APPLICATION
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: King
AGE: 24
JOURNAL: aliasjack
IM: thelonechimaera (AIM)
E-MAIL: thelonechimaera@yahoo.com
RETURNING: I also play bluepurrymuffin!
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Charles Victor Szasz/Vic Sage
FANDOM: DCU (General)
CHRONOLOGY: 52, between weeks 28 and 30
CLASS: Hero
SUPERHERO NAME: The Question
ALTER EGO: Vic Sage was an investigative television reporter who wore a mask to look deeper into stories in a way that he wouldn’t be recognized. In the City, he’ll prolly try to make it as a private investigator, though selling his more interesting cases to the news, or even working freelance for them, isn’t out of the, ahem, question.
BACKGROUND:
Born to unknown parents and dropped on the front step of St. Catherine’s Orphanage in Hub City, IL, he was given the name Charles Victor Szasz by the nuns who took him in. Something of a troubled kid, Charlie was constantly getting into fights and butting heads with the clergy, to the point where they’d lock him in the closet until he was more acquiescent. He ran away as a teenager, found a room in the subsidized housing of Hellaker Plaza, where he stayed as he worked his way through high school.
While he was very anti-social, his grades were good enough to get him into college, where he majored in Journalism and first came under the wing of Professor Aristotle Rodor, one of very few friends he had at the time. He also spent most of his time punching people in the face while crying. It didn’t last forever, however, and he was expelled after punching a professor in the face while crying. To be fair though, that professor was a total asshole. Charlie tried to join the army afterward, decided it might be a good outlet for his aggression, but he was discharged after punching a drill instructor. Likely in the face. Though the verdict’s still out on whether or not he was crying at the time.
Eventually, he found himself back in Hub City, where he changed his name to Vic Sage and began working as a newscaster. A hotheaded moral crusader, Vic would investigate stories of a scandalous or criminal nature and editorialize them at great length. His show was very popular, but his raw, arrogant nature made him few friends and many enemies. It was while he was in this capacity that Professor Rodor reconnected with him. He’d found indications that an old business partner named Arby Twain was distributing an invention of his, Pseudoderm, which Rodor had scrapped after he found it to be toxic under certain conditions. In desperation, he sought out Vic, who was already investigating Twain at the time, to help him gather the evidence to put a halt to Twain’s operation. With a disguise consisting of a Pseudoderm mask and a blue suit, Vic confronted Twain and his buyers, and secured the evidence to put them away. From that day forward, The Question identity played a large part in investigating all of his stories, and Professor Rodor, who he affectionately called Tot, became a valuable friend.
Due to Vic’s knack for making enemies, he and Tot moved frequently. Vic worked as a newscaster in a number of cities, including Crown City, Gotham (where The Question aided Batman in thwarting Radium smugglers), and Chicago (where he worked with Blue Beetle to stop a gang war) before ending up in Hub again, where he began an affair with co-anchor Myra Connelly. An series of reports of the corruption in the in the city government brought him to the ire of Reverend Jeremiah Hatch, the power behind Mayor Wesley Fermin’s political machine.
Hatch hired Lady Shiva to take Vic down, and when she delivered in her magnificently trollsome manner, he and his men beat and shot him, leaving him for dead at the bottom of the river. But Shiva, made curious by his aggressive tendencies, wondered if he wouldn’t make a worthwhile opponent if properly trained. Fishing him out of the river, she healed his more urgent wounds before dumping him on the doorstep of her old friend Richard Dragon. Richard took Vic in, and over the next year did his best to impart some of the lessons the O-Sensei had taught him years ago. Not only combat, though there was some of that, but even more so how to work past his aggression and foster his inherent curiousity. He set Vic on the rode to finally settling his questions of identity, though he could only show the butterfly how to make the cocoon. Vic would have to spread his wings on his own.
