Characters / Heroics

Spoilers for book one, Heroics, are unmarked.

Introduced In Heroics

AJ Hamil / Anthony Sadik

• Amnesiac Lover: An interesting version. He and Cass were technically together when they were teenagers, but they both had their memories altered. They end up falling for each other anyway, and don't find out the amnesia part until after they were already in love with each other.
• Badass Bookworm: Of a Non-Action Guy variety.
• Berserk Button: For the love of god, do not insult Cass around him.
• Beware the Nice Ones: As Justin found out, it's not a good idea to piss of the team medic.
• Character Tics: Whenever he's nervous or flustered, he fixes his tie. Since Cass makes a habit of causing one or both emotions, he does it a lot.
• Genre Savvy
• Happily Married: To Cass as of Vigilance.
• Implausible Deniability: His claims that Cass isn't his girlfriend don't really work on Niall, who walked in on the two of them kissing.
• Like Brother and Sister: With Casey.
• The Medic
• Nice Guy: Unless you're Justin. Or Wechsler.
• Non-Action Guy
• Official Couple: With Cass.
• Papa Wolf: He’s furious that Alice comes into the mansion, not because she shoots him but because Brooke was in the room when she did.
• Platonic Life-Partners: With Casey.

Alice Cage

• Abusive Parents: Towards Alison and Alix.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: With Wechsler.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive
• Killed Off for Real: In Vigilance, via Boom, Headshot! by Alix.
• Mad Scientist: Seems to be even more so than John.
• Never Found the Body
• Would Hurt a Child: In addition to the various young clones she’s murdered, she kidnapped several children from neighborhoods around Caotico, and murdered them when they didn’t cooperate. Finn’s the only one still alive.

Alix Cage Tolvaj / Thief

• Action Girl
• Badass Bookworm
• Brought Down to Normal: By her own choice.
• Casting a Shadow
• Heroic RRoD: In Vigilance, using her powers causes blackouts, bloody noses, and near death.
• Honorary Aunt: To the Hamil children, though they just call her “Alix”. She seems especially protective of Aubrey.
• Meaningful Name: "Tolvaj" means "thief."
• Took a Level in Jerkass / O.O.C. Is Serious Business: She’s absolutely brutal in several instances here, and only seems to calm down completely when around the Hamil children. She’s actually dying, and every time she uses her powers Alice Cage’s personality overtakes her own a little bit more.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Several people call her out for her actions in Vigilance.

Casey Cabot / Robin van der Aart

• Abusive Parents: Stephanie seems to be at least emotionally abusive.
  • Vigilance reveals that John Wechsler was her father. The abuse Casey went through as a child was appropriately appalling.
• The Alcoholic: Descends into this after finding out John Wechsler was her father.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Towards Zach at the end of Vigilance. She had an Aborted Declaration of Love earlier when talking about Zach with AJ.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: With Zach.
• Big Brother Instinct: Towards Cass and AJ. When she was a child, she received a severe beating from John for this reason, too, when she tried to protect Cass from him.
• Calling the Old Man Out: She tells Stephanie off when she suggests killing Alix.
• Disappeared Dad: Her father is never mentioned in Heroics. He’s John Wechsler.
• Gadgeteer Genius: She apparently made all of the tech the team uses.
• Heroic Bastard: The illegitimate child of Stephanie and John.
• Introduction by Hookup: The Belligerent Sexual Tension Casey has with Zach isn't unresolved because this is how they met. They just refuse to talk about it, at least until Vigilance.
• Like Brother and Sister: With AJ.
• Platonic Life-Partners: With AJ.
• Standard Female Grab Area: One of Wechsler's goons tries this, only to have her basically laugh at him and knee him.

Clarice Wagner / Porter

• Action Girl
• Boomerang Bigot: She and Dick are the only two who seem to actively be this among the Alumni.
• Brought Down to Normal
• The Dragon: Serves this role for Wechsler in the climax of Heroics.
• Teleportation

Gabriel Garrison

• Parental Substitute: To Cass. He acts as a sort of grandfather figure to her children, too.

