The Messenger, aka Muriel
(played in the movie by Uma Thurman)
Influences: To Reign in Hell; Stranger in a Strange Land; Angela from Spawn (looks).
Best moments: Facing down Overture alone, and finding that she had an entire team of heroes behind her; destroying the Augmentium meteorite that every supervillain in the world wanted and thereby personally annoying Dr. Destroyer; the private harp and violin duet at the welcoming party for the Circle of Justice; pulling the sheet over her shoulders the first time she saw Christian after she had told him she loved him, because she was now conscious of sin.
Quote: Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty. Share your toys. And if you see a superpowered melee, stay out of the way.
Muriel was an angel. She showed up in Houston one day with almost no memory of her past and a vague sense of what she ought to be doing, which led her to try out for a team of superheroes. She grappled with the questions of what it meant to be human and what it meant to be good and whether she really wanted to be either over the course of two campaigns.
Muriel taught me that it's fun to play the village idiot (even if it does irritate the heck out of the other players a lot of the time), which has kept me from flattening at least one character I can think of. Muriel also brought home to me exactly how much good roleplay with an NPC--even a major NPC whose motivations were completely established at the start of the game--can change things; her romance with Overture, aka Christian Allerdyce, totally altered him and the course of the campaign.
Muriel is the closest name I could find to the name of angel I liked from Gustav Davidson's dictionary. Her superhero name is how her gift of tongues rendered her announcement of her identity, and is a pun from the Greek.
The Messenger's journal from the first campaign I played her in, is one of the creepiest things I have ever written, if I do say so myself.
Vivien,
Lady Hawkwood
aka the White Lioness
(played in the movie and voiced in the animated series by Finola Hughes)
Influences: Batman; Indiana Jones; Lara Croft; Moon Knight; the Egyptian incarnation of Hawkman; the Shadow; Emma Peel (looks); Ghost (looks).
Best moments: Storming up to Nick Samson's island to find out why he was astrally projecting into her bedroom; outsmarting Roddy's evil lawyer; spotting the KWR connection before anyone else (including the GM!); getting her medical file back from Cybermancer and realizing that he was going to protect her secret--but not that he'd fallen in love with her; all the little victories from good planning.
Quote: (in British accent) I don't believe in coincidences.
Viv is smart, tough, and sexy, unbothered by approaching middle age, and energetic enough to run over lesser men. Viv was the public face of the Voyagers, whom she led in outwitting and defeating psychopaths, world-conquering aliens, dinosaurs, time-traveling Aussie dictators, ancient gods, and resurgent Nazis. She also faced her own father, a servant of dark magical forces, questions about her own identity that she was never quite able to resolve, and the dark side of the Collar of Sekhmet, the magical artifact that gave her her powers. I might add that only two of the three were in the background I wrote for her ...
Viv taught me that great planning can do a lot, but that if you have a chaos factor in your group, you can only plan for so much.
Viv's name and lineage come from the English condottiere Sir John Hawkwood, for whom her father was named.