Character outline [OOC]
Appearance
Roxie is a fourteen-year-old girl, but she has a slim, underweight appearance that suggests her as being more twelve or thirteen. She stands 4'11" (and is quite aware of her shortness), has blue eyes, very fair skin, and brown hair she often keeps pulled into pigtails or braids.
She usually wears noticeably worn clothes-not necessarily marred or torn, but not new, or fashionable, or anything better than could be found at a secondhand store on the cheaper racks. The only constant, though, is a denim jacket, baggy and covered in patches, with a myriad of strange loops and pockets sewn onto the inside. It's not impossible for her to dress up and to actually do so rather nicely-but she's rather uncomfortable with the idea.
She wears simple, large-framed glasses most of the time, though she doesn't actually need them. (The lenses have long since been replaced with ones made of plain glass.) They don't do anything; she simply finds their presence reassuring, and feels like they make her appear (when she wants to be) more intellectual and refined.
Background
Roxie has been a foster child for many years. She's not entirely sure how many herself-her long-term memory isn't great, with a tendency to change or reinvent details, and she's never bothered keeping track on paper. Depending on who's asked, she's either a constant troublemaker or a victim of foster homes that failed in their duties; either way, she's a very troubled child. She has a history of strange and dangerous behaviors, and even those homes that she's been relatively safe in eventually gave her up because she was simply too intelligent and disturbing.
It's only in the latest home she was placed into, right around the age of thirteen, that Roxie was able to find any stability. They were a married pair of college professors, and though they never quite managed to like Roxie, they did very quickly manage to find her a much more interesting houseguest than they would have any normal child. They encouraged her artistic and musical tendencies, and tried to bear her stranger qualities as best as she could.
It was during this time that she began her... hunting. It started simply: an errant stick, an alleyway, a man whose strangely-fitted clothes couldn't hide the way he moved with impossibly inhuman joints. She felt stronger for a moment, amazing, and so she beat him to death, and cruelly ripped out some little part of him she knew was his soul or something like it.
And it continued from there. She found traits, common patterns, ways to tell the not-human things from the humans they posed as. She hunted them down. Some tried to act innocent, but she knew it was a ruse-particularly the ones with the white eyes. The cho. The monsters even the other monsters were scared of. With their drills they would crack open the mind and body of another, human or monster or anything else, and pour themselves in like liquid into a container.
She started to track them. She realized strange ways of looking at the world, strange ways to trace strange things, and she slowly grew in power, becoming tougher to face each new challenge, each new thing the cho would send to fight her.
And a little part of her rejoiced, for she'd finally found a purpose.
Personality
The first thing that tends to strike other people about Roxie is how quiet and unemotional she usually is. This is more of a practiced mask than anything; she hates being vulnerable or less-than-competent or being seen as such, and so she affects a certain zenlike manner to hide how under the surface she's full of neuroses, minor compulsive behaviors, near-sociopathic lack of empathy for most other people, pointless anger and impatience at minor difficulties, surges of depression and mania at random times, and other things that would leave a skilled counselor employed for years just to unknot the edges of.
Though all of her negative traits get in the way sometimes, Roxie is an extremely intelligent and well-educated girl, far beyond most others of her age. Despite her troubled history of formal schooling, she could probably easily pass most introductory college classes and some intermediate ones without even needing to look at a study guide. (This doesn't necessarily mean she knows useful things; see Skills, below.)
When she gets thoroughly worked up over something, Roxie is far more likely to throw a fit or do something unpleasantly drastic than to ever even think about de-escalating a situation. Those who would get into an ongoing argument with her about something would be well-advised to either drop the subject or some up with some way to embarrass her with her own pretensions of worldly competence enough that she avoids the issue herself.
Skills
For the most part, Roxie has all the practical skills of a normal girl of her age, though with a certain skew towards housekeeping, managing finances, and other day-to-day tasks. While she's extremely intelligent and well-read, most of this knowledge is basically theoretical and wouldn't work well if she tried to put it into practice. She's not even very good at actually fighting; her disproportionate strength is what lets her succeed in combat situations.
Some of the few things she's actually noticeably good are artistry and music-almost enough to be on a professional level, though she's had none of the proper training that would let her get past that ceiling.
She also has a very sharp eye and ear for things that are out of place-the subtle details that might betray someone as an impostor, the unaligned measurements that hide a secret chamber, or so on. Her senses are not superhuman (yet) but may eventually become so-see Potential under Powers, below.
