Masks 2

Work in progress!

Name: Fionola MacEachthighearna.
Aliases: Finn Faulkner (chosen as her professional name because Anglophones are terrible at pronouncing Gaelic shit!!!)
Date of Birth: October 12th, 2026.
Place of Birth: Minerva, New York, USA.
Place of Residence: Great Bay City, Rhode Island, USA.
Appearance: A tall, pale, lithe woman with short red hair styled upwards in a big ol' feathered swoop. Bowie-esque hair. Hair that looks like it's as windswept as the dunes, except it's been swept into a damn stylish arrangement, unlike actual windswept hair, which just sorta gets to be a frizzy mess. Hazel eyes, wide nose, and a bright smile. Keeps kind of a semi-punk aesthetic in terms of style. Lots of leather jackets, jeans, plaid, and t-shirts in her closet. Typically wearing a shit-eating grin.
Personality: A woman of immense determination, Fionola manages to be hopeful without sacrificing realism. She's the sort to look at a bad situation, recognize its awfulness, and - in the absense of a more viable moral option - charge straight in. Some might call this recklessness - charging in fully aware of danger, moving when the odds are against you. She calls it the only sane way to survive in a world so utterly hopeless as the one she was born in. The deck is stacked against normal folk anyhow, and if she avoided every situation that might lead to her painful, painful death, she'd not have come to the big city in the first place!
She's fairly cheery, though since that cheeriness is often augmented by sarcasm and flippancy, she can sometimes seem rather uncouth. She always means well, but it's easy to get the impression that she doesn't actually care about the things she's doing. Something of an alcoholic.
Powers, Skills, and/or Resources:
Skills
Being a private eye, Fionola's extremely perceptive! Her work has also trained her to get into places she shouldn't be without being noticed - stealth, lockpicking, and the works are key! This also means she's a pretty talented escape artist. She also knows her way around a gun (especially pistols) and is a pretty competent brawler.
Powers
Latent magical abilities! Unbeknownst to her, she's descended from wizards on both sides of her family, and has a strong potential for magical ability which has, thus far, gone utterly untapped.
Resources
Friends!! She's made plenty of allies across the city - people she's worked with, people she's helped through her work, and people who she's just plain friendly with. She can tap these resources for information when she needs to - provided she can make it worth it for them, of course. Also an apartment! It's a two-bedroom one-bathroom place with a living room that gives way to a kitchen, separated by a divider. It's fairly small overall, but the fact that it's got two bedrooms is pretty sick.

Biography:

SpoilerShow

Born to a single mother in upstate New York after an unremarkable night spent with a mysterious stranger, Fionola was raised on the outskirts of a world that was falling apart. As the MegaCorps grew, the idyllic forested horizons of her childhood were replaced by a distant landscape of of concrete and steel. The small township of Minerva grew more and more reclusive as the banks of the Hudson to the south grew more and more dominated by clashes between pirates and MegaCorp police patrol boats. Soon enough, the township found itself voting to move further into the forest to avoid trouble all together.

Were children allowed a vote, Fionola would have been terribly against such a course of action. Ignoring the world doesn't make it go away, she would have said, and if there are people out there who need help, it's everyone's duty to help them. Unfortunately, she was only eight, and the vote was near unanimous anyhow.

Fionola and her mother fought over the matter for years, until finally, after a heated argument, the younger MacEachthighearna managed to remind her mother of why she'd come to the States in the first place. It didn't matter if it was dangerous; living itself was dangerous, and a little more danger was necessary to live a life worth living. Her mother dusted off her old contact list, and managed to get Fionola a room with an old friend. The two would separate - Minerva still needed a doctor, after all - but fifteen year old Fionola would go off to the big city and see what work life would give her.

What surprised her most about city life wasn't the totalitarian nature of it, or the disgustingly wide class divide - she'd expected all of that, and she knew it was far out of her power to fix that sort of thing. No, what struck her was the absolutely unnecessary nature of some of the suffering. The corps had absolute power, but people would never get answers about what had happened to their loved ones who were stolen into the night. They would be left hurting over those questions for all their lives, unless someone helped them out.

Fionola had found her calling. She would be a detective. She'd find answers where no one else could. She might not be able to take down the corps, but she could lessen the pain their inhuman system perpetuated upon others - even if it was just a little bit.

Friends, Family, Acquiantances, Rivals, Enemies, and anybody else:

Friends and Family

Slaine MacEachthighearna

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Name: Slaine MacEachthighearna
DOB: 05/17/1997
Place of Birth: Mordun, Holy Isle, Firth of Clyde, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, United Kingdom
Place of Residence: Minerva, New York, USA.
Height: 6'3".
Build: Somewhat pear-shaped.
Hair Color: Redheaded.
Eye Color: Blue
Description: Warm voice; somewhat round faced compared to her daughter, and with gentler eyes, but otherwise looks similar. Cool, calm (sounding) voice with a thick Scots Gaelic accent.
Skills, Powers, and/or Resources: Doctor; knows her way around a fight.
Personality: Hotheaded, more than happy to throw fists in a fight. Still generally sweet, and ultimately a caring and kind person.
Biography: Born to a small township of Highlander Scots living out in the Hebrides islands, Slaine's people never stopped resisting the English. The town itself, with a population of about 300, is deeply nestled in the heights of the mountains, and is unincorporated into the United Kingdom itself. In spite of this, they've managed to stay up to date on technology by pirating television and wifi from other settlements on the island and nearby islands.

