Mâché: The Masked Conduit

:Name: Sarah Blanchard AKA Mâché

:Age: 19

:DOB: August 19th

:Appearance:

Sarah often dresses quite warmly in a thick, double breasted winter coat. She is fairly pale, which stands in contrast to her bright green eyes. She keeps her brown hair tied into simple pigtails and out of her face She shows off her small but warm smile and brilliant eyes. She often moves reservedly in small, simple motions, as if indicative of shyness.
As Mâché, Sarah’s appearance is somewhat variable. When a change is required quickly, her street clothes will stay the same, bear the adoption of a featureless, paper mache mask, which is similar in its construction to a kabuki mask. When she has time to prepare in advance, Sarah will don a full, immaculate tuxedo in addition to her mask.

:Race:
Conduit

:Powers:
Paper

:Power Level:
Tier 4

:Power Abilities:
-Paper Planes: Sarah can transmute her entire body into a cloud of paper planes. In this form, Sarah can fly around the city more or less at well through careful observation, as she is technically at the whims of airdrafts.
-Mâché Armor: Sarah can create partial body suits of armor out of paper, which are surprisingly strong - this is due to paper’s ability to continually fold in onto itself and become incredibly strong. This armor can resist bullets to a degree.
-White Hurricane: Sarah can conjure a large storm of paper, swirling around her. This paper isn’t particularly potent as a weapon, but it can cause minor papercuts. Still, it is primarily used as a distraction or means of escape as it creates very difficult visual situations.
-Paper Trail: Sarah transmutes into a cloud of paper and can move around, leaving rapidly appearing paper behind her as she moves before she re solidifies. In this state she moves faster and jumps higher.
-Paper Cut: Sarah can make swords and spears out of paper, which while not having as much crushing power as similar weapons of their type, their slicing power is incredible.

:Skills:
-Stage Magic: Sarah was an aspiring stage magician for a brief stint. She has a knowledge of theatrics, and a keen perception of human ‘blindspots’, exploited through careful misdirection.
-Psychology: Sarah was a psych major at ECU(Empire City University), and has a fairly comprehensive knowledge of human psychology, which she can employ to her advantage.
-Guitar: Sarah is a solid guitar player.
-Gymnast: After many lessons in highschool, Sarah retains moderate skill as a gymnast.
-French: She fluently speaks French.


:Equipment:
-Smoke Bombs: She generally keeps a smoke bomb or two on her person for either an impromptu magic trick, or to escape one of the city’s many gangs.
-Playing Cards: She has a half dozen decks of cards that she can manipulate with her power if she so chooses. After an extreme amount of practice, Sarah has found that through force of will with her power, she can change card faces.
-Pepper Spray: It might be useful, at some point, her mother insists that she carry it.
-Flint Powder + Gloves: She has a pair of gloves and a small bag of powder on her person. She inserts her index finger and thumb into the bag, and when snapped together, she can produce a small spark. This is typically used in her magic routines.


:Personality:
Sarah has a bubbly sort of personality - she typically comes off as happy and kind, without a care in the world. She often enjoys spending her time sitting in her rocking chair and strumming the days away on her guitar. It is in the sublimity of this time that she spends thinking about herself - she’s deeply introspective. She considers the things and people in her life, her magic routines, and her place in this world. She’ll often spend long hours, strumming the same few chords absently, dreaming away in her head about all the things that could be, the people she could be meeting, the person she could become. She is enraptured with the possibility of it all. It is because of this she finds herself often biting off more than she can chew. She’s fiercely confident, and believes she can take on any challenge. In her daily life, she is burdened with college, guitar lessons, magic lessons, and magic routines - and now with her newfound abilities, hours spent on attempted superheroics is tossed into the mix. However, this confidence often breaks down in social situations. She often finds herself stumbling through sentences and struggling to make anything more than a surface level connection with someone. She is deeply anxious about her social ineptitude and spends many a guitar session worrying about it. It is perhaps because of this she chose, of all things, to be both a Magician and a Superhero. Both allow her to step into someone else’s skin and pretend to be competent for a little while. This shyness, however, is at constant war with her deep desire for human interaction and praise. She finds herself forcing herself into social situations, each time coming away with a panic attack and a mental promise to never do it again. To her, there’s nothing quite like the roar of a crowd after a stunning trick, or the look in a person’s eyes when they see her in her costume. She craves the attention, but her anxiety continually beats her back from it.

