nick. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
metamorphotic) wrote2019-12-22 03:02 pm
metamorphotic) wrote2019-12-22 03:02 pm
character info | dualis.
YOU
Player name: Rae
Contact: gothmoth#3738 @ the disco(rd)
Referral: IT ME
Current characters: Jason Todd
THEM
Character Name: Nichole Anne “Nick” Rivenna
Character Age: 29
Canon: Original character created (sort of) in the Nightbane universe.
Canon Point: Nick initially left her home world in 2009, about a month after her Becoming, and has been getting tossed around the multiverse (with some time-skipping) from 2015 to 2019. She’s been living in Dualis for the past year.
History/World: BUCKLE IN, CHAPS, this is gonna take a while.
World Description: Nick’s world is fairly ordinary and corresponds closely with the real North America in 2009 - the main difference is the existence of creatures called Nightbane. Some additional background information on Nightbane from the Rifts Wikia page:
Original History: Nick was born in the small town of Winchester, Kansas, on the 18th of June, 1983, the only child of Jack and Marlene Rivenna, a mechanic and housewife, respectively. Nick’s life was fairly uneventful until she was eight years old; that winter, her father died unexpectedly. He and Nick’s mother had driven to a New Year’s Eve party a couple towns over; roads were icy, and Nick’s mother lost control of the truck, rolling into a ditch. Nick’s father hadn’t been wearing his seat belt, and he was thrown from the truck. His injuries were severe enough he died almost instantly. Nick’s mother, on the other hand, escaped the wreckage with minor injuries and a major case of guilt that would only worsen as the years went on.
The singular event of her father’s death would become the defining factor in shaping Nick’s life from there on out - she would later place this incident as “the point my life basically went to shit.” Her mother’s personality drastically changed after the accident; she had always been ill-equipped as a mother, but after her husband’s death (for which she felt entirely responsible), she became even more distant, even downright abusive toward Nick. Now forced into the role of sole provider for herself and her child, Nick’s mother took a job as a waitress at the local bar. She found the long hours agreeable; the more time she spent at work, the less time she had to spend taking care of Nick.
Nick found this an agreeable arrangement as well; she quickly grew to hate her mother and found that the less time they spent in each other’s company, the better. She grew into a fundamentally angry person - angry at her father for dying, angry at God for the same reason, angry at her mother for her near-constant verbal abuse and rapid descent into alcoholism - basically, angry at the world for the difficult hand she’d been dealt.
Nick began to get involved in fights with other children in fourth grade; by fifth grade, she’d started regularly skipping classes. Her grades suffered, not because she wasn’t smart or capable, but because she simply didn’t care enough to put forth the effort, and nobody (especially not her mother) gave her any real encouragement. Nick had also earned a reputation as something of a troublemaker by the time she entered junior high; she listened to loud music, picked up smoking at the age of 14, loudly proclaimed to be an atheist (something unheard-of in a small, Bible-belt town like Winchester), and generally fit the mold for juvenile delinquent.
Throughout all of this, the one bright spot in Nick’s life was her best friend, a small, frail, brilliant but socially awkward boy named Andy. Andy and Nick became friends basically on accident their first year of junior high. Nick’s reputation as something of a bruiser preceded her, and when their science teacher assigned Nick and Andy as lab partners, Andy broke down in tears. Nick was a little shocked; she’d never elicited that kind of unprovoked response from anyone before, and she ended up dropping the tough-girl facade long enough to reassure Andy she wasn’t going to actually kill him or anything.
It was an odd sort of friendship, but it worked; Nick and Andy were both misfits in one way or another, so it made a sort of sense that they would find friendship in each other’s company. Andy quit getting picked on by basically everyone else once Nick was in his corner (she did have that reputation for a reason, after all), and Nick found something of a confidante and comrade in Andy. They spent most of their time together, in school and otherwise, all the way through high school. Nick’s academic performance still suffered, and she did still get in fights, but at least with Andy around, she didn’t drop out of school - she even managed to show up for classes most of the time. Nick’s mother continued her borderline antipathetic attitude toward her daughter and her new best friend, and Andy’s parents vocally disapproved of their friendship as well, concerned that Nick would be a bad influence on their son. Nick and Andy didn’t care; as far as either of them was concerned, their bond was unshakeable, and when Andy made the plan to move to Chicago to study at UIC’s School of Architecture after graduating from high school, Nick decided to go with him. She had no reason to stay in Winchester, after all; she hated her mother and the rest of the town, too. She felt that Andy was basically the only thing she had going for her - why wouldn’t she move with him? She got a job at the same auto shop where her father had worked, doing odd tasks around the office, mostly, and saved everything she could in order to move with Andy at the end of the summer after they both graduated from high school.
After living in a small town all her life, a big city like Chicago was a kind of urban paradise for Nick. She and Andy ended up renting a house in Pilsen with a rotating cast of three other roommates, usually fellow students, artists, and/or punk types. Andy focused solely on school and mostly lived off student loans; Nick got a series of basic customer service-type jobs in various places around town, finally settling in on a schedule of bartending most nights at one of the city’s quasi-dive bars, followed by opening most days at a neighborhood coffee shop. It was a perhaps unconventional schedule, but it paid the bills, at least. Nick was more or less content with her life, as it was.
Six years into this routine, everything changed for Nick.
The main catalyst for this upheaval was the in-town arrival of Andy’s favorite cousin, Kennedy. Kennedy and her parents had been living abroad in the UK for the eight years previous, and as a result of some “scandalous” behavior on Kennedy’s part, her parents sent her away, back to the States, to continue her studies out of their sight. Andy, of course, was thrilled to have his cousin back in a closer locale, and insisted she move in with them, but Nick took an immediate dislike to the other girl. Kennedy had a certain smugness that rubbed Nick the wrong way, and Nick saw Kennedy’s relocation as an intrusion coming between her and Andy. In truth, Andy, who was already halfway through his master’s program in architecture, had simply started to drift away from Nick; the two were clearly moving in different circles by this point in their lives, but Nick was determined to cling to the notion she’d developed in the past - that she and Andy would stick together forever.
The fact that Kennedy was an over-privileged, somewhat manipulative brat who was used to getting her own way didn’t do anything to help with getting into Nick’s good graces, either. Nonetheless, Kennedy became rather infatuated with Nick; she was drawn to the other girl’s standoffish nature and rude demeanor. Kennedy had received substantial parental pressure her entire life to fit a certain mold (polite, gracious, well-mannered, etc.), so Nick presented both a change Kennedy found refreshing, and a challenge of sorts in earning her friendship.
