Birth Name: Jeffrey Carpenter

Nova Name: the Voice
Series:

Eruption: Revelation

Nature: Bravo

Allegiance:

Strength: 3

Dexterity: 3, Athletics 3, Legerdemain 1, Martial Arts 2, Stealth 1

Stamina: 4, Endurance 3, Resistance 3

Perception: 2, Awareness 1

Intelligence: 2, Academics 1, Bureaucracy 1, Linguistics 1 (Spanish)

Wits: 2, Biz 3, Rapport 2

Appearance: 2, Intimidation 4, Style 1

Manipulation: 5, Interrogation 4, Subterfuge 2

Charisma: 4, Command 4, Etiquette 1, Perform 1

Backgrounds: Contacts 4, Resources 3

Willpower: 7

Taint: 1

Aberrations:

Quantum: 3 (1 Tainted Quantum)

Quantum Pool: 26

Mega-Attributes: Manipulation 4 (the Voice, Babel*), Charisma 3

(Commanding Presence)

Quantum Powers: None

(* Babel – can make himself understood to any single person regardless

of linguistic barriers with a Manipulation roll. Add +1 to the Difficulty

of the roll to make his words understood to animals.)

THE VOICE (Jeffrey Carpenter)

Jeff was always something of a user, but not nearly so good at it as he thought. He would usually be prone to attempting to talk (or bullshit) his way out of something, and could claim truthfully that he had never actually been in a fight, as he had managed to weasel his way out of every confrontation in his young life.

He was a senior and had talked a few members of his fairly large circle of friends into hitting a less than savory neighborhood to ‘cruise.’ A batch of ignorant and mouthy middle class white kids walking into the middle of a street gang psyching itself up to smash a rival gang, and looking for some faces to smash, was not quite what he had intended for the night out.

He tried, he fast-talked, he bullshitted, he even tried to intimidate, but there was no chance, bats and chains flew into his body and the bodies of his friends and as a leg smashed into his side and his world exploded into fresh pain, through a bloody mouth, spitting out the remnants of a chipped tooth, he cried out “Stop!” Only it didn’t come out as ‘stop,’ it came out as some strange croaking sound that was both guttural and sibilant at the same time. It sounded nothing like the word ‘stop.’

But everyone present seemed to recognize it, and obey. He shakily reclaimed his feet, even grabbing the arm of the kid who had been kicking him to steady himself, he saw that everyone was frozen. The gangbangers who had been surrounding his friends like vultures stood with their arms raised, staring at him as if waiting for something. His friends, some with arms raised to shield themselves, one running for her life, had all stopped moving and turned to stare at him as well. His head felt like it was split open from the first bat-hit, and he couldn’t see out of one eye because of the swelling and the blood from his scalp, and yet he briefly felt a rush of anger, of contempt, of superiority to all of them. The feeling faded as quickly as it had come, replaced by fresh waves of pain, and he quickly gathered up his friends, telling them to come with him as he moved away from the young gangsters, who turned to look at him expectantly as he turned to lead his friends away, dropping their makeshift weapons to their sides.

At the sight of them moving, even so much as to drop their weapons to their side and turn their heads to him, he was consumed with panic, and he and his friends ran all the way to the bus stop. They fled to their homes (and family doctors), never wanting to return to the darker side of the city.

Over the next week, as the stitches healed on his scalp and the bruised ribs stopped hurting, Jeff was out back testing his new authority on his moms cat, delighted that even a simple cat could understand these words and would obey them (mostly). His friends made a show of saying hi in school, but no one would come visit him at home, everyone afraid of what had happened and what it meant.

Since the incident was reported in varying levels of accuracy by his friends, the recruiters were knocking at his door soon enough, and he found that most of them where just as unable to resist his strange words that spoke to their most primal selves, being as obedient as his mothers cat, although they would remember and sometimes resist his whimsical instructions.

The masters came a long time ago. Descending through the clouds in a silvery sphere, their scientists pronounced that the saurian life-forms would be ready in a few millennia, with some of them already showing rudimentary signs of communication and intelligence. The retrovirus was designed and seeded over the planet, settling into the tiny brains of the saurians, implanting them with the masters tongue, and the primal need to obey the masters. The mission leader strode confidently from ship to test the success of the project, and standing boldly before a large carnivorous saurian attempted to command it in the tongue of the masters, triggering the new structures within its brain to recognize and obey his words. Perhaps it was a perfect success, and only this one saurian reacted poorly or the brain-structures did not form perfectly, but in either case, the mission leader was eaten and the tyrannosaurus obliterated a second too late by the energy weapons of the second in command. Protocol demanded that the experiment be scrapped, and while scientists scrambled to create a virus that would affect the tiny mammalian creatures (which computer analyses indicated was most likely to survive to become dominant next) the ship ascended into space, and maneuvered an enormous asteroid into collision vector, ensuring the extinction of the saurians that had resisted their modification. They then released a similar agent to modify the brain-structures of the mammalian life of earth and left a satellite in orbit around Saturn to keep track of the development of the species.

Ages passed, and the satellite began picking up signal broadcasts indicating that the life of earth had evolved to the point of creating radio waves. It relayed this information to the masters home-world, but the masters had long since been slain in a slave-revolution, so the new caretakers of their world ignored the data. More years went by, until a news report on CNN included a super-being known as ‘the Voice’ using his mutant linguistic abilities to order a gunmans’ surrender. This information was flagged as important by the satellite and send on, and the former slaves on the masters homeworld took interest. Their masters were dead, or where they? They now had a hint that one of them might still exist on this distant world, disguised as a ‘human.’

Fleets began to assemble and converge against that eventuality..