[M&M 3e] Defying the Future OOC

[Abracadangit]

Kalliopi "Kal" Yefantis -- Ariadne

Spoiler: Mechanics

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Combat {40 points}

Defense: +10.
Resistance: +10.
Attack Bonus: +5.
Effect Bonus: +5.
Initiative: +4.

Skills {20 points}

Deception: +0. Expertise: +20. Insight: +10. Intimidation: +10. Investigation: +0.
Mobility: +0. Perception: +0. Persuasion: +0. Stealth: +0. Technology: +0. Treatment: +0.

Fields of Expertise: Egyptian Mythology, Fashion & Garments, General Mythology, Greek Culture, Greek Mythology, Handmade Crafts, Language (Ancient Egyptian), Language (Ancient Greek), Magic.

Advantages {11 points}

Accurate Attack, All-out Attack, Artificer, Defensive Attack, Improved Defense, Improved Initiative 1, Instant Up, Move-by Action, Power Attack, Ritualist, Takedown

Equipment

Smartphone

Powers {79 points}

Thread Combat: 50-point Array + 5. {55 points}

Thread Lash: Damage Effect 10; Ranged, Quirk (Short Range Only), Multiattack, Homing, Penetrating, Secondary Effect. {50}_{With Dual Needle Weaving: Add Cloud Area, Selective.}
Snaring Strands: Affliction Effect 10 (Immobile and Vulnerable/Stunned and Defenseless); Extra Condition, Limited Degree, Ranged, Progressive, Secondary Effect. {50}_{With Dual Needle Weaving: Add Cloud Area, Selective.}
Silken Shields: Deflect Effect 10; Cloud Area, Selective. Linked to Create 10; Selective, Reduced Range [Close]. {50} _{With Dual Needle Weaving: Add Secondary Effect (Deflect), Increased Duration, Continuous (Create).}
Seizing Strings: Strength Effect 10; Perception, Ranged, Extra Condition. {50} _{With Dual Needle Weaving: Add Cloud Area, Selective.}
Twines that Bind: Weaken Effect 10; Perception, Ranged, Secondary Effect. [SUB]With Dual Needle Weaving: Add Cloud Area, Selective.{50}
Suturing String: Healing 10 (Restorative, Area [Shapable], Secondary Effect 6, Triggered 4) {50}

Threadwork Conjurations: 20-point Array + 5. {25 points}

Thread Flight: Flight Effect 10; Platform. Linked to Movement Effect (Safe Fall); Affects Self & Others, Burst Area, Ranged. {20}
Defensive Thread: Impervious Toughness 10. Linked to Immunity 10 (Inhalant Gas/Vapor-Based Effects). {20}
Threadwork Sense: Remote Sensing 10 (Vision; Concentration, Limited [Contiguous Open Space]), Senses 15 (Accurate Radius Ranged Mental Sense, Counters All Forms of Visual Concealment, Vision Counters Illusion, Ranged Detect [Magic], Direction Sense, Tracking). {20}
Dual Needle Weaving: Enhanced Thread Combat (Thread Combat Powers gain new properties) {20}
Enhanced Thread Combat: (Limited [Required Movement]), Thread Combat gains Linked Strength 10 (Ranged, Limited [Launch]) {20}
Thread Cantrips: Variable 3 (Can employ minor tricks & effects; see Power Descriptions for specific examples); Quirk (Max 5 Effect Ranks) {20}

Voice Distortion: Feature 1. (Distorts voice to be unrecognizable) {1 point}

Morphic Garments: Feature 1. (Quick Change) {1 point}

Calculations

Defenses 40 + Skills 20 + Advantages 11 + Powers 81 = 153 PP, PL 10

Spoiler: Complications

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A Safer World For Children [Motivation] -- After spending a great deal of time teaching the after-school craft classes at the local elementary school, Kal feels connected to the children and will suffer any burden to ensure their safety and healthy development, up to and including foiling the League of the Future. Of course, Kal will save any civilian on general principle (though she might hesitate for a second on the richer ones, see: Backstory), but she'll especially go out of her way to protect children as she knows a great many of the local schoolchildren by name. She's heard of the so-called deal to not hurt anyone under the age of 14, but she also trusts the League as far as she can throw them.