But Nick was more than a challenge to Kennedy - she was downright hostile to the other girl, even sometimes physically abusive. Still, Kennedy enjoyed hunting for which of Nick’s button’s to push to get the desired reaction, even if she did end up bruised from the encounter. Kennedy had set her sights on bending Nick to her will, and she was determined to see the task through to the end. Nick found Kennedy’s attention irritating and infuriating, most of the time, but eventually, Nick began to reluctantly admit to herself that she found it somewhat pleasurable. In the wake of almost-total absence of parental affection and the void left by the declining companionship with her best friend, Kennedy’s insistence on being part of Nick’s life was something Nick found both puzzling and oddly satisfying.
After a significant amount of wheedling from Kennedy, Nick agreed to join the all-girl indie rock band Kennedy had formed, which was lacking one key element - a vocalist. Nick had zero classical music or voice training, but she’d held a passion for music her entire life (a holdover from her father’s influence), and her voice was decent enough for the band’s sound without formal training. Mostly, Nick agreed because Kennedy pushed the right button, and Nick wanted to prove that she could do it, that she wasn’t afraid of singing in front of other people. And Nick didn’t have any other hobbies to speak of; joining a band was just something to do to fill her time, and help her avoid the reality of her slowly disintegrating friendship with Andy.
The band enjoyed a small measure of local success, but more importantly, served as a means by which Kennedy was able to start breaking down some of Nick’s walls and become closer to the other girl. Nick begrudgingly forged a prickly sort of friendship with Kennedy, which in time, through a fair number of obstacles and setbacks, grew into a tumultuous romantic relationship. This aspect of their relationship, however, was short-lived; Kennedy broke things off rather abruptly after six months, with the excuse that she needed to “sort her shit out” and couldn’t do it while dating Nick. She made plans to move to New York and leave Chicago - and Nick - behind.
Kennedy’s decision to leave had a seriously negative impact on Nick’s emotional state. The way Nick saw it, she’d gone out on a limb and opened up to the other girl, and all she ended up with was what amounted to a giant slap in the face - the biggest, worst slap in the face in the history of ever, in point of fact. With Kennedy’s departure, under serious emotional distress and with a pointed argument from Andy that they’d remained friends out of habit and it was time for both of them to move on into their respective disparate circles, Nick’s entire world shattered, and she put this change into motion quite literally, and in perhaps the most drastic manner possible - she packed a bag, filled up her truck, and left town without once looking back.
CRAU: Vancouver Nightbane; Feb-March 2009. Nick drove wherever the road would take her - westward, then north, until she finally ended up about as far west as she could get, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She hadn’t set out for Vancouver in particular when she left Chicago; in all honesty, she only chose it because it was the only Canadian city she could remember in this part of the country, and she’d needed a convincing story when crossing the border. But it seemed like as good a city as any to cool her heels while nursing her broken ego - it was far enough away from the problems she’d run away from, nobody knew her there, and nobody from back home would think to look for her there, either. She managed to secure a room in a local hostel and prepared to mull over the wreck her life had turned into until her money ran out and she’d have to head back to Chicago.
Less than a week into her stay in Vancouver, Nick began to notice things - weird things - left for her like presents from an unsettling admirer. Most often, she found rose petals everywhere she went, and it creeped her out. Nick concluded from this evidence that she had a stalker, and she wasn’t wrong - as it turned out, she was being stalked, but not exactly in the way she imagined. She relocated to a hotel, not far from the hostel but better secured.
One night, Nick took refuge in the bar attached to a hotel and spent the evening self-medicating and (in a weird turn of events) talking about her stalking problem to the bartender, a somewhat-spacey man named Graham. Graham, figuring Nick for a dormant Nightbane, befriended her; the two spent some time chatting on a staff balcony, and Graham gave Nick some suggestions as to which sights to see while in town. Unbeknownst to Nick, Graham was also a Nightbane, as were most of the hotel’s other residents and staff, and Graham was part of a secret rescue effort for new Nightbane, who’d recently become targets of deadly attacks. Graham suggested Nick check out Stanley Park in particular, with the intent of both drawing her stalker out into the open and triggering Nick’s Becoming (i.e., transformation into a full-blown Nightbane from her latent human state); Nick suspected nothing out of the ordinary, of course, and followed his advice.
In Stanley Park, Nick was attacked by something hideous, and the trauma of the attack set off her Becoming, where, for the first time, Nick changed into her Morphus form, that of a giant, cracked antique porcelain doll. Luckily, Graham had sent another Nightbane named Jaqueline to follow and protect Nick; Jaqueline was able to fend off Nick’s assailant and bring her back safely to the hotel, where Graham could make with the explanations:
Nick was extremely reluctant to believe Graham, but he was finally able to make her see reason and agree to stick with him and his group, for her own safety, and so that she could learn how to use her new powers.
CRAU: Hadriel; November 2015-January 2018. Nick went through A LOT during her three tours of Hadriel, a ruined city ruled by gods powered by emotions - her overall rating of her stay is 3/10, would mostly not recommend. She and the rest of the population were subjected to some pretty terrible things on a regular basis, like being buried alive, getting attacked by wendigos and zombies and other assorted monsters of the month, being driven to murder someone she’d never even spoken with before, and Nick basically hated every minute of it. Thankfully, by the end of her first tenure in the city, she’d become somewhat desensitized to the gods’ mischief, if a little angry - but when isn’t she a little angry. Hope and Fear both told her that Rage would like having her around, and they’re probably not wrong.
Sometimes, those experiences drew mixed emotions. Confusion’s revival made powered individuals (including Nick) go haywire, which wasn’t fun, and exponentially so for Ushahin accidentally using his powers to get inside her head and, well, break it. That was painful in every way imaginable, yet it proved to be beneficial in the end, because it made the rather violent point to Nick that her own understanding of suffering was incredibly limited. Ushahin had lived for centuries, and the compounded pain of his life shoved into her mind gave Nick a pretty serious reality check. This provided a huge step for Nick in moving past her own self-centeredness with respect to her world view of her life being complete shit - which, yes, there were a lot of bad things that happened, but maybe not quite as bad as possible? Anyway, getting your brain smashed to bits isn’t a good time but it did help Nick grow up a fairly significant amount.
