One of the most famous "good guy" mutants, at least in America. Headmistress and founder of the North Cascades Academy, author of books on a variety of subjects ranging from disability rights to the Cambrian explosion, mutant rights activist, and part-time superhero.
Alternate Character Interpretation: why doesn't she just mind-control Victoria Paracelsus into being good? Does she value free will that much? Is it out of a desire not to betray her friend's trust? Or does she believe that the mutant rights movement needs a "bad cop"?
Asian and Nerdy: along with her interests in science and psychology, she's a big fan of the Discworld novels.
Beware the Nice Ones: she's a nonviolent and basically kind person (although she can be rather manipulative), but she's capable of doing some really nasty things with her telepathy given sufficient motivation.
Silk Hiding Steel: she tries to live up to the ideal of an Actual PacifistProper Lady (with, in practice, a little more snark than is strictly genteel) - but if she needs to, she can make hardened assassins think they're kittens.
Team Mom: to her students. She shares this role with Shoshi.
Technical Pacifist: possibly qualifies as Actual Pacifist if you don't consider non-consensual mental intervention (and the occasional threat to run over people's feet) to be violence.
One of Galatea and Victoria's old college friends, a kind, motherly Jewish girl who happens to be over seven feet tall, green, scaly, and superhumanly strong. She teaches the youngest children at the North Cascades Academy.
Beauty to Beast: unlike some of her fellow Cute Mutant Monster Girls, Shoshi looked like a normal, modestly attractive human teenage girl until her mutation activated. She had a rough early adolescence.
Beware the Nice Ones: she is gentle, but implacable. She normally only shows her truly scary side to Nazis, anyone who threatens "her" kids, and Lazarus when he's acting up.
Blessed with Suck: her powers themselves aren't undesirable, but there are some inconvenient aspects. Modern American society is just not set up for giantesses with tails and digitigrade feet.
The Anti-Nihilist: on occasion. "When I was pretty young, I realized that being a good person gets you nowhere. Then I saw more of the world, and I learned that bad guys get their share of crap, too, so really, why not do the right thing?"
Bare-Fisted Monk: or bare-clawed if she really doesn't like you.
Never Gets Drunk: she processes alcohol very quickly, thanks to her healing factor, and enjoys trolling her friends by volunteering to be the designated driver.
Super Soldier: she was drafted into a program to create these, and later unceremoniously kicked out when the resident Mad Doctors discovered that her blindness was incurable. (Although she claims that it was to make room for the government-mandated number of Francophones.)
A purple-skinned Paragon of Manliness who also happens to be an accomplished scientist. He teaches chemistry and physics at the Academy and works as a superhero on the side. He's dating Anders.
Amazing Technicolor Population: he's naturally purple, although, like an octopus, he has some ability to change his skin color.
The Academy's shop teacher, handyman, and resident tech expert. He's a mutant with an enhanced ability to understand and communicate with machinery. While his projects do what they're supposed to and generally do it well, his intuitive style can cause some complications when other people try to repair, modify, or reverse-engineer his work. He's Jake's boyfriend.
Badass Bookworm: while his mutation has no combat applications, he's pretty strong and can take care of himself in a fight using his mundane skills.
Boisterous Bruiser: to an extent, although not quite as out there as Jake.
One of Galatea and co.'s allies, who is, as her name might suggest, a lepidoptera-person. Her real first love is the performing arts, and her powers aren't particularly adapted to combat, but she manages to make herself useful.
Bizarre Human Biology: she has modified taste buds on her fingers and toes, can turn her tongue into a proboscis, and has a limited ability to breathe through her skin, never mind the wings and antennae.
The Chick: she's not a combat machine, and her interests are very girly.
Hot Teacher: she teaches acting and dance and directs the Academy's school plays.
Little Bit Beastly: wings, antennae, tongue can convert into a proboscis, and can taste with her hands and feet and feel vibrating air currents with her hair.
Helix's field leader. A tomboyish Lebanese-American military geek who can absorb various forms of energy and uses this to fuel her other powers. Comes back from almost-death a lot.
Mood Ring Eyes: it's a power level indicator. Green = low, Golden Brown = medium, Orange = should probably stay out of the sun until she gets a chance to bleed some energy off.
One of the Boys: she's a military Otaku without much talent for, or interest in, conventionally girly things.
Only Mostly Dead: no matter what condition her body's in, if she's charged up enough, she'll probably be able to recover.
Super Toughness: fire, electricity, lasers, energy bolts, impact damage, and so forth only make her stronger. However, she can still be stabbed, strangled, or poisoned, although her powers make her more durable than a regular person.
An eccentric psychic with a deep desire to make sense of the world. Unfortunately, he lives in a comic book universe. Despite his frequent rants about how "science doesn't work that way!", he is a valued teammate and friend.
Ambiguous Disorder: It's not clear which of his quirks are due to his non-neurotypicality, or the result of imperfectly controlled telepathy and the psychological strain of living in a world that doesn't make sense, and what's simply personal eccentricity.
Comically Missing the Point: his belief that anti-mutant prejudice is due to the difficulty contemporary science has in satisfactorily explaining some mutant powers. (Because that's what bothers him.)
Good With Numbers: he's very good at figuring out trajectories and other sorts of practical geometry on the fly - which is very useful for a telekinetic.
Jack of All Stats: has useful amounts of power in all his psychic abilities, but he can't match the pure telepaths, pure kineticists, or pure diviners in their areas of expertise.
Only Sane Man: sees himself as such, and is not shy about saying so.
Naomi Lovelace's mutant younger sister, a young woman with high-functioning Williams Syndrome, enhanced hearing, and sound-manipulation powers. She's a professional singer and spent some time at the North Cascades academy as the pre-teen students' music teacher.
Why Couldn't You Be Different?: she has a mental disability that make math and spacial relations particularly hard for her. Her parents and her big sister are all brilliant engineers.
Elric Musashi Paracelsus-Xiao (Kensei)
Victoria and Galatea's genetically enhanced time-traveling cyborg mutant test-tube baby son from the future. He was sent back in time to prevent the event that led to his timeline becoming an apocalyptic hell-hole, and succeeded, but is now stranded in the early twenty-first century. He spent some time as Amalthea Lovelace's bodyguard.
Adorkable: although it takes most people a while to realize this.
Designer Babies: he was subject to prenatal genetic tinkering, which explains why he's so much larger and beefier than either of his biological parents, among other things.
Nineties Anti-Hero: subverted. He looks like one (without the bad anatomy), but is much more moral and pleasant to be around, if a bit socially awkward.
A very bright (if a bit funny-looking) Canadian orphan, adopted and educated by the Lovelaces as a sort of back-up heir/charity project. He's a field operative when necessary, although he prefers to stick to the technical side of things, as he dislikes violence.
One of the Academy's teenage students. He can psychically read the history of anything he touches, which, when applied to a dead body, includes what the subject experienced when alive.
A teenage student at the Academy with Super Speed. She was an athlete even before her powers developed, and compensates for her lost professional opportunities by taking as much advantage of her powers as possible. She's Rosamond Zdravetz's fraternal twin sister.
Fragile Speedster: by the standards of supers with enhanced physical abilities, but not in absolute terms. Thanks to her Required Secondary Powers, she's fairly sturdy.
Jerk With A Heartof Gold: she doesn't have much patience for... anything, really, and she thinks very highly of herself, but her heart's in the right place a fairly high percentage of the time.
Dani's fraternal twin sister. Rosamund has the ability to summon creatures out of books. She's gentler and less competitive than her sister, but potentially far more dangerous. (Suppose she started carrying around a volume of H. P. Lovecraft?)
Spell Book: she eventually gets a binder (and later, an e-reader) filled with passages relevant to all her favorite summons. It beats rummaging through a backpack full of paperbacks.