Vic wasn’t ready though, he still needed the cocoon, and so he returned to Hub. There he found Hatch’s influence had only spread wider, as public services dwindled and died away, and Myra, with her daughter Jackie being held as a bargaining chip, was forced into a loveless marriage with Mayor Fermin, whose alcoholism kept him preoccupied from any official matters. Vic infiltrated the mayor’s mansion and confronted Hatch, whose slow descent into madness had culminated with him trying to make a human sacrifice of Jackie. The conflict ended when Myra stabbed Hatch with his own knife and the entire mansion burned down.
In the resulting power vacuum, Myra stepped in as acting mayor and did her best to fix the broken system. Meanwhile, Vic worked on his end to face the rampant crime rate head-on, and slowly worked his way back into his profession as a journalist. A few encounters with the mysterious No-Face inspired corrupt cop Izzy O’Toole to go straight and eventually assume the role of chief of police.
Vic had some interesting times in Hub City with the various curiousities that would reside in it, though he encountered many that would take him abroad. While investigating a weapons manufacturer in Seattle, he teamed up with Green Arrow, and the two became friends. They ended up working together again when Lady Shiva recruited them, along with Batman (who didn’t stay long and was unintentionally transparent with his secret identity), on a quest for her godfather, the O-Sensei to find the grave of his estranged wife. There was a also short encounter with the Riddler while Vic and Tot were on a bus headed north (that was entirely stupid but needs to be mentioned because at least they’ve met once).
Eventually, even though Myra secured the election and officially became mayor, and Shiva showed up for some delicious trolling while helping them handle a gang war, and a dozen unfortunate haircuts on Vic’s part, Hub had taken its toll on everyone with little signs of progress. Spurred on by Richard, Vic and Tot cut their losses and put the city behind them. Myra decided she needed to stay, her work unfinished, but she left Jackie in Vic’s care. Shiva also stayed in hopes she’d get a good fight out of the Hub, but not before leaving Vic with some of her best trolly lines.
Vic made his way to Seattle, unsure of what to do next. He’s out of the cocoon, but doesn’t know where to fly. There, Ollie and Dinah took Jackie and him in, and soon they all go to Brazil when Green Arrow and Black Canary are offered a job. It turns out unsavory, but they make things right, and Vic and Jackie decide to stay behind. But after one too many hostage situations, Jackie falls ill. With the help of a fighter named Marco, Vic returns to Hub City to bring her back to Myra, but the reunion is short-lived, and Jackie dies soon after their arrival.
There are a couple more weird (and one uncomfortably racist) incidents before Vic has a disagreement with Myra and leaves Hub again. He’s spotted in various places over this period, playing cards for a living, maybe still working a news station somewhere, maybe helping Green Arrow and the Butcher handle cultural assault against a Mohawk reservation in Montreal, maybe getting trolled by Shiva in Gotham, maybe helping Azrael save a colonel’s daughter on a riverboat.
Eventually he returns to Hub again when he hears Myra’s in trouble, but it turns out to be a ruse to through off her enemies. Vic leaves for the last time, having found that she’s happily married. He’s next spotted in Morocco, where his card-playing has gotten him into trouble and Steel has to help him out. When Gotham is devastated by an earthquake, he’s spotted helping Huntress guard the supply lines, before the city’s cut off. That was the first time they met. Some time late, he’d fallen in with a group of heroes led by Sarge Steel, calling themselves L.A.W. Vic’s old buddy Blue Beetle was a part of it, and the two buddied up throughout the group’s campaign against the mysterious Avatar.
The time came when Huntress went through some very bad times, with GCPD and Batman after her when she was framed for murder. When she was at the end of her rope, Vic showed up, and after stopping her on the road for some random Zen, he kinda abducted her introduced her to his old teacher Richard so she could learn a few of the same lessons he had to get through the situation. They hit it off pretty quickly, and after she’d spent three months under Richard’s tutelage, they returned to Gotham together to settle her affairs. They got freedom to work from the big bad Bat, and Oracle (another Richard Dragon alumnus) helped them fill in a few of the blanks, revealing that Helena’s real father was gangster Santo Cassamento, and that the hit on her parents had originally come down from him. Even worse, Cassamento knew Helena was Huntress, and tried to use the information to blackmail her into operating as his enforcer.
