Heartwood

Heartwood
Reputation	Notoriety Criminal D / ?
Author	Helnae (capes)
Pronouns	She/Her
Civilian name	Ariadne Snell
Alignment	Mercenary
Affiliation	None (Denver)
Age	19
Status	Active
Nationality	American
Approver	ALargeHairyDerp
Trigger Type	Single Standard Trigger

Publicly Available Information

Heartwood is a mercenary previously seen several times in various parts of eastern Colorado, New Mexico, and western Kansas, all in the company of the known mercenary cape Brant. However, recently, she has been seen in Denver, having seemingly separated from Brant and struck out on her own. From prior sightings, Heartwood is said to be some sort of changer or breaker, with a large, tree-like combat form.

Costume Appearance

Black motorcycle leathers with matching gloves and boots make up the base layer of Heartwood's costume, with a kevlar vest providing some additional protection. Over top all that, however, is what is essentially a set of plate armor made from wood. Specifically, sycamore wood. The majority of the wood armor's surface retains its bark, but accentuations made via carving away bark to expose the wood below line the edges of the plates, and certain decorative spots. The wood armor is not meant for protection, really; it's nowhere near thick enough to be good for that.

Rather, its purpose is to provide an aesthetic for her Breaker form to base its appearance on. A cloth mantle and hood shaped to look like sycamore leaves contributes to the same purpose. Finally, her mask is padded metal with a wood outer layer, which covers from her forehead to her nose. The eye holes contain light amber-colored lenses, and little beads of the same amber-colored material are inset into the wood below the lenses. From the bottom of the mask hangs a dark cloth that conceals the rest of Heartwood's face, but can be moved aside should the need arise, say if she wishes to drink something without taking her mask off.

In her Breaker state, Heartwood becomes a hulking, legless humanoid that measures approximately nine feet from the top of its head to where her hips unfurl into roots that anchor her quite firmly to the ground. The state's general form is feminine, in the way of an ancient fertility goddess. Her long arms, proportionate to the scale of her Breaker state's size, each end in a large hand with seven digits.

When Heartwood enters her Breaker state while wearing her costume, the state draws from it for its appearance, resulting in a tree-like appearance, with bark-like skin, a mane of autumnal leaves, a mouth like a jagged gash, and constant streams of amber sap oozing from the empty eye holes in her face.

Civilian Appearance

Ariadne is decently tall at 5'9" (175 cm). She has an athletic build, and weighs approximately 150 pounds (about 68 kg). She has curly red hair, and her skin is the kind of pale that's enthusiastic about producing freckles but refuses to tan. She has green eyes, and her lips are decently full, though her bottom lip tends to be varying degrees of ragged from her habit of chewing on it. She doesn't use makeup outside of rare instances of lipstick and eyeliner, but she knows how to apply most kinds of makeup fairly well.

Regardless of whether she's sitting or standing, in costume or out, she keeps her back ramrod straight, though she has managed to get the rest of her posture to be more relaxed while in civvies.

Out of costume, she tends towards darker-colored graphic t-shirts, jeans, skirts, and the like. For more formal occasions, she has some white-dress-shirt-and-black-slacks sets available. She also tends to wear some jewelry, rings, earrings, and small pendants, for the most part. She prefers silver and steel to gold, and her preferred gems are emeralds. She tends not to wear any jewelry while in costume, though, aside from a pair of small, plain studs in her ears.

Mentality

Ariadne is, to most people, kinda prickly, especially when first meeting them. While in costume as Heartwood, though, she manages to cover that with a layer of professionalism. She reacts quite poorly to attempts to control her. She doesn't have much by way of driving goals, aside from being able to live comfortably, experience excitement at times via her mercenary work, and have access to the internet, books she likes, and clothes and accessories that suit her taste. She has a touch of OCD-adjacent tendencies with regards to how she keeps her apartment, and how she goes about a job. If she gets thrown off-balance mentally to a sufficient degree, she has trouble re-centering herself.

