Spooky Child
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| They issued a hero license to who?!? | |
| Spooky Child | |
| Player: @Omnium | |
| Origin: | Mutant |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Controller |
| Security Level: | 39 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Katrina Visitor |
| Known Aliases: | Kat, Kitten, Squirt, Little, Munchkin |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 9 |
| Height: | 3'11" |
| Weight: | 56 lbs. |
| Eye Color: | Blue |
| Hair Color: | Blond |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Elementary School Student/Licensed Hero |
| Place of Birth: | Bethesda, MA |
| Base of Operations: | Paragon City, RI |
| Marital Status: | Way too young for that |
| Known Relatives: | Marcus Visitor (father), Catherine Britten-Visitor (mother), Columbus (pet cat) |
| Known Powers | |
| Gravity Control, Force Fields | |
| Known Abilities | |
| None known | |
| Equipment | |
| Hero-comm device | |
| No additional information available. | |
Katrina Visitor is the child of two very powerful mutants on active duty with the US military. She cannot remember a time in her young life when she did not have powers over gravity, able to bend, twist, and shift it at will. Extremely intelligent, strong, and fast for her age, she has somehow managed to use these abilities responsibly.
Nearly three years ago, with both her parents deployed on active service against super-powered foes abroad, she started sneaking away from her guardians and appearing in Paragon City, so she could fight the Bad Men and allow her Mommy and Daddy to come home again.
The character of Katrina Visitor is based on an NPC I created for an Aberrant tabletop RPG campaign I ran years ago. Her powers required some adapting to mesh with the limitations of the CoH game mechanics, and of course her history required some revamping. However, her essential personality, and the dynamic of "yes, she's a child, but she can toss forklifts around!" remain.
I began just running her around the city, quietly doing missions, and running up to help any heroes she encountered on the streets, regardless of how outclassed she was. This led to some interresting RP situations, including a group in Perez Park who stopped what they were doing to escort her back to Galaxy City because none of them were comfortable with the idea of running around a hazard zone with a five year old. Eventually, she ran into someone who took her to NPI, and she found a permanent home in the city.
Contents |
Affiliations
She was formerly a student at the New Porter Institute for Psychical Research. After the school was shut down, she followed most of the faculty and staff in founding the Templars of the Abbey.
While the Templars have become a surrogate family for her, she would consider herself closest to Melissa Sverund (The Startling Skilla) and Kara Reynolds-Dengo (The Valiant Dazzling Diamond), and they do their best to make sure she stays out of the worst of the trouble in the city. She is currently living with and under the care of Kara and Lucianna te Addo, the hero and supermodel known as Pin-Up.
No villain groups appear to have a particular interest in her (in fact, few villains she has faced will ever speak about being defeated by her), she seems to harbor a particular fear/dislike of the Rikti. This has softened in the past few months, but her feelings on the invaders remain decidedly negative.
Personality
Katrina is generally upbeat, happy to meet new people, and even happier to leap in where angels fear to tread. It is hard to keep her dispirited for long, possibly because she doesn't think far enough into the future to be worried or depressed about things. She is quite polite to adults (this was drilled into her from a very young age) and usually obedient, but sometimes a stubborn streak crops up (such as running off to Paragon City to fight the "bad men" when her guardians weren't looking).
She is a studious child, and does well in school; of course, if she didn't, she wouldn't be allowed out of the house to do hero things. Thus she can have a tendancy to rush through matters academic, relying on her natural intelligence, in order to get through to what she considers "the important stuff". At the moment, this is adequate for the intellectual challenges of elementary school.
Powers
Unlike most mutants, who always seem to gain their powers around puberty, Katrina has had her abilities (albeit in an extremely weak form) since shortly after her birth. All manifestations of her powers find their base in her ability to manipulate gravity. It began with moving small objects around the house (putting things out of her reach never worked...), but eventually grew in strength so that now she can lift/move objects many times more massive than herself through deftly manipulating the gravitational fields around them.
Her control over her gravatic powers is extremely fine, and is capable of very tiny, extremely low-powered exertion of them, bordering on telekinesis. Generally, such precise control only gets utilized while playing; moving small toys remotely, etc.
