Post by Batgirl on Mar 11, 2011 18:30:07 GMT -5
Batgirl
Cassandra Cain
Cassandra Cain
----------------------
Age: 15
Orientation: Unexplored
Gender: Female
Teacher or Student: Student
Site Canon or Original: Comic Canon
Hero, Villian, or Civillian: Hero
Get the Picture
Height: 5' 5"
Weight: 115 lbs
Eyes: Dark Brown
Hair: Black
Face The Facts
Family:
Mother: Sandra "Lady Shiva" Woosan, assassin[/ul]
Friends: The Bat Family and, to a lesser degree, the Teen Titans
Race: Caucasian/Asian
Abilities:
Fluent in Body Language: Cass learned violence and combat long before she learned any form of verbal speech. Her first language, and still the only one he’s fluent in, is that of the body. She can read every minute tick and twitch of a person’s movement in order to predict their movements with pinpoint accuracy and even intuit some semblance of their immediate reactionary thoughts and feelings.
Master Martial Artist: Cain raised Cass constantly surrounded by combat, imparted all of his own vast knowledge, and had her train with a number of world-renown fighters. More recently, she has added to this by training for a time under Batman and mixing in a greater degree of defensive and non-lethal styles. Her ability to read body language also allows her to mimic and learn the styles of other fighters with an uncanny efficiency.
Master Acrobat: More a faucet of her vast array of martial arts mastery than anything, Cass has excellent agility and is capable of mixing impressive gymnastics and parkour-style movements into her fighting.
Stealth: A good deal of Cassandra’s earlier emphasis was on ninjitsu, lending itself to her being excellent at blending in in preparation for a sneak assault or spontaneous strike.
Weapons Master: Cass is highly skilled in most traditional melee and thrown weapons, as well as being an excellent marksman with a firearm.[/ul]
History: About 15 years ago, the assassin David Cain took on the dubious task of training the perfect body guard for the immortal leader of the League of Assassins: Ra’s Al Ghul. He had a very unique strategy for completing this task, intending to build a living weapon from the ground up. The first step was genetics and he blackmailed the rising martial arts prodigy, Sandra Wu-San, into conceiving his child. The next step was a theory of his, that the language centers of the brain could be developed to interpret combat as fluently as speech. So he raised his daughter, Cassandra, from day one without any exposure whatsoever to verbal language… but constantly surrounded by, and swiftly involved in, violence and fighting.
As it turned out, his methods worked. By the time she was eight years old, Cass was nearly unbeatable and had far surpassed her father. Only one step was left, he felt, for her “graduation”: her final inexperienced hurdle, to take a life. In a strange bout of fatherly pride, he bought her her first (and last) dress ever and sent her to assassinate a wealthy businessman. The act itself was easy; she tore through security and ripped the man’s throat out with two fingers. However, Cass’s ability to read body language caused her to experience his death in such an intimate way that it scarred her against killing for the rest of her life. Striking her father in anger for the first time in her life, Cass knocked Cain unconscious and fled.
For almost six years, she wandered the streets of the world, hiding from her father and herself and living more due to survival instinct than any real desire for continued existence. Eventually, her travels brought her to Gotham where she was found and eventually taken in by Batman and his team. She received additional training, finally learned some speech, and most importantly; she finally found a purpose and a way to balance out her past through taking up the mantle of Batgirl. When the Teen Titans grew into a more concrete and expanded roster, Batman decided to insert her into the team so that she could hopefully learn some teamwork as she operated mostly as a solo agent taking missions from him in Gotham.
Another thing he wanted was for her to be around others her own age and some, though not all, more exposed to some semblance of a normal social life. Despite her enormous, almost reverent, respect for the dark knight; one subject they'd clashed on before was the notion of Cass trying to develop some form of civilian identity, a pursuit he thought healthy but which she saw no value in. As such, when the ordinances to push the Teen Titans into high school went through, Batman insisted she not abandon her team and attend school as well. Though vehemently opposed to the concept, his intensity and way of presenting it caused her to begrudgingly give in.
Know the Person
Likes:
Dislikes:
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Poor Language Skills: It is only since traveling to Gotham and becoming Batgirl that Cass has even learned to speak. Her vocabulary is still rather limited and her speech is generally short and choppy. While her ability to read body language means she has no trouble understanding others, able to interpret what she’s meant to do from a few gestures, Cass sometimes has trouble effectively communicating her own thoughts to others. She is also completely illiterate. Her arithmetic is limited to her ability to count on her fingers, as well. With the recent advent of attending high school, she has been enrolled in ESL and remedial classes to try and develop these skills.
Narrow Experience: Cass is an excellent fighter, definitely one of, if not the, best in the world. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all she brings to the table. She was raised in a secluded dojo until the age of eight and has spent most of her time since then laying very low on the streets of the world, keeping hidden and her head down. Even with Batman, she’s learned only enough more about the world she lives in and the people she coexists with to be an effective vigilante in Gotham. She’s still very uninformed about most things others would have learned in grade school, or just day to day in life, and doesn’t even know how to drive any vehicles (though she gets around remarkably well on her feet and a grappling gun).