Slaine's early life was happy. She lived peacefully with her parents and her grandmother. Her father was the town's local doctor/healer, and he trained her in his craft. Her grandmother told her tall tales from her youth on, tales about how she was once a wizard, tales of their ancestors fighting supernatural creatures, tales of the creatures that waited in the dark. She only ever thought of these stories of faerie tales, and put them behind her as she she grew. After the Angelic Crisis of 2020, Slaine could ignore the suffering in the world no longer. After much blustering, she left her family behind, headed to America, and started putting her doctoring skills to use in the thoroughly devastated Great Bay City. All went well for a few years, but when she got pregnant after a brief, unexciting encounter with a mysterious man named Nick Urias, she was forced to reevaluate her priorities. Things were getting increasingly worrisome within the city, and even with the efforts of the city's heroes - most notably Watchwoman and Archon (AKA Isidora Cruz) - things were still getting progressively worse. To provide a better life for her daughter, she left the cities and moved to the community of Minerva, New York. She still lives there today, even though her daughter has returned to the city.

Detective Amalia Giugovaz

SpoilerShow

Name: Amalia Giugovaz
DOB: 3/28/2022
Place of Birth: Great Bay City, RI, USA.
Place of Residence: Great Bay City, RI, USA.
Height: 5'6".
Build: Athletic.
Hair Color: Black.
Eye Color: Brown.
Description: Hard features. Olive skin. Eyebrows on fuckin' point.
Skills, Powers, and/or Resources: She's a detective, and a damn good one. Good with a gun, intelligent, and has whatever resources the department affords her.
Personality: A real hardass with a strong sense of justice. Has a rigid sense of right and wrong. Usually falls on the side of the law, but isn't heartless, and has a soft spot for kids.
Biography: Born after the many crises that devastated Great Bay City, Amalia's formative years were spent in the ruined shell of the district once known as the Sirloin. Already the poorest district of the city, the Sirloin found itself destroyed by super-phenomena more than almost any other region in the USA, surpassed only by the flooded ruins of West Texas. It was immolated by a daemonic terrorist known as the Burning Butcher three times, the center of conflicts between local heroes and the fascist terrorist group STORM, blown up by the Aliens who invaded in 2016, torn apart by robots during the AI invasion of 2018, and shredded to bits by the Angelic Incident of 2020.

Growing up in this environment taught Amalia that there was a thin line between peace and conflict. The whole of the world rested on the head of a pin, and the only way to preserve it was through order. She bought in whole-sale to the MegaCorps line that they were doing what was necessary. She saw the benefits. She was one of the lucky few whose family got to stay in their apartment when the government had it rebuilt. Unlike so many of the children of Great Bay, she got to go to school, got to have dreams. She wanted to become a detective - someone who would make sure no one got away the way the butcher did, someone who kept the city safe, someone who stopped chaos from spilling over once again and destroying the city she so dearly loved.

Rarest of all, she got her dreams. Now she's a detective, and she often finds herself assigned to the same cases Finn is hired onto. Amalia's not (openly) fond of the PI, and very much would like to get her off her ass. Still, there's some warmth there - much as she wants Finn off her cases, she can't deny the scot's effectiveness, nor can she help but find her quest for truth utterly unrelatable.

Thomas Sawadogo: Bartender at Heaven's Night, a jazz bar that just so happens to be Fionola's favorite. The grandson of Burkinabe immigrants. Has a few lip piercings, dresses very formally on the job, but usually hits a balance between punk and goth while off the clock. An amicable guy, making his way fairly well all things considered, and well liked by all the patrons of the bar. Is the only person Finn knows who knows the bar's mysterious owner.

Travis and Sandra Hawthorne: A husband and wife, friends of Slaine who bonded over their shared efforts towards relieving the destroyed city. Transferred their apartment lease to Fionola after deciding to move someplace smaller once their son moved out. Unbeknownst to Finn and her mom, they're an ex-crime fighting duo, previously known as the Taser Totalitarian and the Watchful Warden. Their son has joined an underground resistance network and is currently outside the city.

Severin Denault: Finn's roommate. Son of a minor city official, of middle-upper class background. Big ol' hipster jackass taking a year off from school to 'see how the poor live'. In constant surprise about the 'odd' practices of the poor. Finn hopes that someday he'll realize that it's not a matter of choice. She is not INCREDIBLY hopeful about this prospect.