Post by Knightfall on Jan 16, 2013 17:34:10 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;] PERSONAL FILE HIGHLY CLASSIFIED AND CONFIDENTIAL GENERAL INFORMATION NAME: Charise Carnes ALIAS: Knightfall, the Butcher Brat, the Spoiled Slaughterer GENDER: Female AGE: 20 OCCUPATION: ‘Princess’, Heiress and Vigilante ALIGNMENT: Evil (Not that she believes it) AFFILIATION(S): Herself, the Disgraced PHYSICAL PROFILE HEIGHT: 5’7” WEIGHT: 125 lbs EYES: Aquamarine HAIR: Dark Blonde CLASSIFICATION: Human UNUSUAL FEATURES: Charise has a smattering of freckles underneath her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. BEHAVIOR PROFILE Charise Carnes used to be a daddy’s girl through and through. All she wanted was to have her father’s approval and the only thing that mattered to her was that he was proud of her. She knew that he was not a nice man. She knew that he had built his world in ways that he could never admit to using. Still, he was her father, she was his princess and that was all that mattered. Even today, when Charise talks about him, the love in her voice is clear and tangible. True, she loved her mother and her brother too, but the most important figure in her life was her father. His approval was everything and she spent all of her time either trying to prove herself to him or thinking of new ways to win his approval. The lack of evidence notwithstanding, the officers of the GCPD found it hard to believe a girl who was so polite and cooperative despite her obvious fear had committed the crime of which she was accused. That, of course, was then although Charise had already had the revelation that changed her life. Today, then, Charise Carnes is an ideologue. She is a prophet, the chosen harbinger of Gotham’s future and heir to its throne. She is the woman who will rule the new city. In that sense, she is idealistic. That is not true in the traditional sense, admittedly, because the last thing that can be said of Charise is that she is naïve. She has no illusions left at all. But she has a vision and she is not shy about that. True, there is a limit to what she can say in public for now but Charise utterly believes in the rightness of her cause. She is a hero and the fact that so many oppose her simply proves that they are beyond saving. She is also an intellectual, a planner though she is perfectly capable of doing her own dirty work, someone who thinks ahead and does not rush into confrontations. Further, she is dedicated and never gives up once she has set her mind to something. No matter how hard or how many times she falls, she will pick herself up, dust herself down and try again and again. What makes her dangerous though is that she is as charismatic as she is intelligent. Charise is loyal to those who are loyal to her and she is very careful in how she recruits her inner circle. On the other hand, she has already begun to gather a movement in her civilian guise and her youth, magnetism and clear passion draw the other young people of Gotham to her despite her wealth. Both as Charise and Knightfall, she is inspiring, able to push people to give their best for her and able to use her own clear passion for the cause of bettering Gotham to make others feel the same. The same is true of those close to her, those who she regards as a surrogate family. They mean everything to her and hurting them is an excellent way to draw her wrath. And even to her enemies, she can be surprisingly charming while she always keeps her word. Interestingly, Charise is almost always polite. She is considerate by nature to those who she feels deserves it, to the point that she will offer to inform loved ones of a death if she respects her victim enough. Naturally, this does not apply to scum, criminals and such. They do not deserve it. Still, there is a natural formality to Charise. She never swears, rarely uses diminutive forms of names, calls people by their surname and title until they are properly acquainted and has an interesting sense of noblesse oblige – the need to give something back to the community. She has always been this way and her traumatic experience did not change it. But she is every inch the princess she thinks of herself as – formal, dignified and regal. Very few things can crack her shell. One is the notion that she was in any way responsible for the slaughter of her family. Charise finds that deeply hurtful and can be visibly shaken to have it suggested that she somehow ‘escaped justice’. The other is the idea that Trevor, the former boyfriend who slaughtered her family, deserves release. And here we come to the crux of the matter. Is Charise Carnes insane? She is, though not in the sense that she is a cackling madwoman. In fact, in some ways, she is utterly sane. It is perhaps better to say that she is broken or that she is disconnected, perhaps even resigned in some ways. She has been hurt in ways that no one should ever be, made to sit and watch for three hours as her family was skinned alive. So perhaps it is understandable. So, what is it that Charise wants? Clichéd as it may sound, Charise has a vision. It is a vision that resonates strongly with many people, which is part of why it is so powerful and compelling. It is a vision that even the Batfamily would find it hard to disagree with – it is after all the same vision that many of them long to become real. Charise Carnes dreams of a golden city, of a Gotham free from crime and criminals – from the Joker but also from the brutality of the gangs and the drug trade, from all crime. A perfect, golden city, where no one ever has to suffer the same tragedy that she did ever again, that is the vision that she seeks. And then, when Gotham is clean and new, then she would expand her vision to other cities, then other countries – but Gotham is her home and a powerful symbol. Gotham will be remade. So far, so good. And, again, there would be few who disagreed with what Charise wants – what sane and normal member of society would want there to be crime in their world? Even if they did not sympathise with Charise herself, who would argue with her expressed goal? Her methods however… Well. Her methods are where the problems