Sandy
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
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| Art by Poison (Manuel Clavel), 2008 | |
| Sandy Jensen | |
| Player: @Jade Dragon | |
| Origin: | Technology |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Blaster |
| Security Level: | 32 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Sandy Jensen |
| Known Aliases: | Sandy. She specifically refuses to use a hero name |
| Species: | Human cyborg |
| Age: | 17 (appears 15) |
| Height: | 4'9" |
| Weight: | 180 lbs (her weight varies, due to antigravity generators in her legs) |
| Eye Color: | Green, glowing with an inner light |
| Hair Color: | Auburn |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | U.S. Citizen |
| Occupation: | Student/Licensed Super-Hero |
| Place of Birth: | Paragon City, Rhode Island |
| Base of Operations: | Skyway City, Paragon City, Rhode Island |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Frank Jensen (Father) |
| Known Powers | |
| Electrical Blast, Fire Manipulation, Leaping | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Extremely fast and agile, although much of her combat skill is due to programming built into her machine half | |
| Equipment | |
| None. | |
| No additional information available. | |
Sandy is a cyborg, turned against her will into a half machine weapon of destruction. She satisfies her programming by fighting crime, but she is very much a reluctant heroine, constantly struggling to hold on to what is left of her humanity.
Contents |
Affiliations
Identity: Public.
Supergroup: None (Has attended United Sanction Society tournaments)
Known Associates: Blood Wolf
Personality
Sandy is a very quiet and shy girl, acting very much like a self-conscious teenager of about 15. She is very uncomfortable about her appearance, and is easily flattered. She becomes more animated and excitable around friends she has known for a while. In combat, she is extremely businesslike, and can seem almost robotic. However, she actively dislikes combat and often says so during fights.
Powers
Sandy's powers stem from a Crey experiment gone wrong. Implants developed by her father replicated inside her body, and turned her into a cybernetic battle machine.
Electrical Emitter System
The majority of Sandy's battle systems are powered by nuclear generators in her legs, which provide electrical energy which can be fired through emitters in her hands. She is capable of shaping this energy for a number of different uses, including long range sniping blasts, short range discharges of lightning, and charged "balls" that will burst on impact to damage surrounding targets. She can also shape her electrical field into a cage, imprisoning a foe within it for a short time, until the charge dissipates.
Plasma Generation and Thermal Control Field
In addition to her long range combat capabilities, Sandy also has a number of shorter ranged weapons, including her primary defensive device, a plasma torch. This weapon is formed by creating a magnetic bottle of superheated air, and then injecting it with a high temperature plasma from her nuclear reactors. This results in a sword-shaped weapon which is capable of slicing through most materials easily, and even setting them on fire.
By setting up resonance frequencies with her magnetic emitters, Sandy is able to feed energy into any flames generated by her plasma torch or electrical blasts, causing them to grow and spread at her bidding. She can use this ability to surround foes in rings of flame, cutting them off from escape. Vents built into her legs can also draw in this heat energy, using it to generate more power. The same vents also exhaust excess energy from her nuclear reactors.
Bipedal Mobility System
Sandy's legs, in addition to housing her nuclear reactors, also contain a pair of powerful antigravity generators. These generators allow Sandy to reduce her weight considerably, or even generate antigravity force to stabilize her position in the air. Combined with the natural strength that her mechanical servos provide to her legs, this allows Sandy to leap vast distances, and even stop and hover in midair. Although she cannot move very quickly while hovering, as long as she can kick off of the ground to maintain her momentum, she can move with extraordinary speed. She prefers to make small but fast hops, shooting along the ground while remaining only a few inches above it, although she will make much higher leaps if the terrain calls for it.
In addition, Sandy's leg strength and the weight of her legs make them an effective backup weapon in combat, and she will often kick at her foes to knock them away. She will usually use this attack in conjunction with her plasma torch, possibly using her electrical cage to imprison a foe first. Sandy's speed and agility in combat is remarkable, and she is able to dodge with uncharacteristic ease for a hero classified as a "blaster". Although she has never fully tested this capability in combat, possibly out of fear, it may be possible for her to "supercharge" her leg servos, increasing her defense even further.
