Jailbreak

OOC Information

Player name: Echo
Player age and gender: Twenty-three, she/her pronouns.
Player Contact: EchoDoctor
Any other characters in game? Undyne (seafoamgreen)

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IC Information

Character name: Jailbreak
Character canon: Original Character (from a collaborative fiction 'verse called Invisible Hand)
Canon point: From the middle of their infiltration of the St. Augustine tournament.

Physical Description: She's fairly tall for a woman, five foot nine, and twenty-six years old. She'd be very well-built if she actually ate healthily and regularly instead of subsisting on whatever random food she can grab on the go, but as it is she's still managed to achieve some solid muscle and decent curves. Light-skinned, pale grey hair, dark grey eyes. Her hair is very long, about tailbone-length, mostly because she hasn't bothered to get it cut in about nine years. She always wears her gasmask (black with a sharp-toothed grin painted in white on the front), even while sleeping or showering, and usually tends to dress in some variant of a tank top and cargo pants unless it's a special occasion of some kind.
A rough idea of her appearance can be found here.

About the Character: The Earth that Jailbreak was born on is remarkably similar to our own, save for the publicly known existence of magic. Officially, the story is that mages are given their powers by the familiars that seek them out, thus choosing these young heroes for the noble fight against monsters which attack our world in blind hunger to devour us all, and that in order to continue the fight they must return their power to the source that granted it to them once they turn eighteen, so that it can be given to another in their place.

Unofficially, about three hundred years ago, a bunch of mages figured out that you could take magical power from others if you could trick them into giving it up, and decided to set up a long con that would put them all in a position to gather all the power they could hold. It's been working for them for a long time, all those magical girls and boys and everyone else who fought and died for their little scheme entirely unaware that they were fueling the lavishly indulgent and magically extended lives of the rich and powerful with the magic that was their birthright.

Sure, the fact that monsters are becoming more and more attracted to Earth because they can sense the increasingly huge amount of magic that's been stockpiled on it and want to feed on it is a little worrying, but hey. It's not like that's their problem to deal with, right?

Jail was a foster kid, ditched on a doorstep somewhere as a baby and brought up in the polite but unloving care of the foster system in general.

She spent the first six years of her life in a small-town orphanage somewhere along the boarder between Texas and New Mexico, and after that a series of depressingly short-term foster homes. Neither the Whitesmith Children's Home nor the majority of her various foster families were particularly cruel to her, merely distant and dispassionate, treating her with the cold professionalism of people who considered it a duty to keep her alive and physically healthy.

The end result was a bright, shy, socially-awkward child who was desperately starved for affection, and did her absolute best to at all times be what other people wanted her to be in the hopes that she would eventually be good enough to be wanted.

It didn't quite work out.

Receiving her powers sometime around age eleven didn't improve the situation- when she told her current foster family about her powers, they turned out not to be able to handle it and immediately sent her off to the next one.

Having "learned her lesson", she didn't tell the next one about her powers and they assumed she was some kind of delinquent, because why else would she be sneaking off to go do things at odd hours? And they sent her off, too.

It eventually culminated in her getting flat-out kicked out of a particularly bad foster home- not just awkwardly shuffled along to the next one, but actively 'tossed all her stuff out the front door, told her to never come back, slammed it shut in her face and locked it'.

She attempted to continue doing her duties as a magical girl while homeless, but getting moved from one area to another all the time meant that she never had a chance to really build up any kind of team or allies among her fellow magical girls, and with no one to help them out she and her familiar, Althea, were fading fast.

Among all the people Jail had known in her life, Althea was quite possibly the only one to ever treat her with genuine, unconditional affection and care... which is why his death upon being lured into a battle they couldn't win hit her so very hard.

They had tracked a monster into an industrial district and followed it into a factory. It had been hiding out in an area that contained some severely caustic chemicals, taking advantage of the fact that the fumes were too dangerous for ordinary humans to enter without protective gear.

While the enhanced durability of a magical girl in their transformed state protected Jail from the danger, Althea's death briefly knocked her powers out of commission, exposing her fragile human lungs and throat to something far too harsh for them to handle. The end result was permanent damage, requiring her to wear her magitech gasmask constantly in order to ensure that she could safely breathe.

