Player Name: LevelTwoBard Character Name: Uplink Power Level: 7 (105/105PP) Trade-Offs: None Unspent Power Points: 0 Progress To Bronze Status: 0/30 In Brief: Well-intentioned hacker empowered and equipped by an investigation deeper than he'd ever imagined. Alternate Identity: Gordon Gatley Identity: Secret Birthplace: Freedom City, USA Occupation: FCPD Consultant Affiliations: FCPD, Cyberhood Watch Family: Jonathan Gatley (Father), Sarah Gatley (Mother), Emma Gatley (Sister) Description: Age: 24 (DoB: September 2, 1990) Gender: Male Ethnicity: Caucasian Height: 5'11" Weight: 155 lbs Eyes: Blue Hair: Brown
Of about average height and build, Gordon Gatley could afford to work out a bit more. He makes up for it with a ready smile, a quick, pleasant laugh, and an aura of welcome and good cheer. He sports a well-trimmed beard and a head of mildly-curly chestnut brown hair, with a pair of simple black-rimmed glasses perpetually perched on his slightly-curved nose. He dresses simply, favoring T-shirts, jeans, and hoodies or light jackets, though he cleans up well on formal occasions.
As Uplink, Gordon wears an armored jumpsuit composed of kevlar and ceramic plates to protect him against injury without impacting his mobility. Goggles with a night vision mode allow him to enter the dark without fear; combined with his half-mask they protect his identity without being stifling or making him look too threatening. He wears a green half-length trench coat over his jumpsuit partly because it disguises his movements, helping him avoid telegraphing his strikes, and partly because he thinks it looks cool.
Power Descriptions:
Gordon's mental internet access is invisible, but its effects on him are not; his eyes glaze over a little, as if looking at something far in the distance, and his reaction times grow sluggish as he tries to make sense of a datastream suddenly superimposed over the real world. These awkward outward signs bely the power within; Gordon can mentally connect to any computer within twenty miles, from home PCs to iPods to electronic braking systems, and he can do it at a speed that shames any such device ever built.
Connected to the internet, Gordon can find and sort information at an incredible rate. He can accomplish research that would take an ordinary person twelve long, strenuous hours in less than a second and remember it all perfectly. When he meets new people, he can practically instantly ransack everything from Facebook pages to news sites to high school yearbooks until he knows all about them. He began to teach himself to fight by streaming, in his brain, almost every martial arts movie ever made; he did it in less than a day.
In combat, his power allows him to turn all the conveniences of the modern world against his enemies. Emergency sprinklers, airbags, automatic doors, weapon targeting systems, any system he can worm his mental way into can be rapidly converted into an electronic ally.
More obvious is his techstaff, a sleek silver weapon that, fully extended, is some twelve feet long and nearly as thick as a clenched fist. It is surprisingly light for its size, but also extremely solid. The ends of the staff are hollow barrels for launching nets and tripwires at the press of a button; they also contain external circuits that, at the press of another button, charge to taser-like intensity. A final button activates panels running the length of the staff, snapping them out into overlapping shields large enough to protect Gordon's body from projectile attacks.
History:
Firstborn son of a doctor and an art dealer, Gordon had a good, stable childhood. Sure, it was Freedom City, so some supervillain or another trashed a block or two every couple of weeks, but they were always stopped in the end; meanwhile Gordon lived in a big old house in Lantern Hill, went to private school, and never lacked for anything he needed. He was clearly a smart kid, sometimes obnoxiously so; he loved to be the center of attention, and was something of a know-it-all, but won friends regardless.
His passion was computers; he could talk about them for hours on end, and outstripped most technicians for know-how by age seven.
Having excelled in school (largely because his parents encouraged him to do so, since he found it pretty easy and boring), Gordon went off to Johns Hopkins University to get his computer science degree. Leaving home was hard for him; he missed the friends he'd left behind terribly, and as they moved on with their lives he found it more difficult to do so. He had a wide circle of buddies, but kept people at arms' length and consequently had few close friends in Baltimore. He soon grew lonely, though he continued to excel.
As Gordon adjusted to college, he tried to combat his loneliness by searching out people with similar interests. There was no shortage of computer clubs at Hopkins, but he found himself somewhat disappointed with the level of most such groups. As his reputation as a real ace spread, however, he found himself invited to join a more sophisticated group. It quickly became apparent that they were hackers, a free information group targeting big corporations and political groups with scuzzy practices.