Then there were the friends she made along the way. Ushahin and Chris Hartley are her two best Hadriel friends, because both of them showed her that a) not everyone is terrible and out to fuck her over, 2) you can fight with your friends and it isn’t the end of the world, and d) having friends who truly understand you is a really good thing! Both were also instrumental in helping Nick accept her “monster” self, i.e., her sense of self as a Nightbane. Except for an initial brief panic attack, Chris wasn’t freaked out and didn’t reject her (as she expected) when he discovered her not-entirely-human abilities, and Ushahin is a fellow not-entirely-human person she could relate to and learn from.
Nick’s time back in her own world also gave her some closure on the first chapter of her life. Seven years elapsed between when she disappeared in 2009 and when she returned in 2016, and in that time, she was legally declared dead. She also discovered that her ex-best friend Andy did still care for her, as he spent significant time attempting to track her down during the years she was missing. Even her ex-girlfriend Kennedy grieved publicly for Nick when she was declared dead. All of these factors gave Nick a push to put serious thought into who she wants to be, instead of merely skating by in her life - which is likely to be much longer than she ever imagined.
During the six months after Nick returned to her home world from Hadriel the second time, she decided to more fully embrace her Nightbane self. She took the words of her doppelganger to heart - namely that she possesses incredible power and potential and just doesn’t utilize it - and decided to leave Omaha and return to Vancouver, to work with the network of Nightbane there on honing her abilities. She spent the months of her post-Hadriel life training with the other Nightbane, learning how best to fight with her existing abilities and learning two additional Nightbane Talents. Regardless of whether the Door ever returned her to Hadriel, Nick knew she had a long, potentially perilous life ahead of her, and it was time to start doing something productive about it.
And the Door did return Nick to Hadriel for a third time, where she attempted to find a purpose in that world. With Delight’s bar demolished, she joined the city’s firefighters, since one of her Talents as a Nightbane includes the ability to call down rain. She fought off the Null, a robotic race on a mission to end the gods of Hadriel, and had a small existential breakdown over it, claiming that she wasn’t a hero and didn’t want to be one, and admitting that she didn’t know what to do with herself. When the truth of Delight’s betrayal of the Hadriel population to the Null became known, Nick took it particularly hard, as she’d trusted and liked the goddess, and it harkened back to previous betrayals of trust in the most painful ways.
CRAU: Peregrinari; January-October 2018. After being swept away from Hadriel for the final time, Nick found herself on a sentient spaceship, roaming through distant parts of a far-flung galaxy, on the run from the ship’s malevolent creators. Even with the trials of this voyage, it seemed like a vacation cruise in comparison to Hadriel, and Nick found herself somewhat relaxed for the first time in years, able to focus her time and energy on her guitar and songwriting instead of mere survival, making a few new friends among the ship’s crew as they traveled. The most significant of those friendships was a young teen boy named Tim Drake, with whom Nick became psychically linked through the ship’s partnering ability. She came to care for Tim like a younger brother, and when they both found themselves in an altered reality of the Pacific Rim universe, they became actual orphaned brother and sister, and Nick took care of Tim as his guardian. She worked as a Jaeger Engineer at the Los Angeles Shatterdome and had no memory of being a Nightbane or any of her previous life, as her memories were all replaced with the alternate history of that universe. The emotional link between Nick and Tim was strengthened by this AU adventure, and Tim insisted that Nick return to Gotham with him when their voyage ended.
Dualis NPC: October 2018-November 2019. Nick did not, however, end up in Gotham with Tim, but alone in Dualis, where she was quickly recruited by a guerrilla resistance group calling itself the Heart. As a Nightbane, Nick was more physically and supernaturally powerful than any other member, and became both a scout for new recruits and the group’s “tank” - she had extensive experience dealing with people over the years and developed an intuition of sorts for who could be trusted to bring on board, and her ability to create and control stormy weather was utilized in a demonstration that freed unfinished mechanical doppelgangers to terrorize the city’s newer residents - who, as it turned out, were some of the only few people in the city’s population that hadn’t yet been replaced by their doubles.
Through her position as a member of the Heart, Nick found employment at Rick’s, a bar that housed a low-fi objects shop in the basement that served as a speakeasy of sorts and one of the Heart’s main headquarters. After a meeting between the Heart and a number of Dualis PCs, Nick began to question the Heart’s methods and doubt that her participation was the right thing on which to spend her time and effort, yet she continued with the group out of fear of being turned in to the Hand. She ended up serving as a link between the Heart and the Dualis PC population, as well as an information source between groups through friendship with Hank Anderson, who then spread that knowledge among others of the more recent arrivals to the city.
Personality:
Original: Nick’s what you might call an eternal pessimist. She tends to expect the worst out of people, for the most part - that’s what she’s seen most of her life, so why would she expect otherwise? And she pretty much flaunts and revels in her bad attitude - she’s been given the “bad girl” badge, and she wears it with pride.
She isn’t motivated by much - she works because it pays the bills, and she works in a bar or a coffee shop because she finds the work tolerable. She doesn’t have many marketable job skills, and she’s fine with that, for the most part. It’s not like she has many hobbies outside of getting in fights, listening to music, chainsmoking, and drinking heavily, so it’s not like she’d have much to do in any spare time she might have. Nick doesn’t aspire to much, outside of scraping by and not - emphatically not - turning out like her mother, a miserable drunk stuck in a dead-end nowhere town.
Nick’s not really what you’d call a people person by any stretch of the imagination, but she can be sociable - if mildly apathetic - as long as the other parties aren’t overly obnoxious. This is mostly a mode she’s trained herself into, though - deep down, pushed so far because it scares her, Nick truly wishes to have a solid connection with other like-minded people (if any exist, that is). She can be extremely loyal, but earning her loyalty is no easy feat. Losing her loyalty, on the other hand, can happen before you have a chance to blink, and once it’s gone, it’s almost impossible to earn back again. Nick doesn’t put much stock in second chances.
Nick truly thinks of herself as more or less worthless - it’s what she’s had hammered into her head from a very young age, thanks to her mother. She doesn’t think much of other people, either, or life, for that matter - it’s a series of struggles with a brutal, often fruitless end. She might consider herself a nihilist, if she cared enough to put much thought into it.
Nick’s very stubborn. Once she sets her mind on something, it’s very difficult to convince her otherwise, and unfortunately, that determination often works against her, feeding her negative self-image and lack of self-esteem into an ongoing cycle of dysfunction. She believes her life is awful, and that it will never get better, so she doesn’t try to make things better, and in some cases, she actively (albeit unconsciously) works against improvement. The same can be said for her relationships with most people - she expects people to be mostly horrible, so she’s not especially agreeable to people who attempt to get close to her, thus setting herself up for a self-fulfilling prophetic circle of vicious unpleasantness.
