Hydra

Hydra
Hydra in her humanoid form
Reputation	Notoriety Criminal E / ?
Author	Koishi (capes)
Pronouns	They/Them
Civilian name	Caitlyn Hughes
Alignment	Unknown
Affiliation	None (Denver)
Age	25
Status	Active
Nationality	German American
Approver	Spectre
Trigger Type	Single Standard Trigger

Publicly Available Information

Hydra is a regeneration brute with seemingly multiple personalities in one body. Acting carefree for the most part if approached and they actually stick around. Their regeneration seems to come in spurts of sudden explosive growth, and losing one of their heads does not seem to hinder either the head nor the rest of the body beyond pain. With large scale damage turning them into some sort of eldritch squid.

Appearance

Hydra stands tall with smooth, rubbery skin. Skin a gradient from off-white to blacks and dark purples. What passes for hair is made of the same material, thick tendrils coming out of the squid-like back of their head. Ending up in heads that look like a mixture of a serpentine head and canine maw.

They generally wear fairly little. Shoes for comfort walking and enough elsewhere to look somewhat covered to the outside spectators.

Mentality

Hydra is a generally pleasant person, if with some issues. Mainly that they've gotten accustomed to acting like they think others expect them to. Which leads to them acting like they're more cheery and clueless than they truly are, and vaguely expecting others to do the same.

Adding to this issue are the heavy mutations that their powers gave them, which includes additional heads, each a slight deviation from the original with their own opinions.

Ever since gaining their powers, they keep out of sight of crowds, still processing, then switching to the confident and cheery persona if approached.

They utterly despise it to be called a 'freak'. One of the few ways to somewhat break persona and genuinely piss them off.

Skills & Training

• speaks fluent, if accented German.
• Well practiced at pretending to be happy and okay with things while suffering.
• Good with Word, Excel and other tools for office drones.
• Can stay polite while being yelled at.
• Hobbyist wood carver in their free time.
• Knows approximately too many little life hacks that aren't complete scams.
• Has an economics degree from a fairly reputable school.
• Familiar with office bureaucracy.
• Knows how to fix up minor things around the house.

Resources & Wealth

An apartment on the third floor of an apartment building. Decorated mostly with their own trinkets and a few gifts from friends and family that don't all fit, but can't stomach throwing away.

• A fairly old second hand car
• A bank account and some savings with enough money to last them another month or two.
• A sales job where they've convinced the boss to let them work from home because of a 'family emergency'.
• An English Springer Spaniel dog. (A good boy.)

Equipment & Gear

A phone. (In a very sturdy case.)

Parahuman Power

Hydra's power has completely reshaped their biology. The majority of their body, minus the jaws on their heads, made up out of a fusion between neurons and muscle tissue with no bones. As well as four additional heads with their own personalities that are offsprings of theirs. Each head contains a nerve cluster serving as a brain, and Hydra will only fully die if all of them are destroyed.

They normally look like an eldritch mixture of a squid and starfish with heads a mixture of serpentine shapes with canine jaws on half of their ten tentacles, and can shift this mass into rounded shapes and vaguely change colors between off white and going through purple to near-black purple. This can be used to appear vaguely humanoid, but will fall apart immediately to scrutiny. This process gets slower the further from the original squid-like shape Hydra gets. Being able to spread themselves very thin or squeeze through small holes if given a good amount of time. While shifting to their favored humanoid form will take around 10 minutes.

Their main power is a sort of explosive regeneration. Rapidly growing new tissue to replace what was lost and pushing out damaged tissue. With greater injuries leading to faster healing. Most injuries healing back in less than fifteen seconds, and limbs (aside from heads) being back in up to thirty depending on how much was lost. Healed tissue will come back slightly larger, approximately one and a half times as physically strong. Limbs coming back as they would have on their undisguised squid form. This effect also keeps Hydra at above average physical strength due to the constant slight wear on muscles also being healed in this manner. Should multiple pieces of Hydra exist, the regeneration will only work fully on the piece with the most brain nerve clusters, prioritising the one with greater mass should that number be equal.

Detached body parts decay to nothing after about a day. Slowly dying off before being reclaimed over that time if it was a head.

Should any of their heads be cut off, two will grow back in their place, with each beyond the fifth head deviating further and further from the original personality. These additional heads have their own control over the body as well, if not as much as the main one, eventually leading to the 'too many cooks' problem as cooperation breaks down due to conflicting opinions on how to go about things.

Additional mass starts being reabsorbed as Hydra calms down after combat, taking 10-20 minutes if they feel safe/at ease and up to an hour if they're on edge, but not expecting a fight. With the more mass they have as they start absorbing it back, the quicker it's taken back in.

Background & Trigger

You didn't fit in well, as a kid. You were the weird one. the one who got picked on for their weird hobbies, the way they dressed, etc. And you resolved yourself to fixing this issue by the time you went to high school. Watching what others said and did, then acting like that to try and fit in

And it worked! You were liked, not quite popular, but you had a pretty big friend group. A certified social chameleon by the time you finished school and got yourself a job.

On said job, people were quick to ask you for 'favors', coming by with a smile and asking you to do more work. Initially, anyways. At some point they just plopped it down onto your workload without another word.

You kept doing it. Silently getting overworked and increasingly frantic in trying to figure out how to get it all done.

Then, a massive project came up. A multi million dollar contract for the company, and your already bad workload doubled. You pretended it was fine, put on a smile.

Then you broke. Going for a toilet break and sobbing your heart out for a good half an hour, then fixing up your appearance to go back to work, but your head couldn't handle it. Nothing was getting done.

The contract fell through. You couldn't finish it, and upper management fired half the team you were part of in retaliation. You'd managed to keep your own job. Barely.

Then some days after, you're walking home from the grocery store when you're suddenly grabbed. Dragged off somewhere to find yourself surrounded by your former coworkers, the one that had laid all that extra work onto you, and they were *pissed*. Blaming you for not finishing their work and getting them fired.

The first kick sent your head spinning, followed by more blows. Both insults and actual physical ones breaking you apart. And all you could do was blame yourself for it. For wanting to be liked. For not being able to finish it all. Choking to death on your own blood and unable to move.

Trigger.