Tyler Niven

Codename: Shatterstream
Nickname(s): Tyler, Ty, Niv.
Age: 17
Race: Human (?)
Alignment: Neutral Good
Is this a canon?: Nope



Hair Color: Strawberry Blond (Dyed Pink)
Eye Color: Jade
Gender: Female
Height: 5'5"
Weight: 102lbs
Other Traits: A network of faintly glowing markings that resemble circuitry that only appear visibly over her body when she is overcharging her capacity or expending large portions of her stored energy.



Main Power Origins: Mutation

Powers
*Disclaimer: These are an overview of what she has the potential to do. Currently she does not know or understand how to do all of these things with regularity*
Energy Absorption:
Shatterstream is a living battery capable of taking forms of raw kinetic and potential energy and store them within her body. She can do this a variety of ways, such as simple touching a live electrical circuit or her usual method, listening to extremely loud music on her headphone. Her capacity to do this has yet to be explored as she doesn't quite understand how it all works. Currently untrained in use of her abilities, she is susceptible to taxing her body to the point of exhaustion should she draw in too much power too quickly, essentially overloading herself.

Energy Stream Fields:
Drawing directly from her absorbed power reserves, Shatterstream is able to form and direct constructed force fields which have several potential uses. Each of these force fields is directly fed from her stored power. Their upkeep and damage they sustain pull more from her existing stores of energy.

- Personal Empowerment: Shatterstream can coat herself with her own energy, creating the guise of her increasing her own physical abilities. This acts as a suit of armor, able to increase her durability as well as augment the power of her "strength". She is however, for all intents and purposes, just as fragile as she normally is within this personal field, she simply is manipulating teh energy around her to perform these feats. Due to the nature of having to redirect, move, and perform in this state while splitting her focus on whatever tasks she is doing, this is by far the most draining use of her powers and taxing on her mind.

- Force Constructs: Walls, domes, cages, just about anything she can envision. The more simplistic in design the easier it is for her to maintain. These can be used a variety of ways. Shielding allies, making floating platforms, pinning creatures against other objects, or sealing gaps would be just a few. She is also able to make more complex objects. Something like a massive hand which mimics her own body movements would be a more simplistic example, while making an imaginary energy dragon would be the most extreme and taxing to maintain. The easier it is for her to understand, the easier it is to maintain.

Flash and Bang: Shatterstream is able to manifest stored power as visible gobs or beams of light to illuminate areas. These can be overcharged with stored energy to the point of bursting, creating bright explosions of light and sound that have no force behind them but are capable of blinding anyone looking at them, including herself.

Skills
Sleight of Hand: While capable of pick pocketing, she tends to make use of her dexterous digits in a less openly criminal way… with street magic! Simple games such balls and cups or coin/card tricks mostly, to scrounge up some cash from bystanders. She has very little issue with conning people like this where as outright stealing she considers to be distasteful.

People Reading: Interact with enough people and you learn how to pick out certain tells. She has good insight when dealing with people untrained in masking their intentions. This helps with spotting liars, helping to recognize tension, or knowing the right thing to say to help deescalate a situation among other things.

Pulse of the City: Life on the street, especially for a grifter, lends itself well to meeting interesting people. She has a decent connection with other street performer, homeless population, and even some shady individuals she has used for fencing stolen items. This gives her a degree of street cred when dealing with lesser criminal entities, as a result she is very unlikely to act against these types of people if they are not openly physically hurting others.

Plenty to Say: She will almost always have a witty retort. Yes, that's a skill.

Abilities

Escape Artist: Incredibly flexible, able to squirm her way through tight spaces our out of the grasp of someone who may wish to do her harm.

Parkour: A remarkable sense of flow and movement when it comes to freerunning. While it may be a hobby for most, she puts it to a more practical use by fleeing from potentially botched cons and hustles.

Physical Weaknesses
Weakbody: While she is physically fit and athletic for her size, her innate physical strength isn't great. Even a normal person could overpower her with greater raw strength or technique.
Untrained: While Tyler has been in her fair share of scuffles before, she has no real training expertise. She would more likely choose to flee than fight without her powers to help her.

Mental Weaknesses
Entrapment: Harbors an intense fear of being locked up with no means of escape. She values her freedom above all things and to have that stripped from her is frightening.
Distrustful: Spending most of her free time as a bit of a grifter and a con artist, she holds a natural distrust for other people, especially the nice ones. Much like her own ideas of we interest, she assumes everyone has a selfish core and some sort of angle to their deeds.
Ego: Tyler has been on her own for quite some time, coupled with her budding powers, she has an inflated self of self worth. She believes herself more cunning and capable than her lack of experience really justifies.

Equipment
Swiss Army Knife: Simple second hand item. The blade is pretty dull, but she finds the rest of the other tools useful.
Lucky Lighter: An old scratched up silver flip lighter with a small gold four leaf clover embossed into the body of the lighter. While she doesn't smoke, this was one of her early pickpocket scores and she regards it as a good luck charm.
Ipod: She is never without her Ipod and headphones. Aside from being a form of entertainment, it also aids to keep her powers online by absorbing loud music.
Army Jacket: An old jacket given to her when she first started living on the streets. It came from a well meaning, slightly greasy old man, but it was a token of good will that she is never really without. She helps to pay the gesture forward by bringing him food and sometimes booze if she manages to score some.
Burner Phone: A clunky junk phone with rechargeable minutes and a texting plan.



