Janice a levé ses lunettes de ses yeux, inspectant son travail. Elle était déjà un peu en retard pour y aller, à vrai dire (comme le rappelait furieusement la minuterie de l'œuf), mais elle voulait s'assurer que les derniers ajustements fonctionnaient bien. Elle avait une cargaison de gilets blindés et de matraques d'impulsion pour le MDU, ce qui signifiait que, autant qu'elle avait besoin pour y aller, elle devait s'assurer qu'il n'y avait plus de défauts. Le design de base n'était pas le sien, mais elle a toujours fait quelques améliorations dans le processus de fabrication sur la maison... L'inspiration n'est pas venue aussi facilement pour elle tout en travaillant sur un plan, mais de petits murmures sont venus, trouvant de petits moyens d'améliorer l'efficacité et de faire un meilleur produit. La partie difficile a toujours été de filtrer ceux qu'elle ne pouvait pas produire en masse ou serait trop difficile pour les soldats à maintenir... mais elle a estimé que cette itération était un bon compromis entre la facilité de maintenance et la fonctionnalité. Tout ce qui restait, c'était d'emballer tout, de jeter ce satané minuteur d'oeufs sur un mur, et d'aller faire la livraison selon les instructions, ils devraient se préparer devant le bureau du Premier ministre.
La conduite était assez ennuyeuse, si longue. Elle avait discuté juste en sortant ses Jetwings pour contourner toute la circulation, mais un jour comme celui-ci la police serait assez à l'écart sans s'inquiéter d'identifier les personnes volant autour de jetpacks (également, la cargaison était lourde et elle n'avait pas tout à fait travaillé sur les clins d'oeil sur ce sac de tote Hammerspace encore), donc elle devrait faire avec un hovertruck et être coincée dans la circulation pendant un certain temps. Les chiffres, les vacances sont toujours parmi les jours les plus occupés de l'année. Néanmoins, elle a lentement réussi à faire un centimètre de travers et peut-être a pris quelques raccourcis moins que acceptables à travers une allée ou deux, et a coupé quelques personnes avec un tour probablement-pas-juridique rouge-léger gauche, mais elle a fait seulement dix minutes plus tard que le temps de livraison convenu et, heureusement pour elle, il semblait que le bon vieux ministre prenait aussi son temps doux. Elle a trouvé un endroit pour garer le camion et a pratiquement sauté du siège avant de marcher jusqu'à l'une des troupes avec un sourire sur son visage et un comportement couché-elle avait assez de bonne volonté construit avec la police et les services de la défense de construire de l'équipement pour eux (parfois au prix coûtant, pas moins) qu'elle pensait qu'elle pouvait habituellement être avec eux occasionnel.
""Soir les garçons et les filles! Je sais que je suis un peu en retard, mais les nouveaux jouets sont prêts. L'un d'entre vous ne peut pas me diriger vers l'officier de service? Je sais qu'ils voudront s'assurer d'obtenir le nouvel inventaire enregistré avant que je commence à décharger pour vous tous d'évacuer les nouveaux gilets."
Name: Janice Ward
Age: 29
Gender: Female
Race/Nationality: Caucasion, Previously GAU
(I mean she usually wears something a *bit* more practical, but y'know)
Personality: Before the world went all high fantasy? She was relatively normal, if a bit of a loner. Preferring to tinker with bits of technology and figure out how they worked, and build useless but interesting gizmos or upgrade her computer or whatever. But then, when she started hearing the whispers in the back of her subconscious, when she started to shape metals into circuits with her bare hands, when she started to make bluescreen'd computers "rewind" prior to the crash and continue functioning as normal...She changed, somewhat. It's said that Insanity and Genius are two sides of the same coin, and the fact that power corrupts is very clearly evident with the events that have occurred all across the world these past twenty years. Really, she's lucky she ended up a bit of a manic shut in with voices in the back of head than a outright psychopath.
As it is, she's...Functional, in society, although she definitely displays the telltale mental signs of being Empowered-slight megalomania, manic personality traits, the aforementioned just-barely-inaudible whispers in the back of her head, and compulsions to build new technological whatzits. That all said, she does still have a full range of emotions(even if she most commonly exhibits the more upbeat aspects), and she tries to be personable and friendly when she does directly interact with other people(aside from probably ignoring them to check the internet for a bit). She has the common sense to realize she's a few circuits short of a computer, but she does consider the less-sane parts of her to, well, be part of her. Aside from trying to manage the more misanthropic impulses(with a few different inventions she's made), she makes no particular effort to hide her nature or apologize for it.
