Raven
From Sinanju
| Unknown Internet Pic as Raven | |
| Raven | |
|---|---|
| Played by | {{{player}}} |
| Statistics | |
| Goes By | Raven |
| Status | Alive |
| Race | Human |
| Gender | Female |
| Age | Approx. 30 |
| Primary Occupation | Lunatic Superheroine |
| Special Abilities | Alter ego of Kate Sutherland. Raven is a lucid dreamer, aware that so-called reality is a collective dream. |
Contents |
Background Story
Kate Sutherland was born and raised in Hudson City. Her father was a very successful reporter for the major city paper until he retired ten years ago. Kate grew up listening to tales of graft, corruption, violence—and heroism. Her father's passion for getting at the truth and for seeing justice done, his respect for those who shared his dedication, rubbed off on her. James Sutherland was pleased--and a little worried for her—when his youngest daughter announced that she wanted to become an attorney. Specifically, a prosecuting attorney.
Kate attended college, then law school and eventually got her law degree. She worked for years as a part-time cab driver to pay her way, so she knows Hudson City intimately. Kate started her career as a law clerk for the law firm Hassebrock, Hurley & Barrett. She was later hired as a prosecutor's intern, and then served as a Clerk to the Honorable Vincent Gambino, Hudson City Court of Common Pleas. Kate now works as an assistant prosecutor for the Hudson City District Attorney's Office. It has been a sobering experience.
She thought she'd known what to expect based on her father's tales, but it isn't the dramatic conflicts that wear down the soul. It's the never-ending struggle against willful incompetence and ignorance, greed, ambition and petty power struggles. Kate soldiered on even as her enthusiasm for the job was ground down. Nonetheless, Kate was determined to make a difference. Her life changed completely when she was assigned to prosecute a prominent "businessman" with ties to the Marcelli crime syndicate for a murder-for-hire.
It was not her first big case, but it was the most important one so far. Kate worked hard to prepare the case, studying the law, studying the evidence, struggling with frightened and uncooperative witnesses, foot dragging by surly cops and pressure from her superiors to drop the case. Kate persevered, overcoming innumerable legal challenges and increasingly overt threats to her own safety—only to be brutally assaulted and nearly killed. She survived with no permanent injuries, but her convalescence took months.
Her lengthy recuperation was excuse enough for the DA to turn the case over to another assistant prosecutor, Simon Taggart. Two weeks later the charges were all dismissed with prejudice. Kate was furious, but despite her best efforts could find no proof of what she was convinced was a deliberate torpedoing of the case by Taggart. She is convinced that he's dirty, and is still watching and waiting for an opportunity to prove it. Kate suspects that the current DA will be retiring soon, and she would like his job, but at the very least is determined to assure that Taggart does not succeed him.
Once she'd recovered from her injuries, Kate was determined to do everything she could to make sure it never happened again. She began taking self-defense classes. She also obtained a carry permit for a concealed handgun and training in its use. Finally, she found a source for fashionable jackets with a ballistic cloth lining. And she went back to work with renewed zeal. On the surface, everything was fine. But only on the surface.
In truth, Kate was constantly troubled by memories of the attack and its aftermath. She began to have trouble concentrating at work, her appetite declined, and she had trouble sleeping. She tried to work through it, but the problems grew steadily worse. She lost weight, she was constantly exhausted, and her work began to suffer. She rebuffed the efforts of friends and colleagues to help her and began drinking too much. It all came to a head one night when she drank herself into a stupor and fell into a troubled sleep.
Kate dreamed. In her dream, she was a small, dark woman who called herself Raven, and she knew something no one else seemed to realize. Hudson City wasn't just a nightmarish city of corruption and violence—it was literally a nightmare. Raven saw the truth—and seeing it, could alter the dreamscape in which she moved. She used her lucidity to do impossible things in her pursuit of justice, performing feats of inhuman strength and speed, shrugging off attacks that should have killed her, defying gravity, and even changing the landscape around her to suit her dark purposes.
Kate woke the next morning hungover but feeling more rested than she had in weeks. She recalled the dream with pleasure. She found herself better able to concentrate on work, and ate better as well. She spent the day struggling to obtain the testimony of two small time criminals against their boss, but they adamantly refused to talk. That night she dreamed of Raven again. This time Raven tracked down the reluctant witnesses and terrorized them into testifying against their employer. It was a very...satisfying dream.
Kate again woke rested and eager to get to work, wishing that her problems with uncooperative witnesses could be so easily solved in real life. It was when the two witnesses arrived at her office that morning with a lawyer in tow that Kate began to grasp the truth. Raven was real, and had terrorized the two men exactly the way she remembered it from her dreams. Kate was simultaneously excited and appalled by the revelation.
The lawyer hinted that the D.A.'s office was behind this assault on her clients and demanded that charges against them be dropped—with no requirement for testimony. Kate argued, but the evidence of the assault was clear and her heart wasn't in it. A private fantasy was one thing, but her mysterious enforcer—whoever and whatever she was—had blatantly violated the law and tainted the case. That was not how Kate wanted to do business even if no one could prove Raven had any connection to Kate. She dropped the charges. It was an expensive lesson she would not forget.
At first Kate believed that Raven was some "Monster from the Id" and could only come out when she slept. That theory collapsed when Kate lay down to sleep that night, tossed and turned restlessly, and finally rose again feeling as if she were not herself. She looked into her mirror to confirm her suspicions; Raven looked back at her. Shocked, she felt—and saw in her mirror—the transformation back to her familiar face.
