Sable Tentacle
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| The Cyborg in Purple | |
| Sable Tentacle | |
| Player: User:Crasical | |
| Origin: | Technology |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Corruptor |
| Threat Level: | 50 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Unknown, refuses to discuss |
| Known Aliases: | Sable, Sabes, Tenta-kun. |
| Species: | Human Cyborg |
| Age: | 27 |
| Height: | 5'8 ish. |
| Weight: | 357 pounds |
| Eye Color: | Brown |
| Hair Color: | Purple |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Unemployed |
| Place of Birth: | Paragon City, Rhode Island |
| Base of Operations: | Confidential |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Mother(Estranged) |
| Known Powers | |
| Dark Blast/Dark Miasma | |
| Known Abilities | |
| High pain tolerance, MIT educated, cyborg enhancement. | |
| Equipment | |
| Hoards grenades, firearms, and other bits of equipment, making his combat payload unpredictable at best. | |
| No additional information available. | |
Sable Tentacle, ex-Freakshow, idiot, pervert, thief, anarchist, and despite his social shortcomings a relatively dangerous combatant.
Contents |
Cyborg without Sanity or Honor
Sable Tentacles is rarely considered a serious figure around the Isles, despite brief Arachnos interest in him when it became possible that he was the Destined One sought so closely by Recluse. Information on his life and background is easy to find, if anyone was ever so inclined to search for it.
Life Before the Metal
Sable was born in Galaxy city, raised by a single mother, his father unknown to him all his life. He grew up in Paragon City, unremarkable except for a deep interest in the Hero community and a knack for electronics. He left his home and what little family he had to earn his college degree, his minor knack for electronics exploding into full-blown mechanical genius, his education at MIT keeping him occupied full-time, his contact with friends and relatives waning due to the demands of his course load. Eventually, he graduated with a Bachelors degree in several respectable fields, and returned home to Paragon city, intent on rejoining his friends and family and pursuing a career.
Upon returning to Paragon City, Sable was assailed by several Hellions, mugged, and left senseless in an alley on his way back home. The incident would repeat itself several times over the course of the next few weeks, as he attempted to reintegrate with the unique Paragon City lifestyle. The final straw came when he emerged from an alley, battered and beaten, to see a Clawed hero pounce upon and ferally savage a pair of Hellions menacing an elderly woman and attempting to relieve her of her valuables. Sable watched in slack-jawed horror as the grandmotherly woman, spattered in the blood of the Hellion by the savage assault, thanked the hero for saving her, mentioning in passing how often she'd been a victim of attempted purse snatching in the past.
Iron Heart, Mad Soul
Sable did not return home to his mother, nor to work in the next few days. His experiences had left him embittered and disgusted, viewing heroes as brutal licensed vigilantes who where allowed to kill in the line of duty, and the Citizens of Paragon as mindless sheep who placed value in material possessions over human safety. Sable wandered the streets of Paragon City, getting into more dangerous circles, spending what little money he had on alcohol and drugs. His mind numbed, he wandered the streets and slept in unused tram cars, unkempt and filthy.
Eventually, his growing hatred of his once idolized heroes, combined with his disregard for material possession, led him to fall in with the disorganized Freakshow in Talos Island after drunkenly trying to attack a Freak Tank with a bat. The Tank was amused, and ended up having his followers give the suicidally brave bum an injection of Excelsior to see how he would cope with the drug. An impressive number of injections later, Sable was still standing and raving at his captors, albeit with slightly decreased lucidity.
Sable came out of the experience with a headache and some new friends, having been nearly universally accepted as a new hire by the disorganized freak cell while he had been sleeping off the effects of the drug. After hearing the anarchist dogma of the Freakshow, Sable accepted their offers and allowed himself to be implanted with an Excelsior feeder, taking the opportunity to dye his hair purple and re-invent himself, severing all ties with his old name and immersing himself in his new existence.
Dark Matter from Another World
Sable would have been just another Mad Freak, a hoodlum with Excelsior and a shotgun, but for a fortuitous accident early in his career. A raid on a secret, underground tech lab in the ruins of Faultline unearthed a bizarre device, dubbed the 'Dark Matter Generator' by Sable based on his initial investigations of it. Not much bigger than an American football, the Generator uses Portal Corp science to open up micro-rifts in space to a specific alternate universe. This universe operates on radically different principles than our own, and matter transported from there is an anathema to most beings from this world. Sable quickly became obsessed with the device, and after months of tinkering turned the small device into a cybernetic arm, willingly having his right arm sheared away to have it attached.
With this new, deadly upgrade, Sable soon rose through the ranks to become the De-Facto leader of the Freakshow cell, using the generator to hurl handfuls of the Dark Energy at foes, often taking them by surprise with his unusual powers. However, Sable's alliance with the Freakshow was nearing it's end. Information leaked over the internet by Bile the Technophile, one of the head faction leaders of the Freakshow, that Dreck, indisputed 'President' of the movement, had been hiring out his and his followers services to Crey as mercenaries. In the Freak civil war that followed, Sable quietly slipped away, taking a ferry and vanishing across the sea to the Rogue Isles, inwardly crushed that the ideals he'd joined the Freakshow to support where being abused in such a fashion.