Her only respite from this war is when she’s in costume, or on stage. She’ll say whatever is on her mind - even if it might hurt someone, as opposed to her more typical attitude of saying nothing at all. She gains a degree of recklessness, unabashedly seeking attention, connections, and glory wherever it can be found. But the superheroics isn’t all it’s cracked up to be - she finds herself shocked at the depravity of some of the things she sees. The post Blast world is a harsh place, and internally, Sarah expected more of a Golden Age Superhero situation.


:Faction: None

:Biography:
Sarah was born and raised in Empire City to a pair of first generation French immigrants. Her parents had only been there a few years at the time, and adding a child to the mix complicated things for them.
The first several years of her life were a mix of moving around to a collection of different hotels, apartments, and occasionally backstreets while her parents struggled to find jobs. Her social development was stunted - they moved around within the city so often that it was difficult for her to make any friends at all, even at her young age. As the children around her grew and matured socially, she still found difficulty in making friends, not having done it too much at all.
The years came and went gradually. Her parents finally found their footing, settling down in a cramped little apartment in the Historic District, and she began attending school. Her grades were passable, and she largely remained unentangled, socially. It is in these years she began finding her passion for Magic. In what time other kid would spend playing with friends, she devoted to sitting in front of her family’s dinky little television, mystified by swathes of TV Magic Men. As middle school flew by, she grew more and more skilled. She started with simple playing cards, balls, cups, and rings - by the time she was out of middle school she’d graduated to smoke bombs, flint powder and an assortment of other gadgets.

But then the Ray-Sphere blast happened. A wave of energy blasted through the city and annihilated her home. She was in a coma for weeks. She came out of it to be greeted by a band of exhausted doctors, and her equally drained parents.
What followed was a return to relative normalcy. The city was different, now - gangs ruled the streets, and fantastically powerful supermen were around every corner. But still, she was just a girl in Highschool. Struggling to find a way to cope with the added stress of gun-toting goons patrolling the streets, and not having very much of a home to go back to, Sarah took shelter in her interests, taking up guitar and gymnastics. Still, Sarah felt like something was missing. The oppressive rule of the Reapers, and the ongoing war between them and the Templars made the city feel like a hellscape at times, and she felt like she was all alone in the center of it. Just a lost little girl looking for someone or something to hold onto, but without the guts to look. Thankfully, she’d get her chance.

The second Ray-sphere detonated, and Sarah found that she was imbued with fantastic powers. This finally helped her fill a void in her life. As she graduated HS and enrolled in ECU, she found that Magic allowed her to come out of her shell, and really be herself with people - to feel the rush and roar of the crowd was the greatest feeling out there. In attempting to chase that same high she got from magic, Sarah decided to try her hand at being a superhero...


:Roleplay Sample:

Sarah’s heart thumped in her chest, it took every ounce of her effort to keep her legs from sputtering out of control as she ran. The bullets whizzed through the air inches from her head. All she could hear was the ringing of what was most certainly tinnitus and the occasional cracking report of gunshots. Her mask was cracked and flaking, showing one of her green eyes, running with tears and ruined makeup. There - an abandoned armored car, long since cleared out of its cash - she dived into the back of the truck. The decade-since-abandoned car groaned as 7.76 mm rounds dug their way into the steel, boring their way to their target, little by little.

Sarah hadn’t expect there to be so many Reapers. The only reason she wasn’t dead was because only a few had guns, and because her armor was stronger than she gave it credit for. She tried to control the shaking of her hands enough to reach into her bag of flint powder, trying to ignore the thunderous rain of bullets inching closer to her head.

:Other: None

Accepted