A sporty, earnest, evangelical Christian teenager with the ability to manipulate gravitational attraction. She's the daughter of a prominent pro-mutant-rights evangelical minister.
Ambiguously Gay: she's never been seriously interested in a boy (which she attributes to never having met the right one), and keeps getting involved in innocently homoerotic moments with other girls. Since Tamar has no gaydar, she hasn't caught on to this enough to angst about it.
Love Freak: she's incredibly earnest, rather sheltered, and a bit narrow-minded in some areas, as well as genuinely friendly and nice and determined to do the right thing.
In the great tradition of Charles Atlas-esque origin stories, Dante Wilder was a sickly, imaginative boy with dreams of adventure, who became a nigh-unkillable, super-fast, super-strong paragon of MANLINESS when his powers manifested. (But he's still a dork with dreams of adventure. They're just more practical now.)
The Power of the Sun: since his powers manifested, he needs a certain level of sunlight exposure to stay in good working order. Unfortunately, he goes to school in Northwestern Washington. Fortunately, he lives in the age of sun lamps.
Wish Fulfillment: in-universe. From squishy bookworm with dreams of epic adventure, to superhero-in-training.
Melit Zza'aktar (Damselfly)
A young "princess" (immature queen) of the Meliai, a mildly insectoid alien race. She's at the Academy to learn about earth culture as well as develop her natural psychic powers. She's a very nice girl in most respects, but her table manners take some getting used to.
Common Mary Sue Traits: she's a princess, she has sparkly wings, and she attracts the love and devotion of others without necessarily doing anything to deserve it (thanks to her pheromones).
Glamour: Meliai queens all give off pheromones that create Undying Loyalty in their hivemates. Since Melit is still young and is around another species, the effect is not that strong, but it still encourages (although not compels) those around her to like and want to protect her. She can also manipulate her pheromones to induce other emotional effects.
Older Than They Look: she's rather petite and lightly built, which combined with her lack of endowments makes her look like a middle school student, although she's well into her adolescence by Meliai standards.
An easy-going teenager with the power to physically adapt to survive any danger. This is originally completely out of his hands, but he later gains some control over it. Lucas enjoys pseudo-philosophical conversations and weird, trippy anime.
Angst? What Angst?: despite all the physical punishment he takes as the student team's designated tank, he never seems traumatized or even seriously apprehensive.
Stone Wall: he's amazingly durable, but his powers are primarily defensive in nature.
Crystal Graves (Lumina)
Crystal would like everyone to know that she does not want to be here with all you freaks. A former cheerleader and high school Queen Bee, whose social status back home took a sharp nosedive when her blonde hair turned green and she manifested the ability to create light projections. Since she was good at being normal, she bitterly resents her involuntary descent into freakdom, and she resents her fellow mutant students for not deferring to her the way her pre-manifestation classmates did.
Alpha Bitch: was this at her old school, before she manifested. She still has the attitude, but mutant kids are less easily impressed.
Cursed with Awesome: she has a relatively attractive physical mutation, and a harmless, interesting, potentially controllable power, but all she can do is Wangst about the loss of her life as a "normal" alpha female.
Jerkass Woobie: borderline example. She lost her social status and all her old friends when she manifested and then transferred to the Academy, and she's completely out of her depth in the mutant community. However, most of her current loneliness and unpopularity comes from her hostile attitude and refusal to adapt to her altered circumstances.
Light Is Not Good: she's not evil, but she's a psychological mess and very self-centered.
Power Incontinence: one of the reasons she's such a ball of mopery. Considering what some other mutants have to deal with, however, nobody is terribly sympathetic over her tendency to start glowing under stress.
A young gentleman with pink hair, a strong theatrical streak, and the ability to understand any language and hijack the communication centers of other people's minds, which proves surprisingly versatile. It's suspected that his birth name was Dwayne, but nobody calls him that.
Agent Peacock: he's camper than a row of sequined tents and has pink hair, but do not underestimate him.
An altered clone of Hellcat who was created by a Canadian supersoldier program. However, when the program lost funding, she was adopted by the head research scientist and actually had a chance at a fairly normal childhood. Kat's a lot like her genetic progenitor in some ways, but without the psychopathy.
Clones Are People Too: since Canada had (for the moment) gone out of the business of raising super soldiers from scratch, she got a chance to live her own life. Her creators weren't looking for an exact replica of Kat's genetic progenitor in any case, however, since Lucy Fraser is a sociopathic loose cannon.
One of the Academy's handful of preteen students. The young son of the governor of British Columbia, whose psychic gifts manifested prematurely after he was seriously hurt in an "accident." In other words, he's a Bran Stark expy.
Constantly Curious: he's a curious little kid, but physically investigating things has become harder since he got hurt.
Genius Cripple: he tends to be the "idea guy" for the little kids' adventures, with Simon and Rena providing the muscle and Adina providing the tech.
He Knows Too Much: the irony being that the testimony of an eight-year-old who had no context for what he was seeing would have been a lot less incriminating than the fallout of trying to murder the kid.
Wheelchair Woobie: at first. His life does improve, although the mobility issues remain.
Simon Halevy (Spring Heeled Jack)
Daemonette's much younger half-brother, who has a similar appearance and power set. One of Shoshannah's students, and friends with Liam. One of the Lilim.
An imaginative little girl who enjoys building Homemade Inventions out of material she finds around the house. The funny thing is, they work, at least when she builds them. One of Shoshannah's students.
Once, Ashley was a very bright but otherwise quite ordinary little girl, apart from her dormant psychic powers. Then she was abducted by an Evil Sorcerer who tried to use her as a physical vessel for the demon he was summoning. Ashley's considerable strength of will (augmented by her psychic potential) let her retain control of her own body, and the otherworldly contact heightened her supernatural powers. However, a fragment of demonic consciousness embedded itself in her personality and continues to act as an internal shoulder devil. She's a Lilim.
Child Prodigy: she's quite adept at both computers and magic for a grade schooler.
Cute and Psycho: she was a Cheerful Child-Innocent Prodigy hybrid who got a demon put in her head, so a certain amount of incongruous behavior is inevitable. At least she's not normally violent.
Poke the Poodle: how she reconciles her demonic desire to do "evil" with her wish to stay on good terms with her friends and teammates and not actually hurt anyone.
Token Evil Teammate: compared to the rest of the younger students, although she's poodle-poking Chaotic Neutral in practice.
Troll: although she has her reasons for it. Zul-Baphon demands an outlet, and expressing her evil side on the internet keeps it from ruining Ash's meatspace life.
Spike
A young boy with porcupine-like quills growing out of his body. His parents are unknown, and after his quills grew in, he was passed around the foster care system like a hot potato until someone got the bright idea to send him to the academy's elementary class.
Blessed with Suck: having a superpower that keeps people at a distance is particularly awkward if you're a small child and not in a position to go off and be a hermit somewhere.
Cute Bruiser: he's stronger and more durable than he looks.
A troubled young psychic with powerful illusion-projecting abilities. She comes from a highly-placed, highly dysfunctional family, and various older relatives often try to use her as a pawn in some evil scheme or another.
Power Incontinence: she tends to project without even noticing when she's under stress. She has a psychically insulated bedroom at the Academy so that her dreams wouldn't suck in everyone else on the floor.
Either the militant wing of the mutant rights movement, able and willing to do whatever's needed to protect mutantkind without having to worry about PR, or a bunch of Well-Intentioned Extremist superpowered terrorists. Founder and leader is Victoria Paracelsus.
Affably Evil: most members. Victoria doesn't want to work with a bunch of jerks if she can possibly help it.
Gratuitous Latin: Prodigium, in Latin, is an extraordinary event sent by the gods as a portent. Before the word became associated with child geniuses, "prodigy" was also used to describe human curiosities.