She acts apathetic about most things, but the truth is, Nick does care - too much, sometimes, and her apathy is more often a front. She’s learned that caring about something means it can be exploited against you, so the only way to show no weakness is to show you don’t care. She can, however, be goaded into things by pushing the right buttons; usually, those buttons involve a challenge of some sort. Nick might claim to not care about what people think of her, but she has earned a certain reputation, and backing down from challenges or showing weakness or fear isn’t part of it.
Nick has a nasty temper, and a terrible violent streak. Nick’s mother was often physically violent with her when she was too young to fight back, and thus Nick picked up her mother’s tendency to slap her or push her into a wall when she was too angry to deal with her daughter in other, less abusive means. Nick isn’t afraid to start or finish a fistfight, and she can be downright vicious once she’s in the mood. She’s not the most physically intimidating person ever, but she does know how to go for the hurt.
CRAU Developments: Nick has mellowed out quite a lot in the past four years; her time in Hadriel, the intermittent visits back to her world, and her journeys through space have all helped her learn to be less abrasive and antagonistic and more kind, tolerant, trusting, and the friends she’s made along the way have helped her grow into a warmer, more amicable, and generally less shitty person. She’s also become less apathetic and much more motivated to be an active participant in her life, and she approaches life with more hope than she had before.
Nick has also gained a measure of self-esteem and lost some of her self-loathing, though both are not entire fixed, and she’s become more comfortable with her sense of identity - she may be a monster, but that doesn’t make her a bad person, and she has made the choice to do good with her life instead of seeking to hurt others. While she has also decided on her purpose in life, she still struggles with figuring out how to make it happen, still insists that she isn’t a hero, and is still often afraid of her abilities, particularly that she will lose control through manipulation, as she has in the past, and hurt or kill someone.
One of Nick’s biggest current struggles is that she still lives with a profound sense of loneliness and otherness; she’s always felt this to an extent, but becoming Nightbane has only increased those feelings, as she is no longer a baseline human, and that sets her apart from those who are in significant ways. She can expect to live much longer than normal humans, which means she will eventually lose anyone she cares about to the passage of time, though Nick is determined in spite of this to still seek out people with whom to form deep connections. Being harder to kill doesn’t mean she’s invulnerable or immortal, and the reality of living in a cyberpunk dystopia and allying herself with an underground resistance group means she could very well be killed at any time, if circumstances align against her. She may live for centuries or she could be killed tomorrow, but either way, life is too short to refuse to care, and choosing to ignore a connection with another person, monster or otherwise, is the worst mistake she could make.
Powers/skills: Nick is a Nightbane, and as such, she has two forms - a Facade and a Morphus.
For most of her life, Nick was just a garden-variety human, with no supernatural powers whatsoever. She was, however, able to develop the following skills: drink most people under the table, find a particularly stinging insult for every occasion, do her own oil changes, make both a perfect cappuccino and an excellent whiskey sour, and sing fairly well, especially considering she has no formal training to speak of. While not a trained fighter, she knows how to defend herself with physical violence, and her father taught her how to throw a pretty mean punch and go for the hurt quickly and efficiently. She retains these skills in her Facade form.
As a result of her various side quests through the multiverse, Nick has honed her skills in playing guitar and writing songs, since she had a significant block of time in which to do so without many distractions. She has also retained the mechanics knowledge (mainly focused on maintenance) of a Jaeger Engineer, as well as a variety of more commonplace vehicles and motors.
In her Morphus form, Nick possesses heightened senses and defensive/regenerative capabilities, resists psychic meddling, though her enhanced strength and constitution come at the cost of agility and speed, as she moves more slowly and in a lumbering fashion. She takes the shape of a giant antique porcelain doll that stands close to 6 and a half feet tall; her hair is long and dark brown, her glass eyes are wide and the same icy blue as in her Facade form, and all of her limbs work on hinges. Her clothing is early Victorian, a poofy multilayer black lace dress with ribbons and tight sleeves - highly impractical, and the exact opposite of Nick’s usual preference. A major defining feature of this form is the crack in her forehead - a visible hollow spot, with multiple fissure lines radiating outward, which is her weakest spot. As a whole, Nick in her Morphus form is a fearsome, bizarre sight.
(Dolls for reference: [1]; [2])
Nightbane possess superhuman Talents, and Nick has developed the following six:
Player name: Rae
Contact: gothmoth#3738 @ the disco(rd)
Referral: IT ME
Current characters: Jason Todd
THEM
Character Name: Nichole Anne “Nick” Rivenna
Character Age: 29
Canon: Original character created (sort of) in the Nightbane universe.
Canon Point: Nick initially left her home world in 2009, about a month after her Becoming, and has been getting tossed around the multiverse (with some time-skipping) from 2015 to 2019. She’s been living in Dualis for the past year.
History/World: BUCKLE IN, CHAPS, this is gonna take a while.
World Description: Nick’s world is fairly ordinary and corresponds closely with the real North America in 2009 - the main difference is the existence of creatures called Nightbane. Some additional background information on Nightbane from the Rifts Wikia page:
The Nightbane are characters who discover that they are not entirely human. In fact, they are shape-changers who possess a comparatively frail, human "facade" and a supernatural, superhuman "morphus."
The morphus is said to reflect the character's personality or subconscious fears, desires and self-image. Thus some are exotic and beautiful, while others (most) are misshapen monsters. No two appear exactly alike and even the most hideous can have the spirit of a saint, while the handsome and beautiful may be evil incarnate.
Whether hideous or beautiful, cruel or kind, the Nightbane are feared and slaughtered by most humans who see only a monster. Creatures of shadows, when slain, they disappear like the morning mist, as if they never existed (and leaving no evidence of their existence).
A surprising number of Nightbane cherish and cling to their humanity. Many of these become secret protectors of humankind and champions of good. Yet even these misbegotten heroes must operate in secret lest fearful, evil or misguided humans torment or destroy them. But there are far greater horrors loosed in the world than this. Evil Nightbane, vampires, human sorcerers, supernatural predators and other dark forces all busy building their petty power structures, preying on the weak and innocent, or engaging in foul pursuits. Worse, the Nightbane are hunted and slaughtered without just cause and without mercy by the Nightlords and their minions.
The Nightlords plan to quietly seize control of the world! They have already secretly infiltrated the highest levels of world government and business, and have begun to manipulate and enslave humankind. Their only opposition: humans who have uncovered the truth, vampires (rivals for world domination), and the Nightbane who have elected to fight their own kind to save the human race.
