Post by rickytick on Sept 6, 2009 21:24:37 GMT -5
Player nick: RickyTickles
Name: Louisa "Lou" Capelli
Codename: Slyther
Status: Villain
DoB/Age: 23 years old
Height: 5'7"
Weight: 120 lbs
Powers:
* Shape-shifting - has the ability to shift into any sized snake, complete with the venom sacks and fangs of poisonous snakes, though she retains her human state of consciousness.
* Reptilian senses - Her sense of sight, taste, touch, and smell are that of a snakes, though her hearing is still human including an inner and outer ear. In addition, she has a rim of heat sensor "pits" around her lips.
Weakness:
* Vulnerability to Temperature - As a reptilian creature, she is cold blooded. This makes her invisible to thermal imaging, however, it also means she has to regulate her body temperature through the use of heating pads.
* Altered appearance - She is unable to shift completely back into human form. Her skin and eyes remain reptilian. As such, she must shed her skin regularly, or else risk accumulating several layers of membrane over her eyes, resulting in blindness. Over time, these patches must be surgically removed if she neglects them.
* Reptilian healing - As with any reptile, stitches are pointless. While stitches might close the wound, she must shed repeatedly to heal properly. As such, the very next time she heals, the stitches would be ripped out with the layer of skin, doing more harm than good, or they would accumulate layers of old skin, making her prone to infection.
* Sensitivity to Light - While she's capable of controlling the slits in her eyes to be able to walk around in the daytime, sudden bright lights, like those of a camera flash, or the sparks from welding not only cause blindness but a searing pain.
* Painful shift - While shifting from human form into a snake didn’t hurt, changing back forces the growth of new limbs, which is very painful.
Special Skills:
* Marksmanship - Her reptilian senses have always given her an edge, however being able to "taste" where the enemy is, gives her an uncanny ability to hit her targets at a great distance.
* Swimming - Like many snakes, she's a natural swimmer, able to move quickly and smoothly through the water, even while in human form.
Background/History:
Life for Lou was a typical Italian upbringing in the Bronx. Rough and tough. Her father took off long before she was born, and her mother died in childbirth, leaving Lou to live with her grandmother. Her grandmother, however wasn't a stay at home and bake you some cookies grandmother. Not in this day and age. Her grandmother worked two jobs to keep Lou fed, and still managing to put something away for her to go off to college with.
As such, when Lou was old enough, she became a latch-key kid, getting herself up, dressed and ready for school on her own every morning, and coming home to put dinner on the table for both her and her grandmother every night. Chores needed to be done, and with her grandmother working herself to death, that left those responsibilities to Lou. Still, she managed time to play with the neighborhood children.
Like most kids her age from the Bronx, Lou learned that "family" meant pride in your neighborhood, respect for your neighborhood, and more importantly, loyalty to your crew before anything else. Growing up in that kind of atmosphere led Lou into a life of "crime" though really, how much trouble can a teenager get into?
Now while the classic "mob" didn't really exist in this day and age, gangs fed by their Italian pride were still going strong, and Lou, being the responsible, independent, and spirited young woman she was, caught the eye of a thirteen year old local street gang leader named Joey Bianchi. It wasn't long before Lou became a cliché mob maul, supporting Joey and his actions as well as assisting whenever necessary.
After a couple of years, the gang life became something Lou could depend on. Joey, now sixteen, had dropped out of high school and made enough of a name for himself to be able to start taking on bigger and better things, at least so he thought. He refused, however to let Lou do the same, though that's all she dreamed of. Joey, while not the brightest bulb on the block understood that someday something bad was probably going to happen to him. And when that day came, if Lou couldn't stand on her own two feet, she'd be crushed under the next guy‘s boot heel. That meant being passed around from guy to guy as people fought for power, or being turned out. While Joey and Lou weren't Ozzy and Harriet...he loved her very much and didn't want to see her trapped in that kind of life. While he would be mapping out and planning heists, Lou would be in the corner working on her school work…sometimes at gunpoint, though she knew that Joey would never lift a hand to hurt her. When she didn’t have her nose in the books, she had her eyes trained down the sight of a gun. After all, maul’s who didn’t know how to handle a gun didn’t stay a maul for long. They ended up being corpses.