Personality
Tyler is a bright young girl who can brighten up any room she walks into, literally and figuratively. Her seemingly friendly and outgoing nature however, is mostly an act. While she would love to actually be that girl, her personal experience with how dim and dark the world can be has left her jaded. Nobody however would trust a slightly bitter, cynical street rat though. So she puts on the happy face that has become second nature to her at this point. There are a select few who have seen her genuinely happy, but its not a list that gets added to obtain given her general distrust of most anyone she meets. Deep down though, she really does want to be better, she just doesn't know how to go about doing it so often finds herself tumbling back down into bad habits.

Her world view is very much centralized on herself. It isn't that she is incapable of empathizing with others, its just that she is scared for her own well being over others. This will make her unreliable in a pinch if she feels in danger to the point she might abandon any would be allies. While she would never be proud of such cowardice, in her mind she would justify it as having been a lost cause and feel she made the right choice.

She has a massive dislike of entitled people, especially those who have or come from money. People who openly flaunt their wealth may find her on their heels, far more willing to actually steal from them and to give back to the less fortunate (including herself). Somewhat hypocritical in nature, she has very little tolerance for dealing with people with large egos and if she cant move away from them, she will be sure to throw at least verbal jabs their way.


Family Members:
Birth Parents: Unknown
Foster Mother: Felicia Vines (Last Recorded)
Place of Origin: New Mexico, United States (Earth)

History
Given up at birth, Tyler was a child of the system. Bounced from foster home to foster home, often times in the company of many other children both older or younger than her. She learned at an early age not to get comfortable in any one place, and only trust herself. Adults were full of empty promises, and friends only lasted until the next move. This was the start of her now firmly developed loner tendencies, learning how to be more independent and take care of herself. While she picked up plenty of good life lessons, her schooling was never great, often times resulting in lack luster grades and a fair share of bullying at the hands of bigger kids.

Back then she had even less controls over her gifts than she does now. After a particularly harsh bout of harassment, she unknowingly shoved another girl down a flight of stairs with her force powers. No one had witnessed exactly what happened and Tyler was baffled. She claimed the other girl just jumped, she swore she saw it happen, while the other girl, who thankfully was alright save for some bruises, claimed she was shoved. Rather than face another round of scolding and reprimand from her foster family and the school... she ran. Unaware of where to go, she knew she needed to go someplace big, somewhere she could easily hide. Jump City was the place to be, and just a few states over. She got herself aboard a bus and was off, leaving behind her old life.

It was especially rough goings early on the street. Often times going to bed cold and hungry in a back alley someplace. She caught the eye of some of the other local homeless population and they took a shine to her. Raised as one of their own, she picked up plenty of tricks and became the bread winner for many of the people who first helped her out. People she found, were often times far more sympathetic to helping a young girl on the street then the elderly, so she turned to petty crime and rigged games of chance to pull in money. These days she doesn't have quite as many mouths to feed. All the action in Jump City has been a bit too much for some, diving them out of the city to places less infested with the strange and unusual. It suits her fine though. She still dreams big but acts small, earning pocket change on the streets at the expense for others, aimlessly wondering what exactly lets her do some of the strange things she can do.



Tyler's eyes clamped down hard as a stray beam of light came through the gaping crack in the wall at just the right angle to lay siege to her eyelids with laser precision. This wasn't the first time nor the last time the afternoon had saw fit to ruin her slumber, reminding the young girl there were things to be done. That didn't mean she had to like it... for the record, she didn't. There was no place to run, nowhere to hide from it either. She had painstakingly hung her hammock here, a task she was less than enthused to try and repeat after the crumbling supports of the ruined building has foiled most of her other attempts to do so. So with a sigh, she turned her head and opened squinting eyes, checking her footing before slipping out of the suspended tarp to drop onto creaking wood boards on all fours.

"Another great day to be alive." She huffed with less than a hint of sarcasm lacing her words like a poison coated dagger. Raising up to stand, she bent herself back, hands gripping her side as she let her spine give a few small audible pops. That was the ticket. With a small smile on her face she stepped into her nearby shoes, wiggling her feet snuggly into them, leaving the laces undone. She wasn't going far, just the small wash bowl she had set up in what had been the kitchen at one point. There was no need to risk tetanus to brush her teeth after all.

Stepping over a collapsed wooden beam, she sauntered up to the dried up sink that head her clean bowl, peering other the dust coated window beyond. A bit of bustle of the street, but without knowing the time it was hard to know if it was the regular sort for this point in the day. It didn't really matter. She had to make the hike to midtown, or catch a ride there. Had she been earlier she could have hitched a ride with the garbage trucks, they didn't seem to mind her company so long as she had a few good jokes to tell to pass the time. Oh well. She would take her time, it wasnt like the good spots would still be left by the time she got there.