Rogue Isles Rampage
Sable hid out in the Isles for the duration of the Freakshow War, slowly buying and integrating more advanced circuits and focii into his arm, gaining more control and power over the energies it provided, gaining more and more esoteric uses for it, finding ways to make the unstable energy and matter exist safely in the real world, ways to make the energies harmonize with and overcharge living organisms and machines, and ways to overlay bits of the alien dimension's geometry and physics over areas in the real world. His powers grew ever more varied with each addition, but using cold, slick tentacles of alien matter to bind and immobilize his enemies always remained a favorite tactic of his, eventually causing others to dub him 'Sable the Tentacle' and then simply 'Sable Tentacle'.
Sable never went back to Paragon City. His intended withdrawal from the world was flawed by the constant need for more Excelsior and parts to tinker with. His disregard for authority led to repeated robberies, eventually leading him to a full on career in super villainy, gaining more and more contacts and equipment, upgrading from one Reactor to two, one on each arm. His powers grew in strength enough to be briefly catch the attention of the Arachnos elite, a stint of having him work under Black Scorpion firmly removing any idea of using him as a Destined one.
Metal Man With Shadow Hand
Dark Matter Generators
Sable is undeniably a lunatic, but in a way embodies the spirit of the Freakshow quite well. Who else would find an untested, possibly dangerous device in the ruins of a hidden lab and then decide the best course of action would be to weld it to themselves?
The Dark Matter Generators give Sable powers rarely seen among Freakshow, and on first inspection most mistake him for a Shadow Freak. Sable's powers tend to have a much wider range of application, however, and he has shown a distressing propensity to tinker with the devices to produce new effects on a whim, something that should not be possible for someone with no training in Portal Tech. This makes him an unpredictable combatant, but he seems to have two basic strategies, for dealing with lone, powerful foes and for fighting large groups.
When presented with a singular, dangerous target, Sable will attempt to ambush his target by creating a distortion field that partially draws his body into the alien dimension, causing him to fade and flicker, making him easy to miss without keen senses or advanced targeting equipment. From there, he will proceed to open the fight by summoning a decoy, a shadowy mass vaguely resembling a man, and by producing more powerful distortion fields around his intended target, slowing, blinding, and weakening them as they are forced to fight in the twisted pocket of space caught between two realities. Sable will then stand back and hurl damaging balls of matter at them, using his tentacles to immobilize the foe if they make signs of attempting to leave the distortion field.
His tactics change little when presented with a horde of weaker foes, namely that he rarely bothers creating a complete distortion field, only focusing it around particularly annoying foes, merely letting the incomplete field weaken and disorient the masses while he pins the group in a large swath of tentacles.
Cybernetic Enhancement
Sable adheres to some Freakshow ideals, and the Excelsior pumping through him has given him the willingness to modify himself with additional Cybernetics. Prominently, he has fitted himself with a pair of piston-fired leaping feet, allowing him to launch himself long distances through the air and cover ground quickly. This has frustrated some opponents, as Sable has no qualms with stunning or immobilizing foes he feels threatened by and then merely fleeing at high speed. Sable has the mechanics slaved to certain muscle actions and nerve impulses, and despite otherwise complete mastery of the cybernetic occasionally the pistons will fire unordered and launch Sable into a ceiling or a wall should he become sufficiently stressed.
Sable still possesses the Excelsior feeder from long ago, although it has been tinkered with over the years to provide a shifting mix of several other drugs, intended to give Sable a chemical advantage in combat. It has succeeded in a minor degree, preventing him from self-resuscitating like the average Freak, but still providing other benefits and retaining a measure of the resilience and inexhaustibly that Freaks are famed for.
Twisted, Brilliant Mind
Sable Tentacle is technically an unrecognized genius, the myriad improvements and modifications to his cybernetics that he has made something that few men could have made as quickly or haphazardly as he had, several key components to his generator having been jury rigged with hastily converted bits of unrelated electronics whenever his equipment has been examined by a certified professional, and in one outstanding cases having managed to completely replace a delicate piece of micro circuitry with a bent paperclip in place of proper materials. Sadly, this brilliance is contained in what is a fundamentally broken psyche, scarred by mental attacks, left an ideological mess, exposed to maddening alien geometries, and addled beyond repair by various drugs. Sable is best viewed as a Savant of sort, his insights and inventions astounding but usually incomprehensible and unrepeatable.
Socially, Sable can be quite pleasant, his years with the Freakshow having given him the bizarre modes of speaking common to their kind, which he will lapse into unless prompted not to do so. He is passionate about his anarchic beliefs, but rarely will elaborate on them unless questioned about them. He has been known to chatter and joke during combat, and occasionally will use his Tentacles to harass a foe he is particularly interested in, the tentacles moving from mere utilitarian binding to actually caressing and stroking the unfortunate target, probing and prodding where decency forbids. This led to a brief period where Longbow ceased sending female agents to apprehend him, lifting the ban when they noted that this did not reduce the incidents by any measurable amount, Sable merely shifting his attentions to the male agents. This would seem to indicate that Sable is either a (rather depraved) bisexual, or merely enjoys harassing and toying with his victims in a sadistic fashion.