may lie. Charise believes in a policy that is light years beyond mere ‘zero tolerance’. No crime is to be tolerated and all are to be punished in the same way: death. That is how she thinks that she will destroy Gotham’s crime. It is quite simple, really, brutally so even. Kill everyone who breaks the law, no matter how insignificantly or for what reason. All criminals die and they die badly. Crippled, tortured, battered and broken, their bodies are left for their fellows to find. Charise Carnes will drown Gotham’s criminals in their own blood, cleansing the city in an ocean of it. There will be no prisons in Knightfall’s Utopia, no Arkham, because there will be no need for them. Anyone who breaks the law will die and they will become an example to all others. Knightfall will be judge, jury and executioner. Charise Carnes will be Gotham’s ruling princess. And eventually there will be no more crime, no more innocent families slaughtered in front of their children for non-existent crimes. There will be no more little girls left in a pool of their parents’ blood. It is certainly an ambitious plan. Charise is an ambitious woman. She knows that she has vast resources available to her – money, followers, her natural gifts, a growing web of contacts and information. To settle for less would be less than her parents deserve. Charise is dedicated to this vision, to the point that the two aspects of her plan consume her every waking moment. She is implacable and pitiless, a terrible enemy for the criminals of Gotham because she is willing to pour everything that she has into her quest. And she would be an equally terrible enemy for anyone who stands in her way. This includes the Batman and his ilk, men and women who Charise views as responsible for the plague of crime that floods Gotham and chokes the city. They will have two choices – join her or die. She would prefer that they chose the former, but she will shed no tears if not. She is the future and there is no way that she will apologise for seeing what they are too stupid to fathom. Her way will work. Theirs has already failed. Something else to bear in mind though is that, for all her politeness, for all her noblesse oblige, for all her intelligence, Charise is a cruel, sadistic, vengeful woman. She has taken her anger at the man who took her family from her and used one terrible crime to justify torturing and brutally killing children younger than her for crimes that barely warrant a prison sentence. And she will do this, absolutely convinced of her actions’ correctness. This is a young woman who willingly accepted an Arkham sentence, a young woman who learnt every dirty trick her father knew at his knee, who learnt the craft of madness from every killer and every sadist in Arkham. Finally, Charise is supremely confident. Not that she is going to win every battle, but that she has already won the war. She owns so much of Gotham that she believes that no one can beat her. And she is proud of that and of her actions. As such, she reacts violently to being helpless even for a second and she loathes the very idea that anyone could think that she can be beaten. DOCUMENTED HISTORY Charise Carnes was never an ordinary girl. The girl they called Gotham’s princess from her birth never had that chance. But then the daughter of Virginia and William Carnes, the last real estate baron of Gotham, never wanted to be ordinary either. No, she was practically royalty already and how could it have ever been any different when her father was Gotham’s kingmaker. From a young age, Charise was aware that her father did many bad things. But she did not care. All she ever wanted was for him to be proud of her. That urge remained as she grew from childhood to be a teenager, pushing her to throw herself into learning every lesson she could from him, pushing her to learn martial arts and to excel at every lesson at school simply to gain one smile. Not that William Carnes had much time for his daughter. The Carnes family was always divisive, hated by many locals for what was seen as their dirty practices. Still, he never claimed he was otherwise and Charise loved him anyway. Her youth, then, was unremarkable, marked only by the birth of a younger brother – Emil – when she was ten. When Charise was sixteen, she met her first and only boyfriend. His name was Trevor: he was two years older than her, far more worldly than she and exactly what she needed. Quite apart from Charise finding his interest in her flattering, he was also the first boy she’d ever met who just didn’t care about her being rich. Before, all the boys who’d shown interest had been greedy, had wanted her to buy them things or take them to places instead of the other way around. Or they let it intimidate them – if she was a billionaire’s daughter, they clearly would not be interested in her. Perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps not. But, either way, Trevor was her first boyfriend and all he ever had to say was that her money would bring her nothing but unhappiness. Did she love him? Charise wasn’t sure. But she was certainly growing to care about him by that fateful day. Before that, they had spent almost a month together, doing normal things and Charise could pretend that she was just another girl, out enjoying her life. It seemed like it would never end. So, of course, it did. One night, Trevor came to her house. He was her boyfriend – of course she let him in. She smiled, in fact, delighted to see him unexpectedly. He wasn’t quite a regular guest, but he had been there before. Charise kissed him and hugged him and took him into the living room. And that is when he pulled out the knives. It shouldn’t have mattered. Charise was already a black belt, after all, well trained in the theory of how to defend herself from attack. But he was bigger and stronger and, more importantly, she was afraid. With a knife to her throat, Trevor made her call her family downstairs. And then she was made to tie them up with a roll of duct tape that he had brought with him. And then he butchered them while she watched, unable to move or even speak as he peeled the skin off their bodies. It took