Replica
| Replica | ||||||||||
| Player: @global | ||||||||||
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| Replica | ||||||||||
| Biographical Data | ||||||||||
| Real Name: | Kyra Sparks | |||||||||
| Known Aliases: | Various (disguised) | |||||||||
| Gender: | Female | |||||||||
| Species: | Human | |||||||||
| Ethnicity: | American of mixed European descent | |||||||||
| Place of Birth: | Athens, MI | |||||||||
| Base of Operations: | Millennium City, MI | |||||||||
| Relatives: | Confidential | |||||||||
| Characteristics | ||||||||||
| Age: | DOB 4-Jul-1999 | |||||||||
| Height: | 5'6" | |||||||||
| Weight: | 117 lbs. | |||||||||
| Eyes: | Blue | |||||||||
| Hair: | Dirty blond | |||||||||
| Complexion: | Confidential | |||||||||
| Physical Build: | Regular | |||||||||
| Physical Features: | Confidential | |||||||||
| Status | ||||||||||
| Fame: |
State | |||||||||
| Alignment: |
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| Identity: | Secret | |||||||||
| Years Active: | 2020 - Present | |||||||||
| Citizenship: | United States of America | |||||||||
| Occupation: | Indepedent journalist | |||||||||
| Education: | University senior | |||||||||
| Marital Status: | Single | |||||||||
| Known Powers and Abilities | ||||||||||
| Enhanced strength, shape-shifting | ||||||||||
| Equipment and Paraphernalia | ||||||||||
| MRM Suit
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| Non-Physical Attributes | |||||||||
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| Telepathy |
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| Sorcery |
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Bravery |
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| MaekadaBoxSlim created by @Maekada | |||||||||
Replica is a Millenium City superheroine. Until late 2021, she had mostly gone under the radar, using her MRM suit - stolen from a super-crook - to shapeshift and infiltrate locations to get information she needed for journalistic stories. But her suit confers other powers, and she soon realized her obligation to use it to its fullest capacity to safeguard lives.
Biography
Replica is actually Kyra Sparks, a resident of Millennium City and an undergrad at MCU studying journalism. She is the host of a popular alternative news podcast and blog called Spark Line, and secretly uses her suit's impersonation power to get information that reporters could never obtain otherwise.
Early Life
The Sparks family is from Athens, Michigan, a small town about two hours west of Millennium City. Kyra's father Denny works as an animal handler at a nearby alligator sanctuary, while her mother Leslie stays at home and prepares various goods like jams and sewn accessories that she sells at seasonal markets. Kyra is a middle child, with older brother Abel (b. 1996) working as plumber in metro Chicago, and younger brother Dylan (b. 2007) still in school.
Young Kyra was a quiet but pleasant youth, and close to her mother until her adolescence. She would beam with pride when the school made its annual field trip to her father's workplace. Her aunt and uncle often teased her about how Kyra Sparks gets a free light show for her birthday every year - July 4th. Overall, she seemed well-adjusted in the beginning.
But the small town life, and being a middle child, weighed on a smart child like Kyra. Often bored and feeling overlooked among her siblings, her early teens saw her pivot to a rebellious behavior. She was brought home in a police car several times for shoplifting or vandalism, and had many other disciplinary issues through her middle school years.
Rebeliousness
Kyra's rebellious streak had her questioning authority through her teens, particularly her parents. She had the occasional citation for misbehavior at school. Her parents had been very strict with Kyra and her brothers early on, using 'grounding' as a punishment liberally; when Kyra began to act out in her teenage years, finding themselves unable to command her as they once hand, her parents gravitated to a "hands off" approach with her - which only left her feeling neglected. She coped by hanging out with other misfit teens in town, which invariably led to trouble.
