[Some description of the characters that appeared in the story Schism]
Contents:
The superhero team is less thought out
so I can get through listing four out of five of them in a paragraph.
Paladin is the leader. The Knights Errant and Erratic are brother
and sister respectively. Erratic chose which was which. Squire, as
her name suggests, prefers support roles.
Page
Page's name suggests she's the lowliest
of the bunch, but it's actually playing with words. There's no
official second in command, but if there had to be one everyone,
except perhaps Page herself, would immediately agree it was Page.
She has some confidence issues, but that's pretty much her only
particular weakness. (As opposed to general weaknesses like reacting
badly to inhaling water or having bullets hit you at high speeds.)
She picked “Page” because it fits
with the team theme while also suggesting one of her defining traits: she loves books. She'll use the internet, and every book she owns
has a digital backups and at least two non-backup digital copies (one
on the teams computer system, the other travels with her in case she
needs to look something up in the field), but she loves the feel of a
book in her hands and the smell of aged parchment.
She's a scholar in her own right, and
she's the “witch” that Tinker told Mishap to kill.
She doesn't use that word to describe
herself. She has nothing against self-described witches, but she
doesn't feel like the word fits her. Sure, the etymology is
uncertain, but there are suggestions and hints and . . . that's not
her. It's not the way she approaches magic.
If you ask her what she is, she'll say
she's shooting for “wizard” but isn't convinced she's got the
wisdom thing down yet. (She might never feel like she's achieved
wisdom, and if she did that might be a sign she's not so wise.
There's always room for improvement, after all.)
If you ask her what to call her, beyond
“Page”, she'll point out that “spell caster” is quite
literal, “magician” and “magic user” are both general catchalls, and
there are a myriad of addition options for those with some
imagination.
The team began to fracture when Tinker
shouted the order, “Kill the witch,” to Mishap in the middle of a
battle. No one is really sure where that came from. Yes, the
opportunity presented itself, but he hasn't ordered anyone else to
kill or that anyone else be killed.
After Mishap didn't kill Page, he got
on her case about not being up to the task of being a villain.
Mishap was generally paired off against Page anyway, and Tinker kept
pushing her to use greater violence than she was willing to and
berating her for not being committed to the cause when she didn't.
Mishap probably could have made a
persuasive argument that Tinker was the one with fucked up priorities
since their brand of villainy was thievery and they had never gone
for attacks that would do lasting harm. Then again, so could any of
the others, and they didn't.
She quit the team.
Schism is the third time that
her old team has bumped into her since she quit, which is why she
brought up the possibility they were following her. The “shoving
at a distance” occurred the second time they all ran into each
other, and was during a fight with the heroes.
Tinker
Tinker is a tech villain and all of the
team's equipment, including his ray guns, are things he personally
made.
As for his personality, Tinker started
off seeming downright egalitarian. Maybe it was being the undisputed
leader, maybe it was because his team was one person short of all
male, maybe something else, but as time went on he started letting
how he really felt show more and more and how he really felt on the
inside was not a pretty sight.
Only two sorts of people call Page a
witch, for example. The first are people who don't know much about
Page. The second are people who want to evoke another word while
having, “I'm not a misogynist,” cover. Tinker knows Page very
well, since her team has been his primary opponent long enough for
mountains of opposition research.
Also, there's a reason Mastodon thinks
Mishap would have been justified shooting Tinker in the back. The
same doesn't really hold true for the others. The male members
haven't had to put up with the same shit.
Multiplicity
Multiplicity can be in many places at
once. The down side is that he can't become stronger by doing so.
If there are two of him they'll each be at half strength. Three and
they're at one third strength. He wishes he could divide the
strength unevenly because he doesn't like the fact that, even though
he's significantly stronger than the average person after several
divisions every instance of him could be beaten by an ordinary
untrained child. He'd like to keep at least one version at half
strength, but his power doesn't work that way.
Then again, he's not there for the
combat. There are plenty of ways to make use of a horde of people
even when they do lack physical strength to an extreme degree. He
can loot a place about as fast as someone with hyperspeed, provided
the loot isn't too heavy (he does not do gold) and in a world where
so much can be done with keystrokes, he often doesn't need much
strength.
