![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shark_girlName: Tess Donaldson, a.k.a. "Thresher"
Age: 21 at canon point.
Race: lesser titan
Hair/Eyes: Sea-Green/Pitch-Black
Height: 4'10" (2" shorter than Danny Devito, for perspective)
Weight: 130 lb
Build: Muscled
Appearance:
Example Art (Deviantart): by Severflame * Severflame #2 * by Insane-Ukulele * By Siamese712 * by Rhardo
Standing at a scant 4'10”, Tess is a stocky, powerfully built and athletic woman with decidedly and obviously inhuman features, the shark half of her parentage far more obvious than any ties to her biological father. Her skin is a gray color and has a very slightly sand-papery feel when the hand is run over it, almost like there are tiny spines all over it rather than body hair. While it is not rough enough to actually chaff anyone touching it, her skin has a definite 'grip' to it. She has jet-black eyes without sclera or iris and sea-green hair the same color as the brilliant shallows of the tropics. Her mouth is full of razor-sharp shark's teeth and she has a set of gills on either side of her throat. Muscular, lithe and smooth framed, she has very little in the way of endowments, being almost flat-chested. She has a pair of trident tattoos on the back of her hands, the tines pointing towards the knuckles.
She generally dresses in either simple jeans and hoodies with sunglasses to cover her eyes, or when swimming she tries to use skin-tight neoprene suits to aid in swimming easily. Her clothes focus on functionality and concealment, avoiding anything that would show off her unnatural appearance. She tends to stand almost ram-rod straight, very rarely slouching and moves with quick, aggressive steps, practically barreling from one point to another. Her voice has a husky, low tone to it that is just at the edge of masculine and seems to brim with aggressive, almost predatory elements.
Personality:
Tess is rough around the edges, to say the least. When meeting new people, she is almost all business, slow to converse about the details of her life and slower still to get close to them. There is almost always something that needs doing, and she'd rather be doing that than trying to socialize or make friends among people who she genuinely assumes think she's some sort of hideous monster. Friends are for other people, and closeness is a thing that she can't afford to risk under most circumstances. Though not one who has suffered many betrayals, she has seen how manipulative others can be, how much they will use others to their own ends and she's disinclined to trust other humans by her very nature. Part of this is raw instinct, akin to the instincts of a cat or a shark, which view other humans as mutual predators and therefore potential threats. Though she can transcend these instincts and does so easily enough, they do color her general interactions and make it harder for Tess to develop any sort of meaningful relationships right off of the bat.
There have been few people in her life that she has ever cared for. She legitimately and truly loved her adoptive parents, Michael and Amber. They were the ones who gave her a name. They cared for her, taught her, did not abuse her and treated her like a normal person. Never once did they treat her as anything less than their precious daughter, and they managed to push down any attempts in the broader community to hate the girl for what she was. There were other Deviants in the world, after all, and Tess was a good girl. She adored and trusted her parents implicitly and looked up to them as examples of hard-working, honorable and generous souls, people that she wishes she could be, if only the world would let her. She did make, among those of her generation, a scant few friends who did not seem bothered by her physical appearance. A joker at heart with just a little bit of an impish heart, he always kept her in on his shenanigans and get-rich-quick schemes as he got older. Never did he go too far or get into the illegal or outright irresponsible, and always he helped to speak on her behalf. For a while, she almost imagined that she had a crush on him, perhaps because he actually treated her like a normal person as well, and most did not. However, they never quite got past the physical issues of her body-consciousness and so stayed more friends over the years until he was killed by a drunk driver, a scant month after she left town.
Tess is, by her nature, a hard working soul. She was taught to want to help others and to be valuable to others, even if they were not thankful for it. She may grumble. She may grouse and complain. She may even growl at the strangers that she helps out, but she is not one to leave people in danger around her or in need when she can help. It is in her nature to wish to be of assistance to those that she genuinely believes are in need, though if she feels that this trust is abused she is swift to turn on them, leaving someone who has manipulated her high and dry without a second thought.
