Jackie Lantern

Jackie Lantern

Vital Information

Gender Female Species Chaos Creature (Human) Source Original Faction Unaffiliated Rank X-None Function Halloween Pilot Groups None

Other Information

Age (Appearance) 35 Age (Actual) 446 (440 years spent in Multiverse) Still Aging? No Height 5'10" tall Weight 220 lbs Hair Color White Eye Color Orange

Quote

"Trick-or-treat~!"

Profile

Jackie Lantern is a self-proclaimed "witch" who pilots the spirit of Halloween itself in the form of a mecha also named, coincidentally, "Halloween". While her history is unclear to others, what is known is that she has been in the Multiverse for a very long time. She is known to some other long-time residents of the Multiverse as a rather chaotic and random individual who is sometimes an enemy, sometimes an ally, and frequently simply a nuisance. However, due to her sporadic appearances and minimal involvement in various upheavals, Jackie is still rather unfamiliar to most people. As someone who thrives on chaos, Jackie is perfectly happy spreading havoc. However, this is not in itself a goal for her. To lock herself into a narrow mindset like 'spreading chaos' would be too rigid. Instead, she is the sort of person who will do whatever her whims dictate at the moment the idea pops into her head. Her mecha is as powerful and versatile as her imagination, and her ability to "craft" magic itself an impressive application of chaos magic. With magic, mind, body, and the Spirit of Halloween itself, this witch may lead to some very interesting times very soon.

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Powers

Combat Skill: Jackie is a proficient hand-to-hand combatant, with a style focused around evasive maneuvers and wielding a personalized staff-like weapon. However, she can also use normal punches and kicks when she must, with lesser effectiveness. Ranged attacks via limited magic and 'gadgets' are also viable.

Inhuman Body: Jackie's body has been altered as a side-effect of all her time spent in chaotic regions of the Multiverse, such as the Temporal Wastes, and the wielding of strange magic. She does not age, and some things that would be harmful or lethal to normal humans are ineffective or reduced in effectiveness against her. She can bathe in a cauldron of boiling oil, but if someone threw boiling water at her, she would be burned normally. She can sleep on a bed of iron spikes, but stabbing her with a sword will still make her bleed.

Magic Engineering: Jackie can "build" magic, whether it is spells, enchantments, metaphysical properties, or supernatural phenomenon. It takes time to craft anything worth making, but once a spell or other magical contrivance has been made, it can be "installed" in other things, or handed off to an ally as a one-shot gadget or similar. (Simple magic only when given to others, such as a flight spell on one's boots or a feather-weight spell on one's armor. Each component is single-use. Once used, it's gone. It counts as +buff in any instance where it would provide a combat benefit. Only Jackie can use the complex engineered magic.)

Mecha (Halloween): Halloween is a "Super Mecha", with amazing speed, durability, and strength for its 60 foot size. It is equipped with a variety of unconventional weapons and gadgets, as well as more straight-forward ones, such as missiles, forcefields, and a giant scythe. All of the weapons and abilities of Halloween are themed after the holiday itself, and are limited only by the imagination of its pilot. (Armor Mode: PL 33)

Pumpkin Bots: (NPCs) The Pumpkins Bots are a pair of mechanized pumpkins. They have hover jets and flashlight eyes, and function via extremely simple magically-derived artificial intelligence. They can serve as spies, lab assistants, messengers, or support Jackie in combat with various attacks themed after jack-o-lanterns and pumpkins.

Spirit of Halloween: Halloween (the mecha) starts gathering energy on the first day of October in a special storage cell. On October 31st, it releases this energy in a very dramatic way by powering-up all of its normal capabilities and assuming its "true" form, "Spirit of Halloween". In this state, Halloween's strength and durability are significantly increased. Spirit of Halloween returns to normal at midnight. NOTE: This Aura Flare can only be used once per year, on October 31st. No other time. (Aura Flare: PL 33 -> PL 35)

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Flaws

Creature of Chaos: Jackie Lantern is inherently a random, chaotic individual. She enjoys causing havoc and confusion, but she herself is constantly fluctuating, changing, and doing things with as little order and logic to them as possible. Her emotions and thought processes are all over the place. She will just as frequently be making any given situation worse for those involved as she will be showing up to help one or more people without explanation.

Halloween Is Serious Business: Jackie puts a great deal of importance upon the holiday of Halloween. She does not have much tolerance for people criticizing the event. Maligning or otherwise speaking ill of Halloween is a sure way to incite her wrath. This can get her attention and cause her to commit fatal blunders in allowing her anger to control her actions and thus ruin her plans. However, whoever is responsible better have a darn good escape route planned or some other way of dealing with an enraged crazy woman out for his or her blood.