Skills & Training

• Reasonably proficient in martial arts
• Decent at lockpicking
• An avid jogger
• A fair hand at driving, especially her motorcycle
• Skilled at playing the piano, but somewhat rusty
• Fairly skilled with accounts and finances
• Reasonably skilled at throwing improvised weapons

Resources & Wealth

Ariadne has a comfortable nest egg and a few thousand in spending money, but is reliant on mercenary jobs for income. She has a motorcycle for transportation, and has acquired a decent apartment in Denver.

Equipment & Gear

• Costume
• Two knives
• Lockpicks
• A flashbang grenade
• Burner phone
• Water and a snack
• Zip ties

Parahuman Power

Heartwood is a Breaker, and as such is essentially a baseline human outside of her Breaker state. Entering her Breaker state takes a few seconds of bodily warping, complete with wet cracking and crunching, though the process does not cause Heartwood any pain.

In her Breaker state, Heartwood becomes a hulking, legless humanoid that measures approximately ten feet from the top of its head to where her hips unfurl into roots that anchor her quite firmly to the ground. The state's general form is feminine, in the way of an ancient fertility goddess. Her long arms, proportionate to the scale of her Breaker state's size at about nine feet from shoulder to fingertip, each end in a large hand with seven digits, each of which is tipped with a blunt claw. Her costume influences her Breaker state's appearance toward something tree-like, with bark for skin, a mane of autumnal leaves sprouting from her head, shoulders, and upper back, and a noseless face with a jagged slash of a mouth and empty eye holes that constantly leak an amber sap. The bark does not make her any tougher than she would be otherwise, and she can see normally from the eye holes. Were she to enter her breaker state in civilian clothes, its resulting appearance would be fleshy, draped in wispy swathes of something partway between fabric and skin.

Her maximum reach, were she to essentially lay her torso across the ground, would be approximately eighteen feet.

The most apparent aspect of Heartwood's Breaker state powers is the greatly improved toughness and strength, the rough equivalent of a mid-tier Brute. Her claws can score grooves in concrete, her grip strength can crush the same, and she can bend rebar with little effort. With her long arms, this makes her rather dangerous in close quarters. In addition, her roots make her nigh immovable, going so far as to make whatever surface she is rooted in markedly tougher than it would be otherwise, in an approximately five foot radius. The added toughness makes affected surfaces approximately 40-50% more durable and resistant to damage. This effect interferes with mechanisms under its influence, which renders them immobile; this prevents, for example, a vehicle from driving around with her Breaker state active in the back. However, being rooted doesn't just prevent others from moving her; she herself cannot move from the spot, to the point that she cannot even turn around, something that is only partially mitigated by a surprising capacity to twist around at the waist.

In her rooted state, attempts to teleport her require more effort than the teleportation-using cape would usually have to exert, unless the teleportation affects both her and the entirety of the material her roots have infiltrated. Similarly, telekinetics cannot move her wholesale unless they can tear the root-affected surface away from the non-affected surface. Telekinetic force can still forcibly move her limbs and such around, though.

The final aspect of her Breaker state's power set is her combat minion. It takes the appearance of a sexless, bark-skinned, emaciated humanoid that stands a little over four feet tall, with oversized limbs and head in proportion to its body size. Its limbs all end in viciously curved claws, those on its hands bearing long, with sharp edges; those on its feet are only sharp at their tips and are smaller than those on the hands, save for the ones that tip each big toe, which are large and held up like those of a velociraptor. All its claws are sharp enough to pierce steel, given they have sufficient force behind them; its foot claws can easily pierce concrete, and it often uses that for additional traction, up to being able to run up walls and cling to them. Its eyes are large and capable of seeing in low light and rotating independently of one another, and its wide mouth is full of sharp little teeth. It cannot speak, and in fact cannot make any sounds aside from childlike laughter and crying. The minions, of which only one can be active at a time, emerge from her Breaker state's belly by tearing themselves free, the damage from which quickly seals up behind them. This regeneration only applies to the birthing wound, not anything else. Heartwood can perceive through the minion's senses, but cannot directly control them, instead having to mentally give them orders that they carry out on their own. The minions are very fast and agile, able to sprint at speeds in excess of 40 mph, and do not flinch away from committing violence, but they are somewhat fragile. While they can dodge many attacks they can see coming, it does not take many hits to disable or even kill one. A dead minion decays away to nothing within a day. Heartwood can kill a minion with a thought, should the need arise, and exiting her breaker state kills any active minion. A minion that ends up outside her range of control goes murderously berserk and makes every effort to return to her range.