He hates making decisions, and so is
perfectly content to follow the leader without question, and is fond
of the path of least immediate resistance. He doesn't think ahead
beyond how he'll spend his take, and so often makes things harder
than they need to be because he won't invest a small effort now to
forestall a large effort later.
Pathfinder
Pathfinder always knows the quickest
way anywhere. Drop him in a place he's never been before and he'll
intuitively know every shortcut and never hit a dead end unless he
wants to. He's also somewhere between free runner and traceur
(parkour practitioner in the purest sense.) He can be as efficient
and fast as possible when he needs to be, but he likes the
flourish and inefficiency to be found in free running even though
traceurs tend to look down on that (“There are no flips in
parkour!”)
Mishap was the only other one on the
team who shared his love of movement, but even though they were
longtime running partners they were never really friends. Pathfinder
isn't big on getting close to people.
He also isn't big on hurting
people. He joined a team of thieves, not of thugs. If Mishap had
preformed the ordered killing he would have turned on the entire team
then and there, but since she didn't (and since no one else seemed
to be escalating violence) he thought the team could temper their
leader's newfound bloodlust and go back to normal or, after Mihap
left, something resembling it.
Mastodon
Mastodon has his name because, well . .
. He's got tusks, but he keeps them filed down to avoid unwanted
attention. He has fur, but he shaves it so he can appear like a
vaguely normal person. Why he has super-strength isn't really
clear since a human sized Mastodon wouldn't be that strong and a human
shaped one would likely be even less so.
He doesn't talk about how he got that
way. He doesn't talk much at all. Schism easily has him speaking
more in one encounter than he did for the two months leading up to
it.
Usually he's monosyllabic, which leads
to various people dismissing him as a dim-witted oaf. Since he doesn't try
to correct that, the reputation tends to stick.
He is, however, intensely loyal to his
few friends and will use words to defend them every bit as much as
super strength. He tries to respect boundaries, which is why his
response to, “Are you following me?” was more than, “No.”
Also he felt really guilty for not having spoken up sooner. Like,
say, when things were at the level of micro-aggressions from Tinker,
the team was fully functional, and no one had even thought of
suggesting killing anyone.
Mishap was his only friend on the team,
though all it would take for Pathfinder to become his friend would be
for Pathfinder to want it. Mastodon's willing, but he's not
going to pressure someone into a friendship they don't desire.
Mishap
Mishap came to magic through natural
talent, and she does consider herself a witch. She's also well aware
of why Tinker started using that particular word to describe Page.
As far as she's concerned it's a completely different word when he
uses it, and there's no confusion because she'd never use Tinker's
version of the word.
As her name suggests, she's good at
making things go wrong. She can make the most nimble person trip and
fall, the best written code crash, the most finely tuned machine
sputter and die. Through refinement of her innate powers she's
learned to do it with a great deal of control, and even do it to
things she didn't originally know existed. Notably, she can cause failure in
the spells of others. If she has the energy and attention to spare,
and time, she can cancel any spell Page casts.
Page can do the same to her, though she
comes to it via entirely different means. That means that when they
face off, which they usually did when the two teams clashed, their
magics cancel out absent deception or distraction. The results are
physical fights where each is trying to sneak in magic while trying
to be vigilant against the other doing the same.
The “Kill the witch” moment was
when Page had her attention elsewhere and was completely unprepared
to counter a magical attack from Mishap. If not for the order Mishap
probably could have made use of the fact, but the order left her
frozen in shock. Also pissed off at someone who very much was not
Page.
Even so, she tried to stay on the team and make things work. There were two things that stopped that from happening. One was that Tinker's misogyny started to show more and more. The other, which was presumably related, is that he kept on demanding greater levels of violence and berating her when she didn't deliver.
Later demands of greater levels of
violence were more physical in nature as opportunities to get a sure magical hit in on Page tend to be both rare and impossible to predict ahead of time.
After she left the team, Tinker
attempted to do the killing himself. Fortunately Mishap happened to
have an unexpected front row seat for that clash. That was when
Mishap “shoved” him from a distance. No one else really knew
what was going on, so neither team knew that Tinker had tried kill
Page.
Mishap might be the only one who noticed that Tinker wasn't trying
to pressure any of the boys into changing their styles and is definitely
the only one to know that Tinker has only ever personally gone after (in
a lethal kind of way) the person he couldn't get her to harm.