Being left once more utterly alone in the world, Jail came to the conclusion that people were simply never going to care about her no matter how much she tried, and that instead she had to look after herself exclusively. Accordingly, she stopped acting as a hero and instead put her powers to use as a black market magical goods dealer and occasional petty thief, and has not bothered to transform fully since.

She was seventeen.

Now, at age twenty-six, she's beginning to start the slow process of caring for others again. It might be a little bit easier for her to admit that if they weren't all so determined to risk their lives all the time, of course...

The magical girl system of her world is a corrupt and arbitrary one, set up by the ancient and malevolent mages of the Hand of Providence conspiracy in order to provide them with power and pleasure for as long as they can keep it running, at the expense of everybody else. Jail is aware of this, but would have counted herself content to have escaped the system into a life of crime and not bothered fighting against them further, if it weren't for the fact that the resistance finds her useful enough to hire her. And keep hiring her. And... keep hiring her, and working with her, and bringing her on missions to the point where she's somehow become a major and valuable part of the rebellion against the conspiracy despite ostensibly only being in this to make a quick buck. Oops?

She acts loud, crude, and cheerfully over the top, almost gleefully shameless about her selfish and self-centered lifestyle, taking pleasure in ignoring or outright trampling over all the strict social rules she used to hold herself to so rigidly. Why bother worrying about what people think of you, or about anything at all, when you could be out having some fun?

The line between what Jail is and what she pretends to be is a blurry one, even (or maybe especially) from her own perspective- she genuinely is a hedonist, someone who enjoys the shallow, physical pleasures of life, but she isn't as amoral as she makes herself out to be. She doesn't like hurting others, and will go out of her way to avoid committing directly violent crime or stealing from anyone who can't easily afford the loss, and she still feels somewhat guilty for abandoning her duties as a magical girl and hero, no matter how much she tries to pretend she doesn't.

While she pretends to be uninterested in people except as sources of entertainment, she is in fact still incredibly desperate for affection and human contact, the kind of emotional connection that's been lacking for almost the whole of her life. Upon finding a vaguely familial bond with her young employee, Maddie, and friendship with her fellow outlaw mages, she repeatedly goes above and beyond her supposedly business-like relationship with them to ensure their personal happiness and safety.

Jail would tell you that her only goal in life is to be happy, and that would be true- but what she won't admit to herself is that happiness involves a lot more than being rich and unhindered by the law. Bit by bit, working with the resistance has brought her out of her cynical shell and uncovered more and more of her moral center, to the point where she's finally beginning to question if being a two-bit thief is really all she wants out of life, and who she wants to spend that life with.

Character abilities:
Scanning- One of Jail's primary abilities, the power to look at things with a kind of magical sense and perceive them on a more complicated level of reality. This can range from seeing and understanding the underlying structure of a machine, being able to look at how all the parts fit together to analyzing an enemy's abilities in order to uncover their weakness to seeing past illusions. Note that this ability will only give her a more detailed view of things, not outright answers. While she can see the information in front of her, it doesn't necessarily mean she'll actually understand any of it, much like being handed the blueprint for a machine doesn't make you an engineer. She mostly uses this ability to work with technology and create magical artifacts (see below).

Altering- Her other primary ability, essentially the power to take ordinary objects and transform them into some variety of magitech. Visually, this looks something like her sinking her hands into the object itself and painstaking rearranging things inside it according to a pattern only she can see, while the item slowly transforms. This process can take anywhere from a couple minutes to a few days, or even weeks, depending on how powerful and complicated the magical item she's creating is. The magical ability of the item is always somehow related to its' original function, but may be symbolic rather than literal. For example, she could turn a pair of glasses into X-ray vision goggles or an elevator into a teleportation device, but she couldn't turn a baseball bat into an ice cream maker. By now she has a pretty decent understanding of what "modifications" will get her what results and usually gets the kind of item she was intending to create, but occasionally a device will end up with abilities she didn't intend to give it. This can take a fair amount of energy, potentially leaving her exhausted, and is one of the main reasons why she rarely uses her powers, instead preferring to save as much energy as possible for making magical artifacts for her customers. Even then, she can only do so much.