Needle & Thread [Power Loss] -- In order to manipulate her threads, Kal must hold a sewing needle in at least one hand, and her other hand must be unhindered (or also holding a sewing needle of its own). With greater training and study, Kal feels as though it might be possible to perform minor tricks empty-handed, but for now, she relies on a needle to focus and guide her energies.

All Magical [Power Loss] -- Almost all of Kal's powers and abilities hinge on being able to weave her magic threads. In areas or dimensions where magic is nullified or ineffective, Kal is effectively powerless.

Never Had Much [Quirk] -- Kal's childhood, adolescence, and even her present are all marked by financial insecurity. She was never in abject poverty, but at the same time, her family could never afford stereotypical middle-class things like vacations, eating out, nice gifts for the holidays, and so on. As a result, she has a knee-jerk snarkiness that emerges whenever she believes someone is being wasteful with their money. Unsurprisingly, she also has a difficult time being sympathetic when someone complains about having to cut X or Y thing from their life for budget reasons. She doesn't resent anyone for having more money than her, but in her mind, being thrifty with your resources is a very logical decision that shouldn't require any hemming or hawing. Incidentally, this issue also ties into her subsequent Complication.

Gotta Keep The Lights On [Quirk] -- What with this awful turn of events regarding the League of the Future, Dimetria's business is doing even more poorly than usual. The disappearance of big gala events like dances and weddings means less customers; there's still the occasional alteration or custom job, but the cash flow isn't what it was. This puts some unfortunate financial strain on Kal's hero operations -- she might have to take a day off from crimefighting to help Dimetria with a particular job, or to spend all day on the phone haggling with customer service agents for another bill extension.

Apophis [Enemy] -- Apophis, aside from putting her in the hospital, tidily symbolizes everything that Kal is against. He uses the power gifted to him to stir up trouble, terrify and intimidate civilians, and generally pursue his own selfish ends. In her guise as Ariadne, Kal is his philosophical opposite, wielding her powers to right wrongs, help the people of the city, and protect those who cannot protect themselves.

Additionally, Kal feels an odd sort of responsibility in stopping Apophis. Others may be able to fight the other members of the League of the Future, but if Apophis truly is the avatar of a god as he claims to be, then it would stand to reason that only someone else similarly blessed with mythic power could stand up to him, so if Kal can't do the job, perhaps no one else can.

Grandma Dimetria [Relationship] -- Kal loves her grandmother more than anything (despite Dimetria's constant protestations that Kal doesn't eat enough), and would sacrifice anything to keep her safe.

Ariadne [Relationship] -- The magically preserved memory of Ariadne, sealed inside of Kal's DNA, acts as both a teacher figure and a personification of the thread itself, regulating Kal's flow of magical energy and preventing her from drawing on too much power at once. With a flair for poetic language, her manner of phrasing leaks into Kal's words whenever Kal assumes the guise of Ariadne, lending a sort of ancient and dramatic (and occasionally stuffy) quality to Kal's speech. While Kal's and Ariadne's goals align most of the time, Kal can't ignore how Ariadne seems to care very little for the welfare of badguys that stand in Kal's way, sometimes to the point of being decidedly un-heroic. To complicate things even further, Ariadne's ability to regulate the thread and reflavor Kal's speech raises the ominous question -- when Kal is manipulating the thread, who's really in control? Kal, or Ariadne?

Strings Attached [Relationship/Responsibility] -- As Kal grows in reputation, she improvises a bit of thread magic to give certain citizens a direct line to her, in case they're in need of superheroic assistance. Undoubtedly a selfless gesture, but one she should use sparingly, or else it might eat into her already limited reserves of time.
Current Contacts: The Magro Family

Secret Identity [Secret] -- For safety reasons, Kal is keeping her identity a secret, though once this awful citywide imprisonment has passed, she's thinking of letting the world know if there was a chance it could get her into fashion school.

