Savvy
| Savvy | |
|---|---|
 A girl with short blonde hair in a ponytail, blue eyes, and freckles, wearing a while shirt, in a fighting stance, standing in front of a cityscape at night | |
| Author | /u/Thatgaybeach |
| Pronouns | She/Her |
| Civilian name | Erica Weathers |
| Alignment | Hero |
| Affiliation | Noncanon (Devilfish) |
| PRT Classification | Thinker/Master |
| Born |
August 8, 2006 Marquette, Michigan |
| Status | Noncanon |
Savvy is a recent addition to the Devilfish Wards, having been around no longer than a week or two as of posting. No major public appearances yet, but has had a fairly professional, if clearly stilted and put-on showing at a charity event, providing meals for the homeless.
Character Sheet
Appearance
Erica stands at 5’9, and by family history, is likely going to end up growing toward 6’ or more by the time she’s an adult. She’s blonde with blue eyes, and has a sort of broad build, and is working on putting on muscle. As Savvy, she’s gone for black and white vertical stripes on the typical superhero bodysuit, both to emphasize her height, and to obfuscate padding and guards on her shins, knees, elbows, and forearms. Capping it off at either end is a white set of steel-toed boots, and a white helmet with a visor set across her face, outlined in black.
Equipment and Resources
Wealth level 4: Erica lives with her single mother in a small apartment. She does not own a car, but is able to use her mother’s small truck most evenings/weekends if she needs to.
- A costume with padding at the level of sports/skateboarding equipment.
- Two phones, one for heroing, one for regular life stuff.
- A set of wooden tonfa as her primary costumed weapon.
Skills and Specializations
- Fluent in English, Spanish, French, and Japanese
- Master level skill in Boxing, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and Karate.
- Master level skill in Javascript and C++ programming.
- Master level skill in playing guitar by ear
- Master level skill in speed reading and typing
- Master level skill in freeform rock climbing
- Adept level skill in proper form for running, weightlifting, and aerobic training.
- Between Novice and Adept level skill in a number of fields given a day’s work in preparation for some event or task, including public speaking, fashion design, lying without tells, cooking italian food, and mental math.
Mentality
Erica spent most of her upbringing as relatively carefree, confident, and popular, and does her best to fake keeping that up, but there are cracks in that front, and a deep paranoia about whether or not people are being up-front about their true nature–or worse, whether *she* is.
Power
Trigger type: Single, natural trigger, second generation
Savvy is a Thinker/Master, with her power’s primary purpose being to gather skills/techniques, and then to loan those skills to another person.
Her Thinker power is relatively simple in concept, despite the math involved–for every hour she spends training or practicing in a skill, she advances by an amount equal to the advancement of the last two hours she spent training that subject, effectively following the Fibonacci sequence. In practice, if she dedicates four hours a day training any given skill, she will have about a month worth of experience in 3 days (novice level, able to grasp basic concepts), 8 months in four days (adept, fairly experienced), 4.5 years in 5 days (equivalent to a degree in the field), 32 years in 6 days (a lifetime of work in the field), and 217 years by the end of the 7th day (skill comparable to or superior to the highest masters and prodigies). There are typically diminishing returns before the 7th day is over, and in some fields by the end of the 6th, but she typically goes for 7 just to ensure she’s at the peak of whatever she needs to do. Skills she gains in this way tend to be narrow in scope with little overlap–becoming a master in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu does not make her learn Wrestling any faster, and becoming an expert surgeon would not give her any knowledge in the field of virology. She requires some sort of study material for most skills and fields of study, and to gain the intuitive muscle memory for physical tasks (i.e. martial arts) she needs to be physically performing them. False information in the study material, or running solely mental training on a subject she lacks a complete understanding of will typically result in false positives of information.
Her Master power requires much less in the way of math–when a person is within her line of sight, she is able to transfer a single skill to them. This process takes a fraction of a second to occur, and can impart a brief stinging feeling in the head if the recipient is not braced for it, at the level of a 2/10 headache. The recipient gains all of Savvy’s skill in that field for as long as they remain within about a half-mile radius from her, at which point it snaps back into Savvy’s head. She cannot pull back this knowledge without creating distance, though she does get a vague sense of the recipient’s distance and direction from her, visualized by a small, blurred "halo" around them. She cannot transfer skills more than twice per second, and more than once per second if she is focusing on other tasks.
Her power does come with a drawback–she is incapable of any sort of skill that allows her to gather emotional information from another person, either with her power or without it. She can only gauge the behavior of her fellow human beings analytically, at the skill level of a 16 year old with trust issues, and without any of the natural, intuitive understanding of these things typical for a person.
Backstory
Erica’s father was a superhero by the name of Golden in a smallish region across Lake Superior from Devilfish, a University town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He was relatively low as far as power went, a low level Brute set somewhere he could keep peace without ending up dead to more serious threats in one of the major cities. Erica adored her father, loved having a family member that was a superhero, and was immensely proud of every small victory, something that he'd taken to heart and further played up into more grandstanding and bold acts of heroics, even while playing in the "minor leagues”. She loved the world of heroics, the stories she was told about meetings with bigger heroes, and balanced a fairly active ParaHumans Online presence with her time in school and doing volleyball, wanting to keep up to date on *everything* hero.
The golden days wouldn’t last forever though, and a more threatening villain named Draoidh began moving into town, finding the relatively unprotected city to be easy pickings. Things were rough for some weeks, months even, before Golden managed to push back, winning at great and terrible odds. Erica was overjoyed of course, and even without Golden managing the final blows of pushing this villain out of town or into jail, she was sure he’d manage it eventually. After all, he was her hero!
Of course, our stories don’t have happy endings, and Erica comes home early from a sleepover without giving warning, and comes face to face with Golden and Draoidh speaking in the living room, working out the details of their next outing. It all comes quickly crashing down around her as her father attempts to explain herself, and Erica sees the cracks where she’d ignored them before, realizing that her father had cut a deal with this villain, helping him to succeed in the long term so long as he can look good in the public eye “stopping” his schemes until then. When Golden attempts to put a hand on her shoulder, to reassure her that what’s going on isn’t that bad, really, she breaks under the realization that her idol was only that, an idol, that she was too stupid and blind to his flaws to notice, and triggers.
Erica flees in the aftermath, not knowing or caring what was left behind, and calls her mom. Over the course of the next few days, the story comes out that Golden has become a villain, and Erica leaves town with her mother to live near her family in Devilfish. At first, Erica doesn’t want anything to do with superheroics in her confusion and stress, but comes to the conclusion that she needs the support and other people around, and makes the decision to join the Wards, hoping they can keep her from straying off the path as her father did.