Elektra
Elektra Kaur
updated after adventure conclusion 3/09/2018 Right to the Bone, Chapter 1; points removed on 4/20/2019 during Chapter 19 and another 18 points removed on 8/23/2019 during Chapter 24
Physical Description
Facial Features
barely visible eyebrows; triangular face with slightly sharp chin
Special abilities
Electric Being 3
Energy Absorption (limit: Electricity only) 10
Force Shield 6
Lightning 5
Magnetic Control (special effect: all the PLUSES and MINUSES of being shaped live electric current) 9
Reflection/Deflection 6
All Power usage has a Special Effect: Made of Glowing Circuitry. I’m not going to take that as a Power Limitation right now because the case of an opponent using it to defeat me would be 1) special circumstances, and 2) roleplaying!
Apparel & Accessories
In civilian life, Elektra wears the usual robes of what most New Yorkers call "a Buddhist nun", with flat sandals or plain boots as weather requires outside the Temple. She also usually has an anti-static heel strap that wraps around her ankle and the heel of her shoe.
When on a mission for SAFEGUARD Elektra normally wears the SAFEGUARD uniform, or whatever the mission requires her to wear. She may wear a short haired wig in order to not draw notice.
Specialized Equipment
SAFEGUARD UNIFORM
{R# 0, BODY 08, Flame immunity: 03, Radio communications: 05, Skin armor: 02, Limitation: Skin armor only vs piercing and edged attacks}
Cost: 089 HP
{R# 0, BODY 08, Flame immunity: 03, Radio communications: 05, Skin armor: 02, Limitation: Skin armor only vs piercing and edged attacks}
Cost: 089 HP
Mental characteristics
Taboos
1. Refrain from killing living things.
2. Refrain from stealing.
3. Refrain from unchastity (sensuality, sexuality, lust).
4. Refrain from lying.
5. Refrain from taking intoxicants.
6. Refrain from taking food at inappropriate times (after noon).
7. Refrain from singing, dancing, playing music or attending entertainment programs (performances).
8. Refrain from wearing perfume, cosmetics and garland (decorative accessories).
9. Refrain from sitting on high chairs and sleeping on luxurious, soft beds.
10. Refrain from accepting money.
2. Refrain from stealing.
3. Refrain from unchastity (sensuality, sexuality, lust).
4. Refrain from lying.
5. Refrain from taking intoxicants.
6. Refrain from taking food at inappropriate times (after noon).
7. Refrain from singing, dancing, playing music or attending entertainment programs (performances).
8. Refrain from wearing perfume, cosmetics and garland (decorative accessories).
9. Refrain from sitting on high chairs and sleeping on luxurious, soft beds.
10. Refrain from accepting money.
Personality Characteristics
Motivation
Elettra Kaur has what might be divided into "the responsible motivation" and "the private motivation".
Responsible Motivation
As a citizen of this life, Elettra feels an obligation to take actions that make the lives around her better in small ways. She looks for things she is capable of doing that another person cannot currently do for themselves.
This is why she took the teaching position for "Continuing Education students"; this is why she entered training, and stayed with it for so long, with a goal of becoming a NYC Buddhist nun.
The thing is, she saw a way to make a more definite difference when she teamed up with a graduate student and a fellow part-time instructor to stop the plot of a minor villain. Three mutants were able to help one another to use their unusual capacities; by those joint efforts, the trio were able to solve a problem, permanently, caused by one determined Bad Guy. They made a difference in many lives -- not a huge difference, but a measurable one. They reversed some causes of suffering and they prevented future misery. They made the city a better place.
This must be why people become Superheroes. This must be why people join Supergroups.
As 2010 approaches, Elektra seeks a means of finding strangers who need the sort of help she can give. She wants to uplift others. She prefers to avoid any plan of hunting down strangers for destructive purposes.
Private Motivation
The work in that first, temporary teamup required all three to push their abilities past the point of self-damage, costing them some of their abilities. The personal losses were more than they were prepared to face. That is likely why they did not form a new neighborhood SuperGroup of their own.
After several discussions with her mentors at the Temple about how the "temporary superhero adventure" was good for her soul and how it was detrimental, "Elektra" began to work with The Trenchcoat Brigade and SAFEGUARD.
It proved not to be a great fit. The life of a superhero seems to be quick to aggression, which naturalized citizen Elettra Kaur found unsettling at best. Forceful responses have their time and place, absolutely, but Elektra would prefer to meet the first burst of aggression with kindness.