Not Really A Pilot: Jackie is not really a mecha pilot. Her ability to pilot Halloween is due to her innate instability, imagination, and affinity for the subject matter of the holiday itself. A "normal" mecha would be even less effective in her hands than it would be in a random civilian's.

Rambling Monologues and Poetry: Being a rather eccentric individual to start with, having been dealing with Weird Stuff(tm), chaos magic, and hanging out in Halloween-themed locations and hideouts has had a serious impact on Jackie's mental stability. She tends to engage in long, rambling monologues that can leave her completely open to attack or simply too distracted to do anything else until she's done if people just endure it or don't interrupt her. She also recites dark poetry reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe or stuff one might expect Vincent Price to come up with.

Weird Weaknesses: Sometimes, Jackie manifests strange weaknesses and vulnerabilities as a result of the chaos magic that has altered her body. Frequently, the mere act of Jackie imagining herself weak to a given thing makes that weakness real. The weaknesses are not always permanent or even long-term, and seem to fluctuate based on her mood, the time of day, and perhaps even nothing at all. At any given time, however, she will be vulnerable to at least one specific thing that will make her easier to take down. Her enemies just have to figure out what that is.

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Background

+ Show background

Jackie was already 6 years old in 420 BU. She grew up during those chaotic times when worlds were unifying, the laws of the universe were warping and merging with those of many others, and the situation in general was one of madness. Jackie's family was caught in one of the unifications from a 'modern Earth', and were hunted down and killed by a pack of strange shadowy creatures. For some reason, they were unable to hurt Jackie herself. However, she was trapped in a dark void with hundreds of inhuman eyes staring hungrily at her, and voices of horrible creatures whispering unintelligibly to her for what felt like years but was probably more like an hour at best before others came along and became prey instead. Either way, it left the young girl an utter wreck. For the next 20 years, she faded in and out of lucidity, unable to seperate an imaginary world of her own devising from that of the "real world". How she survived through all this, she does not know. She suspects she had to have done some really awful things to make it through, but just because she killed a flying eyeball with a screwdriver in her "World of Madness" does not mean that she actually stabbed anyone in the "Plain World", right?

That's what she hoped for awhile. She eventually realized she didn't care and she stopped waking up from the World of Madness for awhile. 4 years after that, Jackie once more gained awareness while travelling through the Volatile Wastelands. It was the year 396 BU, and she found herself standing in a huge field of pumpkins, with various decorations, buildings, and costumed dummies everywhere. She didn't really understand what she was seeing, where she was, what was happening, and had more or less forgotten who she used to be before her encounter with those shadowy creatures.

But Jackie felt a strange affinity for this place. It didn't seem like either the World of Madness or the Plain World. It felt like she belonged. Then an enormous pumpkin rose up from the middle of the field, turned to face her — and it indeed had a face carved into it, though not one that looked like any human's except in the most simplified manner. Then it explained to her.

It explained how to make the World of Madness and Plain World merge together and become a single reality. That was what Halloween was. The day that the strange, the insane, and the unusual merged with and overlapped the world that people see all the time ordinarily. Imagination creates a new existence… An uncertain one, where anything is possible. The thing that spoke to her was the very Spirit of Halloween itself. It helped her merge her world views, and become able to perceive the world in a half-stable fashion once more. Then it asked her to carry its essence to the rest of the worlds out there…

…And show them all what imagination could accomplish in this new existence called the "Multiverse".

Jackie agreed to this request, and Halloween became a physical thing that would aid her, protect her, and spread its influence to as many as possible. Jackie thrived on the uncertainty of a Multiverse in chaos, but with imagination… Raw chaos could be shaped into anything desired.

With Halloween itself inside her head, warping her imaginary world into an imaginary Halloween world, Jackie's insanity stopped being quite so random. She was still crazy, but she had a certain theme and focus to her insanity. This direction served her well in the coming years… Decades… And eventually centuries. She was there and effectively immortal, wielding real magic and real power when the Warp Gate War began in 200 BU. She was there when the Nightmares emerged in 102 BU, watching the havoc in the Volatile Wastes and alternating helping people and hindering them as her whims suited her. To her credit, she did more helping than hurting. She vanished afterwards, until about 0 AU, when the Volatile Wastes expanded.

Being a regular inhabitant thereof, the changes in chaotic energies made Jackie stronger than ever. She ventured beyond the boundaries of the wastes with her knowledge and resources, and began to spread Halloween to even more people than she had been during the prior centuries. She encountered some major players in the Multiverse who are still around to this day over the following years, before vanishing again in about 7 AU.

She has made sporadic appearances since then, but none that were really connected to the "witch" Jackie Lantern by those who knew who she was. Now, things have changed sufficiently that it seems a prime opportunity to make everyone aware of how much their imagination can shape their current reality and the lives they live in the future.