Stuck in a corner where no options seemed available, Helena was in trouble. After THEY TOTALLY BONED talking it out with Vic, she came up with a plan. When she tipped her uncle Tomaso, a capo in the Gotham mafia, off to who was responsible for his sister’s death, well, blood cries for blood. When Vic found out, he was livid. He felt like he’d failed her, and so he walked out, just when she needed him most. He returned to Gotham some time later to help her when she ran afoul of Checkmate, but the meeting was brief.
He had an incident in Metropolis, but it was weird and impossible to reconcile with anything else, so we’ll just ignore it. He was among the ranks of the Battle For Metropolis during the Crisis, though.
When Renee Montoya turned in her badge and sank into depression, Vic popped into her life and recruited her in his investigation of Intergang. They broke the case open on the Religion of Crime in both Gotham and Khandaq, and were lauded as heroes for saving the wedding of Black Adam and Isis from an attempted bombing. He snarked and she grumped and it was amazing. After further aiding Isis rescue her brother Amon and securing a copy of the Crime Bible, they retreated to Nanda Parbat, where Richard and Tot were waiting for them.
While Richard began to teach Renee, Vic revealed that he’d been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, and he’d approached her to be his successor before he died. It was only in Nanda Parbat that he could delay the inevitable, but when the Black Book revealed a prophecy to sacrifice her ex, Kate Kane, he didn’t even hesitate to accompany Renee to Gotham to thwart the prophecy.
With a long and painful death ahead of him, he suddenly found himself imPorted into the City, with his cancer inexplicably gone.
Vic’s role in his world isn’t a big one. He’s a small-time street-level detective, and not widely known in the superhero community. He’s generally known as a friend to the Arrows of Star City, though he hasn’t seen them in a while. His relationship with Gotham’s Batfamily is more complicated, as he and Batman have a sort of mutual dislike of one another, though he’s on better terms with most of the others.
His lack of a base city and relatively obscure reputation frees him to operate on a more international level, following any case where ever it takes him. He’s also been known to act as a sort of liaison for Richard Dragon, connecting the old master with the students who need him most.
PERSONALITY:
The best way to sum up Vic is “perpetually amused”. The joke goes that if he isn’t smirking at any give moment, then something is horribly wrong. After leaving Hub City, he had learned to keep his anger in some degree of check, and found a form of peace from it. Ever since, he’s been incredibly snarky, more than a little trollsome, and entirely insufferable. He really enjoys enjoying himself, sometimes at the expense of another’s patience.
While he is, to a degree, intelligent and very well-read, his real strength is in being terribly clever, and a keen understanding of psychology. Investigation for him is all about perspective. When you have all the information and none of it tells you anything, it isn’t that the answers are wrong, it isn’t about the answers, you’re just asking the wrong questions, and his insatiable curiousity compels him to ask those questions.
But deep under that surface, that anger isn’t completely dead, just dormant. Given the right trigger, they may reemerge, though he’ll do his best to keep it in check. His distaste for submitting to authority isn’t quite as easy, but much harder to control so are his self-destructive tendencies. They’ve caused him to burn bridges he will always regret, though nothing nearly so bad as when they got him in over his head. After that night when Hatch’s men almost killed him (and he never says “almost” when referring to that time), he’s always been mindful of the people who got him through that situation alive, of Shiva, Tot, and Richard. Because of them, he’s taken to seeking out people in similar situations, to be one of those who helps people survive those times when outside forces conspire to overwhelm them.
POWERS:
Innate sense of direction ~ After porting into the City, Vic has found that he can tell the general direction of a place, object, or person if he focuses on it enough. At first it’ll first work by him thinking about a something and finding that he’d accidentally wandered there. As he learns to feel it out it’ll be something like a game of hot/cold, an intuitive impulse he gets if he’s facing his desired destination.
Human compass ~ He’s also been given a natural awareness of which direction is North.