Powers
Strength: Roxie is disproportionately strong, able to manage lifting six to eight hundred pounds without seriously exerting herself and able to push herself to almost twice that for short periods at the cost of severely injuring herself in the process. (This strength seems to explicitly reject normal mechanical requirements and instead operate under some platonic ideal, as she can do things like lift large objects without having enough leverage and without the specific pressure of her hands directly damaging them.) She can still manage a normal human's fine motor control, but doing so requires a certain degree of concentration, usually leaving her capable of only clumsy, overbearing actions in stress situations.
Durability: Roxie is inhumanly durable, able to take large amounts of damage without as much as being incapacitated. For the most part, what damage is done is completely ignored in favor of how much, meaning that things like trauma symptoms, blood loss, and so on simply don't affect her. (She can be physically incapacitated in parts-for example, an eye could be blinded or a limb laborious severed, and she'd lose function of them, but it wouldn't noticeably negatively impact the rest of her aside from the amount of damage done.)
This durability is also reflected in her inhumanly powerful immune system and physical fortitude. Not only can she simply shrug off most mundane diseases, but she can actively resist magical diseases and toxins, as well as even some general magical effects (physical forced transformations, for example) or things like insanely contagious zombie-making viruses. Over time, her body tends to actively purge foreign physical influences, meaning that even if affected by something she might end up returning to normal in stages afterwards.
Healing: Roxie has a very accelerated healing factor, able to recover from almost any injury in the course of only a week at most. The only ones that noticeably remain for longer periods are those reinforced by magic or that are somehow metaphysically important (for example, injury caused by overexerting her inhuman strength); usually these heal over longer periods, though some can be even more persistent.
Rituals: Roxie has an intuitive grasp on how to invoke powerful magical rituals. (It's a disturbingly intuitive grasp, in some cases, because it's almost impossible for her to logically explain the rhyme or reason of much of it, requiring people to take what she says the effects will be on faith.) These rituals typically aren't "flashy" magic, and so in many cases they wouldn't be instantly recognizable as magic at all.
Some examples: creating healing draughts or other strange consumables; designing magical wardings against particular kinds of creatures; inducing prophetic visions; forcing security systems or traps to disarm themselves; seeing through supernatural disguises. Roxie's rituals can have a wide range of effects, but almost all require repeat or prolonged invocation (of whatever kind-the methods can vary massively, in some cases seeming to be almost mundane actions), or need the use of rare material components, or (most often) both.
Harvesting: (This is really more a part of her Rituals, but is included as a separate entry for clarity's sake.) Roxie can use freshly-dead bodies to extract metaphysically-important components. Of course, this tends to be rather horrific for others to witness, even if they can't quite identify what those...things...she's removing are. For many of her most powerful rituals, this is the only way to supply what's needed.
Potential: The strangest thing about Roxie might be her long-term potential. As she kills, she absorbs a small degree of the essence of each fallen foe, slowly increasing her own power. Even now, she's noticeably stronger and tougher than when she was first empowered, though her rate of power gain has slowed. (She also might be able to gain power in other ways-for example, becoming an object of prayer, falling into a Mako reactor, or so on.) Eventually, she might hold the potential to become something less superhuman than transhuman.
Priestess: Roxie claims to be a priestess of a transcendent, multi-universal deity of night, dreams, passion (including crimes of), and inspiration named Shyama. Whether this is true or it's some strange delusion given power by her own traits (as Shyama never actually personally manifests in any way),, her metaphysical interactions with magical things reinforce this, letting her do things like invoke effects triggered by 'true belief' or spiritually consecrate areas against 'unholy' things. She has an intuitive grasp of Shyama's rites and principles, though she has a hard time explaining them to others, making her a poor proselytizer.
World
Roxie's world is one where the Cold War never ended, space travel never significantly progressed past the 60s, and the overall global rate of technological innovation has been slowed by a much cruder and slower Internet and the lack of openness caused by the tension between the major powers. It is also a world where the dimensional borders are weak, and so is used as something of a subtle crossroads by beings from many different realities. The higher echelons of the major governments are at least somewhat aware of this, and so tend to 'skim off the top' of trade that comes through.
Her world is also a point of interest, because of its status as a crux of connections, for the cho-a metaspecies, a sort of transsapient assimilationist collective that expands to covertly absorb important figures and finally entire worlds. Their ultimate goals remain obscure, and it remains some degree of subjective as to how malign or benign they are.
