Destiny Certo
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Cold as winter, strong as stone;
- She faced the darkness all alone.
- A silver goddess; a reflection.
- A mirage; a recollection.
- No return; no turning back.
- The past is gone, the future, black.
Serpents gather in their nest,
- And she stands above the rest.
- Shadows hunt; she hunts the shadow.
- The moon is risen; she stands below.
- She views her world through the eyes of others.
- Black and white; there are no colors,
As she looks down upon a shattered youth.
- A shattered mirror shows a shattered truth.
- -Shattered Mirror by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
Contents
Personality
Destiny can be hard to deal with at points – incredibly crude, blunt, and opinioned she often offends most people that talk to her. Most people mistake her insult wars with them as anger, but in reality, it’s very hard to actually upset the woman. Those that get past her rough exterior find a fiercely independent woman who values her friendships as more precious than life itself, and would gladly die to defend those she cares for.
Because of the failed promises of PSI, Destiny is also a bitter woman. So bitter, in fact, she distrustful of almost every ‘do gooder’ and hopeful optimistic hero she meets. For her, there is very little hope in the world for ‘a monster like me’. She pretends not to care what others think of her, but negative feelings towards her only go to reinforce her self-hatred and deprecation, as well as a phenomenally low self-esteem. Despite what her friends tell her, she still considers herself a monstrous person.
In a desperate attempt to make people like her at all, Destiny dresses incredibly provocatively, delighting in the attention it brings her from men. She has been called a slut because of this on numerous occasions ( mostly by Rezz ) but that couldn’t be the furthest thing from the truth – because of her abilities, it’s physically impossible for anyone to get that intimate with the woman.
Abilities
Telekinetic Manipulation
Destiny was built by her creators in the hopes that they would never have to arm her – weapons can always be taken away, unless you create them yourself, they said. And so after intensive training early in her life, Destiny is able to create bladed weaponry with a mere thought. She became incredibly fond of a scimitar styled blade, and thus most of the telekinetic weaponry she produces resembles them. Usually she’s only seen with one blade, but upon rare occasions, she does dual wield her blades, laughing madly as cuts her enemies down with them.
Destiny is also able to create a decent shield around herself at most times with a bare amount of concentration needed – while it doesn’t block everything coming her way, it does a fairly good damage of keeping her wounds to a dull roar. She is also able to do the standard telekinetic tricks – lifting objects without touching them, tossing people around, etc., though they are not talents she was ever encouraged to deeply develop.
Telepathic Manipulation
When asked, Destiny will tell you she’s not a telepath – she doesn’t read minds or inflict psychic damage to a person’s consciousness, thank you very much. What she fails to recognize it that she’s very wrong; in fact her most powerful abilities spawn from her ability to manipulate the subconscious and unconscious minds of her victims. The reason she doesn’t acknowledge these abilities much is because they are now almost completely out of her control and she is rather ashamed of that fact.
The Nightmare Touch
Currently, anyone who comes into skin to skin contact with Destiny is in for a nasty surprise. Upon touching her, she causes a great amount of fear to flood the other’s psyche. This causes a person to relive their greatest nightmare come true over and over again until they either break contact or die from the adrenaline rush. The longer someone the contact, the worse it becomes, which makes such things as intimacy with the opposite sex completely out of the picture. Destiny has no control over this power whatsoever, and would give her right arm to be rid of it so she could go back to having regular human contact. In the case that another psychic tried to enter Destiny’s mind, they too would be engulfed with nightmares, but at a significantly higher rate than just simply touching her. Most who do probe at her consciousness are dead within a few seconds.
The Nightmare Shroud
When feeling threatened or angry, Destiny becomes engulfed in darkness and red flames. Anyone that touched her at this point should probably make their peace with God as her nightmare causing powers are in overdrive and she’ll probably kill you out of reflex if that doesn’t work. The more threatened she becomes, the worse her powers get, until anyone within a five foot radius would become subjected to overwhelming terror. Her gaze also has the same power to induce nightmares during this time, though to a lesser degree than her touch.
Now you See me! Now you Don’t
Destiny’s main mode of transportation is by simply winking in and out of existence in front of people. She could consider that teleportation, but she honestly has no clue how she does it, so the less said about it, the better, she thinks.
Fighter’s Physique
Destiny was designed to be the perfect soldier in more ways than one – she nearly indefatigable in battle and moves with a precise, cat-like grace when dancing around her opponents. She is slightly more fragile than she likes to admit, but she rarely gets a scratch on her due to her quick movement speed and telekinetic shield. She is less about brawn and more about precision strikes, making her dangerous especially to slow moving, hard hitting opponents.