Feared and hunted by humans, the Nightlords, and the forces of evil, the Nightbane are the ultimate anti-heroes who struggle to triumph against all odds!
Original History: Nick was born in the small town of Winchester, Kansas, on the 18th of June, 1983, the only child of Jack and Marlene Rivenna, a mechanic and housewife, respectively. Nick’s life was fairly uneventful until she was eight years old; that winter, her father died unexpectedly. He and Nick’s mother had driven to a New Year’s Eve party a couple towns over; roads were icy, and Nick’s mother lost control of the truck, rolling into a ditch. Nick’s father hadn’t been wearing his seat belt, and he was thrown from the truck. His injuries were severe enough he died almost instantly. Nick’s mother, on the other hand, escaped the wreckage with minor injuries and a major case of guilt that would only worsen as the years went on.
The singular event of her father’s death would become the defining factor in shaping Nick’s life from there on out - she would later place this incident as “the point my life basically went to shit.” Her mother’s personality drastically changed after the accident; she had always been ill-equipped as a mother, but after her husband’s death (for which she felt entirely responsible), she became even more distant, even downright abusive toward Nick. Now forced into the role of sole provider for herself and her child, Nick’s mother took a job as a waitress at the local bar. She found the long hours agreeable; the more time she spent at work, the less time she had to spend taking care of Nick.
Nick found this an agreeable arrangement as well; she quickly grew to hate her mother and found that the less time they spent in each other’s company, the better. She grew into a fundamentally angry person - angry at her father for dying, angry at God for the same reason, angry at her mother for her near-constant verbal abuse and rapid descent into alcoholism - basically, angry at the world for the difficult hand she’d been dealt.
Nick began to get involved in fights with other children in fourth grade; by fifth grade, she’d started regularly skipping classes. Her grades suffered, not because she wasn’t smart or capable, but because she simply didn’t care enough to put forth the effort, and nobody (especially not her mother) gave her any real encouragement. Nick had also earned a reputation as something of a troublemaker by the time she entered junior high; she listened to loud music, picked up smoking at the age of 14, loudly proclaimed to be an atheist (something unheard-of in a small, Bible-belt town like Winchester), and generally fit the mold for juvenile delinquent.
Throughout all of this, the one bright spot in Nick’s life was her best friend, a small, frail, brilliant but socially awkward boy named Andy. Andy and Nick became friends basically on accident their first year of junior high. Nick’s reputation as something of a bruiser preceded her, and when their science teacher assigned Nick and Andy as lab partners, Andy broke down in tears. Nick was a little shocked; she’d never elicited that kind of unprovoked response from anyone before, and she ended up dropping the tough-girl facade long enough to reassure Andy she wasn’t going to actually kill him or anything.
It was an odd sort of friendship, but it worked; Nick and Andy were both misfits in one way or another, so it made a sort of sense that they would find friendship in each other’s company. Andy quit getting picked on by basically everyone else once Nick was in his corner (she did have that reputation for a reason, after all), and Nick found something of a confidante and comrade in Andy. They spent most of their time together, in school and otherwise, all the way through high school. Nick’s academic performance still suffered, and she did still get in fights, but at least with Andy around, she didn’t drop out of school - she even managed to show up for classes most of the time. Nick’s mother continued her borderline antipathetic attitude toward her daughter and her new best friend, and Andy’s parents vocally disapproved of their friendship as well, concerned that Nick would be a bad influence on their son. Nick and Andy didn’t care; as far as either of them was concerned, their bond was unshakeable, and when Andy made the plan to move to Chicago to study at UIC’s School of Architecture after graduating from high school, Nick decided to go with him. She had no reason to stay in Winchester, after all; she hated her mother and the rest of the town, too. She felt that Andy was basically the only thing she had going for her - why wouldn’t she move with him? She got a job at the same auto shop where her father had worked, doing odd tasks around the office, mostly, and saved everything she could in order to move with Andy at the end of the summer after they both graduated from high school.
After living in a small town all her life, a big city like Chicago was a kind of urban paradise for Nick. She and Andy ended up renting a house in Pilsen with a rotating cast of three other roommates, usually fellow students, artists, and/or punk types. Andy focused solely on school and mostly lived off student loans; Nick got a series of basic customer service-type jobs in various places around town, finally settling in on a schedule of bartending most nights at one of the city’s quasi-dive bars, followed by opening most days at a neighborhood coffee shop. It was a perhaps unconventional schedule, but it paid the bills, at least. Nick was more or less content with her life, as it was.
Six years into this routine, everything changed for Nick.
The main catalyst for this upheaval was the in-town arrival of Andy’s favorite cousin, Kennedy. Kennedy and her parents had been living abroad in the UK for the eight years previous, and as a result of some “scandalous” behavior on Kennedy’s part, her parents sent her away, back to the States, to continue her studies out of their sight. Andy, of course, was thrilled to have his cousin back in a closer locale, and insisted she move in with them, but Nick took an immediate dislike to the other girl. Kennedy had a certain smugness that rubbed Nick the wrong way, and Nick saw Kennedy’s relocation as an intrusion coming between her and Andy. In truth, Andy, who was already halfway through his master’s program in architecture, had simply started to drift away from Nick; the two were clearly moving in different circles by this point in their lives, but Nick was determined to cling to the notion she’d developed in the past - that she and Andy would stick together forever.
The fact that Kennedy was an over-privileged, somewhat manipulative brat who was used to getting her own way didn’t do anything to help with getting into Nick’s good graces, either. Nonetheless, Kennedy became rather infatuated with Nick; she was drawn to the other girl’s standoffish nature and rude demeanor. Kennedy had received substantial parental pressure her entire life to fit a certain mold (polite, gracious, well-mannered, etc.), so Nick presented both a change Kennedy found refreshing, and a challenge of sorts in earning her friendship.
But Nick was more than a challenge to Kennedy - she was downright hostile to the other girl, even sometimes physically abusive. Still, Kennedy enjoyed hunting for which of Nick’s button’s to push to get the desired reaction, even if she did end up bruised from the encounter. Kennedy had set her sights on bending Nick to her will, and she was determined to see the task through to the end. Nick found Kennedy’s attention irritating and infuriating, most of the time, but eventually, Nick began to reluctantly admit to herself that she found it somewhat pleasurable. In the wake of almost-total absence of parental affection and the void left by the declining companionship with her best friend, Kennedy’s insistence on being part of Nick’s life was something Nick found both puzzling and oddly satisfying.
