Characters / Ward Breakthrough

Index | Breakthrough | The Undersiders | Heroes | Villains (Mercenaries, S-Class Threats) | Earth Shin | Other Characters

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Breakthrough

A miscellaneous group of young capes who were brought together in group therapy sessions by Jessica Yamada, and intend to form a hero team. At the urging of Ms. Yamada, Victoria decides to mentor them and show them the ropes.

The Group As A Whole

• Blessed with Suck: Almost everybody in the group has abilities that can read as awesome on paper... until you see how badly burned each of them has been by aspects of their own power. Even by the typical cape standard of all abilities having surprisingly sucky downsides, these guys win prizes by making other capes feel distinctly uncomfortable to be around them.
• Cast Full of Gay: Or a least half the cast. Tristan is gay, Sveta is trans, Kenzie is bi/pan, Chris is functionally asexual, and Ashley and Victoria have at the very least some homosocial tendencies.
• Dwindling Party: As with the Undersiders in Worm, group membership becomes smaller and less stable as the story goes on.
  • In Gleaming 9.15, Chris abandons the group to become a player on Earth Shin, leading to the reveal of his true identity as a clone of Lab Rat.
  • Zigzagged after the aftermath of the Heavens arc, Kenzie leaves the team to form her own group with Chicken Little, Darlene, and Candy, but still works with Breakthrough, and hangs out with them in her spare time.
  • In Dying 15.z, Ashley dies through a combination of injuries sustained during the attack on Teacher's base, an infection from her "brother" Spawner, and Ingenue stripping her of her immunity to her own power.
  • In Infrared 19.e, Tristan uses his power to kill himself rather than become a Titan.
  • In Last 20.7, Byron splits from Breakthrough to join the Wardens.
• Dysfunction Junction: They are this even moreso than other capes. This trope could even be their alternate name if the actual one doesn't work. Practically everyone in the team has some sort of shady past, actions that they heavily regret doing, were victims of some sort of very traumatic event that could put their trigger event to shame, or a combination of all three. Ironically this seems to make them stick together more often than not, something that is very uncommon on cape teams with the same characteristic (read: most of them), that tend to crash and burn over time.
• Easy Logistics: Averted. They all live around the city, but the city is so big that it takes hours for them all to get together.
• Enemy Mine: More than once, Breakthrough has had to work together with less-than-scrupulous characters; most commonly Tattletale and the Undersiders.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Zig-zagged. Most of the team have sketchy, if not criminal, backgrounds which serve as an impediment in establishing relationships with other hero teams in the beginning. But through the story their continued track record of detecting major threats before they happen and taking decisive action against them have earned respect from their peers.
• Loophole Abuse: Breakthrough has had to put a lot of work into thinking and acting around each of their own psychological quirks. This makes them quite unpredictable when it comes to mind control or other Master- or Stranger-whammy effects, since regular practice in metacognitive evaluation, checks and balances pays off in getting around outside orders or perceptual weirdness, too.
• Parental Substitute: While not officially adopted, Kenzie definitely sees Ashley and Victoria as her adoptive mother figures.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: They range from three former heroes (Capricorn, Kenzie, and Victoria) to one accidental mass-murderer (Sveta), a member of the Fallen (Rain), and an intended villain (Ashley). They also include a Case 53 (Sveta), a Case 70 (Capricorn), a clone (Ashley) as well as a semi-official, honorary Case 53 (Victoria) — her two-year dose of extreme Body Horror and Mind Rape, plus their residual effects, earn her the spot, even though Cauldron were not directly involved. Chris also turns out to be a half-clone, half-tinker creation of the late Lab Rat.
• Spanner in the Works: The team finds itself playing key roles in disrupting and neutralizing many villainous plans and groups.

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Antares

Victoria Dallon (Antares, formerly Glory Girl)

Parahumans Online username: Point_Me_@_The_Sky

Debut: Daybreak 1.1

The main protagonist, formerly Glory Girl of New Wave. She officially adopts the name Antares in Torch 7.8, spending the first portion of the story beforehand without a name after discarding Glory Girl.

For tropes pertaining to her Worm appearance, see here.

