Raider-1
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
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| Raider-1 drops in! | |
| Raider-1 | |
| Player: @Chiroptera | |
| Origin: | Technology |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Scrapper |
| Security Level: | 42 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Madison Sloan / Marix Var |
| Known Aliases: | Maddie, Marie, Wind Rider |
| Species: | Thefarin |
| Age: | Unknown |
| Height: | 5' 11" |
| Weight: | 174 lbs |
| Eye Color: | Green |
| Hair Color: | Red |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | Citizenship in the United States |
| Occupation: | Former Longbow Agent, Now Freelance Hero. |
| Place of Birth: | Providence, RI |
| Base of Operations: | International |
| Marital Status: | Taken |
| Known Relatives: | Samuel Sloan, Grand Farther; Eric Sloan, Father; Michelle Sloan, Mother; James Sloan, Brother; Kallysta Var, Lover. |
| Known Powers | |
| Extremely Regenerative, both due to species and nano-tech implants. | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Advanced martial arts practitioner, trained in forms of hand-to-hand and weapons combat native to both Earth and two other confirmed planets. | |
| Equipment | |
| Nano-tech implants throughout her body. Armed with an assortment of dangerous Spec. Ops. tools and equipment. | |
| ' | |
Contents |
Overview
Raider-1 was a Longbow agent, unbenownst to any but her allies in the League of Justice Raider-1 is in truth a secret observer from the planet Thefara, sent here to monitor human technological and social progress, as well as their and evolution. Shortly before the 2007 Rikti Invasion Raider-1 left Longbow after they refused to take any of her recommendations to prepare for the Rikti Strike, though she did hang on to the monicher given to her by them when she first became a hero. In her human civilian guise as Madison Sloan, no longer a Longbow Operative she opted to open a Self-defense studio, a rather lucrative occupation in a city where anyone who walks the streets feels more comfortable knowing they have a means of defending themselves, just incase there's not someone in spandex around to save them.
Raider-1 is extensively trained in martial arts and possesses technological, as well as natural, regenerative abilities and uses a diverse variety of technological tools in her crime fighting.
Affiliates
The League of Justice, Freedom Corps, the Vanguard.
Allies
The following heroes are considered close friends and/or comrades of Raider-1: Capt. Starfall, BlueBird, Skye Lancer, Fiver, Crimson Archer, Twilight Starling, Votum Justicia, Dr. Trinity, Ravenbane.
Origin
Madison Sloan, the heroine known as Raider-1, is one of many heroes to call more than one planet home. She is the reincarnation of an old heroine, a winged alien from the planet Thefara, who came to earth during World War II. Mirax Var, the Wind Rider, served with Madison’s grandfather Colonel Samuel Edward Sloan in WW II fighting for the Allied forces.
Mirax Var was killed by a mob of distraught and angered civilians after the fall of Germany in 1945. The Fifth Column attacked a medical field hospital set up in a small village that Mirax, the Colonel and his men, were assigned to protect. The attack came while the colonel and the squad were investigating reports of a 5th column hold out cell hiding in an abandoned town nearby. Massive Mekk men prototypes, 20 feet tall, were sent against the town with only the Wind Rider and a handful of remaining soldiers to defend it. Though one of the giant machine’s was stopped the second succeeded in reaching the field hospital and initiating a self-destruct, raining shrapnel and debris upon doctors, nurses, and injured soldiers and civilians. Horrified and outraged by the devastation and in need of someone to blame, when Mirax arrived at the hospital to late the towns folk turned upon her in a violent mob.
Mirax refused to hurt those who she viewed as helpless victims of the war, and so she fell under the rage of the mob. Only after the deed was done did they regain themselves and feel the recoil of their act. A statue still stands in the small Polish town of Lesnk in honor of the heroine.
Roughly 35 years later in 1980, Mirax Var was reincarnated, her spirit, like all Thefarin’s continued on regardless of physical form, and when Madison’s mother Michelle began to conceive Mirax’s spirit; long sense a guardian of the Sloan family, was absorbed into the new body as its life force.
Madison Sloan – Agent of Longbow
Madison remembered nothing of her past life as a Thefarin and upon graduation of High School she began taking classes in criminology at Rhode Island University and applied for the Providence Police Academy. Madison did better than she or her family could have ever dreamed. Her father, a Providence PD homicide detective whooped with joy for the first time that she could ever remember in her life when she told him she had not only passed the Police Academy trials, but had been offered a chance to enter the Longbow Corps. training program due to her outstanding academy records.
Just as in the Police Academy Madison set a high standard for her class in Longbow training and passed through with honors. Her first call as a longbow agent was also a defining moment in her career. Police in Providence were preoccupied with a bank heist by meta-powered criminals and so she and her partner were called to respond to a jewelry store robbery. The robber turned out to be her own brother, James Sloan, who her partner shot when he began to raise his gun upon seeing the two Longbow agents arrive. James survived the encounter, and reformed himself afterward, but Madison’s relationship with him remains strained.