Roxie is a fourteen-year-old girl, but she has a slim, underweight appearance that suggests her as being more twelve or thirteen. She stands 4'11" (and is quite aware of her shortness), has blue eyes, very fair skin, and brown hair she often keeps pulled into pigtails or braids.
She usually wears noticeably worn clothes-not necessarily marred or torn, but not new, or fashionable, or anything better than could be found at a secondhand store on the cheaper racks. The only constant, though, is a denim jacket, baggy and covered in patches, with a myriad of strange loops and pockets sewn onto the inside. It's not impossible for her to dress up and to actually do so rather nicely-but she's rather uncomfortable with the idea.
She wears simple, large-framed glasses most of the time, though she doesn't actually need them. (The lenses have long since been replaced with ones made of plain glass.) They don't do anything; she simply finds their presence reassuring, and feels like they make her appear (when she wants to be) more intellectual and refined.
Background
Roxie has been a foster child for many years. She's not entirely sure how many herself-her long-term memory isn't great, with a tendency to change or reinvent details, and she's never bothered keeping track on paper. Depending on who's asked, she's either a constant troublemaker or a victim of foster homes that failed in their duties; either way, she's a very troubled child. She has a history of strange and dangerous behaviors, and even those homes that she's been relatively safe in eventually gave her up because she was simply too intelligent and disturbing.
It's only in the latest home she was placed into, right around the age of thirteen, that Roxie was able to find any stability. They were a married pair of college professors, and though they never quite managed to like Roxie, they did very quickly manage to find her a much more interesting houseguest than they would have any normal child. They encouraged her artistic and musical tendencies, and tried to bear her stranger qualities as best as she could.
It was during this time that she began her... hunting. It started simply: an errant stick, an alleyway, a man whose strangely-fitted clothes couldn't hide the way he moved with impossibly inhuman joints. She felt stronger for a moment, amazing, and so she beat him to death, and cruelly ripped out some little part of him she knew was his soul or something like it.
And it continued from there. She found traits, common patterns, ways to tell the not-human things from the humans they posed as. She hunted them down. Some tried to act innocent, but she knew it was a ruse-particularly the ones with the white eyes. The cho. The monsters even the other monsters were scared of. With their drills they would crack open the mind and body of another, human or monster or anything else, and pour themselves in like liquid into a container.
She started to track them. She realized strange ways of looking at the world, strange ways to trace strange things, and she slowly grew in power, becoming tougher to face each new challenge, each new thing the cho would send to fight her.
And a little part of her rejoiced, for she'd finally found a purpose.
Personality
The first thing that tends to strike other people about Roxie is how quiet and unemotional she usually is. This is more of a practiced mask than anything; she hates being vulnerable or less-than-competent or being seen as such, and so she affects a certain zenlike manner to hide how under the surface she's full of neuroses, minor compulsive behaviors, near-sociopathic lack of empathy for most other people, pointless anger and impatience at minor difficulties, surges of depression and mania at random times, and other things that would leave a skilled counselor employed for years just to unknot the edges of.
Though all of her negative traits get in the way sometimes, Roxie is an extremely intelligent and well-educated girl, far beyond most others of her age. Despite her troubled history of formal schooling, she could probably easily pass most introductory college classes and some intermediate ones without even needing to look at a study guide. (This doesn't necessarily mean she knows useful things; see Skills, below.)
When she gets thoroughly worked up over something, Roxie is far more likely to throw a fit or do something unpleasantly drastic than to ever even think about de-escalating a situation. Those who would get into an ongoing argument with her about something would be well-advised to either drop the subject or some up with some way to embarrass her with her own pretensions of worldly competence enough that she avoids the issue herself.
Skills
For the most part, Roxie has all the practical skills of a normal girl of her age, though with a certain skew towards housekeeping, managing finances, and other day-to-day tasks. While she's extremely intelligent and well-read, most of this knowledge is basically theoretical and wouldn't work well if she tried to put it into practice. She's not even very good at actually fighting; her disproportionate strength is what lets her succeed in combat situations.
Some of the few things she's actually noticeably good are artistry and music-almost enough to be on a professional level, though she's had none of the proper training that would let her get past that ceiling.
She also has a very sharp eye and ear for things that are out of place-the subtle details that might betray someone as an impostor, the unaligned measurements that hide a secret chamber, or so on. Her senses are not superhuman (yet) but may eventually become so-see Potential under Powers, below.
