CnC app
[PLAYER INFO]
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Bruce Wayne | Batman
FANDOM: DC Comics
CHRONOLOGY: Post-Return of Bruce Wayne.
CLASS: Big Damn Hero
SUPERHERO NAME: Batman
ALTER EGO: Bruce Wayne, billionaire playboy and business mogul.
BACKGROUND:
As a small boy, Bruce Wayne watched with horror as his parents were thoughtlessly gunned down on the streets of his native Gotham City by an armed thief. Irreparably marked by the tragedy and the impotence that he felt, he resolved to devote his life to a crusade against crime. He spent his teenage years and his family's vast wealth globe-trotting, studying everything from martial arts to criminology to applied sciences from the world's greatest instructors. When he finally returned to corrupt, crime-laden Gotham city he was a young man, and ready to take vengeance upon the supestitious and cowardly lot as Batman, the caped crusader.
Though early adventures were clumsy and often went awry, he soon became a defining force in the political and social climate of Gotham. Batman was an urban legend, a modern myth -- boogeyman to wrong-doers, inspiration to the downtrodden and the victimised. He met and formed an indispensible bond with Jim Gordon, later to become police commissioner of the city, and together they warred against the police corruption and mob influence that had become endemic. He encountered a new flush of costumed villains, an unfortunate consequence of his example and notoriety, and met with the burgeoning population of superheroes that would later form the Justice League of America. A sidekick named Robin soon followed after he found a kindred spirit in fellow orphan Dick Grayson, and he earned himself a psychotic archnemesis called the Joker whose exploits have dogged our intrepid hero ever since.
Much of Bruce Wayne's later life is defined by further tragedy and the consequences of his deep-seated mistrust for others. Though his father/son relationship with Dick had been a positive influence on the pair of them, Bruce grew paranoid as the boy aged and became more independant. Fearing he could eventually be responsible for the boy's death, Bruce abruptly fired his young ward and drove a wedge between them.
With Dick gone, Batman was once more a solo vigilante, at least until he crossed paths with street tear-away Jason Todd. Bruce hoped he could ease the boy's suffering in the same way that he had Dick, but the boy was less talented and quick to anger. Jason ran afoul of the Joker, beaten savagely and left to die in a bombed warehouse. With the subsequent attack on Barbara Gordon - Jim's daughter and fellow partner in crime-fighting Batgirl - that left her paralysed, this galvanised Batman's paranoia and sociopathic tendencies like never before, and he became steadily more isolated from the world around him.
Later, his increasingly reckless and extreme tendencies drew the attentions of Tim Drake, another young boy that admired Batman for his efforts and sought to help him overcome the emotional hang-ups that were driving him into an early grave. Discovering that Tim was not like the others, that he was keenly intelligent and devoid of the anger that had brought about Jason's death, and he became the third Robin.
Life continued as before until a new mob villain emerged in Gotham, the brilliant mastermind and steroid junkie (that's an understatement) Bane. His intellect underestimated by his caped adversary, Bane trounced Batman in street war and single-combat, ruthlessly breaking his back. Unwilling to let Batman die and Bane take over Gotham, and paralysed by the fear that Tim or Dick might inherit the role with further tragedy, Bruce handed the mantle to a newcomer named Azrael. Bruce worked to recover and regain his strength while the unhinged Azrael became increasingly violent and veangeful, and the two would later battle for the mantle. Having overcome the younger man, Bruce eventually returned to his former role as Batman.
Batman's role flucuated over the passing years as he returned to the JLA to combat planet and even universe-threatening adversaries, as Gotham was devastated by an earthquake and left to rot by President Luthor, as Bruce Wayne was framed for murder. Mob warfare returned to prominence in Gotham which Batman and Robin struggled to combat. A new Robin in the form of Stephanie Brown was drafted only to end in disaster yet again, this time with her supposed death in the hands of the sadistic ganglord Black Mask after she ran afoul of Batman's notorious paranoia.