Gravity Control
With the strength of her current control over gravity, she is capable of incapacitating foes in a net of rapidly varying gravity fields. This can slow and disorient even the hardiest of super-powered foes. Failing that, she can always propel a derelict car at them.
Force Fields
Katrina's power over gravity allows her to make sudden, strong, and drastic changes in the orientation of the local gravitational field. These changes are strong enough to deflect the trajectories of bullets, and even bend the course of attacks that are energy-based.
Additional Powers
Katrina is able to bend space to such an extent that the distance between two locations is greatly shortened. While she usually just uses this for popping around town, with concentration she is able to shift herself extremely long distances (i.e. beyond the scope of the in-game world); this is how she was able to "run away" from home and spend time battling villany in Paragon City, and still return home before her guardians noticed she was missing. The experience is very draining, however.
Recently, she has also managed to mostly nullify the effects of gravity on herself, and pull herself gently through the air. She takes a disproportionate amount of delight in doing this.
Abilities
Aside from her control over gravity, she has few notable abilities beyond those of a normal elementary school student. She is an extremely intelligent child (though still a child), and has inherited some of the speed, endurance, and strength of her mutant parents.
Weaknesses and Limitations
For all her powers and precociousness, she's still just an eight-year old girl. She has a more simplistic black-and-white view of the world than an adult. And while she is very intelligent and has been exposed to things that most children have not, she does not have the experience and understanding that adult heroes do.
Equipment
As a small child, she doesn't have much equipment that she carries around with her that is of much practical use. She is very careful to always be sure she takes her communicator with her, since the adults always get nervous when they can't keep track of her.
She does keep a clothes pin handy, though, for when she has to venture into the sewers after bad guys. That way at least she doesn't have to smell them.
Character History
Early Life
Katrina was born on the last day of November in 1998, while her parents were serving a brief tour at the Pentagon. By the time she was 8 months old, she showed the first signs of her powers; she would instinctively pull small objects to herself when she wanted them. She would never cry when she dropped her pacifier; it would simply leap back to her before it reached the ground. Obviously, this made merely putting things out of her reach useless, and her parents were kept quite busy childproofing the house from a toddler whose "reach" far exceeded theirs.
Shortly after her powers began to manifest, her parents were transfered across the country to California, the first of a series of moves in the first few years of her life that would take them to Germany, Italy, and Texas. She grew rapidly, and as she grew the strength and precision of her power did as well. She swiftly developed a very fine control over gravitational fields, to the point that it could almost be considered telekinesis, but was still limited to moving things of only a few pounds in mass. Her parents constantly emphasized to her the importance of using her powers responsibly and appropriately, and she tried very hard to do so.
The Rikti War
To be added later
A Child Comes to Paragon City
One evening in May of 2004, Katrina saw a 60 Minutes special report on "Paragon City, the City of Heroes". It detailed the response to Statesman's call for a new generation of heroes, the threats facing them in the city, and the process by which Freedom Corps was licensing and training new volunteers. She paid rapt attention to the entire story, and asked her guardian many questions about it during the commercial breaks.
The following day, when she was supposed to be taking a nap, she instead exerted all her strength, bending the fabric of space and time and emerging near the Freedom Corps headquarters in Galaxy City. She immediately set out to get hold of an application and become a licensed hero. This was none to easy, as hero licenses aren't just handed out to unaccompanied five year olds, and she knew that if she weren't back home when her nap was supposed to be over, she would get in big trouble.
With the single-minded determination of the very young, she eventually got hold of the paperwork, puzzled her way through all the hard words on the forms, and got the Back Alley Brawler to sign it. (In Mr. White's defense, he'd had a long day of new heroes constantly bugging him about whether they could train up yet, where the Lost were in King's Row, whether he could use some of his influence to help them, etc. and thought he was just signing an autograph for a small child...) With an official license finally in her hand, Katrina set forth to do her part in making all the bad people go away, so that her Mommy and Daddy could finally come home again.
For the next couple of months, she would teleport herself to Paragon City during her naptime, or early in the morning, or some other time when her guardians were sure she was perfectly safe and not requiring supervision. There she would stop Skulls and Hellions mugging people on the streets, familiarize herself with the city, and make herself known to the people at Freedom Corps (generally as the polite little girl that was so interested in heroes). She also kept her ears open when Freedom Corps representatives handed out assignments to other heroes, and occasionally would beat them to the location and take on the Clockwork infestation, Council base, etc. on her own, or would quietly pick up assignments that other heroes turned down.
