Nighthawk

Nighthawk
Robin Dianne Chevalier

Character Playlist
Trapt: Headstrong
Maroon 5: One More Night
OneRepublic: Counting Stars
Jason DeRulo: Don't Wanna Go Home
Beyonce: Run the World
LMFAO: Party Rock Anthem

Archetype and Design
Nighthawk was an homage originally to the Batman of the Silver Age. The original thought behind her creation was what if Bruce Wayne had been poor and female when his parents died. What would that have looked like. In development, she's taken on more of a Power Man or Captain America as her Ultiman heritage pushes her beyond human normal. Still, strip everything down to the core of the character and its a young woman who really just doesn't want to see people lose the ones they love. Her current costume is based on what she can easily keep at hand but her adult costume draws from Psylocke and Nightwing in many ways. 

Current Role and Hooks
Nighthawk sees herself as the protector of the innocents that live in the Fens, a task that she'd thrown herself into with singleminded devotion. She avoids the actual super villains, figuring she's out of their league but any sort of normal scum on the streets she pursues with enough grim determination to have labeled herself a vigilante. Recently, Claremont's headmistress has offered her a spot in the academy to hone her skills (and to keep herself from getting killed before she turns eighteen). While confident on the streets of the Fens, Robin is very much a fish out of water at the Academy as for the last six years her schooling has been spotty and for the last three years, she's been a homeless truant. 

Hooks to pull Nighthawk in are plentiful. Any sort of criminal activity that looks like it might hurt some innocent bystander and she'll throw herself into the thick of it. She's a student at Claremont with all of those associated requirements on her time but she still abandons the cushy academy to wander the Fens looking for trouble. She IS a known super hero, of the vigilante stripe, that works exclusively in the Fens which she is intimately familiar with. Robin doesn't just confine her hero-ing to punching things. She has some real guilt for the roof over her head and the access to food that she tends to try and cart off anything she gets that isn't pure need to bring it back 'home'.

History
Robin's family and home were happy until she was ten. They were poor, working class folk in the Fens but whatever financial limitations her parents had, it didn't touch Robin's life in any meaningful way. She was a beloved only child. Her parents scrimped and saved to make sure she could go to her gymnastics classes even though that was a definite luxury. Robin was a middling student, bright but unmotivated, but she was driven and dedicated to her after school activities. Her coach was beginning to talk about seriously looking at training for an athlete's life. She was happy.

Her parents were killed, robbed, on a rare evening out when she was ten. The days that followed remain something of a blur. Her father's relatives were in Haiti, her mother's family was non-existent and with no one to take her in, Robin was left to the care of the system. She was bounced in and out of foster homes - none of them the stuff of horror stories but all of them overworked and ill prepared to deal with a grief stricken child with no outlet for her pain, or rage at the unfairness of having all she'd known whisked away. 

Robin started down a path that takes too many of the Fens kids, hanging out with a bad crowd and missing school. She was truant often and began the sort of petty antics that can lead down a much darker road. Although, whether Robin would have embraced that life was questionable. Truancy and graffiti is one thing, after all, but true villainy is an entirely different matter. Regardless, her late nights unsupervised left her by pure happenstance at the mouth of an alley as another crime was in progress in the Fens.

The experience was a blur and remains a jumble of images and emotions to this day but at the end of the scuffle, she was standing, blood dripping off her knuckles. There was no thanks from the rather terrified young woman she'd helped but Robin didn't need thanks. She'd found an outlet, and a cause. Robin had finally found something to live for. 

She threw herself into the new life she'd chosen with a reckless fervor, creating a moniker and, in time, a reputation. Abandoning the latest foster home, Robin took to the streets, scavenging to survive by day and by night pursuing her quest to clean up the Fens, one petty crime at a time.

Costume and Appearance
Robin wears faded and frayed clothing that are without exception hand-me-downs or salvaged from the trash. Almost all of her clothing is a little oversized and she tops it off with a leather jacket that's also a size or two too large. She only has one pair of shoes, old and frayed sneakers that have been patched with duct tape more than once. She's a striking young woman under the old clothing. Her skin is a smooth brown and her eyes are a surprising shade of grey. Her dark hair is naturally a mop of tight black curls but she tries to trade favors for hair styling to have them put up in micro braids when she can to keep the unruly and easily snarled curls in a more manageable sort style for her life.

