Katy Kaboom
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
| |
| Katy in standard costume | |
| Katy Kaboom | |
| Player: @Sofaspud | |
| Origin: | Technology |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Controller |
| Security Level: | 37 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Katherine St. Clair |
| Known Aliases: | None known |
| Species: | Teenager |
| Age: | ... *whistles innocently* |
| Height: | 5-something |
| Weight: | ... next question? |
| Eye Color: | Blue |
| Hair Color: | Brunette |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | USA |
| Occupation: | Student |
| Place of Birth: | Paragon City |
| Base of Operations: | Paragon City |
| Marital Status: | Uh, like NO? |
| Known Relatives: | ... yes. |
| Known Powers | |
| None; her gear does the heavy lifting | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Very good with electronics | |
| Equipment | |
| LOTS | |
| No additional information available. | |
Student by day, hero by night (or whenever she can sneak out of class), Katy Kaboom is following in the footsteps of her grandfather and taking to the streets to fight evil -- and have a little bit of fun in the process.
But, uh, don't say a word to her folks, 'kay?
Contents |
Affiliations
Supergroup
- The Legendary (Rank: Rumor). Katy was invited to join by Evangelia and has yet to seriously participate -- she feels a bit like a welcome-but-unplanned-for guest and has yet to really make friends with anyone in the group. Her schedule restrictions -- parents are such a drag for the secret teenage hero! -- mean that she doesn't often see many of the others, but she's working on ways around that. And summer vacation is going to be here soon, right?
Heroes
None... so far. Katy tends to have to go it alone most of the time, due to her schedule, but she's starting to realize that solo action is more painful than it needs to be.
Villains
- Buffer Overflow, Katy's personal little thorn in the side. There WILL be a reckoning, some day.
Personality
Katy's a bit of a geek, but not the reclusive sort. She's outgoing, outspoken, earnest, and more than a little idealistic; her geekness manifests in the things she enjoys studying, rather than in her personality. Most of the time. Unless it involves blinking lights, bleeding-edge technology, explosives, or some combination of all three, at which point most people will need a Geek-to-English dictionary to keep up.
As a hero, she takes her job very seriously -- it's her grandfather's legacy, after all -- and tends to want to, er, punish the bad guys a bit more than strictly necessary. She hasn't killed anyone, and probably never will, but some broken bones, severe contusions, or kicks to the ribs while they're down never really hurt anyone, right?
Finally, she IS a teenager, after all, with all the angst and drama that entails. Perhaps fortunately, she hasn't yet discovered a particular interest in boys -- or girls, for that matter -- and is content to be friends rather than getting more emotionally involved with anyone else. When pressed, she tends to sigh dismissively, though a few of her friends suspect she's secretly got a crush on someone. But who?
Powers
Katy doesn't seem to actually have any powers. If she does, it lies in her frankly amazing ability to MacGyver technology into doing things it isn't supposed to be able to do. Electronics and micro-mechanics are where she truly shines; while she's able to, say, use a computer (and fairly effectively at that), she's no uber-hacker extraordinaire. She's an electron pusher, not a code monkey. And she's very, very good at it.
Mind Control
Despite her fondness for things that go boom, Katy found early on that the unpredictable results of high explosives on the human body (or test dummies, in her case) made it unfeasible to take to the streets packing that level of heat. So, she turned to more refined, though no less effective, methods, and constructed her 'toys' appropriately.
- Synaptic Disrupt-O-Tron (Dominate, Total Domination): with this handy device, constructed from the scavenged remains of an iPod and a discharged Tazer, Katy can cause bad guys to freeze in their tracks and clutch helplessly at their ears until the effect wears off. Typically, the track she uses is Barbie Girl, but she found that the Vahzilok actually like that, so switches to Henry the Eighth when fighting them. She's recently upgraded this and can now target multiple foes at the same time. Nifty!
- Thug-A-Pult (Levitate): who but a genius like Katy could have taken a toaster, a broken MediComm unit, and a remote control and combined them into a thug-tossing machine of mass destruction?
- Alpha-Wave Inducer (Mass Hypnosis): a little off-the-shelf tech with Katy's signature twist. It wasn't hard for her to convert the electrodes this device originally came with into short-range, powerful antennas... the hard part was tuning it so it didn't knock her out as well.
- Gravitic Modulator (Telekinesis): ... yeah, even Katy's not sure how she managed to get this one working. She knows it contains parts from a microwave, but she finished it after an all-nighter and can't remember the details. She's a bit leery of taking it apart to see how it ticks; her track record for reassembling things into their original working order is not so good.
- The Fraidy Gun (Terrify): her Biology teacher inadvertently gave Katy the means to create this freaky little gizmo. Using an old Lazertag pistol, a Pet Away! sonic cat trainer (used to keep pesky felines off the couch), and the guts from a Kodak Instamatic, Katy can now stimulate the fear center of the brain -- helpfully pointed out to her by the aforementioned teacher in class one day -- and cause her opponents to wet themselves and tremble helplessly before her wrath. So far, she has resisted the urge to use it on those annoying jocks at school...
