Pyroclast_EU

((Just letting people know I haven't died! Man, it's been a busy couple of weeks. Haven't actually had a single night where I wasn't doing something. Anyway, I've got part three of this in the works, and I'm hoping to get back online next week. Woo!)

((Meant to say, but completely forgot - I'm totally down with in-thread comments, if you want to leave something. If you could just use OOC notification - as demonstrated here - that'll keep things nice and clear. Thanks!))

Jen sat bolt upright, stifling a scream, clutching the sheets. Sweat stuck the baggy ZorTel Industries T-shirt to her skin, and her hair was plastered to her forehead.

3:27, flashed the clock on the table. The heavy drapes were drawn, but she could hear the muffled sounds of Steel Canyon at night through the vent in the window. Cars driving by, the murmur of people coming home from a late night, the occasional drunken yell.

Jen dragged herself out from the sheets and flicked the bedside lamp on, checking around the room for fire damage. Nothing. She'd been lucky so far, since checking into the El Cabana. That said, she hadn't accidentally torched a room in her sleep in a couple of years.

Far as I remember.

She stumbled towards the bathroom, rubbing at her eyes and squinting against the light. She filled the smudged tumbler by the sink with cold water and downed it, shivering as she swallowed.

Standing on the edges of her bare feet to keep as far away from the cold floor as possible, she pushed the hair out of her face and stared at herself in the mirror.

So who the hell are you, anyway?

She stared herself in the eyes, daring her reflection to do something, say something, reveal something that she didn't already know. She gritted her teeth. She gripped the edge of the sink with both hands, squeezing until her knuckles were white and the veins on the backs of her hands were standing out. Tears began to well in the corners of her eyes, and she felt herself shaking. The ceramic edging of the sink began smouldering beneath her touch, and the linoleum flooring began to curl and turn brown where she stood.

Her reflection stared back, furious and red-faced, wreathed in grey-black smoke. The edge of her left sleeve caught, and a yellow tongue of flame started eating away at it, joined almost immediately by another flame on her right shoulder--

The room's fire alarm sounded, piercing her reverie.

Jen jumped, and realised where she was. She lunged at the cold tap - it sizzled as she touched it, the condensation clinging to it turning to steam - and opened it fully. She pulled off her t-shirt, dousing the flames under the water, and used it to cool off the floor.

Dumping the sodden, blackened garment in the sink and turning the tap off, she stumbled out of the bathroom trailing smoke and steam. She started throwing things into her well-travelled tote bag, packing her life away for what felt like the hundredth time. She could hear running outside, the bustle and cries of people who know they should be acting in an orderly fashion but have just seen smoke curling out from under a door.

She zipped the bag up and pulled on last night's clothes. She opened the window, checked to check no one on the ground was looking, and tossed the bag out onto the fire escape. Almost as an afterthought, she reached into her trenchcoat and pulled out a brown envelope, counting out three hundred-dollar bills and leaving them on the bed. She made to step out to the fire escape, then stopped and reconsidered, and ran into the bathroom to grab the t-shirt. She stuffed it into the top of her bag and leapt out into the early morning sky.

Galaxy City. Right?

A thin girl in a black trenchcoat, strawberry blonde hair pulled back with a few strands hanging down over her glasses. Hunched shoulders, nervous posture. Geek, right? Some nerdy loner, walking the streets, maybe going to a buddy's place to watch Robot Chicken or something. That's generally the assumption made by the people she passes. Just another girl who came to Paragon City to live amongst the capes and the tights, to get a giddy thrill from being around all the supers.

The girl finds it kinda funny to know this is how they see her. On the other hand, part of it worries her.

She used to be Jennifer Tamland, schoolgirl, cheerleader, secret math whiz. Then it all got taken away from her, and she became something different. Eventually, she became something a lot stronger. Then that all got taken away.

These days, she wonders who she really is.

She feels like her glory days have passed her by. She still wears the costume, she still plays with fire, she still patrols the streets at night, but none of it seems real any more. She was away too long. The thugs have forgotten who she is, and for some reason she can't work out, that matters to her. That, in itself, causes her a fair amount of confusion. She thinks it might be a throwback to her schooldays. Her normal days.

It's not just that that's bothering her, though.

It's the gaps.