Artist [Obsession] -- Kal is a fashion designer first and foremost, and everything else in her life comes second. When she isn't troubled by customers at the shop, being hounded by her grandmother, or patrolling the streets as Ariadne, she spends most of her free time thinking up designs in her head, or sketching them out on paper. She is immensely talented and intensely creative, but talent alone hasn't done her any favors in paying for fashion school. While protecting the weak and helping people always comes first, she would have a hard time fighting crime on the same day as a fashion job fair that might get her foot in a door somewhere.

Flammable [Weakness] -- Even though the threads she conjures are magical in nature, they share many of the same weaknesses as their more mundane cousins. Her thread doesn't disintegrate instantly in fire, but once lit, it typically doesn't take very long to burn away to nothing. Of course, she can summon more thread right away, but this creates problems when something that she needs to manipulate or move is actively aflame.

Shear Forces [Weakness] -- While her thread can deflect most hacking weapons like axes or swords without too much difficulty (due to the imprecise application of the slicing force), precisely applied shearing or cutting pressure (like chainsaws or buzzsaws) can slice through her threads without too much effort.

Spoiler: Power Descriptions

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All of Kal's powers have the [Magical] and [Fabric] descriptors, as a result of them being channeled using magic power and relying on mystical thread.

Red Thread of Ariadne: The source of virtually all of Kal's powers is the mythical Red Thread from the Theseus story, which led him through the labyrinth to the Minotaur. The thread always appears from nowhere and fades back into nothingness on the other side, as though the thread's mooring points are either invisible, or perhaps exist in another dimension. If a line of the thread is severed, burned, or otherwise destroyed, it vanishes just as quickly as it appeared, without leaving a trace.

Patterns: As opposed to casting magic spells, Kal moves her needle with specific gestures and movements, which translate into various effects of the thread. She learns more patterns by studying the eldritch pattern books in her grandmother's shop, inherited from her ancestors. The directions in these books appear alien to anyone else, like bizarre needlework stitches in nigh-incomprehensible permutations or dimensions -- some of the stitches are even in non-Euclidean geometries -- but with diligent study and practice, Kal can decipher them to unlock more functionality of the thread. She can also improvise a pattern of her own, to create a single-use object with a pre-programmed thread effect (Artificer), or whip up a customized pattern that can manipulate thread in unorthodox or unconventional ways (Ritualist).

Ariadne: Aside from using her as her heroic namesake, Kal also happens to have a magically preserved memory of the sorceress Ariadne, dwelling in her soul. Ariadne is a helpful guide when it comes to using the thread, and commands an impressive wealth of information regarding magic in general -- but her brand of uncompromising vigilantism doesn't always agree with Kal's more merciful tendencies. See Complications: Ariadne for more info.

Threadwork Combat: With a little creativity and a whole lot of practice, Kal has learned how to use her signature thread as a deadly weapon, capable of slashing and snaring opponents, while simultaneously protecting herself with woven barriers and other tricks.

Thread Lash [Slashing]: Kal projects a line of thread at an opponent, then sends a ripple along it, with enough force to shatter glass, ceramics, and small objects, and enough sharpness to carve a stinging razor cut into whoever's on the receiving end. Also has the ability to zigzag, to hit targets that may have evaded the initial strike.

Snaring Strands: With some quick figure-eights of her needle, Kal conjures a dense, messy snarl of thread around an unfortunate enemy, who finds themselves unable to move as a result. The ensnaring threads have a spiderweb-like effect; hapless targets often find themselves even more tangled up, the more that they struggle or squirm.

Silken Shields: While Kal can deflect lighter attacks with a single gesture (see Defensive Thread), she can also weave up large, disc-shaped patterns and designs in midair to block more substantial forms of attack, which unravel back into nothing as soon as the assault has subsided. Kal is capable of summoning these defenses around allies as well, for situations when the whole team is under heavy fire. Additionally, Kal can manipulate the thread to form simple, albeit crude, shapes and objects. These objects aren't terribly strong or durable, but they're useful for making things like temporary bridges, ramps, or stairways for others traversing dangerous terrain or unsteady footing.

Seizing String: By crisscrossing threads on a single point, Kal can lift up objects (and people!) with little effort, and place them somewhere else that she chooses. Useful for extracting civilians from dangerous areas, and conversely, also handy for suspending badguys in the air like grisly marionettes until they fold and tell you the location of the hideout. Truly, a versatile tool.