Classification: Mover; Shaker; Brute

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• Achilles' Heel: Her forcefield can take an infinite number of hits, for an infinite amount of time... as long as they aren't too strong. If something strong enough hits her, it can't take more than one hit without shorting out. It takes a few seconds to regenerate, during which time she's as vulnerable to damage as a non-powered person. If a follow-up hit arrives during that window of opportunity, she could be seriously hurt. Such as when she gets shot during Pitch 6.1.
• Ambiguously Human: She sees herself as this, thanks to Amy using all the animals she could find to make Victoria's blob self and not removing all the foreign DNA when she restored Victoria to her original body.
• Ascended Extra: To an extent. She had a chapter from her perspective, but she went from being a strictly supporting character in Worm who vanished halfway through to being the protagonist of the sequel.
• Barrier Warrior: Barrier Warrior Monk is basically the fighting/ philosophy style Victoria is aiming for. She certainly has a decent barrier to use, whatever her feelings about it are on any given day.
• Berserk Button: Being subjected to mind control. Which winds up helping her: when Valefor orders her to not use her powers and serve him, she gets so mad she loses control of the wretch, which promptly knocks him aside, disrupting his ability to maintain his orders.
  • Later in the story, Amy.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Her family could already be described as dysfunctional in Worm. During the events of Ward it proceeds to just get worse with her mother constantly trying to get her to reconcile with a sister who has teamed up with villains, a father who is manic depressive, said sister that takes no responsibility to the damaging things she does as well as sexually molests her unconscious body and proceeds to create pseudo-Endbringer super weapons, with the most normal member being her cousin who may also be her half-sister.
• Body Horror: Although she's physically fine now, she still suffers from mental health issues from the aftermath. Her power altering so that her forcefield is still shaped like her deformed self has not been helping, and neither does knowing that she has animal DNA floating around her body.
• Boomerang Bigot: She makes insensitive comments about the battle-hardiness of some Mover heroes based on her academic studies into trends in cape psychology (imagine saying that a female hero becoming shell-shocked is to be expected due to overall trends that academia has found in gender psychology) while herself being a Mover.
• Broken Ace: Even with her mental issues making her hold back in fights, she still wins most of the time through her skill and determination.
• Brought Down to Badass: When caught in Contender's power nullification arena, Victoria proves she can still kick a lot of ass without her powers, and forces Contender to pick a different target even with him being armed. See Fights Like a Normal below.
• The Cape: In a dramatic shift from her Smug Super attitude in Worm, she's intentionally strived to become a lot closer to this ideal.
• Character Development: Is far less arrogant and impulsive than she was in Worm, thanks to a liberal dose of Break the Haughty. Her experiences in Worm, particularly her time in the institute, forced her to do quite a bit of soul-searching; the cocky Smug Super operating on Silver Age-esque self-serving ethics has been tempered into a Humble Hero with far more empathy and a growing awareness that the lines between hero and villain are often hazy.
• Celibate Hero: Victoria hasn't completely moved from the death of her ex-boyfriend. She also has numerous body issues because of the time that she was a human blob with untold numbers of mouths, hands, and who knows what else for two years with Amy's Mind Rape still active for that time, causing her multiple emotional issues by the start of the story. The fact that her forcefield is a constant reminder of both hasn't helped her one bit to open herself up to dating, or sex for that matter. Ironically, she has no problems having guys interested in her. She slowly gets past this, first fantasizing about the hero Annelace, who volunteers at her physical therapy center. Later, after she has been benched and separated from her team by the Wardens, her craving for human connection drives her past her body issues and she has a fling with him. By the epilogues, it becomes clear she's made real progress and is slowly turning that fling into a healthy dating relationship.
• Chekhov's Hobby: She mentions in her introduction to Ashley that she's studied numerous parahuman cases. This comes in handy later when she's able to identify a nondescript elderly bartender at the villain's Lodge as one of the oldest and first documented villains to exist and who's been potentially used by Teacher in the diary scheme.
• Color Motifs: Black and yellow.
• Combat Pragmatist: Victoria may be a hero, but she has no issues using makeshift knives or even guns as distractions when in a tight spot.
• Combo Platter Powers: Victoria has three distinct powers: her flight, her forcefield, and her emotion aura (her super-strength is the result of her forcefield.) Unlike most other capes with multiple powers, this isn't because she's a multitrigger but a result of her being a second-generation parahuman born to cape parents.
• Covered with Scars: By the end of 'Ward'' Victoria has taken enough hits that made it past her forcefield that she has become pretty scarred up. Highlights include a gunshot wound to the arm, acid burns, claw and bite marks from giant centipedes, numerous stitch scars on her arms, legs, and torso, and a missing fingernail. Some of these she could have gotten healed, but due to her personal history she's not so interested in doing so using powers.
• Deal with the Devil: She cares about Sveta so much, and wants to solve problems for her friends instead of merely coping with them, that she makes a deal with an incarcerated bio-tinker villain in exchange for his aid in giving Sveta a more normal body. Thankfully, it's merely in exchange for more comforts while imprisoned, instead of freedom or reduced sentence.
• Discard and Draw: Her fighting style has changed from Worm, partially reflecting her character development. For instance, her control over her aura has grown due to it being one of the few ways she could communicate in the asylum. Her forcefield has also been altered by her body dysmorphia. While it always conformed to her body shape, it changed to match her deformed body, and it didn't change back when she did.
  • Later, after her adventures in shardspace, she forms a much closer connection to her shard and her power changes again. Victoria begins being able to control her forcefield both unconsciously and consciously with a much greater degree of precision than before. It's still shaped like her deformed body, but she can move herself around inside of it and treat its extra limbs like "gloves" she can manipulate from inside. Then she later basically begins treating the forcefield like a set of extra limbs, but now with complete and natural control over it, to the point she doesn't even notice she's using her power vice her hands.
  • Then, when she finds the part of shardspace that shows you emotional memories and realizes how much her shard loves her, she gains basically total conscious and unconscious control over her forcefield, and her emotion power. She can pretty much re-shape the forcefield at will, shifting from her current body, to her deformed body, to the "cocoon" that Amy put her in to heal her after Crawler's acid attack. And she can even "exit" it and move away from it, allowing it to basically function as a super-strong, invisible Master minion. And now she can choose what emotion her aura causes in others, though it generally relates to whatever she's feeling at the time.
• Emotion Bomb:
  • Her emotion aura used to variably induce fear or awe depending on the person it was affecting. Since her time in the asylum, it seems to be permanently stuck in the "fear" function for reasons Victoria has yet to figure out. Kenzie, for reasons equally unknown, is the only person who still gets the "awe" effect.
  • Later this changes. After the bombs go off in shardspace, everyone's powers are subtly altered, and the aura shifts to projecting physical attraction, much to Victoria's chagrin. Not long afterward, however, Victoria connects with her shard on a very deep level and begins to be able to choose what emotion she is projecting.
• Fights Like a Normal: At the beginning of the story, Victoria was avoiding hero work following her recovery from the events of Worm, and while still using her real name, avoided letting others know she was a cape, a feat made easier by the chaos caused by The End of the World as We Know It. She wound up as an instructor for the Patrol Block, a combination youth group/neighborhood watch/volunteer police department and avoided using her powers, instead using the same sort of martial arts, body armor, and weapons used by the other, unpowered members of the organization. Some of this training carried over when she resumed costumed hero work.
  • As mentioned above, this comes in handy when Contender traps her in his depowering Pocket Dimension. He has an axe, she's got nothing but her costume; she still fights back hard enough that he retreats and relaseses her back into the normal universe in search of easier pickings. She gets bonus points for weaponizing the spikes on her costume against him.
• Flying Brick: Maintains the powers she had in Worm, though she's somewhat out of practice when it comes to flying after being paralyzed for two years. Her forcefield has also improved in its adaptability, range and application so she can even use it to carry objects and cover other people... at the cost of some control. Until she visits shardspace and forms a close connection with her shard, giving her extremely fine unconscious control over the force field. Later this control is refined even more, allowing her to re-shape it at will.
• The Fashionista: Spends a not-insignificant part of her narration thinking about the need for a good costume, and frequently (and snarkily) analyzes and critiques the fashion and costume choices of friends, enemies, and anyone else who happens to catch her attention. This often results in Funny Moments like mentally listing the absurd outfits of a notoriously brutal and reckless team of heroes among their offenses to society or grudgingly admitting that a world-threatening villain with whom she's engaged in mortal combat at least has a cool costume.
• Genius Bruiser: She was always implied to be this, but in Ward she's been trying a lot harder to focus on thinking through her actions and the consequences, which combines with her near encyclopedic knowledge of capes to help emphasize the 'genius' aspect of this a lot more.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Victoria is a gorgeous blonde, and one of the most genuinely heroic individuals in the setting.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Her flight gives her a Thinker 1 classification by virtue of giving her a birds-eye view. Despite the fact that the classification of 1 means it's so minor it wouldn't even be reported on, she considers it one of her best tools for how it lets her coordinate with her teammates and keep an eye on foes. She also uses the advantage her flight gives her in terms of balance and leverage to good effect in close combat.
• Heartbroken Badass: At the series start Victoria has lost the love of her life, her sister betrayed her and left her crippled for years, and the rest of her family save for Crystal is Innocently Insensitive at best and aggressively ignorant of her issues at worst.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Her actions in the first arc to protect a reformed villain earned her the ire of most human groups because they saw it as prioritizing the life of one cape against dozen of humans. Her subsequent forming of a team of problematic cases and establishment of an alliance with the Undersiders generated suspicion in hero circles about her team's intentions. She was also rude to Shortcut that one time.
• Heroic Willpower:
  • In Arc 11, Victoria rips out Nursery's combat tentacles from within her own throat, despite the fact that she's losing air circulation and that the tentacles have dug in to prevent this from happening. She takes a brief moment to vomit once she succeeds, and then proceeds to dive right back into the fight with a vengeance.
  • While fighting Grasping Self in Rain's Dream Room, Victoria ends up on the receiving end of a Tinker tech flamethrower with little to no cover. Despite having her flesh literally melting off of her body in a similar way to what happened during her fight with Crawler in Worm, she still remains conscious for the most part, even summoning up the strength to pull herself up and scream to get the enemy's attention.
• Loophole Abuse: When mastered by Valefor and given a compulsion to "help" him, she decides to do just that. By flying him away from the fighting and dropping him on a roof where he would be safe. Safely out of earshot of anyone he could compel and unable to climb down without assistance, that is.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Due to Carol having an affair with Neil Pelham around the time Victoria was conceived, even she's unsure as to whether Neil or Mark is her biological father.
• Martial Pacifist: Prefers the term "warrior monk", but she's trying to be this, and always makes the effort to inflict as little damage as possible (both physical and collateral) whenever she's pulled into a fight.
• Meaningful Rename: In Worm, she went by Glory Girl, which reflected her brash, flashy, selfish and reckless personality at the time. After more than two years of suffering and trauma at the beginning of Ward, some of which was caused at least partially by her own mistakes, she renames herself Antares, a star and a Greek God that stood in opposition to Ares, the god of war. This shows her desire to be a "shining example" for others, de-escalate conflict, and bring peace. Antares is also part of the Scorpio constellation and is sometimes called "the heart of the scorpion", which is a subtle hint at the nature of her relationship with The Wretch.
  • As Victoria slowly comes to terms with her trauma and begins to recover psychologically, her feelings towards her powers change. Initially she calls her forcefield The Wretch, but once she sees it in action in shardspace, throwing itself at hostile shards to defend her, getting put down and coming back again, she realizes that it (and her trauma) is a source of strength, not weakness, and that it wants to help her. She starts calling it instead The Fragile One and using the pronouns "she" and "her" to refer to it as if it were human.
• The Mentor: Aspires to be one for her team and the younger generation of heroes but is constantly stymied by her own experience under her mother's harsh Black-and-White Morality training.
• Mundane Utility: In addition to all the ways she uses it in combat, she uses her flight to move around her apartment at night without waking her roommates and to avoid putting weight on her bad leg after an injury. Humorously she's even used it to lie down in midair so that she could use her own body as a food tray.
  • Later in the story, her force field improves markedly in controllability and precision, and she is able to use the "extra limbs" for a variety of everyday tasks. At one point she uses it to hold her phone up to her ear so she can rest her real arms, it brushes aside an unwanted touch from her, and she even uses it to braid her hair.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Zigzagged. Victoria is pretty fit and athletic, and exercises in her free time as well, which lets her hold her own in hand-to-hand combat when depowered. However, her muscles are meaningless when using her actual super strength, which comes from her forcefield rather than her body.
• Noble Bigot:
  • She is often dismissive of non-capes, including saying that capes should ignore the wishes of the public if it would interfere with efficiency, lying to said public due to feeling it can't handle the truth or the truth would disadvantage the cape community, and ending the novel with aims to work around the limits that have been imposed. Yet she is still a heroic character that has doing the right thing and saving people, cape or not, as core motivations.
  • Her attempts to apply her knowledge about the correlations between power categories, trigger events, and host psychology can result in prejudicing her against capes based on their powers. For example, during the raid on Teacher she comments that since Movers tend to trigger from wanting to get to/from something, it's unsurprising that some Mover heroes are shell-shocked by the massive battle and want to leave.
• Power Incontinence: Her forcefield changed to match her body when she was mutated and didn't change back. As a result, it acts like a phantom limb with actual substance, clawing at and crushing everything it can get its many hands—and mouths—on. Later played with when Victoria gains fine control over it. Now, it doesn't do anything she doesn't want it to do... but sometimes she doesn't notice when it does things that she does want to do, but expected to do with her own flesh-and-blood limbs.
• Stellar Name: While keeping the light theme from Glory Girl Victoria decides to call herself Antares, or enemy of ares i.e. war. Obviously a Meaningful name given all the Parahuman conflict she's involved in.
• Superhero Packing Heat: Not usually, but she uses a gun during the battle with Cradle's hired mercenaries. Even in the middle of the pitched battle, she still holds back and tries to make non-lethal shots when possible.
  • Although she doesn't wind up using them, near the end of the raid on Teacher in the old Cauldron base, Victoria is seen floating and using the wretch to carry six rifles at the same time. Ominously, she didn't notice she was doing it until it was pointed out to her.
  • Later, in Radiation 18.2, seeking a way to fight the newly-created Titans, Antares requests multiple big guns (i.e. weapons that are normally vehicle-mounted) from the Patrol Block. With the new fine control over the Wretch, she would have been able to wield eight of them at once, giving her more firepower than the typical short-range anti-aircraft battery.
  • In Radiation 18.8, Victoria is denied the firepower she originally requested, but instead is given a tinker-tech laser cannon made by Dragon that, when not carried by Vicky requires a flatbed truck to move around and weighs 12 tons.
• Self-Care Epiphany: Victoria's struggle with her desire to be heroic and her need to help others against the very real mental and physical burden that those things place on her is one of the core conflicts of her character arc. The trope is almost zig-zagged in that she academically understands she should take better care of herself and it's not her responsibility to fix every problem she comes across, but she finds it difficult to follow through and step back. By the epilogue, she has finally managed to come to terms with her powers and found a way to help others without constantly putting herself in harm's way.
  • Her arc is even more ironic in that one of her roles from the beginning of the novel is trying to get the rest of her teammates to pay attention to their self-care while frequently neglecting her own.
• Talking Your Way Out: A common tactic of Victoria is to try and appeal to the conscience of whoever is fighting her, and to also try to get some personal jabs in if that doesn't work, usually by trying to infer the trigger event of her opponent from their power. Has had mixed success so far.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Any time she and Tattletale are communicating. Victoria openly loathes her, though she's willing to be civil, while Tattletale condescends to and patronizes her nonstop. They do get better as the story goes along. Gradually they become more like Vitriolic Best Buds, not really hating each other and instead just bickering Like an Old Married Couple.
• That Man Is Dead: As far as she's concerned, Glory Girl died with Brockton Bay in the previous story.
• Trauma Button: Panacea. Victoria shies away from even thinking about her, changes the topic as soon as possible when she's mentioned, and nearly has a full-blown freak out when her mom tricks her into attending a barbecue Amy is also attending. It gets to the point that in Shade 4.4, Victoria comments that a girl with freckles looks like "someone else", not even willing/able to say "she looks like Amy". In 10.12, her narration pulls a Last-Second Word Swap to avoid even thinking the word "panacea", in a context that has nothing to do with Amy.
  I had moisture brimming in the corners of my eyes, seeing that. A pan- a cure all for the creeping sentiment that had come with the mention of the Asylum.
  • She eventually gets past this, in a way, as her reactions to Amy shift slowly from Trauma Button closer to Berserk Button, where the mention of Amy threatens to send her into a murderous rage rather than give her a breakdown.
  • Another trauma button is being ignored. The final straw for her trigger event was her parents ignoring her, and when the Wardens bench Breakthrough until they have the time to verify that the several potential influences they'd just been exposed to (Goddess, Amy, Shardspace, Teacher) didn't have a hold on them, Victoria finds it immensely distressing that she's not getting to call the shots about how to respond to Amy building an army.
• The Unfavorite: How she perceives her relationship with her mother in Ward, as an ironic mirror of their positions in Worm. She muses that it feels like her mother only has enough love and caring in her for one daughter at a time, and by the time of Ward, it's been switched to Amy.
• Weaksauce Weakness: In fitting with the theme of Ward, hers is due to a mental disorder. Her deformed forcefield means she's adapted her fighting style to work without it as much as possible, making her weaker and more vulnerable.

The Wretch

Victoria's forcefield, which still maintains Victoria's form as a garden of meat and has developed into its own semi-independent entity.

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• Adventure Duo: Well, a serious young woman and a young, trying-to-make-a-splash, interdimensional, crystal whale-serpent-fractal-thing of a power-pack/ partner counts, right? Well, it certainly does for this end of things, given how useful "the Wretch" generally tries to make itself, at least. And, there're a lot of reasons why the two click, even if Victoria is uncomfortable just thinking about the whole thing.
• Barrier Warrior: In its own right, not just as the barrier being used by the warrior. Upon occasion, it has reacted to threats almost completely on its own, with tactical decisions Victoria isn't always aware of having made. She can instantly work the logic chains that caused its actions out, however, even during the act or just after. In fact, Victoria has occasionally had to strain herself from stopping it from pulverising a stressor she either consciously or unconsciously would like very much to hit. And sometimes, she can't stop it in time, like when it mauls her mother Carol near the end of Arc 12.
• Body Horror: It's still shaped like Victoria was when Panacea turned her into a twisted mass of flesh, which apparently involved more hands than arms, a face without a skull to go with it, and many other deformities. Normally no one can see it, but when it's raining or snowing glimpses of it can be seen as material settles onto it.
• In-Series Nickname: Victoria referring to it as "the wretch", and later she starts calling it the Fragile One.
• Improvised Weapon: Though it took some doing to control it, Victoria eventually manages to use the Wretch like a gun, "feeding" it coins that it throws at enemies at supersonic speeds. It is also readily capable of ripping apart furniture or structures to use as makeshift clubs.
  • In Radiation 18.4, Victoria and the Wretch are operating in close sync, allowing her to pick up 3 cars simultaneously and use them as both shields and clubs. She also rips apart a guardrail and fashions it into a spear for Foil.
  • Later she repeats the "coin-shot" trick by crumbling concrete into gravel and firing it at enemies like she was a flying machine gun nest.
• Invisibility: It's invisible by nature, which makes it hard for enemies to know when it's up or not. However, since it blocks solid matter, it's possible to see it if there's rain, smoke, snow, or other particulate in the air that can outline it.
• Glass Cannon: A weird version. It can tear stone and metal to pieces with ease, but technically it can only take one hit before collapsing. However, that one hit can be a lot and Victoria can recreate it in a few seconds.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: It can only take one solid hit before collapsing. Apparently, it does much better against sustained damage though. That said, it doesn't matter how strong that one hit that drops it is, it's getting blocked, whether it's a bullet or (according to Word of God) one of Scion's blasts.
• Power Incontinence: The physical manifestation of Victoria's. She can choose to summon or dissipate it, and can sometimes give it simple orders, but other than that it acts on its own. It's to the point that Victoria addresses it like it's a separate entity from herself, which may not be inaccurate if her passenger is taking a hand in controlling it.
• The Reveal: It later turns out that the Wretch is controlled directly by Victoria's shard, which actually likes her and wants to help her achieve her goals (and has almost as many self-esteem issues as Victoria herself). However, since the destruction of Scion it no longer has access to the greater shard network, so it doesn't have the knowledge or the energy to revert back to being a skintight force field like it was before Victoria was mutilated by her sister. The difficulty it has in controlling the forcefield is likened to controlling a car with no steering wheel, instead only using a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, which goes a ways towards explaining how it sometimes does what Victoria wants and sometimes seems to be on its own program.
• Super-Strength: It's super strong, and once served as the source of Victoria's strength when it was skintight. Now that it's essentially a giant mess of phantom limbs that writhe at random, it's a bit more problematic. It's actual lifting ability is established in Radiation 18.8 as 14.6 tons, last measured when Antares was Glory Girl pre-Gold Morning.
• Unwanted Assistance: The Wretch controlled by Victoria's shard, Waste, sometimes seems like it's trying to help Victoria, but sometimes does more damage than Victoria wanted... or does it to people or things she didn't want to damage. This later fades as the forcefield begins obeying Victoria's desires. However, it still does things for her unconsciously, just with much more precision than before.

