Villains & Vigilantes: Rosalie Burke/Dart

[runawaystory]

Biography

Raised by a struggling single mother, Rosalie grew up hungry for power, respect, and stability. Her mother, who had high hopes for Rosalie attending university, was quite dismayed when Rosalie chose to apply for the Manticore Knights instead.

Despite coming from a relatively unremarkable (and probably comparatively poor) background, Rosalie proved herself to be a dedicated and ambitious Squire with an unrivalled work ethic. Upon her graduation to full Knight, the Manticore granted her powers in the form of an Item that allowed her to induce hallucinations in a single target, a localized form of illusion powers.

[ETA: As a Squire, Rosalie played a role in the Kau Lung Incursion, which occurred five IC years ago.]

Everything went more or less smoothly for Rosalie's first handful of missions. However, her luck ran out on the next one due to [REDACTED] during [REDACTED] in [REDACTED]. Rosalie's team limped back to Manticore Knight HQ exhausted and riddled with injuries, though they had ultimately succeeded, probably. In addition to more mundane injuries, Rosalie wound up with her Item fused to her left arm and a considerable upgrade to her powers.

At Jaunt start, Rosalie is currently at the Newport training academy to finish recuperating from her injuries and practice with her new powers.

Notable Relationships

Elisabeth Bell/The Wraith (Sabetha) - Childhood friends from different sides of the tracks. They grew up together and became Squires together. However, Sabetha dropped out while Rosalie continued on to become a Knight. Despite their rather different life paths, they remain close friends and keep in touch. However, in recent years their friendship has experienced increasing strain due to the number of secrets they are keeping from each other. Rosalie has encountered the Wraith before but does not know that the Wraith and Elisabeth are one and the same.

Drake/Eclipse (Tim Drake) - Another pair who became Squires together, developing a mutual respect for each other. When they became Knights they were frequently deployed together due to their complementary power sets and they have a good working relationship. However, in recent years Rosalie has noticed that Drake, formerly a vibrant and enthusiastic soul, has become deeply depressed. While she doesn't feel like she can bring it up in a way that will be helpful and not wreck their working relationship, she also feels concerned for his state of mind. And, as apparently the only one who's noticed anything, she feels greater and greater pressure to do something about it.

Mako Adams/Psyche (Naoto Shirogane) - Oh god why is the creepy sensor Exorcist stalking me.

[REDACTED]/Stinger - One part hero worship to many more parts oh god please let me not make a fool of myself.

Power Details

Mundane: As a Manticore Knight, Rosalie is naturally highly trained in a variety of areas, and is something of a jack of all trades. She's an excellent hand-to-hand combatant, excellent sniper, and quite good at systems intrusion. She is very good at undercover work too. Rosalie used to get tapped for PR purposes a lot because she ticks off two boxes for Diverse Publicity Shots bingo successful rags-to-riches stories make the Knights look good she knows how to smile charmingly for the camera, deliver approved answers naturally, and had a very cool-looking Item that photographed well.

Item Arm: The magical Item she used was once an excitingly mysterious bracer. It has now fused with her left arm, apparently permanently, and transformed the entire limb as a result. Her arm is now covered in shriveled, leathery red skin and has some new properties: muted sensation, imperviousness to extreme temperatures, and resistance to damage. However, it is not noticeably stronger or faster than it was before the fusion.

Item Power: Originally, her Item allowed Rosalie to induce hallucinations, essentially creating localized illusions. She could make a person sense things that weren't there or fail to sense things that were there. In order for her power to take effect, she has to focus on the person whose perceptions she wants to manipulate.

After the fusion accident, Rosalie now has a considerably upgraded version of this power. She can manipulate more people at once and can exert greater control over the hallucination, though there is an inverse relationship here. More people = less complete hallucination, less people = more complete hallucination. However, the caveat about consciously selecting targets is still in place. If she wanted to go unnoticed, she couldn't project a field of "you can't sense I'm here" and walk through a crowd. She'd have to focus on each and every individual she wants to not see her. As such, her power works best when she only needs to affect a small number of clearly identifiable people.

The nature of the hallucinations she can induce has also changed. She can effect more senses simultaneously and, when focused on just one person, even swap out a person's entire sensory input for whatever she chooses, rather than just altering part of it. She could make something up completely fantastical in that scenario. She could affect more than the five basic senses, affect sense of time passing, and so on. It's a matter of concentration, knowledge, and training -- all of which she's still acquiring, since this power upgrade is a very recent event.

TL;DR: She went from Emerald Sustrai's Semblance to Uchiha Itachi's Tsukuyomi.

OK but why Dart for the cool superhero name??? Dart as in poison dart frog as in those frogs whose toxins make you hallucinate horribly and then die. Also because she's a crack shot and excellent sniper.

THE MISSION THAT WENT SOUTH

Being an account of the mission that resulted in Rosalie's power upgrade. It's basically a hasty adaptation of her canon backstory and it has nothing to do with anything whatsoever. Still needs to be reviewed for Jaunt compatibility.

Most of the details are hush-hush though the results (one Knight dead, one retired, one with an Item fused into her arm) are probably public knowledge. At least among the Knights.

Reports came in of a magic book that was causing troubles at an abandoned house in rural England, warping the environment and creating creepy atmosphere effects. The mission was deemed an excellent opportunity to give some of the newer recruits -- all with a handful of missions under their belts but nowhere near veteran status -- a bit of practice without an experienced Knight holding their hands. A team of five (four of the newer recruits and an older Knight, no longer in good standing, given a chance to redeem himself) went to the house.

After fighting their way to the creepy basement where the book was being kept, nabbing the book, and heading back out, the book revealed itself to be a) a lot more powerful than anyone had realized and b) unwilling to leave the house. The team was sucked back into a survival horror scenario, a pocket world under the house's influence, with all communications cut off before they could call for back-up. Furthermore, Rosalie's Item, a magic bracer, began to react oddly the longer they were confined to the book's sphere of influence. Though it had been considered an inert Item whose properties were well understood, the bracer started changing shape and melding to her arm, even taking over control of the limb at times.

Finally, during a last-ditch push to get away from the book, one of the Knights died while destroying the book and its influence once and for all. Free, the Knights radioed for back up and were escorted back to HQ for treatment and debriefing. The Knight who sacrificed himself received a hero's funeral. Of the remaining four Knights, one of them retired from service and two were reassigned to regular duties as soon as they were fit for them. Rosalie was quarantined while her arm was poked and prodded by Knights and their staff in order to catalog the phenomenon and ensure her arm and new powers were deemed safe. Once all were satisfied on those points, she was then sent to the Newport training academy to re-acclimate to her new limb and powers while under the watchful eye of the Newport base's staff.

It's still not clear how or why the bracer interacted with the book the way it did. Generally it's chalked up to an unfortunate coincidence, one of the many mysteries of the Spirit World. All four of the remaining Knights' accounts of the mission agree with each other and all of them check out as truthful; there is nothing to suggest that they may be lying. Extensive examination of Rosalie's arm showed it to be completely inert, no different from the bracer pre-mission. However, the fusion seems to be permanent and the bracer unrecoverable.