Morgan Karnak was born with an interest in tings being not what they appear. She loved op art, trick photography, surrealism, and especially optical illusions, mirages, and other distortions of visual reality. Throwing herself into the sciences during grade school and college, while transitioning socially and physically, she was prepared to graduate and take the world by storm. Unfortunately, the world wasn't ready for her. Belittling, demeaning, failing to understand er genius. OK, yes, no one else could build things to reproduce her experiments, but that was because they lacked her singular vision of how the devices needed to be constructed. The entire disciplines of engineering and physics needed to be taken apart and rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of principles that her colleagues derided as being more magic than science. When she finally revealed some of her devices to her employer, he was so shocked, so scared by the change in perception of reality, that he fired her on the spot, and blackballed her in the Haven science and engineering community.
The unmitigated fool!
Morgan has had no choice since then but to display the superiority of her vision. To show him. To show them. THO SHOW THEM ALL! Not that she wants to hurt anyone, but flashy crimes help both attract attention and fund her work.
Creation Notes
Oof. The dice did not give me very good stats to work with –
just like Enchanter – and with a 1 on the powers roll I knew I needed to lean
into whatever the dice gave me for powers. Sticking to the Items and Magic
tables I got a Heightened Intelligence (Magic), which could be a good start, but
the 3d10 roll produced a measly 6. The two items, Size Change and Teleportation,
suggested something but I wasn't sure what. I decided to overrule the original
weakness roll (Mute) and moved it up 1 percentage point (Phobia Psychosis)
because I didn't want to have a Mute Hero and a Mute villain battling it out,
and the Phobia/Psychosis roll let me put in a second Infantino's Syndrome
villain.
I dropped the Heightened Intelligence, but used the old page
4-5 rule about upgrading the abilities for characters with fewer powers to make
even her weakness give her an edge, her insane inventing focus from what would
have been the full bore Heightened Intelligence. I could have overruled the +6,
made it like a +26 and kept only one of her items, but the percolating idea of
size change and teleportation had finally surfaced – her growth and shrinking was
all playing with perception – she would move further away and be 'larger' than
what she was looking at, or 'smaller' than what people could see – which then
gets into a fractured nature of reality, stepping through panel borders,
leaving behind two dimensional paper images of herself, and so on. She'd be
very much an 80's-90's Grant Morrison villain, just filtered through 1960's
Flash comics.
I sometimes wonder if doing the character names in alphabet
order helps or hinders this, but in this case it really helped. I had rolled a
3 for Gender (and I use 1-3 Male, 4-6 Female as opposed to the 2E 4/2 which
mirrored the comics up to the early 80's that 2.0 modeled), and then the idea of
the name Fata Morgana (which is an optical illusion of faerie castles on the horizon)
to the bi-gendered nature of the name Morgan, and having Morgan be trans just fit.
It's not something that defines her (the weird bending of role playing based on
comic book reality does that), but it's something that might be explored in one
of her later appearances.
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