Politics were a matter of contention between Kyra and her father. When 13-year-old Kyra had asked her father how one knows who to vote for in an election, Denny replied, "Our family are Republicans." Finding that answer unsatisfying, Kyra turned to the internet to learn more about the workings of politics and society. The tenor of family meals soon soured, with Kyra constantly needling her father with pointed rhetoric, aiming to get a rise out of him more than anything else. At age 15, tired of dinners devolving into arguments, Kyra was told to dine alone in another room until she could learn restraint; but, apart from holiday dinners, Kyra did not dine with her family routinely again.
In eleventh grade, Kyra was caught defacing the car belonging to Cammie Croft, a mean-spirited girl who had exposed Kyra's crush on Ian Brisson, an embarrassment that caused an irreparable rift between Kyra and Ian. That episode also added fresh strain between Kyra and her parents, as they were on the hook for repairs to Cammie's car; they had no choice but to quietly pay from Kyra's tuition fund, which led to the culminating breakdown in her relationship with them when they told her they had little money to help with her tuition.
Diamond in the Rough
Encouraged by her school counselor to find some constructive hobbies, Kyra found an outlet in local theater, and decorating school events to fill her time. Kyra's high school English teacher, Mr. Axworthy, found the troubled Kyra had skill with writing and channeled her argumentative nature toward essaying. To everyone's surprise, Kyra won an essay contest and a modest scholarship in eleventh grade. Kyra volunteered to be the lead editor with the yearbook club in her senior year, and contributed to her high school's social media accounts, showing a growing interest in the media.
Leaving Home
For achieving in the 90th percentile on her SATs, Kyra secured a few college acceptance letters; she chose to enrol in Millennium City University's communications program.
The matter of tuition, however, ended up being a critical breaking point in Kyra's relationship with her parents. Denny and Leslie told Kyra they had little money left to help her; they claimed they were financially drained from helping her brother Abel through trade school, so could afford to help pay just a portion of Kyra's first year tuition, only. Kyra - at last perceiving the ultimate proof that her parents favored her brothers over her - angrily rejected their offer, excoriating them to just save that money to make sure Dylan got a free ride when his time came. Years of a strained relationship meant her parents didn't argue, just quietly and morosely accepted Kyra's stance, and went to bed hoping they could pick up the discussion again in the morning. They didn't have the heart to tell Kyra just then that it was her own actions in damaging property over the years - most recently defacing Cammie Croft's car - that had left them unable to help her more. Her parents, always on a tight budget, had no choice but to pay for Kyra's damages out of Kyra's education fund.
The next morning, the day before her July 4th birthday, Kyra lightly and hastily packed some clothes and important keepsakes into a bag, left home without a word of goodbye. She was propelled by a (poorly-informed) sense of betrayal by her parents. She took a ride with a friend to nearby Battle Creek, and then left on a bus for Millennium City.
Arriving in Millennium City, Kyra took on two part-time jobs, and couch-surfed with friends for the summer, building up some savings before her first semester. Kyra took out a student loan to cover tuition beyond what her essay scholarship paid. Though staying barely ahead of her expenses, she underwent a transformation into adulthood surrounded by her new friends, enjoying brief flings with young men, and living in a big city that always had something exciting going on.
Being away from home, and responsible for her own welfare for the first time, began to soften Kyra. No longer a misfit, she actually found herself missing her parents, and realizing she had taken much of their care for granted. After a couple of months in the city, Kyra began calling home to talk to her mother. The relationship with her father, however, remains strained by their past and his wounded pride, which Kyra privately, deeply regrets; they rarely speak.
Millennium City University Student
Daily Vanguard
Kyra enrolled in a Bachelor of Communications program as a journalism major and a drama minor starting in the 2018-2019 year. She has become a "big woman on campus" - famous or infamous to many for her in-your-face style of reporting on her own publications, as well as the main campus paper, the Daily Vanguard.
