Braddock

Appearance:

Elizabeth Braddock is a genetically sculpted beauty, her appearance carefully orchestrated by a genetic coding computer. Her features are caucasian, with an exotic blending of Nipponese and Polynesian features. Her hair is long and glossy black, and her eyes are slightly oversized. Her family hailed from a long line of old money, dating back through the fuel smuggling dynasties of the fallen European Union, and back to the Petroleum Era. Elizabeth was raised to be a model trophy wife, elegant, stunning, carefully educated, well mannered, and everything that was expected of an old money bride looking to marry a Cosmic Era noble, mogul, or otherwise global power player.

Everything went wrong. Somewhere around her 16th birthday, Elizabeth manifested parapsychic abilities. The events around this eruption are scarce and were very deeply buried by the Braddock family, but it is suspected that a number of lives were lost and there was a good deal of collateral damage. After 16 years of living in a hard shell of a life designed by other people, subjected to thought conditioning and behavioral modifications, she snapped. Elizabeth proved to be not just an aching beauty, but a very powerful telepath, and telekinetic.

My So Called Life:

After manifesting cosmic powers, Elizabeth was subjected to heavy doses of parapsychic muting drugs and was transported from her native home of the London Arcoplex to a research center and educational facility in the Commonwealth of New England. At this school for troubled and violent youths, Elizabeth became fiercely proud of her British roots, as well as a defiant unwilling student. She would have likely been eventually ejected from the school, or subjected to nerve stapling to prevent her from being a threat to herself and others, but she gained the attention of one of Sigma Blue's recruiting agents. Elizabeth was transferred from North America to a Sigma Blue training facility in Stockholm. There, she found people that not only recognized and respected her powers, but had those same powers themselves.

Elizabeth would spend several years studying at the Sigma Blue Academy, first to control and temper her parapsychic abilities, and then later on gaining higher education and the required credentials to become a Sigma Blue Agent. After spending a large portion of her life being conditioned and trained to do a specific and pointless task (please a wealthy and powerful husband) she well understood the details of high intensity training, and threw herself into it. After so many years without her own internal purpose she found something that she cared about and believed in. And that thing was using her parapsychic abilities and martial arts to kick the everloving crap out of criminals.

The Throne of Lies:

It was barely a year into her career as a Sigma Blue field liaison that Elizabeth Braddock learned a lie so deep that it shook her to the core. There was another Elizabeth Braddock, the exact same age, with the same memories, and the same parents. It seemed that some years earlier that the original Elizabeth Braddock died in a traumatic childhood accident, and that her grieving parents had her cloned. Genetically enhanced, but cloned none the less. When their daughter manifested alien abilities and was unsuited to their great plans, she was kicked out of the manor, and Elizabeth Braddock III was brought up to speed and decanted. Their perfect lives would continue with their perfect daughter. Elizabeth suffered a period of severe depression, and a short but sharp psychotic break as she was forced to deal with the fact that she was, despite all physical appearances and experiences, a little over 7 years old and was technically a walking violation of the Tycho Convention treaty against the creation of genetic super humans.

Elizabeth eventually dropped out of Sigma Blue, unable to concentrate on her cases. She lingered for a short time in England, but given the power and prominence of her artificial family, she was easily recognized and drew the ire of the common folk dwelling in the favelas. To them, she wasn't an outcaste clone, she was a daughter of wealth and privilege. She fled from Europe, tumbled through Africa and likely would have ended up in a Nigerian immigrant city if not for meeting an Amazon mercenary. The Amazon commander, Shannon Burke, took a downcast and frayed Elizabeth back to New Themyscira with her. She would spend the next two years living in partial seclusion on the island, where she underwent therapy from a number of resident doctors as well as experienced parapsychics who helped her further understand and control her abilities.

The July Raid

Elizabeth might have ended up a painter, or some other sort of artist on the island, had the July Raid not occurred. The July Raid was a joint effort between three separate groups that had long standing vendettas against the Amazons of New Themyscira. The island was caught in a three pronged attack, with two of the outlaw units attacking from the West and the South, while the third unit, underwater, approached and attacked from the unexpected North. The fighting was intense, and the defensive network protecting the Hippolyta arcology activated and caused a large amount of damage to the ships and landing craft that were foolish enough to attempt disembarking troops within the range of the arco. This was a diversion, as the third landing force was the largest, and while the others soaked up hostile fire, the final group would land, establish a beachhead and then reinforcements would start moving in.

Elizabeth was with a small group of women who were forced to flee as their coastal villa was destroyed by a barrage of cannon fire. She helped organize and coordinated the evacuation of the area, while keeping in 'net contact with the main base at Hippolyta. Once the non-combatants were clear, Elizabeth and a number of other residents with military and paramilitary experience reported to the barracks at the Astronema Cosmodrome, which was only hours away from being placed under military threat.