Her memory's been messed with so much, and she knows it. Or does she? The creeps at SAIL played around with it, for one thing, and she still doesn't know if it's all come out yet, or if there are still some buried commands. And she's fairly certain that she's had her memory messed with again since, but... she's just not sure. Every time something comes swimming back into focus, it's like the lights dim and it gets taken away from her again.

The worst part? The gaps are getting more frequent.

Occasionally, she has to stop and remind herself where she is. She has to think hard about what she's doing. She wakes up with no memory of the night before, and that terrifies her.

She hangs around the Galaxy Girl statue, watching people, not knowing if she knows them, or even if she met them before. She just stands there, balling her fists, trying to remember.

Of course - how could it not be? - Hannah was the exception. She remembers her. Or, at least, she thinks she does. She recognised her, definitely. Everyone else, though? It's all a haze.

She worries. How could she not? Even if she was normal, the thought of a brain tumour, or the C-word, would be bad enough. But with her altered DNA, and her accelerated metabolism, and all the weird beams and rays and emissions she's been subject to over the past few years... it could be anything.

And so she walks. She walks around Galaxy City, and King's Row, and Steel Canyon (where she's staying - "Room 1428, El Cabana hotel", as she writes on her hand every morning when she wakes up), and she tries to remember. Little snatches come through to her. The rooftops in King's. The old gang. Some of their faces come right back to her when she goes to certain places, only to vanish again when she moves on.

And so, the girl who used to be Pyroclast continues to walk the streets of Paragon City.


And the one thought - the thought that keeps her awake at night, the thought that makes the pit of her stomach drop right out - is this:

What if I forgot on purpose?



What the hell did I do when I was away?

It's true... Jen's back!

A quick recap for those who aren't in the know...

About a year and a half ago (yowch, was it that long?) Jennifer Tamland stumbled on the Galaxy Girl crowd after a pretty nasty ordeal at the hands of a mutant hired-gun organisation called SAIL, which had kidnapped her and attempted a brainwashing after her powers first manifested at her 19th birthday. She was pretty roughed up and kinda scared, and it was at this point that she met Hannah Rolando for the first time. The two girls got on like a house on fire, despite the age difference. In time, Jen learned that the life of a vacuous valley girl just wasn't right for her, even though she'd always assumed it was how she'd always be. No, Hannah managed to bring out Jen's inner geek, and taught her to love cheeseburgers, video gaming and comic books. She never looked back. When Hannah's adoptive mother Zorielle invited Jen to move in with them, because she had nowhere else to go, she didn't say no.

It wasn't all that long before the girls realised that their feelings for each other were more than just platonic, and their friendship turned into a tentative relationship. It all seemed to be going perfectly until a series of events were set in motion that brought it all crashing down around them both.

(Okay, here's where the exact details get kinda sketchy in my head, especially the order of things, and short of trawling the old 9PM@GG thread, the only thing I can hope is that I get it mostly right and then get corrected a whole lot! :P)

The first blow came when Hannah started... changing. Her powers were growing unstable, and it was killing her. [The details here are gonna be very sketchy indeed, but I'm sure Z can help fill 'em in!] The end result of this was an explosion in a shack in Perez Park that seemingly killed Hannah, and plunged Jen into a spiralling bad phase. Thankfully, before she died, Hannah had managed to upload herself into a swarm of nano-robots, which infested an old computer she'd been working on and downloaded her consciousness. Sort of.
The nanites rebuilt the computer, bringing about the being that would later come to be known as Jess - at this point, a seemingly simple AI program that could learn, and indeed had a long way to go. It was only when the robot started saying things that only Hannah could have known that her friends realised she was inside there somewhere. After several long weeks, ZorTel Industries managed to bring her out, and there was a joyous, tearful reunion.

Time passed.

Although Jen thought she'd escaped from SAIL, it turned out she'd only managed half the job. They'd turned her into a sleeper agent, and a target finally presented itself - Zorielle Rolando, who clearly had enemies in the business world. At the flick of a telepathic switch, Jen went from happy-go-lucky teenager to cold-hearted killer.