Capricorn

Tristan & Byron Vera

Parahumans Online username: Capricorn

Identical twins who have been in the superhero business since before Golden Morning. Tristan and Byron are one of the very rare examples of a "Case 70", when two parahumans (generally twins) end up Sharing a Body due to accidents related to their trigger event. Both were members of a corporate team called Reach, which split apart after some unknown event and left behind some nasty grudges between its former team members.

Their powers revolve around matter creation- Tristan creates stone while Byron creates water, with the substances created changing to match the associated element of whichever brother is currently in control of the body. Each brother also has a secondary power related to his element; Tristan has improved strength and durability while Byron has greater resistance to extremes of temperature.

Classification: Brute; Shaker

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Both

• Adaptive Ability: An unusual variation; their powers change depending on their relationships with each other.
• All Take and No Give: This was their relationship for a long time, even before they triggered, with Tristan primarily coming across as taking. However, this is mostly Byron's perspective; Tristan doesn't quite see it as all-take on his end. They undeniably both have issues in the give-take department. Including understanding when giving is hurtful, or when a perceived act of taking might actually be a form of giving from a different perspective. Or just a case of total obliviousness.
• Always Identical Twins: Played With. They're identical twins and very closely resemble one another (to the point that Tristan dyes his hair to visually distinguish himself, which Byron also used to do), but couldn't be more different personality-wise.
• And I Must Scream: A variant: whichever twin isn't in control is always present, watching whatever the twin in control is doing and feeling whatever they feel, but cannot physically do anything until his own turn comes around.
• Animal Motifs: Tristan has rams, Byron has fish.
• Body Horror: An inter-dimensional, timeshare, body-swap form of both physical and mental horror rooted in too much shared DNA in too small a space for two parties... and too little experience of humans for the third, yes.
• Cain and Abel: Their trigger event was the result of a sibling argument turned violent, with Tristan stabbing Byron with a pen as Byron strangled him. As is often the case, triggering hasn't exactly helped this root issue one bit, although it's a whole lot harder to be mutually murderous as a Case 70. Yay?
• Can't Have Sex, Ever: Physiologically they can, but given that the other would be trapped in their head the whole time, forced to experience every part of it, and they have opposite sexual orientations, they've taken a pretty understandable stance of abstinence.
• Color Motifs: Byron has blue (the colour of his armour, the colour of his power and the colour he used to paint his hair), while Tristan has orange.
• Dark and Troubled Past: They were a member of the superhero team Reach, but wound up leaving before Gold Morning. Their chapter of Glow-worm shows that Reach had a very troubled dynamic: Tristan and Moonsong bitterly hate each other, and Moonsong gave Tristan's friend Furcate a hard time; meanwhile, Byron and Moonsong appear to be friendly to each other. Tristan says in Torch 7.3 that he tried juggling so many things that he eventually cracked under the pressure, did some impulsive things, became a villain without realizing it, and lost his friends, team, and family in the process.
• Different as Night and Day: Tristan is more extroverted, energetic, confident and a touch narcissistic and trigger-happy, while Byron is introverted, bookish, less energetic and inclined towards anxiety and over-thinking. The contrast makes it hard on Byron, because since they're stuck sharing a body, he has to spend time sorting out Tristan's enthusiastic backfires and mistakes (for which he occasionally snaps and finds ways to passively-aggressively mess with Tristan's day). For Tristan's part, he genuinely seems to struggle in both understanding (or remembering) why his brother doesn't (and can't) act or react to situations more like he does. Bull-headed goat, meet annoyed china shop.
• Discard and Draw: Their creation power changes what it produces for each of them over time based on some vague input:
  • Byron starting with knockout gas was tied to how he triggered while trying to choke Tristan. Later on he cycled through ice and water for a while, eventually settling on water.
  • Tristan started with pieces of spiky metal, which was tied to how he triggered while stabbing Byron with a pen. It changed between stone and metal for a while, sometime with a mixture, and eventually remained stone. There was also a stint where it created spiky growths with crude muscles that would lash out to attack anything close enough, almost certainly tied to the fact that this was the period where he was keeping Byron suppressed for months on end.
• Hypocrite: They're siblings; they're twins; they have both similarities and differences — and, they cannot escape each other. Accusing the other of wilfully doing something hurtful to them... while also unconsciously (or even very consciously upon occasion) doing something really similar to the other and not being willing to acknowledge that? Part of the turf. Neither is an innocent cherub, here. Tristan is arguably a far more active jerkass, but Byron can also passively jerk right back when he wants to. It's a cycle of fuck-ups and blame with Tristan ahead on sheer dumbass points.
• Identical Twin ID Tag: Tristan dyes his hair magenta so people can tell him from Byron. Byron used to dye his blue, but now just leaves it its natural black.
• Innocently Insensitive: Both, in very different ways: their differing personalities, sexualities, interests and goals mean accidentally treading on toes all around them, including their own. Occasionally, it pushes through this and into outright, alarm-blaring Obliviously Evil in Tristan's very specific case.
• Immune to Mind Control: Yes-no: played with. You can mind control whoever is physical at the time you do it, but the one in time-out will 1) definitely be aware of that and will 2) actively work to shake the other out of it and/or undo whatever you controlled him to do as soon as it's safe to go physical themselves. No master-stranger type ever worked out how (or that they even needed) to hit both of them at the same time to avoid evasive shenanigans.
• Meaningful Name: Capricorn... a stubborn, charging-head-first, materially-minded goat that can use earth/rock in various shapes, and a more passive porpoise/fish that prefers to think things over than immediately do and who uses water in highly changeable ways. Yeah: the twins have problems.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Tristan and Rain developed this. Despite Tristan being gay and Rain previously having been part of the homophobic Fallen cults. Byron isn't quite as close, but he's still right behind Tristan and Erin for Rain's closest friend.
• Required Secondary Powers: Tristan has mild Super-Strength to lift his stone creations easier, while Byron is resistant to extreme temperatures, presumably to avoid getting hypothermia from his water. Byron also doesn't need to breathe as much, helping protect him from drowning with his later power or suffocating with the original. They both have access to their own halves of a form of either Hammerspace or a Pocket Dimension. It certainly helps with their quick-complete-changeover-thing to have a way to store their specific equipment, accessories, accouterments and stuff for it to be almost instantly available, but it may have other uses. Just don't think too long about who/what organizes who gets what and how in the dimensional shenanigans. Including biology: it's mucked it up at least once. Darlene's power also reveals that the currently phased-out twin still has his body move its limbs so that he will be on solid footing when the other decides to switch.
• Sex by Proxy: The twins experience all the same sensations. Due to their differing sexualities, this means that any sexual encounter is effectively sexual assault, which has forced them both into celibacy.
• Sharing a Body: He/they are a case 70- twins who triggered while touching each other, which forced their bodies to merge. Each twin gets control of the body for two hours at a time, and rather than personalities shifting, the entire body (including clothes) shifts to become the original twin's body.

Tristan

Debut: Flare 2.5

• And I Must Scream: What he inflicted on Byron for two months. The epilogues reveal that even after killing himself, some part of him is still awake and aware within Byron, who has no idea.
• Back from the Dead: Kenzie is working to achieve this for Tristan as of the epilogues. The Sharing a Body / And I Must Scream situation may actually make this easier/less flawed than previous resurrections by cloning or Valkyrie, since he's maintained continuity of consciousness and his every waking moment was relevant data to the shard's analysis of his conflict with Byron.
• Despair Event Horizon: Hits this after accidentally getting Tribute killed and having a tragic misunderstanding in a conversation with Moonsong afterward. It doesn't get better after that.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Tristan creates things out of rock.
• Drives Like Crazy: Due to a combination of lack of proper teaching and being stuck in battle mentality, Tristan is a pretty piss-poor driver and tends to brake sharply at the slightest thing. Chris has a lot of fun ribbing him over it.
• Easily Forgiven: Played with. Forgiveness didn't come easy, as it took until Gold Morning for Byron to actually forgive Tristan for the long period he was trapped in the back seat, but Byron's made it clear that it's actual forgiveness rather than him just putting on a show.
• Everyone Has Standards: As part of his role as foil to Amy, even though Tristan faking Byron's death was partially motivated by his desire to pursue a romantic relationship without Byron being able to object to the rape by proxy, once he's actually in that position he's too riddled with guilt to go through with it.
• Extra-ore-dinary: His original power let him create twisted clumps of spiky metal.
• Foil: To Amy. Both are gay people that got a lot of trauma related to their power, and in a moment of desperation used said power on their sibling, in a way that made them suffer for a long time. Difference is, Amy lives in denial, doesn't understand the extent that she affected Victoria, and refuses professional help. Meanwhile, Tristan completely understands that he fucked up, sought therapy, is doing whatever he can to be more fair to Byron, and most importantly doesn't expect forgiveness from Byron, unlike Amy does from Victoria.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Tristan occasionally drops Spanish words/phrases.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Gets cut in half by Cradle's whip in Blinding. He gets better.
• Heroic Suicide: Tristan kills himself with his own power to prevent him and his brother from going Titan.
• It's All About Me: Flashback chapters show he had this attitude before triggering and a good deal into his hero career. His most egregious instances of this were just not letting Byron act as an equal, going to business meetings and therapy sessions that affect both of them without ever giving up control, essentially making all the decisions and assuming Byron would go along with it. At another point, he blamed Byron for not letting him daydream because of the rules he put in place despite daydreams being, you know, typically about private things you can't/won't actually outright do in the first place. What he probably meant was "I can't do what I dream up and then want to do right in that moment"... which isn't really "daydreaming" as most people define the word.
• Killed Off for Real: Tristan kills himself to keep himself (and by extension his brother) from going Titan.
• The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Tristan is this towards Weld, going so far as to claim he's the latter's biggest fan. Unfortunately for him, he tries to make this claim in front of Sveta, who is Weld's girlfriend.
• The Leader: Tristan often assumes the role for the group.
• Never My Fault: For much of his life, Tristan has found ways to deflect guilt or blame from himself when his actions have hurt others — that is if he's even worked out that his actions have actually hurt others (telling him isn't the same as getting through to him). Any time Byron brings this up even in the present, he still has a tendency to downplay how not only badly it has fucked them both over, but how he kind of still does it. Although, granted, to a much, much lesser degree these days.
• Noodle Incident: Tristan did something during their time in Reach that caused the junior half of Reach to crash and burn, as Tattletale put it. Moonsong accused him of having killed or attempted to kill a teammate, and he was arrested by her and Tribute for an unknown reason. Later on we find out that he faked Byron's death to take over their shared body completely for over two months and tried to kill a villain.
• Obliviously Evil: He genuinely never fully considered Byron as, you know, an active part of his life for much of it... both before their trigger and for a while after it. Or, that he had hurt Byron in enough ways to make his brother hate him for a host of very real reasons. He just saw his brother as a lesser loser who just didn't know how to live, who he didn't much like and who he very much didn't deserve to be attached to, in short. Acting on this the way he did, however... Eeeeeee~vil. It's to his credit that he now outright states that what he did was his very, very B-A-D and he is actively trying not to be that horrible ever again.
• Straight Gay: Tristan has some camp attributes, such as dyeing his hair and his massive fanboy crush on Weld, but generally defaults to this.
• Super-Strength: He has modestly enhanced strength, which helps with handling the rock constructs his power creates. Notable feats of strength include tossing a Mook over his shoulder one-handed and easily handling a large rock shield that Victoria had to rely on the Wretch to hold onto properly.
• Work Hard, Play Hard: Tris is very much of this mind-set. Finding balance any other way is just not his forte. So, when he can't blow off steam as hard as he'd like to, his frustration impacts negatively on his work... And life.

