Here’s the first member of the Intruders to be featured: Material Girl!

Rebecca Modern, the beautiful Material Girl, is a member of the rogue posthuman team The Intruders, unique in their era for being the first major group to exist without corporate or nation-state backing and without a sponsored agenda. Her posthuman ability involves complete shapeshifting control, including elemental manipulation. She can take on any form she can imagine, include mass-shifting to larger or smaller forms as needed to a reasonable degree, and can transmute parts of her form into different states of matter, and different elements, with a high degree of precision. She is arguably the team’s most powerful member, and only her lack of significant martial arts or combat training, and power-specific offensive technique limit her potential as a combatant. Her focus is defensive and problem-solving methods, and her experimentation with her abilities have remained consistent with that goal. Her experience with image manipulation is considerable, however.

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Concept, Design and Art: Joao Marques
Abilities and Origin: Thom Chiaramonte and Joao Marques

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Material Girl

Name: Rebecca Modern
Affiliation: The Intruders

Attributes:

Melee: 10
Reflex: 20
Muscle: 10
Vigor: 30
Acumen: 10
Observation: 20
Will: 05

Life: 70
Influence: 35

Abilities:

Shapeshifting: Modern’s posthuman ability involves complete shapeshifting control, including elemental manipulation. She can take on any form she can imagine, include mass-shifting to larger or smaller forms as needed to a reasonable degree, and can transmute parts of her form into different states of matter, and different elements, with a high degree of precision. Her shapeshifting [50 IV] ability is of unknown origin. She must make a Power Action in order to successfully transform herself per her wishes, and maintain her current state by making a Yellow Vigor Action every 5 rounds, with failure resulting in a temporary loss of physical control and cohesive form for 1 round, after which she can pull herself back into her stable, dominant form. In order to return to her dominant form, she must also make the same Yellow Vigor Action she would have in order to take any specific form.

Additionally, a separate Vigor Action must be made for each shift across her extremities, so turning her arms into different shapes/materials simultaneously requires individual Actions for each arm. The difficulty of each Power Action is based on the difference from her previous form state, so human mimicry is a Yellow Action, while changing elements is a Red Action, and changing elements and massive form shifting is an Orange Action, etc. Additionally, while near-exact physical duplication of another person is not only possible, with adequate preparation and references, but easy for her, she has little ability to mimic other voices, and requires considerable practice and study to mimic physical mannerisms of her target.

Origin:

Rebecca Modern became a media sensation overnight, when footage of the gorgeous young woman transmuting her arms into clamps, in order to breach the crushed cockpit of a crashed aircraft to rescue it’s trapped passengers, made it’s way onto the internet and spread throughout the international news world, ushering the Intruders into the spotlight for the first time. The pilot of the Cessna CJ3 twin-engine jet was billionaire financier Rand Whitcombe, and his public and grandiose praise of the team in their rescue of the Whitcombe heir and his staff from the flaming wreckage of the downed aircraft, soon became the hot news of both Wall Street and the tabloids. Seen in public several days later, as his guest at one of the most exclusive restaurants in Manhattan, Modern was photographed by dozens of paparazzi and her immaculate visage soon graced the covers of the major entertainment magazines, rivaling the exposure of some of Hollywood’s leading ladies. The public was obsessed with the team’s shapeshifter, though journalists, and their fact checkers, were frustrated to find no evidence of her life before the Intruders were revealed to the world. As the only member of the team with a public identity, she soon became the symbolic leader and representative, not only for the Intruders, but for all costumed posthumans that appeared to serve the public good without private backing. She was gorgeous, charming, patient and observant, and her fans hungered for any footage of the team in action, and of her in particular, changing state to gas, solidifying into granite or mutating into liquid metal.

What the world did NOT know, was that the public identity of Rebecca Modern, the Material Girl, was a construct of a highly-skilled and subversive public relations team employed by Whitcombe, who’s ties to the Intruders were not known. It was not even known to them who she really was, or even if SHE herself knew. The Rebecca Modern persona was the result of viral test-marketing research to produce the personality the entertainment-saturated public would most favor and accept with a minimum of scrutiny. Many fantasized about her, and others wanted to live vicariously through her glamorous image. None realized that Modern might not even be human at all. When Whitcombe contacts began to learn about a rumored expose about Rann Whitcombe and Rebecca Modern, her true identity and the hidden link between the venture capitalist’s empire and the supposedly independent Intruders, the journalist in question mysteriously disappeared, and a story was leaked to the media revealing that Modern was, in reality, a scrawny, plain-faced and awkward teenage girl from a rural farm community, who had fabricated the look of Material Girl in order to emulate the fashion figures she read about in the pop culture magazines. In a well-orchestrated high-profile sit-down on a primetime television news program, Modern tearfully described her life as a teen, before her powers manifested: ignored, ridiculed and judged by kids and adults alike. Her self-recreation as the blonde ingénue Rebecca Modern was the ultimate in wish fulfillment fantasy, and it changed her world instantaneously, and although this was her identity now, she always thought about the girl she once was, and took the opportunity, in front of millions of viewers, to reach out to teens and encourage them to find their own identities, beneath the surface. During pointed questions about her background, home town, family and childhood friends, she appeared distant and non-commital, and when the subject turned to Whitcombe and the rumored romance between the billionaire and Modern, she stunned everyone, Whitcombe included, by announcing the end of their relationship. Soon after, the Intruders went underground again, and little useable footage would surface for years afterward, of the Intruders in action. Questions about Whitcombe’s involvement in the possible fabrication of the plane crash, and the truth about Modern’s identity, covered extensively in the missing journalist’s notes, never surfaced.

The Intruders remained a mystery.

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See the illustration herein the TRDL Universe Gallery.

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