Friends and Associates
There are few people Destiny genuinely gets along with, mostly because very few people get along with her and accept her for what she is, flaws and all. (( Feel free to add your name to the list and I’ll fill it in as I remember to! ))
- Gabriel – One of the very first people to show Destiny true kindness and compassion since Matthew’s death. She values his companionship above all others, and is fiercely defensive of him to anyone that threatens him – though it’s not often since you know, he’s eight feet tall and weighs two tons. She has very deep feelings for him, though she’ll never admit that to anyone else.
- Rezz – On the surface, people assume Destiny hates Rezz, and Rezz thinks Destiny’s an oversexed nincompoop not worth his time. But their continual picking on each other hints that their relationship is more of the bratty little sister – much older brother type. Destiny adores Rezz and respects him very much – even if he’s a fugly lizard man.
- Zen – The alien is completely unperturbed by Destiny, or so it seems, and one hell of a dancer. Though she did accuse him of trying to eat her soul one night because he was going to turn into a pink puppy and cover the world in bubblegum – but hey, cut her some slack, she’d had a lot of whiskey.
- Ariel Thone – In Ariel Destiny sees the kind of person she wants to be, but thinks she’ll never achieve. His quiet manner, infinite patience, and acceptance of her rocked her to her very core. And in their little talks, Destiny is starting to achieve a deeper understanding of herself. He’s probably the only person that actually makes Destiny /want/ to be a hero.
- Metal Raven – He stutters at her cleavage, blushes at her jokes, and always reminds Destiny of the innocence she’d liked to have had.
- Morningstar – She cute, she’s purple, and she’s fun. Definitely an A in Destiny’s book.
- Decker - The only being to entice Destiny Certo into giving him bread with his raw manly charms.
What Others Think…
(( Feel free to add your IC opinion here! ))
- Ariel Thone – She seeks to be so much more than she was made to be, and speaks to the amazing good that remains within humans, despite all that has been done to stamp it out. I do not smile often, but I smile to think of her, and what she may become.
An Abbreviated History
Spoiler Warning
The following details are about a player-created storyline, or is information currently unrevealed about a character.
Please do not use this information ICly unless given permission to do so.
The Dream
- “We had it right this time, we were sure of it – every mutation seemed perfect and the girl was frighteningly good at everything we put her up to. Our geneticists were running about smugly, our combat trainers were beaming with pride… Until the day she walked away. Oh, no, we did everything right to the best of our knowledge – we just never dreamed that Jung was right.”
- - Unknown Scientist
- “We had it right this time, we were sure of it – every mutation seemed perfect and the girl was frighteningly good at everything we put her up to. Our geneticists were running about smugly, our combat trainers were beaming with pride… Until the day she walked away. Oh, no, we did everything right to the best of our knowledge – we just never dreamed that Jung was right.”
It all began as a scheme by some of the largest arms manufacturers in the world. Super soldier programs weren’t uncommon, but this was going to be different, they said. They weren’t building a weapon; they were building your destiny – if you had the money to buy it. The collaboration of companies simply called themselves Certo, the old Latin word for “to settle by combat”. After 386 unsuccessful specimens (most of whom in the womb or shortly after birth) a beautiful young girl was born to a surrogate mother deep in the recesses of the Soviet Union. The geneticists proclaimed her an instant perfection as she had all the mutations they were looking for; but the company executives were less than pleased with her physical appearance – hair the color of quick silver, they said, was far too extraordinary and thus easily traceable. Rather than killing the infant, as many members of the board wanted, she was cared for as the scientists eagerly awaited for physical proof to her powers.
As the Berlin wall came down, she and her caretakers were moved to a more secure facility in Italy, where she was kept in near isolation from the rest of the world. By the time she was three, the signs Certo had been looking for sprang to full life – she began to give the entire facility chilling nightmares as her psychic potential ran unchecked. Gleefully, they began to train her into what they wanted – the perfect assassin and soldier.
By seven, she was proficient in most types of small arms and had a very strong talent for more melee style weaponry – swords, knives, etc. By ten she was a holy terror, able to manipulate the sub and unconscious minds of her victims to such a degree as to render them useless as they writhed away in their own personal nightmares. She no longer needed weapons, she simply made her own as she needed them – daggers and scimitars made from pure psychic energies.
And they eliminated emotions and free will simply by never allowing the girl to find out what they were – she was never spoken to or interacted with other than through psychic communications. In fact, she never learned how to speak until she was in her late teens. The only thing the girl ever overheard was someone refer to her as “Fas Certo” (which is how she later started to call herself Destiny).
A geneticist by the name of Alexander Randall one day decided he’d had enough of both Certo and the horror he’d helped create; he stole as much of the information on the girl as he could and ran with his family to the United States, seeking protection in the newly built Millennium City from the superheroes. Certo couldn’t allow this to happen, of course, so they sent the girl to deal with him. She cut through the superhero bodyguard with ease before slaughtering both Randall and his wife. There was only victim left, the couple’s six month old son, Brian. She approached the crib where the child was screaming…and something just broke inside her. Deep down, something had awakened that forbade her to kill the child, even if she was being ordered to. That was the day she walked out on Certo and their glorious designs, losing herself on the streets of Millennium City as she struggled to deal with a world she’d never dreamed existed.
