Yekaterina
Nickname: Katya Catapult.
Age: Fourteen.
Sex: Female.
Race: Human.
Height: Around 160 centimeters (5'3'').
Weight: Around 55 kilograms (121 lbs).
Eyes: Light brown.
Hair: Light auburn. Her hair is cut in a style which starts out short in the front (ending right above her eyebrows) and gets progressively longer around the sides (ending just below her ears) until at the very back it is long enough to reach just below her shoulders. The long hair at the back of her head is usually gathered together into a ponytail with a black elastic scrunchy.
Skin: Well-tanned. She spends a lot of time out in the sun.
Appearance: Katya is the about the average size for a girl her age. Although the term "muscular" wouldn't quite describe her properly, as a kid who gets a lot of exercise she is definitely more physically fit than kids who stay indoors watching television, playing video games, or surfing the web all day. The term "wiry" might work well. In any case, she is built fairly strong and can pack a surprisingly powerful punch.
Katya dresses in clothing picked out with the idea of freedom of movement in mind. Most prominent is the long and loose jacket she wears, made from a lightweight crimson red material. The jacket has its sleeves torn off, leaving frayed edges and loose threads. The end of the jacket, which nearly reaches the ground, is also somewhat frayed. Although the jacket has large black buttons down one side, Katya pretty much never buttons it up, preferring to leave it loose instead.
Under the jacket, Katya typically wears a tank top and a pair of denim shorts. She likes to pick bright colors for the shirt and dark colors for the pants. Around her waist, Katya wears a wide black leather belt with two rows of large brass-lined holes. It has an oversized disk-shaped polished brass buckle with a
gromoviti znaci (a symbol of the Slavic thunder god, Perun) design etched into it. The symbol is a hexagon formed from six triangles with their points turned in towards a small circle in the center. A half-circle is cut from the base of each triangle, with another small circle at the center of each one.
On her feet, Katya wears tightly-laced boots. The boots are black but the laces are white. Katya also wears a pair of tight fingerless gloves, which reach almost to her elbows and are also black in color. The only jewelry that Katya wears is a pair of earrings, in the simple form of small black hoops through her earlobes. On her head Katya wears a pair of goggles with shiny gold lenses—even when she doesn't have them pulled down over her eyes, she's almost always wearing them. Katya doesn't have a lot of possessions; everything that she owns she carries in a black satchel at her side.
Weapon: Katya carries around with her a polearm weapon known as a
bardiche. Compared to most polearms, the bardiche has a relatively long blade and short shaft. The whole weapon, from the end of the shaft to the tip of the blade, is about 150 centimeters, which is ten shorter than Katya herself. The heavy crescent-shaped blade is about half as long as the entire weapon itself and is attached to the wooden shaft in two places; the first is at the top of the shaft, which is about the middle of the blade, and the other is at the base of the blade, which is about the middle of the shaft.
Although the curved point at the top of the blade can be used for stabbing if swung properly, the most effective use of the weapon is for cleaving. The long shaft and heavy blade make it very well suited to chopping through things, similarly to an axe. Due to being a pole weapon, the bardiche has a greater reach than most other melee weapons.
When she's carrying the weapon, Katya often rests it on her shoulders. Otherwise she has a black strap attached to either end of the shaft which she uses to carry the weapon on her back, similar in function to a baldric.
Armor: Katya does not wear any armor. Armor is rather encumbering; it weighs down and restricts movement. When Katya has freedom of movement she doesn't need armor anyway. You don't need armor if you never get hit in the first place.
Possessions: In her satchel, Katya carries all of her possessions. This includes a few sets of clothing, some food (typically a handful of energy bars) and drink (generally something filled with sugar and caffeine), whatever money she has, and any interesting knick-knacks she's decided to pick up. Wrapped up in its own special protective sack inside her satchel is Katya's most prized possession of all, her
krylovidnye gusli.
The gusli is a traditional Russian musical instrument, played by using one's fingers to pluck its strings, similar to a psaltery, lyre, or harp. The
krylovidnye gusli, meaning "wing-shaped gusli" is a specific form of gusli which has its strings strung over a long and narrow soundboard and is held similarly to a guitar. An opening at the head of the instrument, where the strings are attached to the tuning pegs, allows the musician to put their hand through the soundboard and selectively mute the strings to form chords.
