| Charade
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| Player: @ChampionsRPer
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[[Image: |300px|]]
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| The Absurd Hero
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| Biographical Data
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| Real Name:
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Penelope Williams
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| Known Aliases:
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The Great Charade
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| Gender:
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Female
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| Species:
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Metahuman
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| Ethnicity:
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Caucasian
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| Place of Birth:
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Ottawa, Canada
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| Base of Operations:
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Millennium City
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| Relatives:
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Aloysius Abercrombie
(Adoptive Legal Guardian)
Alicia Blackmun (Godmother)
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| Characteristics
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| Age:
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18
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| Height:
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5' 4"
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| Weight:
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110 lbs
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| Eyes:
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Blue
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| Hair:
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Red
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| Complexion:
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Pale
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| Physical Build:
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Lithe
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| Physical Features:
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Freckles
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| Status
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| Fame:
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| ██
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██
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██
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██
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██
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██
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██
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██
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██
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Local
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| Alignment:
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| LG
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LN
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LE
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| NG
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TN
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NE
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| CG
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CN
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CE
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| Identity:
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Public
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| Years Active:
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3
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| Citizenship:
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US citizen
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| Occupation:
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Hero
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| Education:
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Highschool Student
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| Marital Status:
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Single
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| Known Powers and Abilities
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| Absurdity
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| Equipment and Paraphernalia
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| None
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| Physical Attributes
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Strength
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Weapon
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Durability
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Armor
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Speed
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Reflexes
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Resistance
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Stamina
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Dexterity
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Agility
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Combat
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Regen
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| Non-Physical Attributes
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Energy
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Psionics
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Telepathy
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Willpower
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Sorcery
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Tech.
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Intel.
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Knowledge
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Charisma
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Bravery
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| MaekadaBoxSlim created by @Maekada
|
Penelope Williams
The girl. The myth. The legend.
The absolute weirdo.
The Absurd Hero.
Who is she?
Even in a world of superheroes and the supernatural, Penny is something of an anomaly.
She's just one of those mysteries that refuses to make any sense.
Her Origin
Penny doesn't remember anything about her past, but she doesn't seem to let that bother her. As far as anyone tell, she first showed up on the streets of Ottawa city in Canada a few years ago. Her earliest memory is getting off of a bus that the bus driver couldn't recall if she'd gotten onto in the first place.
As far as she can remember she's always dressed like a mime. Or is she a clown? Maybe both?
She enjoyed exploring the city and goofing around with random people, playing charades, or doing magic tricks. Everyone assumed she was just another street performer. They didn't even question why she couldn't talk. It was just part of the act. They even gave her tips. They didn't even know her real name. At first they just called her the "charades girl", then eventually just "Charade". It even took a while for anyone to realize that her tricks were more than just tricks.
Charade was in the middle of performing a card trick for a local superhero named Weatherman when there was an explosion at a bank across town. He excused himself and flew off, but Charade decided to tag along. She helped thwart the would-be bankrobbers by distracting them with her goofy antics while Weatherman did all the actual work. And she had a blast doing it. It turns out that supervillains make the best marks for ridicule and practical jokes. Now she wasn't just a street performer, she was a hero, and she liked that. When Weatherman asked about her superpower, she just shrugged.
Eventually rumors and speculations began to spread and questions were being raised. Word made its way to the Trismegistus Council, and one of its members, Aloysius Abercrombie, took notice. The 168 year old scholar only looked like he was in his 40's due to the magical energy he channeled that kept him from aging normally, and he has quite a nose for detecting magic. He suspected her powers might be mystical in origin and he was curious enough to find out.
Getting Adopted
Aloysius took a stay in Ottawa for some time to do his research. The more he tried to learn about her, the more questions were raised. His intentions were purely academic at first, but he found himself taking a liking to her. She had no home, no family, no past, no one to look after her, and that was no life for a teenage girl. Perhaps against his better judgement, he took pity on her and decided to become her legal guardian. Charade wasn't too keen on the idea at first herself, but eventually she warmed up to it. Adopting her, however, wasn't going to be as simple as he had hoped.
