Fourth member of the Syracuse Seven hero team, who are gradually being ported over from the Tiny d6 Supers system along with their friends, family and supervillains. Every team wants a flyer, a speedster and a super-strong brick, and she's the whole package rolled up in one.
Meteoric
Justine Cross is a young mutant whose powers manifested about five years ago, resulting in a permanent transformation into her biometallic form. Her bigoted family immediately turned their back on her, but high school teachers and friends helped her find counselling and support, culminating in several years of training in a specialized academy in upstate New York. Since graduation she's gone on to join a small local super team as part of an outreach program intended to improve mutant relations with the broader supers community. She's pretty well adjusted considering everything she's gone through and gets along well with her teammates. They've become found family for her along with her former academy classmates. Justine has become wary about involving her old high school connections with her new life out of fear they'll be targeted by villains and anti-mutant extremists, and has nothing to do with her biofamily.
Description: A slender young woman made of metal? A robot built with a feminine human form? Some kind of iron golem? It isn't immediately clear. Her voice is surprisingly deep with mechanical overtones, which just further confuses the issue of just who and what she is. She wears a pair of biking shorts and a snug tee shirt with the Syracuse Seven's "S7" logo on it when heroing, and civilian clothing when off duty.
Gender: Female Age: 20 Height: 5'4" Eyes: Gunmetal Blue
Hair: None Skin: Dull Metallic Gray Build: Boyish
Background: Tragic Power Source: Nature ("Natural Mutation") Archetype: Speedster
Personality: Sarcastic Health (G/Y/R): 32/24/11
Powers: Flight d10, Strength d10, Speed d8, Vitality d8, Agility d6
Qualities: Acrobatics d10, Close Combat d10, Young But Well-Trained d8, Banter d8
Status: Green (32-25) - d8 / Yellow (24-12) - d8 / Red (11-1) - d10
Abilities:
Green
Biometallic Beatdown (A) Attack using Strength. Use your Max die.
Blur of Motion (A) Attack multiple targets using Close Combat. Use your Min die. Hinder each target using your Mid die.
Positional Advantage (A) Boost or Hinder using Flight. Use your Max die. If you roll doubles, Attack using your Mid die.
Principle of Great Power (A) Overcome a situation using one of your highest rated powers. Use your Max die. You and your allies each gain a Hero Point. Minor twist: How do you restrain yourself from unleashing your full power? Major twist: What major damage do you do in the process of saving the day? RP: Your powers are so strong they can even scare you sometimes, but you work hard to control them. You can wield those powers to intimidate others.
Principle of Speed (I) When you successfully Overcome, you may end up anywhere in the current environment. You and your allies each gain a Hero Point. Minor twist: What physical drawbacks do you suffer from going too fast? Major twist: What critical detail did you speed past earlier that is now coming back to haunt you? RP: You're fast and don't like to waste time. You like to keep moving.
Yellow
Get In Their Face (A) Attack one target using Strength. Use your Max + Min dice. Boost yourself and the target using your Mid die.
High Speed Maneuvering (A) Attack multiple targets using Flight. Use your Max die against one target and your Mid die on all others. If you roll doubles, take irreducible damage equal to your Mid die.
Momentum (R) When you defeat a minion, roll that minion's die to Boost yourself. Use the resulting bonus on your next action.
Red
Interception (R) When an opponent Attacks you may become the target of that Attack and Defend yourself by rolling your single Red zone status die.
Maximum Speed (I) When you use an action ability, you may also perform a basic action using your Mid die on the same roll.
Out
I've Had Worse (A) Hinder an opponent by rolling your single Banter die.
Tactics
Meteoric is a speedy flying brick who prefers to keep moving during a fight rather than get into toe-to-toe slugfests. In Green, she's got strong single target damage from Biometallic Beatdown, excellent multitarget control with Blur of Motion and a solid mod game from Positional Advantage - assuming she has the room to use Flight. Her Principle of Great Power leans into using her physical might and graceful flight to solve problems, and Principle of Speed gives her strong mobility and extra HP when she does Overcome.
The Yellow zone has a potent if somewhat double-edged single-target Attack and Boost from Get In Their Face and an incredibly hard-hitting multi-target Attack from High Speed Maneuvering, albeit at the risk of some self-damage from collisions. The Momentum reaction gives her an easy source of bonuses as long as there are minions to deal with.
Once in Red she has access to a versatile defensive reaction with Interception, and improves her action economy with Maximum Speed. She's still going to be relying on her potent Yellow abilities, but her options get better along with her status die.
Her I've Had Worse Out ability is fairly weak, but lets her mouth off to her heart's content even after a trouncing.
Design Notes
Meteoric hasn't changed much from Tiny d6 Supers to the SCRPG in terms of style, although she's a bit more offensive (especially against multiple enemies) and less evasive due to the way her abilities work and the weird lack of a defensive reaction on the Speedster archetype. I went with Natural as a power source because Genetic just gets boring when every mutant has it, and a "natural mutation" is one perfectly valid way to interpret the ability set. Speedsters are traditionally land-based sprinters but (as the build here shows) there's no reason they have to be. She's still a very fast runner - but she flies even faster and has the Acrobatics quality to use her Flight well.
Justine's abilities are borderline ridiculous when compared to other hero builds, with everything at least good and several (Blur of Motion, Positional Advantage, Get In Their Face, High Speed Maneuvering) so strong they could easily have been up in the next GYRO zone. Some are a little risky, but that fits her character well. I somewhat deliberately tried not to optimize her Red zone choices to compensate - she mostly gets more versatile when hard-pressed rather than seeing the big jumps in raw power many heroes do. Her biggest mechanical weakness is probably her narrow focus - all her powers are Athletic or Mobility, and her qualities are mostly aimed at pooling well with physical tasks. If she has to Overcome social or intellectual challenges she's likely to struggle to build good pools, making her the team's combat monster a lot of the time.
Her role on the Syracuse Seven is to give the team a real flyer (KO Clown and the Leaping Lizard are pretty mobile too, but they're jumpers and have to come back down sometime) who's also got solid offense, and she's a very strong crowd controller in the SCRPG as well as having good single-target hitting power. Meteoric is also very good at providing an aerial taxi service (sometimes involving the four "pokey" team members stuffed in an actual taxi she's carrying) when needed, as well as evacuating civilians or getting injured victims to a hospital ASAP.
Meteoric has a minor weakness to electricity. Her biometallic form is an efficient electrical conductor, which causes pain and spasms even when she resists actual physical injury. She needs to be careful around power lines when flying.
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