Storm Summoning
Having decided that non-lethal was the way to go, Katy soon found that it was pretty hard to find things that could do the job without, y'know, frying the bad guy to a crisp or accidentally stranding them in another dimension or other really cool but not-so-heroic things like that. She finally settled on a few things that, while they aren't deadly, can be downright uncomfortable when used properly.
- The Hair Dryer From Hell (Gale): her first attempt at creating her own toys, and arguably the most successful, if a bit tame compared to some. It's exactly what it sounds like -- a typical hair dryer that she's, er, tinkered with. When activated it sounds like a jet turbine powered by a swarm of angry bees, and it tends to send evildoers, garbage, stray animals, and even some of the lighter parked cars tumbling end-over-end for quite a ways. Katy likes it.
- Blizzard-Matic 5000 (Snow Storm): when the convenience store down the street got rid of its Freeze-Matic 5000 ice cream machine, Katy saw her golden opportunity. Some wires here, a few components there, a bit of the old elbow grease, and the Blizzard-Matic 5000 was born. Instead of ice cream, it spews out snow. Very. Cold. Snow. Tied by a wireless connection to Katy's datagoggles, it locks on to the target Katy chooses and blasts him, her, or it and all nearby foes into submission with sub-zero flakes of doom. Katy's only regret is that she hasn't found a way to cram more batteries into the thing yet -- it tends to run out of juice too quickly for her liking.
- The Freeze-Fris (Freezing Rain): an ordinary looking frisbee, right? Wrong! In Katy's hands -- after a visit to her workshop -- this ordinary toy becomes a non-lethal instrument of JUSTICE! A tap of her thumb and a flick of her wrist sends the toy high in the air, where it detonates and sprays the area below it with supercooled water, instantly forming an ice slick and giving the unfortunates caught underneath a Really Bad Day.
- Katycane (Hurricane): after a few too many trips to the hospital, Katy decided enough was enough. Her biggest problem is when the bad guys get in close. The solution? Don't let them! She immediately turned to her workbench and after several hard nights at work, came up with this elegant solution. Adapting her flightsuit's gravity-control systems to affect the air instead of herself was tricky, but doable. Now, when she desires, she has merely to flick a switch and instantly she becomes the vortex of a large, self-contained, and irresistable force of nature -- a hurricane! And since she's in the eye of the storm, so to speak, it doesn't even mess with her hair. Wonderful!
- BoomGloves mkI (Thunder Clap): unsatisfied with her original StunGlove, Katy returned to the workbench and resumed fiddling. Now she has the ability, when she wants, to unleash all of their charge in one devastating, omnidirectional blast -- with a nifty lightshow as an unintended side effect. It isn't usually enough to take 'em down by itself, but it makes for a great conversation starter and usually leaves the undesirable sort wondering which way is up. Katy's more than happy to show them which way is down.
Additional Toys
Katy keeps a PPD-issue Tazer gun on hand. Y'know, just in case.
Flight
- Flightsuit (Hover, Flight): Katy calls it a flightsuit. Those who have seen it... well, they claim that 'bikini' is much more appropriate. She wears it under her costume at all times. Hey, okay, listen, it was NECESSARY for the full-body support, don't LOOK at her that way...
Other
- StunGloves Mk III (Sands of Mu): as she started taking on tougher foes, Katy realized that her toys, cool as they were, just weren't cutting the mustard. She took a weekend off from hero-ing, holed up in her Secret Underground Lair (a sub-sub-basement in the condominium complex where she lives), and worked. Many designs were scribbled down, then tossed aside like so much trash. Finally, she settled on a pair of fingerless gloves, with lead powder sewn in over the knuckles and a re-calibrated Tazer unit built into the wrists. When activated, these babies pump electricity into her arms in carefully controlled pulses, rendering her fists into a blur of motion that pummels the target into submission. At least, when it works, that is. If that first punch misses, Katy's found that she's thrown off balance and must stand there punching the air until the charge wears off, looking like a fool and giving the thugs a chance to whack her upside the head. She's still working on fixing that...
- The Stick of Summoning (Recall Friend): it looks like a magic wand. It acts like a magic wand. Katy waves it around, points it where she wants it, and poof, a teammate appears. In reality, she's found a way to bypass the usual restrictions and convince the Medicom unit every hero carries to teleport them to where Katy wishes. But, um, don't tell the PPD, okay? They frown on this sort of thing....
Abilities
Katy is phenomenally good with electronics. Like, spooky-good. She first programmed the VCR to get rid of the 'blinking 12:00' problem at the tender age of four. With a Baby's First Screwdriver plastic play-set. Those that have seen her work come away impressed, and often dismayed. She gleefully ignores the basic rules of electronic theory, brushes aside the need for anti-static equipment, and cheerfully tromps all over the circuit schematics printed on the data sheets. And somehow, it all works. She has to go back to the drawing board a few times, but she's stubborn and electronics seem to like her. Eventually, she makes it happen.
