| Beginnings
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In the beginning, Tatters was just a dream in the mind of Denise Francis. She wanted kids -- wanted to make her own, otherwise what's the point, right? But her body wasn't cooperating, and eventually she signed on for an experimental fertility trial run by the Daedalus Group, a prestigious corporation on the forefront of developing medicine.
It wasn't mad science, really. Arguably, it was only irresponsible science, and anyways the side effects didn't show up for over a decade. In the meantime, Denise had twins: Jillian and Lillian, two beautiful baby girls.
Alas, only half of that statement would last.
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| Childhood
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Jillian Francis's early years were normal. Well, as normal as any childhood is: there are hours of home videos and dozens of humorous family anecdotes to illustrate that her years growing up in suburban midstate New York were interesting in that mundane, faintly embarassing way.
This lasted until puberty hit her like a sock full of batteries. Adolescence brings changes to everyone's body, but not everyone's coming-of-age story was co-written by Lovecraft and Kafka: her first morph was internal and resulted in enough system shock to put her in the hospital. This panic and shame brought others, and she lost her face in the process.
Things went downhill from there and soon the newly misshapen Jill dropped out of high school. But then they stabilized, and started to slowly ascend once more: Jill learned to control her morphing sufficiently well that she didn't keep almost-killing herself. Once she figured out fingers again she found The Internet, and began to reconnect with the world through that.
(And in the meantime, her sister manifested a mutation of her own, albeit much more quietly.)
All in all, it could have been a lot worse: the stress on Mr. and Mrs. Francis was clear, but they were supportive of their mutant shut-in of a daughter and did their best to provide her with as normal an adolescence as they could. Naturally, this involved lots of arguments and ill-feeling.
They even approached the Daedalus Group, insisting that Jill's condition was a side effect of Mrs. Francis's treatment and demanding that they do something to assist the poor girl. Daedalus responded with generous financial aid on the condition that the parents not pursue this accusation publically, and even brought Jill to their labs in the city to examine her and see if there was anything modern science could do.
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| Lab Rat
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And things were all well and good, until Daedalus didn't seem to have any intention of letting Jill leave. They could help her there, after all, and on her own it was only a matter of time before Jill caused yet more permanent damage to herself.
Their parents reluctantly agreed, and insisted that they were taking good care of Jill. Lily thought differently, and may have pulled a Simon Tam and broke Jill (who also held a contrary position) out of the facility.
Apparently, Jill was not the only subject of her type being held at the Daedalus labs, nor was she the only one to escape that night. The others, however, were not nearly as well spoken and far more hungry. Twins and monsters escaped into the sewers.
We're not saying who's fault this was. No one's pointing fingers, and anyways the Daedalus labs have done a thorough revision of their containment protocols since.
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| Sewer Knight
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Soon, the twins found their way to the Morlocks. Under Callisto's leadership they were kind of going through a militant phase at the time, and apparently had one of those "WE FOLLOW THE STRONGEST" deals in place.
This lead directly to Jill becoming Queen of the Morlocks for about fifteen minutes. Her first act as leader was to declare that this was "stupid" and that the Morlocks were now an "anarcho-syndicalist commune."
(Her second act was to banish Masque for the crime of flagrant disregard for human decency. Since she had just given up absolute dictatorial power three minutes beforehand, this motion was formally proposed and subsequently confirmed by a vote.)
Rulership successfully abdicated, Jill found herself with a job to do: there were a lot of nasty things crawling around in the sewers (including some of her 'friends' from Daedalus), and apparently her mutability made her something of powerhouse. Cristened "Tatterhood" by her sister, she reluctantly took up the ridiculous Aurthurian mantle of Sewer Knight and less reluctantly set about hunting sewer monsters, stalking them through the tunnels and beating them up and keeping them away from both the Morlocks and the surface.
(Meanwhile Lily moved back upstairs and got a job at PriceRite. And also began a citywide geurilla street-art campaign, but that's another story.)
Throughout her service as a subterranean ranger, Tatters managed to keep the Hounds coralled until Daedalus retrieval efforts finally began to make progress. She also managed to defeat or drive off several other predatory individuals who had endeavored to make their way underground, the most notorious of which is probably the "Manhattan Bloodspider," who waged a newsworthy campaign of kidnapping and exsanguinating local children until Tatters managed to splatter it all over a subway tunnel.
Some of her deeds earned her some reputation (and one in particular got her on a terrorism watch list), while many of them were in the deep and the dark, known to few but herself. For about a year, however, she tirelessly patrolled the Manhattan underground, doing everything in her power to keep it safe.
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| Powers
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But one day, Tatters packed up and left, her sister with her. Why she had to go was't clear, but it was urgent, and it was important. She dropped out of contact a few weeks after that, and remained off the grid for a couple of months.
In that time, dark things began to creep back into the underground, preying on its inhabitants. The Morlocks suffered losses both physically and emotionally, until one day one of them plunged the city into darkness.