Jay West / Clash

• Killed Off for Real: In Vigilance.
• Super-Speed

John "Johnny" Aller / Spitfire

• Heel–Face Turn: Whether he was really a bad guy is still in question, but he’s undoubtedly a good guy here.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted, he is not the same John as the one below.
• Playing with Fire
• Straight Gay
• The Voiceless: He doesn't have a single line of dialogue in the book. Vigilance confirms that he’s mute and cannot speak at all, so he uses sign language.

John Wechsler

• Abusive Parents: Oh yes.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: With Alice.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive
• Killed Off for Real
  • Karmic Death: By way of one of the control bands.
• Offing the Offspring: Tries it at least three times on Cass. Garrison reveals in Vigilance that he was intending to do the same to Casey.
• Tested on Humans: It's his M.O.

Julian Grey / Ghost

• Mind over Matter
• Number Two: Would seem to split this role with Lori.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Is dead by the time Vigilance starts.

Justin Oliver / Archer

• Annoying Younger Sibling: To Kate.
• Career-Ending Injury: A continuation of a wound from Heroics causes this in Vigilance.
• Jerkass
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Evolves into this when he grows up. He’s still a jerk, but he’s very gentle with his wife and daughter, and he’s taken to a Hypocritical Heartwarming attitude towards Alix.
• Good is Not Nice
• Happily Married: To a woman named Erin.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: It's actually his power.
• The Straight and Arrow Path

Kara Hall / Pilot

• Action Girl
• Career-Ending Injury: She gets impaled in a building collapse during Vigilance, obviously leading to this since it partially severs her spine.
• Flight
• Happily Married: To Claire Tyson. They’re raising Claire’s son together.
• Little Miss Badass: She's the youngest of the Heroics kids at only thirteen.
• Only Sane Man: She’s as sarcastic as her siblings, but she seems to be the only one of them who actually notices when they’re doing something stupid.
• Super-Strength

Kate Oliver / Targeter

• Action Girl
  • Action Girlfriend: To Niall in Heroics.
• Beta Couple: With Niall.
• Book Dumb: Possibly. She mentions having a C average, though Lori claims that's only because of how much pressure Kate puts on herself outside of school.
• Broken Ace: She’s completely fallen apart by Vigilance.
• Death Seeker: Has ended up here by Vigilance after loosing too much for her to bear. She eventually tries to force Justin to kill her.
• Happily Married: Subverted. They are happy, and they do love each other, but ultimately Kate’s issues are too much for her and Niall’s marriage to take. It’s up in the air at the end of the book whether they’ll stay married, though it doesn’t look good.
• Heroic BSoD: Briefly, after Lori dies.
  • The “briefly” actually gets shot to hell in Vigilance. She may have covered it up nicely in the final pages of Heroics, but Kate is still feeling her sister’s loss after the Time Skip, and Julian’s Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome only drove her deeper into grief.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: It's her actual power. She even comments that it gives her the ability to do truly impossible shots, such as shooting through a bullet and then burying the arrow in the barrel of the gun that fired it.
• It's Not You, It's My Enemies: Tries to do this with Niall, but he doesn't go for it.
• The Leader
• The Straight and Arrow Path

Lori Marquez / Torrent

• Action Girl
• Killed Off for Real
• Making a Splash
• Number Two: Splits this role with Julian.
• Taking You with Me: Though it was a Mercy Kill.