Byron

Debut: Flare 2.7

• A Day in the Limelight: Arc 9 sees him playing a more active role in the team's actions and even spending several chapters without his brother appearing at all, courtesy of Tristan getting aligned by Goddess. Said arc is also intercut with multiple Interlude flashbacks from his perspective.
• All of the Other Reindeer: How he felt his life was, thanks to Tristan. In Interlude 9.x, he accused Tristan of taking his friends and doing everything he did, and then turning around and using it to mock him.
• An Ice Person: Another phase his powers went through was to create ice.
• Deadly Gas: Byron's original power let him create clouds of invisible, suffocating gas- matching his trigger event, when he attempted to strangle his brother.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Luckily he didn't go entirely mad, but the incident that got Tristan kicked out of Reach was not kind to him. He spent 72 days in the backseat, unable to interact with anyone or control his own body, to the point that when he finally got out all he could do was scream.
• Innocently Insensitive: Byron doesn't always get how much his fairly small, but nonetheless still there, cis-het blinkers annoy Tristan. Byron isn't as woke on orientation as he believes he is, and this means the odd socially clumsy fumble beyond his standard anxiety in public.
• Making a Splash: Byron has water powers.
• Only Sane Man:
  • Often mixed up for The Reliable One by others, but just because Byron isn't inclined to act out doesn't mean he can't — or doesn't. Or that it won't be destructive, either. The more introverted Byron is, however, often left carrying the can of extroverted mistakes that Tristan caused, but which he then can't really face dealing with even as he generally gives it a shot. The problem is... by the time Byron gets stuck with it, it's also undeniably also his can, as well. Whether he feels capable of dealing with it or not. Or if he even wants to. This causes occasionally explosive friction for both brothers.
  • He's also the only powered member of Breakthrough to not get instantly brainwashed by Goddess.
• The Quiet One: Fairly introverted, which isn't helped by his infrequent interactions with the others.
• Self-Harm: In his interlude, chapter Byron is shown to have engaged in self-harm with a pen to cope with the stress of his and Tristan's situation. Keep in mind that Tristan was also along for the ride, even if Byron doesn't quite acknowledge that bit...
• Ship Tease: Has some with Vista, though they're still trying to figure out how to navigate the Capricorn brother's unique situation.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: He still needs to breathe but he can do more with less oxygen, though he wasn't aware of this until a while into the story despite having the powers for years—it just simply wasn't something he and his teammates thought to test for.
• The Unfavorite: In Interlude 9.x while fighting with Tristan he states that he feels like their parents talk to Tristan more than him.

Tress

Sveta Karelia (Tress, formerly Garrotte)

Parahumans Online username: Kraken_In_A_Jar

Debut: Flare 2.5

A Case 53 whose body is a mass of super-strong tentacles that she can't completely control. These days, she wears a human-shaped, full-body prosthetic suit that she can manipulate from the inside and that also contains her tentacles. Used to work with the Irregulars prior to the team's collapse. Having grown to the point where she no longer has to be worried about endangering everyone around her, she's making an effort to branch out and be her own person by becoming a superhero in her own right. Was formerly known as Garrotte, before adopting the name Tress in Torch 7.8.

For tropes applying to her appearance in Worm, see here.

Classification: Brute, Mover

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• All the Other Reindeer: Being a Case 53, she's generally isolated from normal society. What makes this worse is that she's also reviled within the Case 53 community for her part in standing against the Irregular's mob revenge on Cauldron in Worm.
• Ambiguous Gender Identity: From Within 16.11 seems to indicate that Sveta may actually be a trans woman. As she regains memories of her past from wandering through shardspace, she recalls that she was injured by slipping and falling down black rocks. In 13.z, this happened to Dimi, who was introduced as Nayet's brother. Sveta also recalls art of swirls being drawn on said rocks, which were what Dimi drew in the interlude. This implies that Sveta was not actually Nayet, who is the POV character in 13.z, but Dimi. As it is known that Eden shards cause different mutations based on the mental state and background of the individual who consumes the Cauldron vials, it is quite possible that her shard, on top of giving her her inhuman form, also drew on her gender identity in the process to make her biologically female (or as close to it as her new body would allow).
• Ascended Extra: Not quite as big a jump as Victoria and Ashley, being a relatively important character for decent stretches of Worm's second half, but is slated to be a protagonist here.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Any way you slice it, Sveta is a joy to be around. Just... don't endanger her, those she cares about or those she has decided to protect. Fully let loose, she's among the most (physically) dangerous parahumans around. Many have earned the dismemberment they got.
• Can't Have Sex, Ever: On account of not having a normal human body sex is out of the question for her, something she's not happy about.
• Character Development: She's visibly more comfortable with her body and at peace with being stuck as a Case 53, and is even able to smile at a joke Kenzie makes about how her hugs are lethal.
• Combat Tentacles: Pretty much all her actual body is. Later on Rain builds some additions to her artificial body to give her safer versions of this, though she chooses to forgo them shortly after.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Her tentacles are extremely powerful and versatile, potentially allowing her to grab and subdue entire crowds at once or move with incredible speed. However, Sveta doesn't have total control over them and they tend to murder anything that stresses her, so she avoids using them, even against people like the Fallen. When her suit is irreparably breached in Arc 11, she is forced to fight without it, but actually maintains a relatively high degree of control, partially through her own determination and partially by taking advantage of Precipice's "shame you into doing better" power.
• Disability Immunity: When Kingdom Come tries to take control of her body, he finds out that since she can barely control it, he doesn't have a chance. He still manages to disable her and cause problems, but he ends up mostly trapped because he doesn't have the experience with her bizarre biology that she does.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: At least at the beginning of Ward- she has a body, a boyfriend she loves, friends who understand and don't judge her, and she can make all the art she wants now.
• Extendable Arms: She can unhook the connections of her limbs, letting her launch out her tentacles while leaving the hands at the end.
• Foil: While using a prosthetic body whose limbs she can extend using her own tendrils, she has certain resonances with... Mannequin from the S9. They form contrasts on many scales: a colourfully artistic embellisher vs the consummate minimalist, optimistic humanist vs depressed nihilist, control issues vs control freak... it goes on. They both, however, have stonkingly massive body dysphoria their powers do nothing but further complicate. For very different reasons.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Sveta almost never swears, instead opting for terms like dummy or lamebrain. When she does swear, it's most often due to an issue relating to her body control problems.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Sveta has a lot of insecurities, particularly over her relationship with Weld, feeling like she's more like a burden he has to look after than a girlfriend. As she sees it, she can't figure out how to make food he likes, she can't have sex, and though she knows music is about the only thing he can enjoy she can't sing or play instruments. Weld doesn't actually have much, if any, sense of taste, smell, or touch in the first place, but it's clear it's a deep-set fear that Victoria tries to reassure her this isn't the case.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Victoria. The two get each other like no one else has.
• Iconic Outfit: Sveta's body looks almost normal, but she paints every inch of it, making it very distinctive.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Sveta slowly manages to adjust to her body, but the stress of having to maintain control of it after her suit is broken by Cradle's mercenaries, combined with the revelation that Weld is struggling with their relationship because her body is unable to provide him the conventional physical intimacy he craves prompts her to want a new, normal body, which she eventually gets.
• Official Couple: With Weld. Though they end up breaking up later on during the story.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Is quick to pull out the verbal knives when she and Victoria work with Tattletale to uncover a plot to drive wedges within hero and villain teams. Tattletale, however, considers it fun, and may even be her way of helping Sveta blow off steam after she has a messy fight with Weld due to the aforementioned plot targeting their relationship.
• Poor Communication Kills: It's revealed that in her Irregular days, she was the one left to play the messenger between Weld and those seeking a more blood-thirsty revenge against Cauldron. She ended up flubbing the whole matter by not bringing it up with Weld to avoid stressing him, while indicating to the group that she had, contributing to the events in Worm that saw a lot of deaths as result, and her being personally ostracized from the Case 53 community.
• Power Incontinence: She's spent years improving herself, but her control over her body still isn't perfect.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Because she never got any actual training thanks to being mostly institutionalized, she doesn't grok some basic things about how Victoria, Kenzie, Tristan and even Byron do things. Chris and Rain can intuitively get the point behind things like Master-Stranger protocols because one lives on paranoia and the other lived with Masters and Strangers, while Ashley got quality time in the field with the Slaughterhouse Nine, so groks the need for self-checking quite well, thanks. But due to her restrictive experiences and general Cauldron-derived mental tampering, Sveta struggles. Normally, Sveta getting stressed isn't good, which is why it often backfires on Masters and Strangers; but it doesn't exactly help Sveta deal and doesn't always backfire on the correct stressor.
• Logical Weakness: She is one to certain capes. Her body is nothing like a normal human's, with nothing analogous to a typical skeleton and limbs and lacking most full organs, including things like lungs that are needed to speak. As such, while she can't necessarily resist physical control type Masters, they can't actually do anything with her if they get control.
• Relationship Upgrade: She started dating Weld sometime before the story began.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: A strange version where Sveta herself isn't evil, but her body sort of is. Outside her suit she's incredibly fast and capable of tearing through most unarmored opposition, to the point that it took a small army to capture her when Cauldron first dumped her on Bet. The drawback's that she still doesn't have perfect control over her body and could easily slip into lethal tactics with the slightest error. As such her prosthetic body is a prison for her real one, designed so that it can't be accidentally opened by her body acting autonomously.
• Team Mom: Tends to play this role for the group, being one of the least confrontational members. Lampshaded in Shade 4.5, to her embarrassment.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Will instantly become unhappy any time she has to work with any of the former members or affiliates of Cauldron.
• Took a Level in Badass: She's in considerably better control of her tendrils nowadays than she ever was in Worm, though still isn't totally confident about being able to cut loose without seriously hurting anybody. She's also taken a few levels personality-wise, having emotionally matured and gained a lot of confidence over the Time Skip.
• Tranquil Fury:
  • She becomes noticeably angry when discussing the Fallen's treatment of Case 53s, but still remains in control of herself.
  • She's livid with Tattletale in Pitch 6.8, but again remains in control of herself.

Swansong

Ashley Stillions/Ashley Swan

Parahumans Online username: Mangled_Wings

Debut: Flare 2.5

Damsel of Distress was a minor villain who can disintegrate localized matter, and was eventually inducted into the Slaughterhouse Nine before getting killed by Defiant. Ashley is not that character; rather, she's one of the clones of Damsel of Distress created by Bonesaw who managed to survive the fallout of the Nine's defeat. She's decided to give fighting crime a try for a change, but is very vocal that she intends to return to villainy the second the whole "team" thing doesn't pan out.