And Masque moved back in with them. Ugh.
Eventually, Tatters returned: changed by her journeys, but maybe not as much as it looks. She hasn't talked much about what happened on the road, but what she does tend to mention is someone named Renard, who she talks about in the past tense.
But what is clear is that she's returned to a city that's gotten much better at hostility: the dangers in the sewers pack assault rifles and robotic hardware, and the specter of "mutant terrorists" has been replaced by actual mutant terrorists. Her friends an allies are progressively fraying at the seams, and overhead it seems like the sinister wheels of the malicious and powerful are only turning faster, gaining more traction and picking up steam.
Being a hero is hard, guys.
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| Powers
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Tatters is a manual metamorph. This means a couple of things:
- Conservation of Stuff: She can make fairly comprehensive changes to her body, but can't pull mass out of thin air. And while lots of body-things are made out of the same few elements, she still needs the right materials to make something.
- Morphing also burns a lot of energy, and produces a lot of heat.
- No Directions: She does have some intuitive aids that allow her to work on the tissue level (cloning existing tissue is pretty easy, and fabricating new tissue is possible if she knows what she's doing), but Tatters doesn't have any intuitive help actually creating workable structures.
- The simplest side effect of this is that morphing requires time and attention in proportion to the complexity of a structure. Shifting a blob of tissue around isn't very complicated (though it may be tiring), but rebuilding the delicate structures of an inner ear will generally take some time spent in concentration, carefully making itty bitty bones and sticking them together.
- And for instance, she can't decide to "turn into a bird!" and suddenly be able to fly. She'd have to manually solve the relevant engineering problems -- figuring out how to make her bones hollow but strong, how to improve her respiratory system, how to build wings that work efficiently. All of that has to be done by hand, so to speak.
- This also means that she can't just spawn new, specialized tissue just by knowing what she wants it to do. Just knowing, say, that some animals can see into the ultraviolet doesn't let her grow eyes that do that. But with time, study, and a sample to examine, she can eventually figure out how to produce that particular kind of retinal tissue.
- No Snapback: Once she changes her body, it's changed; she doesn't have a "default form" that she reverts to, and while most changes are reversable everything has to be put back manually, and rarely ends up exactly the way it was before.
- And bodies are complicated! And Tatters has had years of mistakes and unconscious morphs and hastily repaired damage fucking up hers. By now, a lot of systems run "manually," and a lot of others bear only a vague relationship to those of a normal human, and yet others don't work at all. (Especially hormonal systems, because those are a pain to synthesize.)
On the bright side, Tatters does have a few tools helping her out:
- Body Sense: She needs to be able to see what she's doing to work, and to this end Tatters has a fairly comprehensive ability to examine the workings of her body.
- Polydexterity: Along similar lines to the above, she has a fairly good grasp of how to actually operate her body. For normal people, things as simple as moving an arm can take months or years to learn or relearn. For Tatters, if she grows herself an extra limb she can immediately begin waving it around without having to spend months in physical therapy.
- Fine motor control does require taking some time to calibrate and tune an appendage, however. Newly created limbs will tend to be fairly clumsy, and she has to spend some time with a hand before she can write or type with it, chickenscratch notwithstanding.
- This also doesn't grant her superior reflexes or coordination. It does potentially grant her steadier hands and finer control if she's done some serious calibrating recently, and does give her a moderate edge in developing muscle memory for a task, but she still needs to learn skills before she can apply them.
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| Connections
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Friends
Lily Francis: Tatters’ devoted sister, a feeling that runs both ways. Presently living topside, trying to juggle being her own business with provoking Tatters to further heroics. Tatters resents this slightly, but doesn't argue too much: Lily is prone to meddling, and if her sister isn't meddleworthy enough she might move on to other people.
Nox: It's twice now that Tatters has failed her. Twice is enough.
- The Village People
- Flicker: Only met him on the raid, but jeeze this kid pulls his weight and a half. Tatters was impressed, and hopes he's okay.
- Hive: Grumpy telepath who thinks she's racist. Not much more to say on the matter.
- Jackson: Kind of a hippy, but does good work. Another person to take hits for, if possible: he's powerful, but looks pretty fragile. Getting hit pretty hard by the bureaucracy too, which she can't do much to help with.
- Jim: Helped that other guy deliver Anole his Christmas present, drove a truck on the raid. Don't know much about him, but he doesn't look like he fits in with the rest of the young, glamorous bohemians.
- Micah: Okay-looking kid, got creeped on by Masque then apparently showed up at the Gala as Jackson's date? Further proof that EVERYONE IN NYC knows each other.
- Ryan Black apparently lives there too! Not long ago Lily would have been making excuses to "casually" stop by and say hello; now, who knows. Apparently wields the POWER OF (indie) ROCK on the down-low, overwhelming his foes with...nostalgia about past breakups or something, what does she know.