Powers
Strength: Roxie is disproportionately strong, able to manage lifting six to eight hundred pounds without seriously exerting herself and able to push herself to almost twice that for short periods at the cost of severely injuring herself in the process. (This strength seems to explicitly reject normal mechanical requirements and instead operate under some platonic ideal, as she can do things like lift large objects without having enough leverage and without the specific pressure of her hands directly damaging them.) She can still manage a normal human's fine motor control, but doing so requires a certain degree of concentration, usually leaving her capable of only clumsy, overbearing actions in stress situations.
Durability: Roxie is inhumanly durable, able to take large amounts of damage without as much as being incapacitated. For the most part, what damage is done is completely ignored in favor of how much, meaning that things like trauma symptoms, blood loss, and so on simply don't affect her. (She can be physically incapacitated in parts-for example, an eye could be blinded or a limb laborious severed, and she'd lose function of them, but it wouldn't noticeably negatively impact the rest of her aside from the amount of damage done.)
This durability is also reflected in her inhumanly powerful immune system and physical fortitude. Not only can she simply shrug off most mundane diseases, but she can actively resist magical diseases and toxins, as well as even some general magical effects (physical forced transformations, for example) or things like insanely contagious zombie-making viruses. Over time, her body tends to actively purge foreign physical influences, meaning that even if affected by something she might end up returning to normal in stages afterwards.
Healing: Roxie has a very accelerated healing factor, able to recover from almost any injury in the course of only a week at most. The only ones that noticeably remain for longer periods are those reinforced by magic or that are somehow metaphysically important (for example, injury caused by overexerting her inhuman strength); usually these heal over longer periods, though some can be even more persistent.
Rituals: Roxie has an intuitive grasp on how to invoke powerful magical rituals. (It's a disturbingly intuitive grasp, in some cases, because it's almost impossible for her to logically explain the rhyme or reason of much of it, requiring people to take what she says the effects will be on faith.) These rituals typically aren't "flashy" magic, and so in many cases they wouldn't be instantly recognizable as magic at all.
Some examples: creating healing draughts or other strange consumables; designing magical wardings against particular kinds of creatures; inducing prophetic visions; forcing security systems or traps to disarm themselves; seeing through supernatural disguises. Roxie's rituals can have a wide range of effects, but almost all require repeat or prolonged invocation (of whatever kind-the methods can vary massively, in some cases seeming to be almost mundane actions), or need the use of rare material components, or (most often) both.
Harvesting: (This is really more a part of her Rituals, but is included as a separate entry for clarity's sake.) Roxie can use freshly-dead bodies to extract metaphysically-important components. Of course, this tends to be rather horrific for others to witness, even if they can't quite identify what those...things...she's removing are. For many of her most powerful rituals, this is the only way to supply what's needed.
Potential: The strangest thing about Roxie might be her long-term potential. As she kills, she absorbs a small degree of the essence of each fallen foe, slowly increasing her own power. Even now, she's noticeably stronger and tougher than when she was first empowered, though her rate of power gain has slowed. (She also might be able to gain power in other ways-for example, becoming an object of prayer, falling into a Mako reactor, or so on.) Eventually, she might hold the potential to become something less superhuman than transhuman.
Priestess: Roxie claims to be a priestess of a transcendent, multi-universal deity of night, dreams, passion (including crimes of), and inspiration named Shyama. Whether this is true or it's some strange delusion given power by her own traits (as Shyama never actually personally manifests in any way),, her metaphysical interactions with magical things reinforce this, letting her do things like invoke effects triggered by 'true belief' or spiritually consecrate areas against 'unholy' things. She has an intuitive grasp of Shyama's rites and principles, though she has a hard time explaining them to others, making her a poor proselytizer.
World
Roxie's world is one where the Cold War never ended, space travel never significantly progressed past the 60s, and the overall global rate of technological innovation has been slowed by a much cruder and slower Internet and the lack of openness caused by the tension between the major powers. It is also a world where the dimensional borders are weak, and so is used as something of a subtle crossroads by beings from many different realities. The higher echelons of the major governments are at least somewhat aware of this, and so tend to 'skim off the top' of trade that comes through.
Her world is also a point of interest, because of its status as a crux of connections, for the cho-a metaspecies, a sort of transsapient assimilationist collective that expands to covertly absorb important figures and finally entire worlds. Their ultimate goals remain obscure, and it remains some degree of subjective as to how malign or benign they are.