Birth Name: Sara Park

Nova Name: the Machine
Series:

Eruption: Threatening Situation

Nature: Follower

Allegiance:

Strength: 2, Brawl 4, Might 1

Dexterity: 3, Athletics 4, Stealth 2

Stamina: 5, Endurance 3, Resistance 3

Perception: 2, Awareness 1

Intelligence: 3, Academics 2, Computer 3, Intrusion 1, Linguistics 1 (Spanish),

Science 1

Wits: 3, Arts 1, Rapport 1

Appearance: 2, Intimidation 1, effective Style 1 from Mega-Appearance

Manipulation: 2

Charisma: 2, Etiquette 1, Perform 1

Backgrounds: Attunement 5, Influence 1, Resources 2, Eufiber 2

Willpower: 7

Taint:

Aberrations:

Quantum: 1

Quantum Pool: 22

Mega-Attributes: Strength 1 (Quantum Leap), Stamina 1 (Adaptation),

Appearance 1 (Copycat)

Quantum Powers: Armor 5, Claws 1 (Armor Piercing), Sensory Shield 2,

Chromatophores

THE MACHINE (Sara Park)

Sara has always felt like an outsider. Her older sister had done it all before her, her younger brother was the baby and got all the attention. She felt like she didn’t belong in her own family, she was just the ‘extra girl.’ At school her grades were mediochre, and her friends gathered together in a gaggle of over a half-dozen to sit around and just gab and occasionally smoke or drink if they could sneak something illegal into the mix. She was in her junior year of high school, still with no strong feelings towards her family, nor towards her clique of friends, nor with the slightest motivation to ever go anywhere in her life. Her friends had found a new place to gather after school, where no one messed with them or told them to quit loitering or asked if they were old enough to be smoking, drinking, whatever. Detroit was full of old buildings, and a few that had been started in better economic times that had never been finished as their construction funding dried up and moved south. They had been hanging out without incident for over a year on the top of a six story shell of iron that had partial floors and supports, no walls or power or plumbing worth mentioning, as the superstructure was all that had been built before the firm that was moving in, moved on. Hanging out on the sixth floor, with the wind blasting through them, they would sit and smoke pot and toss down any beers or sodas they had lugged up the structure. They used to make impromptu campfires from the bits of lumber and cement bags that had been atop the structure, but the winds made that unpredictable, as sparks would flare up and fly in any direction without warning. That and the supply of burnable stuff was sparse up here, and no one was interested in hauling more up the six floors. Sara was never a popular girl, always unsure of herself in conversation and insecure about her body image because of the few extra pounds she carried from her basically sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy diet. She would sit quietly while the others talked, often eating a snack or sipping a drink or taking an extra toke to hide her reticence.

Sitting up here, sharing a joint with some of her so-called friends, in the middle of one of her rare self-pitying ruminating on her utter lack of job skills, ambition, potential, true friends or hope, Sara was already in a somber and self-analytical mood, not for the first time criticizing her own shyness for her lack of friends or ability to interact meaningfully with her family, when she got up to hand the joint off and a freak gust of wind caused her to lose her footing and stagger right off the edge of the building.

She felt only a mild annoyance at first, not registering, nor particularly caring, that she was about to die, since she had been talking at the time and was put out more at being interrupted in mid-thought than at her impending death. She just seemed to stop, the impact on the rebar-studded concrete below her being sudden, but not nearly as painful as she had thought. She felt broken, as if the impact had been so much that she had flown all to pieces for one breathless instant. Seeing blood on her belly, she reached out and in one delirious moment, felt a piece of the rebar that had penetrated through her body from kidney to belly, as a hard cold piece of blood-slicked metal protruding from her stomach. She choked back a laugh at the thought that she was so broken that her cold dead machine guts were coming out. She then blacked out from a wave of agony.

It was hours before the EMTs cut her off of the rebar, trying to work carefully around her, as she had broken almost a dozen bones, including her back. At first they had almost written her off, and were waiting for her to die, but her body clung to life with a ferocity that her mind could never have matched. She awoke screaming a dozen times from the pain as they attempted to shift her off the rebar, or lift her enough that they could cut it from beneath her. In the hospital she raved and thrashed feebly, surprising all expectations of her hardiness. It was during the weeks that followed that the doctors working on her case determined that she was indeed a Nova, as her body was repairing the damage at an accelerated rate, and at times something seemed to push them away so that they could not hurt her anymore.

She reacted like an animal, and for days at a time no amount of force would allow a doctor anywhere near her body, if not for her own enhanced stamina, she would have died from lack of treatment in her own hospital bed, with a dozen medical professions held away from her bed by a force that was at times opaque, at times invisible, but always unyielding. At other times she would be caught off guard and the strange defensive shield would be gone, and she could be aided. But at the sharpest pain, she would scream and her doctors and nurses would be hurled aside by a powerful force, in the second manifestation almost killing an orderly, as he flew with enough force to shatter the window and begin to fall out of the building (he managed to grab the window frame and was pulled in by others in the room). At that point, the doctors threw up their hands and left her in her protective cocoon to heal on her own, only once managing to sneak in and inject her with a quantum-suppressing drug long enough to reset a broken arm she was healing incorrectly.

The endless parade of doctors, health officials, Project Utopia personnel and psychiatrists numbed her, and soon her protective shell seemed to be more often opaque as well, so that she would lie inside a bubble of white force, while people outside knocked and called out to her futilely. She came to the conclusion that she was essentially a machine, that she always had been a machine. She could not love, nor hate, nor feel at all, and that was how she had been built. That moment that she had seen the metal protruding from her body had been the sign, she had never been able to relate to anyone because she had never really been one of them anyway. She knew that as her protective shell could shield her from others, so too was the machine invulnerable and undetectable. She would embrace the machine, no longer questioning herself for being unable to understand people or to empathize with their meaningless concerns. Most of her so-called friends never came to the hospital (since they were either in trouble for being in such a dangerous off-limits site in the first place, or had managed to conceal the fact that they had been there at all and didn’t want to bring suspicion on themselves), which only served to reinforce her notion of the artificiality of her entire life. Even the people she had hung out with for a half-dozen years where not really her friends. Machines don’t have friends. The Machine doesn’t need them.

Yet she was a teenaged woman, despite her denials, and she had spent her life craving fellowship. She still felt things, as her pain and shame over her hospital stay proved. She is a person torn by the very notion of humanity, and now she is on the cusp of a new existence, which only complicates the situations. If she could never even figure out to be a human girl, how on earth is she ever going to deal with the complications of being a Nova?