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Echo (PL11) - R. Bluefish


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Echo

Power Level: 11 (160/175 PP)
Trade-Offs: +3 Attack/-3 Damage, +3 Defense/-3 Toughness
Unspent Power Points: 15

 

In Brief: A wisecracking, reality-warping heroine with ties to the multiverse, determined to stop her evil alternate-self.
 

Residence: Southside, Freedom City

Alternate Identity: Elizabeth “Buffy” Stein
Identity: Secret
Birthplace: Freedom City, New Jersey
Occupation: Barista/student
Affiliations: The Interceptors
Family: Mother (Marian Stein, 55), father (Thomas Stein, 53), older sister (Rachel Stein, 30), older brother (Thomas Stein Jr., 28), younger brother (Joseph Stein, 18), numerous other relatives

 

Description:
Age: 25 (DoB: January 3rd, 1991)
Gender: Female
Ethnicity: Jewish
Height: 5’ 5”
Weight: 125 lb
Eyes: Hazel
Hair: Black (wears a white wig when in costume)

 

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Buffy Stein is a young, cheerful woman with a pale, heart-shaped face, hazel eyes, and black hair she keeps cropped short. She usually wears casual, comfortable clothes and no makeup, not being overly concerned with her appearance.

 

As Echo, she wears a blue-and-silver bodysuit with white lines around the forearms and shins, which is designed to afford her maximum mobility. Her features are concealed behind a full face mask with large, opaque eye slits. She wears a long white wig to make the disguise complete, which does a remarkable job of staying on despite her constant acrobatics.

 

Power Descriptions: Most of Echo’s powers appear to be extremely heightened natural traits, such as her inhuman agility and strength. She isn’t particularly subtle with them, either, constantly flipping and leaping around like a circus performer. She possesses what looks like super-speed, but is actually limited temporal manipulation. She does have a few tricks that are obviously “impossible” even for someone with her enhanced physiology, such as altering gravity so that she can walk on walls or freezing someone in place with a touch. When she teleports, she vanishes instantly with an audible whumph of displaced air, and the space around her seems to ripple and distort slightly, as though being viewed through water.

 

History: Lisa Stein was born to a middle-class Jewish family, the third of four children. Their parents worked demanding, but respectable jobs, and the siblings were well loved and cared for.

 

Until one day, in 2001, they found themselves suffering the main disadvantage of living in Freedom City. When their mother, Sarah Stein, was walking home from work, a grudge match broke out between two groups of so-called “heroes” who had chosen to openly defy the long-standing Moore Act. The battle escalated quickly, until part of a storefront was destroyed by a careless attack, and Sarah was buried underneath rubble.

 

The combatants were too busy with their fight to bother helping her. Eventually, both teams called it a draw and withdrew, and the emergency services deemed it safe to move in. They were too late for Sarah, however – she suffocated to death.

 

The family never recovered. Their father fell into depression, withdrawing, bit by bit, into himself. The siblings drifted apart, separated by childish quarrels. Lisa grew up quiet and deeply resentful, but deep inside she longed for the opportunity to join the rogue heroes of the city, Moore Act or no Moore Act. She knew that her mother was dead because of their failure, and she was certain that she could become a better hero than any of them, and stop this from happening to anyone else.

 

On her eighteenth birthday, everything changed. The moment she woke up, she felt different. The world around her no longer seemed fixed and immutable – everything could be altered. Excited experimentation followed, and she discovered that she seemed to possess an array of minor superabilities. Simply by thinking about it, she could become a little stronger, a little faster, a little less hampered by the laws of physics. Her powers were fairly weak, but she was undeterred – she continued to push herself, intent on discovering exactly what she was capable of.

 

She got her wish. After one particularly intense “training” session, she vanished from the face of the Earth.

 

In her entire life, Eliza Stein never wanted for anything. Born to rich, high-class parents, she spent her entire childhood being pampered, spoiled, and told how special she was. Things like money were almost meaningless to her – she had so much, she could do whatever she wanted without the tiniest consequence. She and her siblings lived a life of such opulence and excess, she grew bored. She wished for something unexpected, something that would throw off the dull monotony of luxury she lived every day.

 

She got her wish when a young woman identical to her in every respect arrived at her doorstep, babbling excitedly about “powers.” This was certainly unexpected. Intrigued, she invited her in, and the woman introduced herself as Lisa Stein. She insisted that she had just arrived from another world, and that they were two versions of the same person. None of the other rich kids had an alternate-universe clone! The next few weeks were an incredible game for the two young women. They switched places, pranked relatives, compared life stories. Lisa began to feel as if she had finally found her true soulmate, in herself.

