The Vigil

Full Name: Iris Arian Smith

Alias: The Iron Rose

Nicknames: Incident #303

Gender: Female



Height: 5'9"

Weight: 60 kg

Eye Color: Blue

Hair Style: A fringe ending just above her eyes at the front, while long at the sides and back. When she 'dons her costume' she ties her hair back into a long ponytail to keep it out of the way.

Hair Color: Black.

Facial Hair: None.

Skin Color: Pale.

Build: Lithe and agile, but firm.

Distinguishing Features: She doesn't have any immediately distinguishable physical traits, although she always wears a rosé on her person. The exact type can differ, as to where it is visible, but she always wears one.

Costume: While not nearly as flashy as some superheroes, she does still dress for the occasion. She wears a black suit (this kind of thing with a plain white undershirt) and wears a flat topped ballistic mask. 

Weaponry: She is usually unarmed but if expecting a fight might carry a gun or knife with her.

Equipment: She has been known to carry a bag with scraps of metal, even short rebar rods before.



Skills: She has trained for many years in several different forms of martial arts, as well as boxing and kick-boxing. She has since learnt how to (effectively) wield a gun, however she has very little need for one. She also does yoga.

Vehicle: An old 2015 model Yamaha YZF-R1 motorcycle, illegally acquired from a random garage. Luckily enough, that random garage belonged to a motorcycle fanatic, and the bike came in good condition with both keys and a mostly full tank. She has named it "Lance". (Probably not as great as most motorbikes in 2020 but I'm sure it's fine for city purposes.)

Other Possessions: None that she leaves outside her home.

Karma: Lawful Evil



Power/s: Elemental Manipulation - Iron
Iron Rose has the ability to completely manipulate all iron within a three meter vicinity of herself. She may alter their properties; their form, their density, their temperature and even their velocity within her field. As long as the mass remains the same.
She may also draw the iron from objects within her field. For example, if she was close enough to a piece of machinery, she could draw the iron out from it, leaving all non-iron parts to remain. She can however, catch things inside the metal and hold them within the metal.
A useful offensive example of this ability would be creating a knife or sword or some other form of melee weapon from a beam. Is she chose, she could heat up the tip of the weapon to the point where it glowed, whilst keeping the handle cool to the touch. She could solidify and liquefy the weapon at a whim, or change it's shape completely. 
An example of a defensive capability would be to create a shield of solidified metal around herself, creating a thick wall, or she could protect herself with a screen of liquid metal, capable of catching most projectiles in their field. As the projectile is quickly covered in iron, all she has to do is pull the iron back into the field. This works against most projectiles, however projectiles become harder to catch the larger and faster they are.
Say if she stripped a car of all it's iron, assuming none was lost she could return the metal to the car. However this takes a large amount of concentration and knowledge of the original form the metal took.
The overall main weakness of the ability are somewhat short range (she could create an iron spear at propel it out at 100 kmph, but the moment it left her field of control gravity and wind resistance would return to the spear) and the dependency on iron at hand. While she usually brings some of her own to combat, and she usually has no trouble finding any in the city, she would lose much of her effectiveness trapped in an environment without any at hand. Due to this she must remain wary of traps.

Strengths of power: 
Versatile and dangerous offensive capabilities.
Impenetrable defense against most projectiles and weapons.
A flexible ability, can be used in all sorts of useful ways.

Weaknesses of power:
Resource dependent.
Requires a certain level of concentration for most abilities.
Usually ineffectual against less 'solid' forms of attack.
While most abilities are quick, they are not instantaneous.

[User must be extra careful against enemies that can 'phase' through objects or move extremely quickly]