Tess prefers to stay active most days. She takes greatest pleasure in physical pursuits and prefers to be working on some level. When she's busiest, it's easiest to keep her thoughts from self-reflection. Introspection always involves periods where she is the most depressed and alone. So, keeping to active pursuits on at least some level has always been important to her. That desire to keep her mind and body constantly occupied, however, belies an underlying issue within Tess' mind that plays into almost all of her interactions and her reasons for being difficult to get close to. She has an incredible level of body-consciousness, almost entirely negative. Tess hates the way that she looks, having grown up around normal humans and looking more like a bad mixture of a shark with a woman. She thinks of herself as both monstrous and ugly and tends to treat any sort of flirtation as being more of a mockery than a real thing. One of the only times she has ever escaped this constant self-consciousness has been during anime and comic-book conventions, surprisingly enough a common place thing even in a world full of superheroes. When she arrives, most assume she's simply another cosplayer, and one who's footed the bill for serious skin work, so she's treated as completely normal. However, the fact that she's only treated by most as 'normal' when they think she's in costume only clarifies for her how monstrous she is. She dresses to conceal her considerable inhuman features and does everything she can not to think about what she is.
That body-consciousness has led to an even more significant emotion for her. Having known she was adopted for all her life, Tess has nursed a building hatred of her biological parents. With the knowledge of who she actually is the daughter of, and how Poseidon has used her as little more than a glorified errand girl to clean up his own personal messes in the name of what he proclaims as justice, she has come to deeply loathe her biological father. She can't bring herself to feel ill for her mother, not even knowing which shark among countless others she is, and not caring. Poseidon, however, she despises with a passion she cannot express. He made her into what she is, gave her this body that all loathe, and worse still he has the temerity to look normal and leave her little more than a monstrosity. He uses her, and in her mind he is nothing more than a petty tyrant. It has sold her off of most religious pursuits and genuinely embittered her to her plight, though she tries not to let the bitterness bleed out too much.
While Tess does perform what is classically considered to be vigilante 'Work,' in her efforts to help others that are around her, stepping in when people are threatened by others with powers, she does not prefer to remain in the spotlight or to be known widely for her actions. The nom de guerre “Thresher” that is associated with her was originally created by the press and not one of her design. She goes by the name her parents give her and actively seeks to avoid conflict when possible and the public eye as a general rule. Much of this stems from her body-consciousness, but in general, she is not one for crowds.
Romance is not a thing that is even in the mind of Tess. Thresher has, on top of her body-consciousness, very little attraction for humans. She has tried, as with her old friend Jim, to feel some level of attraction. It's expected in society, and so she's made the effort, but she can't bring herself to find the human form particularly appealing, or the idea of romance as remotely realistic. While some cosplayers have shown interest, she has never returned the affection. Privately, she finds her urges more fueled by animalistic, feral and aggressive figures, particularly actual sharks. It is her strong suspicion that her titan blood lacks any particular urge for copulation, leaving only her base animal instincts to give her direction. It doesn't make sex impossible, but any urge to pursue it for its own sake is almost non-existent, at least without some sort of outside influence to force her to care about it for reasons other than physical pleasure.
Tess maintains, despite her appearance, a fairly healthy sense of humor. It's dry and cynical, but it is also one of the easiest ways to break past her emotional barriers against closeness. A person who can make her laugh, and who laughs in her presence, is far more likely to disarm her and make her feel at ease. The occasional light-hearted prank goes miles, as it is the sort of thing that you do to someone who you either like, or someone who you want to take down a peg, but regardless it is the sort of thing that a person does to someone that they treat as 'normal.' Pitchforks are for monsters. Buckets of water over the doorframe are for regular people.
History:
World Info - (WIP)
“Thresher” is a relatively minor figure among heroes of the so-called "Deviant Universe" (A Golden-Age/Silver-Age superhero world hybrid), all things considered, and has always preferred this to remain the case. Tess was the daughter of the god Poseidon and a Mako shark, one of countless other minor demigods sired by one of the greek gods over the course of the millenia. Like so many others, she was foisted off upon mortal parents and adopted by devoted worshipers of the pagan gods, Michael and Amber Donaldson, residents of a small coastal community in South Carolina. Living outside of town, among those who were more or less understanding of a few oddities in one of the local children, Tess spent her formative years swimming along the coastline and helping to tend to the lighthouse that her father tended while her mother, a substitute teacher in the local schools, handled her education through home-schooling. She polished this off with seminar courses at a local community college where she could generally downplay her appearance and take both night and distance courses as much as possible, supplementing a GED with an associates in Business.
