〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Justine
AGE: 23
JOURNAL: n/a
IM / EMAIL: justine.cole91@gmail.com
PLURK: failenume
RETURNING: No but I already have a character in game!

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Max Briest
CHARACTER AGE: 24
CANON ORIGIN: Completely original
CHRONOLOGY: 5 months after meeting Asteria and their rivalry developing
CLASS: Um. Supervillain that actually wants to do good and change the world but does it by horrible means
HOUSING: Randomize, she likely won't be there for long!

BACKGROUND:

Throughout history, there's been stories of people with magical powers; oracles, witch doctors, demons and priests, people imbued with powers from deities or from nature or from something else entirely. As science began to develop and humans began to explain the world around them in more logical ways, much of these phenomenom were written off as flukes, liars, charlatans, or mass delusions. The world progressed much like ours has, with the culture, technology and environment turning out much the same by the late 20th Century. Sometimes in the early 1970s, these powers started to show up again.

At first, most people tried to keep it secret, but some made their abilities public, and those few ended up disappearing quite quickly off the face of the Earth, taken by governments or private organisations who were looking to use this magic for their own purposes. It was enough to make people reconsider their approach, and with comic books becoming an integral part of popular culture, they took inspiration from the heroes and villains on those pages.

It took a while for all the kinks to be worked out, and there are still a lot of problems, but gradually superheroes and their villainous counterparts became an accepted part of society (at least in the Western world, where this particular story is set). Most of the problems come from the fact that despite all the different ways the magic can manifest, each power comes with a drawback, a curse to counterpoint the gift. It isn't as easy as it was in the comic books, but those with magic also seem disposed towards reckless, dramatic and self-destructive behaviour. It's hard to say if one is a side effect of the other, or if it's pure coincidence, but there's some truth in the way that superheroes get called crazy for risking their lives, and that supervillains are often labelled mad scientists or insane psychopaths.

Somewhat fittingly, this is where the Sphinx comes into the world. A supervillain with likely borderline personality disorder and personal vendetta against almost the entire world, she's made some drastic changes since she started developing her crime empire.

Max, named as Amelia by her parents, was born into the Italian Mafia in New York, her father, Joseph, was high up in the family and not a very nice man, which affected how Amelia grew up. Her father was cruel, her mother was distant, and when Amelia discovered her powers, she tried to hide them. Unfortunately, Joseph discovered Amelia's talent for shapeshifting and quickly put her to work in the family business, under threat of violence and forcing her to murder, steal, and seduce wherever he felt necessary. Amelia became a bargaining chip to be traded to Joseph's allies, until after a run-in with a superhero (who Amelia thought would save her, but tried to arrest her instead), and a meeting with a strong-willed woman who changed Amelia's opinion on what she could be, the girl decided she was done with being a pawn.

Her plan took a while to perfect, but at 19 years old, Amelia managed to murder a large number of the men in her family, framing a rival gang, and then flaming the fire of retribution and antagonism between the two groups, until they decimated each other. She faked her own death during this time, and rebuilt herself as Max, and as Artemis, a superhero.

Being a superhero didn't pan out the way she'd hoped; after being blocked by red tape, being pushed out by what was essentially a superhero boys club, and watching criminals walk away scot-free, Max decided to take matters into her own hands again. Max felt that she couldn't work within the legal system, even one that allowed vigilantism, so she made use of what she knew, and that was the criminal world.

Using her knowledge and developing new connections, Max slowly and carefully built herself a crime empire, stylising herself as the Sphinx. She control of the drug and arms trade in New York, doing her best to keep those dangerous things out of the hands of people who'd do the most damage with them, while also funnelling her profits into humanitarian purposes. She bought apartment blocks to turn into shelters, using the money from her crime syndicate to fund these projects, taking in desperate people and helping them get their lives back on track. Eventually she expanded her operations to more legitimate avenues, hiring scientists to solve problems she saw in the world and profiting from patents while ensuring that the production of these goods is ethical and environmentally responsible. She owns a variety of businesses, largely employing people who've been through her shelter system and other disenfranchised people.

It took her a while to move onto politics, because she wanted to ensure she had a stable backing before taking bigger risks, but she's been whispering in politicians' ears or blackmailing them to support certain bills or reforms. She's kind of like a one woman lobbying whirlwind, using whatever means she thinks are necessary to get what she wants. It's not always successful, but she's made some changes to the world.