A Child Comes to the New Porter Institute
This double life could not continue indefinitely; Katrina was lucky to carry it off as well as she did for as long as she did. Over the course of the next couple months, her guardians almost caught her reappearing in her room after a mission several times. They would lose track of her, only to have her show up again just as they were starting a frantic search for her. And there were those occasional cuts, bruises, and scrapes to explain away...
It is not known how she managed to get past the Paragon Police Department checkpoint and into Perez Park. While police regulations are clear that registered heroes may be admitted to hazard zones with a valid Hero ID and security level check with Freedom Corps, they remain silent on whether that applies to heroes who have not yet started kindergarden. The subsequent Internal Affairs investigation did clear the officers on duty of any neglegence.
What is known is that two heroes, Bionic and Erich Von Hase, encountered Katrina as she ran up to help them in a fight against a dozen members of the Skulls gang. While grateful for the help, neither hero was comfortable letting a child run around the streets of a hazard zone, even with their protection. To Katrina's great disappointment, they escorted her back to the safety of Galaxy City before returning to their patrol.
The incident caused a minor scandal for the PPD, Freedom Corps, and the Back Alley Brawler as subsequent investigations brought the scope of Katrina's activities to light. People at the Department of Defense school that was responsible for looking after her while her parents were deployed overseas, and at Freedom Corps, lost their jobs. A number of lawsuits were filed all around, alleging child endangerment.
Erich Von Hase saw potential in the child at the center of this controversy, this child who wanted to be a hero and wouldn't take no for an answer. He brought the matter to the attention of friends at the New Porter Institute for Psychical Research. Thus it came about that an interview was arranged between Katrina and the Institute's founder and headmaster, Galen "Mentalis" McCormack.
The end result of this interview was that NPI, making an exception in accepting an applicant so young, offered to board Katrina at its Galaxy City facility, provide her with an education, assist her in developing and controling her powers, and supervise her licensed heroic activities. Over the objections of several DoD agencies, her parents gave their consent from their overseas post, and Katrina came to Paragon City to stay.
Life at the New Porter Institute
She spent the next year and a half (roughly) as a student and resident of NPI, where she entered Kindergarden and helped patrol the streets in her free time. She got to know, work with, and learn from many of the faculty, staff, and older students, such as Jack Garret, Vandellia, Anom, Cale Reynard, Ellie Reynard, Jada Austen, Mazin Wystan, Cassandra Nightshade, Adamilia Product-Brenning, Andy Brenning, and Ariel. She also got the opportunity to work with a number of the Freedom Phalanx while tagging along with other members of NPI.
All that came to an end in the late summer and fall of 2005. First, a number of faculty and students died in accidents or the line of duty. Then Leonardo di Meo, former Outcast and NPI student, staged a breakout from the Zig and returned to his criminal ways. When members of NPI went after him to retrieve him, his brutal actions resulted in a scandal and the Young Mutants' Foundation, the funding source that supported NPI, found its money drying up, eventually forcing the school to close its doors and the students returned to their families or took up lives of their own. Finally, in late October, the school building itself was completely destroyed by a powerful arcane force from the sky. No injuries were reported, as the building and all surrounding structures were vacant at the time, all residents having been evacuated for one reason or another. The Nemesis Council claimed responsibility for the destruction.
A number of the older NPI students left to join Vandellia at SDI - Wolfcry Division. Other students and faculty followed Galen to his new bar & grill in King's Row, the Abbey, and began congregating there, forming a new supergroup, the Templars of the Abbey. Katrina was one of these.
The Templars of the Abbey
To be added later
The Second Rikti Invasion
To be added later
Recent Events
I'll get to all the rest of this eventually.
Trivia
- Her cat often accompanies her in her crime-fighting activities.
- Seems to have a hard time keeping track of a pair of shoes for longer than five minutes.
- All in-character dialog is rendered in lower case, to imply her smaller, childlike voice.
This article about a character is a stub -- a small, but growing, work in progress. If you're the creator of this character, why not consider expanding it?