Katya's gusli is a gift from her mother, who also taught her to play it. It has five shiny metal strings and a dark wooden body. She keeps it inside a blood red velvet bag, kept closed with drawstrings, which she keeps inside her satchel.
Powers: Katya is very quick. Quicker, in fact, than should technically be possible. She has the ability to accelerate any part of her body to greater speeds than most humans can. This enables her to run very fast, or dodge out of the way of attacks, or swing her weapon with incredible force. She also has very good endurance and is able to stay active for prolonged periods of time, even after most people would have tired. In fact, Katya is so active all the time that many people get exhausted just watching her.
Although her quickness is certainly beyond normal human ability, she has to be careful not to push it too far. Theoretically she could probably accelerate herself through the sound barrier if she tried, but her body is only human and would not survive such immense velocities. More than once Katya has painfully strained a muscle, and sprained or even dislocated a joint trying to move some part of her body too fast.
One way to avoid causing herself injury is to start out slower and build up speed, instead of trying to get to top speed right away. Using this method, Katya can manage to get herself running up to 100 kilometers per hour, if she's careful. However, she generally wouldn't dare run that fast unless she was on perfectly level ground, because if she were to trip on something she would probably kill herself, and she would need plenty of room to slow down to a stop without hurting herself as well. Typically she only runs about half that speed, if even.
Another method of travel that Katya has come up with, however, is the one which has earned her her nickname, "Catapult." By quickly accelerating into a fast run and then jumping, Katya can launch herself fairly great distances. This carries a certain danger to it, however, since she has little control over her landing. One particular thing she must always consider is to never jump too high; because the fall could injure her, Katya typically jumps low but far.
Long distance travel tends to consist of both running and jumping. Katya follows the simple philosophy that the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line. When travelling, Katya wears her goggles to protect her eyes from the wind.
Limits: As mentioned, although her speed is theoretically unlimited she must limit her speed to reasonable levels in order to prevent causing herself serious injury. Katya's unprecedented endurance is powered by her insatiable metabolism. Without the excessive calories that Katya is always consuming, excessive use of her ability would eventually tire her out. In practice, however, Katya generally manages to consume enough energy that she never really wears out.
Side-effects: When using her acceleration ability the effected body parts glimmer in a strange red gleam, which tends to trail behind her. The gleam is generally very dim, barely visible even in the dark, but short and quick accelerations have been known to glow quite brightly. Her ability requires the use of energy from her body, which leaves Katya always hungry and craving calories. She's always eating something, but her metabolism makes good use of it and she doesn't gain excessive weight. Possibly due to her increased metabolism, Katya's wounds tend to heal slightly faster than usual, although not supernaturally so.
Skills: Katya has three important skills, which she practices and trains regularly and which can all be enhanced via her special ability. The first one is the usage of her weapon, a bardiche. The bardiche is an ancient heirloom that has been passed down in her family for several generations. She initially taught herself to use it purely out of curiosity. Over the years, however, it has become a functional skill and it would take a particularly courageous or ignorant person to challenge her to a fight with it.
With her ability to unnaturally accelerate her body beyond the usual limits, the bardiche becomes an especially powerful weapon in her hands. The leverage provided by the long wooden shaft, combined with the weight and sharpness of the heavy steel blade, already enable the weapon to easily cleave through many materials. Accelerated, the weapon could chop down a tree in a single blow.
Along with her skill at using her weapon, Katya is also trained in unarmed combat. Her father taught her a form of martial art derived from Russian
Systema, which focuses on hand-to-hand combat, including both armed and unarmed striking, and grappling, with the goal of quickly and effectively subduing opponents. Her training is not particularly stylish, but it is fairly efficient.
Katya has expanded her martial arts training to match her special abilities. Accelerating her arms or legs can be used to deliver particularly powerful blows, and other methods can be used to quickly dodge and avoid attacks or get her into a better position, such as vaulting over her opponent. Technique combined with sheer speed tends to give Katya significant advantages in fights.