Heel Face Turn: most of them at least try being a good guy at some point, either following Victoria through the Heel Face Revolving Door or on their own initiative. For a few of them (like Daemonette), it sticks.
A mutant with biokinetic powers, and a friend of Galatea's since their college days, although there have been times when they've temporarily parted company over philosophical differences. (The most important of these being whether or not it's acceptable to subjugate the world to make it safe for unpopular minority groups.) Sort of a cross between the Magneto to Galatea's Xavier, the Dark Magical Girl to Tea's Magical Girl, and the Elphaba to Gala's Glinda.
Battle Ballgown: her costumes are normally based on a long, semi-formal dress that incorporates some type of light body armor and a skirt she can run in.
Broken Bird: she didn't develop her cynical worldview just to be edgy, let's put it that way.
Combat Medic: her powers are useful both for healing and for kicking ass.
Does Not Like Men: she had a mild case of this as a teenager, although she was willing to make exceptions. Encountering transphobic feminist scholarship when she was a university student shifted her more in the Humans Are Bastards direction.
Emperor Scientist: she wants to be one of these, and did get to rule a small nation for a while before the people of San Lorenzo showed their gratitude for the democratic reforms she had instituted by voting her out of office.
Evil Parents Want Good Kids: at least, she wouldn't mind if Rena and Shiro chose heroic or civilian careers (as long as they did something she considered a good use of their talents), and when they're not working against each other she's fine with the fact that Kensei's one of the good guys.
Freudian Excuse: experiencing how mainstream society treats members of ill-understood minority groups who aren't capable of blowing things up with their minds has had its impact on her view of mutant/genotypical relations.
Green Lantern Ring: biokinesis is amazingly versatile - all sorts of nonsense involving the physical form or physiology of a living or formerly living thing is potentially possible.
Heel Face Revolving Door: she goes through periods in which, for a variety of possible reasons (feels close to the edge of the slippery slope and wishes to pull back, misses her girlfriend, thinks that respectability would be better for her family/followers/subjects), she becomes a semi-law-abiding citizen and tries to defend mutant rights in nonviolent ways. Unfortunately, some glaring example of man's inhumanity to mutant frequently pushes her back into militant-mode.
Lady of Black Magic: has the demeanor and the fighting style, although she's not technically a mage.
Large Ham: mostly Played for Laughs, when she's trying to amuse Galatea by overacting. Occasionally completely serious.
One of Victoria's followers and proteges, who tends to follow her boss through the Heel Face Revolving Door. She's intense, determined, talented, and screwed up even by faux-Marvel superhuman standards.
Anti-Villain: mostly a Type 2, given her backstory.
Broken Bird: she makes Victoria look cheerful and emotionally open.
One of Victoria's followers, a gay geokinetic African-American former professional dancer turned superpowered mercenary turned evil minion turned superhero. Wherever he goes, he makes it his mission to provide a little style and tell his current bosses when they're being idiots.
A French-Canadian Jewish martial artist/teleporter, who, despite her adorably demonic appearance, was probably the least villainous member of the original Prodigium team. (She only joined in the first place because they had just saved her from a lynch mob, and her other employment options were rather low at the moment.) Her Heel Face Turn seems to be agreeing with her. One of the Lilim.
Family legend states that this is trend in the Halevy family is the result of one of Emmie's ancestors marrying an Ascended Demoness who made a High Heel Face Turn. The truth is slightly less exotic. (In that the "demoness" was a nigh-immortal shapeshifting human mutant rather than an extradimensional spirit-entity.)
Combat Stilettos: she has digitigrade feet, so the right kind of heels actually fit better than flats or combat boots, and it's not as if running is an issue for someone who can teleport.
Dark Chick: she's a teleporting demon-ninja-acrobat in a group dominated by superficially normal-looking caster types. As the only melee specialist, overlaps with The Brute, although she doesn't fit the personality profile any more than Terry.
Dark Is Not Evil: even when she was technically an anti-villain, she was a very nice girl.
Easily Forgiven: no one seems to hold her past as "un peu d'un terroriste" against her.
Jewish and Nerdy: she has a surprising fondness for geek culture. (Maybe not that surprising, since she did name herself after a Warhammer 40000 monster.)
Stripperiffic: particularly in her Prodigium days, but even as a hero, she never really gets the hang of wearing pants (at least not the non-painted on kind.)
Technical Pacifist: only joined Prodigium on the condition that Victoria never order her to kill anyone. (But kicking them in the face is okay, apparently.)
Zettai Ryouiki: many of her outfits. See the above-mentioned lack of pants.
Celeste Grangerford (Savant)
Prodigium's telepath. An amiable but rather amoral woman who's more concerned with perfecting her own abilities and having a good time than all this ideological kerfluffle.
Why Couldn't You Be Different?: at first, her family wished she were thinner and made more of an effort to fit in and be liked by the right people. Then her powers manifested...
One of Victoria's followers, a Central American mutant with the ability to telekinetically control small objects and a serious grudge against the Hand of Ares.
Attack Its Weak Point: his standard combat modus operandi. It's amazing what you can do with a handful of high velocity ball bearings flung at just the right spots.
Heart Is An Awesome Power: he can't control any one object weighing more than he could lift comfortably with one hand. However, even quite large constructs can be sabotaged if you displace enough of their small moving parts.
A recent recruit, who in a way fills Daemonette's "unusual looking, upbeat young martial artist" slot, although she's not a true Suspiciously Similar Substitute. She later develops into Prodigium's infiltration specialist.
Another new arrival. Alice has the ability to manipulate the powers of others in various ways (including eventually learning to copy them herself and temporarily transfer abilities to others), which makes her weak on her own but an excellent team player. She is a fervent believer in Prodigium's cause, or, more accurately, in what she considers Prodigium's cause to be. She's a useful member of the team, although her "Communist LARPer" tendencies can get a bit silly.
An androgynous, completely non-powered computer genius who joins Prodigium because they really do believe that Victoria's political ideals would make a better world overall, and because they enjoy meeting unusual people and like the idea of rebelling against repressive society. The mutants don't quite know what to make of this.
Victoria's adopted daughter. Rena is a powerful telekinetic whom Prodigium broke out of a Japanese research facility. She initially had some difficulty adjusting to life outside an isolation chamber, but is currently doing very well, at least by the standards of the setting.
Animesque: she's a tiny, adorable former science experiment with vast supernatural powers and technicolor hair.
Creepy Child: initially. There's nothing innately wrong with her, but she had some serious social and emotional problems due to her upbringing, and massive psychic abilities on top of that.
Enfante Terrible: it takes her a while to grasp why it's so wrong to throw around the people who annoy you like ragdolls.
Expy: inspired by Mariko from Elfen Lied, although Rena isn't as casually violent.
Happily Adopted: once she and Victoria get used to each other.
Victoria's teenage adopted son, the product of a Japanese Super Soldier project. He's a a good kid, really, even if he does look like a Square Enix villain in the making.
Ambiguously Gay: which, combined with his interest in the arts and samurai culture, makes Vick worry that he's going to grow up to be Yukio Mishima.
Defrosting Ice King: he starts out as a borderline Emotionless Boy, but warms up a little after being around people who actually care what he's thinking and feeling.
Mukokuseki: averted. He looks like a fairly ordinary, though unusually pretty and very athletic, Japanese teenager except for his hair and eye colors.
No Social Skills: has a tendency to either be unnecessarily formal or inappropriately blunt. To be fair, it's not like his previous existence gave him much time to socialize.
Alexander Rosewood's Occult Detective business, which has since taken on Michael Mendelssohn and Pilar Pawlowski and expanded its services a bit, to help people with a variety of unusual problems.
Guile Heroes: most of their work involves at least as much maneuvering and gathering information as spellcasting or martial arts.
