Lodestar

Lodestar
Reputation	Notoriety Criminal A /
Author	Leah (capes)
Pronouns	She/Her
Civilian name	Lyla Owens
Alignment	Hero
Affiliation	None (Denver)
Age	37
Status	NPC
Nationality	American
Approver	UnknownMercury
Trigger Type	Single Standard Trigger

Publicly Available Information

Lodestar was a powerful hero in the Denver scene, first appearing 17 years ago, and retiring 10 years ago for unknown reasons. She was a powerful 'flying brick' cape, and her encounters were known to be ended rather quickly. She demonstrated great strength, speed, quick flight, and general invulnerability. Lodestar had a reputation for ending her encounters swiftly, and she was a public icon in her time. Lodestar memorabilia is still sold today.

PRT / Government Information

Lodestar is a breaker of some kind, with a stranger ability hiding the details of her private identity, despite never having worn a mask. She has never demonstrated long periods of engagement without intermittent pauses out of sight for precisely one minute. It is speculated she is not classically invulnerable, but damage to her instead damages her ability to maintain her powers in some form as it has been demonstrated that she will typically engage in one of these pauses after taking significant damage or many hits.

Costume Appearance

In costume Lodestar bears the full Superhero guise, with golden hair and glowing eyes, cape and all. She wears yellow, and is generally an icon of hope, or at least she tries to be. Her appearance is generally immaculate, her power pulling a lot of the work image wise as she never needs to put makeup, her hair is always perfect, and stains splash off like water off a duck.

Civilian Appearance

Lyla stands at 5'8" and has brown hair and eyes when not using her power. She generally wears comfy mom clothing, jeans and a blouse or on occasion a comfy . She's aged gracefully, now 30 years of age, with small laughing lines and a bit of general homeliness to her.

Mentality

Lodestar is what some may call a true blue hero. Self-sacrificing to the core, she will often attempt diplomacy in any given situation before she has to resort to violence, especially because with her power it is so easy to over-do things and hurt people. She will only go for lethal moves if it is absolutely necessary, she will even test creatures and master minions before attacking them, to see if they are mindless or can be persuaded with sufficient damage before destroying them. She is compassionate, and will put the safety of others above her own in a heartbeat.

Older now, with more experience she sees herself as more of an educator now, helping to sheperd along the next generation of heroes from the back lines in her retirement.

Despite absolutely deserving her retirement, she still feels guilt at taking it- at not being Lodestar, the lives she could have saved in the interim, but she believes it is time for the next generation to step in- and that she will leave it to them unless there is true need of Lodestar- or if those close to her are threatened.

Skills & Training

• Ninth Dan Judo, she is highly skilled in the art and in grappling and nonlethal takedowns and control methods.
• She's a trained Paramedic, if a bit rusty, and has excellent first aid and resuscitation skills.
• Skilled in Boxing and methods of controlling the strength of her blows precisely. She has extensive training in this area.
• Lodestar is an experienced hero, and has worked with the Protectorate before and is passingly familiar with their standard protocol, at least as of 10 years ago.
• She can drive, not outstandingly talented but as well as the average adult who uses a car every day.
• A good cook, having to cook for her daughter, as well as having to quickly put together a meal in her old days.
• Excels in the use of her power, especially in using her ability to speed up and increase the rate at which she views the world, using it to her advantage to disable opponents and handle tricky scenarios

Resources & Wealth

Lyla lives fairly well from her time as a Paramedic and hero, not to mention her old contacts helping her along despite her teacher's Salary and she lives comfortably with her daughter in a suburban home she owns. Has a van. Most of her old Hero gear is left in a secured lockbox in a closet in her room so Eliza won't see it accidentally.

Equipment & Gear

• Her costume is made of a kevlar material, difficult to damage and providing moderate protection around her body. Doesn't really do anything for her breaker state, more for if she needs it once she's fallen out of her breaker state and is in danger of taking a hit.
• A set of zip-tie cuffs
• 60 feet of Rubberized woven steel cable, durable for tying people up and otherwise generally useful.
• A set of thicker titanium cuffs, a bit thicker than normal, custom ordered. They won't stop a truly strong Parahuman but they'll give more pause than an ordinary set would

Parahuman Power

Lodestar is a Breaker, one who can toggle her power on her own, or it activates when she is in physical danger. This causes her hair and eyes to glow, but has no other overt physical changes. One partial stranger effect of her power is that, unless someone in her physical presence (Cameras do not count) sees her change between breaker forms, they are unable to deduce that her breaker state and her normal state are the same person, the brain simply refuses to connect the dots. She can tell a person, and have them make this connection, but only via her telling, a person in the know won't be able to have another person register the information. People viewing footage of a transformation will find their brains making logical leaps to account for it, unable to connect the dots.

When transforming to her Breaker state, her body gets completely reset to the moment of her trigger at 20 years old, healing all wounds, reversing the effects of age, and her body remains that way even when she transforms back.

