Stareater

Real Name: Astrid Black
Hero Name: Stareater
Title:
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Age:  16 "Why do you care?"
Gender: AMAB Female | She/Her
Race: Human
Hair: N/A
Eyes: N/A
Height: 5"9'
Weight: 194lb
Blood type: B-




Stareater's face is permanently concealed by a large helmet. Underneath it is an infinite storm of black and white energy from beyond this reality. No one has ever seen her without it.

The helmet is impossible to remove.


By all accounts, Stareater is a very intense and involved person. When she speaks, she does so loudly. When she speaks her mind, there’s no question that she’s being honest. Stareater tends to navigate social interactions with the surgical precision of a sledgehammer, landing a proverbial swing where it is meant to go, but not paying much attention to the implications of being brutally honest. This holds true especially when people try to pry into her personal life, asking her questions like, “What’s your real name?” or “What’s your origin story?” She doesn’t appreciate people being nosy and snooping into her personal history for multiple reasons, and all of them are no one else’s business. Stareater prefers to selectively keep things close to the chest, which often leads to people simply thinking she’s just all business. While they aren’t exactly wrong, another reason is that she just has trust issues.

In terms of heroics, Stareater puts her best foot forward, but lacks any substantial experience. Both of these things are obvious to anyone who gets to know her after a few minutes. She is in need of a guiding hand in her life, even if she won’t actually admit she does.


Not so long ago, Astrid found evidence of a place outside the known universe. She spent days researching an enigmatic trace of this location, in a laboratory run by her father. He was an incredible scientist who made strides in the field of alternative energy, but he was far less than a good parent to his daughter. Astrid wished to follow in his footsteps, but he only tolerated her presence because she was a semi-decent assistant when she wasn’t doing what he thought was just fiddling with equipment. What she was actually doing was pursuing a “side project.”

Astrid couldn’t believe her eyes at first. She found a place untouched by conventional reality, where energy was quite literally infinite and boundless. The energy from this “Whitespace,” as she called it, permeated atomic matter and agitated it such that it destabilized it into any number of results. It could break down even the most stable of matter in theory, but it was volatile to a near impossible degree. In the basement of her dad’s lab, Astrid began to develop her own theories and compile data on this other world. There was no possible way to get there that she knew of, but its discovery could change her life. Astrid found the chance to go down in the history books of the scientific community.

Astrid spent an entire summer and two more months afterwards in the lab’s basement, studying the Whitespace with absurd scrutiny. Most days, she skipped meals to test what frequencies could align with the orbital patterns and ways of plotting the slipstreams of its curvature. She wanted to know it all, and felt a burning urge to be the one to share its existence with the world. That would not be the case, though. Her father discovered her research, and seized it all. What seemed like the mad ravings of a teenage girl at first turned out to be just what he needed to put his own talent as a scientist on the map. Astrid’s father believed the Whitespace could be used as an infinite source of energy, and sat out to prove it himself, much to Astrid’s rage. She lectured him for days that the Whitespace would disintegrate anything it touched, constantly demanding he listen to her before he caused a disaster.

Astrid’s father got physical with her when she told him he didn’t understand what he was doing.

She was permanently kicked out of his lab, but Astrid refused to let her work be stolen, so she snuck in that night to see what he was planning. What she found shocked her. In the days after Astrid’s father read every scrap of her research, he had planned to open a “door” to the Whitespace, and reverse-engineer her own frequency readers to make diffusion shields that could render the energy inert. It enraged her, and Astrid took an eye for an eye. She stole his plans. Thankfully, her father didn’t remember where he “misplaced” the schematics, and over the course of several stressful and covert weeks of hack job engineering in the same basement where it all began, she built an environmental suit that could safely protect her body from Whitespace energy. All that she needed was a helmet, which she stole and fitted into the suit just before the Whitespace gate was ready. During the weeks Astrid spent in solitude, her father had reconstructed his notes, and built a suit of his own. Astrid had planned to sabotage him and slip in just in time to be the one to see the results of her hard work for herself.

When the gate was activated, Astrid was found, and her father elected to get violent with her once again. She was shoved to the ground, and something snapped without her noticing. They fought to get inside the Whitespace first, and eventually, Astrid made it in first. The last thing she heard before she crossed over was the sound of her father screaming in a rage that she never knew a man could feel. She felt as though every cell in her body had ignited and burst into flame, and what she saw on the other side defied explanation.

She saw infinity made manifest.