Weirdness Magnet: both as individuals, and due to the sorts of cases they take on.
Alexander Rosewood
Founder of Rosewood Investigations. A nerdy mage who turned his Weirdness Magnet tendencies and innate inability to leave well enough alone into a fairly successful enterprise, at the cost of making his civilian life uncomfortably interesting.
Pilar Pawlowski had a promising career as a gymnast ahead of her, before an encounter with an Eldritch Abomination summoned by local supernatural gangsters cost Pilar her sight and left her attracting weirdness like Lodestone attracts stray paperclips on a bad day. (She did get enhanced senses out of the deal, which is something.) Since her very presence seemed to bring colorfully unpleasant matters to light whether she liked it or not, Pilar decided, in finest comic-book fashion, to exploit this by becoming a crusading journalist/costumed vigilante. She also sometimes helps out Rosewood Investigations as a researcher and backup fighter.
Raised Catholic: probably to be expected, since she's half-Polish, half-Mexican. Since her partners are both Jewish, she's Rosewood Investigations' source for holy water and Latin chanting when necessary.
Iron Woobie: has one of the more miserable backstories in the setting (genocide, human experimentation, and temporal dislocation), but has not yet suffered a complete mental breakdown, tried to kill himself, or turned evil.
Older Than They LookandYounger Than They Look, depending on how you calculate this. He was born almost ninety years ago, he's been "awake" for twenty-three years, and he looks like he's in his mid-to-late twenties.
Pilar Pawlowski's roommate and fellow journalist, who winds up taking up a lot of the mundane slack when P's off fighting vampire human traffickers or something as Nightshade. She didn't really ask for all this excitement, but Pilar is one of her dearest friends, and she copes surprisingly well.
Distress Ball: averted. She's not much of a fighter, but she's developed an instinct for when she should get out of the way.
Unfazed Everyman: Rosewood Investigations consists of a weirdness magnet ninja reporter with super senses, a mage, and a mutant cyborg. And then there's her.
Lovelace Enterprises
Naomi Lovelace (Iron Maiden)
A gazillionaire genius inventor/executive/costumed adventurer who can make working power armor out of old kitchen appliances but can't keep her own personal life in order. Amalthea Lovelace's big sister. She likes Art Deco, Technology Porn, and Dieselpunk.
Adorkable: has her moments, particularly when she's being a big nerd over something.
Alien Blood: since she got her nanomachine bone marrow, her blood sparkles a little in the right light.
Ambiguously Gay: tends to be seen this way in-universe, based on some flirtatious interaction with other women, her short hair, her habit of walking around in ribbed tank tops that show off her toned arms, and the fact that none of her heterosexual liaisons have lasted very long.
Broken Ace: "she had the rare ability to be both an awe-inspiring overachiever and a human trainwreck par excellence, at the same time."
Bunny-Ears Lawyer: is seen as such by those who know her in her business and scientific capacities, although by superhero standards she's not that weird.
"Have you ever considered not making your employees play dressup?"
"But Lucky looks so stylish in vintage!"
Cyborg: technically, although she has no obvious metallic bits and it's all ostensibly there for medical reasons. (Although giving her experimental nanite bone marrow the ability to let her talk to microwaves was pure Rule Of Cool on Naomi's end.)
Drink Order: gin martinis (until she gives up alcohol), very expensive mineral water, vast amounts of coffee.
Drunken Master: "Hey, remember that time we got trashed on vodka and Red Bull at college and built a perpetual motion machine?"
Unfortunately, her last little bout of inebriated tinkering involved opening a portal to another dimension and summoning an Eldritch Abomination. Ms. Lovelace has since stopped drinking.
Jerkass Woobie: in a way. She certainly has her faults, and the world loves to make her suffer.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She has a bad habit of thinking she knows what's best for everyone else and can be rather abrasive, but she means well, and is willing to give up a lot for what she believes is right.
Knight Templar Big Sister: she can be a bit too protective of Amalthea, although to be fair, she may just be Genre Savvy concerning the hazards of being related to a superhero.
Motor Mouth: when she's caffeinated up and geeking out over some shiny new piece of tech.
Odd Friendship: with Victoria, when Vick's behaving herself. As brilliant human trainwrecks with a shared interest in exotic technology, they have a surprising amount in common.
Old Shame: she spent approximately six months as a hardcore Ayn Rand fangirl when she was sixteen. And she was, unfortunately, kind of obnoxious about it.
Naomi and Amalthea's half-uncle - specifically, the son of their paternal grandfather and his much-younger second wife, a Brazilian fashion model. He's much younger than the girls' dad, and was something of a Cool Big Bro to his nieces during their childhoods.
Obfuscating Stupidity: if he let everyone know how competent he can be, people would keep dumping responsibilities on him, and he'd have no time to explore lost cities, romance beautiful ladies on yachts, or give his cars dangerous experimental modifications.
Odd Friendship: with Amalthea, due to their shared interest in music.
The granddaughter of Naomi's grandfather's Golden Age Chinese Friendly Enemy the Steel Dragon, who wishes to continue their family's association in a way that honors their ancestors' legacies. Naomi is less enthusiastic about the prospect, particularly since she didn't know Phoenix from Princess Azula before Phoenix decided it was time for their Epic Rivalry to commence.
Not So Different: Steel Phoenix and Iron Maiden are both very smart, not entirely organic, and fight by utilizing both skill and technology, and they're both fond of an aesthetic rooted in another era but not strictly historical - Naomi likes Diesel Deco, and Phoenix likes Wuxia.
Heart Is An Awesome Power: "slug powers" (specifically, her abilities to stick to walls and squeeze through small spaces) are surprisingly useful for getting in and out of places one shouldn't be.
Power Perversion Potential: she's incredibly flexible, has a limited ability to reshape the soft tissue of her body, she can form her slime secretions into long ropes (suitable for both Building Swings and impromptu bondage), and, as Lazarus puts it, she "sweats Astroglide."
Punny Name: "Ariolimax" is the scientific name for banana slugs.
Shrug of God: a character with some grounding in molluscan biology raised the issue of whether Ari was, like actual slugs, a Hermaphrodite. Lazarus said that a gentleman doesn't kiss and tell. That is all there is to say about it.
Weaksauce Weakness: subverted. Most people who know her "theme" assume that salt will melt her like the Wicked Witch of the West. She finds it mildly irritating at worst.
Lucy Fraser (Hellcat)
Yet another superpowered Canadian quasi-Cat Girl, and recurring thorn in Tomo's side.
Epic Fail: she once got taken down with an afghan. To be fair, the afghan was made from a very durable experimental synthetic spider silk, and it's hard to unhook curved claws from knitted material.
Faux Affably Evil: when she isn't in murder-mode, she can be fairly friendly and amusing. This doesn't stop her from having all the scruples of a rabid mink on PCP.
Fetish Fuel: in-universe. According to Lazarus (who admittedly has odd tastes), a three-way battle between her, Daemonette, and Kraken would be some platonic ideal of porn.
Unskilled, but Strong: compared to Tomo. While she is an experienced fighter, she relies more on her natural strength and speed, and doesn't have Tomo's formal martial arts training.
Tomo's off-and-on boyfriend, and, like her, a not-entirely-successful product of Canada's Cold War era Super Soldier program. He's a bit whimsical in the brainpan.
Abhorrent Admirer: to Shoshannah. She doesn't mind his physical imperfections or the ADD, but his sociopathic antics are a serious turn-off.
Beauty to Beast: in his twenties, he looked like a more muscular Benedict Cumberbatch. Then... thingschanged. Now he looks like a beefier version of Benedict Cumberbatch in the Creature makeup from Frankenstein.
Birds of a Feather: with Tomo. Go Team Unkillable-Canadians-Wielding-Sharp-Things!