Niall Sullivan

• Action Survivor
• Beta Couple: With Kate.
• Genre Savvy: He knows exactly why Kate is breaking up with him. He doesn't go for it.
• Happily Married; Subverted. He’s happy with Kate and loves her sincerely, but he knows that her downspiralling issues aren’t good for their sons.
• Moment Killer: He interrupts the scene that confirms that Cass/AJ is canon.
• Non-Action Guy

Ray Sampson / Blackout

• Number Two: To Kate in Vigilance, eventually becoming full leader when she falls apart.
• Shock and Awe

Stephanie Cabot / Diana van der Aart

• Abusive Parents: At the very least it seems like she's emotionally abusive towards Casey, given the younger woman's apparent dislike for her mother. Vigilance expands on this, confirming that Diana allowed John to brutally beat the young Casey when she tried to stop her father from hurting Cass.
• Evil All Along: In a way. She's not currently working for Wechsler, but she certainly doesn't have the team's best interests at heart.
• Jerkass
• Killed Off for Real
• Mind Manipulation: How the other members of Heroics got Laser-Guided Amnesia.

Tess "Cass" Cassidy Wechsler

• Abusive Parents: Wechsler was not nice.
• Berserk Button: You can beat the hell out of her and all she'll do is snark at you, but if you so much as imply that you'll hurt AJ, she will hurt you.
• Fiery Redhead: Don't tick her off. Just don't.
  • Hair-Trigger Temper: She shows signs of a milder case of this. AJ notes that it could be a side effect of the experimentation.
• Guinea Pig Family: John experimented on her when she was a kid.
• Happily Married: To AJ as of Vigilance.
• Heel–Face Turn: Performed one about a year before the story after working for her father.
• Idiot Ball: Her decision to surrender to Alice. She Lampshades how stupid it is before she even does it.
• Mama Bear: She is ready to hunt Alice down and slaughter her in Vigilance after Brooke witness Alice shoot AJ.
• Missing Mom: John murdered her.
• Mission Control: It's her role on the team. She's actually outright referred to as such, and "Control" is her radio callsign.
• Nom de Mom: After her pre-Heroics Heel–Face Turn.
• Official Couple: With AJ.
• Self-Made Orphan: She kills John in self-defense.
• Stepford Snarker
• What the Hell, Hero?: AJ calls her out for her backdoor dealings with Alice.

Zachary "Zach" Carter / Kov

• Belligerent Sexual Tension: With Casey.
• Beware the Nice Ones: He kills Tag in a one-on-one fight.
• Bilingual Bonus: "Kov" is Czech for "metal."
• Dogged Nice Guy: A bit of a weird example in that he already has Casey, but she’s still putting distance between them due to her own personal issues.
• Introduction by Hookup: How he met Casey.
• Manchild: Though one who is actually very emotionally mature.

Introduced In Vigilance

Aubrey Hamil

• Badass Normal: She withstands a severe beating by Reznik to protect Heroics and the Legion.
• Gayngst: Subverted. Her angst doesn't come from being gay but from the way her anxiety reacts to her sexuality.
• Generation Xerox: She's rather similar to Cass, a fact that is Lampshaded a few times.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: On the receiving end of one from Reznik in Legion.
• Official Couple: With Rowan.
• Put on a Bus: Briefly alongside her siblings and cousin for their own protection.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: She’s way too smart for her age, and is apparently just as good if not better at calculus than Alix, who is literally the clone of a genius.

Brooke Hamil

• Cool Big Sis: Her siblings clearly love her, even if they sometimes bicker.
• Dead Guy Junior: Named after her grandmother, Cass’s mother. Notably not named for her because Brooke Wechsler was a particularly good person, but because even though she wasn’t a good person, she was the only one who gave a damn about Cass’s well-being.
• Guilt Complex: She seems to have inherited her mother’s tendency to blame herself for things that she could not possibly have fixed. Case in point, her assertion that she should have done something to protect her father from getting shot. She’s nine.
• Harmful to Minors: Watches her father get shot.
• Put on a Bus: Briefly alongside her siblings and cousin for their own protection.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Like the other two Hamil children, she’s far too smart for her age. Since Cass and AJ don’t know how they would’ve gotten powers, it concerns them (especially Cass) greatly.

Edward Caito / Wade “Raseri” Toracid

• Big Bad Ensemble: With Alice. Would be a Big Bad Duumvirate, but they really don’t seem to work together all that well.
• Killed Off for Real: At Sarah’s hands.
• Serial Killer: He’s murdering people without powers with the help of his two underlings.