The idyllic state of her life continued until her 21st birthday. A vicious viral infection ran through South Carolina in 2012, the same year that Psi-Void attempted his first invasion of the earth. Claiming the lives of many within her community, it took both of her aged adoptive parents away from her. Though educated and capable of caring for herself, Tess was alone in the world, aware that the lighthouse she had lived in for years had been scheduled for closure at some point in the next few years and aware how much faster it would occur without her father to plug for it. It was late on the night that she had left her parents quiet, barely attended funeral, that she met her “True Father.” She'd been aware of the fact that she was adopted and that her biological parents weren't human, but more than that her parents had never said. The conversation went poorly, as Poseidon attempted to placate his grieving daughter and proclaimed to her that she had greater things ahead of her, wars in the heavens and villains who sought to ruin the world. She wanted nothing of it and told him to kiss off.
Regardless of her wishes, however, gods were not the sort of things that could be so easily denied. As others struggled against the machinations of mad scientists unmaking reality, demigods rising from the depths of trans-dimensional hells, Tess found herself embroiled in the internal politics of the gods of Olympus. Long grown decadent and disassociated from mortal affairs, they toyed with each other, building rivalries that threatened human interests. Tess was convinced by her father to rescue one of his nereids from the “clutches” of Dionysus, only to learn that she had dallied all too willingly in the other god's clutches, but not before facing down the wounded and mutilated demi-god Pan, an old friend and bodyguard of the god of revelries. Though the girl willingly returned to Poseidon's side, Tess threw her hands up and tried as best she could to distance herself from her father's affairs.
Unfortunately, in the aftermath of her 'victory,' Thresher found her newfound publicity to be as much a danger as it was a positive. The demigod “Omega” rose out of the abyss into which he was imprisoned thousands of years ago, his return aided by the Dark Legion. With his rise, he wielded Dark Energy and used it to empower those who would serve him. Forced to face a Pan, seeking revenge for their last battle, Thresher barely escaped the confrontation with her life and descended into the depths of the ocean to recuperate. Deep beneath the waves, she was unaware of the plight of other heroes who sought to bring Omega and his cronies down once and for all, or the doomsday weapon unleashed by a desperate RAPTOR organization, one that could seek individual deviants around the world and teleport them from time and space. The demigod was blasted out of creation as he fought the Thunder Force to a near stand-still alone even with empowered suits to boost their abilities, but soon afterwards a wave of energy erupted from where he struck. It washed over the entire world, causing everyone who dwelt on the earth and possessed superhuman abilities to disappear, lost in time and space. Unknowing of the source, deep in the darkness and far from the world, she slumbered only to awaken in a strange place.
Powers:
Tess' abilities are granted to her both by her unnatural physique as a half-shark and her semi-divine blood. Like any of the nearly countless half-blooded children of the Greek gods, she is more than a mere mortal. However, her powers have only barely begun to blossom in comparison to titans such as Triton or Polyphemus. These powers, formidable as they are, may be divided up into her physiological enhancements and supernatural gifts.
Her physique is much more robust and durable than a human's could possibly be. She is capable of lifting about 1 Ton and her physical attacks reflect this strength. Small arms fire bruises her but does not penetrate her skin, though rifles and heavier calibers are more effective. She sustains herself on a carnivorous diet and requires about a quarter the amount of food and water expected of a creature her size, with a solid tolerance for ingested toxins and diseases. She is slightly more dexterous than the average person and has an unnatural sense of balance. She is capable, to some extent, of tracking with her sense of smell, and is particularly adept underwater. While not a true shark, she can see in the dark and is able to open the gills on her throat to breathe underwater, breathing normally on land.
Tess also possesses a limited amount of supernatural powers. She can communicate with sharks of all varieties, and to a limited extent communicate with other fish. She is, on top of this, able to control and manipulate water, changing its physical state from gas to liquid to solid with a thought or gesture and manipulating it hydrokinetically. Though water, when manipulated in this way, does not carry her full strength, it is nevertheless able to give her greater range and shows strength on par with a well-trained athlete of human origins. She is not, however, able to conjure water out of nothing.