Blessed with Suck: when your original immune system and your new healing factor don't like each other, the results are... unaesthetic. And also itchy.
Bunny-Ears Lawyer: it's a good thing he's so very good at stabbing people, as he'd have great difficulty holding a regular job in his current condition.
Butterface: male example. It's improved a little since Victoria fixed his healing factor, but he's still not going to be doing moisturizer commercials any time soon.
Freakiness Shame: Given his taste in women, he winds up trying to discourage such shame fairly often. Sometimes it helps, sometimes... not so much. In part, this depends on whether the lady considers "a half-insane Nightmare Fetishist finds me attractive" to be a preferable state of affairs to "no one could possibly find me attractive."
Freaky Is Cool: He seems to be attracted to women with visible mutations.
Friend to All Children: for some odd reason, the preteen class at the North Cascades Academy all adore him. Adina even made him a tinfoil hat so he could come over without giving the resident telepaths headaches.
Gallows Humor: "Ooh, I get the padded restraints. Classy."
Genius Ditz: he's a Cloudcuckoolander with severe ADHD and memory problems, and not very mature even at his most functional and relatively sane. However, he is an amazing fighter despite his lack of offensive superpowers, and has a knack for most kinds of kinesthetic learning.
Heroic Comedic Sociopath: he has a few aspects of this all the time, but being a true example is normally a transitional stage for him - when he's decided "hey, time to try being a good guy!" but the idea that heroes have things like "scruples" hasn't quite sunk in yet.
Insane Troll Logic: his belief that vegetarian observant Jews are allowed to eat bacon, on the grounds that, while bacon is a both a meat product and non-kosher, it is well known that two negatives cancel each other out. Shoshannah is not impressed.
Insanity Immunity: to the point that he's gotten a little sick of being asked to investigate all the sanity-sapping artifacts his friends encounter.
Kavorka Man: being one of the few hetero-leaning adult male major characters in the 'verse has its advantages, although Laz credits his smokin' bod, his sense of humor, his ballroom dancing skills, and the fact that a few benighted souls see him as Troubled, but Cute.
Keet: he was like this in his younger, prettier, pre-freaky-experiment days, with a good side helping of Heroic Comedic Sociopath. Nowadays, he's crazier and less cute, but still rather hyper.
Matzo Fever: he's expressed attraction to both Shoshannah Diamond and Emmanuelle Halevy, although that may just be an expression of his thing for unusual-looking mutant women rather than a kink for Jewish girls in particular.
Meaningful Name: Laz has a disfiguring skin condition and, due to his Healing Factor, is very difficult to kill. Lazarus is also the name of two characters in The Bible: one of whom is the patron saint of people with leprosy, and the other was brought back from the dead.
Stoic Woobie: he's stoic about the stuff that gives him woobie points, at least. The less angst-worthy aspects of life, not so much.
Throwing Off The Disability: averted after Victoria fixes his healing factor. His memory problems and his compexion both improve, but not instantaneously or completely.
"I've gone from 'zombie burn victim' to 'Frankenstein's monster with a bad sunburn.' Any prettier and they'll want me to play The Phantom of the Opera."
Too Kinky to Torture: he's not exactly into pain (unless it involves hot chicks in black leatherand/ora good fight), but his massive powers of physical endurance combined with his unconventional mental state make him excellent at taking it without cracking. (At least not cracking more.)
Wouldn't Hurt a Child: one of his very few consistent scruples. If this wasn't true, Shoshi wouldn't let him within a mile of the academy.
Sonia Patel
Lazarus' minion/secretary/"thinking brain girl"/occasional Mission Control. An Indo-Caribbean civilian paper-pusher whom Lazarus "whisked off to a life of intrigue and adventure" when he discovered that even Heroic Comedic Sociopath mercenaries sometimes need to have paperwork filled out. Despite their rough start, Sonia and Laz now get along fairly well.
Girl Friday: she was "hired" to deal with paperwork and finance, but her role, and skills, have expanded over the years.
Happiness in Slavery: she and Laz seem on remarkably good terms, considering how they began working together. It may not count as a strict example, however, since Sonia is getting paid.
Only Sane Employee: a good deal of her work is compensating for her employer's... extreme quirkiness.
Sassy Secretary: Lazarus may be a sociopathic killing machine with life and death power over her, but that doesn't mean Sonia is going to keep her mouth shut about her opinions.
Stealing From The Till: as long as Sonia keeps it to reasonable levels (which she does), Laz is fine with this. It means he doesn't have to remember to pay her.
Took a Level in Badass: went from Laz's pet accountant to actually helping him out on jobs, albeit in a non-combat capacity.
A mutant shapeshifter and former Soviet covert operative turned mercenary and general provocateuse. As her name suggests, where Loki goes, chaos follows. It is one of the great ironies of history that this "perfect traitor" is the only daughter of America's most famous patriotic heroine. (She's also one of the Lilim on the other side of her family.)
Chaotic Neutral: when left to her own devices, she's more mischievous than malicious.
Charles Atlas Superpower: she's unusually skilled at reading body language. This lets her anticipate her opponents' moves in combat, improves her impersonation skills, and gives her a massive bonus on her Sense Motive checks.
For the Lulz: she's a little too fond of messing with people.
Gender Bender: she has had several male alternate identities.
Gone Horribly Right: her teachers were trying to create a covert operative with no inconvenient sentimental or moral scruples to get in the way of her mission - and they got one. They just didn't anticipate that an amoral infiltration-specialist shapeshifter would be awfully hard to hold on to if she got sick of her job.
Kick the Son of a Bitch: she literally stabbed one of her employers in the back once. Of course, he was trying to plunge the world into nuclear war at the time...
Luke, I Am Your Father: she's the daughter of Miss Victory and a Soviet military psychic.
No Sell: she inherited some of her father's psychic potential, but it manifested "inward" instead of "outward" - she has no Psychic Powers, but her mind is unusually difficult to read.
A small-town mutant girl who left home in search of Adventure. She's been an exploitation starlet, a "legitimate" actress, a musician, a stuntwoman, a henchperson-for-hire, a freelance mercenary, and an adventurer for justice at various points in her career. Despite her sometimes amoral life choices, she's pretty amiable once you get to know her.
Blessed with Suck: her healing factor makes it much more difficult to achieve any kind of long-term body modification - which wouldn't be such a big deal, if she wasn't trans.
Charles Atlas Superpower: her strength, stamina, and agility aren't innately higher than a genotypical person's, but her healing factor allows her to train harder than would normally be healthy without injuring herself.
Delilah Danvers' sidekick and tech person. They originally bonded due to being the only women in their top secret military installation, but eventually became good friends.
Brains: Evil; Brawn: Good: inverted. She's made a few dubious decisions, but, in general, she's less amoral than Delilah was at the beginning of their acquaintance.
Expy: she's Otacon with breasts and fewer dead love interests.
Jewish and Nerdy: although she's not that observant, so the only way you'd know this is from her habit of using Yiddish forms of address for her grandparents.
Khadijah is a Canadian Muslim woman with birdlike traits that include winged flight, enhanced vision, and inhumanly fast reflexes. She's also a fan of old swashbuckler movies, so she decided to compensate for her lack of direct offensive powers by learning to swordfight. Khadijah was a government operative for a while, but got sick of the politics and Black and Gray Morality and took a job as an Omnignostic Library agent. She's allied with Helix on occasion.
Alien Hair: it's actually very soft feathers. Most people don't realize this because her hijab covers it up.
Art Major Biology: even with hollow bones, a bird her size probably wouldn't be able to fly as well as she does.
Barely-There Swimwear: her Beach Episode suit, which shows *gasp* her neck, her lower calves and ankles, and a considerable expanse of forearm. She also trades in her usual hijab for a bandana. The rest of the cast may never get over the shock.