Broken Promises
For six months she lived on the streets as she tried to survive in a world she couldn’t understand or communicate with. It wasn’t until the day that a member of Mind, Inc was treated to one of the best nightmares of his life when he startled her from a dead sleep on a park bench that anyone took notice of her. She was immediately taken in to see Simon Bell, who was able to finally get her to calm down by simply exuding psionic manifestations of love towards her. After learning how to communicate with her (mostly through the use of images), she accepted PSI’s care, with the promises that they would teach her how to interact with the world.
True to their word, within two months they had taught her to speak English fluently and read at a fifth grade level. She could actually go out and order a cheeseburger without fear of being misunderstood – and for her, this was a major milestone. Psimon promised her many more things – a high school education and better, if she choose, a place to stay, money to spend, people that cared about her, and advanced telekinetic and telepathic training – in return for her taking a position in PSI as an enforcer. She accepted and took up the name ‘Destiny’ as that was the only thing she could remember from her days with the corporation.
Again, PSI came through on their promises for the first few years, and all in all, Destiny was as happy as she thought she could be. She even developed a semi-romantic relationship with another man from PSI named Matthew Kingston. And then, the world turned upside down.
The information that Randall had taken from Certo was actually in the possession of PSI, though they didn’t know it was Destiny that the files talked about for a while. When they did, though, they took a much harder look at the researcher notes pertaining to ‘upgrading’ Destiny. Certo had, unbeknownst to Destiny, come up with a way to make her power to manipulate the unconscious mind incredibly potent – theoretically to the point that it would make psychic and physical contact with the young woman unbearable for most people as it would spin their mind into nightmares.
So, PSI decided to try out the compound the researcher had described on Destiny. They never told her what they were giving her, just that they need to give her a shot. She was utterly trusting of PSI at this point in her life, and thus didn’t question their desires. As soon as the drug hit her system, she blacked out from the intensity of it. She remembers vaguely being probed telepathically when she was out, but nothing more than that.
What she found out later was that she killed three people simply from the amount of fear she pushed into their systems – the doctor who’d administered the drug and the two telepaths Psimon had ordered to try and reach her mind. She cried and begged Psimon and Medusa to fix her, and they said they would – if she would become one of PSI’s elite, like Mind Slayer had. Fearful of killing more innocents, she accepted their offer. She soon lapsed back into another black out from the drug. Medusa ordered her to be prepped for surgery right then and there – Psimon didn’t think they had the right, but he meekly went along with Medusa’s decision. Doctors removed Destiny gallbladder and replaced it with a cybernetic device that was capable of creating and administering more of the frightful drug into Destiny for a nearly limitless time span. So they sewed her back up and kept her in a drug induced coma until she was nearly healed and never told Destiny what they’d done.
It was shortly after the surgery that Matthew Kingston came to see Destiny in the hospital. He brought her flowers and told her how much he’d missed her, and that he didn’t care what she could do now, she was still his Destiny… It made her feel so much better, and so she didn’t stop him when he went to kiss her for the first time – Kingston suffered a massive heart attack and died on the floor next to her hospital bed, most likely due to the amount of fear she inadvertently pumped into his system from that small contact.
The hospital staff treated her like a leper after this, refusing to come near her if they didn’t have to; a few even referred to her room as the “Monster’s Cave”. It was at this point in time that she began to develop a deep self loathing, as she too considered herself a monster. But she still believed in PSI and still believed that they would fix her …
On the third anniversary of Matthew’s death, Destiny walked away from PSI. By this time she had developed into a bitter, angry, and highly self-destructive woman. She refused to have anyone touch her and took to wearing gloves and full body suits to prevent inadvertent contact. She wandered the streets again, taking work when and where she could, living out of cheap motel rooms, and slowly began to drink herself to death, as she found it was the only release from the pain she was feeling.
Bringing Order to the Chaos
It was during a drinking binge at Caprice that Destiny ran into Gabriel, the first person who was genuinely nice to her for no reason at all. Even after learning her terrible curse, he still continued to be in her company, and even offered her the services of his co-leader, Rezz, to help with her ‘condition’. Warily, she accepted, only because Gabriel hadn’t asked for a single thing in return. Slowly, she became acquainted with The Ministry of Order and its members, many of who she has become quite fond of – they don’t question her powers and like her in spite of them.
Where this path will lead Destiny, only time will tell…
Trivia
- At night, Destiny suffers from horrific nightmares herself – usually the same ones as she’s caused to happen that day, though she only vaguely remembers them in the morning. Most of them include her lost lust and love... Decker.
- Her biggest ambition in life right now is to get fat – something she can’t seem to do, even if she can hold her own with people like Rezz and Gabriel in the eating department.
- She makes quilts by hand.