Classification: Blaster/Mover

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• Alternate Character Interpretation: In-universe. Bonesaw didn't have the exact memories from each of her subjects when she cloned them so she used what she knew of them to work backwards, trying to guess their inner motivations and what would have driven them to what they became before implanting close-enough memories to get the results she wanted. To be safe, she put together the memories of each clone of a single person differently in hopes that if one didn't work the others would, resulting in nine differently interpreted versions of the same person. This version isn't the perfect Slaughterhouse 9 fit she wanted, but ended up closer to the original as a result.
• Ambiguously Bi: The original Damsel is implied to have been mostly straight, but her clones (who downloaded memories and experiences from other capes when reborn) seem more flexible in that regard. Ashley Black at one point asked her sister if she had become more "worldly" while they were apart.
• Ascended Extra: Was a minor antagonist in Worm that died without accomplishing much. In Ward she's a major character with a whole arc dedicated to her backstory.
• Badass Bookworm: She's an avid reader, and apparently trades books with Rain frequently. Counting the events of her predecessor's life, she also has the longest cape career out of anyone on the team.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Invoked by Ashley during Eclipse X.8, when she tells Jack Slash that even if she agreed to join the Slaughterhouse Nine, Bonesaw might easily make her into a living weapon with no control over her life. Which was exactly what happened- they 'fixed' her power but took away her hands, and took her voice as well.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Inverted; as the antiheroic Swansong, Kenzie makes Ashley contacts that invert the normal effects of her power, giving her blank white eyes that become pure black when she uses her powers.
• Broken Bird: Since before Ashley Stillions triggered, she was a broken little girl from a very broken home. Triggering didn't help. And, the less said about Jack sticking his oar in plus the multiple deaths and collective memory/identity issues, the better.
• Brutal Honesty: Ashley never holds back any opinion that enters her head. At all. It's very good for throwing overconfident villains off their game, but it doesn't exactly win her a lot of friends.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: When she and Bonesaw confronted Blasto in Worm, Blasto didn't recognize her, even after they met during the Boston Games and Ashley killed his kaiju. She didn't take it well.
• Catchphrase: During the Eclipse arc, her narration often talks about how she has either bad days, or days when she dreads the bad days. At the end of the arc, she says that now she has good days, and bad days she can manage because she knows there are good days coming.
• Character Development: Whether it's because of her being a clone or whether Bonesaw cloned DoD after she operated on her, Ashley is remarkably more stable than the original DoD. However, it's revealed that she identifies more as Damsel of Distress than as Ashley Stillions, because she has connected less with her memories before she got powers and more with her memories of being a villain and killing people. Early in the book she was convinced she was going to be a villain again and the team will be gone before long; after the Fallen raid she is one of the members most committed to keeping the team together.
• Clones Are People, Too: She's a clone of the original DoD, and is treated in-story like anyone else.
• Clone Angst: Downplayed, since at least overtly she's utterly determined to present herself as the same person as the original, but it still creeps in from time to time.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: For all her aloofness and disdain for people, she enjoys Kenzie's company, and in Shade 4.4, is visibly happy at a fan's excited responses to getting sent a photo of Victoria, Ashley, and Tristan.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • Does not respond well to mistreatment. Shown when she kills Beast of Burden for hitting her and ordering her to stop pissing him off despite her not doing anything objectionable.
  • It's revealed that back in Worm, the Slaughterhouse Nine's attack on Accord's HQ, which forced him to Brockton Bay, happened because Damsel was gunning for him as retribution for humiliating her at the Boston Games.
• Eye Colour Change: When Ashley uses her powers her eyes and hair are bleached white and it takes several seconds for her irises to reappear.
• Face Death with Dignity: She allows herself to die to save others (especially Kenzie), while also refusing to be turned into a member of Valkyrie's flock (this is for Team Damsel, namely Black, but also their other memory-selves). While she had previously faced each death she remembers with anger, frustration and loathing, this time, she picks her terms and accepts it — while going out like a boss.
• Fatal Flaw: Pride. Damsel was too proud to allow herself to do things like cut her losses, or accept that she wasn't considered a major player. It almost always worked to her detriment. This Ashley actively tries to avoid acting too stereotypically (and predictably) thanks to her pride, but is still pretty proud.
• Ghost Memory: Ashley has the memories of the original Damsel, the Damsel clones Bonesaw killed before her, and people who the original Damsel knew, like Edict and Licit. However, Bonesaw did not intentionally give her most of those memories (nor did she have access to Edict and Licit's memories), leaving the question of where Ashley got those memories unsolved.
• Good Counterpart: She's this to her sister Ashley 'Black', who still identifies herself as Damsel of Distress, and seems eager to return to being a villain. She's trying to slowly convince her to become a hero.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: The original Damsel was just about to give up on villainy, when the Slaughterhouse Nine got her.
• Heel–Face Turn: Whether it's the team's influence or her own maturation, Ashley has become a much nicer person as the story progresses. She even turns herself in for killing Beast of Burden, and doesn't have a problem with going to prison for it.
• Heroic Sacrifice: She willfully destroys herself fighting Ingenue and Spawner in order to stop Teacher. The syringe she gives to Canary allows her to enhance the strength of her powers to neutralize Teacher's base.
• Hope Spot: After the original Damsel triggered, she killed her abusive father. For a second, it looked as though she and her mother could escape their old lives and build something better... and then her powers killed her mother by accident.
• I Am Who?: Bonesaw's conditioning has made it so that she identifies more with "Damsel of Distress" than "Ashley Stillions", even when out of costume, and she suffers a lot of cognitive dissonance from that fact.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: At the end of the day, Damsel of Distress was a very, very minor villain, who despite her power simply didn't have what it took to accomplish anything significant. Even when she did accomplish things, her personality got in her own way.
• The Infiltration: Goes undercover as a villain in Hollow Point.
• In-Series Nickname: When around Damsel of Distress out of costume, people call her Ashley Swan to distinguish the two.
• Like an Old Married Couple: While is clear that she and her sister care for one another, they're also technically the same person with some differences in personality and life choices. So it's practically a given they bicker a lot. From the apartment to Swansong's choice to be hero, or even her haircut, they practically dissent about everything. Victoria is already accustomed to this so it's a given they do it pretty often.
• Morality Pet: Kenzie. In Shade 4.4, Ashley flips her shit at Houndstooth, telling him that Kenzie is human and deserves to be treated with respect, and in Beacon 8.7, she threatens Monokeros for using her power on Kenzie.
• Morally Superior Copy: She's a clone of Damsel of Distress that's decided to give the hero thing a spin.
• Mundane Utility: Her power annihilates matter, but the Manton effect protects her own body from it. This means that she can use her power on herself to instantly destroy all grime and give herself an impromptu bath. We see the original Damsel do this in Eclipse X.2.
• Parental Substitute: She's become something like a kind older sister to Kenzie, who adores her. She's more than happy with this.
• Pretender Diss: As the original Damsel, she was unceremoniously ejected from the meeting of the major players during the Boston Games, after she tried to muscle her way into being treated as an equal.
• Power Incontinence: Downplayed, especially compared to the original Damsel, who could barely control her powers at times. Ashley has much more finesse and confidence in using her abilities, though she still gets "sparky" from time to time, according to Kenzie.
• Prosthetic Limb Reveal: She has prosthetic hands. They were originally installed by Riley, the bio-tinker formerly known as Bonesaw, but they have since been modified and maintained by Rain.
• Punny Name: Comes with the cape turf. In her case, she's truly neither the pale Damsel of Distress nor Ashley Stillons and has yet to differentiate herself. Yet, she still kind of is a messed-up coda appended to the life of the messed-up woman who was. Who can insta-kill most things, by-the-by. Yeah: Swansong.
• Recoil Boost: Ashley's space-warping/matter-destroying blasts create a strong recoil which she can use to dodge attacks and move around with. It's the lowest setting of the whole propulsion-engine-shard-thing, basically.
• Self-Made Orphan: When she triggered, she killed her parents; her father on purpose, but her mother by accident.
• Suicide Attack: During her battle with Spawner, Ingenue removes the Manton Limit on her power, meaning that she is no longer immune to her own blasts. Despite this, she continues to use her power as it damages herself and destroys her hands, even blasting her own gut to remove an insect born from Spawner that was tearing her apart from the inside.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Downplayed. She styles herself as an evil villainess, but while she did do crimes as a villain, such as trying (and failing) to rob a bank, it is revealed that despite her very lethal and difficult-to-control power, she avoided using her power against others, killing exactly one person, who she believed had betrayed her on a very personal level. Meaning that whenever she went on a mad rant about having killed people,she was actually referring to the accidental killing of her parents immediately after triggering.
• Token Evil Teammate: Both in the way she acts (cold, threatening, insulting) and in her motivations, having openly declared herself on PHO to be a villain. In Flare 2.6, she told the group that she would only stay with them until they crashed and burned, and only so she could learn before going back to being a villain. In Glare 3.3, she outright states that she could annihilate the whole team. This comes to a peak in Shadow 5.10, where she kills Beast of Burden. However, she gradually mellows out after that, and her interlude arc makes it clear that all this was mostly posturing due to her insecurities.
• Tranquil Fury: When she really gets mad, it's a quiet, cold, no-holds-barred, hit-em-where-it-hurts kind of anger. Victoria comments that Ashley barely resembles her normal self when in this state. It's been shown when she finally snaps on Beast of Burden and kills him by blowing a hole in his chest with her power, all without raising her voice or batting an eye.
• Weaponized Exhaust: In a way. Her shard is the one responsible for blowing up the planet at the end of the cycle, which the Entities then use to blast off into space towards their next target. When Ashley uses her power in battle, she uses the recoil from her blasts as much if not more than the matter annihilation part.

Precipice

Rain Frazier

Parahumans Online username: of5

Debut: Flare 2.5

A close friend of the Capricorn twins, Rain is a cagey teen with a lot of secrets, many stemming from the fact that he's a member of a multi-trigger (a trigger event involving multiple people in which all involved get portions of each other's powers) and has reason to be afraid of his cluster-mates, all of whom are gunning to kill him. He has a grab-bag of powers which shift day-by-day, but most of them are pretty weak. He spends the first part of Ward without a cape name, picking 'Precipice' as a temporary name in Beacon 8.6.

Classification: Blaster; Shaker; Mover; Tinker (Prosthetic Limbs)

