Tenebrielle
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Contents
Summary
The strange and mysterious superheroine known to us as Tenebrielle doesn't come from this Earth; she's not even from this universe. She comes from another version of Earth in a parallel universe, one very similar to our own, yet with some differences. The parallel histories of these two universes appear to have been roughly - or perhaps perfectly - identical up until about 25 years ago.
Character Genesis
Tenebrielle is the very first character I created on the day I became a Gold Member. The original idea was for it to be a Freeform version of the Void Archetype. I had only started playing Champions a couple of months before, and Cryptic was at the time doing its Premium Archetype Rotation promotion, allowing Silver members to unlock in turn for a week six of the Archetypes that were not available for free. I had started playing on the last day of the Void's turn, the day they switched it to the Master in the rotation, so I had basically missed my chance to try it out for free. After casually trying out the game as a Silver player for almost two months I had come to the realization that I had fallen in love with it pretty hard, enough to become a paying player. So, since I've always had a thing for the Dark and I was eager to try out the Darkness powerset - even moreso since I had missed out on the free preview - I decided to create my first Freeform character in that set.
My original concept for the character reflected my love of Fantasy; Tenebrielle was initially a Dark Pixie, a being from the Faerie World who liked to feed on negative human emotions, and so had been drawn to this dimension by all the criminal activity and had stayed here feasting on all the hate and fear for far too long that she couldn't go back to her world, thus becoming a superheroine of sorts. But like many other new Gold members before me, I was very overwhelmed with all the options afforded to Freeform characters. I didn't quite know how to make a viable build and didn't want to make a lot of mistakes, and I also wanted to try out so many other concepts and ideas for other characters, and more superheroic ones, that I ended up neglecting Tenebrielle for a very long time. The poor dear was left at level 8 and almost 500 days passed before I decided to finally do something with the character. By this time I had more experience designing builds and I had an exciting idea for a new direction for my very first Freeform character: a Munitions/Darkness hybrid! So I redid Tenebrielle's whole character design, made new costumes that completely changed her whole appearance, wrote a new bio and I retconned the few powers she already had to start over and I leveled her all the way to 40 in no time. The new build proved to be one of my best, and definitely one I enjoy playing a lot, elevating this character that had been so sorely neglected into my current main go-to DPS character.
Disclaimer
A little note on the canonicity of the biographical background info: With this character I really wanted to go all out on the CO Lore, to use a lot of it: I wanted to bring in little used NPC characters, heroic agencies and villainous organizations, even well established supervillains and CO mission story arcs, Adventure Packs and Comic Series content. Of course I didn't want to commandeer the whole lore and do with it as I pleased, I wanted to stay true to the spirit of the game and not make canonical changes I had no right to make. So the idea of the parallel universe afforded me a great deal of leeway in actually using a lot of the lore in the backstory without actually changing anything in the real world of Champions Online. But try as I might, some little changes bled in and I am completely comfortable not using these parts of Tenebrielle's story in any Roleplay setting where anyone would object to any deviation from the official canon.
Origin Story
A Chance Meeting
During the preparations leading to the original Demonflame incident, Luther Black, the leader of the magical sect DEMON, had kidnapped a young woman named Francine Dubois, a psychic who worked at an occult bookstore in old Detroit and who knew the location of an obscure tome on demonic evocation which Black coveted for research on his unholy ceremony to come. PRIMUS - the Paranormal Research and Investigation Mission of the United States - being America's premiere anti-supercriminal law enforcement agency, was called in to investigate the kidnapping, and traced it back to DEMON's activities in Downtown Detroit. A young PRIMUS Agent by the name of Peter St. Croix located the demonhame where Miss Dubois was being held captive and managed to singlehandedly apprehend the small group of DEMON cultists present before they sacrificed her in some unholy ceremony. (NOTE: In the Official Champions Online universe, Francine Dubois was not rescued in time, her mutilated remains found several days later in the Detroit River.) The rescued young woman was more than just grateful, she fell in love with her savior, who returned her affections. The two started dating and eventually got married, and one day Francine gave birth to a beautiful baby daughter, who was named Gabrielle.