Kate soon learned to make the transition at will, but it was a frightening one. She was Raven and at the same time...not. Raven lived in a different world, thought differently, felt differently, and acted in ways that both appalled and liberated Kate. Raven felt just as ambivalent about her staid, conservative alter ego. One of the ways in which she copes with this situation is keeping a journal; she writes in it as Kate and as Raven. Though one persona sometimes responds to thoughts or fears expressed by the other, for the most part the journal documents that they're merely two sides of the same person, and sometimes Kate really needs that assurance.
In the months since the discovery of her dual identity, Raven has become well known in the Hudson City underworld. She is neither the most violent nor the craziest hero in Hudson City, but she is arguably the scariest, if only because reality itself seems to go crazy whenever she's around.
Personality
Kate and Raven are two sides of the same coin, both devoted to seeing justice done, but with radically different approaches.
Kate is an idealist. She isn't naïve. She's well aware that many of her fellow citizens are more concerned with their own advancement than with justice, that too many of those tasked with enforcing the law are among them. That just makes it more important for those who care about justice to fight for it. Kate's chosen field of battle is the courtroom. Her mission in life is to see that the innocent are protected and the guilty punished. She is patient, methodical and driven. Kate is careful to see that her methods do not undermine her goals; the ends do not justify the means. She strives to maintain her decorum and professionalism at all times, always aware that her behavior can reflect upon on her office and influence its reputation and effectiveness.
Raven, by contrast, is everything Kate cannot be: impulsive, sensual, direct and violent—prone to administering "street justice" to bad guys, willing to use violence and intimidation to obtain information or cooperation. She doesn't believe that the system works, and pities Kate for her continuing belief that it can be made to work. Raven views the whole world with grim amusement, knowing as she does that it is all a communal dream and that it is a dark place because that's what people expect it to be. She embraces the darkness and revels in it. Her detachment from the world comes across in many ways; animals and small children are particularly sensitive to it and are often alarmed by her presence.
Appearance
Kate is an attractive woman in her thirties with short blond hair and blue eyes, typically dressed in fashionable but conservative skirts, blouses and jackets suitable for appearing in court.
Raven is a small, slender woman with black hair, very dark eyes and extremely pale skin. Her attire varies but it is generally black. Her typical outfit consists of a sleeveless long black dress in pvc, vinyl, velvet or leather, and similar boots. In cold or rainy weather, she often adds a long black duster or trench coat.
Powers
Kate is a well trained and experienced prosecutor. She knows the law, she knows how to build a case and convince a jury. She has acquired self-defense training in both hand-to-hand combat and with firearms, but her chosen battlefield is the courtroom. She does a great deal of interviewing as part of her job (reluctant cops, lazy or corrupt or both, have made doing a lot of her own investigations a necessity) and has become a fairly good amateur detective. Kate has cultivated a number of useful contacts, individuals both within and without the government who share her desire to see justice done. Kate carries a licensed concealed handgun and has learned how to use it.
Raven is stronger and tougher than Kate despite her small size, superhumanly agile, and has an unmistakable presence. Her primary power—her only power, really—is her ability to manipulate reality, the "dreamscape" in which she lives. She can most easily alter her own interactions with the world, performing feats of strength, speed and toughness beyond normal human limits. Raven can slow her subjective experience of time, giving her the ability to dodge bullets, dance through speeding traffic and the like. She can also defy gravity to walk on horizontal surfaces, make fantastic leaps or even fly. She can produce a variety of hand to hand weapons from nowhere (though she has a marked preference for blades); like a slasher flick villain, she's never unarmed.
Raven can even alter the very landscape around her to a limited degree, imposing a nightmarish aura to the scene. Weapons and machinery may malfunction, lights go out, computers crash, car engines stall out, door slam shut or vanish behind someone—all the typical tropes of nightmares or monster movies. When Hudson City criminals start feeling like they've wandered onto the set of a horror movie, they've learned that Raven is probably not far away....
Supporting Cast
Knowledge of Other Characters
Kate/Raven has no special knowledge of other characters yet. As she learns things, they'll be noted here for future reference.
Most action in the Nubian gang's territory is at Eden Plaza. Rooftops--that's where the action is.
Romantic Relationships (If Applicable)
Future Plans and Goals
- Raven made a deal with "Tiny", the leader of a gang in the Needle (an especially bad--albeit small--part of Freetown) to stay out of his territory in return for a lead in her investigation of the Cartel Cocktail. Given the high turnover in gangs, Raven doesn't expect that she'll have to abide by the deal for very long.
Trivia
Kate's bodycast is Elisabeth Rohm, who played Serena Southerland, an assistant prosecutor in Law & Order--but that's the extent of the similarities between the characters.
Raven's bodycast is an anonymous model in a photo I found on the internet. I initially intended to use Christina Ricci (Wednesday Addams in the films) or Summer Glau (River Tam on Firefly), but couldn't find a picture that suited the character. The more I look at the photo I'm using, the better I like it.
Side Pieces & Joint Posts
Influences
- Not surprisingly, The Matrix was an influence. The ability to see through the illusion that everyone around you accepts as reality, and to influence it, is the central conceit of that story.
- Of course, The Matrix is hardly the first tale to explore that concept. It's been a part of various myths and other stories for a very long time. Also, the idea of lucid dreaming (becoming aware while dreaming that you are in fact dreaming informed the character. I've experimented with lucid dreaming, and have managed to do it many times. Knowing that the world around you isn't real and that you can affect it just by willing it is a very empowering experience....