Out of her clothes, Robin has the sort of near-zero-muscle fat that comes from hard conditioning and limited diet. Her build is compact, muscular - as much gymnast as dancer but she is honestly, a little too lean. Also, under her clothes, there are scars that criss cross her body. Robin has been shot a few times, and been stabbed or slashed more often than that and the marks of that remain on her skin as faint white reminders of her various brushes with death.

At the moment, Nighthawk has no costume but for a shirt with a bird logo that she wears and a dark t-shirt with holes poked out for eyes tied around her head. 

Powers
Robin began Claremont thinking that she had no powers because she has always associated her speed and strength with training and hard work. She's never tried to lift a car off of someone, or tried to punch a brick wall as hard as she could. It wasn't until her experiences at Claremont put lie to her understanding of her limitations. Additionally, part of Robin's supernatural abilities has been consumed with keeping her alive and in decent enough shape while living a very hard life. With access to food and rest, as she began to actually be able to tap into the peak of her capabilities. Robin's not sure what to think of it although she assumes its some minor mutation as she's no paragon.

Robin's powers are all innate. Unknown to her, the limits of her body are simply higher than humans because she's only half human. (See Secret Origin Below).

In a fight, Robin tends to take the tactics of first in, last out. She's a scrappy fighter that does best in close quarters and she knows it. As she grows at Claremont, she'll expand her bag of tricks but when it comes down to a fight, due to both personality and power, Robin will be on the front line.

Personal Life
Robin's personal life is next to non-existent. She's spent the last three years letting what few, slim ties she had as Robin vanish into nothing and cultivated instead Nighthawk's network of contacts and the occasional ally willing to let her rest up for a night in a spare room or on a couch. Robin's used to doing for herself and letting no one in and that has stunted her interpersonal skills a bit. Oh, she's perfectly capable of carrying on a superficial conversation but letting someone actually into her emotional space isn't something she even knows how to do. She may never actually be good at it. 

The sad thing is, Robin actually does want that human connection. At least a part of her does. But she's also afraid of loss and the hurt that comes along with it. Robin has a lot of barriers to break down to ever find something like 'emotionally functional' again. While she's not suicidal, part of her has accepted her own death as an inevitable conclusion to the life she's chosen. 

Homeless
Robin has been homeless for almost three years and its not easy. It's left her both guilty about the sudden influx of things like 'food', 'shelter' and clean water but also its hard to adjust. Robin struggles to understand where her classmates are coming from. She doesn't begrudge them their advantages but things like casual waste do ruffle her feathers. Her bed at Claremont is too soft and her room is too quiet. Half the time she feels like a wild thing, trying to adjust to a very nice cage. Robin stays at Claremont because she understands the benefits and she appreciates everything she's been given but it's still hard. When people aren't looking, she takes extra from the cafeteria and some nights, if she can't get comfortable under her bed, she sneaks out to try and find a spot on the roof to nap because honestly, it's much more what she's used to now.

Secret Origins
Robin's powers are not a minor mutation but rather a genetic legacy from her mother who hails from Hyperborea. It was not a simple robber that killed Robin's parents but rather an attack by snake people on an Ultiman exile and Robin's father merely happened to have been their collateral damage. Robin has no knowledge of her heritage, nor any thing from her mother that would betray that ancestry although more questions may get raised if she ever develops the more esoteric powers of her diluted birthright. One can see Robin's Ultiman ancestry in her ruthless devotion to excellence, a trait she gained from her mother but much of the more tell-tale signs have been blunted by both her lack of training and her human half. 

Allies, Associates and Enemies

• Allies
• Associates
  • Claremont: Although Nighthawk is still stumbling through making any real friendships at Claremont, it really doesn't take much to earn her loyalty. Those she meets at Claremont, as little as she might have in common, she shares a certain kinship. Nighthawk is willing to jump in front of a bullet for total strangers, she wouldn't hesitate to do the same for her first tentative friends in a long time. 
• Enemies
  • Misc. Gangs: The Fens have many and varied criminals and Robin has made it a personal goal to track down every single one and kick their teeth in. There are any number of criminals in the Fens that would like to see Nighthawk shot full of many rounds of bullets and put out of their hair for good. One of these days they might actually manage to organize enough to try it.