Canon also provides Vic with the following skills:
Exceptional martial arts ~ Trained by Richard Dragon, Vic is proficient in a variety of styles and forms. He is by no means an expert, but he can usually fight well enough to get by.
Meditation ~ Vic has a particular method he calls “going inside”. By shutting himself off from outside stimuli for a variable amount of time, sometimes days, sometimes seconds, he’ll parse the information he already has and draw what conclusions are available from it. Or sometimes he’ll just chill.
In addition, Vic is in possession of the following equipment:
The no-face ~ A mask made from the revolutionary polymer Pseudoderm, when applied to skin and exposed to a unique bonding agent, it fits like a second skin, and cannot be easily (or painlessly) removed, giving Vic the appearance of a faceless man. On its inner side, it has a visor and mouthpiece instead, to allow the wearer to see, breathe, and speak uninhibited, while still being flexible enough to be folded compactly for easy storage. The Pseudoderm can, however, be toxic when applied to open wounds for an extended period of time.
Binary gas ~ The bonding agent consists of two compounds. The first bonds the mask to the skin, the second releases it for removal. In addition, the gases interact with certain pre-treated objects, such as clothes sprayed with another gas, or hair washed with a special shampoo, to change or revert their color.
Utility belt ~ Vic’s belt is equipped with a special buckle that conceals a compartment to hold his mask. It also has reservoirs built to hold the binary gas, and a powerful atomizer that will distribute it all around his body when activated by a button on his buckle. The amount of gas contained in these reservoirs is limited.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[The voice that comes on is smooth, crisp, collected. It belongs to a man who’s no stranger to a microphone. He speaks in a calm and practiced, yet amused tone.]
It’s a simple but inevitable conflict.
On the one hand, just when you’ve accepted your own impending mortality, you find out you’re going to survive after all. And that’s a hell of a thing on its own. ...But then there’s finding out why.
[The amusement gives way to utter seriousness.]
I don’t like this. I especially don’t like that my continued survival is probably dependent on me liking this. Something about this is fishy, and any attempt to prod it only seems to deepen the mystery. But I keep coming back to one thing: What’s the catch? What happens when the piper comes a-calling? I don’t care what it costs me, I intend to find out.
[He snickers.]
But what about the rest of our resident heroes?
Are you ready to ask that question?
[The line disconnects.]
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
“Welcome to the city, hero,” the voice echoed in the dark room. Vic dropped his briefcase in shock at the sudden new surroundings, and reeled about, trying to take it all in. It was a poorly kept room, dusty, lights flickering, exposed machinery on the walls. With too many questions running through his mind and no one to ask, Vic tried to calm down, collect himself. Before he could catch himself, he took a deep breath, and only when he realized what he’d done did he brace himself for the inevitable cough.
It didn’t come.
Shock gave way to confusion, gave way to panic, gave way to fear, finally gave way to realization. Overwhelmed and dizzy, he fell to his knees, still on the Porter platform. He realized he’d been holding his breath and let it go. Still no cough. This was really happening, wasn’t it? He tried to focus, clear away the irrelevant questions. How didn’t matter. But why? That was worth asking. Where was he? What was he going to do now that he was here? Was Renee here with him?
He pulled himself to his feet, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief in his pocket, then picked up his briefcase and stepped off the platform. As soon as he did, a panel beside him dispensed two dog tags with his name on them. Eyebrow raised, he studied them curiously before turning his attention to the lights along the pathway directing him to the exit. That’s where they want him, but who are they? Should he follow? He fixed his hat on his head and brushed the brim briefly, then, lips curling up into a smirk, he decided to follow it. Nothing he could find out in an empty room, and he had a lot of questions to ask.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
He’s terribly fond of puns. Whether they’re born from his lack of a face when wearing the mask, or somehow related to the word “question”, he just finds them irresistible. It goes back to the insufferable part of his personality, and if you give him enough the opportunity, he will bombard you with them.