Paranoia was the buzzword of that stage in his life. Discovering that trusted friends and allies in the JLA had tampered with his memories to prevent a scandal involving Doctor Light from surfacing, Bruce's paranoid tendencies yet again came to the fore like a winged mammal out of a Meatloaf song and he designed and implemented the sentient metahuman surveillance satellite Brother Eye. Because sentient computers always go bad in the end, Brother Eye turned on the heroes of the world and incited a major struggle for the fate of the world.
With his reputation and relationship with Earth's superhero population left broken, Bruce exiled himself to repeat the globe-trotting pilgrimage he had undergone as a youth, before returning to Gotham with renewed resolve. Around this time he discovered he had fathered a child by occasional adversary Talia Al Ghul, a boy named Damian who had been raised from birth by assassins to be a worthy inheritant of his father's legacy. Before they could form any kind of relationship, Batman fell under the thrall of an esoteric crime ring named the Black Glove, who attempted to destroy both his reputation and his mind. They failed, but soon after he was believed to have been killed by the New God Darkseid.
Naturally, he survived, Darkseid seeking to use him as a time capsule of sorts through which he could ecape his inevitable death in the Final Crisis. Bruce raced back to the present and to Gotham to ultimately defeat both Darkseid and the Black Glove.
Now Bruce wages his old crusade as a man reborn, with allies old and new rallying behind him as he plots the next stage in the evolution of Batman.
PERSONALITY:
Come on, what do you want me to say? It's Batman. Following the death of his parents, he became the single most resolute and driven man in his corner of the multiverse.
As Bruce Wayne, a billionaire “it boy” born into his wealth, he is regarded by his clamouring public in a rather idiosyncratic manner. In his most flattering light, Bruce Wayne the celebrity is charming and charismatic, a responsible and at times noble philanthropist. His more damning critics dismiss him as a smug, entitled and ultimately rather dull-witted narcissist, who squanders a fortune he never truly earned on fast women and hot cars. Ultimately, the Bruce Wayne persona fluctuates to meet the demands of his alter-ego -- be it the affable but shallow thrill-seeker that dissuades suspicion, or the driven community-minded businessman that cleans up what he can of his city on the right side of the law.
What the countless droves of Bruce Wayne obsessives don’t know is that at night he dresses in a spandex bat costume and beats criminals of every calibre various shades of blue. As Batman he is tireless and uncompromising in his one and only hobby, passion, quest -- putting an end to crime and suffering in a world rife with both. Batman is selfless, a man who defines himself through action, an incorruptible champion of the innocent who just doesn't know how to give up... ever. Though he refuses to explicitly state it, he cares for people a great deal and he is willing to punish himself again and again if it will keep them safe.
But Batman has his vulnerabilities and inadequacies, too. Allies often find him surly and uncommunicative, remorselessly egotistical and dangerously obsessive. If he believes in something, he is right and everyone else is wrong and pray for those who get in his way. He doesn’t suffer fools and seldom affords unquestionable trust, even to those who have proven themselves to him again and again. He has machiavellian tendencies and will not hesitate to deceive or use people to further a goal. Friends and even loved ones are often kept at arms length, particularly in times of great strife.
For all of Batman and Bruce Wayne's contradictions, his character is united by a single motivation. He has seen too much pain, suffering and death in his life and simply put, he doesn’t want to see the same happen to anyone else.
POWER:
In recent canon he acquired a robotic suit from the future that allowed him to identify and temporarily nullify the powers of others. I'd like to carry this ability over to the game, minus the suit.
[Updated]: self-duplication. He and his duplicate share experience and identity, and any clothing/possessions he has with him at the time would also be replicated. The chief limitations are that he can only have one duplicate at any given time, and that he and his duplicate can be separated for no longer than three days.
Though acquired through nothing more than intense study, Batman is an unparalleled detective and extremely capable martial artist.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[After a few expertly feigned false-starts, Bruce manages to set the communicator to record and the video feed focused on himself. He's a man in his thirties; the classic tall, dark and handsome. His hair is playfully mussed and the tie to his visibly expensive executive suit is drawn slack enough to reveal a lipstick mark on his neck. He wears the lazy smile of someone who has never had much difficulty having a good time.