 

Until, as always happened, Eliza grew bored once more. Once the novelty of the situation wore off, she began to wish that this crude, low-class girl would go back to where she came from and leave her alone. When she told Lisa as much, Lisa panicked, terrified of going back to her old life of frustration and mundanity. Why couldn’t they just stay together, forever? Couldn’t she see this was how it was supposed to be? Desperate to make Eliza see reason, she seized her by the shoulders and shook her, screaming into her face.

 

She had forgotten about her enhanced strength. She accidentally broke Eliza’s neck. But her initial horror lasted only a moment – suddenly an incredible thing happened. Eliza’s body seemed to dissolve slowly away into glowing threads of energy, which Lisa’s body immediately absorbed. As this happened, Lisa’s understanding of the universe seemed to deepen. It was a feeling of indescribable euphoria, realizing how easy it was to shape the world, make it bend to your will.

 

Lisa’s power nearly doubled. Eliza was gone, nothing more than a heap of empty clothes. Lisa mourned her not, instead taking her place and living her life for several months, until one day the feeling of unease came again. The surety that she was intended for more than this. She had been given this power for a reason, she just needed to figure out what it was. Maybe if she did that again, just once more, then she would understand…

 

Maybe there was always something broken inside the young woman. Maybe the act of inadvertently murdering herself pushed her over the brink of sanity. Maybe when the other woman’s very being was unwillingly absorbed into her own, some critical part of her mind was irreversibly warped by the trauma. But so it was that Lisa Stein became one of the more unusual serial killers in the many worlds. Every few months, she would travel to another reality, divine if there was an Elizabeth Stein there, and if so, kill her. And with every kill, her power grew.

 

Years passed.

 

Beth Stein was raised on one ideal: responsibility. Her father was a police lieutenant – her mother, an assistant district attorney. When she discovered she possessed a suite of minor physics-bending powers, she became a hero without a moment’s hesitation. While she was comparatively weak next to many of the others in the world, the newly-christened Echo made the most of the abilities she had, compensating for lack of raw power with skill and training. Soon, she became a respected figure.

 

Until one day, a woman appeared to her. This woman was her exact physical double in every way. She was polite and soft-spoken, reassuring her that she had nothing to fear, but Beth could see a dark glitter in her eyes. Her fears were not assuaged when the woman politely asked if she would be so good as to let her kill her.

 

She fought. She defended herself with everything she had, but her doppelganger had her hopelessly outmatched. When the smoke cleared, Beth had been beaten so savagely she could hardly move, and her duplicate (who mildly introduced herself as “Lisa”) hadn’t received so much as a scratch, and seemed quite unperturbed.

 

In a final attempt to play for time, Beth begged Lisa for one single favor: to know why. Lisa obliged, explaining apologetically that they were the same person from different realities, and that this was the only way Lisa could realize her true potential. Out of some twisted sense of compassion, she comforted Beth, telling her she wasn’t going to die, far from it. In fact, she was going to become a part of something greater. Something wonderful.

 

With her last ounce of strength, Beth focused on the desire to be anywhere but here.

 

Buffy Stein was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Freedom City, the third of four children. Their parents worked demanding, but respectable jobs, and the siblings were well loved and cared for.

 

One day, when Buffy was ten, her mother found herself an innocent bystander in a battle between a team of heroes and a team of villains. A building was damaged by a misaimed attack, and she was trapped under rubble. The heroes, who had formed based on their respect for the Centurion’s sacrifice during the Terminus Invasion, immediately leaped to her aid, ignoring their opponents and disregarding their own safety. They rescued her, but she was badly injured, and their fastest member rushed her to Freedom Medical Center. She was determined to be paralyzed from the waist down, but alive.

 

From then on, Buffy worshiped superheroes, who had saved her mother’s life with their selfless action. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to possess any powers of her own, despite her many attempts at awakening them, and her father put an end to her experimentation by forbidding her to jump off the garage roof anymore.

 

Resigned to the fact that she would never fly, she decided instead to do the next best thing – write about those who did. Being a reporter swiftly became her new dream. However, she had difficulty applying herself in class – there always seemed to be something better (read: more fun) to do. No matter how hard she tried to work on her grades, she was inevitably distracted by the siren song of that one video game she wanted to try, or the latest issue of Freedom League Adventures. By the time she decided to truly buckle down and pursue her ambition, she was in her twenties and working in a coffee shop to pay the rent. She enrolled at Freedom College, but still had trouble concentrating, unable to shake the feeling that she was still intended for something more important (or at least more exciting).