Threadwork Abilities: Aside from the thread's deadlier combat applications, it also has a number of more benign uses, as well!

Thread Flight: By rapidly connecting her cloak to threads in midair and then severing them, Kal can soar through the air at impressive speed. To keep herself warm while she flies, she keeps her cloak wrapped around her like a shroud, which lends a sort of eerie, ghostlike floatiness to her aerial movements. (Note: it's not a proper platform a la hoverboards, but a well-placed attack can knock her off of her threads, so it's effectively a platform for Power Flaw purposes.) If she's attacked out of the air, her thread can form a wide, circular array beneath her, providing a soft cushion for her landing. She can also conjure this design for others, ideal for evacuation purposes when civilians are escaping a burning building or a villain attack.

Defensive Thread: All it takes is a tiny flick of Kal's needle, and incoming attacks are directed away from her via quick crisscrossings of thread. While particularly vicious or powerful assaults are too strong for this, it's an effective defense against lighter or weaker forms of attack, like punches and kicks, knives and bats, and small-arms fire. Also comes with a woven mouth filter for noxious gases and dangerous vapors.

Threadwork Sense [Sensory]: With focus and concentration, Kal can project a network of intangible, mystical threads in every direction, giving her the ability to remotely view any area within the network's range, as well as detect magical goings-on or phenomena, and see through visual illusions and trickery. Even though the threads comprising this network are effectively incorporeal, they have difficulty winding through solid matter, so she can't see into sealed-off rooms or areas. Additionally, via her threadwork sense, Kal can never get lost, especially in labyrinthine areas, like winding tunnels, sewer passageways, hedge mazes, and similarly confusing constructions.

Dual Needle Weaving: By weaving with both hands simultaneously, Kal can ramp up her thread attacks to strike at multiple enemies at once.

Thread Cantrips: Kal can improvise a number of small and harmless effects by way of simple patterns, that she uses to practice her powers, amuse herself, or for minor conveniences like closing the fridge door from another room. Some examples:

Magic Mending: With a stitch here and there, Kal can magically mend cloth objects that have been damaged or torn.

Thread Grasp: When she's not using the thread to lift up large objects, rubble, or badguys, she can use a tiny amount of thread to grab the landline phone from another room or open and close doors. This can't exert much force, but it's nice for fine manipulation or just grabbing keys off of a table before she leaves.

Thread Shapes: Owing to her skill as a designer, Kal can weave up any small shape or image that she can visualize, and by way of pulling the threads, animate the image to perform simple movements. Examples might include a butterfly flapping its wings, a palm-sized three-dimensional portrait of a person's head, or floating words, symbols, or geometric patterns. These images are always very clearly made out of red thread, so they can't function as illusions with any kind of verisimiltude.

Voice Distortion: By converging several layers of thread over her mouth and then vibrating the threads in time with her speech, Kal can generate an impressively eerie distortion effect, causing her voice to sound like a chorus of ghostly voices, speaking simultaneously. Great for unnerving badguys, and for disguising her voice to preserve her secret identity.

Morphic Garments: Befitting a user of magical thread, Kal can conjure an entire article of clothing or outfit in a matter of moments. Since this ability is limited to garments only, it's not terribly useful for situations where the guards already know what she looks like, but it's handy for any infiltration mission where blending in means wearing the right uniform.

Spoiler: Description

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Kalliopi Yefantis is a tall, lanky, bronze-skinned woman, with long tresses of dark curly hair and intensely dark-green eyes. In her day-to-day life, she doesn't wear anything much more glamorous than T-shirts, jeans, and hoodies, but when she goes out with friends, as you might expect from an aspiring fashion designer, she dresses to the nines with elaborate patterned blouses and handmade pants of her own design.

While fighting crime as Ariadne, her main garment is a dark red peplos, a traditional ancient Greek robe, with a dark red himation over it, essentially a hooded cloak. Both her robe and cloak are fringed with gold trim, matching her gold mask, which is devoid of any features save the eyeholes (think Vega's mask from Street Fighter). Since her cloak is effectively a construct made of the magic thread, she can have it unravel instantly with a flick of her needle, if necessary to escape someone's grip.