- The Breakfast Club
- Kisha: Recently recruited to help supply Tatters with gear. She'd feel bad about being a charity case, but she'll try to feed Kisha a steady stream of supplies in compensation, and the girl genuinely seems really happy to make stuff anyways.
- Ivan: Sweet kid. Apologized for throwing is bugs at her; she apologized for blowing them up. Seems pretty into Peter. (Are they a couple? She can't friggen tell anymore, this whole crowd has oversaturated her gaydar.)
- Peter: Is disturbingly excited about the superhero thing. Will try to be a stabilizing influence before he hurts someone/himself.
- Rasa: Only met in passing, but Lily says she's okay. Odd, but okay. Tatters doesn't actually know how odd is odd, considering everyone else they know, but "okay" seems pretty unambiguous.
- Shane and Sebastian: Shark twins, seemed alright, put her in touch with the school.
- Shelby: Was homeless for a while, but is apparently at Xavier's now -- apparently they do do charity cases? Chatty, and has a -- okay, /everyone/ has probably has a dirty mind, but she keeps it plugged into her mouth. It's weird: Tatters would probably have found her pretty threatening back when she was in school, but now she's just some kid.
Rivals
Marrow: The other Sewer Knight. She's the maverick loose cannon to Tatters' by-the-book cop. Which sucks, because Tatters wanted to be the maverick, and now she has to be the responsible one and that's way less fun.
Lucy: Seems alright, but he's involved with Nox and hangs with a sketchy crowd. Worth keeping an eye on.
Parley: Not really a rival, but -- picked up on the raid, then showed up at the gala being all chummy with Daedalus? You'd think he would've avoided that place like the plague. Probably has a DEAL, but who knows what it is.
Enemies
Norman Osborn: creepy scumbag rich guy who's fooling around with Prometheus and sends additional creeps down into the sewers to eat teenagers. Tatters should see what she can do to interfere with his cartoonishly nefarious schemes, but the best way to do that is probably through Daedalus? Which...ugh. They're maybe the lesser of two evils, but dealing with them makes her queasy. On the bright side, his products tend towards the flashy and impractical; on the downside, they tend to explode. Note to self: see what Kisha can make out of some of his hardware.
Masque: Poor guy. Completely batshit, and there's not much she can do about it besides beat on him and hope he shapes up? Nominally not her problem anymore, hopefully he's not hurting anybody.
Captain Malthus Rogers, Agent of H.A.M.M.E.R.: A cautionary tale about naming your kid "Malthus." Why not a normal, name? Like "Steve" or something. But noooooooo, someone was afraid of there being too many Steves in his kindergarten class and now we have this guy, a straight up pulp villain who someone put in charge of the secret mutant-killing branch of the military.
Maybe she should've killed him when she had the chance.
The Daedalus Group
- Caleswood: Thinks he can get out of being a sketchy ass-jerkbag by acting like it's 'nothing personal.' Likes to act like he's her dad. (Putting the Dad back in DADalus?)
- Zarita: Kind of a bitch, seems to derive a (bitchy) glee from getting under her skin and inside her head, and is too fragile to punch out in good conscience.
- Saint-Quentin: Seems like just a bro (Well, a dad-aged bro. You know, like that uncle you've got.) but was also shooting at her when she busted out of Daedalus. Probably one of those guys who's super into guns 'cause it makes him feel big and badass? Probably okay to punch.
- The Hounds: Cautionary examples of what happens if Tatters doesn't keep her head on straight. The product of the same sketchy science as Tatters, they've mostly been recovered by Daedalus by now, though a few still creep around the sewers doing their thing.
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| Gallery
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| Jillian Rebecca Francis
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| Codename
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Tatterhood
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| Birthdate
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December 16, 1992
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| Species
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Mutant
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| Affiliation
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Morlocks
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| Alignment
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Pungent Good
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| Powers
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Manual Metamorph
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| Occupation
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Homeless Hero
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| RP Hooks
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| Back In Town - Tatters has been out of town. Now she's back, and while the city looks grim she's at least making an effort to carve out a home for herself once again.
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| It's Always Heavy Underground - The Morlocks are in bad shape, and the tunnels are getting more dangerous by the day. Wandering monsters have been upgraded to organized soldiers, and the Morlock's days are probably numbered if they can't find a way to make their home safer. But sometimes Tatters wonders if dissolution wouldn't be for the best.
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| Sins of the Progenitor - Tatters wasn't the first of her kind. It's only even technically her past by way of some irresponsible science and a dodgy fertility treatment, but it's coming up to haunt her anyways. Also Caleswood, who's past it totally is.
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| Just Because You're Paranoid - When she wasn't beneath notice, Tatters used to be That Friendly Mutant Who Punches Creepy Crawlies. But she's been punching progressively more powerful people, who in turn keep acquiring more potential ways to get at her, and it's time she's started putting some thought into protecting herself and the people close to her.
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