Otherwise, her Breaker state has fairly simple abilities, she is a flying brute, capable of flight, feats of strength and incredible durability, but baseline she isn't that strong. She also works on a strict timer, she's limited to 100 minutes in her breaker state, and once it runs out, is stuck for 1 minute in her normal human form before she can assume breaker state again. She can exit her breaker state and assume it again normally to reset her timer.

At a baseline, Lodestar can lift up to 3,000 lbs, assuming a proper lifting posture, can fly up to 20 MPH with some acceleration, and strike with the force of a sledgehammer. She is also generally 'tuned up'. her power bringing clarity of mind and bringing her up to a baseline of being an aware and fully energized individual.

Lodestar can ratchet up aspects of her power greatly by eating into her overall time limit. Doublings stack, which means that if she doubles her strength twice it is 4x what it normally is.

She can double her Strength & Striking power at the cost of 5 minutes per 10 seconds, which stacks up to 3 times

She can Triple her flying speed & Acceleration for a minute at the cost of 5 minutes, which stacks up to 3 times

She can make herself perceive the world 10 times faster than she normally does, at the cost of 1 minute per actual second. This cannot stack, and does not grant the ability to move in this timescale, though increasing her speed otherwise does allow her to act more quickly.

When taking damage in her Breaker state, Lodestar does not actually take damage, and it instead cuts into her timer. As an example, a blow from a sledgehammer or strike from a pistol will cost her 3 minutes in time. Blows scaling up from that subsequently take more, not quite scaling linearly but coming close. Generally no blow barring the extreme will take more than 50 minutes of time, and any blow that exceeds her time limit is still stopped, but triggers an immediate transformation out of her breaker state. Effects such as different types of gas and more exotic attacks / master effects will also generally be transferred into damage to her time limit, at a case by case basis. Generally while her time is on she's able to shrug off almost anything.

Background & Trigger

Lyla, from a young age was always an incredibly compassionate, giving person, and her parents helped nurture this in her. She made long lasting friends, and helped many people. Instead of going to college out of highschool, she instead went into Basic EMT Training and eventually advanced EMT training, and was afterwards hired to be a paramedic.

She could genuinely help people here, like her parents taught her. She threw herself into her work with a determination rarely seen, one to help people, to make change, and to make lives better, and she was damn good at it. The only problem was it was eating into everything else in her life. Her relationships suffered, since she was always out helping people. It began to affect her own health, putting everything she had and more into her work, eating at her body, thinning with stress, but she wouldn't relent. She was making genuine change, helping people, and seeing those she had helped move on to have better, fulfilling lives was what drove her like nothing else.

Eventually she arrives to a scene, a man who had been shot and needed drastic medical attention. She wills herself forwards as she always has, following her partner. It had been a particularly long shift but that was no matter, she could always bear the energy to help. That is, always until then. She could barely stand before she collapsed, confused. On the ground she was confused, scared, but more than all a burning desire to help ran through her- and she realized. It caught up to her. All that stress, the skipped meals and sleep and pushing through it despite better advice- it caught up to her as she could barely move, watching the new colleague she was training struggle between her and the patient, unsure what to do. In that moment, having spent every ounce of her there was to help others- and watching a man die because of it- she triggers.

After her Trigger, Lodestar becomes a capable hero in Denver throwing herself into her new work- saving even more than she did before. Working with other local heroes and the protectorate- though remaining independent she accrues a good deal of fame as a bit of a local icon for hope for her feats, though she remains the compassionate self-sacrificing person she was before. 7 years pass this way with all the challenges and great things that happen, and while she still left her mundane life squandered, and social life near nonexistent, the price was worth being paid for the people she was helping.

That is until, one night she is dragged by some work friends to a bar to relax, for once in her life, and she ends up drinking a little too much, and ends up bringing a handsome stranger overnight to her place. It wasn't long after she began vomiting in the mornings. For whatever reason, her power hadn't wiped out the baby in her womb, instead letting it stay.

It was a hard choice, but when it came down to it, she decided to keep the baby, and in so doing, retire.. temporarily at least, until the birth she told herself. It came and went, she'd never managed to track down the father- he had left before she had woken and she was too drunk to remember his face. The retirement ended up being more than temporary. She faded into the background and history of the city, the sudden dissapearance of Lodestar one among many changes over the years. She kept in touch with her old contacts, but now acted in a more advisory role, on occasion providing pointers for new heroes they thought needed her help. Otherwise, she got her college education, and became a teacher. It suited her, and she was.. happy, finally.

Guilt at staying in retirement bites into her, but she remains so for the sake of her daughter, Eliza, so she can have a normal childhood. A normal mother. And 10 years have passed that way. Without the use of her power, she's aged in the time gone, and it's become harder and harder to even think about rejoining the scene, at least until one day, when she might be needed, or when her daughter is under threat.