All in all, it's a thoroughly convincing charade.]
I must have overindulged on the bubbly because I don't remember the Big Apple ever having its own border control. Is that a new initiative?
What's more, it would appear that I've mislaid my butler. He has my appointment book, but I fear I'm long past expected at a Community Health Center ribbon-cutting in Gotham.
I'd be loathe to flake on such a worthy cause, so would someone be a dear and call for a car? You can be my plus-one. A brunette would be preferable.
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
Bruce was restless. Too tired, too listless to sleep. There was little concept of day and night left to him but if anyone could rediscover and abuse it, it was the Batman. With a mechanical proclivity that came with repeating the same motions every night of what on this particular night felt like a very, very long life, he donned his uniform. Like always, he paused for a few brief moments, holding the cowl between his fingers and feeling the weight of it before pulling it over his head.
Later, he sat amongst the gargoyles of one of the City's older buildings and watched the sun set. Batman never came out before dark in Gotham, but this was not Gotham. These were new rooftops and new alleys to tread, new sights and smells and people. All of it he had to learn and to come to understand, like he understood the city that he called home. To know his foe brought him power and that power, for a time, let him forget that he had once been so afraid.
Oh, but the sounds were the same. He had heard that curdled scream every night for thirty years. It was the sound of the innocent, the helpless, the victim. It was a little boy's plea as it chased gunfire in the night. He momentarily recoiled from the clarity of the memory, but quickly consigned it to that deep, dark place where he kept everything else that made him falter. It was time for work.
The billowing of cloth and the rustle of a monster as it descended from the skies. The click of a switchblade and soon after, the twinkle of it dancing on the concrete. The shattering of bone in a man's hand and his desperate hollering for mercy. The shriek of a life saved as it looked upon the form of its saviour and was horrified. A battle won, a battle lost. That, too, had not changed.
They call him Batman, but his real name is fear. He would remind them of every superstition and every act of cowardice. It would not take long.
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Bruce Wayne | Batman
FANDOM: DC Comics
CHRONOLOGY: Post-Return of Bruce Wayne.
CLASS: Big Damn Hero
SUPERHERO NAME: Batman
ALTER EGO: Bruce Wayne, billionaire playboy and business mogul.
BACKGROUND:
As a small boy, Bruce Wayne watched with horror as his parents were thoughtlessly gunned down on the streets of his native Gotham City by an armed thief. Irreparably marked by the tragedy and the impotence that he felt, he resolved to devote his life to a crusade against crime. He spent his teenage years and his family's vast wealth globe-trotting, studying everything from martial arts to criminology to applied sciences from the world's greatest instructors. When he finally returned to corrupt, crime-laden Gotham city he was a young man, and ready to take vengeance upon the supestitious and cowardly lot as Batman, the caped crusader.
Though early adventures were clumsy and often went awry, he soon became a defining force in the political and social climate of Gotham. Batman was an urban legend, a modern myth -- boogeyman to wrong-doers, inspiration to the downtrodden and the victimised. He met and formed an indispensible bond with Jim Gordon, later to become police commissioner of the city, and together they warred against the police corruption and mob influence that had become endemic. He encountered a new flush of costumed villains, an unfortunate consequence of his example and notoriety, and met with the burgeoning population of superheroes that would later form the Justice League of America. A sidekick named Robin soon followed after he found a kindred spirit in fellow orphan Dick Grayson, and he earned himself a psychotic archnemesis called the Joker whose exploits have dogged our intrepid hero ever since.
Much of Bruce Wayne's later life is defined by further tragedy and the consequences of his deep-seated mistrust for others. Though his father/son relationship with Dick had been a positive influence on the pair of them, Bruce grew paranoid as the boy aged and became more independant. Fearing he could eventually be responsible for the boy's death, Bruce abruptly fired his young ward and drove a wedge between them.