Abilities: Technomancy-That is, Magic(or whatever you wanna call it) that directly interacts with, creates, analyzes, and/or manipulates technology. With a thought she can take raw materials and work them into shape, combine metals into alloys, make engines float around her or input data to a computer from across a room.
Raw technological creativity burns behind her eyes, whispering designs and murmuring secrets she can all but consciously understand, urging her to put components together and create new inventions, both wondrous and terrible. She can draw upon this...Inspiration, to create things useful to her or on commission, but just as often it projects ideas, brilliant ideas into her mind that she herself had no hand in the creation of. Sometimes these designs have no useful or practical function(a computer that interprets input data to 3D-print paradoxic structures, a monolith that seems to do nothing but draw power into itself and hum ominously, a metal three times as heavy as lead and more fragile than glass, ect), some are useful only as components for greater wonders, and some are impossible for her to build with the materials on hand. A few have a useful purpose and can be produced with what possessions she has, and with these she renders down anything at hand into base components to build whatever she currently is obsessing over in a semi-deranged glee. But regardless of how practical these designs are, she still receives them, and the urge to make them real.
Should be noted that while she can reshape materials with her powers, she isn't an alchemist or transmutationist, which means that for some of her more...esoteric...creations, she does have to be able to actually procure materials. She can't just, say, make a nuclear weapon without access to uranium or plutonium or something; likewise, unless she first builds a reactor capable of creating some(which would be slightly difficult in and of itself), she couldn't make anything relating to antimatter. The closest she can get to transmutation or the like is taking two materials and chemically bonding them to make a new material, or taking a compound material and separating it into base components. So she can make steel without a forge if she has iron and carbon, or take a lump of iron ore and shape the iron out from the rock. She cannot take lead into her hands and make it into gold. Additionally, there is a certain level of...advancement, lets say, that must occur in the object for her to be able to manipulate it, and more technologically advanced things are easier for her to control, create, manipulate, and understand. Metals tend to be extremely easy, as are non- or rarely-naturally occurring materials like glass. But while she can levitate a wild western-style revolver or make it jam, she cannot manipulate a wooden spear with her powers, nor can she operate an abacus without being taught how they are meant to function.
Biography: Janice is one of those who remembers a time before being empowered. She was once a normal child, if one gifted with machines, born in a small city in the northeastern US. Nothing groundbreaking, she didn't build a cold fusion reactor or anything, just...She always had a knack with them. She was quick to understand how clockwork made the hands tick-tock, how to make a small light out of a simply circuit and a battery, that sort of thing. She ended up in machinery clubs in school, and her hobby growing up was always to tinker away in a makeshift workshop at her home. But one day, when she was around fourteen...she started to grow a bit more reclusive about her tinkering. She wasn't sure where the idea came from, it just...it just was there, and she, she couldn't understand it, but something about it was...beautiful, in its way. She cannibalized parts from her other little gizmos and gadgets, skipped school, even baricaded the door to her workshop to stop her parents from dragging her out. It took her a full week, and she had to sneak out when she was sure her parents were asleep to get more materials, more parts.
She'd been so focused, so obsessed with her creation, that she never even noticed the news reports about a young boy in Russia.
It took her a full two weeks of work, of stealing components(to be perfectly frank, while she was making her Thing, people had a lot more to worry about than some crazy fourteen year old stealing someone's computer or breaking into the local factory to snatch its tools), but eventually the idea seemed...complete. Unpolished, certainly, it was a twelve-foot-tall tower made of twisted metal, random cabling, and exposed circuitry, but the idea in her head wasn't...everypresent, anymore, it wasn't overpowering her mind or dominating her thoughts. The first thing she realized was that she'd barely eaten in two weeks and was absolutely starving; she'd only had a couple meals every few days while working on it because food was a distraction from her work. The second thing she realized was that, holy shit, she barricaded herself in her workshop to keep her parents from interfering. She should probably tell them she was sorry, she just, just had to finish her thing, she couldn't wait to show it to them and explain what it...what...
...What did it do?