So let me start off by saying omigod she's so cute and also I'm SUPER into this gimmick. Kinda reminds me of an old character of mine, actually!

But there are some teeny tiny issues we need to iron out...


For starters, specifically how much can she lift with her forcefields? Does it vary? To what degree? Also you mention these things are pretty taxing. So my assumption is 'limitless as long as she can keep it up'

But at what point does her mind and mutation start to fail her? We'll need to iron out feats and limits before we move any further.

Yup yup, totally understandable. I wasn't specific with most of those things primarily because I don't have a good reference on what to set in stone and be considered reasonable. I'm not looking to have her capable of reaching any heights of her powers save for possibly key character defining moments as I prefer to keep her in a place where I can have fun with developing her as a character and a less experienced/skilled superhuman. I'd be more than happy to work with staff to bring her powers in line with what anyone feels is fair, I'm in this for the story telling aspect, not the power fantasy side of things. A few of my personal thoughts on power specifics I had when thinking on it further:

Visibility:
Innately, her force fields and simple constructs can be invisible. Walls, dome, platforms, her little "empowerment" shell. She has the ability to color them if wanted or illuminate them like in the case of her flash gobs. Regardless of how they are when she creates them, when strain is placed upon them, they become visible. So if someone were to punch one for instance, it would take on a color whatever shape it was in would be apparent after that point.

I liked the flavor of them remaining slightly transparent, unless otherwise created to not be, and becoming more and more opaque as they reach a breaking point, giving a sort of brittle look and feedback before finally shattering. I figured if she were to make something complex, like that big hand example, such a thing would have to be visible.

Strength:
My ultimate goal is to have her be able to be a good team asset as someone who focuses on a more supportive roll with a creative side use with her powers. As such, I'd ideally like for her to be able to keep her barriers up against mundane things such as generic gunfire or normal melee weapons. I envisioned the simpler the construct and smaller the surface area, the easier it is for her to keep up.

Use of her powers requires two key components. Focus and energy.

Focus is the mental aspect. Not only her creative center for making the constructs, but allowing them to function. It isn't an automated process where she can just slap down a platform and have it raise all on its own. Its something she has to actively focus on. The amount depends on the complexity of the construct, what it is doing, and how strong it needs to be to carry or push whatever is working opposite of it. I would liken the mental strain to how one normally sees telekinesis being portrayed.

Energy is how much power she has access to, generally it would be stored up from use of her absorption ability, though in theory she could be "plugged" into a source of power to draw directly from that if needed, but regardless of where her energy comes from its almost always going to be a finite thing. The stronger the force opposing her force fields, the more energy she would have to use to push back against it to keep a barrier from breaking.

Something as simple as making a mid air step stool for her to hop from being low cost low maintenance to something larger impacting it becoming more draining. My primary goal for her, long term, is to have team based viability in protecting allies, so at its greatest capacity I would estimate she would be able to shield people from things like bullets, heavy falling debris, or a temporary barrage from another super powered individual.

Limitations:
Stored Energy: How much she has in her/access to when using her powers. When she has no more power stockpiled and no way to get more, she is just a squishy human.
Focus: Mental concentration. The more mental strain she is under, the less complex her force fields can be, and likely more vulnerable she is. She cant exactly be flipping around the battlefield when she has to apply all her focus on keeping up a barrier from something beating on it. I imagine there will be points where she gets pushed too far and probably just passes out from mental fatigue as well.
Understanding the balance: Does she know how much strength she needs to pour into a field when she makes it? If something meets or breaks her expectation, it will likely break through right away. Its just like figuring out the logistics for a load bearing wall, if she sets it up too weak, its going to collapse on impact. I imagine as she grows as a character and works with other people and gets real experience with her powers, this wont be as much of an issue.

Early on, I want her powers to fall out on her. I want to see her crash and burn a bit, to give her a good reason to learn and develop. Its one of the main reasons I wanted to start her at a point where she has no real application of experience. Like any skill, it should take time and practice to master, and right now she has had no reason to use most of the powers as listed in the ways I have presented them. Those are the goal.

This was way more rambly and nonsensical then I intended it to sound. Bottom line is, if ya'll need hard numbers for these things, I am fine with whatever the staff thinks works well for it. I'm not terribly picky so long as the application of her powers is still there enough to make her viable to help safeguard allies.

So around what point would it take to crack those walls? Can Batgirl and Robin get a running start and kick through it, or will it take Cyborg or Cinderblock?

If she had visual confirmation someone was coming at her, and threw one up... assuming she was at full energy capacity, it would likely take people on the super strength end of the spectrum ala Cyborg/Cinderblock to pound on it for a bit to make headway/crack it. Assuming her power supply was low, I would imagine even a normal person hitting on it enough with a weapon or with trained strikes would be able to eventually run her down to the point of it breaking.

Both these cases are strictly her holding a defensive position and opposition having room to come at her any way they wanted.

Ya know what, I'll allow that. Obviously, subject to change if we ever feel a need for that.

My sincere thanks.