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• Ambiguously Bi: Despite his protestations in the same paragraph, holding another boy's sweatshirt to your face because it smells like them isn't exactly a straight thing to do:
  He touched the name and realized he still had [Erin's] sweatshirt.
  He wanted to hold it to his face and inhale, only because he felt so desperate and alone that he wanted any connection that wasn’t- wasn’t her.
  Mama Mathers approached the window and looked outside.
  He might have wanted and done the same connection if it was a boy. If it was Byron, or Tristan. Not because he was that way, but…
  He didn’t have much.
• All of the Other Reindeer: He was raised as a member of the Fallen, but after he triggered, they turned against him for a couple of reasons- first, because the guilt from his actions at the mall turned him into a nicer person who didn't believe in their ideology, and second because while he has powers, they're considered to be inferior and useless for the Fallen's cause.
• The Atoner: For what he did as part of the Fallen. It leads him to turn himself in for his crimes, and he does everything possible to make it clear that he wants to go to jail for what he did.
• Blessed with Suck: He may have gotten multiple powers, but all of them have some very serious drawbacks or stumbling blocks attached, particularly if you just use 'em neat.
  • His blaster power can cut absolutely anything in half, but affects the very first solid object that it encounters; in the case of most people, that'll just be their clothes or equipment. If it does hit skin, however, it doesn't have a non-lethal setting; any body part hit will be split in half if pushed hard enough. So realistically, it either does nothing useful, or is instantly fatal. With no in-between. It does give him something of an advantage against tinkers, however, as he can destroy their gear pretty easily, and most tinkers are very weak without their tech.
  • His mover power lets him cancel his momentum, but locks him in place for about a second and has a recharge time. Which... can be a problem in a fight.
  • His emotion power is so weak that people barely even notice when it is used on them. Besides that, "creeping, low-level doubt and/or guilt" is, also, not exactly "terror", "bored-now" or "sleepy-bye-bye" levels of immediately useful in a fight, however insidiously useful his yanking on emotions could be in other, more long-term situations. It in fact turns out that his power is more useful on teammates than on enemies. If they have the right mindset, the guilt, shame, and self-doubt he can cause will drive them to mentally push themselves harder to improve themselves and learn from mistakes much faster than normal.
  • His tinker arms are very, very easy to break. On the plus side: he can whip them up relatively quickly when on a good day. And surprise people with hidden knives that stick out when the arms break.
• Bungling Inventor: He's a Tinker who can make prosthetic hands and arms, but they're really not very good. Well, he constantly says they're not: Ashley, for one, somewhat disagrees with his assessment for a few good reasons. He may not be a Riley-level medical Tinker with self-repairing creations, but he's not in any real danger of going full-on Bonesaw with his tinkering partly because of his limits, either. Also, her not dying because he can both do Tinkerish first aid at need and jury-rig patches on Riley's work in the field if/when breakdowns happen? Worth it! Also, patching or tweaking Sveta's mannequin/armour/suit up at need is no mean task, either. Being a front-line patching tinker for other Tinker's work ain't a bad thing, at all. He's basically a cut-price mini-Dragon, and doesn't know it.
• Butt-Monkey: He's the team resident at this. If something bad or unlucky happens, then expect that is going to happen to him. From gaining shitty powers, to getting almost killed and being in the most awkward situation with his crush, it doesn't matter what happens, poor guy can't catch a break at anything. It getting so notable that practically his entire team regards him as this.
• The Cape: Slowly grows into this through the story while keeping his pragmatic streak. Ironically he ends up as a bigger role model to the younger heroes than Victoria.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: During the Pitch arc, Cradle and Operator Red slice him up very badly, though he lives and recovers.
• Combat Pragmatist: When it comes to fighting his cluster-mates, he's willing to forego the usual restrictions on powered combat and do what it takes to survive.
• Combo Platter Powers: Due to being part of a cluster-trigger/being a grab-bag cape he has multiple powers, but the crappy versions of all of them, or so he claims. They include:
  • Shooting white "lines" of energy that can cleanly bisect anything they touch (including people and animals) if enough force is applied. And we do mean anything, up to and including The Simurgh. His personal power.
  • Completely stopping his own momentum at will, which is a subset of Snag's Mover power. When enhanced by Snag's tokens, this lets him redirect his momentum as well.
  • Inducing (extremely weak) feelings of doubt and guilt, which is drawn from Love Lost.
  • Low-level Tinker abilities specialized in prosthetic limbs, as a weaker version of Cradle's powers.
  • May or may not possess an unknown fifth power connected to the (supposedly) deceased fifth cluster mate. Turns out that space actually belongs to the cluster's shards; his fifth "power" is the ability to access the dream room with the others and share the tokens there, transferring power and personality between the members of the cluster.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Was adopted into the Fallen: a homophobic cult that does arranged marriages, carries out violent acts, worshipped the Endbringers, and took advantage of people on Golden Morning. As a child, his adopted parents sold him to another family. He was a henchman when the Fallen started a fire that killed numerous people, leading him to trigger in the same cluster as several others who were inside the building.
• David Versus Goliath: He's part of a cluster-trigger, and the other members have teamed up and are coming after him, though he says it's not a Kiss/Kill^note Capes that are part of the same cluster-trigger tend to either deeply bond with one another, whether platonically or romantically, or feel all-consuming hatred for each other. type of situation. He's dead wrong about that, of course. He doesn't feel any deep bond with or deep dislike for his clustermates, but they have a seething hatred for him.
• Deuteragonist: Rain is arguably the second most important character in the story, having the most screentime out of all the non-Victoria Breakthrough members, having 3 major story arcs centering around him, his personal antagonist being the most persistently reoccurring, and the mechanics of the dream room ending up being vital to the plot of arc 16 onwards. He also has the second most interludes from his perspective, after Ashley. Like Victoria his own shard even happens to be a bud.
• Emotion Bomb: He can induce feelings of guilt and doubt, but the feelings are so tepid that one can actually not notice that he's inducing them, so it's not very useful against opponents. Turns out this power actually works pretty well at driving teammates to improve themselves and learn from their mistakes, however.
  • Becomes a much straighter example when he gets powered up by Love Lost's token. His emotion power can now be used to manipulate squads of mercenaries into making stupid decisions and turning on each other, and extended targeting reduces Cradle to a crying, self-loathing wreck.
• Everyone Can See It: His crush on Erin is very clear to see, but people outside the Fallen don't bring it up directly.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: How his emotion power is really supposed to be used. Its use on enemies is limited; rather, it's meant to be used on allies: by driving home their failures and enhancing their shame at mistakes made, the people under this effect are forced to learn and improve their performance much faster than normal, even in the middle of a fight. At one point this lets Victoria pin down Lord of Loss's fighting style and finally find an opening to finish him, and another time it helps Sveta maintain control of her tendrils while outside her suit. That said, it's not a magic button. It's easy to let yourself be consumed by the shame and doubt at the wrong moment, and the right mindset is required to actually take advantage of it.
• Heel–Face Turn: Had one after triggering. He used to be a standard, card-carrying member of the Fallen, but after triggering, he found himself rethinking his entire belief system.
• Important Haircut: Cut his hair sometime between the end of Pitch and the start of Torch.
• In-Series Nickname: Jay calls him 'Rain man'.
• Irony: He frequently wishes that Erin would see him as more than a friend. He gets the chance to marry her, but turns it down, because she was forced into it by the Fallen. Somewhat downplayed in that they do seem to become friends again after that whole situation blows over.
• Lethal Harmless Powers:
  • His Blaster power lets him make 'lines' he can throw, and anything they hit can, if the right amount of force is applied, be split in two around the line. But it bypasses the Manton effect, meaning that he can potentially split people in half, and he doesn't have to be the one applying the force, so it's possible for him to make someone kill themselves by throwing a punch. And we're not kidding about how he can cut anything; the power proves able to make The Simurgh half the Endbringer she used to be.
  • He can make prosthetic arms, but they are too weak to be of any use, and break easily. However, he eventually figures out how to build blades into them, so if they break while he is grappling with someone, his opponent will be impaled.
  • In addition: note how he pretty much covers all broad categories of power types. However "minor" any one power may seem on any given day, the odds are good it could prove synergistic with somebody else in any team he works in. The Fallen focused on how weak his Master/Shaker, Blaster and Tinker powers are in isolation, without noticing that he is, in effect, a Swiss Army force multiplier or saboteur.
• Loophole Abuse: Sure, he's been extensively hit by Mama Mathers' mind control. But, he worked around that to engage with outsiders on a regular basis and teamed up to get help. How? By carefully not thinking about her at all... or only doing so in the most tangential ways he could. Although not ideal, he worked around her better than most.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: In costume, he usually sports several of his prosthetic robot arms. Downplayed, since they're very fragile and usually not very dangerous. Unless he hides knives in them to impale whoever breaks them.
• Mundane Utility: His blades produce light, which can be used as a substitute for a flashlight in dark places. He becomes pretty frustrated one time when he realizes that his blades illuminate more than the light-up function he took time incorporating into his mask.
• Power-Up:
  • After killing Snag, he gets most of Snag's tokens, making his Mover power stronger for the day to the point that he can redirect his momentum as desired instead of merely removing it.
  • Later zig-zagged.When Love Lost realizes that Cradle has manipulated her for so long and that he is draining her blood to power himself up, she throws all of her tokens through the barrier in the dream room to Rain in the hopes that he can take down Cradle. When Rain wakes up, his mover, tinker, and blaster powers are severely weakened as a result of Cradle's power grab. However, Love Lost's tokens make his emotion power become stronger than it has ever been, giving him the ability to simultaneously affect hundreds of people at once, massively ratchet up the emotional pressure on two or three people, sense people through his power, and manipulate people's emotions to the point he can influence their actions.
• Psychic Dreams for Everyone: He has them instead of normal dreams, wherein he lives the memories of the others in his multi-trigger, and later psychically connects with and can talk to them.
• Reformed, but Rejected: After triggering, he became a much better person, entirely regretting his previous actions. His cluster, however, don't care about his changed opinions, and want only to inflict the nastiest death on him that they can.
• Required Secondary Powers: It's never directly highlighted (mainly because it's both very abstract to describe and incredibly difficult for Rain to talk about at all), but his entire cluster must have some Thinker ability to pull off the shared-yet-compartmentalized, network-style dreamspace; in much the same way their personalities and powers are shared-yet-compartmentalized, it's likely other processes are networked between them all, too. Which might help explain why Mama Mathers got a little surprise when trying to control Rain, beyond his fairly abysmal Shaker ability. His emotion ability's self-buffering effect when used on himself + cognitive therapy training + inter-dimensionally networked brain = a prize headache for Shaker/Master/Thinker types.
• Support Party Member: Downplayed. Rain is able to hold his own in a fight, but his powers are more geared towards supporting his teammates than 1v1's: his blades allow more mobile teammates to break things more easily, and his tinkertech is useful to Ashley and Sveta. His emotion power also turns out to be more useful on his allies than his enemies, as its shame and self-blame effect forces one to learn faster from their mistakes and turns them into pseudo-combat thinkers. When fully powered up with Love Lost's token, his aura turns into a very effective large-scale manipulation tool that disrupts an entire mercenary team and made the following fight much easier.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Gradually became a better person after triggering, unlearning the cultish xenophobia taught by the Fallen and trying to turn himself in for his crimes. However, it's initially unclear how much of this came from himself or the personality bleedthrough effect of his cluster. Interlude 12.e reveals the mechanism of the bleedthrough: sharing the power tokens while in the dream room. Rain never received any, meaning not only was his growth completely on him, but the source of the bleedthrough was Cradle, not him.
• Unfortunate Names: As he himself says, he's heard all the jokes. It's taken further when his full name is revealed: Rain O'Fire Frazier.

Lookout

Kanzi "Kenzie" Martin (Lookout, formerly Optics/Looksee)

Parahumans Online username: Heart_Shaped_Pupil

Debut: Flare 2.5

The Baby of the Bunch, a former Wards member by the name of Optics (with a lot of bad experiences related to that time period) who had been affiliated with the Protectorate since before she was a teenager. She's a surveillance-counter surveillance Tinker whose specialty lies in cameras, electronics, hacking, and larger permanent emplacements, and struggles with a lot of angst over the expectations other people have of her due to her powers. She picked 'Looksee' as her new cape name initially, before changing it to Lookout in Torch 7.8.

Classification: Tinker (Surveillance, Counter-surveillance)

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• Abusive Parents: Her mother, in particular, is revealed in Interlude 7.x to have once slammed Kenzie into her plate so hard that it scarred her cheek, and previously grabbed her so hard she left bruises. Both parents were emotionally and verbally abusive as well.
• Age-Appropriate Angst: She wants to be helpful and actually wants to help her teammates (both the Wards and the chatroom group), but she's so young that people want to keep her to the sidelines, which she hates.
• All-Loving Hero: A surprisingly dark case: Kenzie loves everyone and wants them to love her back, but this has led to her accidentally getting teachers and instructors sacked and investigated for possible molestation/child abuse (in one case, she doctored a bunch of photos to make them look like she and her older instructor were BFF-close because she was lonely, and when some other kids found them, they turned the photos in, leading to the investigation), and she's also thrown herself at the kind of people who prey on the vulnerable. She also refuses to say anything bad about people she wants to like her, even when they're standing right there, saying bad/insulting things about her. She actually threatened to go to war with Ashley because Ashley was insulting Houndstooth for having insulted Kenzie.
• All of the Other Reindeer: She's been treated as a pariah for reasons ranging from her age, to her powers, and to her race (she's black).
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Tries to give one to Candy in Infrared 19.f. It really doesn't go well.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Her understandably often-overlooked second specialty is building big boxes ("emplacements"); powerful and versatile devices that require unfortunate amounts of labor and materials to construct, and get more unwieldy as their capabilities become more ambitious.
• Badass Adorable: She may be an excitable little kid on the surface, but when push comes to shove she'll show you that she has what it takes to be a hero, even without Tinker equipment.
• Big Brother Is Watching: What you can easily summarise her power-set as. Of course, Kenzie takes this trope to even creepier extremes than the average, highly chipper, Creepy Child of a Big Brother can manage by using temporal cameras. And other privacy-invading tricks.
• Bizarre Alien Psychology: Even by shard standards, Kenzie's agent seems to have a...unique worldview, particularly regarding concepts like time, space, and how they relate to information about time and space. This can occasionally lead to amusing situations as Kenzie tries to relay the insights it shares to her fellow humans:
  Tristan and Kenzie discuss her time camera:

  "It doesn’t make any sense. Why isn’t it easier to move forward and back in time?"

  "Because the box doesn’t perceive time, you dummy. It perceives images."

  "Why not have it perceive things like time, so you can go backward and forward in time without doing... whatever arcane thing you’re doing right now?"

  "Because if it perceived time," Kenzie said, patiently, her focus on the smartphone remote, "Then it wouldn’t perceive images. And that would be a dumb thing for a projector box that works with images. Dummy."
• Blessed with Suck: Triggered at nine, has a power so important that people have tried to kidnap her for it, and at the story's start she's only eleven. She was on a Wards team at ten.
• Blinded by the Light: She built a flash 'gun' that fires very bright light into her opponents' faces.
• Breaking the Fellowship: At the end of Arc 12, she splits from Breakthrough to start her own group with Chicken Little and some of the Heartbroken.
• Character Tics: Whenever Kenzie smiles, she's explicitly not happy.
• Cheerful Child: She's very upbeat and friendly most of the time.
• Creepy Child: By accident- being able to plant cameras on people with a touch tends to make people think of her that way.
  • It's even more than that. When Candy starts seriously evaluating Kenzie, she swiftly starts coming to the conclusion that she hits Heartbroken levels of emotionally creepy/weird, if from a somewhat different direction, admittedly. When you can make a Heartbroken pause over how unusually you respond emotionally to situations, you're officially creepy.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Was abused by her birth parents, triggered at nine, was on a Wards team at ten, and spent the time in-between frantically trying to make friends and failing. She's internalized her failures to the point that she's lost hair and made herself sick, has made her old Wards teammates run scared of her, had one classmate's family move away because of her (and two others considered it), at least one teacher was being investigated, and has been in multiple institutions (including one that was either the same as, or very like the one Victoria and Sveta were in) and placed with several sets of foster parents, some of whom she drove away by trying to get close to them and screwing it up without realising.
• Eye Scream: She has cameras that need to be implanted into people's eyes, though doing so doesn't hurt them.
• Fangirl: Of the Maggie Holt series, at one point in Gleaming 9.12 stating in response to Victoria talking about comparing the Undersiders to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that Regent reminds her of Conquest from Pact's Toronto arc.
• Gadgeteer Genius: A Tinker who specializes in cameras and in making computers, cameras, and terminals that are too big to conveniently move around.
• Heroic BSoD: Has one in Infrared 19.f- she's had little sleep, the world's ending and Tristan's dead. She tries confessing her feelings to Candy, but doesn't take 'no' as an answer and things just get worse from there. One of the epilogues reveals that part of the BSOD came from her discovery that Tristan was still alive within Byron, and she was stressing out as to how she could help him.
• Heroic Willpower: Manages to override Monokeros' awe-control power through sheer force of will just long enough to shoot the villain point-blank with her flash gun, giving the rest of Breakthrough the opportunity they need to make their move.
• Holographic Disguise: Kenzie's specialization in surveillance/counter-surveillance allows her to make liberal use of these. She hands them out to other members to Breakthrough in order to allow the less-human-looking members to appear normal, uses them as part of her costume, uses them on drones to fake her presence in the field, and even uses them like makeup to conceal aspects of her appearance that she doesn't like.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: She made three chatrooms full of bots to have someone to talk to, and practically begs one of her old Ward teammates not to walk away from her. In Flare 2.6, she told the group that there have only been three times in her life when people actually wanted her around, and one of those instances was behind her trigger event.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: She clings onto people (Sveta, Ashley, Victoria) and does everything she can to make them like her. And she'll do things like pull two consecutive all-nighters and spend hours scanning footage to try to make people like and approve of her, making it a miracle that she never ran into a villain who showed her affection to get her on their side... though apparently once she nearly offered herself as a substitute daughter for a woman who'd lost hers (and who she later suspected of having killed her daughter).
• Improbable Weapon User: Takes down Mama Mathers by positioning her flying camera in the right spot high in the air and turning it off, essentially braining Mathers with a really fast, really heavy rock.
• Insistent Terminology: Because her Tinker focus is on surveillance and cameras in particular, she's able to work better when she conceptualizes almost everything she makes as a camera, to the point where she insists that her audio-recording devices are "sound cameras." She does the same thing with her box specialty too, insisting a creation is a box when it doesn't look at all like one. Fellow tinker Defiant backs her up.
• Love Hurts: Her feelings for Chris are heavily implied to be romantic in nature, which are complicated by his closed-off nature and the constant insults he's hurling at her. She takes his betrayal the hardest out of anybody on the team, and in Interlude 10.z she explicitly uses the term "loved" when describing her feelings for him.
• No Social Skills: For all her cuteness and affection, she doesn't quite get how things like friendships and relationships work. She's managed to turn friends, classmates and teammates away from her without realising why, and has spent nights trying to find the magical button to press that will make people like her. Houndstooth says that at nine, she had no brakes, boundaries or emotional defenses.
• Percussive Maintenance: Her boxes seem to actually respond to this, preferably delivered in the form of a sharp kick accompanied by an insult to the box's intelligence.
• Playful Hacker: Hacking is one of her power's sub-specializations. She's good enough to create multiple chatrooms full of realistic AI bots and crack PHO's normally ironclad identity security to track down her former teammates.
• Precision F-Strike: "I'm sorry my parents are such fucking embarrassments", to Victoria in Torch 7.10.
• Projected Man: She can project a perfect copy of herself onto a battlefield, and it worked so well that nobody realized that she wasn't there until the camera got broken.
• Scars Are Forever: Has an inch deep scar on her face as a result of her mother's abuse, which she normally hides using her Tinker tech.
• Semantic Superpower: Her camera/projector specialty is far more versatile than it sounds at first, thanks to very broad definitions of "camera" and "projector". For instance, she's easily able to hijack Teacher's portal generator technology once she realizes it's both a camera and a projector by her terms. It's also hinted that teleportation, Hard Light, and Intangibility tech are other potential forms of cameras and projectors that she hasn't quite mastered yet. Similarly, her big, hard-to-move box specialty can extend to perfectly movable creations that don't look like boxes at all to non-tinkers.
• Shipper on Deck: For Natalie and her co-worker Tony, though Natalie demands that she not attempt to set them up.
• Stepford Smiler: Her power set makes it all too tempting to hide the hot mess of issues she has under a veneer of chipper acceptability. She can sustain her masks for a while, especially as she has rarely stayed in any one place for long, but has been creeping others out for years. She reveals in Interlude 7.x that she only smiles when she's not happy, because it makes whatever's happening go better, and doesn't smile when she's happy.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behaviour:
  • She once did something sexual to one of her foster fathers because she wanted to show him she loved him, having looked up how to show someone she loved them and not understanding things like appropriate behaviour and boundaries.
  • Regarding her biological parents, she tracked them down and they were forced to take her in, but they really didn't like it, and have been trying to kill and abuse her. She's been recording all the times they've tried to kill or abuse her as further blackmail material, because she wants them to be better parents.
  • She threatens to blackmail the Heartbroken in Infrared 19.f to make Candy date her, though she is in a sleep-deprived, manic state at this point.

