Code Name: The Portal Painter/Shard
Real Name: Amber McKenzie Hughes
Age: 16, nearly 17
Appearance: As most superheroines, she must bear the curse of a great body. Her build is lean and strong, while still being feminine. Amazingly, her hair color is not blonde. Instead it is a dark, layered brunette that sets off her gray eyes. Standing at only 5’3’’, she is well-known in the local shoe stores for her tendency to look at high heels, try them on, but never buy them. (In her defense, she swears she would put the money out if she could find a comfortable pair.)
If you were to say that her costume as “The Portal Painter” is colorful, you would certainly be right. It is a purple based bodysuit with splatters of red, yellow, and light green. An artist’s beret, a mask, and a utility belt stocked with various types of artistic tools (paintbrush, sketch pen, ect) completes her outfit.
Her costume as “Shard” will be a solid black bodysuit with silver detailing at the cuffs and waist. The silver “S” on her chest will be a different style and font than the Super-clan’s. It will begin solid at the center, then dissolve into splinters of silver. Shard will also wear tall black and silver boots and a black mask (the kind that must be glued to the face or something, because it doesn’t seem to tie anywhere).
Abilities: The short version is that she has limited telepathy, the power to create and manipulate an endless number of wormholes, exceptional resilience and stamina when dealing with energy, a high pain-tolerance level in general, and a proficiency in a mixed martial arts form of Muay Thai. The long version is as follows: Due to her part-Wreeb alien heritage, Amber can touch 7 dimensions, rather than the traditional 4 humans operate in (height, width, depth, and time. Mathematically there are at least 11 dimensions and very little is known about the ones that are outside of human experience). The 5th dimension, the mental plain, allows her to walk through the minds of those willing to let her in (even strangers if she has physical contact with them). Meanwhile, friends and family she is close to can be contacted at any distance and she knows immediately if they are significantly injured or killed. Although by far the most notably skill on that plain is her ability to tap into “The Universal Mind,” a living mental library of information gathered by the Wreeb. This is extremely important when she needs coordinates for opening her wormholes, as the Mind has entire maps of the space-time continuum. The 6th dimension allows her to control dark energy (a form of exotic matter that makes up 70% or more of the universe, yet little is known about it. It has negative pressure and has also been called anti-energy in some Sci-Fi’s). Dark energy is essential for the making and stabilizing of wormholes. It could technically be used for other functions, but they are so destructive that Amber avoids even studying them. The 7th dimension lets her tap into and channel a massive amount of energy, which is necessary for creating wormholes, stabilizing them, and moving masses through them safely. The process has become so normal to her that she does not truly realize the amount of power she can manipulate. It has made her highly resilient to energy attacks of all kinds (she takes about half the damage a regular person would) and gives her great stamina in battle. Finally, she studies a mixed martial arts version on Muay Thai at a dojo in her hometown of King’s Ridge. The style combines its striking elements with grappling, submission, and choking techniques of Judo, Wrestling, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to produce a versatile form of combat that can hold its own against even some “pure” martial arts forms in the tournament ring. Amber used to train for competitions, and she nearly won an amateur tournament belt. However, when it started to interfere with her work as a superhero, she put that life aside to focus on what she thought was really important. Now she only practices the martial art as a last-resort skill for desperate situations.
As the Portal Painter, Amber is a playful, thoroughly good heroine who battles from the viewpoint of her artist’s persona. She seems to get a kick out of spouting ridiculous puns (After chasing a bank robber until his getaway van ran out of gas: “So I guess this is a situation where you had plenty of Monet, but failed to buy enough of Degas to make your Van Gogh, huh?”), her portals are usually drawn or painted with the help of her artistic tools (though it’s not really necessary), and she has a tendency to leave “Caution: Wet Paint” signs taped to the foreheads of villains she leaves for the police to find. The reasoning behind her comedy is simple: Silly good guys attract incompetent bad guys. She would much rather deal with a jewelry thief who thought he was the reincarnation of Tigger than someone like Keystone City’s Razer.
By the time she takes up her identity as Shard, many of Amber’s balancers are gone, leaving her far more severe and turbulent as a heroine. The humorous aspects of her former self are set aside in favor of the direct approach. Portals are opened wherever she wants them without the pretense of tools, and she often employs a plasma blast she rarely used before. (The plasma blast is energy sucked into one of her wormholes from the corona of a sun and spat out at her enemy) If you add in the violent application of her Muay Thai skills against her enemies, and her occasional habit of forcing her will on others, Shard is really a midline character—neither truly good, nor fully evil.
Weaknesses: As well-rounded as her talents are, Amber is far from invulnerable. Since she is only half Wreeb, the sheer presence of the Universal Mind would overwhelm her if it were not for the balancing effect of having close friends and family. Without those bonds, she would go insane. Another drawback of the 5th dimension is that she can feel the serious injuries or deaths of those close to her as if they were personal, physical wounds. For example, when she was 5 years old her best friend in kindergarten fell off a slide and broke his collarbone. Amber passed out for 2 minutes from the reverberating pain. (Damage felt through the 5th dimension negates her high pain tolerance level because it comes through a mental field rather than a physical one.) A more common disadvantage of her powers is the focus and regularity needed to create wormholes. Ripping open the space-time continuum is not exactly kids stuff. If she is significantly distracted (through circumstance or emotional turmoil), her pinpoint accuracy suffers. She’s well aware that if she is too distracted, her wormholes could become destructive (imagine a portal appearing in the middle of a busy intersection rather than in the path of a missile). Enemies and even friends who use magic can mess up her powers as well because magic causes irregularities in the space-time continuum. Then, of course, there is always the fact that she is half-human and quite mortal.
History: The Wreeb, as a people, tend to keep to themselves. They hide away in a galaxy kept in perfect balance by a series of black holes. Few outsiders can find the place, much less penetrate it without certain death, and even the Wreeb must be careful as they navigate its hazards with their wormholes. Yet as far as they go to ensure their privacy, they often send explorers out to map the rest of the universe. That’s how Amber’s mother ended up on Earth, where she met, fell in love with, and married her father. Unfortunately, shortly after Amber’s birth the happy couple became much less happy. The family split, both legally and physically. Her mother returned to Wreeb, and her father remarried a woman Amber would eventually call Mama Ros.
Amber was told from childhood that she could not use her portalling abilities in public, much less in ways that would hurt other people. The Universal Mind held all the information she needed on how to train and control her powers, and Earth’s heroes inspired her to begin a career fighting crime in her hometown. She’s adamantly against going national and joining a larger group of heroes because she’s afraid that doing so would get in the way of her schooling and her job protecting King’s Ridge. (We’ll see how long that lasts, mwah ha ha.) As a miscellaneous note, Amber is an only child with very few extended relatives that she’s aware of.
Another matter worthy of mention is Amber’s connection to Adam. At the very start of their heroing careers, they both happened to click into a chatroom called “Secretly a Superhero.” The room was full of teenagers who were trying to convince each other that they were the screen names behind the masks of people like Robin, Aquagirl, and Bumblebee.......
Other information: Recently, there was a battle between Darkseid and Mr. Miracle that reached its pinnacle in Amber’s town. Darkseid wanted his adopted son’s completed anti-life equation, and had found a way to extricate a copy of it. Of course, he did not succeed in his goal. Something quite different happened. The three may not know it yet (Portal certainly doesn’t know), but Amber was infused with a full copy of the equation during the fight. ( Ooooh, the plot thickens.)
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