The Raider Project
After serving with longbow for four and a half years Madison was approached with an opportunity to participate in a new experimental training program following in the footsteps of the Ballista project. After the success of the Ballista Agents it was decided by Longbow higher-ups to create another program, where the Ballista Agents were specialized super-powered SWAT officers, built for heavy combat situations against other meta-powered individuals a program had not yet been designed for swift hit-and-run strike operations. The Raider Project was born from the need for this type of unit and Madison Sloan was deemed the perfect candidate. Trained in hand-to-hand combat by her grand father and already a well versed practitioner of several martial arts forms with extensive gymnastics training and a great physical training record, she was asked to be the first Raider agent. Redesignated Raider-1, with her past history locked down and classified she began to train for Longbow’s next step in super-human law enforcement.
Raider Project Enhancements & Equipment
The Raider Project’s goal was to make the ultimate rapid response unit, capable of quick action with little down time. To achieve this goal the first step was a medical operation. Raider-1 was injected with the most advanced of nanotechnology. These small AI bots formed a symbiotic relationship with their host, provided with a place to live as long as their host remained alive. The nanotech bots were programmed to repair, and when possible enhance their host’s body.
She was outfitted with an enhanced armor suit capable of withstanding impact from all manner of blades and bullets and fire resistant. She was equipped with boots with anti-gravity repulsors to allow quick precise airborne control along with an arsenal of special equipment: Caltrops, Flash Bangs, Tazer Cable, Web Grenades, a Mini-camera, GPS tracking chips, wire taps and an ear-plug comm-link all became standard issue equipment for Raider-1.
Project Training
Raider-1 was taught to be a single unit assault. She was given extensive training in both armed and unarmed combat and taught to think on the fly, employing deductive logic into all her actions while working on a case. She was taught how to disarm, incapacitate and if necessary kill her opponents, be they human or meta-human; drilled in scenarios against everything from packs common gun wielding thugs or super-human villains with abilities ranging from super strength to pyrokinesis.
Project Success
In January of 2006 Raider-1 was released from her new training program and cleared for active duty in Paragon City. Pending successful activities in the city she was to be cleared for duty in international districts. By July of that year she had proven the entire project a success, leading to plans for an entire Raider Agent team the same as the Ballista project developed and Raider-1 has since been cleared and has participated in international operations ranging from activity in France, The UK, and the Rogue Isles.
During this time Raider-1 was also accepted into the League of Justice as a representative of Freedom Corps. and Longbow, helping to maintain good relations between this old super group and the new law enforcement of Paragon City.
Return of Mirax Var
In Autumn of 2006 Madison began to receive dreams and visions of a heroine dying at the hands of an angry mob. This marked the beginning of the re-emergence of memories from Madison’s past life. The more the dreams occurred the more she began to acknowledge that they were more than just dreams. By this time she’d also been given a knew longbow partner, Melissa Connolly. The truth was that Melissa was actually Kallysta Connolly, Mirax Var’s mate from Thefara who had come to find and rescue her lost love.
Hesitant to openly tell Madison the truth, less it shock her to greatly for her to wish to pursue it, Kallysta carefully guided Madison in the right direction until she was able to find out for herself about who she once was and the life she once had. As she made these discoveries Madison began to change. The nanobots within her body had been programmed to repair and upgrade her body. They were programmed to learn alongside their host. As Madison wrestled to regain lost memories from her past life the nanobots responded accordingly, working to stimulate her mind to help her try and regain her memories, and also working to repair what they now considered to be “damage” to her body. She was a female thefarin whose body was that of a human. This, to them, now seemed to be a injury and so they began to reconstruct Madison’s body. Piece by piece, day by day, her body began to be rebuilt starting from the very core of her genetic structure. Finally, Kallysta took Madison back to the planet she once called home.
On Thefara the nanobots completed the last changes to Madison’s body. She was no longer a human. Her wings had been regrown and her body had been reconstructed to fit with proper thefarin structure. With her memories restored and her species returned back to what she once was Madison took a new name as Marix Var, and chose to return to earth both to continue her work with Longbow and to recommit herself to her first mission as an observer of humanities increasing education of the galaxy and universe outside of their own world.
The 2007 Rikti Invasion
In early 2007 Thefara contacted Marix Var and warned her of an imminent Rikti return to Earth. Marix returned to Thefara to plead the case of earth and request that Thefara send a small detachment to assist in the defense of earth, knowing it would not take a large force from her planet to repel the Rikti whose technology seemed almost primitive compared to that which was found on her planet.
The Thefarans refused, deeming that earthlings were not prepared for contact with a race as advanced as theirs, sighting organizations like the Vanguard as proof that earth was still not yet ready to come into direct contact with a society like Thefara's. The Thefarin high council deemed that defending earth, showing their own military power would scare earth's populace more than reassure it and only cause tension between the two worlds.
Marix next returned to Longbow hoping to warn them of the threat and prepare for it. Her superiors disregarded her warnings when Captain Dietrech, head of Longbows anti-Rikti task force spoke against Raider-1's suspiscions of a gathering Rikti threat. When Longbow refused to heed her warnings she was disheartened, she went directly to the Vanguard to offer her assistance. Her superiors at Longbow discovered this and reprimanded her. She was put on suspended duty "for interacting with potential hostile organizations."