Money started pouring in from the real gangsters in town who used Joey and his boys to do the dangerous stuff like boosting cars, burglaries and things like that. At the same time, Lou's grandmother, working at the local bread factory during the day, and a local bar at night, was slowly becoming very sick. Unable to afford things like doctor's visits, medical insurance or even the time off...she died of pneumonia when Lou was seventeen.
Joey's determination when it came to Lou's studies paid off. When appearing in court, Lou's 4.0 grade point average, as well as the proof that while Lou's grandmother had been the primary source of income, Lou had been the one seeing to the daily household responsibilities, granted her emancipation. In addition, her grandmother had left everything to Lou. While that wasn't much, it was a house, a classic 1970 Barracuda that had once belonged to her grandfather, and about twenty thousand dollars. Not a mint, but enough to keep herself afloat long enough for Joey to move in and help keep her supported.
A couple years later, Joey, now doing quite well for himself as an illegal figurehead, proposed to Lou. For Lou it was a dream come true. The two of them had never been romantic, always being realists at heart, but Joey was the only guy she'd ever been with, he was smart, had money, and he loved her. Like a lot of women (especially young women from the Bronx), that was all that she needed. Romance was over-rated anyway. The kind of thing that lasted was based on what she and Joey had built together.
Like with a lot of dreams, someone somewhere had a tendency to shake you, and end it long before you were ready for them to.
While Joey did his best to keep his nose clean, like a lot of men, his love for Lou proved to be his downfall. Not directly, mind you, but as the wedding approached, he was bedazzled by dreams of taking Lou out of the Bronx and traveling the world with her. That greedy desire made him start taking risks and expanding into shark infested waters. Swimming with the big boys, you tend to get bit.
At Joey's request, Lou had taken a job at a local chemical plant as the president's receptionist. The president gave her the job at the request of Joey too...it's amazing what a little blackmail and a great big gun can do. This provided a legitimate front for the money that Joey was laundering considering they could simply have the president alter her reported salary as needed, using promotions and demotions as an explanation. She was coming home that night late from picking up her wedding dress at the tailor when she noticed a line of fire trucks and police cars on her block. She knew...before she drove past her house, she knew.
As the green Barracuda passed by her home, she found herself rolling over all manner of debris as the pungent scent of gasoline fueled smoke perfumed the air. Joey had been "whacked" and her home was now a burning pile of cinders and ash. With no where to go, and her name synonymously associated with Joey, she abandoned the scene and parked her car in a decent neighborhood and cried herself to sleep, wrought with worry.
Around three am, Lou awoke to find herself being towed into the parking lot of Enzyme Development Corporation where she worked. There was barely enough time to scream before the windshield was kicked in, and she was dragged out of the car. Bound and gagged, men in masks were pointing guns at the security guards and ordering them to take them down to research and development. As panic set in, everything started to become a blur. Overhead lights and sliding doors was all she could make out before she heard the sound of shattering glass and felt a burning sensation spilling across her body.
“If you survive this, I suggest you forget you ever saw me.”
Saw him? The man’s voice was deep and fierce, but she was already blind from the chemicals they had spilled on her. The next thing she knew, she was floating. Her senses had gone numb from shock, and she closed her eyes, thinking she was dead and floating her way on to wherever her soul was meant to be.
A few weeks later, she woke up in a giant glass cage. She tried to speak, but found she couldn’t. Tried to sit up, but found her body felt alien. Looking down at it, she found that where her skin should have been, were scales, where her legs should have been, was only a tail, and where her arms should be was only smooth patches of green and brown. Adrenaline raced through her body and without meaning to, she shifted back into her human form, sprouting the additional limbs that snakes lacked with such pain that it instantly rendered her unconscious again. A few hours passed before she woke up in the basement of Dr. Gene Hardengrove. Slouched over a microscope, Dr. Hardengrove was inspecting a sample of Lou’s blood.