Carter Technologies:

A small tech company, Carter Tech is largely responsible for the in house weapons and military technology employed by the island nation. What the company lacks in size it makes up for in incredibly talented and gifted volunteers (being a communal non-profit entity) and it happened that Braddock was able to come face to face with Carter's latest cutting edge piece of technology, a suit of power armor designed to be piloted exclusively by a parapsychic empowered woman.

Though incomplete, the armor provided enhanced mobility, endurance, and the ability to use power armor standard equipment. It differed in that the forearms of the armor contained advanced arcanotech devices that when controlled through parapsi power created a set of pure cosmic energy 'blades.' These psi-blades proved able to rip through even hardened mecha armor with ease. Only the polarized armor plating of warships and advanced composite materials proved able to slow the blades. Braddock donned the suit, still in the early prototype phase, and charged into battle with it.

She almost died in the fighting, but her actions along with the other Amazons limited the lose of Themysciran life to 15 casualties and had a direct effect on repelling the July Raid. The prototype armor she wore was destroyed, but she retained the generators from the forearms and ended up keeping the devices for her own later use.

Psi-Blades

Appearing as thick gold bangle type bracelets, the psi-blade generators are powered exclusively by Braddock's parapsychic ability. When activated, she can create unattached psychic energy blades to 'emerge' in her hands. These blades are armor defeating, and are only stopped by another psi-powered device, polarized armor plating, or overheating. The blades are very powerful and very effective, but they are a source of temptation as excessive use of the blades can pull Braddock into a parapsychic burn very quickly if not monitored.

The Amazons

Braddock found something fighting during the July Raid she had been missing. Amid the carnage and violence, she found both inner peace, and a driving purpose. Through controlled manifestation of her parapsychic abilities, she was able to find the calm at the middle of her inner storm. Suppressing her abilities was one of the causes of her persistent unhappiness, and irregular and sometimes uncontrolled outbursts only made it worse. Her attempts to control this with painting, meditation and other artistic ventures never tapped into the physical somantic aspects of her abilities and were therefor impotent in venting them. In defending the island she had come to call home she found a greater purpose than herself. She had fought hard, for years after finding out she was a clone, to be her own person, and as such had become incredibly focused on herself, and had spiritually and emotionally become ungrounded. Now, serving the greater interests of New Themyscira, and the protection of her non-military, non-martial sisters she found a tremendous reserve of inner strength and was able to tap deeper into her parapsychic power than even she knew she was capable of.

Elizabeth applied for a position in the Themysciran military, and after several rounds of tests and trials she placed in the very top percentile and only served in the rank and file Defense Corps for a year. After that year, she was promoted and placed into the Themysciran elite Trojans. The Trojans differ from the Amazons, as all members of the Defense Corps, and technically Law Enforcement are considered Amazon Warriors with appropriate rank and such. The Trojans are the special forces of New Themyscira and are composed almost entirely of parapsychics, genetic augments, ex-pat female supersoldiers from the around the world, cyborgs, and otherwise individuals with abilities that are considered above human capability. The Trojans form the core of New Themyscira's shadowrunning ops, armed rescue ops, and unlike the regular Amazon units, are seldom for hire to parties outside of the Island.

Equipment and Combat

As mentioned above, Braddock retains her psi-blade generators, but in an effort to not overuse these weapons, she typically keeps a number of mundane weapons when she is on missions, with a DiamondKote katana being her go to weapon, but she is skilled with the use of knives and swords in general, can use a staff, and enjoys disarming less threatening foes with sai when those are available but this is more commonly used in training exercises, or on missions where she needs not kill her opposition. She wears a skin tight encounter suit, typically a metallic blue Mk XVI. The suit does have some provocative lines and has the appearance of looking like a bathing suit cut garment at a distance, but some of the panels around the groin/thigh area are just different color material.

Braddock has a small arsenal of firearms, mostly easily concealed pistols, but she seldom uses these. She keeps the weapons mostly for training purposes but on most jobs she favors stealth, and her melee weapons. Her training from Sigma Blue included a good deal of firearms education, so she can competently handle normal firearms as well as magnetic weaponry, and some energy weaponry. Her experience with heavier weapons systems is limited, as is her experience in piloting power armor. She dislikes the armor suits for being too heavy, too bulky, and too slow to keep up with her high intensity approach to fighting and martial arts in general.

Elizabeth has basic and intermediate training in parapsychic martial arts, first through Sigma Blue, and later through the Trojans training regimens. Her fighting style is straight forward and brutal, and she likes to augment her hand to hand fighting with igniting her psi-blades.

Authors note:

For those not well versed in comics, Elizabeth Braddock is based off of Psylocke. I have known about Psylocke for years now and for the obvious reasons that she is very 'dynamically' drawn and I like her look and color palette. I decided that I wanted to write her up as my first addition to the New Themyscira roster, but in doing my research on her backstory I found a mess. Not just a mess, but a hell of a mess. She's a body hopping British Asian psychic with powers that run all over the place. Her story unfortunately is a giant pile of rubbish, and lacks a cohesive continuity, or overall theme. So, I took some salient points, and ran with my own version.