What I’ve Been Doing While You’ve Been Tapping Your Foot

Posted: 14th June 2013 by Jeff Bouley / Deacon Blue in Announcements / General

As with so many personal projects  in life, they not only get away from me but decide to do so at the same time that life dramas are swirling around me. I have tons of stories in my head, but you may have been wondering what I’ve been up to while you’ve been (too) patiently waiting.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on an omnibus document with vital stats (some detailed; others not so much) so that I can be consistent in my treatment of recurring characters. I’ve also wanted to get down on paper (so to speak…it’s all still electronic) a lot of characters that haven’t shown up yet so that I have them at the ready and so, if any of you want to write some fiction around here (hint, hint!), there are basic frameworks from which you can work with various characters I might not have introduced yet.

Also, I had a bunch of images I’ve been collecting. So I sorted through those and did some Photoshop work (several hundred images) and am now in the process of doing brief “vital stat” entries for each image (which I’ve already got names for) in my omnibus document. That doc is already at 170 pages and will likely be approaching 250 to 300 pages by the time I’m done (relatively speaking…I’ll never really be “done” unless and until I stop writing about this universe).

But why not share at least a few entries of characters you haven’t seen yet but probably will someday (or at least hear mentioned by other characters in stories)…

Agent Orange / David Foster
Gender: Male
Race/ethnicity: Black/African-American
Notes:
Agent Orange’s costume is a skeleton-themed unitard with full-head mask (oraAgent Orangenge with black bones and black skull face). Though he is a criminal, he tries to focus his attention on preying on other criminals mostly, to reduce the chances of attention from transhuman heroes and vigilantes; that said, if he feels he can get away with robbing a civilian or a legitimate business, he won’t hesitate. His power is Primal in nature, allowing him to exude pheromones in a fairly wide radius of his body that induce anxiety, and which he can quickly push to panic attacks levels of intensity—breathing the pheromones achieves the most effect, but at close range absorption through the skin and mucus membranes is sufficient to be affected noticeably. Victims, feeling such symptoms as accelerated heart rate, chest pains, shakiness and shortness of breath, often assume he is exuding some odorless toxic gas (associating their symptoms with his name, which is the same as the toxic defoliant used in the Vietnam War), or they assume he is a powerful Interfacer or Necro. Agent Orange does nothing to dissuade such theories, preferring that people not know the nature of his powers so that they are less able to defend against them.
Location: New Judah
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Fatal Natal / Nathan Finau
Gender: Male
Race/ethnicity: Hawaiian/Samoan
Notes:
Fatal-NatalNathan is 5’6” and varies between 325 and 400 pounds in weight. He is reasonably energetic and agile, given his obesity, but doesn’t rush unless he has to. His first name Nathan comes from the fact that his father traveled to New York often and became enamored of Nathan’s Hot Dogs during that time—a fact his father shared often. It is just one of many indignities—small and large—that have help turn Nathan’s already loner personality into a brooding and misanthropic one as he grew older. He grew up in Hawaii but moved to the mainland of the United States in 2000 when he decided a life of crime seemed like a good way to support himself and vent his anger at the world, and he has become increasingly prone to violence and murder over the years. Nathan’s costume as Fatal Natal is grotesque, with a full-face mask that looks like a kind of zombie baby face with dead black pits where eyes should be, and the rest of his costume a black bodysuit completely covered in dozens of baby dolls. The effect is to make him seem almost as if his body is made of infant corpses. His powers are Morph/Morphic in nature (mostly the latter). He has special organs in his body that produce noxious and potentially fatal gases. His Morph power is simply that he can temporarily create small orifices almost anywhere on his body through which to eject that gas. He can exude gaseous emissions as an aura, over a wide area or as a very directed stream of fumes. Despite the fact that Janus prefers to employ women, Fatal Natal was one of his top choices and most desired candidates for the team he and Underworld were forming, and Fatal Natal is part of the A-list of that team roster. Partly because of his size and partly because of his general attitude toward humanity, Fatal Natal almost never travels far for Janus and Underworld, usually sticking around New Judah and occasionally venturing into New York.
Location: New Judah
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OMG /Gail Strumm
Gender: Female
Race/ethnicity: White/Caucasian
Notes:
OMGOMG is generally accompanied by her friend BFF, who is not necessarily a sidekick but who generally takes her direction and cures from OMG; that said, they acts as partners overall and OMG gives her an even split of money if they get paying work. The pair isn’t solely for hire, doing random patrols to fight crime at times, but OMG tries to make sure they get paying gigs as much as possible, even if it straddles the line between mercenary and hero work at times. OMG wears a metallic green face mask with a large red exclamation point in the center, and wears her long brown hair in two pigtails with blue ribbons intertwined with them. On her body is a long, black, tight, long-sleeve dress (but very flexible and stretchy, so it doesn’t usually hamper her much) with sheer black material from her neck to her navel in the shape of a large lightning bolt. She is a Psionic with the abilities of mid-level telekinesis, mid-level illusion powers (against one target at a time), and high-level pyrokinesis at a range of up to six feet sufficient to blister a person’s skin (normally, pyrokinesis is nearly useless against non-flammable objects).
Location: New Judah

BFF / Stacy Gwendolyn
Gender: Female
Race/ethnicity: White/Caucasian
Notes:
BFFBFF is the not-quite-equal partner (but much more than just a sidekick) and friend of OMG. She wears a black, white and gray leopard print costume that seems to be one part cloak, one part tunic and one part dress that leaves her left arm bared, all over red leggings. She is chatty, bubbly and generally optimistic even in the worst circumstances. Her powers are twofold and Interfacer in nature. One allows her to boost the powers of almost any transhuman with Psionic powers (by a factor of about three). The other allows her to shut down higher/conscious brain functions of almost anyone except a Psionic. Both powers require at least minor concentration to maintain, and can only be used against one target, so only one or the other may be active at any given time. Her range is about 40 feet. Her codename was originally (and briefly) Schism until shortly after she answered a Craiglist ad OMG put out looking for a partner. When OMG found out Stacy could boost her Psi powers, she immediately took her on, and given the nature of her powers and the obvious symmetry, Stacy gleefully changed her name to BFF
Location: New Judah
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Big Bad Wolf / Carlos Jiminez
Gender: Male
Race/ethnicity: Hispanic/Mexican-American
Notes:
Big Bad WolfCarlos has wanted to be a costumed villain since he first found out he was a transhuman. When he finally turned 18 and graduated high school—fearing the wrath of his mother if he didn’t—he bought a cheap latex wolf mask with a lolling tongue and a brown unitard…and started committing crimes. Badly. Carlos is a terrible criminal and would already be in custody if the officer who was about to arrest him hadn’t felt so sorry for him and his pitifulness and let him walk. Shortly thereafter, though, he was hired by Black Empress, who saw a use for him as a tool of destruction, if not a useful field combatant. She now makes use of his power to break into places primarily; she also uses him as her “boy toy” at times. Big Bad Wolf’s power is the ability to generate a massively powerful telekinetic wave in a cone shape in front of him—powerful enough, in fact, to reduce a two-story home to splinters. However, it takes several minutes to build up the power necessary to launch that wave—and then he can’t do it again for at least a half hour.
Location: New Judah