Also I just needed a place to say, this man == dapper. as. fuck. good night
NAME: King
AGE: 24
JOURNAL: aliasjack
IM: thelonechimaera (AIM)
E-MAIL: thelonechimaera@yahoo.com
RETURNING: I also play bluepurrymuffin!
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Charles Victor Szasz/Vic Sage
FANDOM: DCU (General)
CHRONOLOGY: 52, between weeks 28 and 30
CLASS: Hero
SUPERHERO NAME: The Question
ALTER EGO: Vic Sage was an investigative television reporter who wore a mask to look deeper into stories in a way that he wouldn’t be recognized. In the City, he’ll prolly try to make it as a private investigator, though selling his more interesting cases to the news, or even working freelance for them, isn’t out of the, ahem, question.
BACKGROUND:
Born to unknown parents and dropped on the front step of St. Catherine’s Orphanage in Hub City, IL, he was given the name Charles Victor Szasz by the nuns who took him in. Something of a troubled kid, Charlie was constantly getting into fights and butting heads with the clergy, to the point where they’d lock him in the closet until he was more acquiescent. He ran away as a teenager, found a room in the subsidized housing of Hellaker Plaza, where he stayed as he worked his way through high school.
While he was very anti-social, his grades were good enough to get him into college, where he majored in Journalism and first came under the wing of Professor Aristotle Rodor, one of very few friends he had at the time. He also spent most of his time punching people in the face while crying. It didn’t last forever, however, and he was expelled after punching a professor in the face while crying. To be fair though, that professor was a total asshole. Charlie tried to join the army afterward, decided it might be a good outlet for his aggression, but he was discharged after punching a drill instructor. Likely in the face. Though the verdict’s still out on whether or not he was crying at the time.
Eventually, he found himself back in Hub City, where he changed his name to Vic Sage and began working as a newscaster. A hotheaded moral crusader, Vic would investigate stories of a scandalous or criminal nature and editorialize them at great length. His show was very popular, but his raw, arrogant nature made him few friends and many enemies. It was while he was in this capacity that Professor Rodor reconnected with him. He’d found indications that an old business partner named Arby Twain was distributing an invention of his, Pseudoderm, which Rodor had scrapped after he found it to be toxic under certain conditions. In desperation, he sought out Vic, who was already investigating Twain at the time, to help him gather the evidence to put a halt to Twain’s operation. With a disguise consisting of a Pseudoderm mask and a blue suit, Vic confronted Twain and his buyers, and secured the evidence to put them away. From that day forward, The Question identity played a large part in investigating all of his stories, and Professor Rodor, who he affectionately called Tot, became a valuable friend.
Due to Vic’s knack for making enemies, he and Tot moved frequently. Vic worked as a newscaster in a number of cities, including Crown City, Gotham (where The Question aided Batman in thwarting Radium smugglers), and Chicago (where he worked with Blue Beetle to stop a gang war) before ending up in Hub again, where he began an affair with co-anchor Myra Connelly. An series of reports of the corruption in the in the city government brought him to the ire of Reverend Jeremiah Hatch, the power behind Mayor Wesley Fermin’s political machine.
Hatch hired Lady Shiva to take Vic down, and when she delivered in her magnificently trollsome manner, he and his men beat and shot him, leaving him for dead at the bottom of the river. But Shiva, made curious by his aggressive tendencies, wondered if he wouldn’t make a worthwhile opponent if properly trained. Fishing him out of the river, she healed his more urgent wounds before dumping him on the doorstep of her old friend Richard Dragon. Richard took Vic in, and over the next year did his best to impart some of the lessons the O-Sensei had taught him years ago. Not only combat, though there was some of that, but even more so how to work past his aggression and foster his inherent curiousity. He set Vic on the rode to finally settling his questions of identity, though he could only show the butterfly how to make the cocoon. Vic would have to spread his wings on his own.