Thus far, the work with SAFEGUARD has helped Elektra to learn new skills. It has led her to discover at least one aspect of her mutant ability that she had never before considered. Elettra appreciates her time "consulting with" this international Supergroup for all the things she has learned about the people of the world and about herself.
One of the things she learned is that she is probably not destined to become fully ordained. The path of her life leads more outward than inward. She has walked in Nirvana and returned to the world, and yet she is not ready to retreat into a life of quiet prayer.
As 2010 swings into motion with the Metal Tiger's customary pounce, Elettra continues to work on recovering the flexibility she lost. She seeks to explore new parts of existence. She seeks to find a new way.
Savvies & Ineptitudes
Acrobatics 5
Artist (sculptor) 6
Detective 3
Martial Artist 4
Scientist 2
Thief (stealth, security systems) 5
Weaponry (melee) 5
Artist (sculptor) 6
Detective 3
Martial Artist 4
Scientist 2
Thief (stealth, security systems) 5
Weaponry (melee) 5
Virtues & Personality perks
Connection (Low, SUNY)
Headquarters (Expansive)
Scholar (circuitry)
Security Clearance (medium, SAFEGUARD)
Sharp Eye (not blind)
Headquarters (Expansive)
Scholar (circuitry)
Security Clearance (medium, SAFEGUARD)
Sharp Eye (not blind)
Vices & Personality flaws
Mistrust (mandatory)
Secret Identity
Loss Vulnerability: Being electrically grounded {static charge, needs to be grounded somehow when not actively using powers} (0 APs) (all powers and skills)
Secret Identity
Loss Vulnerability: Being electrically grounded {static charge, needs to be grounded somehow when not actively using powers} (0 APs) (all powers and skills)
Social
Religious Views
Buddhist (struggling sometimes)
Social Aptitude
Cheerful, congenial, a little too quick to let others push past her even when she has something important to do
Hobbies & Pets
loves tracing salvaged circuit boards until she has memorized all their intricacies, even if she has no idea what the circuit board in question originally did
Speech
faint but definite New York City accent
Wealth & Financial state
0 APs (all resources are provided by SAFEGUARD and her entire paycheck goes directly to the Temple)
Born a mutant, raised a Buddhist, needs to decide if she is going to be a nun or a superhero.
Character Location
Current Location
Underground complex of Dr. Tatiana Von Brandenburg
Dex: 04 | Str: 03 | Body: 04
Int: 04 | Will: 04 | Mind: 04
Infl: 03 | Aura: 03 | Spi: 03
Initiative: 11
Hero Points: 135
Children
Current Residence
New York City, New York, USA
Gender
female
Eyes
brown
Hair
extremely short bright auburn, shaved bald between adventures
Height
5'10"
Phases
August 19, 2009
Ninjas in green led by a woman in blue come to announce that they are taking the Bell away from Madame Von Brandenburg. They scorn each other and part-chameleon minions all in white suddenly separate from the wall.
Meanwhile all of Madame Von Brandenburg's scientist minions are putting on black gloves trimmed in yellow.
I link my electromagnetic phase to the Bell's and try to teleport. Succeed! But only to a nearby hallway.
While I try to update my Team Leader on what I have learned, a man with darkness powers (???) tries to steal the Bell in the name of something called "SHADE".
I reconnect to the Bell and am dragged away with it into the pool of darkness!
Since I am having trouble with teleportation, I try extending my Electric Being field around "my body", which is the Bells and possibly the network between them. The device on the side of the Bell is a transdimensional locator. Something has already received a signal. Ohhhhh dear.
Archaeopotamus in the grass below the building is having things to do with all the men of this team but I am not coming out of phase.
A jackal man is in fact Mr. Von Brandenburg!
I wonder if I am better connected to the Bell?
I wonder if I can summon all of "myself" into this space so that we can be One and we can focus and could try to reach an enlightened state of being together.
... I have all of the Bells appearing here in "mushroom circle" form ...
Team Leader Agent Chameleon wants to know if I can take all of the Bells to another dimension, using the Stargates inside them, where they will be out of reach.
I take a deep breath.
"Yes. I can."
I pass the Blue Ring to a courier -- Loki, on the advice of Psypher; Loki, God of Stories, who will see this woman's story with the ring to a proper start.
I ask Captain Fel for an image of the coordinates for the far away place where the Thanagarians came from. This is a spot that fits most of our requirements: no one is there, it will do the one who answered the signal no good in coming to Earth, it will not increase the danger to Earth, it will bring almost all of the Bells far out of reach of all the villains. Captain Fel has an easier time connecting me to his ship first, which can act as a relay.
