Torch of Glory
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| Torch of Glory in Pocket D | |
| Torch of Glory | |
| Player: | |
| Origin: | Mutant |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Corruptor |
| Threat Level: | 50 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Confidential |
| Known Aliases: | Glory, Glor |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | 29 |
| Height: | 5’10” |
| Weight: | 120# |
| Eye Color: | Blue |
| Hair Color: | Blonde |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | Wanted in U.S., current passport from Etoile Islands |
| Occupation: | Thief |
| Place of Birth: | Denver, Colorado |
| Base of Operations: | Rogue Isles, Pocket D |
| Marital Status: | Confidential |
| Known Relatives: | Confidential |
| Known Powers | |
| Fire Blast/Thermal Radiation/Mace Mastery | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Computer hacker and Safecracker | |
| Equipment | |
| Targeting Reticule, Gauntlets, Loogie Gun, and Watson | |
| No additional information available. | |
Contents |
Background
Glory grew up the only child of well-to-do parents in Denver, Colorado. She fell in love with skiing at an early age and dreamed of competing for the US Olympic Ski Team. Glory wanted to bring home the gold so much that most of her younger years were spent at Winter Park honing her skills on the slopes. However, her dream ended not long after her sixteenth birthday when her mutation manifested. Since meta-humans were not allowed to compete against normal humans in the Olympic games, Glory had to shelve her original plans and find something else to do with her life.
As she gained control of her powers, Glory decided to turn a negative into a positive. Using her powers as a superhero to get some fame and fortune had more than a little appeal to her, so once she got to college, she donned a red suit and began fighting crime. The combination of her fire based powers and her childhood dreams of Olympic gold gave her the perfect superhero handle: Torch of Glory.
After a few beginners’ mistakes, Glory got the hang of her new job. She began as a solo act, but eventually worked with a few of the other local heroes. Her most frequent teammate was Mr. Powerhouse, another mutant possessing super strength. The two quickly became regular partners and not long after were a romantic couple.
Torch of Glory and Mr. Powerhouse continued to make a name for themselves as local superheroes in the Denver area. However, the Mile High City wasn’t paying them the same sort of money a hero can make in places like Paragon City, so they soon found themselves this side of flat broke. To make matters worse, after an interview they did with the local press, “The Power and the Glory” also became the target of the local anti-mutant activists who condemned them as troublemaking vigilantes who should leave crime fighting to the police.
It was all too much for Glory to take. She made a deal with a local safecracker to learn the trade and started moonlighting as a thief. Glory started stealing from suspected criminals and rolling drug dealers for cash. Mr. Powerhouse suspected his partner was the culprit in this newest crime wave and eventually managed to catch her in the act. The resulting fight left Mr. Powerhouse missing an eye and Torch of Glory a wanted criminal. She quickly disappeared while Mr. Powerhouse supposedly developed a drinking problem and retired.
Torch of Glory soon resurfaced in northern Nevada at a “no-tell” motel. She was ambushed by two super-powered bounty hunters who had unknowingly bitten off more than they could chew. Unfortunately for Glory, the bounty hunters were outside of the medical teleportation network and died from their burns. Now wanted for murder, Glory fled to the east coast where she found work as a thief and enforcer for the Family. After refusing to act as a doxy for the resident Underboss, Glory left her next score to find a hero waiting for her, a hero whose heat based powers made him all but immune to Glory’s attacks. Beaten senseless, Glory was turned over to the police. She was being held in the Zig waiting for extradition to Nevada when the Arachnos forces staged one of their now infamous jail breaks.
Seizing the chance, Glory escaped and started working as a freelancer in the Rogue Isles. For a brief period, she was a member of a paramilitary outfit working for a faction of the Arachnos organization. However, she quickly grew disillusioned with the constant infighting between her teammates and resigned her position. Within days of her resignation, Glory was approached by Natasha Nadir. The two quickly became drinking buddies and friends.
Natasha convinced Glory to apply to Anathema. She was accepted and has remained with the organization ever since. Lately, Glory has become very focused on her career as a thief. She is rarely at Pocket D these days and even her closest friends do not see her for weeks at a time. Glory has been very secretive when it comes to details about her recent scores. She has implied that she has made contact with a new underground fencing operation for high priced technology and has been selling to them rather than her usual fences. Glory has not denied the speculation that some of her recent burglaries may have been against Arachnos targets that could get her in trouble with the Arbiters.
Affiliations
Personality
Glory has a very upbeat personality. She is often friendly, funny, and helpful. Glory has a snarky and frequently crude sense of humor and is not above saying or doing something outrageous to shock her friends. In many ways, she thinks of herself as a fallen hero rather than a super villain. Crime to her is just a job and since she is usually robbing “bad people,” she has rationalized that in the end she is doing more good than harm. In other words, she thinks of herself as a modern-day Robin Hood, but in reality Glory tends to steal from the rich and gives to herself.
Since the deaths in Nevada, Glory has been very careful not to kill anyone. She considers herself a professional thief, not an assassin. On the other hand, she will not stop another villain from killing someone. She rationalizes this by thinking that if she was not the one to deal the killing blow, then she is still morally on the high ground. However, if her freedom or life were in danger, Glory would not hesitate to use lethal force. It should be noted that Glory is far less concerned about pulling her punches with those she considers “non-human,” like most vampires, Coralax, and demons.