At 23, she has herself a nice little empire, controls most of New York's crime, has her fingers in a considerable amount of political pies, and everything seems to be continuing smoothly, nevermind the fact that she's incredibly unhappy as a person, at least she's making a difference.

So unlike our world, the Sphinx's version of America is powered by 60% renewable energy resources (she funded development of more efficient and cheaper to produce solar panels, for example), and by 2013 at least half the country is driving electric cars. The United States has universal health care, abortion is legal in every state, as is same sex marriage (among other reforms to LGBT rights), and she's eliminated a large number of food deserts that exist within the country. In other countries, particularly developing nations, access to clean water is no longer an issue, there are significantly less weather extremes (thanks to weather manipulators working with a team of climatologists), and large numbers of the population in these places have better access to vaccines and general healthcare. Natural or man-made disasters have a less dramatic effect, since there's specialised relief teams that help predict disasters, stop them, and deal with the aftermath.

On a more personal note, sometime after her 24th birthday, Max met Atlas, an up and coming superhero who unfortunately fell into one of her traps, and then more unfortunately saved her life after she was attacked by assassins. Seeing the opportunity to gain herself a pet superhero, Max let Atlas in on some of her secrets, namely the fact that she wasn't truly as evil as everyone thought she was. After a lot of work, Max convinced Atlas to work alongside her, though she didn't account for the growing affection between her and Donny, the boy under the mask of Atlas.

Nor did she count on Atlas having a dream controlling psychopath for a sister. Asteria Casy is a dreamwalker, who used her powers to build her own little criminal empire in Boston, under the names of Nyx, Hypnos, and Morpheus, focusing mainly on pharmaceutical. After Max made the connection between Asteria and Nyx, and revealed this to Donny, Asteria started screwing with the both of them.

With a dreamwalker fucking around in her head, a weird relationship developing with her superhero bodyguard, and the rest of the heroes in the world closing in on her, Max is having a slightly difficult time. But she isn't going to let Asteria win.


PERSONALITY:

Content warning for drug/alcohol use

Max exists in a world where people became superheroes purely because that is What Should Be Done when someone suddenly wakes up with powers (thanks, comic books), and as the 'second generation' of powered people, she's been heavily influenced, somewhat unconsciously, by the importance of stories. This was only impacted by her own personal love of literature, which provided an escape during her childhood. As a result, she tends to see the world in terms of narrative structures, and to understand her, you have to understand the roles she's cast herself in. The first, of course, is the villain. She's being playing the part for so long that it doesn't matter anymore whether or not she is a bad person, she's convinced herself that she is, and that's all there is to it. She can do whatever needs to be done - by her own definition - without question, simply because it needs to be done, and she's the bad guy who's capable of doing it. One result of this is that she 'plays up' the villainy; she can be melodramatic, she presents herself alternatively as someone with a short fuse who's a little unstable and can snap at any moment, or as the cold, hard, killer who isn't affected by anything. Neither of these facades are real, but she uses either of them as necessary, depending on which she thinks will get the best results. In her mind, this is what being a villain means, and she never stops to question whether there are other ways to do things.

That said, the villain isn't the only role she plays. There are two other main roles she relies on, the protector and the seductress. The latter is fairly simple; occasionally, in her line of work, people need to be convinced to do what she wants them to. Not everyone can be bribed, or blackmailed, or threatened with an unfortunate amount of violence until they do what she wants, and in those cases, she relies quite heavily on the fact that men like attractive women who pay attention to them. Being a shapeshifter, she can change her looks to suit a target, seduce them, and then whisper in their ear until they're on her side. She plays this role most often with rich men for their money or politicians for their power. Occasionally it takes on a bit of a black widow aspect, but she doesn't like to do that too often in case it draws the wrong kind of attention. The problem with relying on, essentially, herself as a thing to be used, is that it's left her with a really warped perspective. Sex is a tool, rather than something to be enjoyed, as is her own body, and she heavily relies on sex and seduction to get what she wants, without thinking about the consequences. She'll flirt with almost any man with the aim of getting them in a position from which she can manipulate them, even if she can't see an instant use for someone. Women are an entirely different matter. She'll flirt with other female 'villains' if she thinks it might get her what she wants, but she very, very rarely treats women as targets, and despite being mainly attracted to women, she's never even kissed another girl, because she likes them too much to inflict herself on them. The villain is still her main role, what she thinks of herself as, and she's too terrified of hurting a woman to ever let herself get close to one. Unsurprisingly, this hasn't improved her perspective on sex, and she tends to act cagey and avoidant if a woman shows interest in her.