Apparently, the combination of chemicals and reptilian enzymes that her abductors had bathed her in had altered her DNA, somehow fusing it with snake DNA. Some mutants were born the way they were…some were infected…Lou had been accidentally manufactured. Dr. Hardengrove offered Lou a safe place to stay in exchange for allowing him to study her. She agreed, though in the months that followed, she regretted it. Instead of being treated like a guest, she was treated like a pet, and soon grew tired of Dr. Hardengrove’s curiosity. As he became more and more possessive of her, and obsessed with her change, she developed an outright hatred towards him. They ran through daily drills, practicing and testing the limits of her power. Once she was able to completely control her shift, she found she didn’t have to research the snakes she changed into…somewhere buried deep in her DNA was the unwritten “memories” of snakes throughout history. She just knew what to shift into. One night…she decided to shift into a reticulated python and strangled the good doctor before quickly devouring the evidence. It took her more than a week to digest Hardengrove, and a few rough hours of wrestling with her conscience before she was able to take the doctor’s Volvo and head for the hills.
Using Joey’s contacts, she worked her way through the underground making the necessary inquiries to find the man responsible for Joey’s death. While it would be glamorous and exotic to say that the man responsible was some major gangster or some hitman…it had simply been Joey’s competition, Eric Pucciano, an equally small-time operator with ambition. It would also be quite dramatic to say she went in there guns blazing and blew him away in a hail of bullets. The simple truth is one night Eric went to sleep…and the next morning he didn’t. The autopsy reported the presence of Taipan venom.
While it hadn’t been a major concern to her before…Lou was now what she considered to be a mutant. Joey’s gang was slowly dissipating, there were rumors on the street about a place where someone like her could go. Somewhere that could offer her a place to stay. She was bitter and hated the world…why not turn that hatred into a good cause? After all…she’d been watching the news. There were mutant attacks all the time…and she was one hell of a weapon.
Appearance: A young woman with reptilian skin and eyes, and dark hair, though her hair can be sloughed off or recovered with her next shed.
Name: Louisa "Lou" Capelli
Codename: Slyther
Status: Villain
DoB/Age: 23 years old
Height: 5'7"
Weight: 120 lbs
Powers:
* Shape-shifting - has the ability to shift into any sized snake, complete with the venom sacks and fangs of poisonous snakes, though she retains her human state of consciousness.
* Reptilian senses - Her sense of sight, taste, touch, and smell are that of a snakes, though her hearing is still human including an inner and outer ear. In addition, she has a rim of heat sensor "pits" around her lips.
Weakness:
* Vulnerability to Temperature - As a reptilian creature, she is cold blooded. This makes her invisible to thermal imaging, however, it also means she has to regulate her body temperature through the use of heating pads.
* Altered appearance - She is unable to shift completely back into human form. Her skin and eyes remain reptilian. As such, she must shed her skin regularly, or else risk accumulating several layers of membrane over her eyes, resulting in blindness. Over time, these patches must be surgically removed if she neglects them.
* Reptilian healing - As with any reptile, stitches are pointless. While stitches might close the wound, she must shed repeatedly to heal properly. As such, the very next time she heals, the stitches would be ripped out with the layer of skin, doing more harm than good, or they would accumulate layers of old skin, making her prone to infection.
* Sensitivity to Light - While she's capable of controlling the slits in her eyes to be able to walk around in the daytime, sudden bright lights, like those of a camera flash, or the sparks from welding not only cause blindness but a searing pain.
* Painful shift - While shifting from human form into a snake didn’t hurt, changing back forces the growth of new limbs, which is very painful.
Special Skills:
* Marksmanship - Her reptilian senses have always given her an edge, however being able to "taste" where the enemy is, gives her an uncanny ability to hit her targets at a great distance.
* Swimming - Like many snakes, she's a natural swimmer, able to move quickly and smoothly through the water, even while in human form.