Finn / Whitney Finnegan

• Arrow Catch: Her enhanced reflexes allow her to do this.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Seems to be how she and Kaita initially ended up together, but, ironically, they don't show any signs of it now.

• May–December Romance: Kaita is a good sixteen years older than her. Notably, Kaita seems to acknowledge the possible weirdness of it, but they are both adults, and neither of them can keep their hands off each other anyway.
• Official Couple: With Kaita. Nobody really saw it coming.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Her real name is Whitney Finnegan, but it’s basically never used. Justified by the fact that Alice wouldn’t have wanted anyone to figure out that Finn was an abducted child.
• Pet the Dog: Her actions after AJ is shot are the first clue that she’s not going along with the plans because she really wants to.

Jacob Hamil

• Out of Focus: He’s the Hamil child who is in the book the least, although this is Justified by the fact that he’s only two. He may be as brilliant as his sisters, but he doesn’t quite have the capacity to interact with the story as much as they do.
• Put on a Bus: Same as Brooke and Aubrey.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: His is arguably worse than his sisters’. He talks like he’s about six years older than he actually is when he’s two, and he can build full Lego models without instructions from memory months after seeing the object he’s replicating.

Kaita Dragovic

• Mama Bear: Seriously, do not touch her daughter.
• May–December Romance: As of Legion she has ended up in one with Finn, who is sixteen years her junior.
• Muggle Born of Mages: Her mother was a hero, but Kaita has no powers. Her father isn’t mentioned, but Word of God indicates that her father was a former criminal who gained powers, tried to turn his life around through the use of them, and was killed for his trouble.
• Nerves of Steel: She pulls a knife on Finn despite having just witnessed her slamming Casey’s face into a bar counter. She’s disarmed easily because Finn’s far too good for that, but points for having the guts to do it.
• Official Couple: Surprisingly, with Finn. And Kaita's so gentle with her that it's obvious they're legitimately in love, no matter how much they deny it.
• Platonic Life-Partners: With Casey.
• Remember the New Guy?: She’s been friends with the group for a long time, but she’s not mentioned at all in the first book because the bar is barely talked about.

Logan Carter / Eisen

• Heroic Bastard: Casey and Zach aren’t married, at least not yet. The end of the book opens up the possibility for Legion.
• Put on a Bus: Like the Hamil kids.

Sarah Ajam Amirmoez

• Badass Normal: She has no powers. She still easily kills Caito.
• Blood Knight: It seems that the only reason she works for anybody is the opportunity to hurt others.
• Double Reverse Quadruple Agent: She’s working for Caito but actually working for Alice but actually working for Reznik, a military officer who seems to be her commander.

Warren “Tag” McTaggert

• Jerkass: Sarah desperately wants to kill him.
• Killed Off for Real: In a fight with Zach.
• Too Dumb to Live: His constant whining and ignoring Caito’s instructions (and Sarah’s skills) ended up being his undoing.

Introduced In Legion

Maxwell "Max" Oakley / Wraith

• Dogged Nice Guy: He really, really likes Alix, and is determined to prove to her that he doesn't care that she's not going to sleep with him due to her asexuality.

Rowan van Houten / Fuse

• Broken Bird: She puts on a strong facade for Aubrey's sake, but she's shattered, having been beaten down by life at every turn. Her vigilantism and her relationship with Aubrey are really the only things she has going for her.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Practically her entire family was murdered in a hate crime (she's half-Romani) when she was a child.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Her father is killed during Vigilance, and she's referenced as having been who he left behind.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Her downside. She's a very calm person most of the time, but if you find something that will set her off, she explodes as violently as her bombs.
• Hates Being Touched: She's okay when Aubrey touches her, but she has a tendency to flinch or otherwise react badly if anyone else does. It's a side effect of the abuse her mother has been heaping on her.
• Stepford Smiler: A bright, friendly young woman with one of the most depressing pasts in the series.