Karbon Kate is a member of Australia/New Zealand’s Alchera!

Created and illustrated by Thom Chiaramonte

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Karbon Kate

Name: Kathryn Barrows
Affiliation: Alchera

Attributes:

Melee: 10
Reflex: 20
Muscle: 10
Vigor: 20
Acumen: 20
Observation: 40
Will: 30

Life: 60
Influence: 90

Abilities:

Physiological Enhancement: Kate’s body is uniformly hardened, providing resistance from energy attacks [20 AP], and resistance from physical attacks [10 AP] slightly more robust than typical posthuman results.

Replication: When Kate’s Life reaches zero, she must make a Will Save. If Yellow or higher, a new body materializes within 3 areas of the last, within 3 rounds, at full Life. If the Action fails? One doesn’t.

Origin:

Kathryn Barrow is the sister of Obadiah Barrow, known publicly as Kiloton, member of Rampart, the British, French and German co-funded international posthuman crisis response team. She was employed as a posthuman handler for Rampart since the team’s inception, and accompanied them on many of their field missions, as part of the auxiliary support crew that was always positioned to assist with recovery, damage control and intelligence management, when the high-profile team was engaged in public actions. At the time of Kiloton’s disfigurement, in what the international press would call the Leeds Schoolbus Disaster, Kathryn was a major source of strength and inspiration for her brother, during recovery and throughout his rehabilitation.

When Kiloton was killed in combat with Geiger and the Gorgon Gang, in Paris, Kathryn Barrow was devastated, withdrawing from her position with the Rampart auxiliary support staff. Suffering from depression, she was sent, by her employer and mentor, a high-ranking executive in Rampart’s parent administrative organization, Crest and Shield, to mourn the loss of her brother in Sydney, home of her parents and much of her extended family.

Within months of her time in Australia, Kathryn began suffering from fatigue, disorientation, and complained of what her therapist described later as ‘psychological irregularities,’ of a sense of being a part of a larger sentience, or identity, than her own, as if she shared her consciousness with other aspects of herself. As an employee of a Crest and Shield seed group in Sydney, she was asked to undergo extensive psychiatric evaluation, the results of which determined that she remained emotionally affected by her brother’s death, but remained clinically sane. However, anomalies in her brain chemistry triggered a series of physiological tests, which in turn yielded unexpected results: her body had begun exhibiting similar physical and neurological changes to those observed in candidates of the posthuman development program employed by Crest and Shield’s contract bio-engineering lab, JEJ Research Group. It soon became evident that exposure to Obadiah Barrow over time had triggered mutations in Kathryn Barrow’s physiology, which shared enough genetic triggers with her brother’s genome profile to be optimally suited for successful catalyzation by the same radioactive isotopes and nano-enablers that Kiloton continued to emit since the successful conclusion of his treatments.

Kathryn represented one of the first known cases of unintended, proximal posthuman development, and was soon the subject of intense field research at the Sydney lab, while technicians attempted to quantify her physiological changes, and seek evidence of unique posthuman latent abilities that had not yet manifested. For several weeks, while exhibiting enhanced physical attributes and resistance to injury, Kathryn’s body showed no other signs of latent ability, and the research suggested a fair likelihood that proximal posthuman development did not carry the capability of developing latency. Invigorated by her unique circumstances, excited by the scientific potential of proximal posthuman development, and emotionally encouraged by the increased physiological parity with her lost brother, Kathryn was not particularly troubled by a lack of latent ability of her own, never carrying much ambition for the public profile life her brother led.

On a warm summer evening in late Spring, the Crest and Shield/JEJ field research laboratory that contained the sum total of the research performed on Kathryn Barrow was invaded and ransacked, leaving three security staffers dead and most of the equipment and records destroyed. Thirty minutes later, Kathryn was attacked in her home by the armored mercenary known as Mantid, employed by unknown agents, who attempted to kidnap her, and in the process, destroyed her apartment. In the course of the struggle, Kathryn suffered a fatal head wound and was killed. Realizing his mistake, Mantid fled the scene, leaving the body to be engulfed in flames as the building was set fire, and his motivation, and the identiy of his employer, were never determined.

To her horror and shock, Kathryn appeared, moments later, in her flaming living room, standing over her own dead body. Overcome with confusion and hysteria, she leapt out of the second story window, and fled onto the beachway, before emergency crews arrived. Technicians at the crippled laboratory had already heard the terrible news of Barrow’s death, while cleaning up and attempting to salvage any research possible in the wreckage, when Kathryn approached them, seemingly raised from the dead. It was soon hypothesized that Kathryn could generate genetic duplicates of her own body, and in doing so, transfer her consciousness from one to the next. Obviously resistant to any testing of the theory, further research on her newfound ability stalled until JEJ took engaged in a highly unorthodox experiment: a member of the security detailed assigned to her during the lab’s reconstruction was paid to shoot her in the back, and make it look like a follow-up attempted kidnapping gone wrong. She materialized over her fallen form for a second time, and was led to believe the cover story of a second attack. Soon, her confidence level raised (and with the assistance of clandestinely-administered pharmaceutical agents) Kathryn grew to become confident in her ability to replicate her body as needed.

Over the next several months of training and experimentation, Kathryn was exposed to tactics training, martial arts, and profile re-engineering, in preparation to take the public stage as a new posthuman, attached to the fledgling regional defense team, co-founded by the Australian and New Zealand governments, called Alchera, as Karbon Kate. She would soon reveal to her teammates a deep-rooted belief in her ability to perceive the true reality of her latent gift: that she was not replicating her own body, per se, but rather pulling the bodies of her selves from alternate dimensions. She believes that her consciousness actually absorbs that of her alternate dimensional selves as they are pulled into her reality, so that they do not die in the process, but merge with her spirit and increase her ability to perceive a lifeline thread connecting all versions of herself across all dimensions. She remains barefoot at all times, believing she can feel the pulse of the presence of her other selves through the ground itself, and her apparent escape from the gravity of mortality, and the fat of her beloved brother, give her a sense of jubilation and positivity. As a result, she is an extreme extrovert, charming and flirtatious, free spirited and optimistic. Deep psychological study covertly performed on her by JEJ technicians, however, tells a different story: Karbon Kate is more afraid of death than ever, and exists in a state of fractured denial, blocked from allowing herself to believe in her own mortality or the perceived potential moral implications of the consciousness that may or may not exist in each new form she takes, and secretly, she suppresses terrible guilt over the possible deaths of her other selves, and the possibility that one day, there won’t BE a body to claim upon her death fills her with secret dread. While not provable either way, JEJ maintains covert surveillance on Kate, anticipating the potential that her fragile psyche might unravel under stress, or unanticipated variation, side effect, or failure of her latent ability. In the meantime, she remains a popular member of Alchera and one of the team’s most vocal advocates of posthuman/human harmony and regional autonomy from the US/Chinese posthuman cold war.

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You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Universe Gallery.

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1. TRDL Character Factory, No. 27: Kiloton
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3. TRDL Character Factory, No. 69: Tangkuinya