Blood Knight: not Khadijah herself, but Fellbane. The sword was originally more of an inanimate Paladin, but centuries spent as a lethal weapon seem to have taken a toll on its emotional health.
Charles Atlas Superpower: her bird empathy isn't a mutant trait, it comes from experiencing the world in a more avian way than most people can manage, and years of experience working with birds.
Super Strength: mostly in her wings and upper body - enough to enable her to fly well under her own power.
Talking Weapon: Fellbane, complete with pseudo-archaisms.
Uncanny Valley: by conventional human standards, her eyes are a bit too big, and she's proportioned a bit oddly because of all the extra musculature she needs to fly.
Wooden Katanas Are Even Better: when she doesn't want to kill/maim anyone, her default weapon is a bamboo practice sword. The light weight lets her take maximum advantage of her Super Reflexes.
Übermensch: she's big on self-actualization and setting one's own standards rather than following society's, and she's a bit of a megalomaniac.
Siegfried Lorenz
A kindly older gentleman who befriends Victoria during her years as a teenage runaway, introduces her to classical music, and teaches her how to cook. In his younger years, he was mildly infamous as a costumed Gentleman Thief.
Noble Bigot: mild example. Bruce doesn't really get transgenderism and, as Siegfried puts it "believes men should be manly," which has made his relationship with Victoria a bit awkward.
One of the first big-name female costumed adventurers, who became a heroine fighting Nazi ninjas and other disreputable sorts during World War II. The political changes that came with the Cold War were hard on her, however, and she came to a sad end.
An Air Force pilot turned astronaut who acquired superpowers after a surprise encounter with benevolent superpowered space aliens. She currently splits her time and heroing efforts between Earth and the rest of inhabited space.
Black Best Friend: to Naomi. Estella was, in fact the person Naomi built the perpetual motion machine with in college.
But Not Too Black: her transformation gave her blue eyes. Very blue.
Combo Platter Powers: flight + low-level superhuman strength + unnatural toughness and the ability to survive in a vacuum + healing factor and resistance to toxins and radiation + energy projection + built-in translator (which only works on languages known to her alien benefactors.)
An intelligent but very troubled grad student with Dissociative Identity Disorder. She manages to compensate and lives in denial until a Freak Library Accident activates all her alternates' superpowers and they start getting restless.
Anti-Hero: Sandra, Living Dead Girl, and Nimue are Type 1, Annis fluctuates between Type 3 and Type 4.
Broken Bird: Sandra herself, and a few of her alternates.
Let's Get Dangerous: Nimue is normally rather waifish and mopey, but her psychic abilities make her the most potentially powerful alter when she's sufficiently riled up.
Man Child: Princess Awesome (who got the strength + flight package and represents Sandra's squelched desires for carefree fun and adventure) still thinks of herself as a preteen.
Superpowered Neutral Side: all the personalities share Sandra's essential moral scruples, but Annis is much more comfortable with violence and confrontation, and doesn't worry about being a "good girl."
Wolverine Claws: Annis has big ones. (They're psychic, not biological in origin, so she doesn't face the issue of where to put them when they retract.)
The Helix universe's resident Game Breaker, which is balanced by her live-and-let-live, benevolently flaky personality. She provides superpowered disaster relief, explores space and the depths of the ocean for Science!, and helps drive off high-powered malevolent space entities when needed, but she prefers to stay out of politics.
Cloudcuckoolander: by normal standards. Partly this is because she experiences life in a way that even most superhumans can't relate to, but she was always a little eccentric.
Combo Platter Powers: can teleport, survive in almost any environment, completely control her physical body, alter her perception of time, watch individual molecules at work, and control matter on an atomic level.
Mundane Utility: she expends more effort dealing with natural disasters than fighting villains.
No Nudity Taboo: it's not like she gets cold anymore, and there's not much point to wearing clothes when you're the only human in thousands of miles and immune to environmental effects.
Person of Mass Destruction: averted/subverted. She certainly has the potential, but prefers to stay out of fights if the fate of the planet isn't at stake, and anyone attempting to weaponize her would face a thankless job.
A three-thousand year old mutant whose true agenda, if it exists at all, is obscure. (She may just enjoy messing with people.) She's the ancestor of several other mutant characters (referred to here as the Lilim), although initially none of them are aware of this.
A very old Scottish-Canadian mutant (born at some point in the early to mid-19th century) with Lynx and Hellcat's power set. In fact, he's an ancestor to both of them. Formerly a notorious warrior, he has spent the past few decades pursuing the path of peace and enlightenment, although he can still wipe the floor with anyone who pushes him too hard. He's also a practicing Buddhist and a tea enthusiast.
Eccentric Mentor: he never gives deliberately bad advice, but he can be a bit too quirky-Zen-master at times for the tastes of the younger generation.
Erudite Stoner: he's probably not high - if nothing else, his mutant physiology makes him immune to most drugs - but he has a similar demeanor in his more relaxed moments.
Hidden Depths: multiple, depending on what aspect of his personality he's emphasizing. If you only knew him as a tea and dubious advice-dispensing old hippie, you'd never guess what a badass he can be. And if you'd only encountered him in his earlier years when he was trying to claw your face off, you'd probably underestimate his cultured and spiritual sides.
Martial Pacifist / Technical Pacifist: he doesn't start fights any more, and he's given up killing, but he's still not someone you want to mess with.
Once upon a time in a Wretched Hive, Alexa Lestrange was your ordinary teenage thugette - smarter and more vicious than most, but otherwise unexceptional. Then the law caught up with her. She volunteered for an experimental psychological rehabilitation process in exchange for not being stuck behind bars until middle age. Upon her "graduation" and release, Alexa abandoned her former criminal activities, completed her education, and seemed to fall off the legal radar - until she resurfaced over a decade later as a hands-off criminal mastermind and recurring thorn in both Nightshade and Pilar Pawlowski's sides.
Sanity Has Advantages: if she hadn't had her violent tendencies filed down and her impulse control pumped up, she probably would have gotten herself shot or stabbed by the time she was twenty-five.
Technical Pacifist: she won't kill you - she's psychologically incapable. But that's what minions are for.
Iron Enforcer (Dirk Steele)
A non-powered vigilante with a troubled past and a lot of big guns. Thanks to his grim, uncompromising attitude and preference for lethal force, he's not very popular.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: at times, he does genuinely try to help people as opposed to just killing bad guys, but even then he's pretty brusque about it.
Iron Butt Monkey: he's a regular guy with lots of combat experience in a universe that often follows Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards - suffice it to say, he gets in over his head a lot. But nothing takes him out permanently, because the universe loves to make him suffer.
Would Hit a Girl: he's tried to kill Hellcat on multiple occasions.
A Study In Moonlight
Viviane Chatelet Malifaux
The protagonist of A Study In Moonlight, set in the same universe. Viv's an eccentrically brilliant Sherlock Holmes fangirl who's found a way to apply her eye for detail and encyclopedic knowledge of local geology to real-world crimefighting. She's related to the Lovelace sisters.
All of the Other Reindeer: Particularly when she was younger, although even now she's not terribly popular.
"I was the smart, nerdy, sexually ambiguous, non-gender-conforming kid with no tact or knowledge of contemporary popular culture. How well do you think I was liked?
Ambiguous Disorder: In-universe, most people who know her well believe that there's something odd about her brain, but they have no idea what. Even the mental health professionals she's known have had differences of opinion.
Blue and Orange Etiquette: She will apologize for making inaccurate assumptions about another person - because one shouldn't jump to conclusions - but not for Brutal Honesty, and she hasn't really internalized the idea that one should apologize for inconveniencing people even if it's in the process of helping them out at their own request.
Brutal Honesty: She knows what tact is, but she considers it a rhetorical strategy rather than a moral imperative. And even when she tries, she's not always very good at it.