Thankfully, Zorielle managed to escape - perhaps Jen was fighting for control of herself, and was trying as hard as she could to avoid hurting the woman who'd taken her into her home - and Jen fled the scene. Over the next few weeks there were reports of spontaneous fires all across the state, of political figures and people with powerful enemies roasting alive in their beds. One report that stood out in the midst of all this was the death of a middle-aged couple in their beds, neither of whom were important or particularly distinguished people - just a couple trying to get along since their youngest daughter went missing after her 19th birthday.

It was a dark time for Jennifer Tamland.

During this time, her elder sister Marie had come to Paragon City to try to find her, after hearing rumours and tip-offs that she could be found there. She met the "Rooftop Generation", the group of young mutants of which Jen and Hannah had been founding members, and was told what had happened. She was told to leave town before anything bad happened, and did so with a heavy heart.

When Jen returned to Galaxy City, she found a group of her old friends waiting for her. Although she'd treated them so badly throughout all of this, they still had faith that they could get her back to her old self, and after a serious battle that nearly cost her her life, the mental barriers were broken down and Jen came back.

She didn't come back perfect, though. She was a real mess, especially after she realised what had happened to her parents. Also, she was being held inside one of the ZorTel secure facilities, to ensure the safety of both herself and others around her. Through all this, her friends rallied around her, sitting by her cell and keeping her company. She found a close friend in The Pest, a green mutant vigilante whose real name was Jimmy.

When she got out, she realised that what she and Hannah had had was gone, no matter how much both of them wished it wasn't. In her grief, she turned to Jimmy, and although nothing ever happened between them, they became very close indeed.

She stayed in Paragon City for several weeks after that, not daring to go out looking for trouble, or indeed use her powers in any way. She disappeared from the group, even though they were as supportive as ever. As she grew more distant, she gradually became convinced that Paragon City was the cause of her troubles. Eventually, one evening, she left on a train heading west, and stopped about twenty miles out in a town called Bernville.

Leaving her crimefighting equipment locked tight in a box, she started up a 'normal' life for herself, cutting herself off from Paragon entirely and telling no one where she was. She started work in an office, just simple temp work, and was eventually offered a supervisory position. It looked like everything was settling down, and her worries were over.

And they were.

Except...

...it was so god-damned boring!

She was used to vanquishing crime, throwing herself into fights for the good of the city, rooting out evil and controlling fire with her mind. How could she stay in boring suburbia, where the only excitement she got was going out with her few work buddies on Fridays? She dug out her hero outfit, and started heading back into Paragon City on an irregular basis. She started off with petty street thugs, working herself back up to where she had been. It turned out that she had much, much better control of her powers, and as much as she hated to admit it, she knew that it was because of what she'd done for SAIL. And so she carried on for several months, making a trip into the big city when she felt she could.

Some time later, on one of these trips, she bumped back into Hannah Rolando. It was something of a shock, but it started in motion a chain of events that led to her moving back to Paragon City and finding a new job.

But... that part's still going on now. Only one way to find out what happens next!

Turns out my global handle is actually @Pyroclast. Handy!

Oh, why not, seeing as how I'm back!

Global Handle: @Tharilion
Server: Union
RP Characters: Pyroclast, El Torro, Holotrix, Tharilion, some other bit parts
Times on: I've got a lot of RL commitments, so I'm around on sporadic evenings. Involve me in complex plot and I'll be forced to get more regular :P
Timezone: GMT
Roleplay types: Statue, anything in-game really!
Notes: Aiming for the "most infrequent roleplayer" award. Have been at GG since very early days (started playing CoH when it came out, and found the statue crowd not long after) but have had several long hiatuses.

*sniff* It's great to feel wanted! :P

Interesting topic!

Looking over my characters, I've got a roughly equal number of male and female ones. I've RPed with almost all of them, but I'm not sure whether I'm any good at portraying the opposite gender.

One thing that could probably be counted as an odd quirk, though, is that I don't like revealing alts. So most people probably don't know that most of my characters are, in fact, me.

Does that make me a bad, secretive person?

So very very tempted!

I've been playing CoH a little bit lately, after my long hiatus. What can I say? I missed it. I don't wanna leap right back into RPing wholesale just yet, because I keep doing that then disappearing again, but let's just say that something that was holding me back before is no longer an issue. So I'll be around a bit more. Maybe :P

As such, I'll probably be heading to this shindig. Once I've made a concrete decision, I'll be able to take a carload from the Reading area. Sounds like fun!