Weaknesses and Limitations
Although Sandy's physical strength has been increased by the replacement of the muscles in her legs by servos and motors, the nanobots were unable to complete their attempt to replace her skeletal structure. Thus, Sandy is mechanical in some places, but other parts of her body are still totally flesh. This makes her overall structure very brittle and fragile, even moreso than a "normal" human. Her body is able to repair damage to itself with remarkable speed, even the organic parts, but she is still vulnerable to physical damage. She also cannot fully utilize her strength, as she could snap her own body in half trying to lift a massive weight.
Sandy is also extremely afraid of losing control of her machine half, and causing harm to another being before she can regain control of herself. She keeps her machine half under rigid control, but it often rebels against her control, resulting in a stressful relationship between her two sides. Her machine half is intelligent, and is capable of thinking for itself, and Sandy often demonstrates a sort of split personality as she converses with her machine side.
Character History
Although Sandy is otherwise a perfectly ordinary teenager, from the time she was about five years old, Sandy had been diagnosed with a crippling nerve disease that had left her unable to walk. Her father, a robotics expert, became obsessed with developing a robotic implant that could help his daughter walk. He eventually signed on with Crey Industries as one of their researchers, and there found a technology that seemed to be the answer to his prayers: nano-machines.
Crey's nano-technology research, however, was not being used to cure neurological diseases, but to develop combat technologies that could be used in battle. Sandy's father refused to let his research be a part of war technology, but his superiors included some secret programming into the nanobots without his knowledge. When his research was finished, he implanted the nanobots into Sandy, and they seemed to work perfectly. Unfortunately, she was then kidnapped by Crey agents, and taken to a laboratory where they activated the hidden program.
What followed was the most horrifying experience of Sandy's life. The nanomachines devoured her body from the inside out, destroying her human tissue, and replacing it with machinery. She was not even given sedatives to dull the agonizing pain, as it was thought they would interfere with the procedure. At that moment, however, Sandy's father arrived on the scene, and seeing what the scientists were doing to his daughter, he attacked them. He was quickly overpowered, and Sandy became so afraid that her father would be killed that she somehow managed to pull free of her restraints. Even with the process only half completed, she was still so strong that she was able to beat most of the Crey agents to death, before they managed to retreat.
With the process still continuing on its own, and possibly going out of control due to the stress, Sandy's father hooked her back up to the monitoring equipment, and managed to stabilize her condition. This left half of Sandy's body machinery, primarily from the waist down, although her hands, a portion of her rib cage (where her "third eye" is embedded), and parts of her brain had also been replaced by the machines. Somehow, Sandy managed to come to grips with what she had become, and decided to register as a superhero, as much to satisfy her machine side's need for combat as to do good with her new powers. She can never really forget what she has lost, however, as the machines destroyed the organs responsible for her growth, leaving her as a perpetual teenager.
Inspirations and Trivia
Sandy bears more than a little resemblance to Mikoto, "The Dancer Project", created by Akamaz. Akamaz has said that his character was inspired by Battle Angel Alita, and so was Sandy. To be precise, Sandy was inspired by a picture of Gally from one of the video box covers, where she appears to have been partially ripped apart, with her internal machinery spread above her like wings. This image was the primary inspiration for Sandy's appearance, as a young girl who seems to be halfway through the process of being "invaded" by machinery.
Sandy was first created as a fan character based on the game "Monster Rancher", for the Playstation. She was concieved as a combination of a Pixie, obviously a human-looking monster, and a Henger, or robot. She was then written as the main character in "The Experiment", a fanfiction in which a monster ranch breeds this Pixie/Henger hybrid as an experiment, and it goes wrong. Sandy eventually comes to question whether or not she is a living thing, or whether she is some sort of zombie being kept alive by her machine half. Although her background story has been changed for City of Heroes, this is still the main conflict that defines Sandy as a character.
The main difference between the original Sandy and this version is that originally, as with most Pixies, she had wings. The wings have been removed from the drawing above, to match her character in game. While wings are available in CoH now, the combination of Super Jump and Hover for levitation seems to fit her current concept.