Iris’s personality reflects the Iron in which she controls. She is cold, resolute, strong and unforgiving. She remains quiet, waiting, until she has a purpose to serve. She has grown used to the life of a tool, and as such possesses very little personality, outside of habits.
To call Iris a hero or a villain would be a bit of a stretch. Simply put, she is just a woman discontent with the authority. Very few know who she is, even less why she has such a vendetta.
Most of the general public don’t actually know of her existence. She has never been reported fighting; her mask has yet to be revealed. But word has gotten around. Through back-street alleys and chain-link fences, the word has spread.
There are stories. Local stories, nothing that would ever reach anything more than a small newspaper article, of a girl who had once ran into a construction site chased down by three much older and much larger boys nearly a decade ago. There had been a scream, the shrieking of torn metal, and the agonizing cries of men, followed by silence. By the time anyone had mustered up the courage to investigate, there was a dark van leaving the site, with nothing but blood and odd metallic sculptures remaining.
If nothing else from her life so far, Iris has become a soldier. Not in the traditional sense, but she is the kind of person who resolves most issues with violence or abstinence.
Her opinion of the government is less than high, and from her past experiences with them she positively despises them. That isn’t to say she is against law and order, she just does not like the people behind it, the ones who in most cases, would end superhumans with the press of a button and leave the peacekeeping to police.
Iris, or the name she has adopted for herself, the Iron Rose – has yet to be seen. She is indebted to the one who freed her from her captivity, and she owes them her life. She does not necessarily like them, but she understands that without their help, she would have no life to live. Because of this, she is fiercely loyal to them, and would follow nearly any order they could give.

Alias: Staccato (as in staccato lightning, because weather terminology)

Nicknames: I dunno, I’m sure somebody can think of something.

Gender: Male




Height: Six feet, four inches

Weight: Approximately 190 pounds

Eye Color: His eyes alternate between a dull green (their natural state) and glowing a bright, electric blue-white, depending on how much electricity is in his system – the more, the bluer and the glowier.

Hair Style: Staccato keeps his hair pretty consistently short, around three inches long at the most. He usually styles it up and to one side with the firmest gel he can get his hands on, since the electrical current flowing through him tends to try to make it all stand on end.

Hair Color: He's a dirty blond leaning more towards the blond side.

Facial Hair: Staccato usually sports a pretty hefty pair of sideburns, but that's about it.

Skin Color: When not actively making use of his abilities, Staccato's skin is somewhat well-tanned.

Build: While not a bruiser by any stretch of the imagination, he’s in fairly good shape.

Distinguishing Features: Besides his glowy-eyes shtick, Staccato’s blood vessels have a tendency to give off a bit of a glow when his system is charged with excess energy. He also sounds like he’s got an excellent voice for radio.

Costume: Staccato’s costume is a bit of a lower-budget number: a gray-trimmed white polyester track jacket over tee shirt and matching pants with a couple of zippered pockets to hold his stuff. He also favors a pair of leather combat boots, so chosen for their lack of a rubber sole and general toughness. He commonly affixes a dark grey domino mask to the area around his eyes with spirit gum, then lets his glowy eyes shtick do a decent amount of identity concealment. He’s been meaning to get something better, but can’t seem to come up with something unique enough to serve as a ‘signature’ kind of look.

Weaponry: The close-range stun gun Staccato carries is technically a weapon, but it's one he only ever uses to 'charge' himself. He also carries one of those 21-inch expandable steel baton numbers in a pocket and definitely uses this more like a weapon.

Equipment: Staccato wears several cheap rings and a metal bracelet or two on each wrist, thanks to a belief that these help him channel his powers more effectively.


Skills: Staccato is a fairly competent athlete with a fair bit of practice in kickboxing. He’s also fairly adept at identifying weather patterns and possesses some limited understanding of Québécois and the Canadian vernacular. He recently also began trying to learn how to free-run without a ton of success.

Vehicle: He drives a fairly beat-up silver Ford Taurus, when he elects to drive.

Other Possessions: Though his vision is approximately 20/20, Staccato wears a pair of green colored contacts to conceal his identity when not in costume. He’s gotten in the habit of carrying them more or less everywhere, and has a number of extra sets stored in his Batcave. He also tends to carry a smartphone in a bulky rubberized case.

Karma: Somewhere in the Lawful / Neutral Good corner of the alignment spectrum


Power/s: Staccato's abilities are most easily described as limited electrokinesis. He can sense and absorb electricity from various sources, whether static or honest-to-goodness plug-in-go-zap-zap electricity, both by proximity and touch. Being within ten feet of an electrical source is enough for Staccato to begin draining it if he desires to, though to do so without contact provides a slow drain at best. Direct contact is a much more efficient manner of charging himself, but also presents the risk of electrocution before he can adapt to the level of charge. This facet of his abilities, naturally, grants him some level of resistance to prolonged electrocution.

The electricity he harnesses has a number of applications. He can transfer electrical charges of varying intensities either by contact with an object or by transmission through a conductive material such as water or metal. He primarily does so to shock people (but generally tries to avoid stopping hearts) and charge or overload electronics. He cannot, however, shoot lightning out of his hands, because that’s probably a little OP and too common for the writer’s tastes anyway.

