Post by Swift on Sept 24, 2012 16:19:13 GMT -5
[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellpadding,0,true][atrb=valign, top][atrb=cellspacing,0,true][atrb=style, border: 10px solid #f1e3b4; width: 450px; background-color: #f6f7f1;][STYLE=font-family: times new roman; font-size: 36px; color: #191919; text-align: center; letter-spacing: 2px;]PERSONAL FILE[/style][STYLE=font-family: arial; font-size: 8px; color: #FF0000; text-align: center; letter-spacing: 2px;]HIGHLY CLASSIFIED AND CONFIDENTIAL[/style][STYLE=float: right; margin: 10px 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 10px solid #FFFFEE;][/style][STYLE= color: #000000; background: #BBDD22; font-family: courier new; font-size: 15px; text-align: center; width: 296px; margin-left: 05px; font-weight: bold; padding: 02px;]GENERAL INFORMATION[/style][STYLE=color: #191919; font-size: 10px; margin-top: 10px; margin-left: 10px;]NAME: Shen Li-Min ALIAS: Swift, the Winged Huntress GENDER: Female AGE: 25 OCCUPATION: Freedom Fighter/Terrorist ALIGNMENT: Neutral AFFILIATION(S): Tibetan Resistance, Secret Society of Supervillains[/style] [STYLE= color: #000000; background: #BBDD22; font-family: courier new; font-size: 15px; text-align: center; width: 296px; margin-left: 05px; font-weight: bold; padding: 02px;]PHYSICAL PROFILE[/style][STYLE=color: #191919; font-size: 10px; margin-top: 10px; margin-left: 10px;]HEIGHT: 5’5” WEIGHT: 125 lbs EYES: Brown HAIR: Black CLASSFICATION: Meta-Human UNUSUAL FEATURES: The obvious unusual features most notice when they first meet Shen Li-Men are her wings. At their furthest extent, each is longer than she is tall with a mix of brown and white feathers and effectively human-sized equivalents of those found on a bird of prey. The more observant might also notice that her hands and feet can sometimes be rather more similar to talons than the appendages usually in their place. Finally, while Shen used to be somewhat on the slim side, she recently chose to buy herself breast implants and appears to be substantially better endowed than previously, a fact of which she is notably proud. BEHAVIOR PROFILE[/style][STYLE= margin: 0px 10px 0px 10px; border: 2px solid #191919; padding: 2px; font-family: verdana; height: 125px; overflow: auto; font-size: 11px; color: #000000; text-align: justify; background-color: #ffffff; opacity: 0.8] One of the things that Shen Li-Min has done since her first departure from her homeland was move significantly away from the traditional Tibetan picture of a woman. To be sure, she is naturally reserved and quiet, being the sort of person who picks her words carefully and rarely raises her voice. That hasn’t changed. However, where the younger Shen was deferential and respectful, the modern one has gained a dry, deadpan sense of humour that, when used with her enemies, often strays into the actually cruel. She rarely sinks to actual insults, but there is a biting quality to her comments which is made all the sharper by how diffident she can seem even as she mocks them. While Shen has a lovely smile, it acquires a cruel twist in such circumstances (and she has been known to display a nasty sense of humour when it comes to taking revenge). She also enjoys irony and has, given the sort of people she has been spending time with, acquired something of a quiet attitude and equally understated authority – despite her youth, when she speaks, people listen. Beyond that, however, she has also made a conscious choice in recent years to step away from what she sees as the ‘old’ Tibet, the failed Tibet. One aspect of this is her refusal to abide by the traditional norms of that society in terms of appearance, hence her short hairstyle and the choices she has made with regard to her body and dress. In the same way, she is candid about her beliefs when asked – Shen hasn’t worn her heart on her sleeve for years, but she has never been one to hide what she thinks and, if asked, she assumes that people want to know. Shen is also proud of her beliefs and possessed of a quiet strength that lets her maintain her views despite arguments to the contrary. This is true as much of her bisexuality as of her politics and her religious beliefs so that, while she trumpets none of them, she will also not apologise for them. In most cases, she doesn’t hector others as she is quite convinced that everyone has the right to their own beliefs and opinions. What she wants is the same courtesy, although she tends to presume that others are not as accepting as she is. Except from her closest friends and associates, she sometimes sees racism or intolerance where it isn’t present and reacts accordingly. She rarely starts an argument but her stubborn side ensures that, once one starts, she will finish it. The same is true with her enemies, to a degree. Shen certainly takes no pleasure in violence and would be infinitely happier in a world where she never had to fight. However, while she may have reservations, few except her closest friends would know because, when it comes time to fight, she shows little mercy. She will exhaust every option first, but when the battles start, she fights ruthlessly and efficiently, without grandstanding or wasting her energy. Her violence is targeted and precise, meant to end