Byronic Hero: She presents herself as one. She's really more socially inept than morally ambiguous, but she is talented, intense, charismatic in an odd way despite her lack of conventional social aptitude, and alienated from mainstream society.
Creepy Good: She's an aloof Nightmare Fetishist whose odd mannerisms and slightly unearthly looks can put her on the edge of the Uncanny Valley at times, but her heart's in the right place.
Defective Detective: Without Marcella to take up the slack and play Cloudcuckoolander's Minder when required, she'd probably have burned herself out or repeatedly landed in the hospital from self-neglect and exhaustion before she turned thirty.
Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery: Defied. Viviane, if called out on a social faux pas or Insufferable Genius moment, will attempt to explain herself, but she never brings up her diagnosis. She'd rather be considered a socially maladroit jerk than a socially maladroit jerk who claims to be disabled to get away with things.
Ditzy Genius: When she's on a really demanding case, she gives it all her mental resources - including what normal people allot to things like "not walking into traffic."
Expy: Of Sherlock Holmes, but as an American transgirl on the autism spectrum.
Forgets To Eat: She has a tendency to tune out most of her body's signals when something interesting is going on.
Fragile Speedster: She thinks fast, has a quick reaction time, and is a better sprinter than Marcella, but she lacks Marcella's stamina and is vulnerable to Sensory Overload.
Friend to Bugs: She's an entomology enthusiast with a particular love for bees.
Genius Sweet Tooth: She doesn't eat much when she's on a case, but what she does consume is generally sweet and starchy.
Gray Eyes: Mixed-type. She's perceptive, a bit otherworldly, and aloof with most people.
Guile Hero: With Science and Action elements on occasion.
Hair Contrast Duo: With Marcella. Viviane has waist-length pale blonde Braids of Action, Marcella has coffee-brown curls to a few inches below her shoulders.
Hates Being Touched: Mild example. She enjoys physical contact from a select few people (and cats) under certain circumstances, but ordinarily, she's very protective of her personal space. Justified since she has an autism spectrum disorder and Hyper Awareness, and can find too much human contact overwhelming.
Hot Chick in a Badass Suit: Bifauxnen variant, with trousers, since she dislikes nylons and it's harder to run in a pencil skirt. (She saves the skirts for hot weather and very formal occasions.)
Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: With Sandro Davies, her Irene Adler analogue. Viviane's the superficially unemotional Badass Longcoat detective. Sandro's the glamorous performer and homme fatal with better people skills.
Nightmare Fetishist: She takes an effervescent, almost childlike joy from solving a really intricate murder mystery.
Picky Eater: She's very sensitive to the texture of food, and will not eat anything gristly or slimy.
Pragmatic Hero: Mild example. More in the sense of being willing to make other people uncomfortable than being particularly ruthless, with a few exceptions.
Strange Girl: She's the introverted equivalent of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl to Marcella. She also wears her socks inside-out, although that's because she finds seams digging into her toes distracting, not out of quirkiness.
WomanChild: Just a bit. For all her efforts to maintain an aloof and stylish aura, she doesn't always act very mature for her age, and she tends to get along well with bright children.
Marcella Mahina Jehanne Argento
Viviane's co-star, Watson-analogue, and Ambiguously Romantic Life Partner. She's a good-natured, relatively sensible young woman with an adventurous side, who also happens to be half-werewolf. In her civilian life, she's a pediatric occupational therapist who specializes in assisting Differently Powered Individuals.
Academic Athlete: She's not a genius, but she's pretty smart and actually has more formal academic qualifications than Viviane. (Viviane gave up pursuing formal qualifications and just researched what she wanted after she got her bachelor's degree, but Marcella needed a Master's for her job.) She's also a martial arts enthusiast who played rugby in high school.
Action Girl: She's pretty good at judo and can handle a gun competently.
Badass Bookworm: Not to Viv's extent, but she's multilingual, well-educated, has a wide range of non-combat skills, and is a decent detective in her own right.
Girly Bruiser: She's polite, good with kids, enjoys cooking and textile crafts... and she's a judoka and former rugby player.
Ambiguously Brown: She has a canonical ethnicity (Italian and Fijian), but tends to perceived as Ethnically Ambiguous Woman Of Color in-universe by people who don't know her well.
Beware the Nice Ones: She's more polite and approachable than Viv is, but also more comfortable with physical violence.
Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: To Viviane, particularly when they're on a case and Viv's "eat, sleep, and don't walk into traffic" neurons are occupied with Higher Things.
Combat Pragmatist: When facing a Giant Mook who doesn't seem phased by her or Viviane's martial arts abilities, and everyone was thrashing around too much for her to get a clear shot in, what does she do? She stabs him in the eye with her car keys!
Hair Contrast Duo: Brunette to Viviane's blonde, although Viviane is the brainy one and Marcella the approachable one.
Half-Human Hybrid: Half normal human, half human with lycanthropy, technically. She gets a few minor lycanthropic traits but doesn't shape-shift. The technical term for this in therianthrope circles is mezzaluna.
Jack of All Stats: She's "good but not the best" at a wide range of skills. In school, it gave her a bit of a complex, but in situations where competence matters more than winning a prize, she's grateful.
Jumped at the Call: From the start, she's been more than happy to be dragged on Viviane's various adventures. In fact, during her adolescence, she specifically studied martial arts, first aid, and wilderness survival so that she'd be prepared if she ever received the Call To Adventure.
Lunacy: She doesn't shift, but she does experience some minor psychological and sensory changes during the full moon. The main effects seem to be restlessness, distractability, a heightened sense of smell, cravings for high-protein food, and an urge to chase moving objects. Marcella calls this "were-ADHD".
Mixed Ancestry: Italian werewolves on her father's side, Pacific Islander Muggles on her mom's.
The Watson: As expected. Less common later in their friendship when Marcella knows Viviane's methods better.
Werewolf Theme Naming: Mahina means "moon" or "moonlight," and Argento means "silver."
Undine Minerva Livia Malifaux
Viviane's older sister, who works as an intelligence analyst and Almighty Office Manager for a mysterious and secretive government agency. Undine's a bit better at operating within social constraints than her sister, but still rather eccentric in her own quiet way.
Almighty Janitor: Compared to her level of influence and responsibility, she doesn't have much official rank. This could be because she's better at actually doing her job than at currying favor and playing office politics, because her bosses are afraid she'll take over the world with a little more authority, or because her agency doesn't follow the Peter Principle and wants to keep her where she's most useful.
Ambiguous Disorder: She has some rather eccentric habits, and a very formal, almost emotionless demeanor. Viviane claims that Undine's not as normal as she'd like everyone to think, but doesn't propose a diagnosis.
Viviane's cousin and self-proclaimed archnemesis. A talented and very troubled young woman.
Allergic To Routine: The queen of this. When Viviane gets bored, she does experiments or plays experimental classical music at high volume. When Bella gets bored, it involves felonies and explosions.
Ambiguous Disorder: Sociopathy? Histrionic personality disorder co-morbid with a remarkable lack of morals? Who knows?!
Took a Level in Jerkass: Between her first and second appearances. It turns out that she was under a great deal of stress at the time.
Civilians
Mei June Xiao
Galatea's mother. She's a fearless, strong-minded lady with high standards, which has proven useful in her advocacy work, but not so pleasant to actually live with.
Control Freak: on occasion, particularly when under stress. To be fair, she's more of a true perfectionist than obsessed with doing things by the book, but she did once, during a rather rough patch in her life, yell at her husband for five minutes for making the tea wrong.
My God, What Have I Done?: she eventually gets called out on her overbearing behavior (which included the Tea Incident and telling her daughter that a less than perfect academic record would keep her from ever getting a higher education or finding meaningful employment) and changes her ways. Slightly.