Gordon had long been interested in civil rights and environmental protection, and he took the group's invitation as an opportunity to channel his feelings of disconnectedness into something more productive. He found in himself a new passion for the truth and a deep need to be doing something, and before long he fell in with the hacker community known as the Cyberhood Watch. He built up both his skills and his reputation with them under the username Revelation; for all his major hacks, he was never even detected.
But the world had been through a few more near-apocalypses in the meantime, and they pushed Gordon's desire to do the right thing beyond just trying to expose the truth; he wanted to be able to do something about it. So he returned, degree in hand, to Freedom City and applied to become a special consultant to the FCPD Computer Crimes Unit. The unit was initially skeptical of the twenty-two year old, but he quickly won them over with his tremendous skill and positive, friendly attitude.
For a year and a half everything went well. Gordon had a life of his own: his own job, his own car, his own apartment. And he loved that he could have all that, and especially a job he deeply enjoyed, while being back in the city he had always considered home. He lurked in scuzzy chatrooms and broke into deep net sites, traced emails and tapped webcams, watching, waiting. And with the evidence he uncovered, the FCPD shut down human trafficking auctions, drug rings, illegal weapon sales, and a whole lot of fraudsters. Mostly fraudsters.
But Gordon's failing was that he just couldn't move on or leave well enough alone. He would obsess about rumors and unsolved cases, terrified that someone would get hurt because he missed some little clue. That was what kept him investigating the Proteus Cartel long after everyone else had given up, long after the case had formally been closed, even after he received an official reprimand for using sealed records to keep investigating. And soon he drew the attention of all the wrong people.
It just didn't make sense. The submarine technology company was buying materials that had nothing to do with submarines. A number of the employees on their roster didn't seem to actually exist. And Gordon was convinced, though he couldn't quite prove it yet, that a huge sum of money was being siphoned off from the corporation, just a few cents a day but from thousands of different places, and going who knew where. Tax fraud, he suspected, was only the beginning of what was going on there.
What Gordon didn't know was that the Proteus Cartel was one of the holdings of the Labyrinth, and that agents of that shadowy organization had noticed someone poking around in dangerous places. And so the next time he tried to access their secure server, he hit a more physical firewall. Techno-mystical energy reached through his computer and began to fry his brain before he could even blink. It would have succeeded, too, if local power lines had not at that very moment been downed by a storm, shutting the computer down.
Blinded and deafened by the attack, Gordon still managed to feel for his cell phone and dial 911, babbling his address into the receiver. He spent a week in the hospital, tormented by strange hallucinations and phantom sounds, before his senses began to return to normal. But the images and sounds continued to rage around him, superimposed over the real world. Gradually he discovered that, if he concentrated, he could magnify or diminish them. Around the same time he figured out what they were: internet traffic.
It took nearly a month, but eventually Gordon got his unintended ability under control. He found that he could access computers across the city, seeing what their users were doing. Then he found that he could manipulate those computers much, much faster than their users could. And then he found out that he could think much faster than before. He could make hours of work into seconds in his brain. It was an incredible thrill, but he almost immediately turned it to the task that had brought it about.
Gordon's newfound power made it almost trivially easy to divert a corporate shipment that technically did not exist from a secure testing facility to the local post office. He opened the reinforced crate to find a weapon, a high-tech staff that no submarine company had any business building. And then it hit him: with his power, he could learn to do most anything, and learn it fast. So he studied a hundred styles of combat in his mind's eye, and adapted them to incorporate the use of the techstaff he had recovered.
Because this was his chance to not only find the truth, not only to help others do something about it, but to do something about it himself. Personality & Motivation:
Gordon is friendly and cheerful, with a good sense of humor and an enthusiasm for meeting new people, but he's also driven, sometimes to the point of obsession. He cannot abide a mystery, especially one that could get someone hurt. He is thrilled to have the chance to take an active role in defending his home city and ecstatic about his newfound abilities, but also wracked with self-doubt; this is the biggest, most important, most dangerous thing he's ever tried to do, and he doesn't want to let anyone down.
Though hesitant to admit it, he's also lonely; there are a lot of people he respects, but very few he's genuinely close to. Powers & Tactics:
Gordon's techstaff is an extremely versatile weapon, allowing him to fire tripwires and nets from a distance, defend himself from ranged and melee attacks, and strike or stun with great effectiveness in close combat. His powers, though the distraction they cause him can be dangerous in combat, are also formidable; they allow him to turn any nearby technology against his foes, and in a world of electronic conveniences he is almost always in the presence of something he can use to support his allies or hinder his foes.