Vic wasn’t ready though, he still needed the cocoon, and so he returned to Hub. There he found Hatch’s influence had only spread wider, as public services dwindled and died away, and Myra, with her daughter Jackie being held as a bargaining chip, was forced into a loveless marriage with Mayor Fermin, whose alcoholism kept him preoccupied from any official matters. Vic infiltrated the mayor’s mansion and confronted Hatch, whose slow descent into madness had culminated with him trying to make a human sacrifice of Jackie. The conflict ended when Myra stabbed Hatch with his own knife and the entire mansion burned down.
In the resulting power vacuum, Myra stepped in as acting mayor and did her best to fix the broken system. Meanwhile, Vic worked on his end to face the rampant crime rate head-on, and slowly worked his way back into his profession as a journalist. A few encounters with the mysterious No-Face inspired corrupt cop Izzy O’Toole to go straight and eventually assume the role of chief of police.
Vic had some interesting times in Hub City with the various curiousities that would reside in it, though he encountered many that would take him abroad. While investigating a weapons manufacturer in Seattle, he teamed up with Green Arrow, and the two became friends. They ended up working together again when Lady Shiva recruited them, along with Batman (who didn’t stay long and was unintentionally transparent with his secret identity), on a quest for her godfather, the O-Sensei to find the grave of his estranged wife. There was a also short encounter with the Riddler while Vic and Tot were on a bus headed north (that was entirely stupid but needs to be mentioned because at least they’ve met once).
Eventually, even though Myra secured the election and officially became mayor, and Shiva showed up for some delicious trolling while helping them handle a gang war, and a dozen unfortunate haircuts on Vic’s part, Hub had taken its toll on everyone with little signs of progress. Spurred on by Richard, Vic and Tot cut their losses and put the city behind them. Myra decided she needed to stay, her work unfinished, but she left Jackie in Vic’s care. Shiva also stayed in hopes she’d get a good fight out of the Hub, but not before leaving Vic with some of her best trolly lines.
Vic made his way to Seattle, unsure of what to do next. He’s out of the cocoon, but doesn’t know where to fly. There, Ollie and Dinah took Jackie and him in, and soon they all go to Brazil when Green Arrow and Black Canary are offered a job. It turns out unsavory, but they make things right, and Vic and Jackie decide to stay behind. But after one too many hostage situations, Jackie falls ill. With the help of a fighter named Marco, Vic returns to Hub City to bring her back to Myra, but the reunion is short-lived, and Jackie dies soon after their arrival.
There are a couple more weird (and one uncomfortably racist) incidents before Vic has a disagreement with Myra and leaves Hub again. He’s spotted in various places over this period, playing cards for a living, maybe still working a news station somewhere, maybe helping Green Arrow and the Butcher handle cultural assault against a Mohawk reservation in Montreal, maybe getting trolled by Shiva in Gotham, maybe helping Azrael save a colonel’s daughter on a riverboat.
Eventually he returns to Hub again when he hears Myra’s in trouble, but it turns out to be a ruse to through off her enemies. Vic leaves for the last time, having found that she’s happily married. He’s next spotted in Morocco, where his card-playing has gotten him into trouble and Steel has to help him out. When Gotham is devastated by an earthquake, he’s spotted helping Huntress guard the supply lines, before the city’s cut off. That was the first time they met. Some time late, he’d fallen in with a group of heroes led by Sarge Steel, calling themselves L.A.W. Vic’s old buddy Blue Beetle was a part of it, and the two buddied up throughout the group’s campaign against the mysterious Avatar.
The time came when Huntress went through some very bad times, with GCPD and Batman after her when she was framed for murder. When she was at the end of her rope, Vic showed up, and after stopping her on the road for some random Zen, he kinda abducted her introduced her to his old teacher Richard so she could learn a few of the same lessons he had to get through the situation. They hit it off pretty quickly, and after she’d spent three months under Richard’s tutelage, they returned to Gotham together to settle her affairs. They got freedom to work from the big bad Bat, and Oracle (another Richard Dragon alumnus) helped them fill in a few of the blanks, revealing that Helena’s real father was gangster Santo Cassamento, and that the hit on her parents had originally come down from him. Even worse, Cassamento knew Helena was Huntress, and tried to use the information to blackmail her into operating as his enforcer.