The controversy Kyra courted in her freshman year by slipping into the University President's office for an unscheduled interview, and asking pointed questions about rising costs of tuition, led the Daily Vanguard to "punish" Kyra by putting her on the sports beat for two years. This actually served to broaden her appeal: many readers felt she elevated the quality of the sports section's writing, and it gave her a new audience. Many of the university athletes tried to keep a good relationship with Kyra in hopes of more and favorable mentions by her, though a few athletes came to believe she had something against them, and snubbed her.
At the beginning of her senior year, the D.V. reassigned Kyra to the coveted role of columnist, for which she provided opinion pieces about student life. Yet by then, with Spark Line's popularity on campus and at large having surpassed the Vanguard's, it could be seen the paper benefited more than she did. Nevertheless, her contributions continued to be of high quality.
WMCU
Kyra volunteered at WMCU, 88.5 FM, in her freshman year. After 5 months of assisting behind the scenes with the advertising team, she was given a hosting slot from 4:30 AM - 7:00 AM every Sunday, which she named Spark Line. Hungry to do journalistic reporting of the sort the Vanguard forbade her to following her fiasco with the university president, Kyra used the radio edition of Spark Line to produce mini-documentaries and interviews that would play between music sets. Four months later, languishing in her obscure time slot with minuscule listenership, and foreseeing no better timeslot opening anytime soon, Kyra quit WMCU and began Spark Line as a podcast and blog of her own in the summer before her sophomore year.
Accommodations
Kyra lives just off-campus in a ramshackle basement suite of an older, Detroit-era apartment block. Under condition that Kyra "work around" the various detritus left there by the building's owner, Mrs. Spychka, Kyra enjoys a modest rent of $250 per month, and free utilities minus her internet bill. Kyra's ad revenue and donations from Spark Line easily pay her living expenses. Spark Line is written, and its podcast recorded, in a makeshift studio in Kyra's suite.
Independent Journalism
Host of Spark Line Blog and Podcast
When Kyra began her own Spark Line website, including a blog and podcast, she hoped to tap into the market for true crime, and focus it on one of the world's great cities - Millennium City, where she happened to live. The high tech sector. The proximity to the border. The money. The power. The crime that is attracted to all of those. The supervillains that arise. The heroes who put them back down. Kyra recognized the opportunity to be a citizen journalist and reach a global audience with Millennium City stories, even though she wasn't done her formal schooling yet. She had the energy and the access to material, if she was just willing to get out in the world and find it.
Spark Line publishes a podcast episode on Wednesdays. Each episode might be a summary of stories Kyra has published or is working on, along with an interview if she can secure a guest. It is one of the top 25 Millennium City-originating podcasts. The blog publishes whenever Kyra has something - articles being anything from short updates of local interest, to lengthy journalistic reporting representing weeks or months of fact-gathering.
Becoming Replica
Facet
While investigating rumors that the nationally (in)famous shape-shifting burglar Facet - wanted on numerous warrants for armed robbery - had brought his crime spree to Millennium City, Kyra's street-smart investigating found a lead that led her to Facet's hideout. Trying to verify his presence, she found her way inside with surprising ease. With the villain fast asleep on a couch, Kyra saw his famous shape-changing suit draped over a dining room chair. She snapped a photo of the thief - later able to identify him as Reggie Templeton of New Jersey - and then snapped a photo of the suit so that she could establish herself as a witness to Facet's true identity. Just as she was about to flee to make a report, guided by impulse... Kyra stole Facet's suit.
Kyra agonized over whether she should turn the suit over to the police. If she did, the suit would be held as evidence and Facet finally convicted, and she'd never see the suit again. If she didn't, she couldn't easily report on what she'd found without being culpable for evidence tampering. Kyra tried the suit on to see how it worked; momentarily baggy on her from Templeton's proportions, it automatically resized to make a skin-tight fit on her. Slipping the mask on, she saw the augmented reality controls light up in her visual display. Over the course of a couple of nights, she learned how to customize the suit's look, scan people - even pictures of people - to then then shape-shift into them.