After a significant amount of wheedling from Kennedy, Nick agreed to join the all-girl indie rock band Kennedy had formed, which was lacking one key element - a vocalist. Nick had zero classical music or voice training, but she’d held a passion for music her entire life (a holdover from her father’s influence), and her voice was decent enough for the band’s sound without formal training. Mostly, Nick agreed because Kennedy pushed the right button, and Nick wanted to prove that she could do it, that she wasn’t afraid of singing in front of other people. And Nick didn’t have any other hobbies to speak of; joining a band was just something to do to fill her time, and help her avoid the reality of her slowly disintegrating friendship with Andy.
The band enjoyed a small measure of local success, but more importantly, served as a means by which Kennedy was able to start breaking down some of Nick’s walls and become closer to the other girl. Nick begrudgingly forged a prickly sort of friendship with Kennedy, which in time, through a fair number of obstacles and setbacks, grew into a tumultuous romantic relationship. This aspect of their relationship, however, was short-lived; Kennedy broke things off rather abruptly after six months, with the excuse that she needed to “sort her shit out” and couldn’t do it while dating Nick. She made plans to move to New York and leave Chicago - and Nick - behind.
Kennedy’s decision to leave had a seriously negative impact on Nick’s emotional state. The way Nick saw it, she’d gone out on a limb and opened up to the other girl, and all she ended up with was what amounted to a giant slap in the face - the biggest, worst slap in the face in the history of ever, in point of fact. With Kennedy’s departure, under serious emotional distress and with a pointed argument from Andy that they’d remained friends out of habit and it was time for both of them to move on into their respective disparate circles, Nick’s entire world shattered, and she put this change into motion quite literally, and in perhaps the most drastic manner possible - she packed a bag, filled up her truck, and left town without once looking back.
CRAU: Vancouver Nightbane; Feb-March 2009. Nick drove wherever the road would take her - westward, then north, until she finally ended up about as far west as she could get, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She hadn’t set out for Vancouver in particular when she left Chicago; in all honesty, she only chose it because it was the only Canadian city she could remember in this part of the country, and she’d needed a convincing story when crossing the border. But it seemed like as good a city as any to cool her heels while nursing her broken ego - it was far enough away from the problems she’d run away from, nobody knew her there, and nobody from back home would think to look for her there, either. She managed to secure a room in a local hostel and prepared to mull over the wreck her life had turned into until her money ran out and she’d have to head back to Chicago.
Less than a week into her stay in Vancouver, Nick began to notice things - weird things - left for her like presents from an unsettling admirer. Most often, she found rose petals everywhere she went, and it creeped her out. Nick concluded from this evidence that she had a stalker, and she wasn’t wrong - as it turned out, she was being stalked, but not exactly in the way she imagined. She relocated to a hotel, not far from the hostel but better secured.
One night, Nick took refuge in the bar attached to a hotel and spent the evening self-medicating and (in a weird turn of events) talking about her stalking problem to the bartender, a somewhat-spacey man named Graham. Graham, figuring Nick for a dormant Nightbane, befriended her; the two spent some time chatting on a staff balcony, and Graham gave Nick some suggestions as to which sights to see while in town. Unbeknownst to Nick, Graham was also a Nightbane, as were most of the hotel’s other residents and staff, and Graham was part of a secret rescue effort for new Nightbane, who’d recently become targets of deadly attacks. Graham suggested Nick check out Stanley Park in particular, with the intent of both drawing her stalker out into the open and triggering Nick’s Becoming (i.e., transformation into a full-blown Nightbane from her latent human state); Nick suspected nothing out of the ordinary, of course, and followed his advice.
In Stanley Park, Nick was attacked by something hideous, and the trauma of the attack set off her Becoming, where, for the first time, Nick changed into her Morphus form, that of a giant, cracked antique porcelain doll. Luckily, Graham had sent another Nightbane named Jaqueline to follow and protect Nick; Jaqueline was able to fend off Nick’s assailant and bring her back safely to the hotel, where Graham could make with the explanations:
"There are Nightbane as old as history. We're a race of people who age as humans, then turn into something different when we undergo an event that jars us. I nearly got blown up, you got attacked. Now both of us are going to age one year for every one hundred that we live. Now both of us can change forms."
Nick was extremely reluctant to believe Graham, but he was finally able to make her see reason and agree to stick with him and his group, for her own safety, and so that she could learn how to use her new powers.
CRAU: Hadriel; November 2015-January 2018. Nick went through A LOT during her three tours of Hadriel, a ruined city ruled by gods powered by emotions - her overall rating of her stay is 3/10, would mostly not recommend. She and the rest of the population were subjected to some pretty terrible things on a regular basis, like being buried alive, getting attacked by wendigos and zombies and other assorted monsters of the month, being driven to murder someone she’d never even spoken with before, and Nick basically hated every minute of it. Thankfully, by the end of her first tenure in the city, she’d become somewhat desensitized to the gods’ mischief, if a little angry - but when isn’t she a little angry. Hope and Fear both told her that Rage would like having her around, and they’re probably not wrong.
Sometimes, those experiences drew mixed emotions. Confusion’s revival made powered individuals (including Nick) go haywire, which wasn’t fun, and exponentially so for Ushahin accidentally using his powers to get inside her head and, well, break it. That was painful in every way imaginable, yet it proved to be beneficial in the end, because it made the rather violent point to Nick that her own understanding of suffering was incredibly limited. Ushahin had lived for centuries, and the compounded pain of his life shoved into her mind gave Nick a pretty serious reality check. This provided a huge step for Nick in moving past her own self-centeredness with respect to her world view of her life being complete shit - which, yes, there were a lot of bad things that happened, but maybe not quite as bad as possible? Anyway, getting your brain smashed to bits isn’t a good time but it did help Nick grow up a fairly significant amount.
Then there were the friends she made along the way. Ushahin and Chris Hartley are her two best Hadriel friends, because both of them showed her that a) not everyone is terrible and out to fuck her over, 2) you can fight with your friends and it isn’t the end of the world, and d) having friends who truly understand you is a really good thing! Both were also instrumental in helping Nick accept her “monster” self, i.e., her sense of self as a Nightbane. Except for an initial brief panic attack, Chris wasn’t freaked out and didn’t reject her (as she expected) when he discovered her not-entirely-human abilities, and Ushahin is a fellow not-entirely-human person she could relate to and learn from.