Time did not exist in the Whitespace. Nor did gravity, entropy, or even a concept of physical space. There was only boundless potential in a sea of blinding white. It became Astrid, and Astrid became it. She was not made greater or less, but different. To Astrid, everything slowed to an unmoving pace. Eternity stretched out before her, all in the blink of an eye. She had all the time in the world, because it did not pass. Why did she come here, to this place where existence did not progress? What could possibly come from this discovery? Was it worth it? Astrid floated in a blank sea of indescribable geometry for a hundred trillion eons, the answers to her questions were meditated on for intervals of time long enough for the very first stars of the universe to form, and for the very last to finally die out.

On the other side of the gate, enough time had passed for a person to blink, and the entire research facility was consumed in a plume of brilliant white light that laid untold waste to everything around it for miles. Fires raged, and the first responders at the scene arrived just in time to see a radiant streak of light flying overhead, away from the damage. No one paid any attention to it, because of the crisis happening right in front of them, but that streak was the first person to ever discover the Whitespace. No one has ever discovered evidence of its existence since her, and she vowed to keep it that way.


Energy Vampirism
Stareater’s body naturally absorbs energy from her surroundings. This can be anything from the kinetic energy in a punch or the ambient heat of the air, to an electric shock or a fireball from another metahuman. This allows Stareater to constantly sustain her body just by being in places with plenty of energy to be soaked up, since it replaces the need for eating food or drinking water. Any energy that Stareater doesn’t consume to sustain her body is stored in a “battery” that fuels her other power.

Whitespace Energy Manipulation
Beneath Stareater’s helmet is a rift that leads into the Whitespace. This rift happens to be her head. Because the rift is part of her body, Stareater can burn conventional energy stored by her power to project Whitespace outward. In short, she can fire it as a laser. Whitespace energy destabilizes conventional matter, which results in atoms being pulled apart and broken down. The matter is not destroyed, but simply forced to undergo nuclear fission.

Another application of this is the ability to fly like a jet, but Stareater can't seem to get the hang of it yet.


Finite Energy
The energy in the Whitespace is quite literally infinite. There is no source, and there is no end. But a strange property of its existence is that it becomes finite when exposed to energy from Stareater's native reality. This means that Stareater's battery can be drained. She passively consumes this energy in order for her body to stay functional, but must balance her powers with it, since they also consume the energy. As long as Stareater is in an environment with ample ambient heat, or is taking damage from something, she can reasonably avoid worrying about being incapacitated due to losing too much energy. However, when she runs low, her powers become unreliable. She is unable to output normal amounts of Whitespace energy, and in some cases, she can't use her powers at all. If she is starved of energy for too long, she could die. Particularly cold environments, or any sort of countermeasure that could sap energy from an environment can cut off her excess of energy and significantly cut down on what she is capable of.

Volatile
Whitespace energy is an enigmatic thing. The only person left alive who knows of its existence still barely understands it. What Stareater does know, however, is that it's dangerous. Its presence facilitates fission, and could theoretically disintegrate anything it touches. Stareater's powers require a high degree of consideration when being used. Putting aside the fact that she could burn herself out, she could accidentally vaporize an entire building if she slipped up.

New Freak on the Block
The mysterious incident that leveled a research facility happened two months ago. In that time, Stareater has made great strides in understanding her newfound powers. But two months is not a long time in the grand scheme of things. Frankly, she doesn't know her ass from a batarang. Her status as a newcomer to the world of superheroes means she has minimal experience in close-quarters combat or crisis management.

Blackout Diffusion
Before Stareater ventured into the Whitespace, she equipped herself with special energy projection devices call Blackout Diffusers, or BCDs. A BCD emits a constant electromagnetic field modified with very particular properties around the wearer, which allows Whitespace energy to be “blacked out.” There are many applications of this, the least worrisome being the ability to make a barrier that completely negates any attack from Stareater. No one knows how to make a BCD except for Stareater, but if word got out that the Whitespace existed, it wouldn’t be hard to reverse engineer the technology, or even kill Stareater with it.

Overload
It turns out that when your powers make you a living battery, you can't store an infinite amount of energy. If Stareater were to try and absorb excess energy when her reserves were already at 100%, she could risk hurting herself.  The type of energy she is soaking up depends on what sort of damage she sustains, but it is generally an exaggerated form of whatever damage she would normally receive from energy-based damage. Fire would burn her skin even more than normal, electricity would fry her skin and muscles more, and so on. Kinetic energy would behave as if Stareater were more fragile than usual. It would not be difficult to take advantage of this simply by focusing an energy-based attack on her for an extended period of time.