Kyra found a serial number on the inside: SBE2015-G1-MRM-X01. Research turned up a reference to a US Justice Department memo about missing items on a list of Source Biotech Enterprises assets; the company's assets were seized by the FBI, following revelations it had been doing illicit genetic experimentation with kidnapped metahumans for years. Authorities believed that SBE management had sold some of its assets on the black market to make a quick buck after their company was shut down, making that the likely way Templeton obtained the MRM suit.
Now and then, Kyra checks in on Reggie Templeton. He has remained in Millennium City, taking an entry-level job in organized crime as a bookie's bodyguard. Kyra believes Reggie is actively searching for whoever stole the MRM suit from him. He is part of the reason she has been reluctant to be more of a 'public' hero, fearing that he will deduce that Replica is using the MRM suit, and pursue her to reclaim it.
Replica Emerges
Kyra decided to keep the MRM suit. By using the controls to change the suit's default appearance, she hoped to distance herself from Facet, and throw off anyone who might think she held stolen goods. The suit opened up a lot of possibilities for her as a journalist. She took to heart Professor Hochsteader's repeated refrain: "Get the facts, get the facts, get the facts." What better way to get the facts than by infiltrating in a disguise? She tries to get photos and written documentation, as hearsay obtained while wearing the MRM is problematic.
Though Kyra wore a mask, she didn't announce her existence as a vigilante, and tried to avoid ever being sighted, much less get into confrontations. Any information she obtained in disguise, she cited as being provided by an anonymous source. In Kyra's mind, this source is code-named Replica.
Against Imaginetworks
Kyra received an anonymous tip through Spark Line in fall of 2021 that Imaginetworks, a company which was known for manufacturing various home and personal electronics in Millennium City, was secretly developing tech that could subliminally manipulate audiences. Though the anonymous source said that the tech was being aimed at boosting the effect of commercial advertising, they also said that from the specs they had seen, the tech could be used to virtually hypnotize audiences into unwitting obedience.
Using the MRM suit, Kyra infiltrated Imaginetworks and began trying to find proof. But their security procedures were sufficient to detect her attempts at intrusion, and a private security firm was hired to find the mysterious source. During one such intrusion, she was chased out of an Imaginetworks office and nearly captured by their security, their aerial drones having locked on to Replica. A timely assist by Challenger helped Replica get free.
Later, Replica had difficulty on yet another intrusion attempt while trying to steal some "hypno-tech" as she'd come to call it, but got help from the newcomer Courser. Courser then agreed to help Replica complete the intrusion attempt - but they were both captured by security! They worked together to escape, and then managed to seize a few of the personal devices and take them back to Courser's hideout for examination.
Replica recruited help from a teen hero named Battery. Posing as an Imaginetworks employee, and using falsified credentials supplied by Courser, with Battery in disguise as the employee's daughter, they entered the facility on 'bring your child to work' day. They managed to steal the product specs for the hardware that allowed a typical screen to become a piece of hypno-tech and escape before anyone realized who they were.
When moving in to destroy the Imaginetworks hypno-tech at a warehouse, the team of Replica, Courser, Challenger, and Battery were actually led into a trap set by Imaginetworks's private security contractor! Captured, and restrained in a product testing room, their true enemy was revealed: Bogeyman, a supervillain who uses his tech to hypnotize victims and bloodlessly steal from them. He left the group to be hypnotized by typical TVs, but fortunately, Challenger and Courser managed to break free of their restraints before they were affected. Replica and Battery had to be subdued, first, before they overcame the hypnotic control of Bogeyman. The team moved quickly to strike the actual storage site of consumer-ready hypno-tech products and destroy it all. Bogeyman tried to stop them, but was repelled by Challenger.
Joining the Adventurers
The Adventurers, having learned of Replica through Sombra, reached out for her help in a rescue attempt deep into a mob casino. The target: Red Spider, a noted superhero, leader of the Adventurers and someone Replica had admired for years. Replica was almost discovered and killed in the casino's off-limits areas, but the Adventurers team sprang into action and ensured she had a safe path out. Red Spider was rescued, but badly beaten to the point of being unrecognizable.