Age: 21 at canon point.
Race: lesser titan
Hair/Eyes: Sea-Green/Pitch-Black
Height: 4'10" (2" shorter than Danny Devito, for perspective)
Weight: 130 lb
Build: Muscled
Appearance:
Example Art (Deviantart): by Severflame * Severflame #2 * by Insane-Ukulele * By Siamese712 * by Rhardo
Standing at a scant 4'10”, Tess is a stocky, powerfully built and athletic woman with decidedly and obviously inhuman features, the shark half of her parentage far more obvious than any ties to her biological father. Her skin is a gray color and has a very slightly sand-papery feel when the hand is run over it, almost like there are tiny spines all over it rather than body hair. While it is not rough enough to actually chaff anyone touching it, her skin has a definite 'grip' to it. She has jet-black eyes without sclera or iris and sea-green hair the same color as the brilliant shallows of the tropics. Her mouth is full of razor-sharp shark's teeth and she has a set of gills on either side of her throat. Muscular, lithe and smooth framed, she has very little in the way of endowments, being almost flat-chested. She has a pair of trident tattoos on the back of her hands, the tines pointing towards the knuckles.
She generally dresses in either simple jeans and hoodies with sunglasses to cover her eyes, or when swimming she tries to use skin-tight neoprene suits to aid in swimming easily. Her clothes focus on functionality and concealment, avoiding anything that would show off her unnatural appearance. She tends to stand almost ram-rod straight, very rarely slouching and moves with quick, aggressive steps, practically barreling from one point to another. Her voice has a husky, low tone to it that is just at the edge of masculine and seems to brim with aggressive, almost predatory elements.
Personality:
Tess is rough around the edges, to say the least. When meeting new people, she is almost all business, slow to converse about the details of her life and slower still to get close to them. There is almost always something that needs doing, and she'd rather be doing that than trying to socialize or make friends among people who she genuinely assumes think she's some sort of hideous monster. Friends are for other people, and closeness is a thing that she can't afford to risk under most circumstances. Though not one who has suffered many betrayals, she has seen how manipulative others can be, how much they will use others to their own ends and she's disinclined to trust other humans by her very nature. Part of this is raw instinct, akin to the instincts of a cat or a shark, which view other humans as mutual predators and therefore potential threats. Though she can transcend these instincts and does so easily enough, they do color her general interactions and make it harder for Tess to develop any sort of meaningful relationships right off of the bat.
There have been few people in her life that she has ever cared for. She legitimately and truly loved her adoptive parents, Michael and Amber. They were the ones who gave her a name. They cared for her, taught her, did not abuse her and treated her like a normal person. Never once did they treat her as anything less than their precious daughter, and they managed to push down any attempts in the broader community to hate the girl for what she was. There were other Deviants in the world, after all, and Tess was a good girl. She adored and trusted her parents implicitly and looked up to them as examples of hard-working, honorable and generous souls, people that she wishes she could be, if only the world would let her. She did make, among those of her generation, a scant few friends who did not seem bothered by her physical appearance. A joker at heart with just a little bit of an impish heart, he always kept her in on his shenanigans and get-rich-quick schemes as he got older. Never did he go too far or get into the illegal or outright irresponsible, and always he helped to speak on her behalf. For a while, she almost imagined that she had a crush on him, perhaps because he actually treated her like a normal person as well, and most did not. However, they never quite got past the physical issues of her body-consciousness and so stayed more friends over the years until he was killed by a drunk driver, a scant month after she left town.
Tess is, by her nature, a hard working soul. She was taught to want to help others and to be valuable to others, even if they were not thankful for it. She may grumble. She may grouse and complain. She may even growl at the strangers that she helps out, but she is not one to leave people in danger around her or in need when she can help. It is in her nature to wish to be of assistance to those that she genuinely believes are in need, though if she feels that this trust is abused she is swift to turn on them, leaving someone who has manipulated her high and dry without a second thought.