The minion has lungs but does not need to breathe. its body otherwise reacts to chemicals in ways akin to how human bodies do, such as, for example, tear gas severely irritating the mucus membranes of its eyes.

While Heartwood is in her Breaker state, the urge to move around in ways her state's rooted nature prevents gradually builds until eventually becoming a frenzied, maddening urge, which gives her a soft cap of time spent in her Breaker state of approximately two hours. After leaving her Breaker state, she must wait a little over a minute before she can re-enter it, regardless of how long she'd spent in the state, but the strain spending too long in the state inflicts on her mind makes it difficult to voluntarily re-enter it without taking time to mentally decompress and calm down. In addition, leaving her breaker state and then re-entering it removes all injuries it might’ve sustained, though for each major wound it received, Heartwood must focus for an additional three interruptible seconds. This form-shift healing also applies to her human body and costume.

Background & Trigger

From the moment she was born, Ariadne's purpose in life, as decided by her parents, was to be a threat to her older brother, Harding. Their parents owned and managed a fairly successful insurance firm, and they wanted their inheriting child to be smart, resourceful, and ruthless. Harding was instilled with the belief that if he didn’t work hard, Ariadne would overtake him and steal the position he’d been promised. Likewise, Ariadne was led to believe that if she didn’t outshine Harding, she’d be deemed useless and discarded. Not only was sabotage permitted, it was encouraged.

Naturally, all this left both kids quite fucked up.

Their parents were far from being in perfect control, however, and over time both children independently came to see just how awful and abusive their parents were. The two came to an understanding, out of their parents’ notice, and while on the surface their competition never wavered, underneath they worked to gradually mend as much of their relationship as they could, redirecting all of their true animosity towards their unknowing parents. The two agreed that Ariadne would allow herself to fall behind Harding in their parents’ metrics, and he would support her financially should she truly be discarded.

Despite this, the stress started to get to Ariadne, even more so than it had before. To deal with it, she started with small acts of rebellion, but soon enough things escalated beyond what she could handle. All it took was sneaking out to a party she wasn’t supposed to be at, and a bit too much to drink, and that was that. Consensual it might have been, but her parents went ballistic when they found the positive pregnancy test she’d failed to dispose of covertly enough.

Ariadne found herself confined to her room, not allowed anywhere without a watchful eye on her. Her parents had decided she would have to bear the child, and then, once it was born, she would have to put it up for adoption herself. Somehow, this was not her breaking point.

No, that happened when she was on the surgical table, months later, having to get a cesarean performed. Something went wrong with the anesthetic, leaving her partially aware during the procedure, with everything cast in a terrifying light. Instead of doctors, her parents were the ones looming over her, baleful eyes not deigning to acknowledge her as anything more than a tool even as their grasping hands reached into her torn-open belly to rip the child from her womb. In that moment, she triggered.

Harding made good on his side of the bargain. By the time Ariadne was recovered enough to leave the hospital, he had gathered a large sum of cash for her, and had secured a means for her to escape their parents’ cruel grasp. The two of them parted on amicable terms.

Ariadne sought a way to make a living with her powers, and soon attracted the attention of a parahuman mercenary. The woman took a liking to her, and made her an offer: Ariadne would lend her services as a parahuman to the mercenary for one year, during which time she would receive teaching in combat and other such skills a mercenary would find helpful. At the end of the year, she would be free to leave, and, in fact, encouraged to go strike out on her own.

Thus, her year completed, Heartwood arrives in Denver.