In the midst of a fight, she always holds one of her trademark sewing needles in her left hand, flicking and darting to conjure threads as she requires them. She keeps some thread wound around the fingers of her right hand in a cat's-cradle-esque, star-shaped string figure, gesturing with it to focus and direct her threads with greater precision than the needle by itself affords.

Spoiler: Backstory

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Before she became the thread-weaving wonder known as Ariadne, Kalliopi "Kal" Yefantis was a fairly normal young woman, twenty-six years old, who was watching her life pass her by and was unsure on how to stop it. From as early as age nine, her singular passion was clothes and clothing design -- her Greek immigrant parents initially chalked it up to "young girls enjoying dress-up," but after she dragged them to fabric stores to stock up on materials, their jaws dropped as she sewed actual, wearable garments, only following instructions from craft books.

Kal's passion only grew stronger as she went through middle and high school; she routinely made prom dresses for friends, altered clothes for relatives if they didn't fit right, and constantly developed her own designs. As high school came to a close, she applied to all of the top fashion schools, certain that her portfolio was enough to get her in. And as it turned out, it was.

But due to a complication of her parents' immigration status, she didn't qualify for financial aid, nor did she qualify for grants or scholarships. It was almost worse than being outright rejected -- if she wasn't good enough, at least she could work on improving, but finding absurd sums of money wasn't going to be so easy.

As a sort of compromise, her parents suggested that she stay with her grandmother Dimetria in Forester's Bay, Michigan, where she owned her own small tailoring business. She could work there and earn some money while learning all about traditional clothes from Dimetria. Kal had always loved her grandmother since she could talk shop with her, but helping out at a tailor's wasn't how she imagined her life after school, not to mention Forester's Bay was a bit of a nowhere town. Still, after some gentle coaxing, she decided maybe a gap year wouldn't be so bad.

After moving in with her grandmother in the Residential Quarter, Kal took to the work diligently, and spent most of her nights staying in and reading something from Dimetria's enormous library of antique portfolios. She could grasp all of them fairly easily, except for some odd ones that were off by themselves on their own shelf, underneath some antique Greek masks hanging on the wall. They depicted strange patterns and bizarre stitches, that couldn't feasibly work on virtually any clothing. When she asked her grandmother about them, Dimetria just said she inherited them from her own grandmother, and couldn't make much sense of them either.

As time passed, a gap year became a gap chapter of Kal's life, as she tried in vain to get her designs noticed on social media while scrounging up money. She quickly learned the painful lesson that "exposure" wasn't terribly helpful -- many a well-to-do socialite from Lakeside saw her designs hanging in the shop, asked if they could borrow one for an event, and then nothing would come of it. Kal developed a healthy distrust for the town's upper class, as well as a callous bitterness that they could probably send their kids to whatever school they wanted, while she had to toil endlessly to afford an education that she felt like she deserved. There was at least one thing that brought her some joy: teaching after-school craft classes at the James K. Polk Elementary School.

Children were non-judgmental and easy to talk to, not to mention they loved her classes. While she wasn't teaching them fashion, she got to show them how to make origami cranes, paper lanterns, and a hundred other fun little activities. She started to wonder if maybe a career in teaching instead was worth looking into, but all of that changed the day Apophis showed up.

During the fateful incident when he turned the school's parking lot tarmac into sand, there was a little girl standing behind him, one of the students from Kal's craft class who was waiting for her parents. Not knowing exactly what Apophis was planning, Kal saw the golden radiance flow from his palms to the tarmac, and acted without thinking. She sprinted behind him, and hoisted the little girl up into the air, keeping her off of the tarmac as it morphed beneath her into sand. Kal gently put the little girl back down on the grass, away from the sand, and told her to run away as fast as she could, instructions which the little girl had no trouble following. As Apophis finished his magic, he turned and noticed Kal standing behind him, scowling. She hissed that he should pick on someone his own size, to which Apophis responded with an enthusiastic "Capital idea." He held his palm out towards Kal, and shot a pulse of light at her that knocked her off her feet, as time slowed down to standing still.