Tess prefers to stay active most days. She takes greatest pleasure in physical pursuits and prefers to be working on some level. When she's busiest, it's easiest to keep her thoughts from self-reflection. Introspection always involves periods where she is the most depressed and alone. So, keeping to active pursuits on at least some level has always been important to her. That desire to keep her mind and body constantly occupied, however, belies an underlying issue within Tess' mind that plays into almost all of her interactions and her reasons for being difficult to get close to. She has an incredible level of body-consciousness, almost entirely negative. Tess hates the way that she looks, having grown up around normal humans and looking more like a bad mixture of a shark with a woman. She thinks of herself as both monstrous and ugly and tends to treat any sort of flirtation as being more of a mockery than a real thing. One of the only times she has ever escaped this constant self-consciousness has been during anime and comic-book conventions, surprisingly enough a common place thing even in a world full of superheroes. When she arrives, most assume she's simply another cosplayer, and one who's footed the bill for serious skin work, so she's treated as completely normal. However, the fact that she's only treated by most as 'normal' when they think she's in costume only clarifies for her how monstrous she is. She dresses to conceal her considerable inhuman features and does everything she can not to think about what she is.
That body-consciousness has led to an even more significant emotion for her. Having known she was adopted for all her life, Tess has nursed a building hatred of her biological parents. With the knowledge of who she actually is the daughter of, and how Poseidon has used her as little more than a glorified errand girl to clean up his own personal messes in the name of what he proclaims as justice, she has come to deeply loathe her biological father. She can't bring herself to feel ill for her mother, not even knowing which shark among countless others she is, and not caring. Poseidon, however, she despises with a passion she cannot express. He made her into what she is, gave her this body that all loathe, and worse still he has the temerity to look normal and leave her little more than a monstrosity. He uses her, and in her mind he is nothing more than a petty tyrant. It has sold her off of most religious pursuits and genuinely embittered her to her plight, though she tries not to let the bitterness bleed out too much.
While Tess does perform what is classically considered to be vigilante 'Work,' in her efforts to help others that are around her, stepping in when people are threatened by others with powers, she does not prefer to remain in the spotlight or to be known widely for her actions. The nom de guerre “Thresher” that is associated with her was originally created by the press and not one of her design. She goes by the name her parents give her and actively seeks to avoid conflict when possible and the public eye as a general rule. Much of this stems from her body-consciousness, but in general, she is not one for crowds.
Romance is not a thing that is even in the mind of Tess. Thresher has, on top of her body-consciousness, very little attraction for humans. She has tried, as with her old friend Jim, to feel some level of attraction. It's expected in society, and so she's made the effort, but she can't bring herself to find the human form particularly appealing, or the idea of romance as remotely realistic. While some cosplayers have shown interest, she has never returned the affection. Privately, she finds her urges more fueled by animalistic, feral and aggressive figures, particularly actual sharks. It is her strong suspicion that her titan blood lacks any particular urge for copulation, leaving only her base animal instincts to give her direction. It doesn't make sex impossible, but any urge to pursue it for its own sake is almost non-existent, at least without some sort of outside influence to force her to care about it for reasons other than physical pleasure.
Tess maintains, despite her appearance, a fairly healthy sense of humor. It's dry and cynical, but it is also one of the easiest ways to break past her emotional barriers against closeness. A person who can make her laugh, and who laughs in her presence, is far more likely to disarm her and make her feel at ease. The occasional light-hearted prank goes miles, as it is the sort of thing that you do to someone who you either like, or someone who you want to take down a peg, but regardless it is the sort of thing that a person does to someone that they treat as 'normal.' Pitchforks are for monsters. Buckets of water over the doorframe are for regular people.
History:
World Info - (WIP)
“Thresher” is a relatively minor figure among heroes of the so-called "Deviant Universe" (A Golden-Age/Silver-Age superhero world hybrid), all things considered, and has always preferred this to remain the case. Tess was the daughter of the god Poseidon and a Mako shark, one of countless other minor demigods sired by one of the greek gods over the course of the millenia. Like so many others, she was foisted off upon mortal parents and adopted by devoted worshipers of the pagan gods, Michael and Amber Donaldson, residents of a small coastal community in South Carolina. Living outside of town, among those who were more or less understanding of a few oddities in one of the local children, Tess spent her formative years swimming along the coastline and helping to tend to the lighthouse that her father tended while her mother, a substitute teacher in the local schools, handled her education through home-schooling. She polished this off with seminar courses at a local community college where she could generally downplay her appearance and take both night and distance courses as much as possible, supplementing a GED with an associates in Business.