 

The last thing she had been expecting when she returned home from her shift one night was to find a woman perfectly identical to her lying in a bloody heap on the floor, clad in a tattered costume. The strange woman could barely move, but she refused to let Buffy call 911, saying there was no time. With her final breaths, Beth told Buffy everything she knew about Lisa Stein – that she was them from another world, that she grew stronger by killing them, and that she was already terrifyingly powerful. As the last of her strength began to fade, Beth begged Buffy to heed her warning. It was all up to her now, she told her. Lisa Stein was going to come for her too, sooner or later, and she had to stop her, to protect every Elizabeth Stein in every world everywhere. And with that, she died.

 

When Buffy involuntarily absorbed Beth’s essence, she was both shocked and horrified. But because Beth willingly allowed it to happen, the process was smoother than it had been when Lisa murdered Eliza. By combining her own latent power with Beth’s, Buffy was made far stronger than either of them ever could have been alone. She became the second Echo, determined to uphold the ideals the first one died for, and honor her sacrifice (whether it was voluntary or not).

 

And besides, being a superhero sounded like a lot more fun than being a barista.

 

Personality & Motivations: Echo is torn between two conflicting feelings. She is intently disturbed by the knowledge that she is apparently capable of cold-blooded, selfish mass murder, even if it is a different her who lived a different life. On top of that, she watched herself die in her arms, an experience that she still has occasional nightmares about.

But on the other hand, she can walk on walls.

 

She is both excited by her new power and troubled by how she came by it. Never much one for self-analysis, she’s decided the best way to deal with it is to beat nine kinds of crap out of bad guys and save people, while doing her best to live up to her own ideals, particularly the name of Echo (despite the fact that no one in this universe knows who the original one was).

When in-costume, she has a tendency towards being energetic, almost manic. Heroics are a chance for her to break free of the stifling restraints of her normal life and become a different person, and she likes to make the most of it. She can’t resist making constant wisecracks (of sometimes dubious quality) unless the situation is truly dire, in which case she can become surprisingly serious. Of course, her definition of what constitutes a “truly dire situation” might differ somewhat from that of most people.

 

Ultimately, however, she knows that she has these powers for one reason: to stop Lisa. She has no idea what Lisa’s endgame is, or if she even has one, but she apparently intends to reach it by murdering countless innocent Elizabeth Steins. A source of constant frustration for Echo is that she currently has no way of actually confronting Lisa, having yet to master her own world-traveling powers. Not to mention the fact that Lisa could be literally anywhere in the entire multiverse.

 

Powers & Tactics: Echo has what she might describe as a “unique” relationship with reality. She considers things like time, space, mass, and gravity to be loose guidelines at best. Simply by wanting to, she can accomplish physical feats that would be outright impossible for any ordinary human, becoming far faster, stronger, and more agile. Beyond this, she can bend or even outright break the laws of physics themselves, doing things like redirecting gravity in order to walk on walls, reducing it in order to perform impressive leaps, slowing down time, or teleporting short distances (although when asked, she says she’s actually moving the universe around her, which she insists is far easier). She is unsure if she has the ability to travel between parallel worlds like Beth and Lisa, but if she does (and she does), she hasn’t figured out how to do it deliberately yet.

 

She is well aware of her own physical strengths and weaknesses, and she has tailored her combat style around them. Fighting fair is something she avoids at all costs, using all manner of dirty tricks and unorthodox tactics to seek an edge. She also has a tendency to keep up a steady barrage of taunts and groan-inducing quips during a battle, partly to rile up her opponent, but mainly just for kicks.

 

Complications:
Best Game Ever: Despite everything, Buffy loves being a superhero, sometimes a little too much for her own good. She has trouble taking thing completely seriously, having yet to truly appreciate some of the stakes of her new role, or experience the consequences of failure.
Family: Buffy has a sizable (and fairly close) family.
My Own Worst Enemy: Lisa Stein is still out there, somewhere in the multiverse. And she is extremely displeased that the original Echo escaped her clutches. She has been spending a certain amount of effort attempting to divine which reality she fled to, to settle the score with “the one who got away.”
Secret Identity: To date, only a select few know that Buffy Stein is actually Echo, and she does her best to keep it that way.
Struggling: She’s not likely to starve, but most of her money goes toward paying bills, leaving her perpetually a little cash shy.
Unworthy: Deep inside, she worries that she’s not as much of a hero as Beth Stein, and that Beth’s the one who should be alive, not her. She does her best to not acknowledge these fears, but the nagging self-doubt remains. Her exuberance is partly due to overcompensating for this feeling.