Background/History:
Life for Lou was a typical Italian upbringing in the Bronx. Rough and tough. Her father took off long before she was born, and her mother died in childbirth, leaving Lou to live with her grandmother. Her grandmother, however wasn't a stay at home and bake you some cookies grandmother. Not in this day and age. Her grandmother worked two jobs to keep Lou fed, and still managing to put something away for her to go off to college with.
As such, when Lou was old enough, she became a latch-key kid, getting herself up, dressed and ready for school on her own every morning, and coming home to put dinner on the table for both her and her grandmother every night. Chores needed to be done, and with her grandmother working herself to death, that left those responsibilities to Lou. Still, she managed time to play with the neighborhood children.
Like most kids her age from the Bronx, Lou learned that "family" meant pride in your neighborhood, respect for your neighborhood, and more importantly, loyalty to your crew before anything else. Growing up in that kind of atmosphere led Lou into a life of "crime" though really, how much trouble can a teenager get into?
Now while the classic "mob" didn't really exist in this day and age, gangs fed by their Italian pride were still going strong, and Lou, being the responsible, independent, and spirited young woman she was, caught the eye of a thirteen year old local street gang leader named Joey Bianchi. It wasn't long before Lou became a cliché mob maul, supporting Joey and his actions as well as assisting whenever necessary.
After a couple of years, the gang life became something Lou could depend on. Joey, now sixteen, had dropped out of high school and made enough of a name for himself to be able to start taking on bigger and better things, at least so he thought. He refused, however to let Lou do the same, though that's all she dreamed of. Joey, while not the brightest bulb on the block understood that someday something bad was probably going to happen to him. And when that day came, if Lou couldn't stand on her own two feet, she'd be crushed under the next guy‘s boot heel. That meant being passed around from guy to guy as people fought for power, or being turned out. While Joey and Lou weren't Ozzy and Harriet...he loved her very much and didn't want to see her trapped in that kind of life. While he would be mapping out and planning heists, Lou would be in the corner working on her school work…sometimes at gunpoint, though she knew that Joey would never lift a hand to hurt her. When she didn’t have her nose in the books, she had her eyes trained down the sight of a gun. After all, maul’s who didn’t know how to handle a gun didn’t stay a maul for long. They ended up being corpses.
Money started pouring in from the real gangsters in town who used Joey and his boys to do the dangerous stuff like boosting cars, burglaries and things like that. At the same time, Lou's grandmother, working at the local bread factory during the day, and a local bar at night, was slowly becoming very sick. Unable to afford things like doctor's visits, medical insurance or even the time off...she died of pneumonia when Lou was seventeen.
Joey's determination when it came to Lou's studies paid off. When appearing in court, Lou's 4.0 grade point average, as well as the proof that while Lou's grandmother had been the primary source of income, Lou had been the one seeing to the daily household responsibilities, granted her emancipation. In addition, her grandmother had left everything to Lou. While that wasn't much, it was a house, a classic 1970 Barracuda that had once belonged to her grandfather, and about twenty thousand dollars. Not a mint, but enough to keep herself afloat long enough for Joey to move in and help keep her supported.
A couple years later, Joey, now doing quite well for himself as an illegal figurehead, proposed to Lou. For Lou it was a dream come true. The two of them had never been romantic, always being realists at heart, but Joey was the only guy she'd ever been with, he was smart, had money, and he loved her. Like a lot of women (especially young women from the Bronx), that was all that she needed. Romance was over-rated anyway. The kind of thing that lasted was based on what she and Joey had built together.
Like with a lot of dreams, someone somewhere had a tendency to shake you, and end it long before you were ready for them to.
While Joey did his best to keep his nose clean, like a lot of men, his love for Lou proved to be his downfall. Not directly, mind you, but as the wedding approached, he was bedazzled by dreams of taking Lou out of the Bronx and traveling the world with her. That greedy desire made him start taking risks and expanding into shark infested waters. Swimming with the big boys, you tend to get bit.