The idyllic state of her life continued until her 21st birthday. A vicious viral infection ran through South Carolina in 2012, the same year that Psi-Void attempted his first invasion of the earth. Claiming the lives of many within her community, it took both of her aged adoptive parents away from her. Though educated and capable of caring for herself, Tess was alone in the world, aware that the lighthouse she had lived in for years had been scheduled for closure at some point in the next few years and aware how much faster it would occur without her father to plug for it. It was late on the night that she had left her parents quiet, barely attended funeral, that she met her “True Father.” She'd been aware of the fact that she was adopted and that her biological parents weren't human, but more than that her parents had never said. The conversation went poorly, as Poseidon attempted to placate his grieving daughter and proclaimed to her that she had greater things ahead of her, wars in the heavens and villains who sought to ruin the world. She wanted nothing of it and told him to kiss off.
Regardless of her wishes, however, gods were not the sort of things that could be so easily denied. As others struggled against the machinations of mad scientists unmaking reality, demigods rising from the depths of trans-dimensional hells, Tess found herself embroiled in the internal politics of the gods of Olympus. Long grown decadent and disassociated from mortal affairs, they toyed with each other, building rivalries that threatened human interests. Tess was convinced by her father to rescue one of his nereids from the “clutches” of Dionysus, only to learn that she had dallied all too willingly in the other god's clutches, but not before facing down the wounded and mutilated demi-god Pan, an old friend and bodyguard of the god of revelries. Though the girl willingly returned to Poseidon's side, Tess threw her hands up and tried as best she could to distance herself from her father's affairs.
Unfortunately, in the aftermath of her 'victory,' Thresher found her newfound publicity to be as much a danger as it was a positive. The demigod “Omega” rose out of the abyss into which he was imprisoned thousands of years ago, his return aided by the Dark Legion. With his rise, he wielded Dark Energy and used it to empower those who would serve him. Forced to face a Pan, seeking revenge for their last battle, Thresher barely escaped the confrontation with her life and descended into the depths of the ocean to recuperate. Deep beneath the waves, she was unaware of the plight of other heroes who sought to bring Omega and his cronies down once and for all, or the doomsday weapon unleashed by a desperate RAPTOR organization, one that could seek individual deviants around the world and teleport them from time and space. The demigod was blasted out of creation as he fought the Thunder Force to a near stand-still alone even with empowered suits to boost their abilities, but soon afterwards a wave of energy erupted from where he struck. It washed over the entire world, causing everyone who dwelt on the earth and possessed superhuman abilities to disappear, lost in time and space. Unknowing of the source, deep in the darkness and far from the world, she slumbered only to awaken in a strange place.
Powers:
Tess' abilities are granted to her both by her unnatural physique as a half-shark and her semi-divine blood. Like any of the nearly countless half-blooded children of the Greek gods, she is more than a mere mortal. However, her powers have only barely begun to blossom in comparison to titans such as Triton or Polyphemus. These powers, formidable as they are, may be divided up into her physiological enhancements and supernatural gifts.
Her physique is much more robust and durable than a human's could possibly be. She is capable of lifting about 1 Ton and her physical attacks reflect this strength. Small arms fire bruises her but does not penetrate her skin, though rifles and heavier calibers are more effective. She sustains herself on a carnivorous diet and requires about a quarter the amount of food and water expected of a creature her size, with a solid tolerance for ingested toxins and diseases. She is slightly more dexterous than the average person and has an unnatural sense of balance. She is capable, to some extent, of tracking with her sense of smell, and is particularly adept underwater. While not a true shark, she can see in the dark and is able to open the gills on her throat to breathe underwater, breathing normally on land.
Tess also possesses a limited amount of supernatural powers. She can communicate with sharks of all varieties, and to a limited extent communicate with other fish. She is, on top of this, able to control and manipulate water, changing its physical state from gas to liquid to solid with a thought or gesture and manipulating it hydrokinetically. Though water, when manipulated in this way, does not carry her full strength, it is nevertheless able to give her greater range and shows strength on par with a well-trained athlete of human origins. She is not, however, able to conjure water out of nothing.