Staccato can also use this electricity to essentially accelerate his body, causing different effects depending on what he’s looking for. His reaction time slightly increases passively as he absorbs more electricity, but not nearly to a point where he can try and intentionally dodge bullets at full charge – he might be able to get lucky and generate a construct in the right place to stop one, though, or get lucky and dive out of the way as he notes a firearm being brought to bear. He can convert electricity into energy for his body, allowing him to nourish his body and muscles without eating or resting – though electricity is hardly a replacement for oxygen. Staccato can even ‘shock’ his muscles into moving more quickly or to apply more force than they should be able to, effectively granting him speed or strength roughly on par with an Olympic sprinter, but maintaining such levels of speed or strength for too long can effectively result in his body tearing itself apart as it certainly isn’t built to withstand such force.

Staccato’s ‘signature’ ability, however, is the ability to harden portions of his bioelectrical field (covering an area of about three square feet at maximum, limited to within a foot or so of any portion of his body) into what basically amounts to electrified hard light, roughly the same blue-white color as his eyes. These coalesce at the speed of thought as simple objects out of Staccato’s imagination – common shapes are boxing gloves, boots, pieces of armor he’s seen in pictures and history books. A favorite technique of his is to generate a construct around his hand and forearm and then punch people with it, both doing the electrocution thing high-intensity bursts of electricity do and avoiding any injury to his hands when he starts punching people in the jaw. The duration and strength of these constructs is mostly dependent on how much charge Staccato possesses, but he can maintain one for about three minutes when fully charged and can force it to withstand forces close to that of a single direct large-caliber rifle shot before the construct gives way or shatters.

Strengths and weaknesses:
Strengths
Staccato is a pretty fast runner, fairly strong, and possesses a ton of endurance. He’s fairly powerful at close range, being capable of shocking the bejesus out of people or basically just hitting them with electrified hardlight constructs. He can drain the energy from most everything with a battery either slowly by simply being near it and willing himself to drain it, or much more quickly with direct contact – though static electricity and his own bioelectric field also work as power sources.

Weaknesses
Well, there are the obvious weaknesses one might expect from a guy who’s basically a walking battery, such as being much less effective against anyone careful to ground themselves. He can also be injured about as easily as anyone else by quick, high-voltage shocks (like being directly hit by a bolt of lightning) or random shifts in voltage: his resistance to electrocution generally only keeps him from harm when he has a constant, even flow of electricity to acclimate to. Acclimation to high-voltage power sources is quick, but often rather uncomfortable at best.
Using his abilities also burns quite a bit of Staccato’s energy. Simply generating and maintaining a charge with which to jolt people is quite efficient, as his augmented flesh creates an excellent circuit, but breaking that circuit by pouring energy into an object or using pretty much any of his other powers proves quite costly to his energy reserves. Further, without access to an outside power source, it takes Staccato quite a bit of time to recharge and be able to make use of his abilities again.
He also has pretty much no offensive ability beyond ten feet or so. Anybody with a gun is going to represent a fairly major threat, unless he can take them by surprise or luck out and deflect a few bullets with his constructs as he closes the distance.


Staccato seems like he’s let being superhuman go to his head a little bit. He loves being in the limelight, loves the attention, and there’s a pretty good chance he’s doing what he does as much for the fame as for a chance to do some good. He’s definitely not afraid to reap what benefits of celebrity he can without compromising his anonymity, not that that usually adds up to much more than a chance to “get caught on TV” every once in a while. This has taught him quite a bit of patience: not that he did before, but he rarely allows himself to become flustered or visibly angry. There’s a good bit of lightheartedness in him, and he’s certainly not unwilling to flirt or joke around on the job.

He’s got a good heart, too - Staccato does truly believe he’s in this superhero thing to do some good and improve at least one city. He came to the conclusion pretty quickly that his responsibility as someone with powers was to protect those without, and Detroit seemed as good a place as any. Nevermind that a job search back before he’d awakened his powers had led him here, a place some people had considered hopeless; sometimes, you just had to take it upon yourself to manufacture that hope.
Of course, this would-be beacon of hope still tries to follow the rules. He’s certainly not willing to kill; that’s really the one thing that separates him from the chaos and depravity that he opposes.