Character Biography

[nor_iron_bars]

"Although I'd argue that Jail is genuinely a garbage fire, she's just been a garbage fire for so long that she somehow manages to be competent at various things while still being a human disaster in most other areas. Like, she's been in this dumpster for so long that she's learned how to wheel it around so she can get where she needs to be going. For example, Jail is fully capable of picking a lock one-handed while very drunk. On one hand, this means she is very skilled at lock picking. On the other hand, if she weren't a ridiculous disaster, she would probably still have her keys, and also be sober, and capable of using both hands." -via Discord chat, in which I accidentally summarize her character surprisingly well "I taught a parrot to recite Pi, out of spite. I've coded a program that does nothing but tell me which bakeries give out free samples. There is a specific Fall Out Boy song for every single one of my ex-girlfriends. I got into a fight with a guy in a kilt in the middle of the carpet and tile section of a hardware store, and I still don't know why- he threw the first punch, I said some randomly chosen insults about his grandma on general principles, things escalated from there. Neither of us won because the manager chased us out with a forklift, but I lost him in the parking lot and didn't have to pay for any damages, so I feel like it was still kind of a victory. I once rerouted some phone lines so that every single call to a specific U.S. senator went to a phone sex hotline instead, in the middle of election season, and no one could figure out how to change it back for a full week. He did better in the polls over the course of those seven days than any other point in his entire campaign. I own the entire discography of a band called Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard. Two years ago for Halloween I dressed up as Catwoman, then celebrated by illegally looking up the security information for a bunch of museums and private collections until I found one that actually had one of those super-complex webs of infrared beams where if you break one the alarm goes off, just so I could twister my ass through it to pull off a jewel heist while in the costume. The year before that I dressed up as a pirate queen and nearly got my ass kicked by the Coast Guard. I glued thirty dollars in pocket change to the underside of a freeway overpass, and I think it might still be there. I'm always carrying a minimum of five different fake IDs. Of the ones I've got on me right now, three of them are legally dead and another has a restraining order against Charlize Theron. I've accidentally started fires in two completely separate fast-food restaurants, and burned down a third on purpose to help someone commit insurance fraud. I know multiple dudes named Ratface, and I might owe one of them money. I wrote myself a note about it, but it was fingerpainted on a wall in barbecue sauce in an apartment that wasn't mine, and they kicked me out before I could take a picture of it, so I don't know what it said. My place of residence is a car that was built during the Carter administration. It has a publicly inappropriate lesbian dryad mural painted on the hood. It was a commission and I paid the artist for it with a plastic milk jug full of vodka and a little baggie of gummy bears. I once convinced a man his accordion was haunted by the ghost of a minor celebrity who's actually still alive right now. I get away with lying to people all the time because the bullshit I make up is usually less weird than the bullshit I can prove I've actually done. There was once a minor local production of Les Miserables where I played both of the Thenardiers at the same time. I still don't know what the difference between a handtowel and a washcloth is, and I'm not sure how to ask. I've tried to turn myself in to collect my own bounty money three times, and it's only worked once. I'm having fun. I'm still alive. I have no idea what I'm doing." -Jailbreak, as explained in her own words Name: Jailbreak, according to every piece of information that can currently be found. Her original, legal name has been deleted with prejudice from any document that once contained it. Her previous codename, when acting as a hero, was Iron Maiden. Age: Twenty-six. Gender: Female. Hair: Silver. Eyes: Dark grey. Height: Five feet nine inches. Weight: 154 pounds. Birthdate: January 1st, 1992. Occupation: Criminal, primarily a provider of black market magical technology and goods. Likes: Fast cars, loud music, jasmine tea, 24 hour breakfast restaurants, pretty girls, money, dancing, her friends valued customers and business associates, feathers, card games. Dislikes: Failed business deals, hot dogs, the magical system her society operates under, hangovers, sleeves. Powers: Jailbreak's power is essentially the ability to analyze the nature of things and, if she so chooses, to alter that nature. The end result is that she can turn ordinary objects into a kind of magitech, capable of strange and fantastic things. While this is a very versatile power, it also comes with the obvious drawback that the vast majority of her strength is in her possessions, and she is at an overwhelming disadvantage if her magitech is stolen from her or too damaged to function. In theory, she possesses the ability to transform into her magical girl form like any other mage, but in practice she has almost never used that ability since stopping her work as Iron Maiden, because she needs to conserve as much energy as possible in order to have the spare power to create magitech she can sell. Her usual arsenal of magitech tends to include: Her mask- Jail always wears 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. Her boots- 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. Her car- In addition to being a source of transportation, Jail's car is both her home and her place of business, and has been a major project of hers for quite some time. It therefore has many unusual abilities, including but not limited to... A solar panel on the roof that allows it to run purely off the electricity it generates. It likely does not work the same way ordinary solar panels are supposed to, and Jail is somewhat cagey about whether it's really drawing energy from the Sun or if it's secretly something else. Of course, she could just be messing with people. An enchantment on the tires similar to the one on her boots that allows it to drive on any surface, regardless of gravity or solidity. Note that there does need to be some kind of surface for the wheels to drive on, though it does not need to be a solid one. The car can easily drive on water, or even a relatively thick vapor, but cannot outright fly through thin air. The car has some variety of autopilot, allowing it to drive itself, although Jail will usually still get behind the wheel in more risky situations. It has been noted that monsters, while not entirely invisible, produce an effect that makes them difficult for non-mages to notice or focus on them directly. With effort, Jail has managed to duplicate the effect to a lesser degree on her car. The average person is aware that there is a vehicle present, but will find it vaguely uninteresting and not focus on it for long. This is probably the only way that Jail has managed to avoid being arrested for many new and interesting kinds of traffic law violations. When opened, the trunk of the car proves to lack a bottom and instead reveals a set of rough stone steps leading down into a small stone room that measures about 100 square feet, defying multiple laws of physics. Tucked away in one corner of the room is a sink, a small tub, and a toilet. Both the sink and toilet function perfectly well despite the plumbing theoretically having nowhere to lead. If asked, Jail will explain that anything flushed down the toilet is automatically teleported from the pipes into the fifth-floor men's room toilets of an office building in Nevada. When questioned about why that specific building, she will briefly look much more serious that is typical for her and mutter "They know what they did" before moving onto other topics. The opposite wall is lined with a large collection of canned and nonperishable foods, plastic jugs of water, and various other potentially useful items stacked up and waiting for future use because Jail is a paranoid thieving magpie of a woman. Her workbench, covered in various diagrams, tools, and mechanical parts is pushed against a third wall. Against the fourth wall is a couch. It is plaid, and hideous. The car itself appears to be an old sedan in two different colors, with the hood, roof, and trunk being black and the sides being grey. The black center parts are painted with a design of winding green vines with white flowers, with the occasional scantily-dressed dryad lounging among the leaves. One particular plant woman painted on the hood of the car appears to be performing a dramatic guitar solo, while a group depicted on top of the lid of the trunk are playing a game of poker. In general, the design is one of those ridiculous car murals that can only have been painted by someone who was extremely stoned at the time. Inside the car, the seats are comfy and a nice cream color, give or take the odd stain. A large chunk of rock crystal hangs down from the rearview mirror on a tangle of string, and a surprisingly healthy potted cilantro plant rests on the dashboard. History: 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... When something is in Jailbreak's handwriting, I will likely use this font and color.