This encounter forced Marix to consider that her people may indeed have been wise in their judgment that earth had not yet come as far in their social evolution as she wanted to believe. Raider-1 decided her time as a full Longbow agent had come to a close when the Rikti Invasion finally arrived on July 24th, 2007. Rather than standing alongside Vanguard, putting aside their differences with the criminal metahumans of the world, and standing united to face the Rikti threat, Longbow opted to act alone, refusing to accept aid or offer aid to Vanguard or any group that they deemed unlawful. Raider-1 was astonished and disappointed in her former allies and so turned in her uniform, striking out as a freelance hero like many others, though she still maintained her contacts in Longbow and did her best to remain on good terms with them when she left.
A Brief Overview of Thefarin Culture
Species
Thefarin
Home World
Thefara
Geography
Forests, highlands and mountain regions compose the majority of the planet, spanning two large continents and one smaller southern continent. A few tropical regions and desert areas rest near the equator, and their are plainlands in the mid-sectors of the two larger continents. The planet itself is roughly the size of Saturn. Two large oceans make up roughly 65- 70% of the planet’s surface The planet itself is largely undeveloped as the species prefer to stay as close to nature as possible. Only key areas in the various environments have been urbanized into large cities and residential areas.
Lifespan
Undetermined – Thefari are an extremely evolved race, with a means of defying death through their spiritual philosophy. It is not unheard of to humans, but one that has thus far been unobtainable, that concept being that death only occurs because it is accepted as an inevitability. A Thefarin will age to peak physical ability and then simply remain in that state, only aging in times of extreme stress or upset, or when they willingly choose to. Many Thefarins grow to be so old that they stop celebrating birthdays and stop trying to keep track of their age.
Health concerns are still quite common on the planet, the species plays host to a variety of illnesses humans have never even thought of, one such illness is commonly referred to as ‘wing rot’ usually caused by an infection received during a molting season, causing the molting to continue longer than usual. This leaves the subjects wings smaller and weaker than appropriate for the Thefarin’s size, resulting in loss of normal flight abilities, forcing the subject to rely upon gliding or only brief periods of air travel. While death is a rarity, it is still a possibility, as it is only natural death that can be defied. Natural causes are rarely ever a cause of death, but the Thefari are not immortal and can die from disease, starvation or injuries.
Typical Body Structure
The average height of a Thefarin can vary from 5' to 7'5" with height usually determined by the caste. Members of the Raptor caste, being composed mostly of those sharing similarities to owls, hawks, falcons and eagles, tend to be stronger and larger than Thefarins who compose the lesser castes. They are lighter than humans but surprisingly more durable, like most avian species the people of Thefara have hollow bones, but it takes a great deal of strength to be able to break a Thefarin’s bones, they are capable of taking far more abuse than the average human bones. They are incredibly resilient and heal much faster than humans, cuts and lacerations rarely last more than a day, and it is very rare for them to gain scars or permanent wounds. A permanent wound is considered to be a mark of pride and distinction among their people, for only one who fights against incredible odds and wins would live to have such an injury.
Government
Thefara is governed by a council composed of representatives from the different castes of Thefarins. There are 9 council members in total, 7 from different regions, led by two high Councilors; usually a mated pair from the Raptor caste. All members of the council serve for three years before a new election is held.
There is a more significant ‘eye for an eye’ approach in Thefarin government, particularly the judicial system. Jail time is for those who have committed small crimes, or first time offenders. Offenders who commit heinous acts, such as murder and rape, are punished according to the nature of the crime. Murder is punished by execution. Rape is punished by dismemberment or mutilation of the rapist’s genitalia. Thieves, pick-pockets and other common street scoundrels are punished in rank of offense. A first time offender may simply be sentenced to jail time, or if the reason for the theft is just; trying to feed a family for instance, they may actually be permitted to keep the stolen goods. A second time offender will be forced to work off twice the amount of the goods they stole and also suffer jail time. A third time offender will have one finger cut off, and another for every subsequent crime.
Though it might be considered harsh by human standards, this no non-sense policy on crime has made Thefara one of the safest planets in it’s sector. Criminal acts do occur on Thefara due to other species presence, however, because Thefara is heavily involved in export and import trade in their galaxy. While the more inland cities are reserved only for Thefarin inhabitance and are almost completely crime free, the space port cities containing the trade markets get their fair share of crimes. Due to Thefara’s justice system however, the offenders usually only commit a crime once. They either learn there lesson the first time, or don’t survive the punishment for the crime.
Trivia
~ Raider-1 is a tribute to two of my favorite heroes, Hawkgirl(Kendra Sanders) and Batman. I wanted a character that blended some of my favorite aspects of both characters, Hawkgirl’s tenacity and her sci-fi/fantasy background with Batman’s detective work and gritty “Last line of defense” stance against crime and injustice.
~ Colonel Samuel E. Sloan is based off of my grandfather, one of my personal heroes.
~ Raider-1's wings were initially going to be just another piece of longbow technology as part of the Raider project.
~ Raider-1 was intended to be killed off during a storyline in spring of 2006 but a last minute change to the plot spared her and let her develope into a more detailed character.]]