Cryptid

Chris Elman

Parahumans Online username: Curious_Cephalopod^*  As well as 31 others that he cycles through depending on his most recent form

Debut: Flare 2.5

The team's least talkative member, an orphan of unknown origins with dynamic shapeshifting powers that have permanent ramifications on both his appearance and personality. He's snarky and insulting even at the best of times, but seems to be firmly on the side of the good guys. He spends the first part of Ward without a cape name, finally picking Cryptid in Torch 7.8.

Classification: Changer^spoilers Actually a Tinker specializing in mutagenic serums, other classifications vary by form.

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• Accidental Murder: Claims that he's killed someone by accident before, though he doesn't give the details at the time. It was actually two people, that he led into Lab Rat's secret compound while he was still in his feral, instinctual state. A security mechanism gunned them down while he was let through.
• Admiring the Abomination: Revealed in Last 20.8 to be something of a fan of the Simurgh, and finds her plan to drive humanity forever into conflict and madness ideal so long as he’s not included in it.
• All Your Powers Combined:
  • It's not remarked a lot upon, but his Changer abilities have a Trump aspect. Different emotions show different powers, both primary (Wan Indulgence can shape things by eating them) and secondary (Mad Anxiety is very fast and nimble even before taking into account that it is a huge spider-face thing).
  • Once we know the truth of his powers, this becomes an even greater part of them. He's a tinker with a specialty in mutagenic substances, but he prefers using them on himself. All the powers that he shows on his different forms are copied from a cape he had contact and "scanned" previously, with the added benefit that he can mix and match powers to make different forms. This effectively makes him the resident Ditto Fighter. Once he helps in making the Giants for Shin it's clear that he can also use these powers on his own creations, which is impressive since he has copied the powers of extremely powerful parahumans like Goddess or Mama Mathers.
• Armor-Piercing Question: "Or did your sister handle you when she tightened the screws?" to Victoria.
• Artificial Human: What he actually is, having been made as a successor to Lab Rat to survive Gold Morning. Originally 'hatched' as some rat-like thing, he ate and grew into a boy, only for him to find the lab he was genetically hardwired to find and getting the personality and memories his predecessor chemically downloaded into him.
• Ascended Extra: He's actually a sort-of clone of Lab Rat, a minor side-villain from Worm.
• Berserk Button: People invading his privacy and/or overstepping the boundaries, even if they had a good reason (aka Victoria showing up to the orphanage in Torch 7.7 to give him a message because she couldn't email him and he wasn't answering his phone). This trait is later revealed to be a ploy to conceal his true power as a tinker and his true identity as a clone of Lab Rat.
• Big Eater: He's constantly chowing down on something and always has extra snacks stockpiled in his backpack. Justified, since he tends to spend a lot of time roaming around and doesn't seem to frequently eat proper meals.
• Birds of a Feather: Chris thinks he is this with Riley/Bonesaw, believing that their shared status as Mad Scientists, past crimes against humanity, and unique biologies (giving them the minds of adults in the bodies of teenagers) makes Riley one of the only people alive who could be a feasible romantic partner for him. Riley rejects him on the grounds that she is at least trying to become a better person, in stark contrast to Chris who is both a Card-Carrying Villain and a traitor to the entire human race.
• The Blank: He refuses to choose a normal cape mask and instead uses one of Kenzie's holograms that essentially gives him a featureless appearance when not transformed.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • His power is very versatile and has a lot of uses, but Chris believes (possibly because of prior experiences) that one day he'll transform and physically fall apart. This is made worse by the fact that he has to transform in order to have the emotions associated with each form.
  • In Arc 7 we get a more direct look at this problem. He transforms a single time more than his stated daily limit in Arc 6, and sure enough, he loses teeth as a result (and gets dry socket). The fact that he knew his limit in advance indicates that he isn't merely guessing, though the later reveal that he's not a Changer at all implies that this was likely the result of a mishap in his Tinkering.
• Body Horror:
  • The more we learn about him, the more obvious it is that he's physically breaking down. However, his interlude implies that he wants this to happen, as it makes him more his own person/being, and less a perfect copy of Lab Rat. Additionally, most of the forms he transforms into are pretty horrifying.
  • At least one of his forms (Mad Anxiety) is a definite case of this trope, a six-foot-tall screaming face with legs like a spider. Another, 'Multifaceted Interest', apparently has a large number of eyes. Some of his others are merely mildly horrid or just downright uncanny because of the bits that are physiologically icky.
  • He can be hit by body horror as a result of overuse of his powers or strain. As in "teeth falling out" or "patches of skin flacking off". Just looking like hungover, death-warmed-up-on-a-defrost-setting for a few days is the optimistic outcome; he's understandably wary of the possible outcome of really pushing his limits.
  • Apparently he's gone to the bathroom in the morning and left blood and meat in the bowl, woken up with a variety of fluids staining his bed, and has had at least one instance where his pancreas apparently tore itself in half.
  • His 'Brooding Anger' form comes with over a thousand half-human half-grub creatures inside of him, and he can give birth to them and unleash them on his enemies. Not giving birth to them and changing back leaves him with a slurry of their parts stuck in his guts. According to his Interlude, it was inspired/derived from Nursery.
• Braces of Orthodontic Overkill: He has to manually adjust his teeth continually with a pair of pliers because of his shapeshifting.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: His emotional changes from his forms can be exploited to manipulate him and exactly this happened to him for a while after his trigger event, leading to people using him as their pet monster assassin. Or so he claimed.
• Brutal Honesty: Not unlike Ashley, he tends to always speak his mind with little-to-no reservation or consideration for how it might hurt other people.
• Clone Angst:
  • Much more severely than Ashley. He's an incomplete, imperfect clone-like creation of Lab Rat, intended to inherit his memories and shard. He has a lot of issues with this, and isn't exactly happy with what his creator / he himself put him through.
  • Judging by his words to Jessica —one of the few people he ever showed sincerity to —he seems to have sincere difficulty in whether to define himself as Lab Rat or as his creation, shrugging when asked if he is the old Tinker or not.
• Control Freak: When it comes to his life and his boundaries. He flips out at Victoria coming to the orphanage without asking him, even though she couldn't contact him and had a legitimate reason to go there, and becomes incandescent upon finding out that Victoria was talking to one of the orphanage staff because he doesn't know what was said and can't control the results of the conversation. Later revelations imply that it's an act intended to keep anyone from discovering his identity.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • He's an orphan who lives in an orphanage where people are mostly afraid of him, and has apparently killed people by accident.
  • According to Tristan in Polarize 10.3, he doesn't even remember triggering, and was apparently passed between numerous people over the years where he was used alternately as a font of exotic materials to be harvested from his various forms and a pet murderbeast.
  • He is actually a clone-like creation of Lab Rat. After his "birth", he had a compulsion to seek out of laboratory where he would be held for several weeks and injected with cortisol and memories in order to recreate Lab Rat's trigger event. He was only able to escape when the powers and memories set in enough for him to find a way out of mental loop he was trapped in. The story he told the rest of the team had some truth to it, but he does remember his trigger event, and the tinker that experimented on him was himself.
  • He, or rather, Lab Rat, was raised by his sister after their parents died. However, his sister was a serial killer who was implied to be responsible for the deaths of their parents, and who later killed his brother. Lab Rat was stuck living with her, aware that nobody would believe him if he told them the truth about her, and when he finally told his sister that he knew, hoping to disarm her or make her stop, it just made her more bold about bringing her victims home.
• Death Seeker: Implied. During his fight against Antares in the Shin prison he's quick to attempt a completely unnecessary suicide attack. His final plan to help the Simurgh by sabotaging the heroes's last plan also has some notorious self-destructive aspects, as even Precipice notes that he would be essentially dooming himself to a horrible fate and that he would eventually be driven mad by loneliness.
• Deadpan Snarker: Snarky one-liners seem to be his primary method of interacting with pretty much anybody. This is actually a point of contention in his therapy sessions with Dr. Yamada, who thinks he spends too much focus on how clever a put-down might be and not on the fact that it's actually, you know, a put-down. It's so pronounced, that when his teammates experience a gap where some acid remark would usually be, they know he's either taken off or gone silent for some other notable reason that may need looking into.
  • It's also deconstructed to a point: Chris's snarkiness is often shown to be truly mean-spirited and destructive, and by the end of the story his comments are more than enough reasons for several characters to truly hate him.
• Ditto Fighter: He can scan and copy powers from other capes and create mutagenic substances that mix these powers with other mutations to make powered monster forms.
• Disability Immunity: His power-inflicted emotional disability makes him mostly immune to Mama Mathers' attacks- sure, she can control his senses, but she can't control how he reacts to what she shows him, so he's able to report on the "anti-Thinker countermeasure" with only a minimum of freaking out at his vision suddenly turning into a trypophobic nightmare. Later on, Goddess's "alignment" doesn't really work on him given how it functions based on adjusting emotional relationships.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Based on Ashley's reading of the situation, Red Queen was his subordinate rather than boss during the murder of Goddess.
• Emotionless Girl: Zig-Zagged; he claims that he normally does not feel emotions at all, but each of his transformations brings a single strong feeling with it, and this feeling lingers for a time after he reverts back to his normal human form. In reality this is just a cover story for the fact that he is actually a tinker who is using his mutagenic serums on himself. The serums produce forms that do have some emotion-altering properties, but only if he engineers them in.
• Evil Is Petty: What the final status of his Heel–Face Turn extravaganza leads to. After helping Breakthrough throughout the fights with the Titans and apparently showing signs of growing a bit and accepting his humanity he then makes a hard turn left (partly due to Simurgh influence) and decides that humanity can suffer as long as he doesn't. After being confronted by Antares he essentially rage quits even his own plans and resorts to spreading half-truths around as vengeance.
• Exact Words: The backstory that he gives Breakthrough mentions him being kept in a feral state while being experimented on by a tinker, among other things. While most of it is a lie, that part is technically true: he just didn't say the tinker was himself, or rather, his past self.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Has a number of these throughout the story.
  • He abandons Breakthrough for Red Queen in Gleaming 9.15.
  • ...Then when the Titans appear, he comes back to the team to help try to prevent the world from ending again.
  • Only to be revealed in Last 20.8 to have betrayed them, yet again, in favor of supporting the Simurgh’s plan to drive humanity into eternal conflict and madness. after inoculating himself to be the only sane person left.
• In-Series Nickname: Tattletale calls him "Creepy Kid", which Victoria adopts as her name for him in her phone.
• Invisibility Cloak: Kenzie made a cloaking device for him that he uses to hide while untransformed or changing.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's extremely sarcastic, emotionally insensitive, and tends to get on the nerves of everyone around him without even trying. This doesn't change the fact that he is, essentially, a good person who wants to become a superhero so he can help other people. Ultimately subverted when his true identity and motives are revealed, as his joining a hero team was just a means to gather data for his tinkering from the conflicts Breakthrough encounters.And then double subverted when he helps Breakthrough escape from prison on Shin, vehemently insisting (as in previous encounters during the visit) that his time with the team was purely a means to get scans and hide his identity, and meant absolutely nothing to him whatsoever. By the time the Titans appear, it's clear that he has a massive internal conflict about pushing people away versus standing by his friends.
• Kick the Dog: Does this to pretty much everyone during the Gimel-Shin conflict.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: In comparison to his predecessor, the first Lab Rat. Chris is no saint, but at least throughout most of the story he can be called roughly in the side of good: tellingly he only uses his mutagenic abilities on himself or on nonthinking human-like beings. The only times he uses them on people is to heal and then with extreme care. He's a Nominal Hero that sides with very questionable allies (like Amy) but does so arguing that he's looking for "better" solutions to save humanity.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: His power scales up significantly over the course of the plot compared to his teammates. At the beginning, he can transform only himself into a variety of useful forms that still have significant drawbacks and deleterious drawbacks on his own health. By the end of the story, he's helping Amy make superpowerful semi-sapient abominations that can fight the Titans hand to hand.
• Mad Scientist: His actual power. Lab Rat's primary motivation for villainy was to get as many test subjects as possible, usually by kidnapping. Cryptid, however, is not a perfect clone of the original and seems to only experiment on himself, though he does seek out other parahumans to "scan" for inspiration.
• Magic Pants: Averted. It's very easy for his shapeshifting to shred his outfits, so he tends to bring clothes in different sizes to fit his various forms, and has to be careful that he doesn't end up naked when he shifts back to normal.
• Multiform Balance: An emotional version. Chris has to vary his forms in order to keep his emotions balanced, as focusing on one over the others can skew his mentality to a dangerous degree. Subverted in that this is a cover for his real tinker power. His emotions can be affected by his formulae but there's no evidence that this persists when he transforms back to his baseline.
• Older Than They Look: Zigzagged. He is actually a 2-year-old clone that looks like a 13-year-old but with the artificially downloaded memories of an adult. That said, he considers himself a different person from his predecessor, and acts like an adult or a teenager depending on the situation at hand.
• Pet the Dog: Gives the team his emergency medications to stop Rain from bleeding out, saying that he likes Rain more than the rest of them.
• Playing with Syringes: This is both his actual power and his actual personality, right down to his driving motivation being to scan as many parahumans as possible and thereby come up with a formula for every situation (unlike his progenitor Lab Rat, who instead would kidnap and experiment on other people).
• The Quiet One: Tends to speak his mind the least out of everyone in the group. When he does speak up, it's typically to make a sarcastic comment or question the logic of somebody's latest plan.
• Rapid Aging: He's chronologically two years old, but biologically thirteen. According to his Interlude this is the source of much of his Body Horror, as he was designed to age quickly, not well.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gives these out constantly to team Breakthrough when he reunites with them on Shin.
  • He is also the target of a brutal one courtesy of Kenzie, of all people.
• Squishy Wizard: He claims to be very frail, so much so that even Kenzie could overpower him. Given what we've seen of the effects of his powers, this could very well be the case. After finding out his true nature, this is even more so the case. He mentions being "made to grow fast, not well", which implies that he might not even be capable of surviving without his "vials". For what it's worth he can pick and choose forms as long as he has his tinker vials, but he is even more defenseless than the average tinker without them.
• The Starscream: When Goddess whammies him to get him on her side, he comes to her with no less than three layers of behaviors and plans to counter her. This is only the ones she knows about and despite the fact that her power is meant to make people utterly loyal. And he still manages to betray and murder her - with a form intended specifically for betrayal, no less.
• Theme Naming: All of his forms have two-part names that relate to the emotion they're based on.
• Tragic Monster: Chris really did have a horrible past and he is still controlled by the "imperatives" established by his maker. He's paranoid and trusts no one, even people that could conceivably help or understand him. Tellingly, Jessica believed he was on the road to recovery, which is why she wasn't worried about him on being the cape team. He drives people away with cruelty to "become more monstrous" and avert his maker's influence, but he's clearly capable of empathy and everyone can still tell that he cares for his ex-teammates. When in a really tight spot he has shown that he will go out of the way to help them, but that's while also working overtime to hurt their feelings to prove a point to himself. Even though his teammates know this, the lengths he's willing to go make them much less eager to forgive him. By the end, he essentially runs out of sympathy and makes a poorly thought-out move to betray humanity and ends up pathetic and alone. He's essentially a non-romantic, very dark deconstruction of a Tsundere.
• Unwitting Pawn: The Simurgh's. He's a key aspect of her plan, and she meticulously controls the moments that lead to his final turn to evil. It's implied that his existence might be All According to Plan for The Simurgh.
• Variant Power Copying: He can study other parahumans and create forms based on their powers.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Kenzie.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: His power. He has a variety of forms he shifts into, but he can't shift all the way back, leaving him with changes (usually mental or sense-related) that he has to live with. This is in reality a consequence of experimenting with less-than-perfect mutagenic serums on himself.
• Walking Spoiler: It's hard to say much about him without mentioning that he is a clone of Lab Rat.