Nick’s time back in her own world also gave her some closure on the first chapter of her life. Seven years elapsed between when she disappeared in 2009 and when she returned in 2016, and in that time, she was legally declared dead. She also discovered that her ex-best friend Andy did still care for her, as he spent significant time attempting to track her down during the years she was missing. Even her ex-girlfriend Kennedy grieved publicly for Nick when she was declared dead. All of these factors gave Nick a push to put serious thought into who she wants to be, instead of merely skating by in her life - which is likely to be much longer than she ever imagined.
During the six months after Nick returned to her home world from Hadriel the second time, she decided to more fully embrace her Nightbane self. She took the words of her doppelganger to heart - namely that she possesses incredible power and potential and just doesn’t utilize it - and decided to leave Omaha and return to Vancouver, to work with the network of Nightbane there on honing her abilities. She spent the months of her post-Hadriel life training with the other Nightbane, learning how best to fight with her existing abilities and learning two additional Nightbane Talents. Regardless of whether the Door ever returned her to Hadriel, Nick knew she had a long, potentially perilous life ahead of her, and it was time to start doing something productive about it.
And the Door did return Nick to Hadriel for a third time, where she attempted to find a purpose in that world. With Delight’s bar demolished, she joined the city’s firefighters, since one of her Talents as a Nightbane includes the ability to call down rain. She fought off the Null, a robotic race on a mission to end the gods of Hadriel, and had a small existential breakdown over it, claiming that she wasn’t a hero and didn’t want to be one, and admitting that she didn’t know what to do with herself. When the truth of Delight’s betrayal of the Hadriel population to the Null became known, Nick took it particularly hard, as she’d trusted and liked the goddess, and it harkened back to previous betrayals of trust in the most painful ways.
CRAU: Peregrinari; January-October 2018. After being swept away from Hadriel for the final time, Nick found herself on a sentient spaceship, roaming through distant parts of a far-flung galaxy, on the run from the ship’s malevolent creators. Even with the trials of this voyage, it seemed like a vacation cruise in comparison to Hadriel, and Nick found herself somewhat relaxed for the first time in years, able to focus her time and energy on her guitar and songwriting instead of mere survival, making a few new friends among the ship’s crew as they traveled. The most significant of those friendships was a young teen boy named Tim Drake, with whom Nick became psychically linked through the ship’s partnering ability. She came to care for Tim like a younger brother, and when they both found themselves in an altered reality of the Pacific Rim universe, they became actual orphaned brother and sister, and Nick took care of Tim as his guardian. She worked as a Jaeger Engineer at the Los Angeles Shatterdome and had no memory of being a Nightbane or any of her previous life, as her memories were all replaced with the alternate history of that universe. The emotional link between Nick and Tim was strengthened by this AU adventure, and Tim insisted that Nick return to Gotham with him when their voyage ended.
Dualis NPC: October 2018-November 2019. Nick did not, however, end up in Gotham with Tim, but alone in Dualis, where she was quickly recruited by a guerrilla resistance group calling itself the Heart. As a Nightbane, Nick was more physically and supernaturally powerful than any other member, and became both a scout for new recruits and the group’s “tank” - she had extensive experience dealing with people over the years and developed an intuition of sorts for who could be trusted to bring on board, and her ability to create and control stormy weather was utilized in a demonstration that freed unfinished mechanical doppelgangers to terrorize the city’s newer residents - who, as it turned out, were some of the only few people in the city’s population that hadn’t yet been replaced by their doubles.
Through her position as a member of the Heart, Nick found employment at Rick’s, a bar that housed a low-fi objects shop in the basement that served as a speakeasy of sorts and one of the Heart’s main headquarters. After a meeting between the Heart and a number of Dualis PCs, Nick began to question the Heart’s methods and doubt that her participation was the right thing on which to spend her time and effort, yet she continued with the group out of fear of being turned in to the Hand. She ended up serving as a link between the Heart and the Dualis PC population, as well as an information source between groups through friendship with Hank Anderson, who then spread that knowledge among others of the more recent arrivals to the city.
Personality:
Original: Nick’s what you might call an eternal pessimist. She tends to expect the worst out of people, for the most part - that’s what she’s seen most of her life, so why would she expect otherwise? And she pretty much flaunts and revels in her bad attitude - she’s been given the “bad girl” badge, and she wears it with pride.
She isn’t motivated by much - she works because it pays the bills, and she works in a bar or a coffee shop because she finds the work tolerable. She doesn’t have many marketable job skills, and she’s fine with that, for the most part. It’s not like she has many hobbies outside of getting in fights, listening to music, chainsmoking, and drinking heavily, so it’s not like she’d have much to do in any spare time she might have. Nick doesn’t aspire to much, outside of scraping by and not - emphatically not - turning out like her mother, a miserable drunk stuck in a dead-end nowhere town.
Nick’s not really what you’d call a people person by any stretch of the imagination, but she can be sociable - if mildly apathetic - as long as the other parties aren’t overly obnoxious. This is mostly a mode she’s trained herself into, though - deep down, pushed so far because it scares her, Nick truly wishes to have a solid connection with other like-minded people (if any exist, that is). She can be extremely loyal, but earning her loyalty is no easy feat. Losing her loyalty, on the other hand, can happen before you have a chance to blink, and once it’s gone, it’s almost impossible to earn back again. Nick doesn’t put much stock in second chances.
Nick truly thinks of herself as more or less worthless - it’s what she’s had hammered into her head from a very young age, thanks to her mother. She doesn’t think much of other people, either, or life, for that matter - it’s a series of struggles with a brutal, often fruitless end. She might consider herself a nihilist, if she cared enough to put much thought into it.
Nick’s very stubborn. Once she sets her mind on something, it’s very difficult to convince her otherwise, and unfortunately, that determination often works against her, feeding her negative self-image and lack of self-esteem into an ongoing cycle of dysfunction. She believes her life is awful, and that it will never get better, so she doesn’t try to make things better, and in some cases, she actively (albeit unconsciously) works against improvement. The same can be said for her relationships with most people - she expects people to be mostly horrible, so she’s not especially agreeable to people who attempt to get close to her, thus setting herself up for a self-fulfilling prophetic circle of vicious unpleasantness.
She acts apathetic about most things, but the truth is, Nick does care - too much, sometimes, and her apathy is more often a front. She’s learned that caring about something means it can be exploited against you, so the only way to show no weakness is to show you don’t care. She can, however, be goaded into things by pushing the right buttons; usually, those buttons involve a challenge of some sort. Nick might claim to not care about what people think of her, but she has earned a certain reputation, and backing down from challenges or showing weakness or fear isn’t part of it.