Headstrong: Fighting is her first language, her entire childhood, and still the center of how she defines herself and her world. Its small wonder that Cass is oblivious to the notion of diplomacy and not much more in touch with the idea of caution. She sees an enemy, her first and only instinct is to engage and incapacitate. Other courses of action simply don’t occur to Cass and, as someone who hasn’t truly lost a fight since her age could be counted on one hand, neither does the possibility of defeat, no matter the odds.[/ul]
Fears:
Dreams: For her actions as a vigilante to eventually feel like they've balanced out the sins of her past.
Personality: Cass is very much a product of her upbringing. She has no social graces or tact and her sense of humor rarely rears its rather twisted and grim head. Her first answer to anything is always violence. She’s direct and concise, speaking only when necessary and preferring to simply act. Cass is very confident in her abilities and was taught at a young age that hesitating to make a decision lead to pain, injury, and the possibility of death. She hasn’t really displayed or developed any desire to form a life or relationships beyond her all-business identity as Batgirl, and her lack of any identifiable secret identity (its not like Cain got her a birth certificate) or civilian life. Even when she joined the Teen Titans, she interacted almost exclusively for group training and missions, spending any "free" time patrolling, solo training, or occasionally sleeping when even her stamina ran low. Being forced into high school could conceivably force her to alter those values somewhat.
Other:
Roleplay Sample:
Batgirl had become Cass's identity, the face by which she most defined herself being the blank blackness of her cowl. The suit gave her purpose, promised redemption, and added the mystique of Batman's legacy to her presence. However, it was often out of costume that her true warrior's colors shown through most clearly. Though she didn't realize it, it was at times like the current one that her savage history was most obvious.
Practicing on the training ring of Mount Justice against a vast host of holographic foes, Cass wore only workout clothes in the form of a sports bra and a pair of loose gym shorts. Muscles muted by the shadowy darkness of her costume were further defined by glistening sweat and the sleeveless crop top of the bra, as well as the shorts ending just below her knees, revealed the normally-concealed network of criss-crossing old scars that covered almost the entirety of her torso and limbs. Hair raggedly whipping across her stony features, Cass whirled in a frenzy of brutal motion as she dispatched one digital opponent after another to the soundtrack of the computer system's analysis of her moves. Though its appraisal was positive, Cass had long since tuned it out. She was in the fugue of intensive battle and besides, it had an annoying tendency to use complex words which she did not understand and had no body to reference to fill in the blanks. When the electronic voice shifted focus however, it did catch Cass's attention with the booming announcement of;
>Recognized: Zatanna<
"End program," Cass responded instantly in her usual deadpan tone, turning to face the glowing entrance portal as her projected enemies blinked out of existence and she mentally slowed her heart rate back to its usual pace, which was still a bit faster than most due to her constant preparedness for battle and expectation of attack. She simply stood where she'd stopped her routine, watching the silhouette of the Justice Leaguer materialize with a small dimple in the center of her forehead as the only indication of Cass's vague puzzlement. Batman gave them missions, Red Tornado oversaw them, and Black Canary was in charge of training. She wondered what brought the sorceress here, the Gothamite incidentally being the magic-user that the mystic-wary young vigilante was the least uncomfortable around.
Her social graces still few and far between, Cass remained as she was even after the light faded away and left Zatanna fully transported into Mount Justice a few yards in front of Batgirl. The concept of offering a greeting didn't occur to her and she simply assumed that the magician would probably explain her presence, if she intended to do so, without prompting. So Cass just stared and waited.
Practicing on the training ring of Mount Justice against a vast host of holographic foes, Cass wore only workout clothes in the form of a sports bra and a pair of loose gym shorts. Muscles muted by the shadowy darkness of her costume were further defined by glistening sweat and the sleeveless crop top of the bra, as well as the shorts ending just below her knees, revealed the normally-concealed network of criss-crossing old scars that covered almost the entirety of her torso and limbs. Hair raggedly whipping across her stony features, Cass whirled in a frenzy of brutal motion as she dispatched one digital opponent after another to the soundtrack of the computer system's analysis of her moves. Though its appraisal was positive, Cass had long since tuned it out. She was in the fugue of intensive battle and besides, it had an annoying tendency to use complex words which she did not understand and had no body to reference to fill in the blanks. When the electronic voice shifted focus however, it did catch Cass's attention with the booming announcement of;
>Recognized: Zatanna<
"End program," Cass responded instantly in her usual deadpan tone, turning to face the glowing entrance portal as her projected enemies blinked out of existence and she mentally slowed her heart rate back to its usual pace, which was still a bit faster than most due to her constant preparedness for battle and expectation of attack. She simply stood where she'd stopped her routine, watching the silhouette of the Justice Leaguer materialize with a small dimple in the center of her forehead as the only indication of Cass's vague puzzlement. Batman gave them missions, Red Tornado oversaw them, and Black Canary was in charge of training. She wondered what brought the sorceress here, the Gothamite incidentally being the magic-user that the mystic-wary young vigilante was the least uncomfortable around.
Her social graces still few and far between, Cass remained as she was even after the light faded away and left Zatanna fully transported into Mount Justice a few yards in front of Batgirl. The concept of offering a greeting didn't occur to her and she simply assumed that the magician would probably explain her presence, if she intended to do so, without prompting. So Cass just stared and waited.
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