As you might guess, things were...tense...the next few days, as she tried in vain to explain everything that'd been running through her head, words failing to properly communicate the force of idea and inspiration running wild through her mind the previous couple of weeks. But...unlike her, her parents knew well what'd been happening all over the world. They actually kept up with the news...and they were ery scared that whatever happened had overtaken their daughter. After a few days, they initially started thinking, hoping, that it was just a fluke...a brief flash of hormone imbalance or...something...that coincidentally happened to occur alongside everything else, and that everything would go back to normal. Then Janice casually walked out of her room with her powered-on computer(newly bought, since she cannibalized the previous one; she kinda needed it for school), unplugged, floating behind her with the monitor flashing through website after website and programs flying on one by one. She hadn't even realized it was behind her until her father screamed and she turned around.
Yeah, things...weren't going to go back to normal. But it turns out having a mad genius as your loving daughter is kinda a godsend during a magical apocalypse-there were more than a few superpowered people going crazy in her hometown(and a couple mundane maniacs who wanted to get in on the action while the gettin's good, too), and if it weren't for her and the things she kept inventing, they'd almost certainly have been killed in the ensuing bloodbath. Once, a aspiring serial killer tried bursting into her house with a tommygun of all things, only to find it jam when he tried shooting her family and all of the bullets spontaneously detonate with the gun in his hand. Another time, a pyrokinetic tried holding up the grocery store while she and her folks were out shopping-and ended up tangled and choking in a mess of wires as the power cables ripped through the walls themselves to ensnare him. She never went complete batshit like some other empowered individuals, but her friends and parents noticed her very clearly growing more and more...enthusiastic...about her powers as time went on. She never quite intentionally killed anyone, per say, but she grew more than a little sadistic towards the crazies when it came time to protect herself and her loved ones, and after the third time she stopped being even a little scared, reveling in the thrill of it all.
Sadly, one girl with a mastery of machines can only do so much.
She was powerless to stop the ascendancy of the Great Arcane Union, of course. And likewise, when their soldiers started rolling in to take over her city, she wasn't going to even try to stop them. Twisted monsters under thrall of summoners, superhumans with the backing of a state...these weren't things she was anywhere near equipped to deal with. Her family was smart enough to leave the city itself when they started rolling in, and for two years they stayed on the run. It wasn't as though the GAU was going to let a powerful technomancer slip through their fingers after all, and while Janice knew she was falling down on the slippery slope of mania, she didn't want to even think of what kind of person she'd become under their tutelage and encouragement.
It wasn't until she turned nineteen that her family found someone able to help. A smuggler, specializing in getting Empowered people-and their families-out of the country, out to somewhere...safer. There was a city-state, he said, somewhere over in Europe, one that'd managed to retain some semblance of sanity in a world gone mad. Sure, they had Empowered, but they regulated it, they kept the rule of law, and it wasn't run by a bunch've wannabe demigods with eyes set on world conquest. Of course, he wasn't in the business purely for charity, and his price was steep, but...Well, the honesty that he was making a quick buck off the state of the world helped her and her family to trust him before being willing to get on board his plane, with the last of their worldly possessions, and make a new life elsewhere.
The trip was long and a bit uncomfortable; it was obvious the plane had seen some better days. They started to panic when they saw a GAU Airship right in their path, wondering if their guide had sold them out...only to be perplexed when the airship went right past them as though they weren't there. The smuggler explained with a shit-eating grin that he discovered he had what he called the power of Obfuscation-as he willed it, people stopped noticing him. Their eyes glazed over him, and just stopped...noticing he was there. After a couple years? He'd learned to project the power over a larger area. It was pretty obvious to him what kinda job he'd end up in with that particular skillset. Also terribly useful for getting into places unnoticed, but he warned his guests not to try to stay in the city undocumented; better to explain to the officials that they're a group of refugees and spend the time in processing to get an official pass than to be taken for a bunch of spies.
Since then, it's been a fairly quiet decade. She stayed with her parents at first as everyone got settled in to their new life, but moved out when she was around 23 into her Secret Lair(really just a duplex apartment, but she insists it's a Secret Lair. Even if everyone who knows her is aware of where it is), and supports herself by building useful gizmos and gadgets for people willing to buy them, with special priority and discount given to the government of Mundin-after all, they're the ones keeping her and her family safe and allowing them a sense of relative normalcy. It's only fitting that she should pitch in and help them out...Upgraded computers here for the social sector here, better weapons for the PD there. With the world going to hell, everyone's gotta pitch in to keep the last few havens standing.
Specialties: Blurs a bit with her more preternatural abilities, but she is mundanely skilled with operating technology and understanding how it functions. This mundane knowledge, for the most part, only serves to feed into and support her powers however, and she has decidedly focused herself within learning how to control her powers and building her inventions, to the detriment of other skills. After all, she reasons, technology is by definition meant to make our lives easier; so if something comes up, she can just build a new tool to help her handle the situation at hand.