Under the sunny personality resides a methodical, intelligent, and selfish woman. As long as things are going her way, Glory is a pleasant and generous person to have around. When things are going against her, Glory’s true colors come out. At her core, Glory is greedy as sin. She wants it all and she wants it now. Her concerns come first, all others are a distant second.
Glory has worked to develop her professional skills. She has become a good planner, a passable hacker, knowledgeable regarding security systems, and a competent safecracker. Glory is a good fighter, but combat is not her specialty. She is careful not to let people know how smart she is until a certain level of trust has been built. Her concern for her personal safety borders on the paranoid.
Powers
Glory has two separate, but related, mutant powers. The first is a specialized form of telekinesis. She can lift and move herself and anything her body produces by thought alone. For example, if Glory spits she can move, shape, and change the saliva with her mind.
By using her telekinesis Glory can fly. She can carry approximately fifty additional pounds of weight and still fly easily. Beyond fifty pounds and she has difficulty maintaining any altitude and looses most of her maneuverability. Any additional weight over one hundred pounds and Glory is grounded.
Glory’s body-centric telekinesis gives her finer control over her autonomic functions, particularly her sweat glands. This is critical for her second mutation, which is that her body produces a complex chemical compound that Glory can telekinetically alter to produce several effects. She can alter the substance’s composition to cause it to burn, accelerate tissue growth, flush most poisons out of a person’s bloodstream, and mix it with particles in the air to form a kind of body shield for her allies. While the substance is in all of her bodily fluids, the highest concentrations are in her blood and sweat. Glory’s fire is not a product of pyrokinesis, she literally sweats the fuel, telekinetically changes its composition, and throws it around.
This compound in her sweat was called “phlogiston” by one of the lab techs in the Zig, naming it after the mythical fuel used by dragons to breath fire. In spite of the name, the substance is not at all magical. Glory can and occasionally does increase the amount of sweat she produces, usually from her palms, to fuel her powers. However, she typically only does this in emergencies. There is only so much extra liquid Glory can spare before she runs the risk of becoming dehydrated, so she stores a supply of sweat in sponge filled tubes inside of her gauntlets (see Equipment).
Glory’s mutation has several other interesting minor effects. First, while not super humanly strong, Glory is quite a bit stronger than a normal human of the same weight and height. She can easily press 200 pounds over her head. The second minor effect is the ability to alter her sleeping patterns almost at will. As long as she gets between six and eight total hours of sleep in a 24 hour period, Glory can divide her sleeping hours any way she chooses without any physical or psychological consequences.
The third minor effect is that Glory’s body flushes foreign chemicals out of her system at an accelerated rate. Whether its aspirin, poison, or cold medicine, her body will respond and neutralize them usually in less than an hour. The only exception is alcohol, which is the last minor effect of Glory’s mutant physiology. Like a normal human, when Glory ingests alcohol it is absorbed through the stomach wall. But instead of hanging around in her blood stream until her liver filters it out, the phlogiston compound in her blood grabs the ethanol molecules and incorporates them. This means Glory can drink truly staggering amounts of alcohol, far in excess of the amount where normal human would suffer from alcohol poisoning, with no ill effects.
Weaknesses
Aside from her equipment, Glory has no special resistances against physical harm. She is good at hiding her thoughts, but has no real defense against psionics either. One thing that Glory is particularly vulnerable to is long exposure to heat.
Glory can make the phlogiston compound in her system work like a natural flame retardant, so she is very hard to burn, but her body has to produce it in large amounts for it to have that effect. This means that Glory runs a huge risk of dehydration if she is fighting off a prolonged fire attack or fighting in a hot environment.
Equipment
Glory is a firm believer that even the best mutation can be made better with a little technological assistance. As a result, she uses several devices to enhance her abilities. The first one most people notice is the ever-present targeting reticule over her right eye.
Glory’s targeting reticule is linked to computer chips in her gauntlets, giving her the ability to pinpoint targets for her fire blasts. The reticule also has telescoping capacity, night vision, and a scrolling data feed feature. The basic technology for the reticule is Rikti based, allowing her a limited ability to see invisible objects.
Her reinforced plastic gauntlets have several sponge filled tubes where she can keep a reserve of her sweat. The palms of the gauntlets are made from a porous, flexible material that allows for fine finger control and allows Glory’s sweat to pass easily.
She also uses a magnetic resonance body shield she got while working for Black Scorpion’s organization. Two other devices she acquired from Black Scorpion’s labs were a wolf spider mace that launches tangle grenades (Glory calls it her “loogie gun”) and Watson.
Watson is Glory’s Arachnobot Disruptor. She has extensively altered Watson’s programming to ensure the robot responds only to her and to keep nosy Arachnos operatives from using Watson as a means of spying on Glory’s activities.
Glory also has a magic staff that bleeds off the demon blood in her system in order to fire a blast of Netherworld energy. She got the staff from a business associate who neglected to tell her that it would be mystically linked to her so she could never get rid of it. Glory still has not forgiven him.
Trivia
She is a health nut and works out daily.
Glory has a tattoo on the left cheek of her bottom. She’s been known to show it in Pocket D when she’s in the mood to shock someone.
She has a personal record of robbing five banks in Founder’s Falls in under two hours.
Glory had an ongoing vendetta with a Longbow Officer. They finally ended it by fighting a duel that Glory barely won.
Glory has contacts in the Verandi crime family.
She is huge fan of Sherlock Holmes stories.
