spin_kick_snap | BANZAI! Bouncing To An LJRP Near You! (Reply)

New sophomore Kathy needs a bit of an explanation and I have a burning need to share gifs and pictures of her face with you. And thus, an infopost was born.

*It's normal to look at someone and scream, "FAAAAAAAAAAACE," right?*

So, upon arrival, Katharine Hana Li (please, just Kathy!) is just a normal girl. She's from Koreatown in LA, today's newspaper says July 2, 2013, her biggest concerns are: making sure her grades are high enough to earn approval from her parents, placing well in her upcoming gymnastics meet, and trying to hide her jealousy that her twelve year old sister Sarah is already wearing a bigger bra. Sure, there are some big ticket items for her to worry about (Down with Prop 8! Asian-American media representation! Gang activity in her neighborhood!), but she's about to start her sophomore year of high school. What can a normal girl do about stuff like that?

*It's okay, Kathy. It's hard to be ~~less busty than your little sister~~ young.*

Well, if said normal girl from Kathy's version of Earth, the answer is "gain superpowers." Superheroes are beginning to crop up all around the country (and the globe!) Everyone knows about the Mighty Dragon. He was the first real superhero, with flight, fire-breathing, invulnerability, and everything! He's awesome and, of course, totally from LA. The tabloids claiming he was some kind of stunt for an upcoming movie were proven wrong when other people started manifesting powers, too. There's the Awesome Ape in Chicago, a guy made of electricity flying around Boston, and some kind of giant monster said to be hanging around the Venice Beach area. They may not be doing much about the VRA, political unrest in Egypt, or student loan debt, but they are doing their bit to help clean up crime in their surrounding cities. Cool!

Kathy's own powers will be manifesting sometime this year. Unlike some people, she doesn't get a cool backstory involving how she was gifted with her powers. No blood transfusion, no talking cat, no magic medallion, not even a meteor and a room full of improperly stored chemicals; nope, Kathy is "some kind of mutant" and her mutant powers revolve around being "a human superball."

*"It was like watching a superball bouncing in a closet."*

With her powers, Kathy is roughly three times faster than a normal human being, and can, well, superball it up. She can leap between buildings, jump over people's heads, do multiple flips in the air, scissorkick two bad guys as she falls. She's fast, flexible, and as long as there's plenty of space to maneuver, she is almost a perpetual motion machine. When she does land, it's only for a moment before she bounces off again. Like most mutants/metas/characters with super-speed and super-agility, she has a very fast metabolism and eats a lot to keep her going.

Whole canon mentions at least one self-defense course (though she'll likely get more in Fandom), most of her moves seem based around gymnastics. Spin kicks, vaults, back flips, handsprings, split kicks; she narrates the moves she's doing as she performs them. She compares herself to Jackie Chan while she's flinging herself around. She's also good at parkour, flying between buildings and bouncing from wall to wall to fire escape, before scampering up a fence just to backflip off of it and land on a moving target. She also has enough body strength and stamina to go from one very acrobatic fight to another without pausing for breath, all while running across the rooftops of LA.

She'll be slowly building up to those things here on the island. But she's got a good start, amirite?

*Striking fear into the hearts of evildoers everywhere!*

Like pretty much every other powered student on the island, Kathy is going to eventually don both a costume and a superhero name. She'll be calling herself Banzai, and her uniform is a white karate gi with rainbow-colored cuffs, collar, belt, and mask. No spandex or tights for her! I have only a few icons that reflect that, so please assume that when the narration is referring to her as Banzai, that's what she's wearing, regardless of whatever the icon suggests. Anytime this isn't true, I'll be sure to mention it in the thread.

Like Nikolai/Gorgon, Kathy comes from Peter Clines' novel, Ex-Heroes, a totally normal zombie-apocalypse-meets-superhero-comic story. The first book in a planned trilogy (the second book, Ex-Patriots, just came out a little while ago), the story follows a group of zombie survivors who are living in Paramount Pictures studio which has be repurposed to be habitable, barricaded, and "safe."

Of course, once the zombie outbreak has hit critical mass, zombies kind of fade into the background and become an environmental hazard. The real danger comes from people, both within the group and outside of it. So it is with Ex-Heroes. Kathy will be an ex-pat, leaving at the end of the summer after her junior year. While she'll ICly be expecting to return after Labor Day to kick off her senior year, the zombie crisis will have become a global pandemic and martial law will be declared. Unwilling to leave her family, her city, and her fellow superheroes in danger, she'll remain in LA to fight off the hordes of undead.

As you do.

And now, more gifs, because I really love this girl's face. I kind of have a problem.