As Aloysius soon found out, there were no records about her at all, not even a birth certificate. She didn't even have a real name yet, and being mute sure didn't help. The only name she knew was Charade. He tried suggesting countless names, but she rejected all of them. With a sigh of defeat, he sarcastically suggested throwing a dart at a phonebook. Surprisingly, she agreed, but she was going to make a whole game of it.
She spent the whole day setting up an elaborate Rube-Goldberg machine of dominoes formed from books and other appropriated knickknacks. The finale was a slingshot strapped to a spinning globe that fired a dart which ricocheted around the room before striking one of several hundreds of old phonebook pages she had scattered and taped around the room. Aloysius retrieved the page and read it off for her.
"Penelope Williams."
She bobbled her head back and forth looking a bit unsure.
"Penny?" he cautiously suggested.
She smiled and nodded eagerly.
He sighed in relief. It was settled.
Choosing a birthday was much simpler. As best as he could tell, she was around 14 at the time, so they went with 2003. As for the day and month, Penny knew instantly. April First. It was an obvious choice. He completed the rest of the paperwork on his own, and just like that, it was done. She gathered the few things she had from the abandoned treehouse she'd been living in and moved back with him to his home in Vibora Bay.
A New Life
Aloysius and Penny would develop an interesting relationship. It wasn't so much a father/daughter relationship as a grandfather and his granddaughter, or an uncle and his niece. They undoubtedly care for one another, but they show it in their own ways and give each other their space. Being her legal guardian didn't excuse him from her pranking habits however. In fact he's probably been on the receiving end more than anyone else. Similarly, Aloysius is one of the few people Penny respects and listens to, as well as the only one capable of holding her accountable with scorn and punishment when her jokes get too out of hand.
His first order of business was teaching her to speak. After all, he didn't believe there was any medical reason she should be mute. Like before, he found it easiest to teach her by turning it into a game. He started by getting her to mimic animal noises to strengthen her vocal chords, and within just a few short weeks she was speaking English. She could even perfectly mimic the voices of others, but it took her a while longer before she found her own voice.
He almost immediately regretted it. The only thing worse than a mime is a mime who talks. The jokes, puns, and sarcasm were practically nonstop and almost unbearable for the first few weeks. After that however, Aloysius found out how inquisitive she could be, and how sharp and bright she was. He had thought trying to give her a proper education was going to be a nightmare, but he was delightfully mistaken. She didn't much care for complex math or sciences, but one of her favorite subjects she shared with Aloysius, Magic.
Penny had the same desire to understand how the world worked on a fundamental level, and Aloysius was more than happy to oblige sharing everything he knew about the mystical world. However, her absolute favorite subject as it would turn out, was philosophy. Being 168 years old, Aloysius had quite the library including all the classics from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to Kant, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Nietzsche, and Sartre. He was surprised to see how deep her internal thoughts were, now that she was able to voice them. They'd have long conversations about the nature of reality, morality and ethics, and what it meant to be good and evil.
Penny recalled how she enjoyed being a hero with Weatherman, but she couldn't figure out why. Sure, mocking the villains was fun for her, but no matter how many they'd stop, there always seemed to be more. The fight against evil seemed like a big joke to her. She thought the heroes were just as foolish as the villains they were trying to stop, and that it was all rather pointless in the end. And if that were the case, even making fun of them was just as foolish. Suddenly, she wasn't sure what to do with her life, and for the first time ever, Aloysius saw the poor girl look sad.
He tried to console her as best he could, but he was never the most sentimental type. What he knew was books, and he knew just the one. Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus. He handed it to her and hoped it would help. For the next few days, he never saw her put it down, until one evening she came to him, hugging the book in her arms, smiling, and said, "I get it."
Penny's Philosophy
"All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime…it is itself an absurd phenomenon."