At Joey's request, Lou had taken a job at a local chemical plant as the president's receptionist. The president gave her the job at the request of Joey too...it's amazing what a little blackmail and a great big gun can do. This provided a legitimate front for the money that Joey was laundering considering they could simply have the president alter her reported salary as needed, using promotions and demotions as an explanation. She was coming home that night late from picking up her wedding dress at the tailor when she noticed a line of fire trucks and police cars on her block. She knew...before she drove past her house, she knew.
As the green Barracuda passed by her home, she found herself rolling over all manner of debris as the pungent scent of gasoline fueled smoke perfumed the air. Joey had been "whacked" and her home was now a burning pile of cinders and ash. With no where to go, and her name synonymously associated with Joey, she abandoned the scene and parked her car in a decent neighborhood and cried herself to sleep, wrought with worry.
Around three am, Lou awoke to find herself being towed into the parking lot of Enzyme Development Corporation where she worked. There was barely enough time to scream before the windshield was kicked in, and she was dragged out of the car. Bound and gagged, men in masks were pointing guns at the security guards and ordering them to take them down to research and development. As panic set in, everything started to become a blur. Overhead lights and sliding doors was all she could make out before she heard the sound of shattering glass and felt a burning sensation spilling across her body.
“If you survive this, I suggest you forget you ever saw me.”
Saw him? The man’s voice was deep and fierce, but she was already blind from the chemicals they had spilled on her. The next thing she knew, she was floating. Her senses had gone numb from shock, and she closed her eyes, thinking she was dead and floating her way on to wherever her soul was meant to be.
A few weeks later, she woke up in a giant glass cage. She tried to speak, but found she couldn’t. Tried to sit up, but found her body felt alien. Looking down at it, she found that where her skin should have been, were scales, where her legs should have been, was only a tail, and where her arms should be was only smooth patches of green and brown. Adrenaline raced through her body and without meaning to, she shifted back into her human form, sprouting the additional limbs that snakes lacked with such pain that it instantly rendered her unconscious again. A few hours passed before she woke up in the basement of Dr. Gene Hardengrove. Slouched over a microscope, Dr. Hardengrove was inspecting a sample of Lou’s blood.
Apparently, the combination of chemicals and reptilian enzymes that her abductors had bathed her in had altered her DNA, somehow fusing it with snake DNA. Some mutants were born the way they were…some were infected…Lou had been accidentally manufactured. Dr. Hardengrove offered Lou a safe place to stay in exchange for allowing him to study her. She agreed, though in the months that followed, she regretted it. Instead of being treated like a guest, she was treated like a pet, and soon grew tired of Dr. Hardengrove’s curiosity. As he became more and more possessive of her, and obsessed with her change, she developed an outright hatred towards him. They ran through daily drills, practicing and testing the limits of her power. Once she was able to completely control her shift, she found she didn’t have to research the snakes she changed into…somewhere buried deep in her DNA was the unwritten “memories” of snakes throughout history. She just knew what to shift into. One night…she decided to shift into a reticulated python and strangled the good doctor before quickly devouring the evidence. It took her more than a week to digest Hardengrove, and a few rough hours of wrestling with her conscience before she was able to take the doctor’s Volvo and head for the hills.
Using Joey’s contacts, she worked her way through the underground making the necessary inquiries to find the man responsible for Joey’s death. While it would be glamorous and exotic to say that the man responsible was some major gangster or some hitman…it had simply been Joey’s competition, Eric Pucciano, an equally small-time operator with ambition. It would also be quite dramatic to say she went in there guns blazing and blew him away in a hail of bullets. The simple truth is one night Eric went to sleep…and the next morning he didn’t. The autopsy reported the presence of Taipan venom.
While it hadn’t been a major concern to her before…Lou was now what she considered to be a mutant. Joey’s gang was slowly dissipating, there were rumors on the street about a place where someone like her could go. Somewhere that could offer her a place to stay. She was bitter and hated the world…why not turn that hatred into a good cause? After all…she’d been watching the news. There were mutant attacks all the time…and she was one hell of a weapon.
Appearance: A young woman with reptilian skin and eyes, and dark hair, though her hair can be sloughed off or recovered with her next shed.