Lastly, Katya is also skilled in the use of her musical instrument, the gusli. Hand-crafted and gifted to her by her mother, Katya's gusli is her most prized possession and she practices on it regularly. Her mother taught her to use it and Katya's skill has increased ever since. Katya has found a way to use her strange ability to help her play music, increasing the speed of her fingers as she plucks the strings to interesting ends.
Her ability to play beautiful music is also her main source of income. She'll play on the streets and collect donations from generous listeners.
Strengths: Katya's main strengths are her speed and maneuverability. Her battle philosophy is that the victor is the person who is in all the right places at all the right times, so Katya is always wherever she wants to be whenever she wants to be there. Combined with her experienced weapon usage and her martial arts training, Katya is used to winning fights. However, if it is clear that she isn't winning whatever fight she's in, Katya can at least easily get away without much trouble.
Weaknesses: Katya's speed and maneuverability come at the expense of not being able to wear armor or other protective gear. So while it isn't very easy to hit Katya, any blows that do manage to land will generally be very serious indeed. Katya is only a teenage girl, so despite being fit and getting plenty of exercise, her body doesn't have much bulk to it.
Speed can only increase her strength so much before the lack of mass becomes impossible to overcome. For instance, Katya would not want to do something as foolish as punching through a brick wall—the brick wall will win that fight every time, no matter how much speed she puts behind her fist. Replace the brick wall with a hefty muscular man and you see the problem. Putting more force behind her fist only means either the surface she's hitting has to absorb most of that force, or her fist will have to take the force itself.
Finally, some things are too fast for even Katya to dodge, specifically bullets. Katya's method of dealing with guns involves staying as far away from them as possible. Her speed might be able to get her out of the way of a gunshot if she can predict it coming and move before the trigger is pulled, and at really close range Katya knows how to disarm a gun-wielding fighter before they even know what's going on, but at mid-range she doesn't stand much of a chance.
Other: Katya is Russian and although she can understand and speak English fluently, she has a very heavy accent which might be hard for some people to understand.
Personality: Katya is very energetic. She's always on the move, always active, never stopping. She doesn't like to sit still for long and can get very impatient. She is also quite impulsive, making decisions on-the-fly, usually without thinking them through all the way first. In this sense, Katya doesn't seem that irregular when compared to other fourteen year olds. Indeed, she really isn't that unusual in any significant way.
Katya is a very extroverted and social individual. She likes to be the center of attention. She likes to meet new people and make new friends. Kayta has few social inhibitions, simply behaving like herself in social settings without much concern for how other people think about her. She isn't usually very shy either, easily going up to strangers and interacting with them; whether it be just talking, asking a question, looking for help or directions, or dragging them along on whatever escapade she's currently in the middle of.
There are some conditions, however, where Katya will suddenly become shy and inhibited. As with any young person her age, having recently reached biological maturity and such, Katya tends to be awkward around certain peers, people around her age whom she finds attractive and inexplicably feels the need to be accepted by. Therefore, although she is extremely social with everybody else, she finds it difficult to speak to pretty girls and can be easily embarrassed around them. Although she always likes to show off her skills, she especially likes to show off around other girls in order to impress them.
Despite carrying around such a gruesome weapon as a bardiche, Katya doesn't actually like to hurt people with it and has never killed anybody. Usually the threat of using it is enough to keep potential enemies at bay, but when Katya does have to fight she prefers to use non-lethal grappling techniques to disarm and incapacitate opponents. Katya would be very disappointed, to say the least, if she were forced to kill anyone.
All in all, Katya is an energetic and feisty kid who likes to show off her skills and have fun. She's always nice and, when she remembers, also very polite. She likes her freedom and therefore does not like to be told what to do—she will often do the opposite of what she's told just to spite authority. She seems to like getting into trouble, pulling pranks and breaking rules and whatnot. Really, Katya will do anything if she thinks it will be exciting and interesting.
Likes: Katya likes anything sweet and sugary, such as soda pop and candy. She also likes caffeine—she hardly ever drinks anything which isn't filled with caffeine and loaded with sugar or corn syrup.
Dislikes: Katya dislikes all the electronic entertainment (television, movies, video games, recorded music, the Internet) that seems to have most people wasting all their time lazing about indoors.
