Black Dove

The Black Dove
Author	/u/unknownmercury
Civilian name	Wren Nguyen
Alignment	Hero
Affiliation	Protectorate (Devilfish)
PRT Classification	Thinker Mover Breaker Stranger
Born	New York City, New York, USA
Status	Active

The Black Dove is a cape from New York City, part of a cape cluster that triggered during a mass shooting at a movie theater. Due to an event where she was unmasked on a live stream, her civilian identity is a matter of public record.

Character Sheet

Appearance

Out of costume, Wren is a short Chinese woman with straight black hair and dark brown eyes. She wears stylish, bright clothing that draws the eye.

In costume, she dresses in dark clothing with armor panels sewn in, a dark cape with stylized feathers, and a black mask styled to look like a bird’s head.

Equipment and Resources

• Personal wealth on the upper end of 6
• Personal apartment with a view of the lake
• High-end motorcycle
• Crossbow and ammo
• Throwing knives
• Darts
• Caltrops
• Smoke grenades
• Flash bang grenades
• Grappling hook with retractable line
• Lockpicking set

Skills and Specializations

• Good spatial awareness
• Skilled in hand-to-hand as well as ranged fighting
• Athletic and acrobatic
• Good singing voice
• A skilled liar and knows how to spot lies in return
• Knows how to sew
• Knows first aid, including how to stitch up wound and handle bullet wounds
• Can pick locks

Mentality

Wren is a cynical individual who believes that a person’s true nature is who they are at their lowest moment. She finds people to be selfish and uncaring, unwilling to help their fellow humans without outside influence.

Power

Trigger Type: Natural Multi-Trigger, Mover/Thinker/Breaker/Stranger

Being a grab-bag cape, Wren has multiple powers.

Heightened awareness; Can tune her senses to increase or decrease certain stimuli, allowing her to adapt more than normal to environmental conditions. This can give her enhanced night-vision by filtering out certain wave lengths, allow her to detect infrasonic and ultrasonic frequencies or hear faint or far away sounds, allow her to pick someone out of a crowd based on scent, etc. (Primary)

Enhanced agility and immunity to dizziness from spinning, tumbling, flipping, etc. Allows for a very acrobatic fighting style that includes standing back flips or spinning to throw projectiles in an arc around her. (Secondary)

Personal gravitational force manipulation; can increase or decrease the force of gravity on herself by around 22 percent, making her lighter for quicker movement or longer jumps, or heavier to resist changes in her momentum or to tackle someone.(Secondary)

Personal interdimensional storage space; has a pocket dimension she can reach into to store and retrieve inorganic objects. While no upper bound has been discovered on how many objects or how much mass she can store at a time, she has to be capable of holding whatever she stores inside. A bicycle could theoretically fit, a car couldn't. (Secondary)

Backstory

Wren Nguyen triggered during a shooting at a theater when she was 14. In the immediate situation, she used her new awareness and sense of timing to evade detection as she ran and hid from the gunman, boosting her speed with bouts of acrobatics to move more efficiently between cover as well as making herself lighter to get more speed as she ran.

In the months following, she looked online about powers and discovered a group of villains with powers similar to hers calling themselves the Flock. The leader, Albatross, apparently knew some things about how powers manifested and was looking for their fourth member. Wren reached out and met with them in a homemade costume consisting of a dollar-store mask, a hoodie, and jeans.

After the initial introductions, Wren found herself drawn in by Albatross and agreed to join them on a small job to see how she’d fit in. The theme was birds, with Albatross as the leader and Rook and Sparrowhawk as sidekicks. Sparrowhawk took an immediate dislike to her and tried to scare her off after the meeting was over.

Despite this, she joined the Flock for the next job, carrying out her role as their surveillance while the others broke in and robbed a small retailer. Heroes had shown after the silent alarm got tripped, and she’d proven herself capable in a fight.

Things were okay, for a time. They would do jobs, the others would retire to the Nest, and Wren would sneak home to collapse into her bed. Albatross often invited her back to the Nest, and she spent some time there during days out of school, but she never liked the vibes she got while there and always kept her face covered.

Then one night, after a hard job, she didn’t think she’d make it back home. She sent a text to her mom saying she was staying at some friend’s house and let herself be led back to the Nest.

That was when she found out Albatross, a woman in her mid-twenties at the youngest, was sleeping with the two boys. Sparrowhawk was sixteen. Rook -- Danny, out of costume -- was twelve. Albatross tried to get Wren drunk and in bed as well, but Wren put her foot down and stormed out of the building. Sparrowhawk followed her, threatening her if she told anyone. She promised her silence and used her powers to get away from him, taking a long route home that night.

Afterwards, she became a vigilante, as if New York didn’t have enough of those. She targeted low-level villains and non-parahumans who she thought were up to skeevy stuff. She roughed up a few, some enough that she’d needed to call an ambulance to be sure she didn’t unwittingly murder them, but it wasn’t enough of an outlet for her anger and disgust at the criminal element.

While acting as a vigilante, she became disenfranchised with humanity, believing that everyone had selfishness and pettiness at their core. She made a name for herself and found herself fighting against heroes on occasion as well. Once or twice, she considered going to the Flock and asking for a place to lie low.

Thinking about what that would cost her helped keep her away. One night, she saw Sparrowhawk looting a store and chased after him. From there she was ambushed, drugged, and kidnapped by the Flock. They tied her to a chair and set up a livestream as they unmasked and then tortured her.

She managed to escape, killing her nemesis in the process. She was taken in by the PRT later that night, as she got home to find the police waiting at her home with her worried parents. She turned herself in, admitting to killing Sparrowhawk. Due to her father’s position in the NYC political scene, she was given clemency. Most of the assault charges against her were consolidated into acts of vigilantism, minus the ones she’d carried out against the hero teams.

For those, she was convicted and sentenced to one year of community service, to be served over the span of four years as a probationary member of the NYC Wards, after which she would graduate into the Protectorate. She was informed that any acts of vigilantism -- defined as ‘acting outside jurisdiction of the Wards and Protectorate, including dereliction of duty or going too far in the line of duty’ -- would be grounds for immediate expulsion from the Wards.

She graduated four years later with a less-than-stellar recommendation from her Wards captains. She joined the New York City Protectorate and was informed that, while her probation was officially done and the assaults and the like had been expunged from her record, she would still be watched carefully for any signs of old habits.

She served for four years on the Protectorate before taking a year’s sabbatical in order to ground herself. During this time, she filed for a transfer from NYC to, as she put it, ‘literally anywhere else in the country.’ News of an up and coming Cape City reached the NYC division and they filled out the necessary paperwork to get her transferred to Devilfish, Minnesota.