the violence as fast as she can and Swift’s tactical nous allows her to do so with exceedingly great skill. This may seem contradictory for a terrorist and supervillain, but there are two targets which are exceptions to this rule. The first are her arch-enemies, the Chinese. So far as she is concerned, any soldier or official of their government is a viable target and, so long as they occupy her home, she has no qualms about slaughtering them. Indeed, in Shen’s eyes, they are all collaborators who deserve no mercy. The second are superheroes. In some respects, Shen has more patience for certain of these. The younger ones, for example, who might see the light and she would certainly much rather convince powerful potential allies to help her than have to fight them. But she has no time for the Justice League. They simply support a corrupt system that allows for injustices like Tibet or other countries that are occupied by larger neighbours while the so-called ‘heroes’ do nothing to prevent it. Therefore, given that they are her enemies and refuse to see that their power makes them morally obliged to do something, they and all those who support them are equally as guilty as the Chinese. She feels no guilt at fighting these and anyone else who stands in the way of her better world, therefore. But she will go out of her way to avoid fighting unnecessary battles and, if forced into one, will never resort to involving innocent bystanders. There is a certain irony in Shen’s position – though she is an unlikely and reluctant fighter at times, she is still exceptionally good at it. It is worth reemphasising at this point that Swift prefers non-violent solutions. If she thought the Chinese would genuinely go away without the fighting, she’d jump at the idea in a heartbeat. If she thought that she could convince people to change the world without death and destruction, she would do the same. But she knows that it won’t happen. On the other hand, she will come to terms with an enemy if she can do so without compromising herself or her cause and is surprisingly compassionate for a mass-murdering terrorist. When it comes to friends, well, Shen doesn’t have many. She tends to keep a certain cool distance between her and those around her, to avoid the sort of betrayal that she has faced more than once. For all that, she remains a thoughtful person, who is capable of surprisingly kind gestures even to her enemies while her preference for finding ways other than combat ensures that (even if she does not agree) she may have ‘friends’ in surprising places. Again, this should never be mistaken for weakness or for indicating that she could be ‘converted’ to the side of the heroes. As far as relationships go, she has had a few. Most were effectively ‘flings’ with those who were not interested in anything deeper or more meaningful, letting Shen set the pace (others who know her may have used the phrase ‘boy toys’ and Shen is not exactly shy about enjoying her fun either). However, that might change. Perhaps what she enjoys most is flying. It is natural to Shen, and she feels at home in the air in a way that she doesn’t always on land. She feels free there. She is still a Buddhist in some respects and would certainly identify herself as one, but does recognise that she no longer practises her faith as such – it is more an identification in the same way that many British people identify themselves as Christian but barely practise their faith. She is still a vegetarian though, even if she eats animal products that do not involve the animal’s death. [/style][STYLE=color: #191919; font-size: 10px; margin-top: 10px; margin-left: 10px;]DOCUMENTED HISTORY[/style][STYLE= margin: 0px 10px 0px 10px; border: 2px solid #191919; padding: 2px; font-family: verdana; height: 125px; overflow: auto; font-size: 11px; color: #000000; text-align: justify; background-color: #ffffff; opacity: 0.8] It was said once, many years ago, that each of us is the architect of their own fate. This, perhaps, is not a sentiment that Shen Li-Min would appreciate. Her own story began in the late 1980s, but she would argue that it is equally important to look back further, to see why she is the woman she is today, to the long history between her homeland of Tibet and the neighbouring superpower of China. In fact, China has had a claim to Tibet for over a hundred years. Treaties signed at the beginning of the twentieth century between the British, the Chinese and the Russians agreed as much. However, given the chaos that ruled in China from the late 1920s to the beginning of the 1950s ensured that no faction in China, leaving the bulk of the country to continue as it had for years before. Somewhat isolated from the rest of the world, untouched by the Second World War, it was not until the victory of Mao Zedong and the Communist party that China began to reassert its own views on the Tibetan question by which time Tibet had begun to regard itself as effectively independent though the government of the Dalai Lama remained willing to accept Chinese suzerainty in certain forms. This did not prove acceptable. In 1950, the People’s Liberation Army swept aside Tibetan resistance before an agreement was signed providing for the reunification of Tibet and