Stuck in a corner where no options seemed available, Helena was in trouble. After THEY TOTALLY BONED talking it out with Vic, she came up with a plan. When she tipped her uncle Tomaso, a capo in the Gotham mafia, off to who was responsible for his sister’s death, well, blood cries for blood. When Vic found out, he was livid. He felt like he’d failed her, and so he walked out, just when she needed him most. He returned to Gotham some time later to help her when she ran afoul of Checkmate, but the meeting was brief.
He had an incident in Metropolis, but it was weird and impossible to reconcile with anything else, so we’ll just ignore it. He was among the ranks of the Battle For Metropolis during the Crisis, though.
When Renee Montoya turned in her badge and sank into depression, Vic popped into her life and recruited her in his investigation of Intergang. They broke the case open on the Religion of Crime in both Gotham and Khandaq, and were lauded as heroes for saving the wedding of Black Adam and Isis from an attempted bombing. He snarked and she grumped and it was amazing. After further aiding Isis rescue her brother Amon and securing a copy of the Crime Bible, they retreated to Nanda Parbat, where Richard and Tot were waiting for them.
While Richard began to teach Renee, Vic revealed that he’d been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, and he’d approached her to be his successor before he died. It was only in Nanda Parbat that he could delay the inevitable, but when the Black Book revealed a prophecy to sacrifice her ex, Kate Kane, he didn’t even hesitate to accompany Renee to Gotham to thwart the prophecy.
With a long and painful death ahead of him, he suddenly found himself imPorted into the City, with his cancer inexplicably gone.
Vic’s role in his world isn’t a big one. He’s a small-time street-level detective, and not widely known in the superhero community. He’s generally known as a friend to the Arrows of Star City, though he hasn’t seen them in a while. His relationship with Gotham’s Batfamily is more complicated, as he and Batman have a sort of mutual dislike of one another, though he’s on better terms with most of the others.
His lack of a base city and relatively obscure reputation frees him to operate on a more international level, following any case where ever it takes him. He’s also been known to act as a sort of liaison for Richard Dragon, connecting the old master with the students who need him most.
PERSONALITY:
The best way to sum up Vic is “perpetually amused”. The joke goes that if he isn’t smirking at any give moment, then something is horribly wrong. After leaving Hub City, he had learned to keep his anger in some degree of check, and found a form of peace from it. Ever since, he’s been incredibly snarky, more than a little trollsome, and entirely insufferable. He really enjoys enjoying himself, sometimes at the expense of another’s patience.
While he is, to a degree, intelligent and very well-read, his real strength is in being terribly clever, and a keen understanding of psychology. Investigation for him is all about perspective. When you have all the information and none of it tells you anything, it isn’t that the answers are wrong, it isn’t about the answers, you’re just asking the wrong questions, and his insatiable curiousity compels him to ask those questions.
But deep under that surface, that anger isn’t completely dead, just dormant. Given the right trigger, they may reemerge, though he’ll do his best to keep it in check. His distaste for submitting to authority isn’t quite as easy, but much harder to control so are his self-destructive tendencies. They’ve caused him to burn bridges he will always regret, though nothing nearly so bad as when they got him in over his head. After that night when Hatch’s men almost killed him (and he never says “almost” when referring to that time), he’s always been mindful of the people who got him through that situation alive, of Shiva, Tot, and Richard. Because of them, he’s taken to seeking out people in similar situations, to be one of those who helps people survive those times when outside forces conspire to overwhelm them.
POWERS:
Innate sense of direction ~ After porting into the City, Vic has found that he can tell the general direction of a place, object, or person if he focuses on it enough. At first it’ll first work by him thinking about a something and finding that he’d accidentally wandered there. As he learns to feel it out it’ll be something like a game of hot/cold, an intuitive impulse he gets if he’s facing his desired destination.
Human compass ~ He’s also been given a natural awareness of which direction is North.