The third and final role is the one she likes the most, even if she'd never actually admit that to herself. It's the way she deals with the people who she helps, the women living in the apartments she owns, or the girls slinking into clinics to get broken bones set or STIs treated, or the kids coming into soup kitchens looking for a meal they don't have to steal. It's a fairly distant role, she doesn't like to get involved for their sake, but she's friendly, generous, and willing to take the time to help anyone out with a problem, no matter how small it is. Despite this being her favourite 'role', it's also the one she views as being the most constructed, because she sees herself as a monster, and doesn't think that someone can take pleasure in murdering people and be kind. If she spent more of her time in this role, she might be happier.

As part of these roles, the most important thing about Max's personality is her obsession with control, both in a personal content, and in how she deals with others. The skills she learnt in childhood to keep herself safe have only improved with age, and by the time she's twenty, she doesn't have reactions that aren't controlled in some way or another. She might let her surprise, or happiness, or anger show, but only because she wants to, and it's very rare that something gets a genuine reaction out of her. It's not necessarily that she choses every single word, or expression, or gesture, but she'll decide how she wants to interact with someone and tailor her behaviour around that.

The only time she lets go of her control is with the help of alcohol, or, occasionally, illicit drugs. The latter is generally used when she's operating under other identities, particularly that of a young socialite who spends too much money on clothes and goes to a lot of parties. Since she's usually the one supplying the drugs offered to her in these situations, she knows they're safe to take, and part of her enjoys relinquishing that control. The alcohol is a more common vice; she often unwinds with a few glasses of wine or a tumbler of scotch, though it can escalate more when she's had a rough week. It's a problem and she knows it, but she doesn't let it interfere with her work, and thinks she has it under control, too.

Whether a reason for being so tightly controlled, or a result of it, underneath the surface Max tends towards rather intense emotions, both with regards to frequency and variation. Rapid mood swings are a common occurance, and she can get extremely worked up over nothing, it's just that she rarely actually lets any of it show. These intense emotions are often on the negative end of the spectrum, though she does get intensely elated when something goes right. In an attempt not to keep her control and not let her emotions overwhelm her, she can sometimes suffer from a sort of dissaffection, shutting down her emotional reactions. It's likely that she has some degree of borderline personality disorder (not a great illness for a shapeshifter to have, really), but it's undiagnosed.

In recent months, with Asteria's constant torment, Max has started to unravel, some of her carefully constructed facades coming undone and leaving Max angry and scared. Her moods have become more volatile, and she's become more self-destructive, losing herself in alcohol or drugs, because the sleep brought on by them doesn't result in dreams. She's withdrawing from all the positive parts of her life, from the role of the protector, because she thinks it's the best way to keep the people she's promised to look after safe from Asteria. As a result, she's been crueler in other parts of her work, and with most people in general, taking out her frustration on targets that she deems acceptable. Asteria has also fucked with Max's sense of worth, making her question herself and dragging up a lot of self-loathing that she thought was buried in her psyche, which is making her act out even more, and she's often overcome by periods of depression, during which she'll barely talk to anyone. This is slightly gentled by Donny's presence in her life; his belief in her has kept her from spiraling too far into self-destruction, and he reminds her how to be human, how to be someone other than the roles she's created for herself, which has helped negate some of Asteria's torment.

Still, the problem with Max, is that she's spent so long telling these lies about the sort of person she is, that she's started to believe them herself. Asteria has started stripping them away, forcing them out into the open for Max to see, making her confront all the things she hates about herself. Without the lies, Max doesn't really know how to function, so by the time she's coming to MoM, Asteria has started her on the path to destroying herself, and that will be reflected in the way she thinks and acts.

She's a fucking disaster, basically.


POWER:

Max has a single power in canon, which is that of shapeshifting, though it comes with many limitations. I'm just gonna detail it below it's long I'm so sorry.