China, though the Chinese also agreed not to alter the structure of the country. There remain several views on the agreement – the Chinese, naturally, view it as legitimate, while the Tibetan Independence Movement equally naturally as never accepted it as anything more than a treaty extracted by force and thus invalid. Regardless, since then Tibet has been a part of China. There has been resistance, both political and violent, sometimes sponsored by America, often not. Regardless, this was the land into which Shen Li-Min was born. Her family were Tibetan nationalists, especially her father, a man who believed passionately in a free and independent Tibet achieved by peaceful means and not through violence. He was to die, cut down by gunfire in the chaos of a demonstration turned into a massacre, in the year of his daughter’s birth. Shen never knew him, but his death was to have a great impact upon his daughter’s politics in later years. Instead, she was primarily raised by her mother, who tried to bring Shen up in the same way that she felt that her husband would have wanted. Shen was raised a Buddhist in the Tibetan tradition, made aware of the complex traditions and the history of her people and country. At the same time, she was taught to believe that Tibet should be independent, but that the way to achieve that was not through violence, which was against their religion. Even then, however, Shen was proving to be stubborn and showing signs of the path her life would take. Still, as she grew up, she accepted the pacifistic doctrines of her faith and the Middle Way Approach then favoured by the Dalai Lama to be the best way forward. This was simple enough, but then Shen already felt that she should be doing more. Even as a youngster, she would linger around the peaceful demonstrations that occasionally filled the streets of their home town before the authorities broke them up and, in this way, she came into contact with some of those younger Tibetans who felt that they should be doing more than just conducting peaceful demonstrations or asking politely for the Chinese to accept changes. They drew on other examples, looking to other figures than those generally accepted, to claim that the only thing the Chinese would understand was violence – violence and fear. At this time, Shen shied away from this way of thinking, but the mere fact that she knew these people and was known to be a part of their circles was to play a part in what happened later. When she was sixteen, as part of a routine government program set up following the establishment of the Great Ten, Shen and her classmates at the local school were tested for metahuman genes. It was routine, designed to ensure that the Chinese government found any and all metahumans in their sphere of influence for their Great Ten project, and even in populous China it was rare that any results came back positive. Shen’s did. At this point, however, fate intervened. One of the friends of the family, a distant relative of Shen’s father, had contacts abroad and within the bureaucracy. Hearing from one that her result had been positive and that the security forces would be coming for her, he panicked, presuming that they intended to kill her or force her to serve in the Great Ten program. As a Tibetan nationalist, he guessed correctly that his niece would refuse and ‘disappear’ so, instead, he made a bargain with an American agent. Shen would be spirited out of the country before the Chinese could take her but, in exchange, she would be taken in and trained as an agent of the Americans’ intelligence apparatus to serve as their eyes and ears in Tibet. The deal was made. Shen was taken away before the Chinese were able to find her and removed, first to India and then to America itself, where she was to live in a secret base. Initially, her hosts focused on teaching her English but, as soon as they had managed that, they moved on to what they had always intended – training her to be a spy for their government and they had had practice at circumventing the pacifistic beliefs ingrained in Shen by her life so far. By having her live with more extreme Tibetan separatists, they allowed them to work on her from one end while the Americans focused on the notion that violence was sometimes necessary for a greater good. It helped that Shen proved to be good at her training, while a pragmatic streak in her personality allowed her to accept the notion that it was possible to use violence to prevent further violence – though she remained committed to the minimum necessary and always attempted to find peaceful options to resolve a situation. In time, her powers were triggered by another metahuman with the power to ‘activate’ those of others with abilities that had not yet manifested. Shen herself was most delighted by her ability to fly, but her tutors found all of her newly gained abilities to be of use to them. They had her trained as a pilot to take advantage of them, although it was unnecessary. Shen, codenamed Swift, simply had a gift for flight, as she had for much of her training despite her reticence towards violence. One thing that she did take away from this training was that the ‘heroes’ of the Justice League could not be trusted, given how they stood by