With Dick gone, Batman was once more a solo vigilante, at least until he crossed paths with street tear-away Jason Todd. Bruce hoped he could ease the boy's suffering in the same way that he had Dick, but the boy was less talented and quick to anger. Jason ran afoul of the Joker, beaten savagely and left to die in a bombed warehouse. With the subsequent attack on Barbara Gordon - Jim's daughter and fellow partner in crime-fighting Batgirl - that left her paralysed, this galvanised Batman's paranoia and sociopathic tendencies like never before, and he became steadily more isolated from the world around him.
Later, his increasingly reckless and extreme tendencies drew the attentions of Tim Drake, another young boy that admired Batman for his efforts and sought to help him overcome the emotional hang-ups that were driving him into an early grave. Discovering that Tim was not like the others, that he was keenly intelligent and devoid of the anger that had brought about Jason's death, and he became the third Robin.
Life continued as before until a new mob villain emerged in Gotham, the brilliant mastermind and steroid junkie (that's an understatement) Bane. His intellect underestimated by his caped adversary, Bane trounced Batman in street war and single-combat, ruthlessly breaking his back. Unwilling to let Batman die and Bane take over Gotham, and paralysed by the fear that Tim or Dick might inherit the role with further tragedy, Bruce handed the mantle to a newcomer named Azrael. Bruce worked to recover and regain his strength while the unhinged Azrael became increasingly violent and veangeful, and the two would later battle for the mantle. Having overcome the younger man, Bruce eventually returned to his former role as Batman.
Batman's role flucuated over the passing years as he returned to the JLA to combat planet and even universe-threatening adversaries, as Gotham was devastated by an earthquake and left to rot by President Luthor, as Bruce Wayne was framed for murder. Mob warfare returned to prominence in Gotham which Batman and Robin struggled to combat. A new Robin in the form of Stephanie Brown was drafted only to end in disaster yet again, this time with her supposed death in the hands of the sadistic ganglord Black Mask after she ran afoul of Batman's notorious paranoia.
Paranoia was the buzzword of that stage in his life. Discovering that trusted friends and allies in the JLA had tampered with his memories to prevent a scandal involving Doctor Light from surfacing, Bruce's paranoid tendencies yet again came to the fore like a winged mammal out of a Meatloaf song and he designed and implemented the sentient metahuman surveillance satellite Brother Eye. Because sentient computers always go bad in the end, Brother Eye turned on the heroes of the world and incited a major struggle for the fate of the world.
With his reputation and relationship with Earth's superhero population left broken, Bruce exiled himself to repeat the globe-trotting pilgrimage he had undergone as a youth, before returning to Gotham with renewed resolve. Around this time he discovered he had fathered a child by occasional adversary Talia Al Ghul, a boy named Damian who had been raised from birth by assassins to be a worthy inheritant of his father's legacy. Before they could form any kind of relationship, Batman fell under the thrall of an esoteric crime ring named the Black Glove, who attempted to destroy both his reputation and his mind. They failed, but soon after he was believed to have been killed by the New God Darkseid.
Naturally, he survived, Darkseid seeking to use him as a time capsule of sorts through which he could ecape his inevitable death in the Final Crisis. Bruce raced back to the present and to Gotham to ultimately defeat both Darkseid and the Black Glove.
Now Bruce wages his old crusade as a man reborn, with allies old and new rallying behind him as he plots the next stage in the evolution of Batman.
PERSONALITY:
Come on, what do you want me to say? It's Batman. Following the death of his parents, he became the single most resolute and driven man in his corner of the multiverse.
As Bruce Wayne, a billionaire “it boy” born into his wealth, he is regarded by his clamouring public in a rather idiosyncratic manner. In his most flattering light, Bruce Wayne the celebrity is charming and charismatic, a responsible and at times noble philanthropist. His more damning critics dismiss him as a smug, entitled and ultimately rather dull-witted narcissist, who squanders a fortune he never truly earned on fast women and hot cars. Ultimately, the Bruce Wayne persona fluctuates to meet the demands of his alter-ego -- be it the affable but shallow thrill-seeker that dissuades suspicion, or the driven community-minded businessman that cleans up what he can of his city on the right side of the law.