SO MANY ATTACKERS arrive right now!
I have to concentrate to ignore the combat for a few seconds before I can move us to the Endupaar in a very bright flash of light.
Loki shuts that portal down.
I get ready to go through. Captain Fel is asking me again if I am sure.
I am about to transmit when Sahara suddenly asks about putting the transdimensional locator into Saturn's gas cloud and then MOVE the Endupaar. What a nifty idea! Agent Chameleon detaches the locator from the large Bell and they put it in a little probe and send it away.
Agent Chameleon decides everyone will go to Thanagar, and guard me from interference while I settle and try to detach the Bells from me (and vice versa) throughout the magnetosphere of the planet. Agent Chameleon then instructs me on what to look for as I examine the magnetosphere, and when I am disconnected he has us go back through the gate to the Endupaar.
When it is done, Captain Fel says he can return us to Matumaini.
Did we not still have people to rescue?
We get back to Matumaini and the crystal pillars are all glowing blue-white.
Loki tries to fix it with his Tesseract cube, says "Oh my," and disappears. He tells Sahara that he thinks General Zod is free of King Solovar's prison.
House Call
August 19, 2009
When the Jeep parks in the garage at the Von Brandenburg complex, it then sinks down into the bedrock on a concealed platform. Clear doors slide shut above us. Once we have truly arrived, Dr. Von Brandenburg addresses me as "Agent Elektra" (which is not quite accurate) and it turns out that someone named "Simon Kincaid" is here to go fight "Agent Chameleon".
Dr. Teleios absolutely accepts my respect and admiration and deference as a part of the natural order of things. He has INDEED had problems with the very-strong-nearly-human alien aggressors, in fact they stole one of Dr. Teleios's Brilliant Experiments and may have damaged it.
Dr. Tatiana Von Brandenburg wants to tempt me into her genocidal plan.
I am having to keep on as someone who knows a very little about Kryptonians but to whom the idea of aliens with wings, "Thanagarians" (which I keep having trouble pronouncing), is entirely new and oh so disturbing.
Now I have been left alone to think about the Doctors' offer to put me as the "guide" for a sentient quantum computer which will sort the "aggressive" Kryptonians and Thanagarians and "transplant" them to a contained habitat in Dr. Teleios's base in Antartica.
This is definitely a trap.
While the gentlemen start carefully poking at things, I take off my shoes (and put them in my pocket) and kneel down to "pray". By now, I know the electromagnetic circuit of the Bell-related gates. I probably cannot "sense" them when I don't even know where to look. ((I haven't bought that power yet.)) But I can push into a sphere emanating from me the kind of disruption pattern that I have used before to weaken that circuit. I am going to do so, or at least try, and maintain it until I get some kind of reaction from people.
Oh yes.
That circuit is a bell related circuit -- the large circuit about one story below me. The one that is now reacting and testing my sphere. The bell emissions synch in harmony with mine... and the ring I carry.
So I try to modify to a shut-down cycle, which works BUT NOW there are many other smaller Bell-portal circuits linked to it? There are many small emissions going out beyond my range.
I stand up and quietly say, "I have made my decision. I know my path." And then add something quiet about the many bells....
Several stories down through the maintenance passages, I find the room with the large Bell and many scientists either 3d printing things or else analyzing the Bell network around the world. They want to set off a signal that will bounce off the Earth's magnetosphere from the inside. One says there's a chance of it going very wrong. The other one says (first) that it's a 0.5 % chance and later that it's a 5% chance.
So to stall, I tell them that's why I am here. I am linked to the Earth's magnetosphere. I can enhance harmony. I do not understand all the things they are saying, but I do understand harmony. BUT FIRST! All things that might cause any energy spike or strong power, must be completely depowered, not even a residual charge. Microwaves! Cell phones! Wireless charging stations! Cell towers! All sorts of things.
They scurry to work. One calls Dr. Von Brandenburg to tell her that I am here and I have agreed to the plan.
Reconnoiter in the Jungle
August 19, 2009
We get clean, and clean clothes, and more food, and some information. We need to go reconnoiter the Van de Bergh property near Matumaini because the Van de Berghs may be a threat to this hidden city. After, we will probably need to go talk to the genuine Hammer Empire commando squad of five to ten people.
Minzi and Corporal Adani will be escorting us to the edge of the area that we will reconnoiter. They have bone conduction comms gear for us to use on this work.
I get to ride a rhinoceros for the second time. I am all smiles!