Complications:
A Drink from a Firehose: Gordon can sort through a lot of information very quickly, but sometimes the sheer amount of it can overwhelm him. If, at the GM's discretion, information Gordon is looking for is buried in a flood of data, he must make a DC15 Will Save or suffer a Stun effect.
Aftereffects: Gordon doesn't know it yet, but the techno-hex that hit him is still active in his system, trying to finish its interrupted work: completely digitizing him. Energy exposure can cause it to flare up. If hit with an energy attack that, at the GM's discretion, might power up the technovirus (electrical attacks, for example), Gordon must make a DC15 Fortitude Save or suffer a Nauseate effect as his body tries to fight off digitization.
Nearsighted: Gordon wears glasses because he needs them. Without them, or the lenses built into his costume, he suffers a -4 penalty on Drive, Notice, and Search checks and a -2 to ranged attacks, with additional penalties at the GM's discretion.
Secret Identity: Gordon is trying to keep his newfound role as a superhero secret for his own safety as well as that of his family. Yet he also has to hold down his job and keep people from getting suspicious when he uses information from that job in his costumed career.
Sellout / Criminal: Gordon has thus far managed to keep the hacker and police consultant parts of his life mostly separate, but the people he knows from each side would be pretty upset if they knew about his involvement with the other.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abilities: 0 + 2 + 0 + 10 + 4 + 6 = 22PP
Strength: 10 (+0)
Dexterity: 12 (+1)
Constitution: 10 (+0)
Intelligence: 20 (+5)
Wisdom: 14 (+2)
Charisma: 16 (+3) Combat: 6 + 6 = 12PP
Initiative: +5 (Speed of Thought)
Attack: +7 Melee, +3 Ranged
Grapple: +7
Defense: +7 (+3 Base, +4 Dodge Focus), +2 Flat-Footed
Knockback: -3 (-1 Flat-Footed) Saving Throws: 5 + 5 + 5 = 15PP
Toughness: +7 (+0 Con, +4 [Defensive Roll], +3 [Combat Jumpsuit])
Fortitude: +5 (+0 Con, +5)
Reflex: +6 (+1 Dex, +5)
Will: +7 (+2 Wis, +5) Skills: 52R = 13PP
Bluff 3 (+6)
Computers 10 (+15) Skill Mastery
Diplomacy 3 (+6)
Disable Device 5 (+10) Skill Mastery
Drive 9 (+10) Skill Mastery
Investigate 5 (+10)
Notice 8 (+10) Skill Mastery
Search 5 (+10)
Sense Motive 4 (+6) Feats: 23PP
Attack Focus (Melee) 4
Benefit (Security Clearance: FCPD)
Connected
Defensive Roll 2
Dodge Focus 4
Eidetic Memory
Elusive Target
Equipment 1
Improved Block
Improved Disarm
Online Research
Skill Mastery
Speed of Thought
Uncanny Dodge (Hearing)
Weapon Bind
Well-Informed
Equipment: 5EP Combat Jumpsuit [3EP]
Mini-Tracer [1EP]
Night Vision Goggles [1EP] Powers: 4 + 7 + 9 = 20PP Datalink 6 (Mental, 20 miles; Flaws: Distracting [-1]; Feats: Machine Control) [4PP] Quickness 14 (50,000x normal speed; Flaws: Mental Only [-1]) [7PP] Device 3 (Techstaff, Easy to Lose) [9PP] Array 5 (10PP; Feats: Alternate Power 5) [15/15PP] Base Power: Strike 7 (Feats: Extended Reach 2, Mighty) [10/10PP]
Alternate Power: Deflect 5 (Fast and Slow Projectiles) [10/10PP]
Alternate Power: Snare 7 (Flaws: Entangle; Feats: Accurate 2, Ricochet) [10/10PP]
Alternate Power: Stun 5 [10/10PP]
Alternate Power: Trip 7 (Accurate 2, Ricochet) [10/10PP] DC Block ATTACK RANGE SAVE EFFECT
Net Gun Ranged DC17 Reflex Entangle (Physical)
Staff Strike Touch + 10ft DC22 Toughness Damage (Physical)
Staff Stun Touch DC15 Fortitude Stun (Electrical)
Unarmed Touch DC15 Toughness Damage (Physical) Totals: Abilities (22) + Combat (12) + Saving Throws (15) + Skills (13) + Feats (23) + Powers (20) - Drawbacks (0) = 105/105 Power Points