three whole hours while Charise watched, sitting terrified in a growing pool of her family’s blood. Three hours. And, when he was done, Trevor told her why he had done it. Why he had come there that night to kill her family – except her. He did it for the lulz. That was it. He killed her mother and her father and her little brother for the laughs. Then he left. Charise stayed exactly where she was. She couldn’t even think of moving despite the fact that she was sat in the clotting blood of her loved ones. And that was how the police found her hours later. Still sat there, covered in blood, shivering. But by then she had had a revelation. True, she could tell them all about Trevor. She could tell them the truth, possibly have herself exonerated but then what? Trevor would get away with nothing more than a prison sentence, more likely a trip to Arkham. That was all. And how could something like that ever begin to teach him what he had done? It could not. It would not. And so she would have to see to that herself. But, if she was going to fight a madman, she needed to know her enemy. As a result, while Charise pretended to fight the charges, claiming that there had been an intruder, the result was inevitable and the trial was the media event of Gotham – the city’s youngest billionaire a murderess. She protected Trevor, kept his name out of it. The press, in turn, tore her apart. The ‘Butcher Brat’ and the ‘Spoiled Slaughterer’ were their favourite pair of titles, but they were universally unkind and the public bayed like hounds for her blood. They were to get it, though everyone predicted that the heiress to the Carnes fortune would never be given a guilty verdict. They were wrong. She was found guilty, though with the note that she was only guilty of manslaughter by virtue of diminished capacity. And then they sent her to Arkham. Just as Charise Carnes had planned, though nobody knew it except her. She was only eighteen (the trial took a year of her life) and she had chosen to be committed to Arkham Asylum. Not to be ‘rehabilitated’ though, no – as if she was at fault for anything but weakness that night. No. She was there to learn. And learn she did. She learnt from every single inmate, persuading them to help her one way or another, soaking up every lesson that Arkham had to teach about killing, about sadism, about torture, about fear and about madness. She took the Charise Carnes that had existed before and remade herself in the remorseless avenger that she knew she had to be in order to find justice for her family. Charise honed herself physically and mentally, though she was careful to conceal it from the guards. Of course, there was a limit to what she could learn, most of the time. The guards kept a protective eye on her, thinking her still a weak girl, a lost lamb alone among the wolves. Was she scared? Yes. But the time that changed her the most were forty eight hours. There was a breakout. The inmates escaped their cells or were set loose – among the chaos, no one quite knows what happened exactly. But Charise was left alone, utterly alone, for those two days. Alone, in a prison full of the worst men in America. She had gone in a girl, polite and cooperative, seemingly sweet and naïve. The guards felt bad for her. The creature that walked back into her cell at the end of the two days was polite, yes, and cooperative, but the more perceptive guards looked at her and saw that… something had changed. Regardless, Charise was to remain in Arkham for nearly two years. That was all it took. At the end of that time, she bought her way to an appeal and was found innocent by virtue of the jury having been tampered with. It had, incidentally – Charise had bought her own guilty verdict just in case. Now, though, she bought, bribed or blackmailed the judge and the witnesses, ensuring that she was released first on appeal and then simply released. She was utterly innocent in the eyes of the law, just as she had known herself to be all along, though many of the people refused to believe it and the press continued to be unkind and unsympathetic at best. Charise though did not care. She had more important things to do. At first, she moved slowly. Her father had controlled many important men – Charise retied those strings and added more by reaching out to police officers and judges and politicians at all levels. She worked on them, persuading some, bribing others, blackmailing or intimidating still more. As long as they would dance to her tune, she did not care why they danced. At the same time, she began to assemble a coterie of metahumans around her and put the pieces in place to make the Three Towers and Cherry Hill the vision that her parents had wanted. Money was no object, after all. She was careful and clever and soon she had her finger on the pulse of Gotham City. And then she created Knightfall. The name, naturally, was always a pun on the Batman’s title as the ‘Dark Knight’ of Gotham, but it also represented the fall of darkness upon the criminals that strangled Gotham. She created her armour, intensified her training and then, weeks after her release, she went after Trevor. And she destroyed him. Where before she had been afraid of him, the bleeding wreck of a man she created was terrified of her now – but she refused to let him die. Instead, sewing his eyes shut, she crippled him and dragged him back to her new home where she keeps him still. Now Charise intends to start reaching out, gathering more followers even as she instils fears into the criminals of Cherry Hill. Her new-founded Three Towers Army works to give the area hope in turn. Knightfall descends. POWERS AND ABILITIES KNOWN POWERS: N/A KNOWN ABILITIES:
STRENGTH LEVEL: Charise has the strength of a girl her size and build who engages in regular extensive exercise. WEAKNESSES:
PARAPHERNALIA EQUIPMENT:
TRANSPORTATION:
WEAPONS:
EXAMINATION RECORD “I don’t hate them, you know." subject examined by Doctor Cyber | [atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellpadding,0,true][atrb=valign,top][atrb=cellspacing,0,true][atrb=style, width: 40px;] K N I G H T F A L L |
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