The Adventurer attack had some aspects of cavalier destruction at the casino that disturbed Kyra, but when they asked her to join them, she agreed. She had faith that the group was doing what was necessary, and would rein itself in more carefully in future.
Kyra eventually got to meet Red Spider in her home, as her alter ego Cassandra Olsen, while pretending to be a prospective client to her dance and fitness studio. Cassandra was suffering from amnesia and unaware that she had super powers, and could not yet be told she was really Red Spider. The team wanted Kyra and others to share the duty of keeping watch over Red Spider while she recovered. Kyra was overwhelmed and excited to meet her idol, but soon realized the tremendous responsibility of protecting her, and despaired that she couldn't talk hero stuff with her.
Gear
Prototype MRM Suit
Replica depends on the Prototype Matter Reassembler Matrix suit to provide all of the super abilities she employs, i.e. without the suit, Kyra Sparks has no super abilities.
Kyra stole the suit from Facet, a super thief of national-level infamy rumored to have come to Millennium City when she was investigating him for a story. Facet had obtained the suit during the chaos surrounding Source Biotech Enterprises being put out of business after coming under Federal investigation for a litany of violations in 2016. Source Biotech had been developing the prototype suit for nearly 20 years based on its illicit study of meta-human specimens.
Operation
Within the suit, as long as the operator is contained (i.e., all components worn, and in good condition), the operator can use the augmented reality (AR) display in the eyepieces with their hands to choose how to shapeshift. The suit can scan subjects and attempt to duplicate their appearance; a built-in voice approximator attempts to disguise the operator's voice to be similar to the imitated subject. The operator also has the option to do size-manipulation, but this is quite taxing on the suit's power as well as the operator's health.
The MRM suit's default appearance is customizable by its operator.
Damage and Repair
If the suit is damaged, it may disrupt the integrity of any disguise, potentially exposing the wearer to discovery. If the mask is not worn, the wearer does not have suit integrity nor the means to operate the suit's AR controls, thus they cannot shapeshift.
The matter reassembler matrix does have a self-repair feature, able to 'mend' tears. It can request a supply of powdered metals like carbon, aluminum, and copper to replenish lost portions. It may also reabsorb part of the suit which has been separated and attempt to recycle its components. These functions can only be accomplished while the suit is not worn, and connected to power.
Electrical Supply
The suit has a USB plugin for active recharging, as well as a micro-solar array through the suit for passive energy collection.
Personality
Depending whom you ask, Kyra is either gutsy and outspoken, or just a shrill rabble-rouser. The owner/operator of Spark Line, she lives and breathes her work as a reporter - even as she works on her academics. Kyra is affable, sociable, studious, and yet ceaseless in looking for stories.
Few would deny Kyra is a bold individual. She takes calculated risks, and can come off as whimsical - reckless, even - but she moderates this by being a sharp thinker and a fast talker. Will it keep her safe, or just keep getting her into trouble?
For all of her tremendous talent, her relative fame, and her ease of insight into the social and political sphere upon which she reports, Kyra surprisingly lacks close, personal ties. Is it that she has prioritized her career, that she has burned too many bridges, or is there something else that causes her distance from others?
Kyra seems to have an outlook on the greater good, but it remains to be seen how deep this conviction runs - is it intrinsic, or is her pursuit of it a benefit to her own ego?
Being a middle child of three deeply affected Kyra, though she doesn't fully realize it. Each facet of its effects upon her is two-sided: she has been made stronger by resulting self-reliance, but has an irrational antagonism toward authority; she is motivated to compete and excel in life, but in large part because she is subconsciously driven to prove her worth to her parents.
Specialties
- Costuming
- Improvisation
- Journalism
- Stealth