Nick has a nasty temper, and a terrible violent streak. Nick’s mother was often physically violent with her when she was too young to fight back, and thus Nick picked up her mother’s tendency to slap her or push her into a wall when she was too angry to deal with her daughter in other, less abusive means. Nick isn’t afraid to start or finish a fistfight, and she can be downright vicious once she’s in the mood. She’s not the most physically intimidating person ever, but she does know how to go for the hurt.
CRAU Developments: Nick has mellowed out quite a lot in the past four years; her time in Hadriel, the intermittent visits back to her world, and her journeys through space have all helped her learn to be less abrasive and antagonistic and more kind, tolerant, trusting, and the friends she’s made along the way have helped her grow into a warmer, more amicable, and generally less shitty person. She’s also become less apathetic and much more motivated to be an active participant in her life, and she approaches life with more hope than she had before.
Nick has also gained a measure of self-esteem and lost some of her self-loathing, though both are not entire fixed, and she’s become more comfortable with her sense of identity - she may be a monster, but that doesn’t make her a bad person, and she has made the choice to do good with her life instead of seeking to hurt others. While she has also decided on her purpose in life, she still struggles with figuring out how to make it happen, still insists that she isn’t a hero, and is still often afraid of her abilities, particularly that she will lose control through manipulation, as she has in the past, and hurt or kill someone.
One of Nick’s biggest current struggles is that she still lives with a profound sense of loneliness and otherness; she’s always felt this to an extent, but becoming Nightbane has only increased those feelings, as she is no longer a baseline human, and that sets her apart from those who are in significant ways. She can expect to live much longer than normal humans, which means she will eventually lose anyone she cares about to the passage of time, though Nick is determined in spite of this to still seek out people with whom to form deep connections. Being harder to kill doesn’t mean she’s invulnerable or immortal, and the reality of living in a cyberpunk dystopia and allying herself with an underground resistance group means she could very well be killed at any time, if circumstances align against her. She may live for centuries or she could be killed tomorrow, but either way, life is too short to refuse to care, and choosing to ignore a connection with another person, monster or otherwise, is the worst mistake she could make.
Powers/skills: Nick is a Nightbane, and as such, she has two forms - a Facade and a Morphus.
For most of her life, Nick was just a garden-variety human, with no supernatural powers whatsoever. She was, however, able to develop the following skills: drink most people under the table, find a particularly stinging insult for every occasion, do her own oil changes, make both a perfect cappuccino and an excellent whiskey sour, and sing fairly well, especially considering she has no formal training to speak of. While not a trained fighter, she knows how to defend herself with physical violence, and her father taught her how to throw a pretty mean punch and go for the hurt quickly and efficiently. She retains these skills in her Facade form.
As a result of her various side quests through the multiverse, Nick has honed her skills in playing guitar and writing songs, since she had a significant block of time in which to do so without many distractions. She has also retained the mechanics knowledge (mainly focused on maintenance) of a Jaeger Engineer, as well as a variety of more commonplace vehicles and motors.
In her Morphus form, Nick possesses heightened senses and defensive/regenerative capabilities, resists psychic meddling, though her enhanced strength and constitution come at the cost of agility and speed, as she moves more slowly and in a lumbering fashion. She takes the shape of a giant antique porcelain doll that stands close to 6 and a half feet tall; her hair is long and dark brown, her glass eyes are wide and the same icy blue as in her Facade form, and all of her limbs work on hinges. Her clothing is early Victorian, a poofy multilayer black lace dress with ribbons and tight sleeves - highly impractical, and the exact opposite of Nick’s usual preference. A major defining feature of this form is the crack in her forehead - a visible hollow spot, with multiple fissure lines radiating outward, which is her weakest spot. As a whole, Nick in her Morphus form is a fearsome, bizarre sight.
(Dolls for reference: [1]; [2])
![[1]](http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/sarkao/sarkao1007/sarkao100700027/7443584-antique-porcelain-doll.jpg){kind=link}
![[2]](http://www.craftster.org/pictures/data/500/medium/161189_13Sep09_100_8739.JPG){kind=link}
Nightbane possess superhuman Talents, and Nick has developed the following six:
Darksong: The Nightbane can emit a piercing, deafening sound; it can be an inhuman howl, a mighty roar, an ultrasonic keening, or even electronic feedback, depending on the Nightbane's Morphus. Nick's sounds like a distorted, inhuman wailing, and will stun targets in the direct vicinity, rendering them immobile and unable to cast magic.
Shadow Blast: Fires a bolt of black energy from either hand; range of 500 ft.
Sharing the Flesh: A strange and horrific healing spell. The Nightbane touches an injured person and magically transfers the other person's wounds, injury, and pain to themself. The person being healed falls into a coma or sleep that lasts a short amount of time (up to player discretion) and then awakens completely well. The effect is often gruesome, with nasty wounds spontaneously appearing on the Nightbane as the subject heals.
The Nightbane can transfer as much damage as he or she can tolerate, which may be only a little amount to all. This is actually a painful sacrifice on the part of the Nightbane as they heal normally - fortunately, these creatures heal rapidly compared to humans.
Nightbane must perform this act of sacrifice of their own free will. Healing critically injured/comatose characters will cause pain and shock to the Nightbane, enough to put them into a coma for a length of time (depends on the situation). A Nightbane who is weakened can perform the same healing but will die in the process.
Shadow Storm: Creates a swirling cloud of dark energy that fills a small area. This cloud can be sent forward at a medium speed; maximum distance away from creator is 500 ft. The dark energies of the cloud inflict damage on anything or anybody in its path but can be dodged. Each time it hits a sound of thunder is heard overhead.
Storm Maker: Allows the Nightbane to control certain aspects of the weather, namely rain, wind, and temperature, but including tornadoes, strong thunderstorms, blizzards, etc. Strength of effects vary depending on Nick’s stamina, i.e., will weaken the longer she sustains whatever effect she’s casting, and will take a significant physical toll on her, requiring several days to weeks of rest for recovery.
Mark of the Nightbane: Temporarily curses another by inflicting the Nightbane’s Stigmata on them (Nick’s Stigmata is the cracked forehead in her Morphus form). This is a very painful, damaging curse for anyone who is afflicted but it is not permanent. It can only be cast on one target at a time and only once (i.e., cannot be stacked). Length and strength of the effects will be left to player discretion.
memories and dreamscapes.