CHARACTER: Rachel "Honey Badger" Silva CANON: Original Character CANON POINT: After stabbing her friend/co-hero Umbra (at her request) with an obsidian knife to rid her of the Curse of Tiamat and running away to avoid the blowback
BACKGROUND: Rachel Silva looks like any other down-and-dirty delinquent teen you could find smoking behind the school between classes in Halcyon High, and you'd almost be right.
People have always said Rach has a hard head, metaphorically and literally, and well, wasn't her doctor surprised during a checkup to find her having developed bones so thick and dense that they had to recalibrate the x-ray five times to be sure that they were seeing them correctly. (They were.) So it's probably a little unfair that she does roller derby. She'd always been rowdy, a bullied child before this little mutation kicked in, and once she realized that there were essentially no physical consequences for her actions aside from bumps and bruises, instead of getting revenge on her bullies she went out and started fighting crime after school as a vigilante. Who was going to stop her? Hence, Honey Badger - because she just did not care.
This mutation of the pituitary gland wasn't just by chance, however. Her father, a scientist for HexaDyne, had taken some military-grade serum home and started putting some of it in his little girl's food, day by day, for years, using her as a guinea pig for repeated long-term exposure. And she got slowly bigger, slowly stronger, and slowly harder to hurt. One morning, she saw her dad putting something in her orange juice. He hemmed and hawed and hedged and said it was a vitamin supplement. But it was too late; she was big, but she wasn't dumb, and suddenly a lot of things that had never added up - like all of those doctor visits when she'd been perfectly healthy - made painful sense. And she clocked her dad hard enough to send him flying into the kitchen cabinets and breaking the dishes.
After that, Rachel didn't stay for long in one place aside from being with the little ragtag team of heroes she allied with, until she ran away from them, too, thinking she was a monster and that the team would agree. School was out of the question. The team had given her at least a little bit of stability, even if it had been a weird kind of stability, but now that's over and done with, and she's accepted her lonely existence, even though she doesn't like it. She doesn't know if her dad is alive and she pretends not to care, but she knows HexaDyne's not going to let their lab rat escape that easy. She also doesn't know that her former teammates and friends are looking for her, because they care about her and are worried she's going to get hurt...or worse, fall into HexaDyne's clutches.
ABILITIES | POWERS: Rachel is extremely strong and extremely sturdy. She heals at about three times the speed of a normal human being. She also taught herself parkour, how to pick locks, and whatever an eleventh-grade education and a quarter'll get ya these days. Her best class was always physics.
PERSONALITY: Rachel pretends that she doesn't care about things, but she cares about one thing: sticking up for the little guy. So she'll get in a knock-down drag-out fight with a villain just to be sure that someone who can't take the lumps like she can might get hurt. She acts tough, and for the most part, she is. She doesn't let little things bother her, but she's always more than ready to fight, especially if there's something in it for her. (Is it cheating to get in a fight for money if you have super-strength and super-durability? Probably. Does she care? No.)
She's contrary and rebellious, often for no reason. Sometimes, she just likes arguing. Catch her on a good day, and you'll get puns. Catch her on a bad day, and you'll get acid-tongued sarcasm. It's not only her bones that are hard to break. Much of it is a shell built up to keep herself from getting hurt. If you manage to get close to her, you'll find someone who's fiercely loyal and will fight for you and protect you until she can't fight anymore.
Rachel is like a wandering ronin, but with fists instead of a sword. She considers herself to be noble, while also thinking of herself as a monster. Her life is a constant battle between who she thinks she is and who she knows she is - the super-soldier and the superhero. She never wanted to be what her dad tried to turn her into.
But for all of that, she's still a teenager. She wants to do dumb things with friends and turn in her homework late and skip school, and she'll never forgive her father for taking that away from her. She wants friends, even though she decided to keep herself away from most people because she hates what she was turned into and the decision she was forced to make to save her friend Umbra from the Curse of Tiamat. Umbra had trusted her to do what needed to be done, so she's worried that her friend may have correctly identified her as a killer. She's desperately lonely, but she'd never, ever, ever admit it.
INVENTORY: A backpack containing a pack of cigarettes, a Leatherman multi-tool, a lighter, a pair of quad roller skates, a small journal with pen, a plush honey badger (a gift from her hero team), and a small, well-loved stuffed unicorn.
