Leading Lady

Rank: Commander
Primary Power Set: Invulnerability
Seconday Power Set: Energy Melee
Pilot: @TalynDerre

Background

Jennifer Garrison was a Hollywood actress and a known figure on the cover of magazines and the tabloids. At least, she was until she was kidnapped from the set of a commercial by an obsessed fan, prompting a nationwide manhunt over several months. Ms. Garrison’s kidnapper, a mentally unstable young man who believed himself to be a plastic surgeon, “operated” on her with a magically-empowered knife. By the time a Hero Corps/FBI joint task force tracked down the kidnapper and rescued her, Jen Garrison’s face and arms were covered with horrific, disfiguring scars.

Horrified at her appearance, Jen Garrison disappeared from the public eye. Frightened and ashamed, she hid out in a number of secluded homes, surrounded by hired guards, and she began searching for ways to correct the awful scarring to her face. The enchantments on her kidnapper’s knife, however, made the scars stubbornly resistant to any repair – corrective surgery, magical healing, even experimental nanotech all failed, and Jen had to face the fact that her career as a model and actress was over.

She contemplated suicide, but it turned out that she was made of sterner stuff than anyone expected. Rather than despair, she turned her pain and hopelessness outwards, and she promised herself that she would work to make sure that no one would have to suffer in the future like she did. A conversation with her brother, a Major in the U.S. Air Force experimental weapons division, motivated her to use her personal fortune to purchase a few suits of MiliTech “civilian” armored welding suits and have them converted into powered armor. She then moved from California to Rhode Island and registered as a Paragon City novice hero under the “stage name” of the Leading Lady, hiding her scars with the heavy armor and a face-concealing veil.

The Star Patrol first encountered the Leading Lady when she was working with the Trolls Task Force in the Hollows, rescuing a team of police officers who were under attack by a gang of Trolls. After running a number of missions with some Star Patrol agents, she was recruited as a new agent. Now with access to full-scale military technology, she has been working with the Star Patrol ever since, helping keep Paragon City safe.

Tactics

Star Patrol analysts have noted that the Leading Lady has a tendency to rush into combat situations and uses a combination of noisemakers, high tech target scramblers and verbal taunts to force enemies to attack her. Even more so than most armored “Tanker” heroes, she revels in painting a target on herself and then withstanding every attack an enemy can throw at her. She is particularly aggressive when fighting magic-using foes, probably due to her victimization at the hands of a magic-wielding villain before she became a hero.

She has a number of suits of armor which she uses depending on the situation – a heavily modified Crey Powersuit for “everyday” heroics, a Vanguard HECUBA for fighting the Rikti and other extraterrestrial/interdimensional threats, and a prototype MiliTech Darksuit (scavenged from a Hand of Artemis now in government custody) that she uses for missions where Freedom Corps would prefer not to associate their name and logo. Despite her marked distate for magical weapons, she has no such qualms about enchanted armor, and even has a suit of ancient armor ensorcelled so that she can fight in time-displaced locations without sacrificing her effectiveness.