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[explosionpunches]

OOC INFORMATION
Name: Maggie
Contact: omixgirl10
Other Characters: Ginko

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Erika Fisher
Age: 23
World Information: Erika comes from a futuristic world in which superpowered humans were once considered fairly commonplace; hero vs. villain battles were regularly reported in the news, seen in the streets, and so on. Superhero culture was a fairly typical part of everyday life, with the heroes (and villains) themselves treated much like any other celebrity, and, by the time Erika was born, her hometown of Haven City was known for having one of the most concentrated populations of metahumans in the country, and possibly the world. For the first few years of her life, Erika was raised in a world saturated with ongoing battles between good and evil, and, more so than for many people, that idea stuck solidly in her mind until long after most of the world thought of those days as a thing of the past.

The conflict between heroes and villains did, of course, present its own problems, even besides the obvious ones associated with having a bunch of malevolent superpowered criminals running around. While the vast majority of structures in Haven City, and many other densely-populated areas, were reinforced to account for any unexpected conflicts, certain amounts of property damage were unavoidable, and some civilians were getting pretty tired of being taken hostage on a regular basis.

So, after decades of development, the Hunter program was put into action: A plan to station highly advanced police drones all over the world to assist the superheroes, and, as some worried and some hoped, potentially replace them entirely. Though some concerns were raised about the wisdom of putting the safety of civilians purely in the hands of machines, these doubts were promptly ignored, a decision which practically everyone would end up regretting.

Though the Hunter drones seemed at first to be perfectly functional and effective, possibly more so than the heroes themselves at times, they were not totally infallible. A few years after their release, a still-unidentified hacker found a small hole in the security of the central computer that controlled the drones' programming, and before long they began turning against those who they used to assist and protect. Not long after that, they simply became aggressive toward anything they recognized as a human - and especially toward those with superpowers. The company that released the drones to begin with tried to shut them down, but by that time they were fully outside of their original creators' control.

By the time the drones were finally destroyed, a significant portion of the human population had been wiped out, including the vast majority of metahumans. Those who were left began efforts to rebuild, and that was where New Haven City came into it.

Unsurprisingly, Haven City had been one of the locations most at risk when the drone attacks began; with the enormous number of heroes and villains in the area, quite a few Hunters had been stationed within and around the city. In order to protect as many people as possible, various areas of the city were locked down as 'safe zones', including those locations deemed most necessary to infrastructure. As such, much of the population ended up spending quite a lot of time hiding around industrial districts or greenhouses, a few fleeing to the rural areas far away from the city. With the main conflict over and done with, those left in the city found themselves in what was essentially a barely-functional husk. However, over the course of the next few years, the city was rebuilt.

Gradually, with the surrounding area choked with out-of-control forests, the citizens of New Haven City were pretty much restricted to the town itself; it was commonly agreed that to wander beyond the boundaries of the city was too dangerous to be worth it, given the unknown wilderness beyond. So the survivors remained within the borders, as safe as could be expected - except for the occasional disturbance from those who were less than interested in maintaining the peace.

Character Information: Erika's childhood was far from peaceful, given the fact that she mostly grew up in the middle of a huge robots-versus-humans war. By the time Erika was twelve years old, she was living primarily on her own in the city. Separated from her family in the midst of the chaos when she was ten, she was left to try to survive on her own. At the time, resources, though available, were somewhat limited - and especially difficult to acquire for a lone child. Rather than seeking out any sort of help, however, Erika instead opted for independence, finding food and shelter wherever she could - often taken from those who she deemed "bad" and therefore less deserving of those supplies than she was.

It didn't take long for her standards to slip. While Erika was heavily influenced by the stories of the heroes from before her time, and initially made an effort to maintain some semblance of a sense of morality, she rapidly came to prioritize convenience and action - any action - over doing 'the right thing'. Over time, she grew to not only have looser standards as to who she considered worth taking from, but came to despise those who she considered to simply be too passive to do the same.

It was only after a good three years of struggling to survive with no real life experience or advantages to speak of, relying on luck as much as skill, Erika suddenly discovered that she may have had somewhat more of an advantage over those around her than she had thought. It was only when she was fifteen years old that, after years of idolizing metahumans (or at least the idea of metahumans), her own powers finally came to light. The ability to tear apart nearly any substance merely by touching it may not have struck her as the most heroic power possible, but it was something that most people couldn't do, and that was good enough for her. Erika, of course, had next to no firsthand experience with the actual nature of the superhero/supervillain dichotomy that used to be so central a part of life in Haven City, given how young she was when it all started to fall apart. But she had heard about them as a child, seen occasional bits and pieces of battles and arrests on the news or in the streets, and over time she had absorbed one story after another, twisted and warped though they may have been by circumstances and the memories of those telling them.

Between the destruction of the city and its current predicament, Erika convinced herself that the loss of that dichotomy when the drones took over must have been one of the major factors of the city's current problems - which meant, in her mind, that such an arrangement would inevitably re-energize New Haven City. While there weren't really any 'heroes' or 'villains', by Erika's limited definitions, to be seen, there were plenty of petty criminals - so she decided that they would have to be good enough for now. In the end, it was mostly thanks to the relative convenience of said criminals and the idea of being a hero being the more 'desirable' option that Erika chose to take on the role; if things had worked out differently, she could well have ended up trying to act as an enemy of the people from the start, and whether she ever switched could have gone either way.