Equipment:
Kept On Person Regularly-
-Super Duper Secret Lair Entrance Device(that is, her apartment key)
-Manic Converter: Small device she can channel Magic/Superpower through to generate an electric charge; not enough to drain someone entirely of their powers or anything though, just enough to have a(rather strong) source of power. For her in particular, it also helps her to keep her more...unstable impulses under check when actively being used, as these impulses are directly tied to her powers. Device itself is a pair of small plates that fits over the back of her hands and are worn as part of a pair of gloves, and have a port on the side closest to her forearm to connect to other devices as a power source. On the side next to her knuckles, has two prongs that allow them to be used as impromptu punch-tasers, which only activate if she actively feeds her power into the converters while intending that part to activate(using her powers, that is; nobody else can activate that part unless they too are technomancers). Self defense is important, after all.
-Uplink Glasses: Sadly, she hasn't quite been able to figure out how to miniaturize computer circuits enough to have a fully functional computer system integrated into her glasses. She was able to make them into a transceiver, though, and they're linked to her home computer, acting as a monitor for it that can display web windows or whatever program she needs right that moment and with headphones built into the earpieces. Normally, she'd think the entire concept is a horrible cybersecurity flaw, but they're almost useless to anyone else aside from being prescription glasses; she uses her powers as a direct input device to manipulate them instead of a haptic interface or keyboard or whatever, and the glasses themselves don't have ports(nor are they big enough besides) to allow someone else to connect one to them. To be perfectly honest, they essentially function as a hands-free smartphone for her with all the advantages of a home computer processing.
-Wallet, pocket money, ID, yadda yadda.
Kept In Secret Lair(aka apartment)-
-Jetwings: See the appearance image? It's basically a jetpack. It's big and clunky though, and the police generally frown upon you using a personal flying device reliant on jet propulsion in a populated area, so she doesn't generally take it with her unless she needs to. Can be mostly powered by her Manic Converter, but does still require some fuel source nevertheless.
-Monolith:A replica of the...thing...she built when she initially discovered her powers. A 12-foot tall technological tower, with a black-plastic shell covering the outside(one of the few parts she intentionally added). One of the very few bits of technology she can't actually figure out the true purpose of, which infuriates her to no end and is why she built the replica of the original(was a biiiit too big to get out of the door of her original house). As far as she can tell, all it does is suck power and hum, but it's packed with electronics and circuitboards placed haphazardly but with...Some underlying purpose. Also what really proves to her in her mind that not all of her inventions are created based on her own thoughts and ideas, but instead the result of some force manifesting as her power acting through her. And whatever this force is, it isn't keen on letting her know just what this particular device is for, not yet. For safe's sake? She chooses to keep it unpowered when she isn't trying to analyze it and figure out just what it's for...But, there is still another out there.
-Computer: A very powerful computer, custom-built by Janice using her powers and operates on principles far ahead of modern science(and very probably doesn't actually follow conventional physics); for example, its central processor is a crystal that refracts small beams of light to serve as memory storage, with three-dimensional circuitry embedded throughout the entirety of the crystal. Has a long-range transceiver connected to her glasses to allow those to serve as a monitor for it while she's out of her Secret Lair(tm).
Otherwise Owned-
-Bank Account, money
-Stuff-to-be-added-later-during-RP
Other:
-Didn't wanna put this directly in the explanation of her powers because not everyone's played WoD games, but if you have, you can think of her powerset and personality as somewhere between a OWoD Mage Technocrat and a NWoD mid-high Obligation Genius without the Paradox/Havoc. She can build and manipulate almost anything technological, and some of it doesn't actually even fully conform to conventional physics, but her "magic" as it were is very limited outside of dealing with matters of technology and she doesn't have full control over the force of Inspiration her powers give her to build her gizmos-most of what she does end up building is because she feels compelled to do so, not (necessarily) because she intentionally thought the idea for it up.
-Under watch by Mundin for less-than-stable tendencies. Willingness to work with Mundin governmental body is noted, of course, but also noted is her immigration from the GAU. I'd imagine it's at least a little likely that they're keeping tabs on her in case she turns out to be a mole-she won't, but they obviously don't know that, and in this kinda world they'll no-doubt need to keep a healthy amount of paranoia.