Dynamo Harness
The Dynamo Harness is a major component of Stareater’s hero costume. It is a device that holds electrical charges in multiple separate capacitors that she acquired through undisclosed means. It is controlled and managed by an interface sewn into the left sleeve, and even lets Stareater monitor how much energy her “battery” has left.


Stareater is shockingly intelligent. She won’t be told otherwise. Also, the helmet she wears prevents reality from being destabilized.


Ellie couldn’t sleep.

Between having to work on a banged up car that absolutely reeked of Marlboros, watered down booze and what she assumed was some kind of weed and the usual 150 push-up, 150 leg kick exercise she always did before even touching the punching bag at her apartment...Ellie was a little wide awake. More so than most people would be at this hour. Then again, aren’t heroes typically up at night anyway? Currently the woman was sitting up in her bed staring out a window. 12:01. It was dark out. A little too dark for her tastes. What’s a girl with steel-crushing strength to do on such a dead night like tonight?

The only thing she never gets tired of, obviously.

Ellie threw on some pants, and her boots, oh and the gloves. They’re sexy. The only sounds that accompanied Ellie in the dead silent, barely illuminated apartment were the accession along sound of crickets or the flash of a firefly. It felt like all of Tenebrae was sound asleep. Naturally of course, someone was undoubtedly out and about stirring up trouble. There were always self made heroes and self made baddies out at this night. Ellie was used to the idea of going around and beating on the bad guys. She’d been doing it since high school. God, this building was so damn quiet...Ellie grabbed her keys and her gun, the two room apartment she lives in wasn’t very bad to look at, nice couch, nice tv, pretty open kitchen across the way if you wanna watch the news while you whip some eggs, even a punching bag hooked to the ceiling. Ellie’s phone light was all she was using to see, didn’t need the bright lights. Her apartment was on the third floor, at least 50 feet up from the ground, give or take. Typically, people climb three flights of stairs and leave through the main entrance, passing by tens of tens of doors where others lived.

At least, normal people do.

Ellie hopped out of her bedroom window and closed it behind her. She was standing on the metal staircase that acted as a fire escape. There weren’t even cars on the road. Down on the ground was the garage where people parked. This was also the destination of Ellie’s...shortcut.

Thud

A flash of sunlight was the only thing to break the dreary facade of Tenebrae’s midnight. A falling star from the third floor onto the ground, right by the front entrance to the building. Ellie landed feet first on the pavement light as a feather. She strolled off the path and into the garage, like an angel just descended from heaven in a padded rider’s jacket. Down she went to find her ride with a click of the keys and a chirp of the beast.

Ellie’s motorcycle was old but gold. The back had storage trunks, out of which she pulled a solid black helmet and rode out with style, and discretion.

12:20. The air was chilly and crisp. Nothing Ellie wasn’t used to. The steers were quiet as she took the pace a little slower, only going 20 down the roads. Nights like this brought her peace, even if she couldn’t sleep through them. Most of the bad guys she dealt with were at night, every now and then someone throughout the day got roughed up, but most of it was in the face of few eyes. Life was good. What was that sound? Was that smoke she smelled? ”That’s not right...” And so she sped on, following the distant crashing noises that shook the calm of the night. Trouble. Her head was calm and clear, this isn’t unusual to her. Well, it is, but if it’s a bad guy, nothing new would be found.

And found she did. A bomber. She rolled up to the end of a street, a good 20 feet away from where a jewelry store was being raided. Cars ablaze on the sides of the road. This was a mess. Ellie slowly brought her bike closer and closer, a final blast shook the store. It seemed someone was trying to cause a distraction to direct attention to the damages. Either way, that final blast gave away the intent. Parking the bike on its leg, she stepped off.

Night became day.

Ellie’s clothes began to permeate a warm, orange light as she bravely and coldly strolled down the streets building up energy across her body. 15 feet, more light. 10, more light. She was coming up on the scene like a human candle, the light wasn’t very spectacular considering how much of her body was covered, but she stuck out. Finally she stood outside a shattered window, inside was a thief haphazardly bagging whatever he could. Easy pickings, really. It’s certainly bold to just walk up to someone who’s blowing things up when all you’re planning on fighting with is your hands, but that’s really all this girl needs. Besides, there isn’t much that can get past her Sunlight.

A sharp crack of the knuckles in Ellie’s two hands preceded the very much intentional announcement of her presence, oh, and so did her yelling.

”Knock knock, chucklefuck.”