Max's power has manifested in the form of shapeshifting, although of a very limited nature. She can't shift 'automatically' as it were, can't just think "I want to look like this", and have the magic work. It requires a conscious effort on her part, to make every single change, from bone structure, to muscles, to skin. She has an extremely intimate knowledge of human anatomy as a result, because if you fuck up how a joint is supposed to work and end up in agony, you're going to learn how to do it better next time. That said, the more she practices, and the more experienced she gets, she's been able to learn what are essentially shortcuts. For example, when her power first developed, if she wanted to be one inch taller, she'd have to think about changing her bones, the muscles and tendons and skin to match, as well as adjusting all the other little things that need adjusting when someone suddenly grows a bit taller. With about eight years of practice under her belt, at her current point, she can just can give herself an inch of height without having to grow through each step individually.

For this reason, she sticks to a humanoid figure. While theoretically she could shift into something more complicated, at this point in time she doesn't have the necessary knowledge to do it, though she may take on non-humanoid aspects. She's learnt a lot about animal anatomy, for example, and makes use of smaller features, such as claws/talons, jaw/teeth structures, or things like hardended skin or spikes/spines that are used defensively.

The advantage to this, is that shifting back requires just as much conscious thought. Once she's shifted to a certain form, she'll retain it until she chooses to change, regardless of whether she's exhausted, killed, or unconscious (even if her power was taken away, somehow, she'd be stuck in the form she'd been in at the time). This means she doesn't have to worry about going back to her own form, if she happens to fall asleep around someone. It also means that she can't automatically return to the body she was born with, and over the years, she consciously returns to it less and less, until she forgets what she used to look like. By the time she's 24, she hasn't worn her own body for years, and couldn't tell you how tall she naturally is.

She's also limited by the law of conservation of mass, much to her annoyance. If she wants to be taller, she has to be skinner, if she shifts into a form with more well defined muscle mass, she has to make sacrifices in other places. It's all a bit tedious.

It's also worth noting that she can't imitate other people perfectly. She can copy a look, going for a vague sense of a person, but up close it would be obvious that she isn't who she's pretending to be. All her tutors have told her that it should be possible for her to perfectly wear someone else's face and body, she simply can't get past the mental block of it. Sometimes her morals show up in odd places.

That will take up one power slot! And I'd also like to give her the power of transmutation, only over her own body, so that she isn't limited by shifting to organic matter only. It will still be limited to conservation of mass, and her knowledge of whatever she wants to shift into. For example, she could turn herself to concrete, so long as she understands the chemical and physical make up of concrete. This will keep her fairly limited at first, but as she learns more and studies more, she'll get much better at controlling it.

I'll leave the last slot free in case I think of anything cool to give her.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:

[The woman on the screen is dressed simply, but the white blouse she's wearing was probably very expensive, as is the gold bangle on her wrist. Considering she came in with the recent batch of arrivals, that might seem a bit odd, but Max has never had an issue with getting what she wants, and for this, she wanted to look nice.

And she does; along with the outfit, her hair is in loose curls to frame her face, and her lipstick is a soft pink that makes her look a little more friendly than her usual bright red does. It's always important to make a good impression.]

I've been led to understand that those responsible for our presence here claim to have no control over the process.

[Her accent marks her as a New Yorker, from the Upper East Side if anyone has an ear for that sort of thing. And it's clear she doesn't buy the line that the government is selling.]

I find that hard to believe, when they have the practice down to such a fine art.

[She thought about playing stupid, but she doesn't have time for that. She needs to get home.]

While I've made a start on reading through the backlog of all your conversations, I feel it would be much simpler if someone would care to summarize what I need to know. I'm not interested in hearing the governments' lies; I have business to attend to at home, so the sooner we can clear all this up, the better.

[Something in her tone manages to suggest that she has every confidence she'll be the one to clear it up, because Max occasionally has an ego problem.]

If you do have answer for me, I'll be sure to make it worth your time.

[Her smile is sweet, with no suggestion in it, though if someone reads more into it, well, that's not her problem.]

Thank you.

[She cuts the feed.]

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:

a test drive thread

another test drive thread

FINAL NOTES:
Can Max please have her puppy?? He's a pitbull named Maurice who's a total sweetheart