Canon also provides Vic with the following skills:
Exceptional martial arts ~ Trained by Richard Dragon, Vic is proficient in a variety of styles and forms. He is by no means an expert, but he can usually fight well enough to get by.
Meditation ~ Vic has a particular method he calls “going inside”. By shutting himself off from outside stimuli for a variable amount of time, sometimes days, sometimes seconds, he’ll parse the information he already has and draw what conclusions are available from it. Or sometimes he’ll just chill.
In addition, Vic is in possession of the following equipment:
The no-face ~ A mask made from the revolutionary polymer Pseudoderm, when applied to skin and exposed to a unique bonding agent, it fits like a second skin, and cannot be easily (or painlessly) removed, giving Vic the appearance of a faceless man. On its inner side, it has a visor and mouthpiece instead, to allow the wearer to see, breathe, and speak uninhibited, while still being flexible enough to be folded compactly for easy storage. The Pseudoderm can, however, be toxic when applied to open wounds for an extended period of time.
Binary gas ~ The bonding agent consists of two compounds. The first bonds the mask to the skin, the second releases it for removal. In addition, the gases interact with certain pre-treated objects, such as clothes sprayed with another gas, or hair washed with a special shampoo, to change or revert their color.
Utility belt ~ Vic’s belt is equipped with a special buckle that conceals a compartment to hold his mask. It also has reservoirs built to hold the binary gas, and a powerful atomizer that will distribute it all around his body when activated by a button on his buckle. The amount of gas contained in these reservoirs is limited.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[The voice that comes on is smooth, crisp, collected. It belongs to a man who’s no stranger to a microphone. He speaks in a calm and practiced, yet amused tone.]
It’s a simple but inevitable conflict.
On the one hand, just when you’ve accepted your own impending mortality, you find out you’re going to survive after all. And that’s a hell of a thing on its own. ...But then there’s finding out why.
[The amusement gives way to utter seriousness.]
I don’t like this. I especially don’t like that my continued survival is probably dependent on me liking this. Something about this is fishy, and any attempt to prod it only seems to deepen the mystery. But I keep coming back to one thing: What’s the catch? What happens when the piper comes a-calling? I don’t care what it costs me, I intend to find out.
[He snickers.]
But what about the rest of our resident heroes?
Are you ready to ask that question?
[The line disconnects.]
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
“Welcome to the city, hero,” the voice echoed in the dark room. Vic dropped his briefcase in shock at the sudden new surroundings, and reeled about, trying to take it all in. It was a poorly kept room, dusty, lights flickering, exposed machinery on the walls. With too many questions running through his mind and no one to ask, Vic tried to calm down, collect himself. Before he could catch himself, he took a deep breath, and only when he realized what he’d done did he brace himself for the inevitable cough.
It didn’t come.
Shock gave way to confusion, gave way to panic, gave way to fear, finally gave way to realization. Overwhelmed and dizzy, he fell to his knees, still on the Porter platform. He realized he’d been holding his breath and let it go. Still no cough. This was really happening, wasn’t it? He tried to focus, clear away the irrelevant questions. How didn’t matter. But why? That was worth asking. Where was he? What was he going to do now that he was here? Was Renee here with him?
He pulled himself to his feet, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief in his pocket, then picked up his briefcase and stepped off the platform. As soon as he did, a panel beside him dispensed two dog tags with his name on them. Eyebrow raised, he studied them curiously before turning his attention to the lights along the pathway directing him to the exit. That’s where they want him, but who are they? Should he follow? He fixed his hat on his head and brushed the brim briefly, then, lips curling up into a smirk, he decided to follow it. Nothing he could find out in an empty room, and he had a lot of questions to ask.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
He’s terribly fond of puns. Whether they’re born from his lack of a face when wearing the mask, or somehow related to the word “question”, he just finds them irresistible. It goes back to the insufferable part of his personality, and if you give him enough the opportunity, he will bombard you with them.
Also I just needed a place to say, this man == dapper. as. fuck. good night