After the rhinoceros ride, we have to walk for two hours before we reach a pond near the wall of the Van de Bergh area. It looks like a twenty foot tall wrought iron gate in a foreboding wall. The wall seems to be wrought iron fencing. It has a strong electromagnetic field, and the grass does not grow within an inch or two of it.
Sahara says he could make a staircase that goes above the wall and back down the other side. Psypher says he could jump over it. Chameleon says there are security cameras built into every fourth gnarl in the wrought iron pattern. Loki says he could create an illusion for a distraction.
Loki will make an illusion of antelope coming from very far away. When they pass near here, an already dead tree will be knocked over (really by Kabuki) to fall onto the wall. We will see what happens to the wall, what happens to the dead tree, and whether someone comes out to clean it up. I climb up a tree on the opposite side of the pond where I will have plenty of height for a good concealed view of everything that happens. Sahara disperses himself and floats up 200 ft in the air.
The dead tree had bats in it. So it kind of exploded when it hit that fence.
A man in a ghillie suit appears on the far side of the wall, looks at the situation and talks into a radio. He sprays something on himself when he sees one of the giant prehistoric jackals near him. Four other guys in ghillie suits rise up and then all of them pull back away from the fence. They eventually settle down and vanish into the grass on the inside of the wall.
We hear a faint whine as a flock of drones come out of the trees inside the wall. They go to the tree and spray it with a fire suppression foam.
More than 400 yards away is a group of ebony trees that have a suspended walkway up in the area of their crowd, and there are people up there who are up there using it as an observation point.
Welcome to the City of Hope
August 18, 2009
King Solovar offers us medical care, resupply, and a meal, but cannot allow us to enter his city of Matumaini. He says he has a refugee population living there, and he cannot allow us to enter nor to take pictures with our phones. He wants us to leave once we are recovered, taking the Kryptonian prisoners with us -- especially including Zod.
Our transit across the skies of northern Africa can be obscured with information from the Perseid meteor shower, which peaked a week ago.
Then, after stating what help he will give us, King Solovar asks us what we know about "the bell".
This all started with a set of heiroglyphics and a holographic map, a list of destinations that included the lost tomb of Alexander the Great; and the Palais de Papis in Avignon, France; Wewelsburg Castle in Wewelsburg, Germany; a place we have not investigated closely in the Himalayas; and possibly that place with the ruins, that once was an Atlantean citadel.
I had a list. I think it got burned up when my phone was damaged, two or three fights ago?
We need to know *why* these "bells", these quantum reality manipulators, are here to be fought over in the first place. If we succeed in disabling, removing, or destroying them, will something bad happen?
It sounds like the Thanagarian engines might be like the _Heart of Gold_ from the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ novel series, in that the Thanagarian engine creates propulsion by rewriting its reality.
Suddenly the ground shakes! A bubble of energy races out from the ruin in which the Bell resides! It destroys things in its path! Uh oh!
We all try to stop the ringing of the quantum bell. The efforts of Psypher, Agent Chameleon, Sahara, and King Solovar do much better than mine: this energy field seems to have a repeating hexagonal shape like battery cells, not like an electric circuit that I really understand.
A hexagon is a six-sized crystalline molecule. But in our reality, there are 8 electrons! I activate my Electric Being, I power up my Lightning 5, and I focus on the center of this dome (which is probably the bell?) and stabilize it as if I am completing the electron bonds of this +2 ion version of whatever element this is. I concentrate it as if nothing else exists to me. And then I step toward it, bringing an "electron" at each pole of my magnetic sphere. I do get there, but I do not do very well at stabilizing it! At all! And the energy field is turning the trees into vines, the grass into other plants, this is NOT GOOD for ANYONE!
In the center of the energy sphere, the bell is singing. I try to sculpt the electromagnetic field of the bell into a *non-moving* bell of the exact same size ... it is not going very well. Sahara goes inside the bell's sockets and ports. He says there are shiny crystals and a tiny Stargate inside there! If only Agent Chameleon would tell us what to do about shutting down a tiny Stargate!
Kabuki says we can reshape this into a duplicate of something somewhere else. How about ... a physical iris to block/shut down the Stargate??
YES!!
I need to sleep now.
#righttothebone
I would like to eat a food.
August 15, 2009
As a Buddhist, I would never eat a meat salad (not an article) but we can certainly eat a fruit salad
Comments
Author's Notes
Elektra Kaur follows the trope of the comic book Buddhist monastic novice, which is very different from the real people. I try to be careful with her to always respect the traditions from which I am borrowing, even when superhero plot puts our characters into combat situations. I know that I am far from perfect in this. I always try to acknowledge my shortfalls so that I may do better in the future.