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus is an Absurdist, an existentialist who recognizes the lack of meaning in the world, and humanity's defiant nature to find meaning in it anyway. Like Sisyphus, cursed to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity, only for it to roll back down and start all over again, Camus's final words were, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." With those words, Penny understood why Weatherman and other heroes fought for good. It was a battle that could never be won, but it was the rebellious act of fighting anyway that made it worth it. Despite all the evil in the world, Penny would choose to be happy regardless. Penny wasn't just a hero, she was an Absurd Hero.
As it turned out, this revelation helped Aloysius as well. For months he'd been researching, trying to figure Penny out. Despite all his tests and theories, she was well and truly just an ordinary human teenage girl, if perhaps a bit eccentric. Her powers came from magic, but he couldn't find a source. There was no mystical artifact, no spell, no thaumaturgic aura, no magical creatures, extradimensional entity, or blessing from a deity. Absolutely nothing could explain where she came from, or how and why she could do the things she did. She was well and truly, absurd, and that was as best an answer as he could come up with.
Penny's Powers
Perhaps the hardest thing to explain about Penny is what exactly her superpower is because of its very nature. After all, Absurdity is defined by its unreasonableness. Penny sometimes calls it ImaginAction, but you could consider it a minor form of reality-bending that allows her to break the laws of physics to do things that wouldn't otherwise make any sense. For Penny, this often equates to her doing things that a mime would do, such as making invisible walls, or otherwise following what could be considered to be 'cartoon physics'.
What has perhaps been most baffling to Aloysius is trying to figure out the scope of what she is and isn't capable of doing, as even Penny doesn't know for sure. She describes it as being entirely intuitive. She has no idea how it happens, she just does it, and she doesn't know what she can't do unless she tries. As far as Aloysius can tell, there does seem to be some kind of rules or limitations to her powers, but he has no way of knowing what they are as they seem to change.
She can't, for example, just imagine something away out of existence. Penny described it as trying really hard to NOT think about something. She also can't just create anything she wants, like pulling a supercomputer, an atomic bomb, or the cure for the common cold out of her pocket. Her powers, for the most part, don't seem to be able to affect other people, aside from hitting them with objects, but even then they don't always seem to follow the normal laws of physics. One of her favorite moves is firing invisible bullets from her finger guns, but even those seem to range in force from that of a nerf dart to a rubber bullet.
Another of Penny's favorite tricks is her ability to make quick costume changes. Sometimes the clothes come from her closet, but sometimes she's not sure where they come from, or where they go when she takes them off. She's also remarkably talented at mimicking people's voices, but she's not able to perfectly imitate someone like a shapeshifter would. The best Penny could do is a crude parody, which she tends to do rather often.
The closest thing that Aloysius has come across to describe the bizarre limitations of Penny's powers is The Rule of Funny, that is, that the limitations of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its funniness. Any violation of continuity, logic, physics, or common sense is permissible if the result gets enough of a laugh. Aloysius has speculated that these restrictions may be self-imposed by Penny's subconscious. If that's the case, than it would have more to do with her own willingness to do things only if she thinks its funny to do so, rather then some other governing factor. However, he's accepted that there's no way to know for certain, and its certainly a more comforting thought than trying to comprehend the implications of a nigh-omnipotent Penny who may have very well even created herself.
Millennium City
Satisfied with his conclusions, Aloysius determined that the best way for her to learn what she was capable and fulfill her own life's purpose was to go to the city of heroes, Millennium City. He enrolled her at Ravenswood Academy to help her train and practice her abilities, hopefully make some friends, and maybe even save the day a few times. Penny has her own dorm room on campus that she often stays in, but she also visits her home in Vibora rather often ever since she figured out how to enter one door and come out somewhere else. Aloysius also asked one of his fellow Trismegistus Council members, Alicia Blackmun, to be Penny's godmother and keep a close eye on her to make sure she didn't get herself into too much trouble.
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