A friend of Victoria's from her teenage years, before she met Galatea or any other mutants. She was a pretty, artistic transgirl with horrible taste in men, and wound up being murdered by a sexually confused yuppie. Years along the road, the psychological fallout of this would play a role in Victoria's Start of Darkness.
Disposable Sex Worker: subverted-deconstructed. Giselle actually wasn't in the sex industry (she was a beautician), but but due to stereotypes about low-income trans women, the local law enforcement assumed she was this, and didn't take her murder particularly seriously.
Fatal Attractor: even not counting the one who killed her, she didn't have the best taste in men.
Another of Victoria's old friends, although they had a falling out around the incident in which Victoria revealed her mutant powers. Currently alive and well and running a boutique in San Francisco.
All of the Other Reindeer: she didn't react well when she discovered Victoria's abilities, although to be fair, it would be kind of disconcerting seeing one of your friends suddenly animate a tree and start beating people up with it.
Cool Big Sis: in a way, she's a couple of years older than Victoria and when they first met, she had a lot more useful life experience.
While Helix and Prodigium may disagree on many important issues and at times clash bitterly, there's one thing on which they can always agree: Lebensborn are jerks. They see mutants as a potential Master Race, which isn't unique among villainous mutant factions, but they're distinguished by their belief that mutantkind won't be fit to inherit the earth until it's cleansed itself of those with substandard powers or other unacceptable weaknesses. Perhaps not surprisingly, they like to Put On The Reich.
Boomerang Bigot: neither of the two Lebensborn members who get much screen time have particularly impressive powers.
Eschenbach has money and connections, and Marlene Von Bulow has genuine (if twisted) scientific talent. Maybe the membership requirements are looser for people who can make themselves useful in other ways?
They've toned down the overt racism and Antisemitism since the 1960s, but they're still blatantly ableist and the high-level leadership remains whiter than a Lutheran church buffet in a blizzard.
Take Over the World: they want to do this eventually, although their aforementioned leadership difficulties make it difficult to anticipate what they'd do if they ever caught the car.
Doctor Eschenbach
A Lebensborn affiliate connected with European organized crime, who held Elisa Magnusson prisoner for several years in her early to mid teens.
Fauxreigner: Elisa suspects that he's not really German, and he just plays up the Nazi angle for effect.
Healing Factor: gained from an earlier experimental subject. Also responsible for his slow aging.
Mad Doctor: and not even a particularly competent one. He had little patience for proper scientific procedure, to the point that he relied on Valeriya to gather most of his actual data. His experiments, whatever their ostensible goals, mostly involved messing with people.
A Lebensborn scientist, who may be one of the founding members of the organization, since she was active in the 1940s. In fact, she's the scientist/occultist who decided it was a good idea to turn Michael Mendelssohn into a magical winged cyborg. She was also active, under a different alias, in Canada's Cold War era Super Soldier program. The girl just can't not cut people up!
The Baroness: Rosa Klebb through and through, although she's not ugly so much as very severe-looking.
They Look Just Like Everyone Else: most of the time, she looks more like a no-nonsense schoolteacher than a century-old war criminal.
Brotherhood of Minions
A mercenary team founded by a disgruntled former Lebensborn operative. Their membership leans toward the quirky misfit types.
Anang Berhanu (Phantom Queen)
The founder and leader, a former evil minion who'd worked for a variety of organizations, but was frustrated by the lack of advancement opportunities for someone with her ancestry and talents. She runs a tight ship, but has mellowed ever-so-slightly since she set off on her own.
The Baroness: she has a cold, bossy attitude, is arguably Lawful Evil, carries a whip, and wears a lot of black.
Blasian Boss Lady: she's half Ethiopian and takes no crap from anyone, ever.
Defrosting Ice Queen: now that she doesn't have her bosses to deal with and the initial stress of setting the squad up is over, she's become just a bit less of a jerk.
The team's muscle. A highly eccentric British-Iranian aristocrat mutant who comes from a long line of eccentric aristocrats. Rostam enjoys tea, history, mythology, the Furry Fandom, and beating the crap out of robots.
Bunny-Ears Lawyer: he's very good with machinery, is surprisingly book-smart in his areas of interest, and he's definitely the man you want on your side if something needs to be punched really hard. He's also somewhat classist, unabashedly kinky, and not the best at social interactions.
Power Limiter: his strength-dispersion gauntlets, which let him operate delicate machinery without crushing everything to powder.
Real Men Eat Meat: averted. He believes that making cattle into sandwiches is an insult to their noble and majestic natures.
Spot of Tea: as befits his Anglo-Persian heritage. He did have a problem with breaking teacups before he made his strength-dispersion gauntlets, however.
A race of small, generally peaceful, roughly humanoid extraterrestrials with many bee-like features. The aliens most frequently encountered by humans who aren't superheroes or astronauts. (Not in that way.)
Bee People: they have six limbs, proboscis-like tongues, antennae, insect-style wings, an eusocial social structure, and the ability to see into the ultraviolet. They also love sweets.
Beware My Stinger Tail: How their sting is mounted. This is more practical than having to sit on anything they wish to attack.
Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Meliai have three genders - queens, workers, and males. Workers and queens have the same genetic sex, but look considerably different and play different roles in reproduction and society, and so are considered separate categories in Meliai culture.
Scary Dogmatic Aliens: averted. They do have some Communist tendencies, but they don't try to force their society on other species, and they can be quite pleasant to be around.
Space Fae: With their petite stature, wings, and unusual powers, they do bear an odd resemblance to fairies.
An ancient race of incorporeal immortal beings who feed on emotional energy. They are relatively weak in the physical realm (although difficult to hurt), but have exceptional influence on the minds of mortals. Much of their interaction with lesser beings involves inspiring artists.
Blue and Orange Morality: they are in favor of the continuous existence of intelligent life, and fun things like love, beauty, art, and free will, but that doesn't mean that all of them have the best interests of individual non-Orpheans at heart.
Emotion Eater: which doesn't hurt their food source - it's more like a plant feeding on sunlight.
A Form You Are Comfortable With: which they use to encourage their favorite artists, go to high-stakes sporting events, and so on.
The Muse: a frequent activity, although the creation of great art is a secondary goal for them. They normally want their protegees to create something with as much Emotional Torque as possible. A respect for subtlety only develops in older Orpheans with steady food supplies.
The products of Soviet Super Science. They were created as Super Soldiers, but in the age of modern high-tech warfare, their increased size and strength wasn't enough of an advantage to justify the additional expenses involved in creating genetically engineered Half Human Hybrids and providing them with plenty of fruit during Russian winters. They did, however, prove useful in guerilla warfare in areas where the terrain was too rough for most motor vehicles.
A race of intelligent, aquatic alien cephalopods, allied with the Meliai. Despite their physiological and lifestyle differences, they have enough in common with humans for the two species to get along reasonably well, once the language barrier is taken care of. Because they're sea-dwellers, R'lyehan science and technology developed in ways that don't really correlate to human ideas of Technology Levels.
Schizo Tech: by human standards, due to a different cultural progression. They understood Mendelian inheritance before it became commonly understood that the moon and stars are not atmospheric phenomena.
Starfish Language: R'lyehan is a sign language which, for proper expression, requires ten flexible limbs and the ability to change the color of one's skin. Fortunately, their written language is simpler. (It's not dissimilar to written Chinese in some ways.)
Scyllarians
A technologically advanced race of decapod crustaceans. Because of their warlike and imperialistic policies, they aren't very well-liked by most other spacegoing races. Currently going through hard times due to a crushing military defeat and loss of much of their interstellar travel capacity, but few outsiders have much sympathy.
, enhanced hearing, and sound-manipulation powers. She's a professional singer and spent some time at the North Cascades academy as the pre-teen students' music teacher.