and did nothing while her people suffered. It would be absolutely pointless to describe the sequence of missions that followed. They began with simple recon operations but soon escalated. By the time she was nineteen, Shen had been on at least half a dozen in Southern Asia. Some had ended in violence, none yet in fatalities. At least one had been saved by Shen’s quick-thinking and refusal to stop looking for an alternative to violence. But time and again she found that she had to take the expedient option and that being a pacifist was no longer an option. Being a pacifist didn’t help her stop that suicide bomber in London. Being a pacifist didn’t help her stop the Chinese general who wanted to convert a town of people into a new food supply. Being a pacifist didn’t help her save her team from an angry Bialyan assassination squad. And, when her beliefs were placed in the scales with the finer world that Shen hoped her actions would bring about, she found them to be an acceptable sacrifice even if she still looked for alternate courses of action. Her faith was destined to be tested further on what would be her last mission. A Chinese scientist was apparently developing a chemical weapon system and Shen and her team were sent in to destroy his work. To cut a long story short, Shen and her team found the man in his laboratory, where he threatened to release a deadly toxin if they did not surrender. Swift was forced to kill him. It was a threshold that she had not crossed before and that would have been enough to shake her normally, but worse was to come. Following a change of administration in the US, it was decided that certain global strategies would be changed. While there were countries against which such activities were acceptable, the new government preferred to come to a proper arrangement with China. The President ordered all teams to be recalled, but the handlers of Shen and her team decided that those agents not of American origin were expendable. They pulled out their assets and informed the Chinese security agencies of their team’s whereabouts to gain credit with the PRC. Fortunately, they were able to escape, but Shen took what she saw as a betrayal not just of her but of her people especially badly. Before she fled China for the relative safety of India, Swift went to find the CPC Committee Secretary for the Tibet Autonomous Region, the effective governor of her homeland while it remained under Chinese occupation. And then she publically killed his bodyguards when they tried to defend him, humiliated him and quite literally threw him out to make a point. Then, before she drew the full attention of the Great Ten, she made her escape southwards. But she had made her point. Shen no longer had any interest in any cause but her own. Tibet would be independent, one way or another. But, to make that happen, she would need powerful friends, friends who were not afraid of the displeasure of the Chinese government. And that is how Shen Li-Min found herself joining the Secret Society of Super-Villains, a group that might not share her views but lacked nothing in the way of power and, more importantly, did not lack the will to use it. With her new contacts and allies, Shen intends that her homeland will be free and that, in time, all those who connived in its enslavement will pay the price of their apathy as well. All for her finer world.[/style] [STYLE=color: #191919; font-size: 10px; margin-top: 10px; margin-left: 10px;]POWERS AND ABILITIES[/style][STYLE= margin: 0px 10px 0px 10px; border: 2px solid #191919; padding: 2px; font-family: verdana; height: 125px; overflow: auto; font-size: 11px; color: #000000; text-align: justify; background-color: #ffffff; opacity: 0.8] KNOWN POWERS:
KNOWN ABILITIES:
STRENGTH LEVEL: Shen is capable of achieving super human strength, allowing her to lift weights in excess of 1500 lbs. WEAKNESSES:
[/style] [STYLE=color: #191919; font-size: 10px; margin-top: 10px; margin-left: 10px;]PARAPHERNALIA[/style][STYLE= margin: 0px 10px 0px 10px; border: 2px solid #191919; padding: 2px; font-family: verdana; height: 125px; overflow: auto; font-size: 11px; color: #000000; text-align: justify; background-color: #ffffff; opacity: 0.8] EQUIPMENT:
TRANSPORTATION:
WEAPONS:
[STYLE=color: #191919; font-size: 10px; margin-top: 10px; margin-left: 10px;]EXAMINATION RECORD[/style][STYLE= margin: 0px 10px 0px 10px; border: 2px solid #191919; padding: 2px; font-family: verdana; height: 125px; overflow: auto; font-size: 11px; color: #000000; text-align: justify; background-color: #ffffff; opacity: 0.8]N/A[/style][STYLE=color: #191919; font-size: 12px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: center; font-family: courier new]subject examined by Doctor Cyber[/style] | [atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellpadding,0,true][atrb=valign,top][atrb=cellspacing,0,true][atrb=style, width: 40px;][STYLE=background-color: #f1e3b4; font-family: times new roman; font-size:30px; color: #404040; min-height: 150px; padding: 5px; text-align: center; moz-border-radius: 0px 10px 10px 0px; -o-border-radius: 0px 10px 10px 0px; border-radius: 0px 10px 10px 0px; -webkit-border-radius: 0px 10px 10px 0px;]S W I F T[/style] |
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