It only took another few years for Erika to build up a pretty significant reputation for herself. Stories spread rapidly of a young woman with a destructive touch who had taken it upon herself to punish all those she saw as deserving of it; though the numbers of those who feared this figure were at least equal to those who respected her, Erika herself remained unperturbed by their reactions, more confident in her status as a major figure in the city - and therefore an asset merely by virtue of her importance - than she was concerned with the actual morality of her individual actions. As far as she was concerned, the brief calm that settled over the more functional parts of the city was as good as stagnant complacency, especially considering the significant criminal element still roiling within the community; what New Haven City really needed was an extra boost - be that determination or fear - and preferably a proper moral dichotomy, an ongoing, balanced conflict to give the people something to unite under and someone to root for.

The one problem with her absolutely-not-deluded plan, of course, was that there were no true supervillains to be seen. Over time, Erika became increasingly frustrated, wondering why no villains - she was sure they must have been out there somewhere - would step up to fight her. It wasn't for a few years that it occurred to her that she might have been approaching her plan wrong all along.

It was Artemis's sudden appearance as a figure within the city that really got her attention. Artemis wasn't a villain, not by any means; in fact, the first thing Erika heard about her was that she was another metahuman, one who people were far more ready to refer to as a hero. Working under the direction of public leader and scientist Diana Clarke, Artemis had begun keeping the peace in the city, seeming to stop crimes almost as quickly as they started, keeping civilians safe and criminals' movements limited.

Given her reputation for violence and destruction, it was no surprise to most that Artemis would see Erika as a potential threat. However, after her initial surprise the first time Artemis tried to arrest her, Erika's dismay at this turn of events didn't last long. It was obvious that Artemis had the people's support, something that Erika had never quite managed to garner in her role as an attempted hero. But what she didn't have was a proper villainous rival. It was in that moment that Erika made possibly her worst decision yet in a long string of bad decisions, as obvious as it may have seemed to her at the time. Over the next few years, Erika executed her plan to establish herself as a "real" supervillain, intentionally clashing with Artemis time and time again. However, despite the theoretical appeal of her plan, she found herself frustrated by her genuine inability to defeat Artemis, and her determination to stay on even footing came to have less to do with her 'cause' and more to do with a personal vendetta over time.

Whatever concern she had ever had for real morality was shifted and warped, and in the end, Erika had herself totally convinced that this was exactly what she needed to be doing all along. After all, there had never been any denying the dissonance between Erika's heroic view of herself and her brutal methods; with that in mind, she came to be more and more certain that she was simply meant to be the villain the begin with.

Personality: Erika is someone who's capable of justifying just about anything to herself, largely through a combination of overwhelming confidence and a supposedly solid moral standing that actually consists mostly of delusion. In her own world, her nostalgia for a time that she didn't even remember brought her to so firmly believe that a dichotomy between good and evil was necessary to society as a whole that she actually convinced herself that she was doing the right thing by wholeheartedly taking on the "evil" role. In fact, paradoxically, she sees that decision as something of a sacrifice; after all, she's signing herself up for who-knows-how-many years of being defeated or fought to a draw time and time again, right? Of course, if anyone were to point out that nobody actually needed her to do this, and she's just making up excuses to keep doing what she's been doing without thinking about the consequences, she would likely punch them in the face and then proudly explain why she had every right to do that. On top of that, she's got an undeniable tendency toward dramatics - making a strong impression is generally a top priority for her, even above making a good one. Erika wants to be important, and she wants to seem important, whatever that takes.

It's also practically impossible to deny that Erika enjoys having power over others (even if she may claim that that has nothing to do with her decision-making); even if she may not want actual responsibility, she certainly wants those around her to acknowledge and even fear her, if necessary. In fact, given her past failures to gain the respect rather than fear of those around her, she's come to default easily to manipulating those around her through fear rather than emotion (assuming she can't just get them to do what she wants right away without bothering with said manipulation). Really, despite her poor decision-making skills, Erika is far from stupid. More accurately, she's far more wired for strategy, both combative and social, than for reasoning. In essence, she's pretty good at getting what she wants, but absolutely terrible at determining whether this is something she should want to begin with, a combination that often results in lots of regrets.

Despite her self-proclaimed supervillain status, Erika doesn't particularly enjoy causing harm to random people; more than anything, she sees it as a means to an end. In fact, she has an unfortunate tendency not to even fully acknowledge the effects her actions have on others; with the exception of those who she specifically knows on a personal basis, or sees as equals, Erika doesn't tend to think of other people in terms of them being individuals so much as just "them". She may do something that she thinks is helping "them", she may even become angry on "their" behalf, but most of the time it doesn't occur to her that "they" actually consists of numerous people with lives and opinions.

If someone actually makes an impact on her, though, that changes things. In some ways, catching Erika's interest can be more dangerous than just happening to get caught up in her natural disaster of a life by proxy; best-case scenario, she sees you as someone to protect - which can sometimes result in a more concentrated version of her usual theoretically-well-meaning lack of regard for others. Worst-case scenario, she sees you more as a rival, if not an enemy - someone to prove herself to, often through competition, or simply to "win" against, however she can. For example, while Artemis originally seemed to her simply as a convenient foil to act as the hero to her villain, the legitimate threat that she posed quickly boosted her in Erika's mind from a tool to a person - a dangerous person, who should be watched carefully, and punched whenever possible.

In addition, Erika has an unfortunate tendency to romanticize those she sees as worthy of her attention, including her enemies. If she doesn't know someone well, but does know that they're powerful enough to face off against her, she's quite likely to build up an idea in her head based largely on what she thinks they should be like, more than who they actually are. Though she can usually handle discovering that she was wrong about someone, that won't stop her from being somewhat bitter about their inability to measure up to the arbitrary concept of them that she built up based on little to no evidence.

5-10 Key Character Traits:
Overconfident
Vindictive
Competitive
Self-Righteous
Driven
Dramatic
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, or EITHER? EITHER
Opt-Outs:
Troll (automatic opt-out)
Goblin
Vampire
Faerie
Merperson
Arachne

Roleplay Sample: here and here