An End Too Soon
When Gabrielle was still an infant, Francine St. Croix had a pressing and very troubling premonition of impending doom and as a result she immediately sent her daughter to her grandparents' care out of state. Soon after this the events that were to be called The Battle of Detroit unfolded, and Francine who had stayed in Detroit to be with her husband who was on duty, was killed in the ensuing carnage. Devastated by the loss of his wife, and the total destruction of the city of Detroit and so much loss of life, Agent St. Croix left PRIMUS and began a new life as a single parent in North Dakota, joining his small town's police force. But new Superthreats never ceased to creep up and when PRIMUS came calling looking to grow their elite forces they managed to convince him to reenlist back in service.
A New Beginning
Years later, after Millennium City had been built on the ashes of old Detroit, Agent Peter St. Croix was reassigned there to work under Silver Avenger Mayte Sanchez, who quickly became a friend of the family and something of a big sister to Gabrielle. Having had experience living with a psychic wife, and raising a child who had demonstrated some level of psionic ability, Agent St. Croix was deemed best suited to be assigned to the PRIMUS investigation of the "self help organization" Mind, Inc. and its possible connection with the psychic-powered criminal organization PSI. After Gabrielle graduated high school, she followed in her father's footsteps and joined PRIMUS Academy. She was tested for compatibility with the Cyberline Serum which she passed and was inducted into the Silver Avengers program. She had also been tested for psychic abilities and was ranked a Class 10b Psionic, a rather rare classification showing noticeable - if still somewhat latent - telepathic, telekinetic and protopathic abilities. She scored extremely high as a marksman with firearms, since she was apparently capable of unconsciously affecting the trajectory of her fired bullets telekinetically, an ability which she would later develop to include the protopathic creation of bullets, thereby insuring she would never run out of ammunition. Gabrielle was assigned to work with her father, under her mentor in the Silver Avengers division and longtime family friend Mayte Sanchez, to infiltrate the PSI organization through its connection with Mind, Inc. She was the perfect candidate for the job, as her latent protopathic abilities made her a very desirable recruit, and her training at PRIMUS had taught her to block access to certain parts of her mind and hide her real identity from the PSI telepaths.
A PSIzable Enemy
The PSI organization had been founded by psychic researcher Sebastian Poe, but he had been sold out by his second wife Madeline Brunner, aka Medusa, and his protégé Simon Bell, aka Psimon, who had been having an affair and had been plotting to take over his organization. The child of Poe's first marriage, Kevin Poe, was now all grown up and had become aware of his father's existence and what he considered his birthright, to be the heir apparent to PSI. Sebastian Poe had experimented on his young son with a psychic serum and as a result Kevin was exceptionally intelligent and endowed with force powers. He had vowed to take over PSI and bring down Psimon and Medusa, whom he had tracked down to Millennium City. Kevin first took over the Purple Gang and then managed to get the new leaders of PSI arrested in a frame up job, and ultimately reclaimed the PSI leadership for himself. Under his guidance PSI stopped committing what he considered to be petty crimes, and the whole organization now focused on the much bigger task of achieving world domination through mind control. Where Menton had failed, Kevin Poe was convinced he would succeed.
The As-PSI-gnment
After undercover Agent Terry Kestler's failure to investigate the strange recruiting practices of Mind, Inc., PRIMUS was at a loss on how to infiltrate an organization filled with mind readers, that is until Gabrielle St. Croix graduated from PRIMUS Academy. The young Agent and Silver Avenger proved herself to be resistant to the standard mind probing practices of the telepathic Mind, Inc. Hypnotists and she was a candidate PSI simply could not disregard, there simply were not that many protopaths around, and Gabrielle was the first one PSI encountered since the Adina Monroe incident which almost ended up in a complete disaster after ARGENT tried to corrupt her for their own ends.
In further preparation for her assignment, Gabrielle trained with Lt. Isabella Maronni, UNTIL Officer on loan from Project Mind Game. She was instructed on advanced mind blocking techniques to make sure she would not be exposed as an undercover agent. When she was deemed ready, a naive looking Gabrielle let herself be approached on the street near the PSI building in City Center and in no time was enthusiastically convinced to attend a series of self help seminars. She was in. She even attracted the attention of young PSI leader Kevin Poe based on her disarming charms and unusual protopathic potential.
(Much More To Come)