 

Abilities: 0 + 2 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 8 = 22PP
Strength: 26/10 (+8/+0)
Dexterity: 30/12 (+10/+1)
Constitution: 14 (+2)
Intelligence: 14 (+2)
Wisdom: 14 (+2)
Charisma: 18 (+4)

 

Combat: 8 + 8 = 16PP
Initiative: +14/+5 (+4 Improved Initiative, +10/+1 Dex)
Attack: +14 Unarmed, +12 Melee, +4 Ranged
Grapple: +24/+20/+12 (+12 Attack, +8/+0 Str, +4/+0 Super-Strength)
Defense: +14 (+4 Base, +10 Dodge Focus), +2 flat-footed
Knockback: -4

 

Saving Throws: 4 + 2 + 6 = 12PP
Toughness: +8 (+2 Con, +6 Defensive Roll), +2 flat-footed
Fortitude: +6 (+2 Con, +4)
Reflex: +12/+3 (+10/+1 Dex, +2)
Will: +8 (+2 Wis, +6)

 

Skills: 56R = 14PP
Acrobatics 12 (+22/+13) Skill Mastery
Bluff 8 (+12)
Diplomacy 6 (+10)
Gather Information 8 (+12) Skill Mastery
Knowledge (current events) 8 (+10)
Knowledge (popular culture) 2 (+4)
Language 1 (English [Native], Hebrew)
Notice 10 (+12) Skill Mastery
Sense Motive 8 (+10)
Stealth 5 (+15/+6) Skill Mastery

 

Feats: 31PP
Acrobatic Bluff
Attack Focus (Melee) 8
Attack Specialization (Unarmed)
Challenge (Fast Acrobatic Feint)
Defensive Roll 3
Dodge Focus 10
Elusive Target
Evasion
Improved Initiative
Skill Mastery (Acrobatics, Gather Information, Notice, Stealth)
Takedown Attack 2
Well-Informed

 

Powers: 1 + 10 + 14 + 2 + 4 + 34 = 65PP

 

Feature 1 (Temporal Inertia) [1PP]

 

Go Real Fast 4 (8PP Array, Power Feats: Alternate Power 2) [10PP]
          Base Power: Speed 8 (2,500 MPH/25,000 feet per move action) (Bend Time) {8/8PP}
          Alternate Power: Enhanced Skill 12 (Acrobatics +12) + Leaping 4 (x25 [using Skill Mastery Acrobatics: running long jump: 875 feet; standing long jump: 437.5 feet; high jump: 218.75 feet]) (In a Single Bound) {3+4=7/8PP}
          Alternate Power: Teleport 5 (500 feet; Flaw: Short-range only, Power Feats: Change Direction, Progression 1 [200 lb], Turnabout) (Spatial Hop) {8/8PP}

 

Reality Warping 5 (10PP Array, Power Feats: Alternate Power 4) [14PP]

          Base Power: Damage 0 (Extra: Autofire [8]; Power Feats: Improved Critical 2 [18-20]) (Superfast Fists) {10/10PP}

          Alternate Power: Enhanced Speed 1 (to Speed 1 [10 MPH/100 feet per move action] or Speed 9 [5,000 MPH/50,000 feet per move action]) + Quickness 9 (x1,000) (Slow Time) {1+9=10/10PP}

          Alternate Power: Paralyze 10 (Extra: Alternate Save [Reflex, +0], Flaw: Action/Full) (Temporal Stasis) {10/10PP}

          Alternate Power: Super-Movement 5 (trackless, wall-crawling 3, water walking) (Gravity Schmavity) {10/10PP}

          Alternate Power: Super-Strength 4 (effective STR 46; heavy load: 6 tons; Power Feat: Groundstrike) (Ignore Weight) {9/10PP}

 

Super-Movement 2 (dimensional [parallel universes]; Flaw: Uncontrolled) (World Traveler) [2PP]

 

Super-Senses 4 (Danger Sense [Mental], Dimensional Awareness [Mental], Temporal Awareness [Mental], Uncanny Dodge [Mental]) [4PP]

 

There Is No Spoon 6.8 (34PP Container [Passive, Permanent]) [34PP]

          Enhanced Dexterity 18 [18PP]

          Enhanced Strength 16 [16PP]

 

DC Block

ATTACK                RANGE      SAVE                                    EFFECT
Temporal Stasis       Touch      DC 20 Reflex (staged)                   Paralyze
Unarmed               Touch      DC 23 Toughness + Autofire (staged)     Damage (physical)

Totals: Abilities (22) + Combat (16) + Saving Throws (12) + Skills (14) + Feats (31) + Powers (65) – Drawbacks (0) = 160/17

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