Wan Indulgence

A potbellied ogre with thick limbs and a small head.

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• Boisterous Bruiser: As it's derived from a variety of joy, Chris is in a pretty good mood while in this form.
• Extreme Omnivore: Capable of eating nearly any inanimate material and regurgitating them as more useful constructions.
• Super Spit: One of the potential products he can make what he's eaten into, simply compressing it into a blob or a cloud of loose material to spit out.
• Super-Strength: Enough to break stone with his bare hands and tear down trees.
• Tiny-Headed Behemoth: Not quite gigantic, but bigger than a normal person and with a smaller-than-proportionate head.

Mad Anxiety

A distended face skittering on insectoid legs.

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• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Not a giant bug, but similar in basic shape with how the main part of the face forms a thorax and abdomen while the chin and lower face form a "head."
• Cowardly Lion: Literally defined by its fear, but Chris still uses it against the Cedar Point villains.
• Emotion Bomb: When it shrieks in mortal terror, everyone who hears it is gripped by the same fear. And it screams a lot.
• No-Sell: Immune to emotion-altering effects by virtue of its fear leaving no room for any other emotions.
• The Speechless: Capable of vocalization though its screams, but doesn't seem to be able to speak.
• Volumetric Mouth: The upper and lower jaws aren't exactly connected by cheeks, jawbones, or other connective tissues, which causes it to gape wide and look even more unnerving.
• Wall Crawl: Capable of skittering right up walls, which helps stay one step ahead of anything that may be chasing it.

Dark Introspection

A "conch shell" shaped body formed from scaled flesh, feathers, and eyes with four long legs.

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• Extra Eyes: Has eyes of various sizes all over the spiral of its body.
• Hellish Pupils: The pupil of the main eye, which is itself the size of a human head, looks rather like an inkblot skull.
• Immune to Mind Control: As its body and mind are largely separate, mind control doesn't quite work against it.
• People Puppets: A weird example where he's puppeteering himself. Chris doesn't have direct control over his body in this form, essentially giving it commands and sitting back while it acts like an autonomous drone.
• The Speechless: No mouth to communicate with, just eyes to watch.

Keen Vigilance

An armored creature with incredible senses and a variety of blades.

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• Blade Below the Shoulder: Has a number of retractable blades on the hands, arms, shoulders, and various other points.
• Exotic Eye Designs: They're used to see but they're not much like normal eyes. For starters, they're essentially amorphous, allowing them to extend and stretch out of this sockets.
• Mighty Glacier: Heavily armored with bony plates, but rather slow.
• Super-Senses: One of the main benefits of this form.

Strained Peace

A gaunt and bearded humanoid with a cloak of skin.

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• Fingore: Minor, but it has raw nail beds where there should be fingernails.
• Fragile Speedster: Quick and durable but lacks stamina or strength.
• In the Hood: Made of skin, but still.
• Marionette Motion: Usually moves slowly and deliberately but when incited moves in quick, jerky motions.
• Primal Stance: Perpetually forced into a crouch by the weight of the skin cloak on a gaunt body with unusual joints and muscular structure.
• The Speechless: Lacks a mouth and has no other method of vocalization. Better off than most of Chris's forms though, as it still has the coordination and necessary appendages to scratch words in the dirt.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Lacks any special abilities or real combat potential, though it provides a good choice for when Chris needs to change but doesn't want hostilities.

Brooding Anger

A masked tardigrade-like creature with transparent skin revealing the brood within.

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• Gender Bender: Chris apparently considers the form female.
• Malevolent Masked Man: "Man" is severely overselling how human it is to look at, but its face is an armored mask faintly resembling Chris's. Applies to the young as well, which have deformed skulls with mask-like faces bearing the occasional similarity to their parent.
• Mook Maker: The form can "birth" over a thousand creatures resembling a cross between a human and a grub.
• Nothing Is Scarier: We never get to see the brood unleashed, largely due to everyone's disgust and fear at the mere idea of letting them out.
• Punny Name: "Brooding" refers both to the type of anger and the horde of young it can unleash.
• The Speechless: Another form that can't talk.
• Wolverine Claws: The limbs bristle with claws and gnarled, spiked lumps of armor. Also applies to the young, which have razor-sharp fingers.

Twisted Betrayal

A twisted, broken bird-like thing.

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• Body Horror: It's not the most pleasing to look at given its apparently broken neck and twisted limbs.
• Feathered Fiend: It's one of Chris's more nightmarish forms and the actions he performs with it are among his most monstrous.
• Handicapped Badass: The form's broken limbs force it to walk with a constant limp and it can't even turn its head to look at something without having to move its head with its hands. This doesn't stop it from killing Goddess, one of the most powerful parahumans alive.
• Immune to Mind Control: The reason why he picked this form during the Goddess arc, and the theme behind its naming. Goddess herself commented that she could sense three different layers of deception coming from him in this form. These convoluted thought processes allowed him to deceive Goddess into thinking he was on her side and ultimately kill her.
• Neck Snap: It looks like it was on the receiving end of this, as its head dangles like a pendulum. Chris actually has to grab it and move it with his hands if he wants to nod, look at something, or just stop it from knocking into someone.
• Wolverine Claws: It has razor-sharp hooked talons on its fingers.

Natalie

Natalie Matteson

Debut: Shade 4.1

A young lawyer hired to help guide and protect Breakthrough in the legal goings-on of the parahuman world, and by extension help plan their operations and crime-fighting. As of Interlude 7.x she is also one of the people acting as an impromptu guardian for Kenzie.

Classification: None

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• Action Survivor: Manages to protect a tech-less Kenzie from four of Love Lost's goons without any weapons, powers, or training.
• A Day in the Limelight: Interlude 8.x is told from her perspective.
• Character Tics: Creases her forehead when worried or pensive.
• Ignored Expert: Victoria and the other members of Breakthrough often play fast and loose with the legal guidelines Natalie sets up, much to her dismay.
• Lustful Melt: Her internal reaction to her co-worker Tony asking her on a date.
• Mission Control: Being a non-parahuman, non-combative member of the team, Natalie serves partially as this, helping to plan the team's actions and advising them on legal matters.
• The Team Normal: The only member of Breakthrough without any powers.
• Utility Party Member: She's part of the group because of her legal expertise, not anything combat or power related.

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