Fears: Katya doesn't like to let anybody know, but she's extremely phobic of just about every little creepy crawly thing. Spiders, insects, rodents, snakes, etc. She can't stand them at all and gods forbid they get on her.
Virtues: Katya is a nice and caring person. Due to her lack of social inhibitions, she will not hesitate to stand up for someone if she feels they are being treated unfairly. Peer pressure doesn't tend to sway her much.
Vices: Katya tends to miss many of the subtle intricacies of social interaction. Because she always just acts like herself in social settings, she expects everybody else to as well. This means she misses what some people might consider obvious hints and she is also quite gullible and easy to fool.
History: Yekaterina was born and raised in a small village in the
Astrakhan Oblast of Russia (located in the far southwest of the country, on the Caspian Sea). There she lived a normal life, with her mother and her father. In school, Katya's tenacious and energetic personality often got her in fights, so her father (who works for the Russian Special Purpose Forces, or Spetsnaz) taught her how to defend herself.
On her tenth birthday, Yekaterina's mother gave her a musical instrument, a gusli, which she had crafted herself. Although she learned how to use it very quickly and was quite good at it, Yekaterina soon got bored of it and moved on to other interests. For instance, she taught herself how to use the old bardiche that Yekaterina's father kept on display above the mantel.
Yekaterina's father was often away at work and her mother didn't have the energy to keep up with her, so Yekaterina was generally allowed to run about and do her own thing. The village was small and most of the kids were allowed to go about through it freely as long as they were home by dinner, so Yekaterina often played with her friends.
Among the village children, Yekaterina was considered one of the cool kids and most everyone wanted to hang out with her. She always liked being the center of attention so it never bothered her that everyone wanted to play with her. Being about as much of a tomboy as possible, into physical activity and roughhousing and not afraid to get dirty, she seemed to be especially popular with and comfortable around the boys.
Yekaterina often got into trouble with her friends—in fact, she was usually the one who initiated the trouble and led everybody into it. Because of this, not only did her own parents get angry with her when she got in trouble, but so did the parents of all the kids she played with, for being a "bad influence." The other parents were always less considerate and understanding about her behavior than her own, who were quick to forgive.
Somehow, probably due to the fact that any attention is good attention, this only encouraged her to find further ways to bend the rules, instead of conforming to them. Following rules wasn't very exciting, after all.
This came to a head at the age of twelve, when one of her mischievous capers resulted in one of the other kids inadvertently getting injured. Although Yekaterina's parents never minded her practicing with the bardiche, she was never allowed to leave their house with it. However, wanting to show it off to the other kids, she managed to sneak it out one day.
They gathered at a clearing in the nearby woods, where Yekaterina showed off her skills by chopping up a log. One of the boys wanted to try it out but Yekaterina refused to let him have it, which resulted in them fighting over it. In the scuffle, the boy's hand got sliced open on the blade. Needless to say, when the parents of the children discovered that her antics not only injured someone, but involved an ancient medieval war axe, there was trouble.
After this point she often had to play by herself, since all the other kids were told they were to stay away from her and, although they didn't strictly follow those instructions (she was a fun person to be around) they didn't dare go along with her schemes anymore, for fear of getting in trouble again.
It was at the age of thirteen that Yekaterina discovered her unique ability. She had always been fast but this kind of speed was unnatural. In learning to use it properly she suffered from many minor wounds and injuries, but she quickly managed to get a hang of it. Soon, however, word of her unusual ability got out and eventually reached the wrong kind of people.
One day, Yekaterina came home from school to find a bag packed for her. Her father was home, which was odd since he was usually at work this time of day. All he told her was that she had to get out of Russia and not stay in any one place for very long. He said that bad people were out to get her but that since she was fast if she just kept running nobody could ever catch her.
And so she did.
07-07-2011, 07:47 AM
Even chopping through trees takes an incredible amount of force in one swing, something that super strength would make far more sense performing than just speed, or at the very least a more durable weapon. Considering her bardiche is made out of wood and steel itself, if she used her speed ability to swing into such a solid object she could very well break her weapon in two, or at the very least dent and deform the weapon's blade.