What the countless droves of Bruce Wayne obsessives don’t know is that at night he dresses in a spandex bat costume and beats criminals of every calibre various shades of blue. As Batman he is tireless and uncompromising in his one and only hobby, passion, quest -- putting an end to crime and suffering in a world rife with both. Batman is selfless, a man who defines himself through action, an incorruptible champion of the innocent who just doesn't know how to give up... ever. Though he refuses to explicitly state it, he cares for people a great deal and he is willing to punish himself again and again if it will keep them safe.
But Batman has his vulnerabilities and inadequacies, too. Allies often find him surly and uncommunicative, remorselessly egotistical and dangerously obsessive. If he believes in something, he is right and everyone else is wrong and pray for those who get in his way. He doesn’t suffer fools and seldom affords unquestionable trust, even to those who have proven themselves to him again and again. He has machiavellian tendencies and will not hesitate to deceive or use people to further a goal. Friends and even loved ones are often kept at arms length, particularly in times of great strife.
For all of Batman and Bruce Wayne's contradictions, his character is united by a single motivation. He has seen too much pain, suffering and death in his life and simply put, he doesn’t want to see the same happen to anyone else.
POWER:
In recent canon he acquired a robotic suit from the future that allowed him to identify and temporarily nullify the powers of others. I'd like to carry this ability over to the game, minus the suit.
[Updated]: self-duplication. He and his duplicate share experience and identity, and any clothing/possessions he has with him at the time would also be replicated. The chief limitations are that he can only have one duplicate at any given time, and that he and his duplicate can be separated for no longer than three days.
Though acquired through nothing more than intense study, Batman is an unparalleled detective and extremely capable martial artist.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[After a few expertly feigned false-starts, Bruce manages to set the communicator to record and the video feed focused on himself. He's a man in his thirties; the classic tall, dark and handsome. His hair is playfully mussed and the tie to his visibly expensive executive suit is drawn slack enough to reveal a lipstick mark on his neck. He wears the lazy smile of someone who has never had much difficulty having a good time.
All in all, it's a thoroughly convincing charade.]
I must have overindulged on the bubbly because I don't remember the Big Apple ever having its own border control. Is that a new initiative?
What's more, it would appear that I've mislaid my butler. He has my appointment book, but I fear I'm long past expected at a Community Health Center ribbon-cutting in Gotham.
I'd be loathe to flake on such a worthy cause, so would someone be a dear and call for a car? You can be my plus-one. A brunette would be preferable.
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
Bruce was restless. Too tired, too listless to sleep. There was little concept of day and night left to him but if anyone could rediscover and abuse it, it was the Batman. With a mechanical proclivity that came with repeating the same motions every night of what on this particular night felt like a very, very long life, he donned his uniform. Like always, he paused for a few brief moments, holding the cowl between his fingers and feeling the weight of it before pulling it over his head.
Later, he sat amongst the gargoyles of one of the City's older buildings and watched the sun set. Batman never came out before dark in Gotham, but this was not Gotham. These were new rooftops and new alleys to tread, new sights and smells and people. All of it he had to learn and to come to understand, like he understood the city that he called home. To know his foe brought him power and that power, for a time, let him forget that he had once been so afraid.
Oh, but the sounds were the same. He had heard that curdled scream every night for thirty years. It was the sound of the innocent, the helpless, the victim. It was a little boy's plea as it chased gunfire in the night. He momentarily recoiled from the clarity of the memory, but quickly consigned it to that deep, dark place where he kept everything else that made him falter. It was time for work.
The billowing of cloth and the rustle of a monster as it descended from the skies. The click of a switchblade and soon after, the twinkle of it dancing on the concrete. The shattering of bone in a man's hand and his desperate hollering for mercy. The shriek of a life saved as it looked upon the form of its saviour and was horrified. A battle won, a battle lost. That, too, had not changed.
They call him Batman, but his real name is fear. He would remind them of every superstition and every act of cowardice. It would not take long.