Magitech items she'll be bringing with her include:

-A black gasmask that covers the lower half of her face, with a large sharp-toothed grin painted on it in white. The mask allows her to breathe in any situation, which compensates for the permanent damage to her lungs that occurred during the fight that killed her familiar. It also allows her to emit a high-pitched shriek (a sound best described as a combination of audio feedback and metal being torn) that temporarily stuns and disorients opponents. The section of the mask that covers her mouth can be detached, allowing her to eat and drink, but she will not remove the mask in its' entirety even while sleeping, eating, or bathing.

-A pair of heavy, dark grey steel-toed workboots with colorful laces. They allow her to safely jump extremely high, up to hundreds of feet in the air, and land without damage. They also enable her to stand on any surface, even in defiance of gravity, such as walking on water or directly up a wall and onto the ceiling.

-Smoke bombs. Cheap and easy to make, these are the primary weapon in Jail's arsenal and tend to look like little spheres of dull grey metal, about the size of a golfball, with a perforated pattern in the metal like an incense burner. The top and bottom halves of the sphere are twisted to prime it, and once primed it can be crushed in one's hand or thrown to break on impact, thus releasing a cloud of smoke contained within. They typically contain some variety of knockout gas, leaving opponents unconscious but otherwise unharmed, but she does occasionally use versions containing hallucinogens or other surprising effects.

Lockpicking- Well, she is a thief. Everything's digital these days, but every now and then it's important to know how to crack open a good old-fashioned lock with a bobby pin and some patience.

Pickpocketing- Again, she's a thief. Jail has very nimble fingers and a lot of practice at the kind of careful sleight of hand that lets you run rigged games for tourists and make people's wallets suddenly disappear.

Hacking- Has a pretty thorough understanding of computers and computer programming, unsurprisingly geared towards ways to break into secure systems in order to retrieve useful information or shut down other security measures.

Engineering- In addition to her magical abilities with technology, Jail is fairly skilled with good old mundane mechanical and electrical engineering. She knows how to fix most vehicles and appliances, has a working knowledge of robotics, and has honestly pretty much managed to make herself the self-taught equivalent of a certified engineer via years of practice.

Magical girl transformation- Can change into her magical girl form, giving her a new outfit and magical weapon. While in this form her powers are much easier to use, and her strength, speed, and durability are all enhanced past normal human levels. Jailbreak has not transformed in nine years, and would prefer to never have to do so again, due to severe past trauma. While she will eventually manage to force herself past it and transform again in a moment of desperation at a later point in her canon, she's definitely not quite there yet right now, and may or may not ever actually use this ability at any point in PhanRift depending on her development emotionally and psychologically.

Fighting- While Jail would honestly prefer to solve all her problems with stealth and cunning, sometimes combat is inevitable. On those occasions, she's generally pretty capable of handling herself, even if she's not a major powerhouse. She primarily relies on her arsenal of various magical artifacts to fight, lacking any direct offensive capabilities, but is also perfectly capable of just straight-up beating someone up physically. She doesn't have any formal combat training, but she survived six years of life-or-death battles with magical monsters and nine years of being a wanted criminal, so she's learned pretty well out of necessity. Since she doesn't transform she's working off purely human strength, but she's a fairly muscular woman and getting hit with that sledgehammer she carries around isn't going to be fun. When she fights, she fights dirty.

Drumming- Can play the drums. Unlikely to be relevant, but it's nice to have a hobby.

Inventory:
-Her current outfit (black tank top, olive green cargo pants, dark grey steel-toed workboots with colorful laces, gasmask, white bandages wrapped haphazardly around her wrists and forearms, black leather work gloves, toolbelt around her waist)
-Twelve of her smoke bombs (in the pockets of her pants)
-A sledgehammer (hanging from her belt)
-A hip flask full of cheap mint-flavored vodka (in pockets)
-Approximately nine white chocolate cranberry granola bars (in pockets)
-Her car keys (in pockets)
-Her cell phone (in pockets)
-A wrench (on toolbelt)
-A Swiss army knife (on toolbelt)

Samples: My toplevel on the Test Drive Meme and another thread.