Wow. Can't even say how much I dug this one. Too good.
Interesting origin story. Good job on capturing the "feel" of a willpower hero, as well as the idea that the obsessiveness that "powers" her has eclipsed all other emotions in her life.
Shadowdancer really needs a few years of intensive therapy, but what hero doesn't? 
Maybe someday she'll discover that it isn't revenge that drives her, but a deep-seated desire to rescue the child who lost her family and her life in an instant. Saving a child in similar straights might symbolically allow her to finally move past the event that effectively "killed" her and allow her to truly begin living again.
Of course, she might not be Shadowdancer any more after that!
Not too shabby. Although I do find it rather odd that the majority of the RPs have flat-out died lately, and a bumper crop of stories has sprung up from their corpses >.>
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"
Nice story and very well written 
Whitmoore Wiki -|- The Legion of Valor -|- My characters on DA!
- - -
"Crime fighting today... it's all style over substance." ~Alfred Pennysworth
((Thanks, guys. I actually decided to go willpower with a character that was intended from the start to be a former ballerina based in part on a conversation I was having with this ex-ballerina I've been seeing--I'm an ex-boxer and she's an ex-dancer and we have a lot of discussions about grace versus brawn and strength versus plain old toughness. I realized that some of the toughest people I know, unexpectedly, are dancers, who have worked through some of the nastiest injuries I've ever seen. My people in the boxing ring, we just get hit and our faces and hands get mangled. Dancers, their bodies splinter and sunder when they get hurt, and yet they keep getting back up and doing it again.
Funny part of the conversation that started this was that she told me some of the more graceful people she knows are boxers. "You all want to be dancers, don't you," she says. Granted I was always a graceless, in-close body-shot fighter myself, not an ounce of grace in me, and that's why I can't fight anymore. Her, she just broke too many of her leg bones and had to take herself off the stage forever.
Dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee, obviously. ))
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Interesting origin story. Good job on capturing the "feel" of a willpower hero, as well as the idea that the obsessiveness that "powers" her has eclipsed all other emotions in her life.
Shadowdancer really needs a few years of intensive therapy, but what hero doesn't? Maybe someday she'll discover that it isn't revenge that drives her, but a deep-seated desire to rescue the child who lost her family and her life in an instant. Saving a child in similar straights might symbolically allow her to finally move past the event that effectively "killed" her and allow her to truly begin living again.
Of course, she might not be Shadowdancer any more after that!
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Not to steal from this well written vignette (I really dug it too) but such a story in which Batman chases after a group of thieves who have killed a young boy's parents in order to steal their car is one of the finest Batman stories ever written (Denny O'Neil penned it).
I agree that she's really trying to rescue her parents and herself more than simply revenge them (I think this is a key to understanding a character like this).
I also agree that capturing a Willpower character is beautifully done here--she is a fully realized individual behind the mask, not simply a cipher for revenge. I'd love to see the story suggested by Slickriptide, it would be a killer.
My daughter is a dancer and I always loved the t-shirt they sold at her studio: "If dance were any tougher they'd have to call it football."
omy
Age 7. She is known as Kathy Miller. She glides across the studio floor in perfect form, a tiny dancer on pencil-thin legs, her frail frame pale and hard.
She spins and spins. Her teacher looks on, impassive, arms folded across her chest. Suddenly, Katie turns an ankle. She falls to the floor, uttering a small cry.
"Ballet is perfection," the instructor says, her accent thick and from some far away place. "You must be better."
"I am better than this," the little girl, the dancer, says. She rises to her feet, and begins to dance again.
***
Age 13. She is now known as Katie Miller. Her parents look on from the audience as she performs, partnered with a young boy of surprising grace and strength. During the performance there are flaws--she can sense them, as all dancers can, as they happen, tiny imperfections her parents would not see, but her teachers would--but she powers through, on sheer will, the old ankle injury aching as it always does. It should seem odd to a 13 year old to have old injuries, that there should be nothing old about her, but in her world, children grow old before their time.
The performance ends. She and her partner thank the audience, in the graceful way ballet dancers do. She is certain she can see her parents. It makes her heart swell.
Back stage, the teacher is upset.
"You will never be accepted to one of the great dance companies unless you are perfect, Miss Miller," she says. "You must do better."
"I am better than this," she says, under her breath.
***
Age 15. She calls herself Katherine Miller. She believes this makes her sound older. Her parents are driving her back from an audition for a school in Manhattan. They have high hopes. The instructor she auditioned with took her aside at the end of the audition.
"You have a lot of potential," she said.
"I am better than this," Katherine said, in return.
The car pauses at a red light in Atlas Park. One moment, the street is dark and empty in front of them; in another, bone-chillingly, it is filled with men in masks like skulls. Three, five, it is difficult to tell in the shadows. They have guns.
"Step out of the car," the leader says. He has a hard blond flat top. His voice is muffled by his mask.
Katherine's father looks to his wife, then looks to his daughter.
"Duck," he says.
Katherine's father slams on the gas, plowing through them. Bodies of men hammer out of control against the cheap metal walls of the car. Arterial blood sprays across the wind shield. There is gunfire; Katherine covers her head, crawls down to the floor to hide. She looks up once, just once, the very moment a bullet pierces her father's head. She will never forget the sight of his brain landing wetly on the window.
The car stops violently. A moment later, so too do Katherine, and her mother.
***
Age 16. Days from her seventeenth birthday. She calls herself Kate now. She doesn't have the time for extra syllables. She spends her days in rehab, regaining control of her body. The crash broke her like a vase thrown against a wall; but she lived, and her mother did not, and Kate often wonders which was the better fate.
She tires. The physical therapist tells her she can rest.
"You did good today," she says.
"I am better than this," Kate says, and picks herself up to walk again.
***
Age 20. She no longer cares what anyone calls her. Her scars have healed well, both because of what doctors call an unconquerable desire to get better, and because her parents left her with their fortune, their sole heir, and there was money enough for plastic surgery to hide the ugliness the accident left on her skin.
She is in a studio. It is for a different kind of dance these days. She still attempts ballet, in rare moments of peace, but her efforts are far more focused on mixed martial arts. She has thrown herself into combat with an animal ferocity. Her teachers are proud of her, though they tell her she must temper her anger.
"Nobody has ever won a fight in a rage," one tells her, an aging instructor who teaches her muay thai. "You've come a long way."
"I'm better than this," she tells him, and launches herself, again, at the red heavy bag.
***
Today. The girl born Katherine Miller now calls herself Shadowdanser. She rests rarely; at night, she takes to the streets, behind a mask. She claims to be fighting crime, but in truth, she is chasing ghosts.
Tonight she faces down a pack of Skulls, in a warehouse in Atlas Park. The battered bodies of her adversaries lay splayed on the floor behind her, bones broken, eyes closed. Before her stands a man who calls himself a Bone Daddy. He smiles.
"So, you've beat up a bunch of little boys with guns," he says. His hands drip with black, viscous material. Otherworldly. "But you'll need to do better to beat me."
"I am better than this," she says. She feels the small, delicate bones in his neck crack as she lands a kick to the side of his head. The black material fades away into nothing. She stares at his body, watches the small trickle of blood drip from his mouth to the filthy warehouse floor.
She pauses, just a moment, confused that there is no satisfaction in this. She expected something more. She expected to feel finished. Instead, she feels empty.
"I am better than this," Shadowdanser says. And she turns to leave, and become part of the night again.