other side, met in secret and bid their time. The was still a Cold War, but now it was on metahumanity, and their army was the Malta Group.
Corporal Maxine Rayne spent a good part of her career in the US Army frustrated, her one goal denied to her as women aren't allowed in Army Special Forces. Her luck changed when an officer offered her enlistment in a special project for very delicate tasks. Her job as a splinter cell focused mainly on fighting in America's many shadow wars, except all of her targets were metahuman. Her secondary goal was constant field-testing of new weaponry specifically designed to take metahumans down. While Malta is publically verboten, the one assignment where she was delivered a Malta uniform "for plausible deniability purposes" delivered the message.
Lextalionis
By the time the Praetorian War began, Maxine was already a Major, and in lieu of her performance record she got put in charge of a new project. Lextalionis was an up-and-coming private army styled after VIGILANCE and equiped with state-of-the-art weaponry for dealing with the metahuman crises of today. For some reason, not a single government quirked a brow at the incarnate-grade technology of this new army, and no one felt nervous about newcomers with enough resources to bring more than one country to their knees. Being a Malta front will do that for you.
I Fought the Law
The list of accusations against Palas kept piling up in several countries, charges from sedition to outright terrorism. For a long while the NATO kept looking the other way as long as she didn't step on the wrong tails. One too many corporations, however, had more than a little disregard for trivialities like the environment or human rights, and soon enough many added their names to the list of protestors as their operations started receiving visitations from the juggernaut activist. The straw that broke the camel's back was Palas showing up to support the Indignant protests during Occupy Wall Street, stepping on every fat-cat's tail at the same time.
Metahumans were crossing the line once again, and this time The Powers that Be wouldn't take it, lest more incarnates started following her example. All previously ignored charges against her were now a go.
As if on cue, Lextalionis was ready just in time to be outsourced by the FBSA as one its first contracts, and their first task under their new contractor was bringing Palas in. The rabble-rouser was to be made an example of so the metahuman population saw that the nail that sticks out gets hammered in.
A grandiose display of force, a media circus of a trial, and a most effective sentence, that ought to show them. Malta, however, had some addendums for The Man's agenda: In the time between her arrest and the trial she was to be borrowed in order to implant her brain with very specific instructions. Eventually Malta would arrange her escape from the Zig (furthering the governments' future Zero Tolerance legislations), and the implanted instructions would bring her to Malta for full brainwash and assimilation.
These movements, however, attracted the attention of The Everglades Mink, who was already following the leads of a global-scale conspiracy at the time. With help from the woman detective, Palas was able to not only to foil Malta's plot but also to clear the charges against her in other countries.
The damage, however, was already done. She'd never get her old life back, and even when Mink did her the favor or relocating her parents where none of her enemies could find them, Palas thought it best for everyone if she just disappeared from their lives for their own good.
Rise, Rebel, Resist
No enemy is more dangerous than the one with nothing to lose.
Palas was now that enemy, and while she failed to prove Lextalionis' nexus to The Malta Group, now she'd stop at nothing until seeing them fall.
While she lacked the means to outmaneuver Malta and expose Lextalionis for what they were, for years she hounded them, foiling every single black operation of theirs and becoming a major thorn in Rainmaker Blue's (a.k.a Major Rayne) side.
Endgame: Duty
Palas' final clash with Lextalionis and Malta took place in Darfur, where she found out about Lextalionis' "Final answer to super-powered crime world-wide."
In the years she hounded Lextalionis, the world's political, economic, and social climates had taken a turn for the worse, and the loss of the Ziggursky prison after the Pandora's Box incident meant the world had spent years without any effective penitentiaries for the super-powered. All those years Lextalionis had been working in what would become the ultimate super-prison. A massive construct that would be offered by the private army to keep any and all supercriminals in the world contained. Now every country, big and small, could afford an effective solution to keep super-powered individuals locked. Governments wouldn't have to worry about "pesky human rights groups" meddling as everything would take place outside their borders. More importantly, the Malta Group now could keep a large pool of super-powered prisoners within reach for ease of use.
As fate would have it, Rainmaker Blue was in the instalation, and most of the prison was demolished during their fight, the final test to Rayne's cybernetic modifications.
The fight, however, was interrupted by an army of Praetorian-breed Hamidon army that were hatching right at the frontier (a month past the aftermath of Everglades Mink's story). Palas knew that even if the nations of the world weren't divided and even if the world's strongest metahumans weren't off-world, no one would care about Darfur, it was "an acceptable loss." Rainmaker Blue knew that Africa had enough available organic matter to make a Praetorian Hamidon army impossible to remove from position; if she didn't mobilize Lextalionis now, they'd have a new Eden in their hands, one the size of a third of Africa.
Unthinkable as it was, they'd have to join forces.
Maxine knew that, even if Lextalionis is the bleeding edge available to Malta, they were still a step behind actual IDF technology, and the IDF was never able to stop a Hamidon full assault. Still, they could buy the top brass enough time to deploy a neutron bombardment.
Palas knew that, even if it costed her life, the monsters would be a lot easier to kill if she focused on the Hamidon Avatar, and that she couldn't allow Malta to destroy Darfur's rainforests.
For all of Lextalionis' sins, in the end they'd be posthumously remembered as heroes, and once Palas' part as well as their cooperation made it to the blogosphere (in spite of Malta), it served as a precedent to gradually mend relationships with the metahuman community.
Paragon City is a city of heroes, but true heroism is a thankless job.
Trivia
- Leonore hated her "transformation" with a passion, feeling it like "magical girl cliche." She could be rather self-conscious about it at times.
- The first incarnates (a.k.a the olympian pantheon) had a tendency of storing their power within material objects. Zeus used Pandora's Box, Afrodite used her sash and, as it happened, the "Girdle of Palas" was actually crafted by her eponym. Having been damaged for several years, eventually its self-repairing process progressed enough to start enabling Palas' most important gift: Wisdom, it was this final talent that helped Leo tail Lextalionis down to her showdown with Rainmaker Blue.
- Palas' "theme songs" would be "Rise, Rebel, Resist" by Otep and Dying Breed by Five Finger Death Punch. Maxine's one would be Invaders Must Die by The Prodigy.