This, combined with her racial teenage ability to scarf down a metric ton of junk food and still be hungry half an hour later, makes her an unstoppable force of creation when she's in the mood. Just keep her supplied with Doritos and Dew, and make sure you keep clear until the dust settles.
Weaknesses and Limitations
Katy's reliance on technology has an obvious downside, and it's not the batteries -- that'd be easy to fix. What technology giveth, technology can also taketh away-eth. More times than she cares to think about, Katy's experienced a glitch in her toys. It can be something as relatively harmless as a simple misfire, or as potentially deadly as a total catastrophic meltdown. She's only experienced the latter once, so far, but it was at an exceedingly bad time: when she was about thirty stories up, testing her new Flightsuit. Which gave out. Amazingly, she survived the fall itself, though with grave injuries, but a roving pack of Hellions quickly saw to it that Katy visited the local medical center. She's learned to operate with some form of backup whenever possible, these days.
Another weakness is harder to work around. With her toys, Katy can fight a single enemy as easily as she can an entire mob of them, using multiple toys in quick succession to hold them in place, bounce them off the ceilings, toss them around, freeze their toes off, and so on. But none of it really hurts, and eventually even HER power packs start to run dry. It may take a while, but they do -- and when that happens, humiliated Hellions and outraged Outcasts don't make the most friendly of neighbors.
Equipment
You mean, aside from the garage-sale-sized pile of stuff she already carries?
- Compression Pouches: nifty devices that Katy's butler, Craig, acquired for her at the start of her career. They look like ordinary containers, but you could stuff an elephant inside and have room left over for the family Buick. Katy's not sure how they work, though she'd dearly love to find out. She does know they're expensive, however, and she's learned to leave them alone -- being covered in soot and laughed at by one's supposed mentor is a humiliating experience, and one that she'd rather not repeat, thankyouverymuch.
- Datagoggles: an off-the-shelf purchase, she hasn't seen the need to tinker with these yet. They give her a HUD with a compass, tie her into the Internet, allow her to designate targets... pretty much everything you'd need for the hero on the go.
- Jump Pack: another gift at the start of her career. Had she thought to use it during the unfortunate flightsuit episode, she might have fared better, but she was too busy panicking at the time.
- Police Band Radio: Katy's given serious thought to taking it apart and re-using the components -- hey, every detective out there is handing them out like they're Halloween candy -- but so far she hasn't thought of a use for them. Time will tell.
- Raptor Pack: ah yes. This lovely little item was a reward for stopping a bank heist. Katy was thankful for it at the time. She finally worked up the nerve to remove the 'WARNING: AUTHORIZED SERVICE TECHNICIANS ONLY' panel on the back (after the fuel ran out), and that led directly to her flightsuit, with a left turn on Quantum Physics Avenue. Now if only it wasn't strewn in pieces over her workbench...
- Pocket D VIP Pass: given to her by a rich boy who wanted to impress her. She hasn't used it much, and the rich boy got the cold shoulder when he got too frisky. She's not quite sure how it works -- even with her most sensitive equipment, she can't detect anything except plastic and dye on the thing.
Character History
Katherine St. Clair is following in her grandfather's footsteps down Hero Road. The old man shared her affinity for technology, though in his day it was more Victorian and mechanical, clockwork gears and steam-driven pistons rather than electronic pulses and solenoids. He was the one who created the tunnel network that Katy uses to get in and out of her home undetected. He was the one who inducted the butler, Craig, into the life of hero's aide. And when he died, he left his legacy to Katy, who shared her grandfather's passion for technology and heroic deeds.
(For a more thorough treatment of Katy's origins, please go here.)
Continuing Adventures!
(Katy's escapades are documented on The Legendary forums, and will be linked here for convenience)
Tales of The Legendary Comics
- Katy Kaboom Issue #1: Double Jeopardy
Battle Cries and Catch Phrases
- "Don't make the hair dryer angry."
- "Product safety warning: these toys not suitable for dummies!"
Trivia
- Katy's grandfather is/was a character from a different RPG system (Heroes Unlimited, by Palladium) called Santa's Helper who directed an army of toys against the forces of evil. Think G.I. Joe paratroopers raining down from a hover-sleigh and you've got the right idea. I wanted to bring him in, but the game engine won't allow a heroic mastermind, darnit. It seemed fitting that he pass on part of his legacy, so I wove him into the backstory for Katy.
- Katy's flightsuit? Yeah, that's a bit of retconning there. See, I didn't realize that the skirt would disappear in water; I had to come up with an explanation for the bright-red bikini bottoms on the fly. But I think it works well this way. :)