As Kal awoke, she found herself in a dark, cold passageway, and as she navigated its serpentine path with multiple intersections, she realized she was in a maze. Even though it was constructed to be confusing, she knew exactly which turn to take each time, as though she'd solved this maze before.

After what felt like hours, she found herself in a small, dimly lit room, with a middle-aged woman working at a loom, clad in traditional ancient Greek robes, colored red. When the woman saw Kal enter, she smiled and stopped her work so she could give Kal a big hug, and said that her name was Ariadne, and she's waited so long to meet her. Kal asked where they were, and Ariadne responded that they were in the place between her soul and her DNA, where echoes of ancestors and past lives dwell. She took Kal by the hands, and told her that moving forward, she would always be there for her, if Kal needed someone to talk to or to make sense of things. She also explained that they didn't have much time, so she needed to see her finger for a moment. Kal stuck her finger out, and Ariadne quickly pricked it with a needle. As Kal yelped in pain, she saw not blood drip out of her fingertip, but tiny red threads.

Suddenly, her vision swam, as her world became a swirl of red string.

Kal woke up in the hospital, with her grandmother sitting there beside her, frantic with concern. After getting her to calm down, she discovered that she had been unconscious for almost a day, and the doctors were beginning to get nervous. She passed a battery of tests, and was allowed to leave the following day.

Once she was back home and settled in, she began to notice a series of odd happenings. For starters, she had developed a nervous tic where she wanted a sewing needle in her hand at all times, even if she wasn't actively working on clothes. Kal also felt like she was forgetting things -- she would want her coffee mug, and then it would suddenly be in her hand. She must be forgetting she picked it up, right? What other possible explanation could there be?

Irate and irritable after a day of annoying customers, she decided for the heck of it to try rereading her grandmother's old pattern books, the inherited ones that didn't make any sense. As she eyed one such pattern on the page, she thoughtlessly traced it in the air with her needle. A line of red thread shot through the middle of the living room, shattering a lamp.

After getting over her shock, she inspected the red thread. Both ends of it mysteriously trailed off into nothingness, as though it was moored in another world. No matter how much she pushed or pulled, the thread was rigid and refused to budge. She tried tracing the pattern once more, and the thread instantly vanished.

Ariadne's voice whispered in her mind, telling her that the trick is to spool some thread around her other hand, or else it would be impossible to aim. Kal wound some thread around her empty fingers, in a sort of cat's-cradle-type arrangement, and discovered she could direct the red thread with greater precision, at a specific point or target. In her mind's voice, she whispered 'Thank you,' but the Ariadne's presence had already vanished. Kal spent the remainder of the evening combing the pattern books for more techniques.

The following week saw more and more violence inspired by the League of the Future, including an attempted robbery of the tailoring shop. Kal watched in horror from the back room as her grandmother took the bills from the register, urged on by the goons with guns.

Lines of red suddenly tore through the store, cleanly knocking the guns out of the robbers' hands. The robbers all looked dumbfounded at each other, until their dispatcher emerged from the back, clad in ceremonial red robes and wearing a mask of gold. Before they could mock the strange woman for her unusual dress, she held up her sewing needle and traced feverishly into the air.

Spirals of red thread picked them all up at once, and handily deposited them outside, in a heap. Without warning, Ariadne's voice returned to Kal's mind, with a tone much less warmer than before: These men would do you harm. A lesson in humility is in order.

As the goons slowly rose to their feet, zigzagging lines of red sped past them, puncturing nearby mailboxes and garbage cans with ease. Reading the room with expert agility, the entire group of them fled in a hurry, while Dimetria stared bug-eyed at the woman in red.

With another flick of her needle, the hood of her cloak unraveled, and she took off the mask to reveal that it was in fact her granddaughter Kal who saved her. After reprimanding Kal for doing something so dangerous, Dimetria asked what she was doing in that outfit.

Kal explained everything to her about Ariadne, the strange thread, and the old pattern books, which her grandmother listened to with a sort of wry skepticism. After hearing her out, Dimetria muttered something under her breath, and went into the basement to retrieve a number of old wicker baskets.

Each basket was filled with old pattern books, and when Kal opened them, she discovered they were full of the mysterious arcane patterns, which somehow guided the thread.

Time to study up, her grandmother said.