Rachel "Honey Badger" Silva | Original Character
CONTACT:
CHARACTER: Rachel "Honey Badger" Silva
CANON: Original Character
CANON POINT: After stabbing her friend/co-hero Umbra (at her request) with an obsidian knife to rid her of the Curse of Tiamat and running away to avoid the blowback
BACKGROUND: Rachel Silva looks like any other down-and-dirty delinquent teen you could find smoking behind the school between classes in Halcyon High, and you'd almost be right.
People have always said Rach has a hard head, metaphorically and literally, and well, wasn't her doctor surprised during a checkup to find her having developed bones so thick and dense that they had to recalibrate the x-ray five times to be sure that they were seeing them correctly. (They were.) So it's probably a little unfair that she does roller derby. She'd always been rowdy, a bullied child before this little mutation kicked in, and once she realized that there were essentially no physical consequences for her actions aside from bumps and bruises, instead of getting revenge on her bullies she went out and started fighting crime after school as a vigilante. Who was going to stop her? Hence, Honey Badger - because she just did not care.
This mutation of the pituitary gland wasn't just by chance, however. Her father, a scientist for HexaDyne, had taken some military-grade serum home and started putting some of it in his little girl's food, day by day, for years, using her as a guinea pig for repeated long-term exposure. And she got slowly bigger, slowly stronger, and slowly harder to hurt. One morning, she saw her dad putting something in her orange juice. He hemmed and hawed and hedged and said it was a vitamin supplement. But it was too late; she was big, but she wasn't dumb, and suddenly a lot of things that had never added up - like all of those doctor visits when she'd been perfectly healthy - made painful sense. And she clocked her dad hard enough to send him flying into the kitchen cabinets and breaking the dishes.
After that, Rachel didn't stay for long in one place aside from being with the little ragtag team of heroes she allied with, until she ran away from them, too, thinking she was a monster and that the team would agree. School was out of the question. The team had given her at least a little bit of stability, even if it had been a weird kind of stability, but now that's over and done with, and she's accepted her lonely existence, even though she doesn't like it. She doesn't know if her dad is alive and she pretends not to care, but she knows HexaDyne's not going to let their lab rat escape that easy. She also doesn't know that her former teammates and friends are looking for her, because they care about her and are worried she's going to get hurt...or worse, fall into HexaDyne's clutches.
ABILITIES | POWERS: Rachel is extremely strong and extremely sturdy. She heals at about three times the speed of a normal human being. She also taught herself parkour, how to pick locks, and whatever an eleventh-grade education and a quarter'll get ya these days. Her best class was always physics.
PERSONALITY: Rachel pretends that she doesn't care about things, but she cares about one thing: sticking up for the little guy. So she'll get in a knock-down drag-out fight with a villain just to be sure that someone who can't take the lumps like she can might get hurt. She acts tough, and for the most part, she is. She doesn't let little things bother her, but she's always more than ready to fight, especially if there's something in it for her. (Is it cheating to get in a fight for money if you have super-strength and super-durability? Probably. Does she care? No.)
She's contrary and rebellious, often for no reason. Sometimes, she just likes arguing. Catch her on a good day, and you'll get puns. Catch her on a bad day, and you'll get acid-tongued sarcasm. It's not only her bones that are hard to break. Much of it is a shell built up to keep herself from getting hurt. If you manage to get close to her, you'll find someone who's fiercely loyal and will fight for you and protect you until she can't fight anymore.
Rachel is like a wandering ronin, but with fists instead of a sword. She considers herself to be noble, while also thinking of herself as a monster. Her life is a constant battle between who she thinks she is and who she knows she is - the super-soldier and the superhero. She never wanted to be what her dad tried to turn her into.
But for all of that, she's still a teenager. She wants to do dumb things with friends and turn in her homework late and skip school, and she'll never forgive her father for taking that away from her. She wants friends, even though she decided to keep herself away from most people because she hates what she was turned into and the decision she was forced to make to save her friend Umbra from the Curse of Tiamat. Umbra had trusted her to do what needed to be done, so she's worried that her friend may have correctly identified her as a killer. She's desperately lonely, but she'd never, ever, ever admit it.
SAMPLE: Meme from Dec 2020
INVENTORY: A backpack containing a pack of cigarettes, a Leatherman multi-tool, a lighter, a pair of quad roller skates, a small journal with pen, a plush honey badger (a gift from her hero team), and a small, well-loved stuffed unicorn.
NOTES: None!